Letters to the Editor
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you have given me the idea to look into the evolution of cotton and other plants to use against the fundamentalists.
Plant evolution is a good place to start in general; their genetics is more fluid than animals, and a new species evolving happens reasonably often, both naturally or by intelligent design (human, though).
For instance, while animals must have two and only two sets of chromosomes (diploid), plants seem to function well, and even be healthier, with four sets of chromosomes (tetraploid); these species obviously came from a diploid parent by some developmental error, but they canot interbreed with that parent (three sets of chromosomes is a no-no even for plants) and that's the definition of a different species. We see such tetraploid plants in nature, and we also create them in the lab; that's where seedless watermelons come from, they're the sterile triploid offspring of an artificially created (but stable) tetraploid species and its diploid parent; like horses crossed with donkeys, you get a sterile offspring which is useful but can't reproduce, which proves that the two parents are different species.