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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 891109" data-attributes="member: 2205">No, actually I understand evolution quite well, being almost technically proficient enough to go toe to toe with paleontologists on the subject from time to time.I'm not trying to "sneak" it into the ENboards.  I am not a creationist, so my discussion of evolution has nothing whatsoever to do with religious or political agendas (although by their very nature, it's probably impossible to discuss it without it eventually becoming embroiled in religious or political baggage that it carries.)  I understand that evolution posits a series of steps leading up to human beings, not human beings per se being created literally from the primordial soup.  And yes, the genesis of life in the first place vs. the evolution of life are two different subjects.But the argument is still essentially the same one; and how complex multicellular life came to be from simple unicellular (or not even completely cellular, as in virus life forms) is as much a mystery as is the genesis of life itself.  I happen to think that the theory of evolution is missing some key ingredient -- it fails to adequately explain what we see in the fossil record.  At a macro level it works, but when you look at the actual details, it embarassingly consistently fails to do so.A simple example:  Archeopterix lithographica commonly held up as the poster child of evolution -- a clear cut case of a dinosaur-bird hybrid, right?  Wrong.  Archeopterix springs out of the fossil record like Athena from Zeus's head, fully formed with fully formed flight feathers, and there are no precursors anywhere in the fossil record to explain where it comes from.  Not only that, the closest relative it has amongst dinosaurs embarassingly occur many tens of millions of years later, in the mid Cretaceous.  Quite a few specialists hold out alternate ideas, that birds evolved from some earlier pre-dinosaurian "thecodont" ancestor, that birds evolved from some earlier dinosaur stock such as Protoavis (if such a creature isn't just a chimera, as other specialists believe) etc.  Cladistic analysis often nests birds firmly as descendents of Archeopterix but often simply reveal the biases of the person conducting the cladistic analysis, and all sides conveniently ignore glaring holes that remain unexplained.The theory of evolution remains untested and untestable.  It's ironic that the idea of punctuated equilibrium seems to explain why we can't find better evidence of evolution -- it's a fait accompli for explaining our lack of better evidence.  Exactly what would drive punctuated equilibrium, or any other evolutionary process for that matter, remains completely conjectural and speculative.There.  None of that was, I trust, religious or political in nature, merely pointing out that the theory itself has some serious problems.  Do I have a better model to replace evolution, as Einstein's model of gravity replaced Newton's?  Absolutely not.  That doesn't mean I don't believe there isn't a model out there waiting to be discovered.</blockquote>

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