Polyploid speciation

Yesterday was Darwin Day and I hope that everyone had a good one. In the spirit of Darwin Day I am going to again talk about an aspect of evolution. This aspect is polyploid speciation. This usually occurs in plant species as two plants form a hybrid. The reason why this happens in plant species frequently is that they can self fertilize themselves. The hybrids or daughter plants can no longer reproduce with either of the parents, yet they can reproduce with themselves. Not only is this evolution happening within one human lifetime, we can also test it and reproduce the results. The amazing thing is that I really do not remember hearing about this in many of the books that I have read. However, Jerry A. Coyne has mentioned this in his book Why Evolution is True. Now, one of my hobbies is gardening. I love to grow peppers and use them in my cooking. One of the hottest peppers is a hybrid of the habanero pepper. Many watermelons are hybrids as well. The seedless ones are designed so that the fruit is unable to produce seeds. However, there are also other watermelon hybrids that are able to produce seeds. The banana is another plant that can not reproduce. I once saw an argument that the banana was made by God as the perfect fruit. However, the person who made this argument was not aware at the time that the plant was manipulated by man to create the commercial banana. (This is also discussed in Jerry A. Coyne's book. If you want to see the argument for the banana being the perfect fruit, it is on YouTube and has Kirk Cameron in the video. I encourage you to watch it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4) Then it was pointed out that the banana was manipulated by man and the "proof" then became that God gave us the knowledge to formulate the useful banana. Plus, look at bananas and they don't all fit the "divine" design that was described in the video. We can manipulate many plants just like we have done with dogs. This does not mean that the peppers or watermelons have become new species, but it just shows that we do as much artificial selection with plants as anything else. One argument against the idea of artificial selection providing evidence for evolution is that their are no new dog species, they all can interbreed. However, this can no longer refute evolution since we can create new species of plants that are able to self fertilize and are no longer able to fertilize either parent species. Evolution is a wonderful and interesting science.