Vagabond said:
What you propose is utterly impossible.
You speak with a confidence that is not justified by your knowledge.
Don't take that personally, the complete knowledge of the world's biologists is not enough to make this statement.
And that is my problem with Intelligent Design. We simply don't know enough to make a claim that evolution is impossible.
To be fair to the creationists and ID crowd, we do not, in fact, have enough knowledge to prove, in any meaningful way, that evolution really happened.
Before anyone jumps on that, let me explain what I mean. I am certainly not using the usual "it's only a theory" line.
I cannot prove that a Daspletosaurus evolved into a Tyrannousaurus, or that chimps and humans share a common ancestor. I wasn't there. Neither was anyone else.
What I can prove is that if those things were true, if evolution happened, if chimps and humans shared a common ancestor, etc, that the world would look pretty much exactly like it looks. If I go about and examine rocks, fossils, and living organisms, they look the way they would look if they evolved. In fact, it looks so much the way it would look if evolution were true, that I can assume evolution is true, and use that to make useful and accurate predictions about things I've never looked at before. To put it differently, the theory of evolution makes predictions about the world, and those predictions can be verified by observation and test.
Does that mean that evolution really is true? Technically, no. However, it does mean that it explains everything we know, and that there is nothing that we can observe that contradicts the theory.
ID proponents disagree. They say that certain organs demonstrate "irreducible complexity". I think they are wrong. At best, what those organs have is "complexity we haven't reduced yet". In other words, no biologist has studied that particular organ and come up with an explanation for that specific bit of the evolutionary puzzle.
But I'm up for a challenge, Vagabond. Not being a biologist, I don't know if I can do it, but hey, it's only a message board. Give me one organ on one organism that you think could not have evolved, and I'll come up with a similar organ that would be useful to a similar creature, and that could change into the current organ with a very, very, minor change, possibly a single mutation. For example, if you said a spinneret of a spider, I wouldn't trace the evolution of the spinneret from the primordial soup to the modern arachnid, but I would show something that is not a spinneret, but is useful to a spider, and could become a spinneret with a very, very simple modification.
Or I might not be able to do it. After all, I'm a programmer who does this in his spare time. I just can't resist the challenge.
... yet it is faith nonetheless.
