Why Evolution is science

I don't know how you determine what definitions are "universally agreed", but the idea that scientists don't have any deeper understanding of evolution except as "change" is ludicrous and betrays a significant lack of research on your part.Obviously, in language, words are slightly fuzzy, and science is a lot more concerned with testing hypotheses and developing explanatory models than it is with developing the one true definition that everybody is supposed to memorize and never change. This is true of all scientific fields so, for any scientific term, there's no such thing as a truly "universally accepted definition."The fact that you would single out evolution and impeach it alone from this universal characteristic is further evidence that your arguments are driven entirely by ideology, rather than evidence. For my own part, I usually define evolution as:"The scientific understanding of the history and diversity of life on Earth as a result of descent with modification from a common ancestor through natural selection and random mutation, as well as other natural processes."But, really - why would scientists need to have a rigid definition of the term? What would they do with it? Pin it up on whiteboards? What would that accomplish?Everybody knows what evolution is - it's the scientific model for the history of life and the origin of species. And sometimes the word is appropriated to describe the history of other things that change over time, but that's just a metaphor. Regardless of how you state a definition of evolution, it always means the same thing when you're talking about living things - random mutation and natural selection causing changes to successive generations of organisms through time. The real world is fuzzy. If you're not comfortable with a little fuzz then you have no business in the sciences. Best to stick with theology, or philosophy, or economics, or any other completely made-up human endeavors that require absolutely no evidential basis for their reasoning.But to assert that something stops being a science just because of your ignorance is folly. Luckily, evolutionary biologists continue to get the work done, regardless of whether or not cranks on the internet think they can.

Wasn't it mathematicians who came up with so-called "fuzzy logic"? Plus, at least mathematics as a field has rigor. Not so with the fields I listed. In math, poor models are discarded and forgotten. In philosophy and theology and economics, poor models are enshrined.

In fact, I quoted what you actually wrote, which pretty much makes your charge of misrepresentation a falsehood.We do know how to read around here, despite the assertions of science's enemies to the contrary.

What's most interesting is that there aren't any "totally different creatures"; all living things on Earth share, at some level, similarities with even the most utterly different organisms you can imagine. Plants and animals have similarities. Vertebrates and invertebrates. Multicellular and unicellular.However you want to draw the boundaries, there are similarities. The great thing about evolution is that it both explains why this is true, and explains why some organisms are more similar than others.

Which both have bones, a central vertebrate nervous system, a closed circulatory system, calciferous teeth, aerobic cellular metabolism, and generate amino acid polypeptides based on the same substitution codes. Well, we can observe the changes over millions of years; the fossil record provides a static record of changes that have occured in the past.Moreover, we can see it happen in the present, too; we make direct observations of new species arising from old ones. Untrue. Evolution is based on scientific evidence, not assumptions.

No, the fossil record proves about a billion years of change. Sure. Why wouldn't it be? Even an incomplete record is of use, though. It's not assumed; it's concluded from the evidence. I mean how else do you fuse a mineralized skeleton to the inside of an unbroken stone that's millions of years old? You have to form the stone around it. Which means that the skeleton has to be as least as old as the rock. What do you mean? How doesn't direct observation of macroevolution prove macroevolution? That's nonsensical. Are you saying that just because we see it happen now doesn't mean that it happened back then?Why not? What's so different about the past? All the other basic physical principles seem to have operated identically in the past. What evidence do you have to propose an exception in this case? Right. Which produce what you call "macroevolution." We've literally watched it happen right before our eyes. Clearly you don't know the first thing about what real science is.