(March 16, 2016 at 6:56 am)AJW333 Wrote: So if the vast majority of mutations wreak havoc with an organism, and a vast number of positive mutations are required to go from pond slime to human beings, isn't it a giant leap of faith to think you could go from one living organism in the beginning, to hundreds of thousands of wildly different species with virtually no trace of failed intermediates?
The "failed intermediates" never survived enough to breed and pass on their failed genetic makeup. How would you be expecting to spot them?
Also, I think that, in the beginning, there must have been lots of similar self-replicating "organisms" which all self-assembled spontaneously in the same "soup" conditions...