Dealing with the Creationists

Here is my response to Richard B's complaints that I am not dealing with the real arguments of Creationists.

Money quote:

"There are several ring species, but the most famous example is the herring gull. In Britain, these are white. They breed with the herring gulls of eastern America, which are also white. American herring gulls breed with those of Alaska, and Alaskan ones breed with those of Siberia. But as you go to Alaska and Siberia, you find that herring gulls are getting smaller, and picking up some black markings. And when you get all the way back to Britain, they have become Lesser Black-Backed Gulls.
So, the situation is that there is a big circle around the world. As you travel this circle, you find a series of gull populations, each of which interbreeds with the populations to each side. But in Britain, the two ends of the circle are two different species of bird. The two ends do not interbreed: they think that they are two different species."

So we have a real world example here of how you can have interbreeding populations separated only by distance that become more phylogenetically distinct as the distance increases - until the ends of the ring no longer recognize the other end as being a member of their own kind. Now consider how a minor calamity to a portion of the ring would change the single 'ring species' into two separate and non-interbreeding species - in short we would have an example of how 'speciation' occurs - the evolution of two distinct species from whence before there was only one.

In other words, the 'intermediary steps' of evolutionary speciation are visible to anyone who wishes to look for them, in the current populations of the Herring gull.