Interesting responses to this long and scientifically bankrupt post from a creationist website/magazine/whatever. Time-consuming and pointless to discuss every single point of it here, but I'll pick out a couple of my favourites.

Quote
"Natural selection" is a coined phrase of the evolutionist to describe the survival of the fittest. Simply stated, it is the natural process that enables the strongest of each generation to survive and the weaker, more poorly adjusted ones to die out. The assumption of evolution is that since only the strongest survive to father the next generation, the species will gradually improve, even advancing into other more highly developed states on the evolutionary scale.


Misunderstanding of natural selection. "Strong" is an inappropritae word to use; "best adapted to the evironment" is more accurate. Are the "weakest" eliminated in every single generation? No, as had been explained in other posts here. When beneficial mutations occur, there is a tendency for those organisms' offspring to survive and reporduce more successfully in that environment, and over time that mutation will become established within the population. There's also an assumption in this quote about "improvement," which is typical of creationist posts, because they think evolution has to have the "goal" of getting from the simplest organisms to humankind. While complexity has increased in some organisms over time (not all), it's more accurate to say that . . . well, as RAZD has repeated to deaf ears, inheritable traits in a population change over time. "Improvement" is a subjective, not a scientific term.

This is a hoot:
Quote
The subject of strata beds leads into the interesting question of how these layers were formed, and why the evolutionists have guesstimated their age in the billions of years. The dating of those layers has been done on the basis of the theory of uniformity. This theory assumes that all the natural processes at work in the past have operated exactly as they do today. In other words, the creation of those strata can only be explained on the basis of what we see happening in the world now. Scientists must calculate how long it takes for sedimentation to build a foot-deep stratum. Then that age is assigned to any 12-inch layer, no matter how deeply located within the earth.

Is that a valid assumption to make? Have all the natural forces of the past been just what we can demonstrate and understand today? How naive and conceited to compel ages past to conform to our limited observation and experience! We can assume what we please, but it proves absolutely nothing except our own gullibility. The Bible explains very graphically about a Flood that ravaged the face of this earth, covering the highest mountains and completely destroying all plant and animal life outside the ark.


There are just so many things wrong with this, which would be clear to anyone with a basic high school level science education. And an ability to think logically.

"Guesstimated" is yet another (yawn) stab at geologists who have studied rocks for decades, in the field and in the lab, comparing their results and information. Radiometric and cosmogenic dating methods are ignored, possibly because the author of this post wouldn't know how to refute radiometric dating and, this is just a guess, possibly has no clue what cosmogenic dating is. This is also ignoring the fact that the fossil record is sorted around the world, and index fossils such as foraminifera -- for which a complete evolutionary record exists, covering millions of years -- can help with dating (though it is obviously erroneous to state, as creationists often do, that fossils date rocks and rocks date fossils). Geologists study the deposition rates of all kinds of sediments and are aware that some processes are slow and some are rapid -- you will not find one who believes in "uniformity" in such a way that he/she denies the possibility that catastrophic events do occur. They know, for example, the difference between a landscape carved by gradual uplift and erosion, and that carved by a catastrophic flood, as was discussed in detail in the Grand Canyon thread here. They also are able to count millions of layers of varves in different areas of the world (such as the Green River formation) and can see that these layers have been deposited a fixed number of times per year, every year, without having been disturbed by a flood.

Interestingly, the above post is trying to make a case for geological processes having been different in the past. How foolish not to consider this! it says. Problem is, there is absolutely no evidence that geological processes havechanged, because we can study rocks and ice which are hundreds of thousands to billions of years old and get a lot of information from them; nor is any evidence given to attempt to validate this assertion.

Finally, this post claims that the Biblical flood killed all plant and animal life outside the ark. This can be discussed in depth in another thread, but I'm interested in the dead plants claim here. The Bible doesn't say anything about Noah turning the ark into a greenhouse as well as a zoo, nor how he would be able to grow plants from the arctic tundra and tropical rainforests in the same boat. I can see the next claim coming -- that he took seeds. (Which begs the question of how he got them -- not from the local garden centre.) Not being a botanist, I don't have any handy examples of species for which this is improbable, but the logistical problem remains of how he would then get all the necessary seeds planted in the proper environments, while also coping with dispersing the animals to their respective habitats while preventing them from attacking each other while they got off the ark. This is the tip of the iceberg as far as this particular subject is concerned.

However, I'll be content to see RAZD's definition of evolution discussed here. That's the heart of the matter.