I have been told about spontaneous evolution of frogs?

Question

All I know is that what I have heard of ia the following details, and would like to know if there is any information about this.

Some years ago, at least 10 years ago, some scientist, no name gut well known. announced that he had finally proven evolution. He said that he had taken some frogs, put them under some sort of pressure, and after some time they had become something else.

This is not a homework project, but a debate with a friend. He is the one who has come up with the idea, and I would like to know if there truth to it.

Answer 1

Don't believe everything you're told, or that you read. Evolution is a lengthy process and "some scientist" pressurising frogs will prove 0. If you really want to understand evolution try this:0.http://books.google.com.au/books?id=-ddV...  

Answer 2

If you squeeze frogs and they change into something else, that is not evolution. The theory of evolution says that the frogs do not change, but their children will be slightly different from them and most of them will die. Only the most suitable ones will survive.

Answer 3

If you take *any* population of organisms of a species, and put that population under *selective* pressure, they will evolve!  Period.

That's basic, basic biology.

Whether they become "something else" is a matter of semantics.

Simple example:  If you take a bunch of undifferentiated dogs, and put them under 120 years of *selective pressure* by breeding only the ones that are good at some job (like herding sheep, or chasing small animals into burrows) the dogs will become more and more like a border collie or a fox terrier.   Is that "something else"?   Well border collies look quite a bit different from fox terriers, but they are still dogs.   But if instead of 120 years of selective pressure, they underwent 120-*million* years of selective pressure, chances are that that animal would not be able to mate with what we call a "dog" today.   It would be an absolutely different *SPECIES* than a modern dog.  It is "something else."

Lab experiments have been able to demonstrate ... many many times ... that selective pressure can cause enough evolution to achieve *speciation*, the separation of the parent population into two populations that cannot breed with each other.   The significance of this is that the two populations are then *permanently* separated genetically and are thus free to evolve in very very different ways until they are indeed "something else."

As far as frogs, there is a really interesting study out of the University of California documenting that the selection pressure of "picky females" caused speciation of a frog population in nature, in fewer than 8,000 years (which is unbelievably fast in geological terms):

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/ne...

Does that answer your question?