I'm going to have to start calling iodine Salamander Goo from now on.

Psychologic, you are correct in saying that individuals with split, merged, extra, or in other ways funky chromosomes (aneuploid) are usually not viable, and are often sterile. However, if the individual is viable and fertile, finding a mate with the same issue is not always necessary. A beneficial aneuploidy can be passed on much as any other beneficial trait. And, with a terrific amount of luck, can increase in frequency within a population.

For instance, in humans with Down's syndrome, although fertility is severely reduced, many females can have children. You can imagine, that if this trisomy were in some way adaptive, it could eventually sweep the population. The rest of the genome would then likely evolve to accommodate the trisomy/new chromosome, and fertility would increase.

Here is a really neat paper where yeast evolve via aneuploidy to overcome the problems that occur when researchers delete an important gene:
http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(08)01196-3

As for needing to find a mate with a similar chromosomal aberration, you may be thinking of evolution through polyploidy, when the the entire chromosomal compliment is doubled (like you see evidence of in many plants and salamanders). That really screws things up, but because of the way in which plants reproduce, 'gametes' with double sets of chromosomes are common. Combine that with self fertilization and you have reproductive isolation and a new species in one generation.

The question of defining things into categories and different species is a very good point, Dakwins has a chapter on this in The Ancestor's Tale, It's called The salamanders tale, and I posted a video of it here http://www.videosift.com/video/Richard-Dawkins-The-Salamanders-Tale

One way to look at animals is to compare it to colors, ie: defining "blue" What is blue? it goes from "almost white" to "Almost black", and it goes from "almost purple" to "Almost green" and so on, the truth is that the number of blue shades is actually infinite, the same goes with every other color. The same is true with animals. Imagine if you only lived 3 minutes on a sunny afternoon, and you'd say "The sky is blue. Period" and I show you a picture from the same morning with a blood red sky, you'd perhaps say "That's a different sky, a blue sky cant become a red sky, its blue!" And that's how we see animals, a deer-like animal cant become a dolphin and a dinosaur cant become a bird., yet during the course of a few million years, that's exactly what has happened.

This is 2 pictures of the same person:
http://www.lies.com/wp/images/bush3.jpg
http://www.topnews.in/uploads/george-bush3.jpg

When did the kid turn into an old man? never, and all the time, of course, at no point in this mans life could you actually see, from one day to the next that he became older, but of course, he did. and we have photographic evidence, you can look on the web and find pictures of this guy when he was an infant, when he was 4, 20,30,50 and so on. We can also run a DNA test and determine that Barbara Bush once gave birth to this old man, so he must have been smaller at some point

The same thing goes with evolution: Fossils are like pictures frozen in time, and DNA can show how related we are to tomatoes. Or monkeys. Or fish, or anything else that lives on this planet.

Salamanders and caterpillars were born to rock n' roll -Truer words were never spoken.

Do not attempt if you are much bigger than a salamander.
To wit: Cheese Rolling

they displaced all those salamanders and grubs from their natural habitats just to film that? Not to mention all the tires that were displaced from their natural habitats. I'm going to have to flag this one as

*peta

Short list of choggie avatars:

me on giant ad-cow
Rasputin's preserved penis and scrotum
tinky-winky turtle
telletubbies together(pre-tinky-launch)
plastic Cerebus toy found at thrift store in Newton,Kansas
Amazing Criswell
salamander eggs
corn-dog with doll head
pretzel corndog smoking ciggy
me nekkkid
Dita Von Teese (almost nekkid) James scolded me
Mery Xmas rubber sea anemone

thumbnail looks like an "evil eyeball and salamander burger"

It's obvious in lots of real life examples that species change, but this (or any other "evidence") does not prove that one species became another.

Typical ID "argument" that misunderstands the concept of evolution, try this for size: There are no species. just wipe words lik human, ape, monkey, fish, tree,horse,dog, cat and fox out of your mental image of the world for a moment.

All of the above are just "Life", pure and simple, a "species" is just another "variation of life" it is simply how we humans, for simplicity, classify animal variety. The rule is that if two animals cant produce an offspring, or if the offspring itself is unable to reproduce (such as mules) the animals are a different "species", for example, you could probably not mate with your ancestor 3 million years ago (even if you had a time machine) because the difference would be to great, yet, there is an unbroken line of relatives from this ancestor to you, but the whole thing about evolution is that it flows gradually shaping a different species, at no particular point is the mother a different species than her offspring, no more than you are a different species from your mother, but in a sense, that small change (from parent to child) is the largest kind of change that happens in one step on the road from "one species to another"

A good example of this is a so-called ring-species(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species) This is a known phenomena, where animals are separated not by time, but geography to from a complete transition from one species to another, one good example is the Ensatina Salamander, that migrated up a valley and around a mountain, and when they finally closed the ring, they could no longer interbreed, thus defined as "different species", yet, if you went back down the valley, there was an unbroken line of relatives.

There really is no such thing as "macro" and "micro" evolution, its all the same thing, its just that one takes longer than the other.