(November 12, 2009 at 2:11 pm)rjh4 Wrote: So why does this make less sense than to say that we all come from some original organism? Why is this inconsistent with what we actually observe?Because what we observe isn't that dogs all come from the same "kind" of dog, and that's the end of it. That original "dog" is part of a several species that all came from the same "kind" of <insert common ancestor here>, and that common ancestor came shares another common ancestor with other organisms.
What the evidence points to is every organism today, whether it be animal or plant, coming from a single common ancestor billions of years ago, namely a (very) simple cell that formed through some process that we currently do not know about (although we can make several likely hypotheses about it).
