Creationists: Why is Evolution Bad Science?

Could you give us specific examples of "guess work and huge leaps of faith"?

I would define mutation as the source of new variation. This part gets a bit messy. There are two types of speciation we need to look at. First is temporal, that is change over time in a single lineage. The second is divergence where two lineages split and accumulate different changes over time resulting in different species in modern times.Let's use languages as an analogy. The Romance Languages (e.g. French, Italian, Spanish) have "evolved" over time from Latin. If we look at just French we can track the changes from Latin to French over time. We can also look at how French has diverged from Italian resulting in two modern language groups that are unable to understand each other, language species if you will.So macroevolution is the accumulation of microevolutionary changes with the added mechanism of divergence, the production of two lineages that move away from each other over time. This gives us the temporal sequence of changes. However, genetics offers a rich resource for looking at how lineages diverge. For example, we can compare the genomes of humans, chimps, and gorillas. In doing so we can determine what the genome of the common ancestor looked like and the specific DNA changes that occurred in each lineage. Genetics is a much more powerful tool for looking at macroevolution.

That's exactly what the fossil record shows us, transitions between species such as the hominid transitional fossils. Why would they need to change into a "higher life form"? Bacteria are the most successful type of life on Earth. Single celled organisms make up the vast majority of the biomass on Earth. Evolution does not produce entirely new lines. Evolution produces species that are modifications of their ancestors. You are what your ancestors were, plus modifications. Humans are still apes, as was our common ancestor with apes. Humans are still primates as was our common ancestor with other primates. Humans are still mammals, as was our common ancestor with other mammals. Is it by faith that we observe transitional fossils? Is it by faith that we observe humans and chimps sharing the same genetic markers that are indicative of common ancestry (e.g. shared psuedogenes, orthologous ERV's)? Is it by faith that we find agreement between the differences between the human and chimp genome and the observed mutation rate?Common ancestry is supported by solid facts, despite your protestations. We can see it in the genomes of living species and in the fossil record. These fossils still demonstrate transitional features which is exactly what we should see if humans and chimps share a common ancestor. That is completely false. Genetics alone is enough to establish human and chimp common ancestry as a fact. The theory of evolution explains why we are different.

It is both. Of the DNA we share from common ancestry the sequence is 98% homologous. When you include DNA that has been deleted or inserted since common ancestry there is 95% homology across the entire genome. The 98% measures point mutations and the 95% measures indels (i.e. insertions and deletions). There is a different "Eve" for every gene in the human genome. If the human race goes through a sever population bottleneck in the next 10 years the next Eve may very well be living today. Not all human lineages survive to this day so it is expected that all but one lineage for a given gene will remain. A good analogy is a small isolated village where just a few surnames can be found. When the village first started there may have been many families with many different surnames, but over time one surname tends to dominate. If all human species descended from a single parent species then we would expect to see modern humans in sediment which dates to 5 million before present. We don't. Instead, we see the gradual appearance of human features over that 5 million years period, from australopithecines up through H. ergaster and H. erectus. Without DNA it is impossible to tell if any of these fossils are in our direct lineage, but from the fossils we can know which modern human features evolved first, and in what order.