Paul5204

Evolution happening is obvious? Sorry, but the fossil records does not support that claim.

I will otherwise let Gerald Schroeder speak for me:

"At the Cambrian explosion of animal life, 530 million years ago, some 50 phyla (basic body plans) appeared suddenly in the fossil record. Only 30 to 34 survived. The rest perished. Since then no new phyla have evolved. It is no wonder that Scientific American asked whether the mechanism of evolution has changed in a way that prohibits all other body phyla. It is not that the mechanism of evolution has changed. It is our understanding of how evolution functions that must change, change to fit the data presented by the fossil record. To use the word of Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, it appears that the flow of life is "channeled" along these 34 basic directions.
****
If the fossil record is an accurate description of the flow of life, then the34 basic body plans that burst into being at the Cambrian, 530 million years ago, comprise all of animal life till today. The tree of life which envisioned a gradual progression of phyla from simple forms such as sponges, on to more complex life such as worms and then on to shelled creatures such as mollusks has been replaced by the bush of life in which sponges and worms and mollusks and all the other of the 34 phyla appeared simultaneously. Each of these bush lines then developed (evolved) a myriad of variations, but the variations always remained within the basic body plan.

Among the structures that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect lenses, intestines. These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the fossil record that they were coming. Below them in the rock strata (i.e., older than them) are fossils of one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and clumps known as the essentially structureless Ediacaran fossils of uncertain identity. How such complexities could form suddenly by random processes is an unanswered question. It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory. Abrupt morphological changes are contrary to Darwin's oft repeated statement that nature does not make jumps. Darwin based his theory on animal husbandry rather than fossils. If in a few generations of selective breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into an ape. The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory.

The abrupt appearance in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, "Did Darwin get it all right?" And answered the question: no. The appearance of wings is a classic example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence. And they do, fully formed. We may have to change our concept of evolution to accommodate a reality that the development of life has within it something exotic at work, some process totally unexpected that produces these sudden developments. The change in paradigm would be similar to the era in physics when classical logical Newtonian physics was modified by the totally illogical (illogical by human standards of logic) phenomena observed in quantum physics, including the quantized, stepwise changes in the emission of radiation by a body even as the temperature of the body increases smoothly.
****
The British Natural History Museum in London has an entire wing devoted to the evolution of species. And what evolution do they demonstrate? Pink daisies evolving into blue daisies; small dogs evolving into big dogs; a few species of cichlid fish evolving in a mere few thousand years into a dozen species of cichlid fish. Very impressive. Until you realize that the daisies remained daisies, the dogs remained dogs and the cichlid fish remained cichlid. It is called micro-evolution. This magnificent museum, with all its resources, could not produce a single example of one phylum evolving into another. It is the mechanisms of macro-evolution, the change of one phylum or class of animal into another that has been called into question by these data.

The reality of this explosion of life was discovered long before it was revealed. In 1909, Charles D. Walcott, while searching for fossils in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, came upon a strata of shale near the Burgess Pass, rich in that for which he had been seeking., fossils from the era known as the Cambrian. Over the following four years Walcott collected between 60,000 and 80,000 fossils from the Burgess Shale. These fossils contained representatives from every phylum except one of the phyla that exist today. Walcott recorded his findings meticulously in his notebooks. No new phyla ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion. These fossils could have changed the entire concept of evolution from a tree of life to a bush of life. And they did, but not in 1909. Walcott knew he had discovered something very important. That is why he collected the vast number of samples. But he could not believe that evolution could have occurred in such a burst of life forms, "simultaneously" to use the words of Scientific American. This was totally against the theory of Darwin in which he and his colleagues were steeped. And so Walcott reburied the fossils, all 60,000 of them, this time in the drawers of his laboratory. Walcott was the director of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It was not until 1985 that they were rediscovered (in the draws of the Smithsonian). Had Walcott wanted, he could have hired a phalanx of graduate students to work on the fossils. But he chose not to rock the boat of evolution. Today fossil representatives of the Cambrian era have been found in China, Africa, the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The explosion was worldwide. But before it became proper to discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the data were simply not reported. It is a classic example of cognitive dissonance, but an example for which we have all paid a severe price.

rlogan

Hi Paul! Say, I'll just bite off a little bit here:


Say - I have the origin of species. Could you point me to the pages where he does this?

Thanks!

OneWayTraffic

Hi Paul. I would recommend in future that you post a link to any further (long)quotes you cut and paste and then summarise the article or select just a few lines to post.

That way those of us who don't feel like reading long technical articles can get the gist of what you are saying. It also makes it easier to us to see if you really understand what you are posting before we debate you on it.

Otherwise it would be fair play on my behalf to go find a 5 page article refuting yours and paste the whole thing here. This thread would very soon become unreadable.

Paul5204

rlogan:

I will dig the Origin of Species out of the box in the closet and post the instances sometime over the weekend. In the meantime, I found this as well:

"Darwinian theory attempts to explain the common ancestry of all species through the gradual transformation of major body plans. This theory is in opposition to the fossil evidence and the pervasive patterns of natural history.

An estimated 50 to 100 phyla appear explosively at the base of the Cambrian. Fossil evidence suggesting their common ancestry is not found in Precambrian rocks. A General Theory of Macrostasis is needed to explain the fossil data and the stability of the higher taxa."

The web address for the site wherein that appears is: http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/...ions/sub2.html

From that same site:

Contrary to both Darwinian gradualism and punctuated equilibria theory, the vast majority of phyla appear abruptly with low species diversity. The disparity of the higher taxa precedes the diversity of the lower taxa.

The sudden appearance of between 50 and 100 disparate body plans with extremely low species diversity supports the conclusion that neither gradual Darwinian evolution nor lower taxon-level punctuations can account for the origin of the higher taxa and the major body plans. In the history of life on earth, disparity typically precedes diversity.

And then there's:

"In The Origin of Species, Darwin accepted this fact and explained:

'If my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all of the species of the same group together must assuredly have existed... Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains.'

Even Darwin himself was aware of the absence of such transitional forms. He hoped that they would be found in the future. Despite his optimism, he realized that these missing intermediate forms were the biggest stumbling-block for his theory. That is why he wrote the following in the chapter of the The Origin of Species entitled "Difficulties of the Theory":

'…Why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?… But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?… But in the intermediate region, having intermediate conditions of life, why do we not now find closely-linking intermediate varieties? This difficulty for a long time quite confounded me.'

The only explanation Darwin could come up with to counter this objection was the argument that the fossil record uncovered so far was inadequate. He asserted that when the fossil record had been studied in detail, the missing links would be found."

And also:

"Niles Eldredge, the well-known paleontologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History, expresses as follows the invalidity of Darwin's claim that the insufficiency of the fossil record is the reason why no transitional forms have been found:

'The record jumps, and all the evidence shows that the record is real: the gaps we see reflect real events in life's history - not the artifact of a poor fossil record.'"

Eldredge, N. and Tattersall, I. (1982)
The Myths of Human Evolution
Columbia University Press, p. 59

And also:

When Charles Darwin wrote "The Origin of Species " in 1859, the sudden appearance of animal fossils at the beginning of the Cambrian was of particular concern to him. It was at odds with his view that the diversification of life on earth through natural selection had required a long period of time. Darwin's theory predicted that the major groups of animals should gradually diverge during evolution. He knew that the sudden appearance of fossils would be used by his opponents as a powerful argument against his theories of descent with modification and natural selection. Consequently, he argued that a long period of time, unrepresented in the fossil record, must have preceded the Cambrian to allow the various major groups of animals to diverge. At that time the strata that we now regard as Cambrian were subsumed within the concept of the Silurian, so Darwin wrote,

'I cannot doubt that all the Silurian trilobites have descended from some one crustacean, which must have lived long before the Silurian age....Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian strata was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian to the present day.....The case must at present remain inexplicable; and may be truely urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained'

The Origin of Species, 1859, pp. 313 - 314

And also:

Described recently as "the most important evolutionary event during the entire history of the Metazoa," the Cambrian explosion established virtually all the major animal body forms -- Bauplane or phyla -- that would exist thereafter, including many that were 'weeded out' and became extinct. Compared with the 30 or so extant phyla, some people estimate that the Cambrian explosion may have generated as many as 100. The evolutionary innovation of the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary had clearly been extremely broad: "unprecedented and unsurpassed," as James Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently put it (Lewin, 1988).

Lewin then asked the all important question:

"Why, in subsequent periods of great evolutionary activity when countless species, genera, and families arose, have there been no new animal body plans produced, no new phyla?"

Lewin, R. (1988)
Science, vol. 241, 15 July, p. 291

[T]he fossil record itself provided no documentation of continuity -- of gradual transitions from one kind of animal or plant to another of quite different form.

Stanley, S. M., 1981
The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species
Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, N.Y., p. 40

The gaps in the fossil record are real, however. The absence of a record of any important branching is quite phenomenal. Species are usually static, or nearly so, for long periods, species seldom and genera never show evolution into new species or genera but replacement of one by another, and change is more or less abrupt.

Wesson, R., 1991
Beyond Natural Selection
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 45

[L]arge evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in progress. There is no good fossil record of any.

Wesson, R., 1991
Beyond Natural Selection
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, p. 206

Taxa recognized as orders during the (Precambrian-Cambrian) transition chiefly appear without connection to an ancestral clade via a fossil intermediate. This situation is in fact true of most invertebrate orders during the remaining Phanerozoic as well. There are no chains of taxa leading gradually from an ancestral condition to the new ordinal body type. Orders thus appear as rather distinctive subdivisions of classes rather than as being segments in some sort of morphological continuum.

Valentine, J.W., Awramik, S.M., Signor, P.W., and Sadler, P.M. (1991)
"The Biological Explosion at the Precambrian-Cambrian Boundary"
Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 25, Max K. Hecht, editor, Plenum Press, New York and London, p.284

"... many of the large populations should have been preserved, yet we simply do not find them. Small populations are called for, then, but there are difficulties here also. The populations must remain small (and undetected) and evolve steadily and consistently toward the body plan that comprises the basis of a new phylum (or class). This is asking a lot. Deleterious mutations would tend to accumulate in small populations to form genetic loads that selection might not be able to handle. Stable intermediate adaptive modes cannot be invoked as a regular feature, since we are then again faced with the problem of just where their remains are. We might imagine vast arrays of such small populations fanning continually and incessantly into adaptive space. Vast arrays should have produced at least some fossil remains also. Perhaps an even greater difficulty is the requirement that these arrays of lineages change along a rather straight and true course --- morphological side trips or detours of any frequency should lengthen the time of origin of higher taxa beyond what appears to be available. Why should an opportunistic, tinkering process set on such a course and hold it for so long successfully among so many lineages?

We conclude that the extrapolation of microevolutionary rates to explain the origin of new body plans is possible, but does not accord with the primary evidence." (Valentine and Erwin, 1985, pp. 95, 96)

And, finally:

Evidence of gradualism between phyla, classes and even orders is either non-existent or is much disputed. Certainly, no pervasive pattern of gradualism exists. George Gaylord Simpson acknowledged this decades ago as he described the situation in these terms:

"This is true of all thirty-two orders of mammals...The earliest and most primitive known members of every order already have the basic ordinal characters, and in no case is an approximately continuous sequence from one order to another known. In most cases the break is so sharp and the gap so large that the origin of the order is speculative and much disputed...

This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate...it is true of the classes, and of the major animal phyla, and it is apparently also true of analogous categories of plants.

Simpson, G. G. (1944)
Tempo and Mode in Evolution
Columbia University Press, New York, p. 105, 107

RufusAtticus

Paul,

I notice that you are relying on the same old erroneous creationist interpretation of punctuated equilibrium. Punctuated equilibrium does not disprove evolution, but confirms it.

Stasis in the fossil record refers to the observation that species will vary in a certain range of morphology and that range is static for a significant period of time. Rapid turnover referrs to the fact that in the fossil record species often abruptly disappear and are replaced without any recorded species to species transitions between them. However, anti-evolutions are guilty of equivocation by confusing what is considered gradual and rapid in biological time (evolution) with what is considered gradual and rapid in geologic time (fossilization).

Gould and Eldredge first described the broad pattern of species stasis and abrupt replacement in the fossil record (punctuated equilibrium) and also demonstrated how it was logically the result of “the standard evolutionary model.�? Gould and Eldredge explained how evolution, which is biologically gradual, coupled with the rare event of fossilization would produce stasis and abrupt replacement in the fossil record. Because fossilization is rare, the species most likely to be represented in the fossil record are ones that have body parts able to be fossilized, die in areas and in ways prone to cause fossilization, and are numerous. Now assume we have a species complex that reasonably satisfies the first two conditions. The species in this complex most likely to be represented in the fossil record are the most populous ones. However, large populations also evolve slower than small populations. Thus fossilization most likely will preserve species that evolve slowly, explaining the observed stasis.

Because large populations evolve slowly, “the standard evolutionary model�? predicts that most speciation events will happen in the periphery of the population range where there can exist small subpopulations and, more than likely, different habitats. It is in these locations that gradual evolution will lead to speciation. However, fossilization is unlikely to preserve the event. From ecology and demography we know that population replacement can be relatively rapid (over a few thousand years). One example would be a pathogen wiping out the parent species, and a daughter species, which before was on periphery invading the newly open central habitat.

Together, the evolutionary, demographic, ecological, geographic, and geological forces would produce a fossil record showing a species with a stable range of morphology existing for—say—100,000 years disappearing and being replaced by another species in less than—say—5,000 years. The interesting thing in all of this is that “the standard evolutionary model�? was already elucidated before Gould and Eldredge describe and explained punctuated equilibrium using it. Punctuated equilibrium is not an application of the fossil record to evolution as is commonly claimed by anti-evolutionists, but rather an application of standard evolutionary theory to the fossil record.

(Modified from my work here.)

Some more resources.
http://www.talkorigins.org
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/index.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC300.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/

Albion

Lewin then spent the rest of the article answering it. It turns out that when you get your information from the carefully mined quotes provided by the creationist ministries, you're left with a misleading impression. You might want to ask yourself why, when deciding which bits of articles to quote, the creationist ministries include rhetorical questions and omit answers. If this sort of thing was being done by anybody else (who isn't protected by the "Christians don't lie" assumption), I think you'd probably recognise it for the dishonest propaganda that it is.

Jet Black

Here is a nice example of observed punctuated equilibrium in the Devonian trilobyte Phacops rhana. A study of this lineage by Eldredge (1971) showed that the population consisted of two main groups, one living in the eastern marginal sea along the coast of the northern Atlantic, and the other population lived in a shallower Epicontinental sea, which covered the American Midwest. The level of this sea increased and decreased several times, changing it's extent. Trilobytes have their eyes arranged in dorso-ventral columns called files. Initially both populations had 18 files. Now the population on the eastern sea was observed to fluctuate between 18 and 17 files for some time, and then eventually settled on 17, and about 1-2 million years after this settling, the entire epicontinental sea population was replaced with the 17 file population. This represents the extinction of the 18 file form caused by a regression of the sea, and then the immigration of the 17 file form. So looking at the epicontinental sea alone, you would see a sudden chance from 18 to 17 files, a sudden change in an otherwise static population regarded as punctuated equilibrium, but it is only by looking at the isolated eastern sea that we actually see the drift in the population from predominantly 18 files to 17.

rlogan

Hi Paul!

One thing at a time, buddy.

Just want to know where the first instance is where we are:


"to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted to believe his theory."

Thanks!

Focus in now. Don't just copy long pages of websites.

JonF

BZZZZZT! Wrong! Oh, so sorry, but at least you can have this copy of the home game...

From Phylum Level Evolution:

Number of phyla appearing by period:
Recent 13
Eocene 2
Cretaceous 2
Jurassic 1
Triassic 3
Carboniferous 5
Devonian 4
Silurian 1
Ordovician 1
Cambrian 9
Vendian 4

scigirl

Hello Paul,

I haven't read this book that you quote, but a lot of things pop out at me in your post that need addressing:
I wouldn't. He's not a paleontologist, he's a physicist.

From here:

Paul, I'm not sure what your background in biology is, but if Gerald did indeed make that claim, then he has a serious lack of understanding about DNA and how it works. Surely he is aware of other ways to alter DNA besides just point mutations? I hope he's heard of gene duplications, which can change thousands of base pairs in one division.

Pop quiz: How many changes in the DNA sequence does it take to get from a tadpole to a frog?

Answer. Zero. How can that be? Totally different body plans, totally same DNA. Hmm, maybe there’s more to the genome then the raw sequence. So think about it: Could one or two point mutations in the right place radically alter an organism?

I'll let my colleagues critique the paleo stuff since I'm a lowly medical student and I only know about modern human fossils (and just barely at that!) But I thought these arguments needed some objections:
Please clarify your position. Are you saying that we have more than 34 body plans now? If we started with 34 basic body plans, and now we have more than 34, than something had to create those new body plans. Which evolution could do, easily.

Or are you saying that we still only have 34 basic body plans? This does not disprove evolution. Evolution, remember, is constrained by what it has. Sort of like attorneys – they can only go by case precedents, right? They don’t get to make new law. However, they can get old laws re-enterpreted for new situations. That’s exactly what evolution does (but with less paperwork). It takes an existing body plan – limb. Than it modifies it for the situation. Plus – remember it is humans who have made these arbitrary “body plan�? categories.�?

I suggest you read up on the controversies of categorizing species. If species were specially created, you would think there would be no gray areas. Dogs would be dogs, and cats would be cats. But biologically – it’s a huge shade of gray. For example, certain dog “kinds�? are new species because they cannot breed. Dogs are not in fact just dogs anymore. Lab mice would not be able to breed with wild mice – for a number of reasons. And this is just in a few decades. Imagine a million years. It’s easy if you try.

Plus Gerald is making an error that no respectable paleontologist would ever make: He is assuming that the Cambrian fossils captured every type of animal that lived at that time. Scientists suspect that “One study estimated that we may have fossils from as little as 3% of the species that existed in the Eocene�? (from talkorigins, see link at end of post). If those 34 body plans are from only 3% of the total number of fossils, then there were really 34/.03 = 1133 and a third types of body plans. How can you have a 1/3 body plan? Why it’s a transitional fossil.
Optically perfect lenses? Perfect for what? For seeing in the dark? For seeing underwater? For detecting movement? There is no such thing as a perfect eye. It depends on the situation.
If by "suddenly" you mean a million years, than yes you could be right. The cambrian "explosion" was very slow.
No it's not. It's called random mutation and natural selection over millions and millions and millions of years. Imagine gene duplications. It’s easy if you try.
Page number please. Darwin spends several chapters on the fossil record –hardly ignoring it.
He used both. And barnacles. Besides, that was a while ago. We have progressed since then - evolutionary biology is no longer an idea written by a former cleric in Britain. It is now a legitimate college major, with several thousand experts.
Does too, does too! Especially if you add on this amazing discovery we like to call DNA.
Reference please. Of course Darwin didn’t get it all right. He lived before we even knew what a heritable unit was. Louis Pasteur didn’t get it all right either. He didn’t even know what a virus was. And we base a common medical principle (infectious disease) on his discoveries? Damn, maybe we should stop teaching modern medicine and use faith healers instead, because a scientist 100 years ago was wrong about something.

Paul, your (or Gerald’s) quote mining is showing. Are you seriously claiming that the journal Science no longer believes in evolution? Or merely - did the Journal Science point out where Darwin was wrong? Evolutionary theory does not equal Darwin. Modern medicine does not hinge on Louis Pasteur.

Perhaps you are confused because you use a text to glean knowledge that hasn’t changed in 2000 years. I can understand your confusion. If Matthew or Mark or Luke or John were wrong, than Christianity is in fact wrong, since that’s all it’s based on. Science is different, because it does not hinge on the historical accuracy of a written text. It hinges on things we can retest and reobserve many times.
What a good analogy. Einstein did not disprove Newton, he modified him. We still use Newtonian physics today. Why? It works to explain certain defined systems. Just like the theory of evolution - we have modified and added to it over the years as we have made new discoveries.
My suggestion? Go to a different museum.
Nope.
This is backwards reasoning. We defined the phyla from looking at all the fossils that we have known about. The fact that newly discovered fossils match a previously known animal body plan is proof for evolution, not against it.

I don't know about this Walcott guy. Anyone who hides scientific evidence is no scientist worth mentioning. But allow me to diverge for a minute and say that yes scientists are humans too. They have been racist, sexist, biased, and all the rest. Just ask Barbara McClintock or Rosalind Franklin. They got screwed by a sexist society, and science was hampered because of it. It does happen.

However, think about what you are accusing the scientific community of, if evolution is wrong. There are so many lines of independent evidence that corroborate evolution’s story. The fossil record does support evolution. DNA evidence supports evolution. DNA replicating mechanisms support evolution. Carbon dating supports evolution. And so on. We are not talking about one tiny theory here. Surely we have a lot to learn about how evolution shaped our world. However, if descent with modification did not happen – than scientists are wrong about lots of things. Including cancer, DNA forensics, dating biblical texts, and so on. So think about what creationists are really saying:

1) A mythical text written by primitive men who didn’t know DNA from a hole in the ground is scientifically accurate and
2) Scientists from all faiths, all cultures, all countries, who actually collect and study the evidence, are wrong about a huge huge huge theory and
3) even though they are wrong about this huge theory, we will still use their expertly collected evidence to prove the Babble is true, when it suits us.

Um, but no. Paul - what happens in court if it is proved that the evidence was tampered with or collected improperly? And if a method continues to produce bad evidence? It isn't used.

Creationists aren't being consistent when they allow scientists to make conclusions on DNA regarding cancer or forensics, yet not evolution. Somehow they use mental acrobatics to accept all other applications of scientific theories (computers, cancer treatments) yet they say evolution is wrong. Ask yourself - why are scientists wrong about evolution? Is it because they are using faulty methods? If so, than all scientists who study DNA are wrong, because they all use the same methods. Is it because they are drawing the wrong conclusions about the data? Perhaps, but in that case - remember that the evidence clearly disproves creationism, so that can't be the answer. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-...rt2c.html#conc

Is it because scientists are promoting a huge conspiracy? Oh ha ha ha ha. I laugh so hard my side hurst. Scientists don’t get along. You can’t even get pathologists to agree on classifying lymphomas, much less “conspire�? to pull the wool over people’s eyes about a huge issue. Individual scientists have committed fraud, just like faith healers continue to do. However, science as a whole thrives on controversy and repeatability. There’s nothing scientists like more than to prove other scientists wrong.

Evolution happened. We have more evidence and explanations for it than we do gravity. Let’s stop using ancient mythology to explain the creation of humans, and start learning about our origins. Then and only then will we understand who we are.

Evolution explains a great many things – here are some examples I can think of that relate to humans or medicine:

1) Our maxillary sinuses (the ones that get infected when we get colds or earaches). They drain at the top. What an idiot idea – until you realize that they evolved in grazing animals who held their head sideways compared to ours.
2) Babies born with tails. I mean real tails, not just a longer coccyx. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comd...l#atavisms_ex2
3) A fetus goes through several body plans in utero – which look like the same body plans of our ancestors. You used to have a fish kidney, now you don’t. And the genes that make our fish kidney are similar to the genes that make kidneys in fish. Nature was constrained by what she had – so she used the same paradigms over and over. You think that only a few basic body plans is proof of evolution? No – it’s evidence for.
4) Our chromosome #2 looks like two ape chromosomes stuck together. Why? Well, because this chromosome has telomeres in the middle, and two centromeres instead of one. Not only does this evidence support evolution, it also shows how it happened.
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/hum_ape_chrom.html
5) They layers in our eyes are backwards. But that makes sense, considering how they had to form.
6) We have a broken gene for vitamin C, and so do chimps. Other apes do not. So – we get scurvy if we are British sailors in the 1800s or dumb college students who try to live off Top Ramen and Mountain Dew.

I suggest you read one or two articles here at http://www.talkorigins.org/ in your spare time. The one on transitional fossils would be helpful: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html

scigirl