True or False: Diversifying selection can eventually lead to speciation?

True or False?:


Diversifying selection can eventually lead to speciationTrue or False: Diversifying selection can eventually lead to speciation?
True.





Darwin's example was with finch beak sizes. He found that the birds with small beak sizes were able to eat the small seeds and the birds with big beak sizes were able to eat the big seeds, but the birds with medium beak sizes were too big to grab the small seeds and not strong enough for the big seeds.





Now, what caused the birds to mate with one another was there location. The big beaks all hung out by the big seeds. The small beaks all hung out by the small seeds. Therefore they mated with one another. This slowly, very slowly, pushes out the medium beaks.





Is this on track?True or False: Diversifying selection can eventually lead to speciation?
False.





Adaptation within species has been known throughout history but no hard evidence exists that one species changes into any other.





Yes, of course it a popular and indeed mandatory element of the educational curriculum but fossil evidence of vestigial organs etc is


purely speculative na creatures allegedly billions of year old are much the same today as then, right down to the finest detail.


Finches are still finches not reptilian.
I have heard it referred to as disruptive selection. In that case, the traits at the extreme ends of a bell curve distribution have a selective advantage. This leads to positive assortative mating, where organisms with similar traits reproduce with each other. This can lead to speciation. Thus, the answer is TRUE.
Not sure exactly what you mean by 'diversifying selection'.





But variation and selection do lead to speciation. For example lions and tigers ar different species, yet they can interbreed (producing ligers and tions).


Lions and tigers (plus perhaps many or all of the other big cat species) share a common big cat ancestor.





It is quite possible for this speciation to lead to species that can no longer interbreed, even though they share a common ancestor.





Note that this is not evolution in the neo-darwinian molecules-to-man sense. The lion and tiger have *less* genetic information than their big cat ancestors. What we see is devolution. Evolution requires a massive net increase in genetic information. This is not observed. The proposed mechanism is mutations, yet all observed mutations are information neutral or lossy.