Creationist offers $10,000 to anyone willing to challenge literal interpretation of Genesis in court

[downbeatplumb]

I can see from this statement that you have a basic misunderstanding of evolution.

Absolute nonsense and I reject that ...

You can do, Evolution is the only mechanism in nature that can achieve that BUT evolution does not have to go from less complex to more complex. Birds lose the power of flight fish in darkness lose eyes. If it doesn't impart a survival advantage then those complex features can and do wither and disappear.

You are incorrect. Perhaps you've heard of the "Panda Principle". The idea that once something has developed to the point of being "good enough" in an environment where competition is lax, evolution gets lazy and doesn't improve the feature. This is not only true for Pandas, but often Cuckoo birds as well. While some Cuckoos lay eggs that are pretty close match in appearance to the host that they're fooling - others lay eggs that look nothing like the eggs that the host birds lay, but Cuckoos get away with those eggs in fact more than the "more evolved" ones simply because they're "good enough". This doesn't mean that a feature will necessarily wither away - and in fact, it certainly means the feature shouldn't wither away.

But this is besides the point. You are looking only at microevolution. You need to look at the big picture, it is the big picture where we see clear patterns form. And what the big picture tells us is that Evolution drives towards - not away from - more complicated organisms with more features.

I'm afraid that you are completely wrong, evolution cares not for the advancement of the species it only operates on works at the time and that means adapting to current conditions whatever they may be. Nothing more, it is a simple system that has complex results but HAS NO DIRECTION.

No, that's totally wrong. You've been taught incorrectly I'm afraid. You are moving away from the observation of Evolution and into the theoretical side of it. What your presenting is a theory on how evolution works. And guess what? The theory has been tested, and has not had confirming evidence. Evolution requires a strong driving force, not a weak one. One that is in fact resilient to change, even though it adopts it where it's beneficial.

Most DNA mutations, for instance, are unhelpful. They play no role in evolution - they can't because they're unhelpful!

You seem to think that there is some sort of intelligence behind evolution that wants life to "get better" sorry to disillusion you but that is not what happens.

Don't put words into my mouth. Did you hear me claim that there is intelligence behind crystallography? Crystals are a non-organic structure. Evolution is a biological structure. You have the theory backwards, out of date, disproven I'm afraid.

Your insistence on an evolutionary direction implied intelligent oversight and I have to reiterate that evolution has no direction.

http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_artic...-evolution

But evolution is, as far as we can tell, purposeless and unguided. There seems to be no direction, mutations are random, and we haven’t detected a teleological force or agent that pushes it in one direction. And it’s important to realize this: the great importance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection is that an unguided, purposeless process can nevertheless produce animals and plants that are exquisitely adapted to their environment. That’s why it’s called natural selection, not supernatural selection or simply selection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_o...complexity

Nowadays, this idea of "progression" in evolution is regarded as misleading, with natural selection having no intrinsic direction and organisms selected for either increased or decreased complexity in response to local environmental conditions.[4] Although there has been an increase in the maximum level of complexity over the history of life