Given the available data, denying the theory of evolution is completely unreasonable

Mirriam-Webster"s Dictionary defines a "kind" as: "a group of people or things that belong together or have some shared quality: a particular type or variety of person or thing." http://www.google.com... The average person can usually look at four things and tell which one doesn"t belong in the group. Scientists have gone overboard, splitting hairs to place things that are almost identical into different groups just because they can"t breed together as with Pro"s example of drosophilia. But we even have some couples today who can"t have children; it doesn"t make them a separate species just because they can"t breed with the rest of us. Humans are a kind, that's the example you asked for. If some disease or mutation unique to Africans were to occur in the next few years which prevented them from having offspring with whites, I"m sure the average person would still consider them human. It"s only over zealous evolutionists who would begin to class them as a separate species and seize upon it as proof of evolution. The fact is, after all these generations, the drosophilia in Pro"s example didn"t evolve into anything radically new. I never argued that a dog should give birth to something radically different from a dog as Pro alleges. My point is that since evolutionists claim the changes happen to slowly in large mammals to be observed, we should be able to observe the gradual changes into a radically different from of life with things such as bacteria, and fruit flies, because of their extremely short life span. Yet, despite all the thousands of generations, no such radical changes have developed. We have not observed the small changes eventually accumulate into any massive change as evolution predicts. All the changes run into the limits of variation. Because evolutionists lack imagination to see how a Creator could have made the giraffe, they speculate that during droughts, short animals had to reach higher and higher for food and over millions of years inherited longer necks. Darwin said "that an ordinary hoofed quadruped might be converted into a giraffe." (On the origin of species, P 227-8) Look at how dumb this is. First, female giraffes are two feet shorter than the males, so in this scenario the males would survive and the females die out. How then did they reproduce? And if height were the key to survival for this species during a drought, how did the baby giraffes survive? Second, how did the other shorter animals such as gazelles, elands and impalas which roamed Africa along with the giraffe survive the same droughts without evolving long necks? Third, Pro said the mutations are random, but a mutation giving an antelope-like creature a longer neck wouldn"t increase the length of the legs. Fourth, it would be a sever health hazard to dramatically increase neck length without all the physiological and anatomical mechanisms simultaneously being in place to facilitate the skeletal changes. Without special valves in the neck and head to protect against severe fluctuations in blood pressure when raising or lowing their heads, giraffes would rupture blood vessels in the brain when lowing their heads for a drink. Evolutionists thus expect us to believe that a whole set of beneficial mutations occurred simultaneously in the neck, head and legs of the giraffe at random. The odds of this happening are so small that if it did happen, it would be proof of divine intervention. Fifth, the low height of most plants common in the giraffe"s diet argues strongly against the notion that they evolved longer necks to reach food. Sixth, the idea that use of a body part can pass on a physical characteristic to the young is biologically untenable. If you are an athlete it won"t mean your child will be born with natural speed. When Chinese made women wear tight shoes to achieve small feet it didn"t make their offspring born with smaller feet. The Laetoli Footprints feature giraffe prints with human footprints 3.5 million years old, showing humans in the wrong period of history on Pro"s phylogenetic tree. I know he will claim these were not fully human but some kind of bipedal creature on its way to becoming human. I would simply ask him to point out the difference between these and modern human footprints. Don"t tell me the toes were longer, because we only have shorter toes because we wear shoes. People who don"t wear shoes are characterized by longer toes. Pro thinks my argument against bacteria evolving into something else is silly, but its people like him who claim that e-coli bacteria developing the ability to ingest citrate is proof of evolution. They don"t say "oh no, this is just a domain, this is silly," when trumping these mutations, but now all of a sudden its silly to bring in a domain? Why shouldn"t we see a bacteria evolve multicellular algae or fungi? Pro also gave me a link to a site which calculates the half-life, which says that to find out the half life, one has to at least know the mean lifetime of the particle or decay constant. Since the decay constant is the inverse of the mean lifetime, one would have to know the mean lifetime to find out the decay constant. So how do you establish the mean lifetime? The mean life-time is how long the particle will live before it begins to decay. Has anyone observed an atom of C-14 from its creation till the point at which it begins to decay? Who? And how long did this take? I bet Pro won't tell us, but we'll see. Scientists have an equation, yes, but they have not looked at C-14 for 2,570 years to see if this calculation is correct that it takes that long for half of it to decay. For calculations to accurately represent real life situations, one must begin, not with the equation, but with the facts of the situation that will form the basis of the equation. How big is an atom of C-14? Typical size of an atom is 0.000000001 inches. Divide this by 1285 years and you get the amount that will decay into Nitrogen in year, an amount so small that nobody could measure it. So how could they know the amount that decays over time? If Pro claims that even one Carbon-14 atom completely decays on a regular basis, he can't maintain it takes 2570 years as a constant rate of decay. It would then vary according to the amount of C-14 present. Atheistic evolutionists usually say what they'd expect to see if God existed, like he would make his existence more evident, and if the Bible were true they'd find scientific evidence of Noah's flood, etc, so why is it unfair for me to state what I'd expect to see if evolution were true? My opponent says that "the environment in which you live does not PROMPT the mutations in your body (which is what my opponent seems to be alluding to); you have to be lucky enough to develop a mutation that helps you survive (which will then be passed down)," but in saying this he implies the even more improbable scenario in which animals simultaneously developed plenty of beneficial mutations to sustain their physiological changes. To get from fish to amphibians like frogs and toads, the entire backbone would have had to change beyond recognition. Fish gills must change into lungs, fins had to become jointed limbs with wrists and toes, accompanied by major alterations in muscles, nerves and tendons; a two-chambered heart had to become a three-chambered heart. Fish receive sound through their bodies, but most toads and frogs have eardrums. No fish had to develop an extendable tongue and ability to blink. Its just not enough to compare fossils and say the bones are similar. And many beneficial mutations would be necessary to accommodate the new features. Trying to bridge the gap between amphibian and reptile poses other serious problems. Creatures prior to reptiles fertilized their eggs externally. Reptiles practice internal fertilization, before the egg is surrounded by a shell. To evolve this would reqire new sexual organs, new mating procedures and new instincts"all of which constitute a vast gulf between amphibian and reptile. So even if some random mutations every once in while made fish and amphibians change in their size and shape, a whole lot more is still needed. Natural selection and mutation seem woefully inadequate to produce this. Yes, Creation.com isn't a scientific source, the scientific sources for their comments are given at the bottom of the article on their website. Science has no monopoly on truth either. Science can't tell you when a woman truly loves you, or if you are in love. Science can tell you the result of rape, it can't tell you if rape is right or wrong. If you accept that rape would still be wrong even if all humans except one single female thought it was right, you'd be agreeing that right and wrong are not determined by majority vote, or mere human opinion, but some higher law. God's law? I repeat, chimps are more similar to gibbons than humans, despite being further from gibbons on the evolutionary timeline. They are more claimed intermediates between chimps and gibbons over a longer time, than between humans and chimps. So we ought to be more like chimps than gibbons if evolution were true. As for his illustration with language, Italian originated in he 12th century from a vernacular form of 960-963 CE. New words and expression are formed regularly, and we can trace the changes in written documents from Latin in 900 CE to Italian in 1200 CE, just 300 years under human observation. In 300 years we have not seen generations of ANY life form gradually produce any new species that was radicully different morphologically. I'll respond to the rest of Pro's argument next round. this will be very cramped as I also have his last round to respond to, but I'll do my best. Thank you.