Atheist Idicoy

[pocaracas]

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After 4 pages of just kicking this guy, I think it's time someone told him how the theory of evolution by natural selection came about.
It was not poofed into a book. It was not imagined. It was not inspired. It was not dreamed up.
It was reasoned after many observations and comparisons of the various animal and plant species in diverse regions of the globe.
Let's quote the wiki a bit, because I don't want to write it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_...ry_thought

With the beginnings of biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, Western biological thinking was influenced by two opposed ideas. One was essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology. The other one was the development of the new anti-Aristotelian approach to modern science: as the Enlightenment progressed, evolutionary cosmology and the mechanical philosophy spread from the physical sciences to natural history. Naturalists began to focus on the variability of species; the emergence of paleontology with the concept of extinction further undermined the static view of nature. In the early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed his theory of the transmutation of species, the first fully formed theory of evolution.

In 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published a new evolutionary theory that was explained in detail in Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Unlike Lamarck, Darwin proposed common descent and a branching tree of life, meaning that two very different species could share a common ancestor. The theory was based on the idea of natural selection, and it synthesized a broad range of evidence from animal husbandry, biogeography, geology, morphology, and embryology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science.[9] His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.[10]

Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection.[11] Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority.[12] He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories.[13] Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature.[5] In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.

All of Darwin's research has been verified time and time again by a number of researchers, botanists, biologists, etc.

The scientific community accepted the theory as valid because of the sheer amount of evidence he presented.
Nowadays, people still accept the theory because no evidence has managed to challenge it. All evidence supports it.
Lay people never actually read the books and papers which show the evidence, but many watch nature documentaries on tv, and end up seeing some of the evidence this way... and we're aware that, given funding, time, and dedication, each and every one of us could find that evidence for ourselves.
This is one of the main factors of science: any one could repeat the experiment and obtain the same results.... if they don't mess up the methodology.

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It's so frustrating that one of the most serious answers to the OP got completely ignored by the OP....
Maybe he just chose to ignore it... that would tell us so much about him... no wait... it wouldn't tell us anything we don't already know, sorry, carry on.