the phylogeographic challenge to creationism

One of the last great extinctions occurred roughly 66 million years ago, and according to one popular theory it resulted from Earth's receiving a direct hit from a large asteroid. Whatever the cause, the event proved to be the dinosaurs' coup de grace, and also wiped out a good portion of Earth's marine life -- including almost all species of planktonic forams.Like ecologists who study how wildlife recovers from a forest fire, evolutionists are drawn to such incidences of "biological vacuum" in search of clues as to how the earliest forms of life started evolving, when competition wasn't the controlling factor in the process.s revealed by the ancient record left by the foram family, the story of recovery after extinction is every bit as busy and colorful as some scientists have long suspected."What we've found suggests that the rate of speciation increases dramatically in a biological vacuum," Parker said. "After the Cretaceous extinction, the few surviving foram species began rapidly propagating into new species, and for the first time we're able to see just how this happens, and how fast."As foram survivors rush to occupy their new habitats, they seem to start experimenting will all sorts of body shapes, trying to find something stable, something that will work, Arnold said. Once a population in a given habitat develops a shape or other characteristic that stands up to the environment, suddenly the organisms begin to coalesce around what becomes a standardized form, the signature of a new species.As the available niches begin to fill up with these new creatures, the speciation rate begins to slow down, and pressure from competition between species appears to bear down in earnest. The extinction rate then rises accordingly.

The two populations will diverge, then tend to adapt to different environments and different pressures. At some point, even if the two species come into contact with one-another, they will no longer be able to produce fertile offspring -

Why wouldn't they be?

I'm assuming that by 'mutation' you mean a change in the primary sequence of DNA

such as DNA methylation

Are you defining 'copy' errors as ...

Strictly speaking, a "mutation" is any genetic sequence (or lack thereof) in an offspring that does not match the portion of genome inherited from its parent(s).

The third sentence isn't right at all; genetic drift is not due to random segregation of chromosomes, it's due to stochastic factors like a tree falling on some animal's head when that animal lives in a small population.

It does include most somatic mutations when you consider a daughter cell to be "offspring" of a parent cell (within the same organism); but to be clear I was specifically referring to mutation in the sense of heredity.

You seemed to originally be using "copy errors" ...

You seem to be making a fairly arbitrary distinction here.