Sorry, I completely forgot about this thread. OK, here goes.
We'll start off easy. Four considerations lead to the ocnclusion that evolution is omprobable.
1. Life is unique
2. Complex animals appear suddenly
3. Change in the past has been limited
4. Change in the present is limited
1) A scientist named Jacobson reported in American Scientist that "From the probability standpoint, the ordering of the present environment into a single amino acid molecule would be utterly improbably in all the time and space available for the origin of terrestrial life." A Swiss mathematicion named Charles Eugene Guye came up with those odds. One chance in ten to the one hundredth and sixtieth power. A number far to large to be expressed in words. The amount of matter that would have to be shaken together to create the simplest molecule of protein would be millions of times greater than that in the entire universe. For it to occur on earth would take ten to the two hundred and forty-third power years. That's a long time.
2) An old scientist named Charles Walcott was riding his horse one day in the Canadian Rockies when he stumbled upon something interesting. He found fossils of soft-bodied Cambrian organisms. They were so well preserved you could see everything from their eyes to the intricate organs within their bodies. They grew by molting, a complex process scientists are still trying to understand. The interesting thing is that these fossils pre-date any other fossils in existence at that level of complexity. Basically, these animals were modern and sophisticated, but came out of the primordial soup before they were supposed to be able to do any of these things. They are millions of years too early, and don't have any ancestors. The conclusion was reached that a single creative act in which the major forms of life were created best fits what is actually found in the earth.
3) Basic kinds of animals have not changed. The "missing links" between species are actually entire chains that are missing. G. G. Simpson puts it this way, "It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptible changing forerunnerssuch as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution." Science wants you to believe that they have a long chain of slightly different beings all grouped together and positively identified as an evolutionary ladder, but that is simply not true. Science has to strain and guess and assume to get even a partial chain. We've all seen the pictures in our high school textbooks of Neanderthal man clad in his skin loin cloth armed with a club and some tight dreadlocks, but the skeleton from which we derive that drawing (Lucy) has recently been found to have sufferd deformities from an abnormally sever case of authritis. It appears that person would not be much different from you or me.
4) Let's define evolution real quick. Literally, evolution means change. IN that sense, yes, evolution is a fact, because things change. If you want evolution to denote Darwin's theory and all that crap then we have to look a little closer. We can detect adaptation in some species. Some call it microewvolution, but all it is is the adaptation of a species to its environment without changing families, groups or species. This we can observe. Evolution as a change from one species to another has never nor can never be observed. It will forever remain a theory because it cannot possibly be proven. New species are forming every day from a host of different circumstances, but a change from one fundamental kind to another has never been observed, and will never be observed.
I have more, but will have to get back to you later with it.
