[alphageek31337]

Since this got dredged up from the dark, horrible recesses of the Cellar, I feel I must add my opinions. I don't necessarily buy evolution part and parcel, but I see it as a much stronger jumping off point than "God made the world as it is today and it has not changed at all ever". Darwinian competition ("Survival of the Fittest") can be observed in the world today, with the evolution (yes, whether you believe evolution started it all or not, you cannot deny that it is happening today) of such things as antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the commonly cited case of Peppered Moths in Britain. For those of you unfamiliar with the moths, the basic idea is thus: there are moths in England that tend to gather on a tree with white bark. These moths varied in color from almost pure white to pure black. A pure black moth is easy for predators to spot, so the population tended to include very few pure or mostly black moths, with the dominance of color leaning toward the white moths. Around the time of the industrial revolution, however, a shift occurred. Coal smoke from nearby factories blackened the trees, suddenly making white moths very visible and black moths quite well hidden. Thus, obviously, the population swung toward black moths. Now, it has been argued that since no new genetic information was created, that evolution did not occur, and this is true. The moths are simply an example of natural selection, the driving force, the keystone if you will, behind evolution. If an omniscient, omnipotent being created all the creatures of Earth, why do things like this have to change? Creatures needn't adapt, because they were created in perfect balance by a perfect being. One might also note Albert's Squirrel on one side of the Grand Canyon versus the Kaibab Squirrel on the other side. The two are almost perfect genetic matches, with minor physical variations, and cannot interbreed. New genetic material and a new species were both created, theoretically by the Grand Canyon forming and splitting the populations. There we have proof that evolution does happen, though it will be impossible without some interesting manipulations of the fourth dimension to prove that it *did* happen. Never has it been observed that God plopped a new species onto the Earth, though if Creationism is correct in its assumptions, he wouldn't have to. There will also always be gaps in the fossil record, because we must note that it is an extremely rare occurence for an animal to be fossilized after death. Even in extremely successful species with millions in population at one time (and, we must assume, an exponentially greater number of deaths), there are not terribly many preserved fossils, especially those of full bodies of a single organism, which would prove infinitely more useful than single or small groups of bones, which could easily be attributed to the animal before or after the transitional species. Transitional species are just that, transitional. They exist for a short time as one archetype moves toward another. There are not nearly as many of them as there are of successful archetypes, and they do not exist for as long a time (hence, fewer bodies and exponentially fewer fossils).

On another note, one of the more common arguments for intelligent design is what I refer to as the automobile theory, essentially that evolution is just as likely as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a complete, running automobile. The problem with this theory is that it assumes one junkyard, one planet on which life could possibly have evolved. Given that the universe is infinite (space is nothingness, nothingness can extend onward indefinitely, therefore the universe must be infinite in size), and that there are an absolutely mindblowingly large number of planets in the universe (a number large enough that it can be considered, for practical purposes, infinite), what is the likelihood that there is *not* a planet on which life could evolve? Essentially, given 1 junkyard and one tornado, the chances of assembling an automobile are infintessimally small, but given an infinite number of junkyards and an infinite number of tornados blowing through each of them, it is almost a guarantee that, at least once, the parts will come together by chance and form a running automobile. This is the same theory I present to people who don't believe that intelligent life exists off of the planet Earth: given an infinite number of attempts over time, even at infintessimally small odds, Earth cannot be the only place in the universe that fell within that precise range on the bell curve that permits intelligent life to develop. In fact, it is safe to assume that there are a vast multitude of civilzations throughout the universe.

Also, as a sidenote for intelligent design theorists who wish to argue, "your theory is wrong" != "my theory is right". Simply poking holes in evolution does not mean that there is a God. Come up with scientifically backed data that withstands scrutiny and provides mechanisms to explain the changes in organisms that we have observed, and you will begin to actually prove your theory.