Why is evolution so controversial?

My gut feeling is that Kimberly Berrine does not exist. There may have been someone with a similar name with some sort of a scientific degree, but I doubt it was a person by this name.

In a nutshell;
Shapiro denies random mutation and natural selection, and postulates natural genetic engineering. His findings confirm his theory that evolution is not random, that the genetic engineering of the cells is driven by sentient changes in answer to the environmental events that occur.

Like these guys you mean:

[Faith]"You're forgetting that this is an immense flood and would behave differently than normal floods. It would sort sediment into different layers, and it would also sort animals and plants into these layers in a way precisely resembling an evolutionary progression (which is what huge floods do), and it would also transport entire burrows and egg clutches and even footprints intact. The flood will create both marine and terrestrial layers (no, it isn't contradictory, you just have no idea what a flood this big can do), and it will keep land animals from being deposited in marine layers, and marine animals from being deposited in terrestrial layers."The sediment carried and deposited by the flood was eroded from the Earth's surface during the flood, or it wasn't, I can change on a dime on this point. Some canyons were carved by catastrophic releases of water from high altitude lakes left over from the flood, some weren't, but you can't tell which are which, you have to ask me and I'll tell you, though I'll be so vague you'll never know what I'm actually saying, and then I'll accuse you of misrepresenting what I say." [/Faith]--Percy

Fossils are always tough to find.

You are implying (at the minimum) that all the scientists of the "Project Steve" list have biology related degrees.

I think that Bolder-dash had indeed made a valid point, to counter anyone who promotes the "Project Steve" list as being made up of only biological scientists.

A sudden moment of endarkenment?Or do you mean "on"?

Yes, following someone else's characterization of my argument, even if Earth is only 6000 years old the cow in the Precambrian is not to be expected because that's too deep for the burial of land animals in the Flood. It's not impossible on Flood theory but it is highly unlikely.

Land animals got buried in the higher levels of the strata, that's the explanation and there's nothing wrong with it.

Certainly no more wrong with it than the idiotic idea that flat slabs of rock represent time periods of millions of years each. A lot less crazy than that as a matter of fact.

Summary: Evolution is "controversial" only to those who won't accept it for religious reasons, and who do their best to generate "controversy" because of that.Among those actually doing science the only controversy is over the details, as they try to learn more about how it all works.The few real scientists who dispute evolution do so for religious reasons, not scientific ones.And finally, those who dispute evolution for religious reasons try their best to make it appear that they accept scientific methods and findings, while twisting both in an effort to convince themselves that their religious beliefs are supported by science.That should get the thread back on topic--for a moment or two.

Except my understanding is that Michael Behe accepts the bulk of old Earth evolution, including man and the (other) great apes having a common ancestor. I got this from Kennith Miller's "Finding Darwin's God". I consider Behe to be a theistic evolutionist.Kurt Wise is sort of on record as conceding that the evidence supports old Earth evolution, but that he is a young Earth creationist because of what the Bible says. But this is not the sort of information you find at creationist site.

The fact of the matter in my case is that years before I became a Christian, when I still considered myself an atheist, I read the usual popular accounts of evolution and at times tried to track down the evidence for it. It always seemed to disappear into assertions and assumptions. That didn't keep me from continuing to believe in it, I had no religious objections to it, but it was frustrating, and once I did become a Christian and read some books on creationism I could see why it's so frustrating: the evidence for it IS only assertions and assumptions.

I've made case after case based on various observations of such things as the strata, the fossils and the decrease in genetic diversity that is the necessary result of microevolution.

Well, it's a thoroughly ossified thoroughly accepted not-to-be-questioned principle of modern biological science, assumed and embellished at every turn, but "bedrock" in the sense that it actually contributes any meaningful knowledge of biology? No. All it contributes is more fleshing out of the evolution assumption. It hangs on biology like a parasite getting fatter all the time but biology benefits not a whit.Source: Intelligent observation.

The "effective population (Ne)" is approximately 10,000 in the current population of ~ 7 billion. This could not be if there was not a recent origin or a recent bottleneck in human ancestry. Large populations of organisms drift by polymorphisms over large timespans, increasing the "effective population" unless they have experienced the above mentioned.

Since the acceptance of indels as percentage divergence between humans and chimps, evolution can not maintain a 5.6 million year split between humans and chimps. Paleoanthropology can not accommodate the new similarity percentage of 95%.