For Christians (or anyone else) who deny Darwinian evolution.

[SteveII]

I've snipped the crap about definitions of evolution and what one person believes. It's a typical religionist tactic to get the conversation bogged down in irrelevant definitions so people are faced with a wall of text and no one making any progress. It makes it look like the debate is equal when it is not.

I asked for an example of a partially formed non-functioning ability found in nature. Clearly the current theories indicate there should be some. Isn't that the hallmark of a good theory: predicting?

Learn to read.

You said "You are the one claiming that complex organs and traits evolved without any survival benefit until they were complete. No evolutionary scientist claims that, only creationists making strawman debates." Of course no evolutionary scientist claims that. They infer that it must be so. Here's the thing, the theory is that parts can get co-opted from other systems. While that might be the case, having the parts is not the hard part. What mechanism organized the parts into a significantly more complex working system with a totally new function? How many parts are there in an eye that would have had to endure how many generations with no evolutionary advantage until some new function appeared. 

It is fine to think that it did happen. Don't confuse that with knowing how it happened. If we don't know how it happened, there cannot be a fact of the matter that evolution made it happen. All you have is an inference of naturalism to say it did. 

Is the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium (developed to explain the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record) true? 

That's not why the understanding of Punctuated Equilibrium came about. Punctuated equilibrium comes about because the evolutionary process is not a steady, linear improvement over time.

The evolutionary process can be considered much like hill walking in fog with the landscape being a fitness landscape. The higher up the population the fitter its members are. But it's a blind ascent which means that a population can get stuck on a local maxima, or a plateau. Note, this is not to insinuate that evolution is a deliberate process, it is something that happens as a form of self organisation.

When a population spreads out randomly on a plateau with each member roughly as fit as each other, the population is effectively exploring that part of the fitness landscape. If there is a way off then the plateau that leads to much higher up on the fitness landscape then this leads to punctuated equilibrium.

A species cannot be considered in isolation though. It is part of a larger ecosystem or environment, and this may suddenly change. So what was once a local maxima or plateau may no longer be that because the fitness landscape changes. The classic example being the peppered moth which evolved from white to black and back to white again because of the industrial revolution.

It just so happens that punctuated equilibrium also explains why some transitional fossils are much harder to find, because they occurred during stages of rapid evolutionary progress.

And before you say that this is not observable or testable, it's a feature of genetic algorithms. We see it happening all the time. I myself have one experiment that I need to wait for roughly two days of processing before it comes across the right solution and the fitness shoots up.

Yes, and the whole theory is inferred because of the gaps in the fossil record. There is no other reason for the theory except to explain why the evidence does not match the predicted theory of very small changes over very long periods of time. Again, this is not something tested in the biology lab, it is a theory to explain the evidence but we know very little about the mechanisms. For example, why have some living things not changed for hundreds of millions of years? What halted the process? 

Wait, that explains why we still have them. How did we get them? 

Because they were useful once. I explained above that the environment changes, not least because of speciation.

Again, an inference. 

LOL. We do not have evidence of the mechanisms that would generate complexity from simplicity and that all life has a common ancestor. If you think we do, provide them.

If all you're asking for is complexity from simplicity then that's easy. Self organisation does that. We see it all the time with crystalisation. Or do you think that each snowflake is designed?

Do we see examples of biological self-organization where we get a function from non-function n the lab? Or is this more inference? 

If you're specifically asking for the increase in complexity over time from simpler life then the neutral gene explains that which I referred to early. There is also duplication where part of the genotype gets duplicated. If this does not lower the fitness of a member of the species then, as with junk DNA, it can hang around. The important thing is though it opens up a whole new area of search space whereby the duplicated part can be mutated. This increases complexity over time. 

Even if a mutation in the cell develops a new feature, systems take many different kinds of cells to be organized to form a complex function. What is the mechanism that assembles these disparate parts into a working system? It is not observed, it is inferred.

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What is the alternative to evolution that they propose?

I have seen people say "design" but what does that mean?
How is the design carried out?
Where do they get the materials?
How does design make life?

Design as an idea needs to be supported with evidence but all I see is fallacious arguments against evolution.

So come on, describe the alternative in detail with supporting evidence and peer review.

Anything yet on this? or are there just attacks on evolution?

I'm just pointing out that claiming evolution (in the all-encompassing sense of the word) is a fact is a philosophical claim, not a scientific one.