I won't reiterate the replies already, but just add a few bits and pieces of my own.
- Fossils - If evolution were true, the fossil record would reflect it. But it doesn't. In fact, Darwin himself said, "To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer." (The Origin of Species, Part Two, p. 90) There just isn't any fossil evidence for the transitional forms that we'd expect to find between known species.
"Species" is actually something of an artificial construct. A species is defined so that members of different species cannot have fertile offspring. You mention dogs, and you're correct to say that they are the same species as every breed of dog can procreate with every other breed of dog. As a counter-example, lions and tigers are different species and, while they can have offspring, those offspring are infertile.
The reason I mention this is to talk about what are known as ring species. This is where you have a species that starts off in one geographical location and spreads out in different directions. So you have a colony which we can call colony N, then to (say) the West of colony N you'll have colony M, and to the East you'll have colony O. To the West of colony M you'll have colony L, and to the East of colony O you'll have colony P. And so on until you reach colonies A & Z.
The thing is, as the colonies are separated by distance and time, they adapt to their environments, and they change genetically. This can lead you to a situation where creatures from colony N can have fertile offspring with creatures from colony A and colony Z, but creatures from colony Z cannot have fertile offspring with creatures from colony A.
One example of this is the bird known as the green warbler. The species is thought to have originated in Nepal, and encircle the Tibetan Plateau (hence the name "ring species"), meeting up again on the other side. And while the two populations that co-exist in the same space (colonies A & Z) cannot breed with each other, they
can all breed with their neighbours all the way around the ring in an unbroken chain. Indeed, you sometimes see cross-breeds between the group located in Nepal (colony N) and one of the groups on the other side of the ring.
So, not only are previous posters absolutely right about the presence of transitional forms in the fossil record, there are examples of transitional forms that are still alive.
- First Life - There is no scientific evidence for life being created from anything other than life. There are guesses/theories/hypotheses, but none of which can be tested or proven. Nothing that can be considered evidence or fact. Note that theories like gravity can be tested, while the origin of life via evolution cannot.
Well, gravity is actually a bad example. There's more evidence for the theory of evolution by natural selection than there is for any theory of gravitation. We know that relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible, though. The best theory is quantum field theory, but it's entirely impossible to test that with relation to gravitation. It's just utterly impossible to build a Graviton detector, and even if you could it couldn't give you meaningful results.
None of which is really relevant because abiogenesis is not evolution by natural selection, and evolution by natural selection is not abiogenesis. They're just not the same thing at all.
One website I found ( http://www.reasons.org/articles/probability-for-life-on-earth ) took in 322 required parameters for life on Earth, used 258 sources to help determine the probability of each one, then calculated the probability of all of them happening. The result: 1 chance in 10^282 that Earth could support life without divine intervention.
Firstly, this is the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. It's applying posterior probability to something that wasn't predicted. It's assuming that life evolving on Earth was the end goal. It's easy to assign significance to something after the fact and have it seem amazing.
Let me put it this way - counting the number of cards in
gives me 16. Using that as an average for each element because I'm too lazy to count them all and ignoring the anomaly of
, that gives us a total of 192 cards in the game. Now, when you visit the Oracle in the morning and you get an
Pillar do you sit back on your chair, gobsmacked that out of all the possible cards you could have got you got that one which was a 1 in 192 chance? Of course you don't, because you're not attaching any special significance to that card. In order for it to have significance you have to say "I'm going to get an
Pillar with this roll"
before you hit the button. If you do that, then that 1 in 192 chance becomes significant.
What's happening there is that that website is drawing the target around the bullet holes
after the gun has already been fired.
Secondly,
the latest research suggests that there's probably around 6 * 10^21 Earth-like planets out there in the universe. So they can't be all that rare.
Thirdly, I've only skimmed it, but not a single one of the variables listed that I can see have a single thing to do with evolution.
Fourthly, while there are plenty of references given on that page, they're not useful as at no point are we told what papers are relevant to what variables and, most importantly, the author doesn't show his working out.
And, fifthly, you should always be suspicious of anybody who has started with the conclusion that they want to reach, and are fitting the data to support it, which is what the author of that piece admits to be his raison d'etre.
