Welcome to the "monkey house", thure.
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The problem is the scientific community has not soundly proved macro-evolution; the more scientists try to stack up the evidence the more the foundation of the theory crumbles.
This is an interesting statement -- I'm not sure what to make of it. There's quite a bit of
evidence in favor of evolution -- in fact, the evidence is pretty overwhelming. This evidence exists in many different fields, and relies on many different unrelated methodologies. Far from the "foundation crumbling", the theory is strengthened with each passing decade.
By the way, what do you think the "foundation" of the theory is, and why do you think it is crumbling?
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The fossil record actually shows change occurs with the sudden appearance of new, well-differentiated species.
Actually, the fossil record has some pretty interesting gradual transitions -- human evolution, for example, is pretty well documented by gradual transitions, as is the evolution of the horse's family tree. Niles Eldridge and Stephen J. Gould, the originators of "Punctuated Equilibrium" also noted examples of slow gradual evolution in the families that they studied.
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The struggle to prove it with the fossil record, 1859 tons of them by 1982, have clouded rather than clarified our attempts to reconstruct evolution.
Again, I am not sure what to make of this statement. The theory of evolution does not rely on the fossil record; in fact, the fossil record was very incomplete in Darwin's time. The fossil record is useful not so much as "proof" of evolution, but to give details of the evolution of particular lineages.
That said, the fossil record has become, in the last 150 years, remarkable evidence in favor of evolution. It is known, for example, that whales evolved from an ancient terrestrial animal related to the artiodactyls. Fossils were discovered of animals that had characteristics in between ancient artiodactyls and modern whales, and the older the fossil, the more terrestrial, less whale-like they were. It is known that terrestrial vertebrates evolved from fish. And, sure enough, there are fossils of animals that are in between certain lung fish and ancient amphibians, and the older the fossils are, the more fish-like and less terrestrial-like the creature is.
Here is a nice, although still incomplete and now out-of-date, list of nice
fossil transitions.
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We certainly hope that scientists evaluate the evidence and abandon the postulates when they are unsupported, or accept them when they hold sound.
This is another statement that I don't quite understand. Here are the postulates of the Theory of Evolution: (This is the third time that I have posted this; I apologize if people are getting tired of it)
1. Fact: Most breeding organisms produce more offspring than is necessary to replace themselves.
2. Fact: The population of most species are not increasing.
3. Conclusion: Most individuals must die before reproducing.
4. Fact: Many of the physical traits of individual organisms are hereditary.
5. Fact: Some traits make an organism more likely to survive and reproduce, while others make an organism less likely to survive and reproduce.
6. Conclusion: From 3, 4, and 5 we can conclude that organisms with the traits that make them more likely to survive and reproduce will produce offspring with those traits, while organisms with traits that make them less likely to survive and reproduce will leave few or no offspring with those traits.
7. Conclusion: A corollary of 6 is that as generations pass, the number of organisms with "good" traits will increase, while the number of organisms with "bad" traits will decrease, until eventually all individuals in the species will have the "good" trait and the "bad" trait will disappear altogether.
8. Fact: New heritable traits, usually subtle, occasionally appear.
9. Fact: These new traits do not appear in any predictable pattern; these traits can appear in any body part or instinctual behavior; furthermore, some of these traits are helpful to an organism's survival, and others are detrimental.
10. Conclusion: From 7, 8 and 9 we can conclude that a species will slowly "improve" with time, as new helpful traits appear and as the organisms with these traits are better able to survive and produce offspring with these traits.
11. Fact: There is no mechanism that is known to prevent these small, incremental changes from adding up, over time, to large changes; furthermore, there very few (if any) physical organs and instinctual behaviors in any species that do not appear in simpler versions in other species.
12. Conclusion: From 10 and 11 we conclude that there is nothing that will prevent very simple, primitive living species from producing the complex species that we see around us.
13. Fact: Occassionally separate populations of a species will become physically isolated from one another and cannot interbreed.
14. Conclusion: From 9 and 13 we conclude that these populations will evolve independently; from 12 we conclude that these will become different species.
15. Conclusion: From several interations of 14, we conclude that several species can have a common ancestor.
The items I have labelled as "facts" are, indeed, facts that are known to science. Do you have a problem with any of these facts? Furthermore, the items I have labelled "conclusion" seem like logical conclusions to me -- do you have a problem with any of them?
Of course, these facts and conclusions would be merely intriguing if it weren't for the fact that there is much, much evidence that exists for macro-evolution -- evidence that is in the links I have supplied.
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