<< Yeah, like I said, I find both theories to be risible.
Scientist: "Giraffes evolved increasingly longer necks because they had to stretch them to eat leaves off the trees."
Christian: "No they didn't, evidence shows otherwise. Just because I stretch my neck my whole life doesn't mean my kid's going to have a longer neck."
Scientist: "Oh...well...it takes millions of years for microevolution to develop sufficient changes to produce macroevolutionary changes."
Christian: "Then where are the transitional forms? Where are the millions of intermediaries?"
Scientist: "Oh, well... hm... perhaps punctuated equillibrium can explain the sudden gaps we see between species in the fossil record."
Christian:
Xirtam: This is NOT how evolution works. Maybe there was some crackpot who tried to explain it that way, but that's not how natural selection works at all.
An animal becoming better suited to its environment (such as a giraffe getting longer and being able to eat leaves from more trees) has NOTHING to do with what the animal WANTS to do. No intelligent scientist will tell you that an animal gets taller by "stretching" itself. It happens completely randomly. Everytime a new organism comes into existence, there are always some slight genetic variations from its parents--and these are just completely random variations and genetic "defects". Some giraffes may be born just slightly taller than others. These giraffes, just by random chance, now have a very slight advantage over shorter giraffes. These particular giraffes are able to get leaves from trees just slightly better than their shorter peers. Therefore, these slightly taller giraffes will have a slightly better chance of surviving long enough to pass on their taller genes to their offspring when they mate. Over time, these small, small, changes compound on each other. The taller giraffes will have, on average, taller kids. And over long periods of time, the slightly taller giraffes will prevail. And as the generations go on, everytime a baby giraffe is born that is just slightly taller (by random genetic variations), if that makes it more suited to its environment, it will be more likely to pass that "better" trait onto future generations.
You can use this same explanation to understand why people who live in hotter, sunnier environments (like Africa and South America) have darker skin. Or even why we have developed eyes. And it's not always about survival, either. Why do you think humans have gotten taller and taller over the years? Natural selection. Taller people are considered more "attractive" in general. Thus, they're more likely to get laid and have taller kids. And those kids will have kids, etc.
So, you may look at an animal and say to yourself, "Wow, it's so perfect! Look at it, it's perfectly designed for its environment. The giraffe would of course need a long neck to reach those trees! God is a genious for designing them that way!" But the "design" is nothing but the result of lots and lots of random variations that resulted in a better "design" through completely natural means. Most things that seem to be of a perfect "design" really only seem that way because if they didn't happen to evolve that way, you wouldn't be seeing them now. They would have died off or changed so much that they would appear to be a different creature.
Just because you haven't found certain "missing link" fossils doesn't mean the theory is wrong.
And this is not just a "theory". It works. You can see it happen under a microscope. Want to know why it's so damn hard to cure someone with the AIDS virus? Natural selection and evolution. Scientists develop drugs to kill certain strains of the AIDS virus all the time. BUT, the problem is that because it's a virus, it muliplies itself much, much, much faster than an animal such as a human would or could. So the "variations" that happen when the virus reproduces itself happens at an accelerated pace. In an AIDS patient's body, several slight variations of the virus develop as it reproduces itself. When a drug is found to fight the virus, it will kill off most of the virus. BUT, some of the virus that has changed through random variations will remain. It, just by chance, doesn't respond to the vaccine. And now, those ones that don't respond will now start multiplying since they're impervious to the vaccine. And, viola, you end up with a new strain of the virus that's more resilient.
Even if you have problems with certain aspects of natural selection and specific theories associated with it, you should NOT default back to the position that "God created everything." There are FAR, FAR, FAR more holes in the creationist theory than there are in any scientific theory about how the universe was created. Not being able to find some fossils is nothing compared to the huge, gaping holes and contradictions that exist in most religious accounts of the world.
Seeing "order" and "design" does not mean that there really is any. Just because you think something is "pretty" or seems to make sense, does not mean that some invisible man in the sky "designed" it. So your "I see design in the universe, therefore God must have done it" idea is inherently flawed.
The last part of my statement was this:
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