Evolution

Thank you for your argument. I'm glad that you took the chance to show your actual debate skills! You said "How does it advance life in any way?" Well, I would consider us humans to be slightly more advanced than mindless microbes... You said "...we should find ample fossil evidence of links in intermediate stages of transition. For decades, evolutionists have searched for fossils of these links... the links have not been found." Actually the links HAVE been found. Do some research first before making statements like that (http://en.wikipedia.org...) Just because a few scientists have decided to reject evolution doesn't mean anything. There are still a couple million of scientists who accept evolution. As for Gould, many scientists have periodically doubted their own theories; Dmitri Mendeleev rejected the existence of atoms for a long time after publishing his Periodic Table of elements. "Evolutionists tell us in the new 'punctuationalist' theory, that, in effect, a lizard laid an egg and out pops a baby bird. " You are misunderstanding the theory of punctuated equilibrium. It does not mean that rapid evolution happens within a generation. It means that species don't evolve much for the long periods of time in which their environment isn't changing. When the species do evolve, it is due to changes in the environment favoring one phenotype over another, causing more rapid evolution. Note that "rapid evolution" still takes several generations to accomplish small changes. When you talked about Archaeopteryx, you mentioned two bird-like species that lived long before Archaeopteryx. However, only two such fossils have been found in the history of paleontology, so there is more likely a reasonable explanation behind how 2 such fossils could have gotten so deep into the ground. There is much more evidence supporting the theory that Archaeopteryx is a link between reptiles and birds. When you talked about Australopithecus, all you said is that it might just be an ancient species of ape. However, there is evidence of direct progression of features between it and Homo Habilis, between Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus, and between Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens. You also said "Zihlman compares the pigmy chimpanzee to 'Lucy', one of the oldest hominid fossils known, and finds the similarities striking. They are almost identical in body size, in stature and in brain size..." This proves even further that chimpanzees are related to humans... You said "Darwin and modern evolutionists still have faith that given long enough periods of time, frogs would evolve into handsome princes." That is a completely untrue assumption. It would be almost certainly impossible for frogs to evolve into humans given just time. The external conditions also have to be exactly right for a species to evolve in a certain way and the conditions to make frogs evolve into humans would have to be spectacularly strange. Evolutionists believe that organisms evolve given the right conditions, both internal (e.g. mutations) and external (e.g. climate), in combination with ample time for the phenotype of the organism to gradually change over generations. Not just "time". Evolution has way too much undeniable evidence supporting it to simply dismiss. I don't even know how it is possible to reject such a well-evidenced theory in favor of ancient Hebrew mythology. Especially when God and evolution are so easily compatible! Anyways, thank you for the debate! It was really fun giving rebuttals to your arguments :D