The birding website eBird introduces the Sulawesi babbler, Pellorneum celebense:
A plump, small, long-legged nondescript brown songbird with paler underparts that vary from whitish to buffy in different parts of the range. Found singly or in pairs, on or near the ground, in understory of lowland and foothill forest and forest edges. Restricted to Sulawesi and the Togian and Butung islands, where it is the only babbler present. Long legs, plain overall appearance, and ground-loving habits make it readily identified within its small range. A vocal species with bold calls, including a musical “dewiyou-dee-dee” and repetitive cries of “KEER-KEER-KEER…”.
It’s obvious that the call means, “Do you, like we, desire D (Darwin)? Three cheers!” What else could it mean?
The birds, furthermore, hybridize easily, just like the Galapagos finches. This team went to all this work to hear the birds babble, “We evolved!” when really the best they can come up with is, “We might evolve in the future!” A closer look at the translation shows that the Darwinians got the verb tense wrong. The birds are only offering futureware.
If we are to understand how populations become species, it is natural that we must study populations as well as species. Variation below the species level provides the raw material for natural selection, as populations will begin to diverge before they evolve physiological barriers to reproduction (Dobzhansky, 1940).
How do they know that subspecies are raw material for the Stuff Happens Law, without assuming that first? Circular reasoning!
Therefore, targeting the species level and below allows us to study both current and past speciation (e.g. Brelsford & Irwin, 2009; Everson et al., 2018). Units of diversity below the species level have been defined differently through scientific history, as varieties (Linnaeus, 1766), subspecies (Esper, 1781; Mayr, 1963), incipient species (Dobzhansky & Pavlovsky, 1967), conservation units (Coates et al., 2018) or Evolutionarily Significant Units (ESUs) (Moritz, 1994).
Linnaeus was a creationist (see biography).
His assignment of “varieties” did not imply molecules-to-man
transformation. “Subspecies” is not controversial in the origins debate,
nor is “conservation units.” The terms incipient species and Evolutionary Significant Units (ESUs), however, embed evolutionary imagination into the language." CEH
