Where are all the missing links?

I didn't read anybody saying it was inconsequential. It adds a lot of additional supporting evidence.Primary evidence for evolution: what can be seen in the currently existing species, together with what is known from artificial selection.Secondary evidence 1: the fossil record, and its consistency with ToE.Secondary evidence 2: the DNA evidence, and its consistency with ToE.If ToE were wrong, then there would be no reason to expect the degree of consistency that is seen.

In that case, you can have theistic evolution. Where is the problem?

There isn't any secret about this. You can find it in "The Origin of Species". His main evidence was experience with artificial selection, and observation of closely related species (in the sense of the Linneaus systematization) that were adapted to slightly different niches. It seems to me that you are jumping to conclusions.Why are you picking on Darwin? Why not Linneaus? Once his method of systematization was in wide practice, the evidence for evolution stood out.

Citation please.There are two problems with using this to support your claim about what motivated Darwin.

1. At best it is hearsay, since it does not come direct from Darwin. But it is not even hearsay, for Mayr was not born until after Darwin's death, so he could not have heard that from Darwin.
2. There is a question on what Mayr intended there. Was Mayr saying that the Darwinists were first opposed to creationism, and supported evolution only because it was an alternative, or was he saying that the Darwinists supported versions of evolution on the evidence, and as a result came to believe creationism to be wrong. I expect Mayr intended the second of these. Perhaps with a full citation we could check the context to see if that gives further hints on what Mayr intended.

There are similar problems in the way you are using your second quote, although you at least provided a citation in that case.

You quote Rahvin as saying "Evolution is not based on the fossil record in any way."You later say "We have already agreed the fossil record does not support ToE, ..."Whoa! Where is that agreement?Certainly the statement you quote from Rahvin does not imply your own assertion of agreement. I won't try to put words in Rahvin's mouth. For myself, I certainly belief that the fossil record supports ToE, even though I agree that the theory was not based on the fossil record..

That's a misunderstanding. Gould and Eldredge were not making excuses. They were proposing that some change was needed from the standard neo-Darwinist account. That's in their 1977 paper in Paleobiology, "Punctuated equilibria: The tempo and mode of evolution reconsidered".

This is a misunderstanding. There is a large conceptual difference between theoretical science and empirical science. There is often little or no evidence that can back up statements of a scientific theory. Newton's theory works just as well if you present it as "Things move as if there were a force of attraction between masses". Copernical astronomy works just as well if you say "the planets move, and can be best understood, if we think of it as if the planets move around the sun." Galileo might have saved himself some problems, had he been willing to insert that "as if" qualifier.Scientists usually find it convenient to drop the "as if". For the most part, scientists are pragmatists, and they don't much care about the metaphysics. Physicists and cosmologists move quite easily between Newtonian gravity and general relativity. The first says that it is due to forces between masses, while the second says that it is due to the curvature of space. This is a huge metaphysical difference (which scientists barely notice) but makes only very small differences in the prediction made, differences that scientists take very seriously.Similarly, the theory of evolution works just as well if you add an "as if". The biological systems and fossil evidence are as if the bio-history of the world is one of common descent due to natural selection from variation due to mutation. Most scientists are not likely to add that "as if" qualification. It seems as silly as the assumption that there was phlogiston. But you could be a good YEC, and at the same time be an evolutionist, if you used that "as if" qualifier. Somebody who is both an evolutionist and a YEC could presumably say "God designed it so as to have an appearance of having evolved. We should therefore study evolution, so that we can best understand God's grand design."

Bad choice of wording on my part.There is usually a huge amount of evidence that the theory makes excellent predictions. There is often little or no evidence that the theory is literally true. We judge theories on their goodness of fit, not on their metaphysical truth (if there is such a thing as metaphysical truth).More later -- I have to rush to a meeting right now.

I have already commented on this in Message 230. The deep underlying question that remains, is "What is truth?" You can search all of the literature in philosophy without finding a clear answer to that question. Scientists are pragmatists. They look for a scientific theory that works, and don't worry too much about whether the theory is true, although they may come to assert that the theory is true. That's actually quite typical of scientific theories. A good theory will tend to define a field of study. The theory is not just a collection of assertions. The theory also defines new terminology, introduces new concepts, defines ways of gathering data. It pretty much has to come as a whole thing. The better statement is that the theory is not based on the fossils. However, the fossils are consistent with the theory, and in that sense they do support the theory. It is easy to imagine fossils that are inconsistent with the theory, but there haven't actually been any such fossils. Most people would take that as support for the theory, although not by itself enough to confirm the theory. That's a misunderstanding. We know the tips (the species). But we also have a pretty good knowledge of the relation between them. Our knowledge of the relation comes, initially, from the systematic classification due to Linneaus. When it turned out that the relationship between species as given by Linneaus was a close match to the relationship as given by DNA, that was taken as strong support for the theory.We also know biological processes, including those involved in reproduction. From those processes, we can infer the kind of change that should be expected, and the kind of evolutionary tree that would result. When the tree we see from the Linnaeus classification fits so well with what we can infer from the biological processes, that's also pretty strong evidence.The lab experiments (creating species in the lab) are mainly to test whether we are correct in our understanding of the processes.Compare to astronomy. We observe gas clouds. We observe young stars. We observe middle-aged stars. We observe old stars. But we never observe a single star being born in a gas cloud, progressing through the stages of young, middle aged, old. Everything happens far too slowly to observe that. We have to use our knowledge of the processes involved to put together a composite life history, based on the parts that we see.Or consider the tree in my backyard that was planted as a seedling. I have never actually seen the tree grow. I do look at it from time to time, to see how it has changed from the previous time. For all I know, every night a fairy comes, digs out the tree and replaces it with a slightly larger tree. Maybe everything I believe about trees is wrong. But it would really be bizarre to assume the fairy story. What we know about the processes involved, together with the periodic observations, is best explained by the traditional theory on how trees grow. When you go shopping at your local Walmart, you just assume that it is your local Walmart. But maybe, overnight, the old Walmart was removed and replaced by a substitute. Maybe the old employees were all kidnapped, and replaced by alien look-alikes. Assumption is the glue that holds your life together. Assumption piled upon assumption.Science does not depend on assumption any more than your every day life depends on assumptions. It really does seem bizarre to question these assumptions. If you want absolute truth, try mathematics. In science, as in every day life, we have to make do with what is available. You really cannot quantify this. Missing links are not any sort of problem. It would be nice if the fossil evidence were more complete, but only because that would satisfy our curiosity. The ToE is not dependent on fossil evidence. That gets us back to the question of "What is truth?"

The "Species Mutate But Don't Change To Another Species Theory" does preduct extinction. But it does not predict that other species will arise. There is plenty of evidence that species have arisen.

crashfrog did a pretty good job of answering this in Message 241. I don't agree with that. Uniformity is observed in the geologic evidence. That's a misundestanding, in my opinion.If you look at ToE (or any scientific theory) as a collection of facts, then what you mostly see is a sparse collection of isolated facts, and a lot of interpolation to reach conclusions. Once could reasonably be skeptical. But that isn't how science works. Science, primarily, is a knowledge of processes. The lab work is where we test our understanding of these processes. Knowing the processes, you can predict the kind of world that we will have. You do need some facts to anchor the predictions in reality. But most of the facts serve as confirmation of what you could predict from knowledge of the processes. The foundation is in the known and well tested biological processes. Even for Darwin, this was true. His experience with artificial selection (pidgeon breeding was one example) gave him the process knowledge that connected all of the observed facts together. Today our process knowledge is far greater.

The quote from Denton is interesting.You might want to check out this link
http://home.wxs.nl/~gkorthof/kortho29.htm
for a more recent view of Denton's thoughts.