My own question was about what you meant when you say that things are found "fully formed." This sounded like the "what use is half an eye" argument but maybe not.

I'm unsure, as well, of what you are claiming in your post above. As you go deeper into the fossil record, you do see gradual changes in fossils, and boundaries of extinction. If you look at the layers of rock in the Grand Canyon, as you go deeper you will see the sorts of creatures that appear in layers of rock of the same age in other parts of the world. You will eventually see trilobites, then stromatolites, then nothing. I don't think self-replicating molecules can fossilise, so there's going to be a limit to what we're able to see in rocks regarding the first life on earth, though there are certain chemical signatures that scientists are looking for.

For creationism to be verified, you would have to find a layer in the fossil record where ALL creatures suddenly appeared according to your description. We see no such layer anywhere in the world. What is more, there can be a number of mundane reasons why an organism appears suddenly in the fossil record. Due to climate change, many plants and animals that previously were only seen in southern Europe have migrated to the UK. If you dug up some of the fossils in millions of years' time, it would look like they appeared here abruptly. It's possible that the first fossils of those organisms could be found here, rather than in the place where they originated. It would be obviously be erroneous to conclude that they were therefore created here.

Can you point to a layer in the fossil record which shows that no life existed, then all life that has ever existed on earth sprang into being at once?

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I am fully aware of the evolutionary belief of the common ancestor and the "ape-like" one that we all supposedly branched off from into the primates and humans. I'm interested too in this ape-like ancestor we apparently share and why if we share "it" with the apes, did we wind up going down different paths of evolution and what was the cause?


This a wonderful question, one which drives the efforts of paleoanthorologists worldwide. ToE says that natural selection drives evolution. Perhaps those ancestors of ours had mutations which were beneficial in their environments, such as the increasing ability to walk on two legs (therefore freeing both hands), or increasing brain size and intelligence. There may be other things we aren't even aware of yet. There's a lot of research out there about this if you have a Google.