Quote Originally Posted by cheeseburger View Post
I'd like to see your source on this before I respond to it.
Will try to find it, it is from a book I read so I do not heve it handy.

It's mitochondrial DNA. (In case you don't know what a mitochondrion is, it's the organelle most human (and not so human) cells contain which functions in aerobic respiration; i.e. making ATP or energy.

Where did it come from? According to the secondary endosymbiotic theory, it was originally some single celled bacterium/prokrayote that made it's energy by aerobic respiration (citric acid cycle), and got engulfed by a bigger organism that couldn't digest it.

Point is, it has been traced back to something else.
Not really, at least not in the sense I meant. Scientists have, at least theoretically, traced the mitchondrial DNA back to "Eve" through the testing the similarities of different women's mDNA and extrapolating it back to a woman in Africa.

Scientists are not 'diluting' anything. Over the last decade or so, scientists have gone from a morphological approach to what constitutes a species, to a molecular approach. As a result, some species that 'looked' the same turned out to be unrelated, and some species that didn't look similar were actually related.
The definition of a species I learned says that they are unable to mate. As far as I know this would hold true on a molecular level. Species are being redefined because of early misconceptions. Yet you cite a study that shows two different 'species' of butterflies mating to produce a third. To me that means that the definition has been diluted. Artificial support to force a hybrid that is not viable in nature does not prove evolution, it proves an outside influence.

Very few different species can mate due to pre-zygotic mating barriers, i.e. you physically cannot mate a whale with a fly. But even if you tried to fertilize a whale egg with sperm from a fly in vitro, you would fail nearly 100% of the time. Mating barriers are generally the first to appear in any speciation event.

This quote indicates you don't even know what evolution is.
My language was not clear, I am referring to the genisis of life on Earth. Every model I have encountered tells me that the chemiacals in the pre-biotic soup came together and formed the organic molecules that support life, and then life spopntaneoulsy arose. Am I mistaken in this? (By the way, i am aware that this a goss oversimplification, but my point is that the original event seems to be random.)

Let's take a step back and consider why species even undergo sexual reproduction. It is far 'cheaper' (in terms of energy) to reproduce asexually.

Species reproduce sexually in order to increase variation within the species, because that increases the chances the species will survive. Mutations occur far too infrequently, and are too often detrimental, for it to replace sexual reproduction.

So if species didn't evolve, why bother with the variation within species? If there is no selection, or 'survival of the fittest,' why do practically all species have some mechanism for genetic recombination?
Adaptation to environment? I would have no idea, i am at a loss to explain how we went from asexual reproduction to binary reproduction anyway, another thing that has never been explained in any way other than, it happened, so it must have happened.