Evolution is a coherent theory with significant amounts of data to establish its veracity.

http://www.youtube.com... http://www.youtube.com... I am the pro side of the debate in favor of evolution. You should not be surprised to find I am an evolutionist. Furthermore, one of the primary points in the initial debate was whether I actually understood the theory. Demonstration of my understanding is required as is a presentation of the coherency and data behind the theory. *Rabbits and mice are both glires. They are members of the closely related rodents and lagomorphs orders. In fact, so closely related are the groups that they were once placed into the same order. Pikas, for example, look like really big mice or very short eared rabbits (They are sooo cute: http://images.google.com... ). The Pika one of the more ancient lagomorphs but not on the rodent side. In theory you could say they are kind of like Rabbit-Mice. The reason this evidence is so convincing and doesn't work for an individual designer is that the rules are set in stone. After the divergence of the species branches you never ever see any species adopting the characteristics of the others. * Mammals have hair, so you never ever see a reptile with hair, or a reptile expressing milk, or warm blooded reptiles. Hair, milk, warm-bloodedness are all very useful adaptations and yet do not jump branches. * When animals evolved the same general strategy, we find they use completely different methods to achieve this. Bird wings are modified forelimbs, with the fingers being completely eliminated (we have some transitional fossils with small digits), whereas in bats the digits are the wings. Bird wings are arms. Bat wings are hands. In insects it's different and in pterosaurs (extinct) it's different still. In every case where non-birds fly modifications of the common body shape are all different whereas with birds every single bird uses the same general wing design. Moreover, this wing design holds true even for species of birds which don't fly. Penguins are aquatic and yet have well adapted wings for flight (they kind of fly underwater). Ostriches similarly have non-functional wings. * Humans have a lower back better built for an animal running on all fours. This seems odd unless you realize that humans had ancestors which ran on all fours. * All mammals have a poorly built eye with a blind spot and nerves and blood vessels running in front of the light detecting surface. Squid eyes don't have this problem. * Shrimp can see polarized and phased light. Most animals including humans are polarized and phase blind. * Pit vipers can see infrared. Humans can't. * Bees can see ultraviolet. Humans can't. * Humans use the same hole for eating, breathing and talking. This insures that some percent of the population will choke to death. Dolphins don't. Gould noted that it isn't in the amazing designs of nature that you really see evolution in the perfections but rather in the imperfections. The jerryrigging and the nonsensical design which makes no sense unless you consider all the little ins and outs of its history. If you understand that evolution simply pushes species towards those variations which are more successful, it isn't going to always produce perfect adaptations but rather jerrybuilt designs remaking the wheel when the wheel is needed or changing the wheel into wing if variations towards that end survive better in the struggle of life. * Theories can't be false. They can be wrong. They need to be shown to be wrong by the evidence. * Eagles and humming birds are both members of the class Aves. They notably have feathers like some dinosaurs, but are actually quite distinct from each others. Fairly modern hummingbird fossils have been dated to 30 million years ago. If more than 30 million years is your definition of "microevolution" then you are tassedly admitting an acceptance that all the old world apes are easily the same species. Humans, gorillas, orangutans. In fact, it was only 18 million years ago that the greater and lesser apes split. So we'd be the same general kind as gibbons. Your supposed disconnection between micro and macro evolution is wrong. There is no suggestion of any alternative mechanisms. The question is whether or not it is possible to walk 10 miles with the same mechanism you used to walk 10 feet. And though the distances may be greater. The underlying mechanisms remain the same. Those variations within species which allow that species to better exploit their niche and better survive in their way of survival (eagles hunting or humming birds drinking nectar) are the ones to have the most offspring and be similarly inclined. Through a continuation of this same mechanisms you get species diverging and changing and adapting. When we look back at the (quite literally) world of evidence we have for these changes we understand that them under the light of evolution, we can make sense of this very diverse group of facts. We can make astounding predictions about the history of organisms and with genetics we are finding all the DNA changes falls into rather specific trees and we can find DNA similarities between humans and yeast. In the spirit of debate you could suppose that you could walk ten feet with feet but to go ten miles demands a spaceship and alien abduction. This is however silly and pointless. There's nothing special to explain about macroevolution. It is microevolution over long spans of time. There's no different mechanisms to establish. Looking at the entire fossil record and the entire diversity of life today as modified variations of previous forms explains all the questions we asked and more. There's no other mechanism nor is one needed. * If your God designed all species on this planet he did a hell of a lot of work, redesigning everything on other branches of the tree of life and no reusing work there, while similarly reusing work within the same branch without fail. Oh, and designing things like the humans lower spine and panda's thumb implies that he isn't very smart. * You suggest that there are various kinds and those kinds diversify. But if you look at the kinds you suppose those can be tracked back into their own tell-tale signs of diversification. Reptile, amphibians, and mammals all have the same basic skeletal structure with the same number of limbs and same number of digits in the same order and attached at the same places. My estimation of the last common ancestor between the zebra and horse comes from a June 2006 paper published in Genomics. Walking With Beasts was produced in 2001 and the previous date given for the divergence was 4 million years ago, with the donkey earlier yet. The more recient picture due to new genetics evidence is that 2 million for the zebra/horse split and .9 MYA for the zebra/donkey split. -- This has nothing to do with being right or wrong but rather is a testament to the advances we are making due to genetic analysis and molecular clocking. http://dx.doi.org... * A cold climate was simply an example. New predators, extinction of other predators, new food sources, coevolution, etc are equally as adept at producing such changes. * There was actually considerable debate as to whether panda was a bear or a raccoon. It has a number of very unbearlike features. * What we see today as diversification of bears could be seen 60 million years from now as the diversification of the polar, grizzly and panda lineages of radically radiated species. 340 million years ago, the changes in very related species of tetrapods which would eventually become snakes and elephants would look like extremely slight microevolution within the tetrapod species. * I know people who question speed of light and gravity (by the way neither of those equations actually related). * The suggestion that one branch is going to jump to another branch is exactly what evolution predicts will never happen.