How do we define a "new" species.

Remember, evolution is simply a history looking backwards. It's just the story of what DID happen. Since evolution deals with populations of critters and not individuals, what we see is the results of those that did reproduce successfuly. There are two things going on simultaneously, and they are unrelated. Mutations happen all the time, and Natural Selection filters out part of the population. What is left ater the filtering is the record we see, Did they? It's not a competition. It's not that humans gained an advantage over chimps, it's that humans and chimps each evolved from some other critter. Two separate and unrelated paths and processes. We both changed and changed enough that our lines, Homo sapiens sapiens and Pan, continued while our ancestor, died off. Well, not actually monkeys, they still have the tails. But there is a valid question whether humans, chimps, gorillas and bonobos should all be classified in the same group, either all in Pan or all in Homo.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

While that is one possibility it is not the most common outcome. One great example is to look at the primates. The humans, chimps, gorillas and bonobos all developed in pretty much the same area and over about the same period. But each occupied a different ecological niche. You can see it in some of the other primates as well, where many different species of monkey live in the same area.In fact, in most cases many different species live side by side without one species wiping out the other. Just look most anywhere. Look at the variety of antelope that exist side-by-side, or big cats, lions, cheetahs and leopards that we are all familar with but also the smaller serval, caracal, swamp cat, golden cat, sand cat and secretive black-footed cat.Look at the plant world where many species make up an environment and at the world of birds, or butterflies, the number of bats that live side-by-side. In Texas alone there are 33 species of bats, 484 species of birds and over 300 species of butterflies that live down here in the Rio Grande Valley.The most common thing we see is not one species dominating over another but rather each species living within a unique niche.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I used to work for the GaDNR. One of our programs was sea turtles and every season we'd sit on the beaches at night watching for turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs. Then we'd gather our information, check or tag, and when she struggled back down to the sea we'd wire off the nest to protect the eggs from dogs, raccoons and hogs.We'd also get several sea turtles each year that had been trapped in nets or tangled up in fishing lines. The Loggerheads were enormous. Their heads were so broad and they were downright threatening. One of our biggest projects was developing a turtle excluder device that would keep them from getting caught in the shrimp nets and still not cut down on the shrimp harvest.They are neat critters.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion