Secondly, I think the onus is on the evolutionist to prove his case. The proper scientific response to any new idea is, "BS, I don't believe it. Prove it!" If reasonably intelligent people don't buy your evidence you need to come up with better, not insult your audience.
well, the onus
was on the evolutionist, 150 years ago. now that it's pretty well demonstrated, the onus is on the people who fail to understand the evidence or are ignorant of the evidence to back up their interpretations.
and yes, we do need to show the evidence, not insult people. but after a certain degree, if a person simply refuses to see the blindingly obvious, it's also no longer our faults that they are ignorant.
If there truly is some mechanism whereby species regularly evolve into something better and more complex, that mechanism ought to be one of the best understood mechanisms there is.
ignoring the implications of directionality,
it is.
So turn cats into dogs in the lab,
just
not by you. "cats into dogs" is such an old creationist strawman, and really all it demonstrates is that the person making the argument does not understand evolution
at all. in fact, if such a thing were done, it might require significant modification of the theory of evolution as it stands.
map out the sequence of events like the genome is mapped, and I'll take another look.
here is
some suggested reading. i have suggested this book to other people on this board before, and it is quite a fantastic overview of the history of life on this planet.
it is nice and thick, full of a pretty good range of known vertebrate species. not
a lot of information is given, as it is an overview. so you won't see things like reconstruction information, and it will not explain to you every principle of paleontological study employed by people who spend their lives studying it. you won't see proofs of things like geologic time or the law of superposition (take a geology class). but the drawings are fantastic, and there are so very many of them. flipping through, you
should easily get a sense of how things are related.
it is not the tree itself or the work-in-progress catalog of every last fossil (i can link you to a website with about half a million of them, which is some very small percentage and still really difficult to comprehend).
but i promise you, there is
a lot you're simply not aware of in evolutionary biology, and paleontology.