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

There is a joke in the scientific community that goes "There are two kinds of people, those who accept evolution and those who do not understand it" and I believe that my opponent's last round is an excellent demonstration of the fact that this joke is grounded in reality. I will rebut my opponent's points paragraph per paragraph. One of the famous complain that people have against evolution is that is has never been observed. The easy response to that is that it HAS INDEED been observed countless times, including by me. It is actually not a very difficult experiment, all you have to do is gather a population of, say, a species of drosophila and separate the population in order to create what is called "isolated reproduction". After many generations, the two separated populations can NOT interbreed with each other and you therefore have, by definition, two different species. Con then commits the ultimate "sin" when discussing the subject of evolution; he brings up the concept of kind. Why is this a problem? Because kind has NO scientific definition and is therefore often use as an equivocation fallacy. I would really like my opponent to define the word kind and give me an example of what he considers to be a kind. Con then proceeds to give examples of minor mutations in the human, but I fail to see how this is an argument against evolution. He says: "No amount of breeding has ever caused dogs to produce anything other than dogs" which is another example of how people misunderstand evolution. The theory of evolution would NOT allow for a dog to produce anything other than a dog. Actually, breeding procedures are ENTIRELY based on the assumption that the theory of evolution is accurate. Although I can not assess the reliability of my opponent's sources, I can understand why a species that is very well adapted to its environment would only change very slightly; this is completely in accordance with evolution and the idea of survival of the fittest. I would start by pointing to the title of the book from which this quote is taken, which seems to indicate that there is a bias from the part of the other. That being said, there is indeed a limited amount of mutations that can occur from one generation to another, but why would anyone believe that these minor changes can NOT add up over time? That seems to be a failure of their imagination. This one is exactly the same thing as the "dogs stay dogs" quote from the first paragraph. Once again, evolution does not permit them to be anything else than what there ancestors were; they simply become a SUBSET of their ancestors. Those subsets may (and often do) vary from one another, but NOWHERE in the transition from the ancestor to its currently living descendant did a parent give birth to a completely different child. The segment of this paragraph that focuses on bacteria may seem like a rehash of the "dogs stay dogs and pigs stay pigs" argument, but it is actually far worse. The previous argument had at least the merit of talking about species, which is the lowest taxonomical rank, but this one is referring to a domain (bacteria), which is the highest taxonomical rank. For those who do not know what a domain is, it is the first division of life which divides it between bacteria, archaea and eukaryota (which includes animals, plants and fungi) (1). The argument that evolving bacteria are "still bacteria" is therefore even more silly then "this animal evolved, but it is still an animal". As I said earlier, everything is going to be a subset of its ancestors. Con challenges me to prove that there is enough time for evolution to occur in human, but since this challenge is based on the bacteria argument which I have now refuted, I believe that the timeline of the fossils I provided is demonstration enough. This paragraph shows a study of fruit flies in which the conclusion that was drawn was that favorable mutations happen rarely, which is true. That is precisely why evolution happens over millions of years and why 99,9% of every species that have ever lived are now extinct (2). That being said, favorable mutations DO happen, and this video shows a few example in humans : My opponent then complains about the fact that fossil dating is inaccurate. My response is: yes it is (3). My opponent's precise complaint is that the half-lives are impossible to determine. It is actually a rather simple process by which we use mathematical models in order to calculate with amazing precisions the half life on an element without having to "wait" for the actual half life to pass. Here is how you calculate the half life of an element: . http://www.calculator.net...Con quotes me as saying that a theory must produce accurate predictions, which is something I stand by. Then he proceeds to give his own predictions and faults evolution for not actual behaving like he predicted, which is a bit unfair, to say the least. He starts with the prediction that Eskimos should have grown fur since they live in a cold environment, but the fact that they wear furs to protect them from the cold allows them to stall the process of natural selection and therefore explains why they did not "grow fur". It is important to point out 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), which is why, as I said earlier, 99,9% of species are extinct. That being said, Africans have a skin that is more resistant to sunray than north American and Scandinavians DO in fact have more body hair than most. Con then faults scientists for being unable to predict what mutations will occur, but this is a ridiculous accusations since mutations are random (but natural selection is not). My opponent says "The only reason they could predict the discovery of a so-called sea to land transitional like tiktaalik is because we already have similar animals", but that is incorrect. The way scientists predicted the existence (and location) of this animal is very well described in the sources I provided. Scientists did NOT already know that tiktaalik was there; they made the prediction that it was and it turned out to be correct. The fact that DNA is similar from one species to another is not the only (or the best) reason why DNA is evidence for evolution, it has to do with the precision and accuracy of the phylogenetic trees that it produces and their concordance with predictions made using morphology and geology. The idea of a "common designer" is a post-hoc rationalization which has no value in science. DNA is in fact sufficient to confirm common ancestry, according to Francis Collins (Head of the Human Genome Project) (4). And by the way, creation. com is not a scientific source. Since neither me nor my opponent have actually looked at chimp DNA, I can only put forth my own sources against his own to challenge the numbers he provides. I will also add the following:. http://news.sciencemag.org...http://en.wikipedia.org...http://www.genome.gov...Con points to differences between humans and chimps and then goes on to say that gibbons are more similar to human than chimps DESPITE being further away in the phylogenetic tree. This, once again, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. The fact that a distant "cousin" of humans has evolved similar psychological properties does not necessarily mean that they are more closely related, it simply means that they evolved similar psychological characteristics, which does NOT go against evolution. Furthermore, the only scientific source that I found regarding this topic rejects my opponent's implications (5). "If indeed we evolved from chimpanzees, its odd that the so-called intermediate forms such as australopithecus, homo erectus, and homo habilis are extinct but the inferior apes survived. How did lower lifeforms outlive their evolved successors? " This is, yet again, a misunderstanding of evolution. The concept of inferiority is a meaningless concept when we are talking about evolution, there is only well adapted and not well adapted. I would like to give my opponent an analogy in order to help him understand evolution: language. For this analogy, take the concept of speciation as being the ability to understand one another. We know that french, spanish and italian are all derivative of latin, which is now extinct. The way these three languages evolved was by dividing the latin-speaking population in many isolated area and overtime, latin became french in one of these areas, spanish in another and italian in the last. Nowhere in the evolution of these languages did a latin-speaking mother give birth to a french-speaking child and yet, french and latin are radically different languages. French, spanish and italian also are radically different languages and yet, they are all descendant of the same language. This is a direct analogy to biological evolution. Finally, I would like to remind my opponent to give me his definition of kind and an example of a kind. If my opponent uses the term Macro-evolution in his next round, I would also like a definition. I await Con's responses. (1) . http://biology.about.com...;(2) . http://paleobiology.si.edu...;(3) . http://www.agiweb.org...;(4) . http://www.cnn.com...;(5) . http://genome.cshlp.org...;