This is going to be a bit cumbersome to reply to Bex, but I'll do my best. Maybe I should have listed one or two things for you. My time is going to be more limited soon and it will be easier to write and address shorter posts.

You seem to be saying that the hind limbs which have been observed to form and disappear in whale embryos are not what they appear to be, like the so-called gill slits. I've looked into this and I've seen pictures of them. They form briefly and then they do indeed simply disappear -- they do not turn into anything, form any other body parts, indeed there seems to be no use for them. But they are also a small part of a bigger picture, when you look at vestigial parts -- we can focus on the whale here. Rod-like vestiges of pelvic bones, femora (thigh bones) and tibiae (shin bones) have been seen embedded within the musculature of whales. They are more pronounced in earlier species. Whales also have vestigial olfactory structures. Some whales possess rudimentary ear pinnae, which serves no purpose for an animal with no external ear.

Dolphins share similar characteristics, and you can see here some pictures of 5-week-old fetuses with the hind limb buds, as well as some with atavistic remains of hind limbs.

To add to this, genetics can tell us how species are related to each other, and we can see that whales are more closely related to ungulates than they are to all other mammals, through genetic analysis.

You can read about the molecular biological evidence and the vestigial evidence for the evolution of whales here. It's difficult to see how anything other than evolution would make sense when such a large body of evidence is considered as a whole.



First, how do you define "species" then? How many "variations within a kind" do you accept? And how do those variations occur? Some pretty large ones are called for in Ken Ham's flood story, and they needed to happen rapidly. You could avoid labelling this "evolution" if you want, but the process is the same.

Second, if species are completely unrelated to each other, then the nested hierarchy of life needs to be explained. In Darwin's day as well as ours, this is a strong piece of evidence for evolution. Carolus Linnaeaus first noted that the arrangement of species in genera united by many traits shared by only members of that genus, in orders united by a somewhat smaller number of unique shared traits, in classes united by their own suite of traits common to members of the class and not found elsewhere, and so on. For example, all animals with mammary glands also have (although this hardly seems a logically necessary corollary of mammary glands) a single bone in the lower jaw and three bones in the middle ear, as well as other morphological similarities.

There are no birds with mammary glands. There are no bats with feathers; they all make do with the general mammalian architecture, including fur. This is an odd feature if species, or "kinds," are separately designed for their particular roles, but is a typical pattern for groups of organisms resulting from common descent with modification. Families of documents hand-copied from a common original fall into consistent nested hierarchies, as do families of languages, but designed organisms do not. This same nested hierarchy is reflected in genetic and biochemical traits. Humans share pseudogenes (nonfunctional "crippled copies" of functional genes) with chimpanzees and other primates, with those in chimps more similar to those in macaques, but all disabled in the same way.

Surely these patterns and similarities would not exist if the organisms were not related to each other, and instead had each been specially and individually designed.



Do you have evidence for this? We've found out recently that the human genome consists of 25,000 genes rather than the predicted 120,000. We also know that some genomes are more complex than the human one, and that some species also have more genes than we do. So where is all the extra complex coding for all the future morphologies that are supposed to be pre-programmed? And how do we know that God has programmed for all possible contingencies that the organism will find itself involved in forevermore? I think this pre-existing program isn't there but you're welcome to try to show with some evidence that it is.



I think what you've shown is that there's more to the puzzle of life than genetics. I've talked above about how the human genome is smaller than anyone thought possible. And we share 70% of our genes with a nematode worm. Is it possible that genes alone can code for the vast differences? I don't think so, and growing numbers of scientists don't think so either. We don't have a situation where a single gene is responsible for a single trait, or even the coding for a single protein.

However, the pattern of gene similarities among species, like the patterns of nested hierarchies, presents a pretty strong body of evidence. A branch of science called molecular phylogeny tells us how animals are genetically related to each other and what their probable evolutionary trees look like. We share 70% of our genes with nematode worms, but more than 99% with chimpanzees. When you look at these patterns for other species, it would seem that this is more than coincidental. And before you say that this must have been the pattern God used for all of life, I would ask why he also included some of the weird similarities discussed above if those animals are not related to each other in any way, and why primates all share the same "junk DNA."



What you need to be mindful of when you are using the argument from incredulity is that something isn't necessarily impossible just because you think it is. No evolutionist says that life sprang fully-formed out of the oceans, with all the complexities that it now entails. From fossil evidence we can see that life on earth consisted of nothing but single cells for a few billion years. Before those cells appeared, life would have been simpler still. At its most basic you could be looking at self-replicating molecules, though abiogenesis is a separate issue which is still in a speculative stage. I think it's quite possible that the first "life" didn't even have any DNA (it is not necessary for survival on a basic level), and that DNA could have evolved over a large amount of time, bit by it. When the first multicellular organisms appeared, life had already been on the earth and evolving for a very long time.



This is a strawman really, because a single mutation being responsible for a whole new creature is more akin to a nuclear radiation piece of science fiction than it is to what happens in life. Beneficial mutations, however, have been observed to occur. If they are an advantageous adaptation to the environment then natural selection can act on the population.



But abiogenesis is a different theory from evolution. Being an evolutionist doesn't require you to think that abiogenesis definitively happened.



But anatomical homology is not mere "similarity" of superfical appearance, it is deeper strcutural, genetic and development matching. And it includes what I said earlier about nested hierarchies and shared genes. These patterns all point to species having common ancestors. Otherwise, why would all of these patterns exist? To deny them would be akin to saying that the fossil record is just a pile of bones that doesn't mean anything.

I think I've addressed the main points here . . . it's taken a bit of research though. I recommend it for you -- if you've got questions such as these, visit TalkOrigins or other sites which explain the evolutionist perspective. I'm not going to have the time to keep doing it so much myself. This has never even been one of the great interests in my life, believe it or not, and it takes work to learn the facts because I'm not a scientist and I don't have them all to hand.

More to the point of the thread, though, does creationism consist of anything other than trying to discredit evolution and by default claiming victory for its own ideas? Is there nothing else to present other than "it says so in the Bible"?