Can you disprove this secular argument against evolution?

Not every time, no. But every so often you will - you'll end up with essentially the same organ with the same functionality, but with a small mutation, which doesn't impair the organ's function. And every so often, the mutation (or more likely a sequence of them) proves beneficial and is naturally selected as a more beneficial variant.Do this often enough, over millions of years and even more generations, and you may end up with an organ that is so different from what it was millions of years before, that we give it a different name from the original organ. It doesn't change in one impossible leap - it changes over millions of years, by way of millions and millions of small changes, each one of which is pretty likely, given the small change involved, and the tendency towards small mutations.

A good description of every one of the religious creation myths.Except for the "unfalsifiable" bit.

Your particular brand of snake oil, however, relies upon waiting for evolution to hit a point on a wall with a near infinite number of possible strike points, and then drawing a target around the strike point and calculating the chances of it hitting that particular point.Evolution is not a theory which anticipates the arrival at the precise forms of life we see today, from its starting point billions of years and trillions of generations ago. It is a theory which explains the pathways which life happens to have taken, to get to the point it happens to have got to.You're right that evolution isn't terribly concerned with possible evolutionary outcomes that didn't occur. Instead, that is something which has to be pointed out to someone who is trying to sell an argument founded on the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.The pack of cards is the best way to demonstrate this. I can take a pack of cards, choose one at random 52 times, and put them in a pile. The chances of the pile being in that particular sequence of cards is 1 in 52! . The chances of a well shuffled deck of cards is 1 in 1. Nothing in evolutionary theory says that the end sequence has to be the sequence we see today - that's just how it worked out. I could have had 6 legs, 10 photo sensitive buds on stalks and glinkwurbles instead of hands. As it happens, I don't - no biggie.Edited by vimesey, : Autocorrect error

Indeed.Forexhr's sharpshooter fallacy assumes that the phrase "Methinks it is like a weasel" is the only possible outcome. The thing is, of course, that the program would work just as well with any phrase.

You're setting up a false dichotomy, for the purposes of your snake oil.When it comes to evolution, trying to distinguish between origin and modification is irrelevant. It's all a continuum of billions of incremental changes - simple as.

More completely, it's all a myriad of continua of incremental changes.

Are you seriously expecting anyone, with even the most rudimentary understanding of evolution, to go along with such a blatantly simplistic attempt to discredit it ? To attempt to argue that evolution must be false, because it can't, in a few lab experiments, produce the dramatic physiological changes which took place when, say, a gill based respiratory system became lung based - when evolution incorporates, at its most fundamental level, billions of incremental changes over billions of years ?You will run away from this point, and try to hide behind mathematical symbols and scientific terminology, in order to try to impress your target audience. But with your above quotation, you have completely laid bare your utter misunderstanding of the field.

Evolution only requires two resources from its organisms - the tendency to reproduce, and the tendency to mutate on reproduction. The environment does not supply these resources - instead it exerts selection pressures.

Your are aware how life reproduces aren't you ?I mean, there are uncountable ways in which the atoms making the human body could combine, and yet my ex and I made a fully functioning human being not once, but twice !! What are the odds ?Edited by vimesey, : Realised I probably needed to make it even clearer.Edited by vimesey, : No reason given.