Speciation examples?

[joel]

Can you good people give me examples of observed speciation? I'm particularly interested in speciation resulting from habitats getting isolated due to human activity. Such as roads/deforestation/etc. separating north and south populations of frogs or whatnot. Thanks!

[HydrogenBond]

I am not sure if this counts but when I lived down south many years ago farmers would complain about wild boars coming down the hills and mating with their domestic food pigs. The result was a more gamey flavor to the meat of the offspring. The piglets would also show more signs of wild behavior.

[joel]

Thanks! I'm looking for something along the line of one dispersed population of critters getting separated into two non-interbreeding populations, with the result that eventually the two populations are no longer able or willing to do the wild thing with each other anymore. I am under the impression that this has been observed in amphibians, in eastern US, due to human activity splitting up contiguous north/south habitats. But I'd like a reference if possible! I'm having an on-line debate with an ID proponent (I'm in the evolution camp myself, as you probably noticed). Having examples such as this is sort of the crux of the debate. Cheers!

[Fishteacher73]

African cichlids are excelent examples of "speciation" in action. The main problem is that the line deviving clades, sub-species, and variants are so blurry, that a definate example is almost always argued by some perspective that is does not reach specific qualifications to reach new species level. Mainly it is a vague line as to what exactly a species is (mainly just a contrived human term that does not exactly mirror what happens in nature).