Again let me draw attention to the hypocricy at work with people like Knute, he claims it all about the evidence, and no evidence counts except if it happens before his eyes (everything else is just 'observations')? Does he then have a problem with God? Or the big bang theory? or even jurors convicting people on other evidence other than eye witness accounts?

you can NOT provide proof of evoultion sinse none exists. you can provide observations, and you can provide opinions but you can NOT provide facts.

If i go into his house and he does not see it happening, does he believe the fingerprints i left behind are merely "observations" and not evidence or proof that I was in his house? What if the footprint matchs my shoe as well. What if they then also find DNA evidence say the hair/fingern nails matching my dna?

At what point will he start believing I was in his house ?

Or will he never ever believe i was in his house unless he was there at the time watching me come in because dna, fingerprints , footprints are just 'observations' and 'opinions' i was in his house? LOL

Darklor, it started as that. It's got way out of hand since

Now, to respond to knute. I never said fantasy. Whether you like it or not, it happened. However, I said the evidence was debatable, nothing else. It IS NOT fantasy, and it happened. Most religious people I know accept this, and the only ones who don't were brainwashed by being taugh by nuns, and can't bring a shred of evidence to their theories, and use the "I aint no monkey" argument. Sadly a lost cause, because these people tend to be immune to logic, and don't know a thing about evolution.

You want to see it happen? Fine. I mentioned Chernobyll, where the lack of natural selection mechanisms allows 3 eyed frogs to grow. There are multiple-headed turtles in the world, extremely rare due to the fact that each head is (seemingly) independant, which makes walking a difficulty. Again, they have beem saved by the people that found them, defeating natural selection. These things are mutants. Mutations are evolution.

There is no good or bad in nature. No "useful" genes or "useless" ones. If it survives, it breeds. If it breeds, it multiplies. If it does this enough to get into the genepool at large, it has evolved. You cannot deny this has happened, there is so much evidence for things like this (and, as I said before, hybrids like mules, zonkeys, etc are evidence for the mutation-breeding) that I would be less impressed if you managed to persuade me that the sky was purple.

If you must continue with the ridiculous notion that you can see evolution, then study bacteria. Get a high powered microscope and projector, and film it. You will probably see them change over time. DNA changes every generation, and if it works it stays. That is evolution in progress, and the only way you can defeat that is to say that bacteria don't exist, and are a figment of scientists imaginations. Do that, prove it, record the proof, and present it to someone, and I'm sure you'll be nominated for a nobel prize soon enough.

Oh, and frogs don't grow wings because it would serve them no benefit and they haven't got anywhere near the genetic structure. Reptiles became birds because they had cooling mechanisms. Some mammals could do it too. Frogs however aren't aerodynamic. Cats and dogs evolved seperately. As did humans and apes. You seem to think that we evolved from apes, which is a cause of a lot of misunderstanding. We (all primates) had an ancestor tree, that split into branches. We are cousins of apes, not descendandts.

That's a good argument, but I think knute is claiming more that you CAN"T point to any evidence for evolution (an emperical question) rather then saying evolution is impossible based on what we know (a theortical one), altough no doubt there is some of the latter as well.

People who argue the later , tend to ramble about the 2nd law of thermodynamics....

"He repeatedly asked questions like: "How can life spontaneously assemble?" or "How could an eyeball evolve?" If I cannot explain to the satisfaction of Walt Brown, right now, how an eyeball evolved, then evolution did not occur. But this is nonsense, confusing an observation with its causation.

The first question is a much bigger mystery then the second. Altough many people confuse abiogenesis and evolution, in theory they are not the same, The evidence for the latter is nearly unchallengable, the former is much less so.

Well, the standard textbook answer is "A combination of our volcanic atmosphere, and porbably a meteorite, caused protein strings to be created, forming deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. This twisted and formed into methane breathing bacteria, which expelled oxygen. As more oxygen became available, some bacteria learned to breathe oxygen, which was more efficient in terms of energy, thus they generally prevailed".

I don't think there is a standard textbook answer yet.

The one you described sounds like panspermia to me, the theory that life basically came from outer space. A possible theory, but one that just pushs the question back one layer.

Most other theories, speculate that there were simpler forms of replicators, more primitive than DNA, (RNA??m, clay based?) that kick started the processes, and through bootstrapping they were replaced by more and more complicated replicators until we came to DNA.

But it's just a theory, and different scientists have different candiates for what this inital primitive replicator ancestor of DNA was, but we might never know really the answer.. We need to know more about the conditions that prevailed in the past as well..

Evolution of the eye is far different. People claim that eyes are useless unless all the components are there, but simply by surveying nature we can see species with eyes of varying sophisication from simple light sensitive cells, all the way to complex len like eyes of different designs and with many steps in between.

This shows that eyes do vary in ability, and that you don't need a fully blown 100% super advanced eye , for it to be useful. So eyes can indeed slowly evolve.