Booboocruise's Dissolvable Best Evidence

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But, you know, even with that. I can understand why individuals find it incredulous that life could have reached into all the nooks and crannies and 'found' all the ways to live it has. It is an awesome picture. One hard to wrap your head around even if you're not impared by a restricted world view to begin with.

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I just wanted to agree with this. Evolution is extremely hard to believe until someone explains the process, and even then it takes a lot of explaining.I know creationists misquote Darwin's comment about how hard it is to believe that an eye could evolve, but he did say it was hard to believe without an explanation (an explanation which he gave). Dawkins starts his _The Blind Watchmaker_ with an awesome description of the sonar in bats, his very point being how hard it is to believe that such an ability could evolve gradually. Darwin also has a good description of behavior and gender in ants which is also meant to show how difficult it is to see an evolution for that behavior.Mind you, I know the explanations work, and I believe the explanations, but life really is a marvel; in my opinion, more of a marvel from an evolutionary standpoint than a creationist one. From a creationist viewpoint, you marvel at the Creator (and where he came from), but life is pretty simple (God did it). I guess that's why we humans were mostly all creationists until 150 years ago. You figure that if Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years then 150 years is less than a tenth of a percent of our history.

I'm not sure I followed your point, Ned, although I think I did. I haven't looked at your link yet. I have to go run an errand, and then I will. I think your main point is at least somewhat summed up in:

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If you didn't have the example outcome before you but understood the process in great detail you would still be astonished at the outcome.

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I had a thought on this that has always interested me. Darwin's approach to evolution in _Origin of Species_ has always seemed backwards to me from what I was taught in school and from most debate approaches. Darwin started with the outcome, life today, saw the fact that subspecies were, by definition, descendants of the species they belonged to, then noticed how hard it was to classify organisms as belonging to species, subspecies and genera. He used doves as an example, pointing out that if naturalists didn't know they all (probably all) descended from Rock Pigeons, then they would classify doves as falling into three different genera. He then hypothesized that species descended from genera, genera from families, and on back.Today, most everyone starts with the fossil record, pointing out the simplicity and lack of diversity of early life, then following it forward to modern life. Darwin went the other way.If I followed you, then that seemed somewhat related to what you were saying. It always fascinated me, and it gave me a real respect for Darwin's reasoning ability as well as his incredible knowledge of modern life forms.