What i can't understand about evolution....

I just would like to provide my condolences and respect to all the people who show (soon "have shown"?) patience and perseverance while dealing with certain people in this thread.I figured they need it.

Peg, others have pointed this out, but let me give my take.Your approach to this whole issue, somehow refusing to accept insights from the ToE because its 'starting point' remains unknown and fuzzy, can be generalized as reducing every (scientific) question to "Explain to me ALL AND EVERYTHING AT ONCE, or I will not accept ANYTHING AT ALL". This doesn't work and doesn't get you anywhere (you will remain stuck in the starting blocks forever)!Science is a cummulative process, it's not like an all-encompassing revelation that provides absolute total explanation for everything. The Giant-All-Answering-Rabbit that you would presumably want to pull out of your hat, doesn't actually exist. So science basically has to start from nothing, and then slowly builds up and accumulates. There's only one practical way to achieve this, and that is by chopping reality into "digestible chunks", and explaining those chunks one-by-one. Slowly putting pieces of the puzzle together.What you should understand is that a theory (and they ALL have this limitation) which only considers a limited "chunk" of reality seperately (like the ToE is concerned with the diversity of life, but not the origin), is not somehow inferior or less valid because of this. It's not like we have somehow first isolated the part of reality that we are investigating (like the diversity of life), from Reality As A Whole (which would include the origin of life). No, while we investigated it, it remained embedded in the grander scheme of things all the while, subjected to any influences that other parts of reality could have on it. So if we end up with certain conclusions about that sub-area of reality, they are not just valid for that particular area that we are investigating, but simply "valid" altogether, within reality as a whole. It is not necessary to know Everything about Everything before we can start answering sub-questions.The future might see a theory that encompasses more of reality at once(we can envision a more general "imperfect replicators" theory in the future which might encompass both abiogenesis and evolution), but this wouldn't invalidate the more limited previous theory. The conclusions of that more limited theory would still stand, because they would still fit the evidence.So to apply this to the ToE: the Theory of Evolution is what it is because it fits the available evidence this way. It fits that evidence at this moment, while the question of the origin of life is still open, and it will still fit this evidence in a possible future where the origin of life will be understood (after all the world itself remains the same, whether we understand more of it, or not). It will still do so, because even though we don't know the details behind the origin right now, whatever its implications are for evolution, they are already having their impact on the available evidence right now.Hope this helps.Annafan

Which only proves that not all analogies fly. ;-)This would be a better one: we are up there somewhere, and all we see is a thick layer of clouds below us: there are simply no foundations visible. But we might notice that the cloud pattern is not the same everywhere. And by thinking smart, we might find out that this indicates the presence of foundations below some of those places with different cloud patterns. So, based on that, we build a "hanging-down" building from the top down in those areas, and if we are right, we will meet a foundation right below where we started, so eventually the building van be detached from its "crane". If we are wrong, the bulding will eventually become too heavy for our crane, and with lack of a real foundation it will rip off.Still not perfect analogy, but a lot better already. It doesn't "get stuck", because it is not concerned with the origin.I have actually no idea how to explain it any clearer than I and others already did. We are running in circles... That's actually the reason why they are making any progress at all, in anything at all, and why we aren't sitting in a hole in the ground anymore like 5000 years ago. Not such a bad approach, over all...

I just had a "déj-vu" of truly monumental proportions and magnitude!

Let me predict what will happen once these demands will have been fulfilled: you will NOT concede the point, but instead you will claim that obviously an "intelligence" was needed to "artificially create" life from non-life.And we will be back to square one.Why not just admit that no observation will ever convince you, and save other people a lot of time?