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I have known doctors and biologists who have degrees up to their elbows which believe in God and are very much convinced of the complete farce of evolution. So please do not come up with these ridiculous, unsupported statements about "all scientist."



In any case, you can find cranks in any discipline. The fact is modern biolgical sciences depend entirely on evolutionary theory.

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and Darwin himself knew that all his theories depended upon finding intermediate fossils which he assumed a later generation would find. We never found them.



Yes we did, and in fact Darwin was triumphantly vindicated 2 years after publication of Origin of Species with the discovery of archaeopteryx, a form connnecting dinosaurs to birds. More recently, we have found many feathered dinosaurs that resemble birds and dinosaurs so closely, that it's difficult to draw a distinction between the groups, and now many scientist consider birds as therapod dinoaurs. This is a fascinating example of how two apparently distinct groups are shown to be closely related to each other, because the latter share derived characteristic with the former. Birds therefore are diapsids, like reptiles. In other words, birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than they are to mammals. The fact that both are warm blooded shows a case of convergent evolution, where the same traits are NOT derived, but evolved seperately.

Darwin predicted early human ancestors, and that the earliest would be found in Africa. It is a common misconception, one you seem to hold, that humans are descended from "monkeys" . This is not the case. Humans and monkeys however, did have a common ancestor. Chimpanzees and the great apes diverged from the human line more recently than monkeys, and in fact Chimps are our closest relatives--morphology and DNA comparisons prove this conclusively.

Obviously you know NOTHING of the fossil record, or do you belive that fossils are all hoaxes? There are a vast number of intermediate fossils, in fact all fossils are "intermediate" in that evolution is not made of discrete steps, and has no inevitiable or directed goal. Evolution IS adaptation. Just for instance, look at the various stem tetrapods, and you can see there is a clear transition between water and land-based forms. All the fossil record can give us are snapshots of an immensely long and gradual process. Howeever, remarkably, ebnough fossils formas have survide to enable us to construct very complete trees of life.

Fos instance, we have have hominind forms, going back in very obvious graduation, to millions of years ago. Look at the Homo Erectus skeleton, it is so very clearly related to us, that one walking down the stree, if cleaned up and in a suit, would probaly not warrant more than a glance.

Homo hiedlebergensis, homo habilis, and are good representatives of close ancestors. Going farther back we have austrolapithicus and so on. There is no other way to undertsand these fossil speacies without evolutionary theory. Exactly what the relationshoips are are still not compo,etely clear, but that humans share derived characteristic with homo erectus is clear. We alos share older derived characteristics with chimps. Characteristics are not convergent, but derived, because the structres are the same.

However, humans and birds are indeed distantly related, because the dinoaurs and mammals had a common ancestor, the amniotes, like A. Cotylorhynchus. These odd creatures had characteristics that eventually are shared by all living reptiles and mammals. This is yet another exmaple of 'intermediate' forms.

The problem is, you expect every possible permutation to be represented in the fossil record. They arent. Only a small number of specias have been preserved, but they are enough.

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However, we can even look at living specias to get an idea of what intermediate forms look like. Consider the lemurs. The lemurs are creatures that resemble, and may actually be ancestral, to all monkeys, apes, and hominids. The lemurs are clearly not monkeys or apes, but have many distinct characteristics that are more distinct in other species.

Lunfishes, for example, while not ancestral to the first land tetrapods, show primitive lungs capable of breathing air. This is an example of evolutionary recursion, in which the same evolutionary step is made more than once.

Look at the coconut crab of the South Pacifc and Indian oceans. This is certainly a crab, or is it? It is in fact not a crab per se, but a derived hermit crab, which is not a true crab. It is a related crusacean, for whom evolution has found a suitable form, that resembles the true crabs. This evidence of recursive convergence clearly supports that evolution proceeds by the process of natural selection, that is, favorable forms are more likely to survive and reproduce than lass favorable forms. That the crab-like is favorable to arthropods is clear. Other arthropods crustaceans have also evolved into a crab-like form.

The coconut crab is also interesting to us, because it has independently developed an air-breathing lung, although not like our lungs. in fact, it still has rudamentary gills also, but these gills dont function very well, and a coconut crab will drown underwater after a few minutes. Interestingly, it is not fully adapted for dry land either, as its "lungs" must be occasionally wetted.

How else do you explain rudamentary gills that dont work well, and lungs that needs some water to function, if you dont accept that the coconut crab is derived from water-living animals?

An interesting form of this recursive convergent evolution can be seen in the "icthyoid" forms, bascially a long, slender, streamlined shape, a single erect dorsal fin, two large fore-fins, and a finned tail. Beginning with icthyosaurs( a giant sea-going reptile), to sharks, and finally dolphins, we can see that this form is apparently so favorable, that three extremely different groups of animals have evolved to almost exactly resemble each other. This is a strong case of a form so succesful, it is almost a case of inevitability. Does this contradict the idea that evolution isnt directed or inevitable? No, because the forms only evolved under similar conditions, and plenty of sea-going species look nothing at all like this.

An existing species bears in its genes marks of its history, as a canyon's walls shows the layers of its making in the sedimentary rocks.

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As i tried to show in as few words as possible, there are clear intermediate cases. Living animals have traces in their bodies of previous modes of living. Very differnt groups come to resembel each other because the form they take is favolrable in the same conditions. But not all forms converge, becaue of randomness, drift, and otehr factors.. showing that evolution is never consistent, and is essentially random. What is tempting to see as design is simply our anthropomorphicizing a very complex and gradual process.

One may argue that science can only show how, not why, something is, and this is true. In its strictest sense, "why" is an anthropic term: i may ask "why do you like blue?", "why did you go there?", but not "why does the apple fall from a tree?". What i really mean is "how did the apple fall?". The apple falls because of physical forces, but it made no choice to do so. "Why?" is a question of behavior, "how?" is a question of mechanics. So in the end, no scientist should ask "why?" but only "how?".

(I'd appreciate it if any biologist would care to comment on my arguements, and make any corrections if needed)

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