"X only gives birth to its kind" is an invalid argument against Evolution

In this round I will rebut my opponent"s arguments of the second round. Due to their forfeiture I will not be adding anything to my earlier round. "X only gives birth to its kind: For evolution to be true; an organism must be able to give birth or produce offspring that is not the same species." As mentioned in my earlier round, the biological taxonomy is only able to be functional due to the gaps in between what we see in observable extinct and extant fauna. An animal is defined as a mammal as it feeds milk to its babies and are warm blooded. During the course of evolution there would have had to be a point at which a reptile stopped being cold blooded and started feeding milk to its offspring. These instances may not have happened at once either. We may have had warm blooded reptiles, or cold blooded mammals " neither of which we have classifications for as each description has not been observed and as a result is mutually exclusive and counter intuitive. That being said, at some point there would have been at least one individual that would have had to cross over the arbitrary line in the sand that we have created in defining reptiles vs mammals. This individual then would have gain some traction and their population would have grown. So out of all the attributes of a mammal, what is the ultimate defining characteristic? As birds are also warm blooded, feeding young milk would be the defining characteristic of a mammal. Along the evolutionary path there would have been a point at which this began " and it would have begun with one individual, and at that point that youngster would have been, not only another species but a totally different class. I am surprised my opponent claims that evolution does not happen at the individual level when evolution can only occur with the mutations in individuals that become more frequent within a population due to natural selection. This criticism of evolution is not a misunderstanding of gradualism, it simply highlights that if evolution is true, the current classification method that we use is quite deficient in being able to differentiate between gradually evolving populations. The arbitrary definitions that we assign to a specimen completely break down as soon as an individual specimen or a group of specimens cross over these arbitrary lines in the sand. "X only gives birth to its kind: For evolution to be true, we should be able to see dogs turn into cows, or fish into men" This is a bit of a simplification and misrepresentation of what evolutionary theory states, but there is a valid point in there amongst the mis-information. We would not expect to see a dog turn into a cow or a fish into men " especially over one generation. But over many many generations a dog could evolve into a cow like creature just as a shrew like creature has evolved into the current mammalian menagerie that we currently have. Over time according to evolutionary theory animals will continue to change and evolve into many weird and wonderful random combinations. As mentioned earlier, there are significant variations within dogs, yet they are still dogs. As soon as they are geographically and reproductively isolated we would expect they should change " but this hasn"t been observed yet. . "The importance of this tree is mainly down to it not being violated; there are no examples where there are common traits in one branch that occur in multiple other branches without sharing a common ancestor with that trait". This is quite a completely false statement. Similar traits can be found in multiple branches. Such instances are referred to as convergent evolution. Falcons and Hawks were thought to be closely related due to their similar bird of prey traits, but as referenced earlier Falcons are more closely related to Parrots. The tree is often violated, but evolutionary theory has the flexibility to overcome these contradictions via convergence, or the ability to add additional branches that either continue on today or are dead ends with yet another unknown common ancestor being created. "X only gives birth to its kind: We should be able to see fundamental differences occurring between descendants and ancestors" We do see fundamental differences between descendants and ancestors. Dogs are not sea dwelling creatures, nor are they reptilian. They may share some similar traits, such as a backbone and the like, but dogs are warm blooded, have fur, not scales and don"t lay eggs. In many respects they are nothing like reptiles or their sea dwelling ancestors at all. These are fundamental differences that dogs have with their ancestors. The beauty of evolutionary theory is that similarities are evidence of evolution, whilst differences are also evidence of evolution. Also if any new creature is found that doesn"t fit nicely into the tree of life, the solution is simple, another branch is added or a creature is moved from one branch to the next. "The first issue with this, is that species cannot out-breed their ancestry. " Dogs may not have out outgrown their invertebrate-ness, but they certainly outgrew their fishiness and their cold-bloodedness "In this way, no species will ever become fundamentally different from it's any of its ancestors. A Dog will never produce a non-dog in the same way a mammal has never produced a non-mammal." But reptiles have evolved into mammals, dinosaurs into birds, these are fundamentally different types of animals " all species are all fundamentally different from their ancestors. Evolutionary theory is powerful, it shows how one type of creature can diverge and become many thousands of kinds throughout the world. Is it too much to ask to observe this occurring? If we don"t see it occur it is definitely a valid criticism of the theory.