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I have only read through the first page of this thread, and I'm not sure if what I'm about to say has been said already, but here it goes anyways.
1st what are these holes in evolution, like Phoenix said? Every time it has had to step up and prove itself to skeptics, it has stood it's ground.
People keep saying we can't see evolution happen, but there are common examples happening all around us. Take resistant bacteria. Say someone has the flu; we pump them full of medicine and kill almost all the virus cells except for the ones that have some type of resistance to the drug. These survivors then multiply, passing their genes on, and voila a new version, hell arguable a new species of the influenza bug is born within a few generations. Now this is with human intervention, but the same thing happens in the natural world, accept with things other then massive waves of poison thinning the population, more simple things like predators, food shortages, and droughts. Those animals best suited to survive these events pass on their traits, and after generations, these traits become the norm.
Now what about the making of new species? What makes a group of animals not only separate by a few traits, but by their ability to breed with each other? Lets take our own evolution (as well as explaining why there are still apes in the world). A group of apes are separated when the Great Rift Valley is formed; one group remains in a forest, and evolves into the great apes we see today, perfectly adapted to live in the trees. Now the other group is in a much more severe condition. They have to adapt to the grasslands that they now inhabit. To look over the tall grasses to avoid predators and find food, they learn to stand on their back legs, freeing up their hands for the creation of tools (of course this takes millions of years to happen). These half monkey, half man creatures do appear on the fossil record. Fossils like those of Lucy, or homo habillis, or homo erectus..or the ones with the longer names that I’m far to tired to try and spell and to lazy to look up at the moment.
In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, evolution is described like a tennis tournament. Obviously, in any tournament, there must be a winner, and in a game of skills, this of course is the most skilled. But in nature you have to throw luck and random chance into it, so lets say after each point, the loser has to play Russian roulette. Now there is still a higher probability for the most skilled player to win the tournament, even with luck. As is the case with those that are best suited to survive pass on their genes.
Many people think that it is impossible for a molecule as complex as DNA to occur by chance. But in nature, those things that are best suited to be together, stay together. Take the sentence TOBEORNOTTOBE. By randomly typing in letters, it would take billions of combinations before you eventually got this. But lets say you first get the T, then after that the O, after that the B, all the way until the whole sentence is complete. This would just take a few hundred tries, and explains how, if the proteins, molecules and atoms found in DNA would stick to each other, and eventually form the entire strand (which wouldn't be nearly as complex as it is today)
Humanity isn't the last step in evolution, in fact we are just another branch in the great tree of life. And ya i believe in evolution over creationism
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