The website "Behe's Empty Box" points out the dozens of references to
published work in the field where Behe claims nothing has been done.
Whether these explanation hold merit or not can hardly be discussed
when Behe doesn't even seem to be aware that they exist.
> area that evolution hasn't been able to address properly. There is also the
> fact that evolution of the type that would give rise to the diverse amount
> of species that we have hasn't been observed. Furthermore, there hasn't
The reason is that evolution proceeds slowly enough that it is impossible
for a field experiment to observe large amounts of speciation. Just as
an example, the suggested divergence times of apes and humans is about
*one thousand times* the entire length of earth's history as proposed
by Creationists. (Yet many Creationists suggest that the species we
observe now have resulted from post-flood adaptive radiations! Is this
absurd and unobserved theory to be presented in the classroom, or not?)
> been any experiment done that would even merrit a conclusion that we all
> come from a common ancestor.
Comparative gene studies *do* in fact produce this evidence, and in spades.
Others here know a lot more about it than I do, but the basic idea is
that molecular similarities mimic the morphological similarities that
evolutionists traditionally used to do cladistics and determine ancestry.
> Another thing is abiogenesis. It is a known fact that no one has been able
> to show that the building blocks of life could have formed randomly. The
> expiriments that have been done have all been in labratory, and almost every
> aspect of the expiriment is controled. Such expiriments prove nothing,
> after all, the conditions billions of years ago were far from labratory
> conditions.
Actually, it has been proved that the building blocks of life--amino
acids--*can* be formed under random conditions. They occur in
extraterrestrial matter and interstellar dust, for heaven's sakes! What
hasn't been shown experimentally yet is how these blocks could ever
combine to build life up.
> So as you can see, although evolution has done a great deal in allowing us
> to understand how change occurs in animal species at the microevolutionary
> scale, it has done nothing at the macroevolutionary scale.
This is almost completely wrong. As we are know learning from observations
like those of the Grants with the Galapagos finches, our ideas of
microevolutionary changes are in need of (sometimes dramatic) overhauling.
This is exactly because, up until recently, evolutionary examinations
were simply not carried out at the microevolutionary level, because
no-one thought there'd be anything to see.
> So fine present the evidence for and against creationism, but do the same
> for evolution.
How about first getting a grasp of the basics of it, and the current
state of play?
-Greg