"You understate the discrepancies and problems. Take the origin of life. Natural selection accounts for how cells and organisms adapt and survive, but says nothing about the _origin of life_. This is not a mere discrepancy or problem. This is a fundamental matter, and laboratory research on it has practically ceased because of the intractibility of the problem. Take the origin of sexual reproduction. The entire section in the 25 September issue of _Science_ was devoted to research on the evolution of sex. Yet all the articles deal only with _maintenance_ of sexual reproduction., but not a word about the _origin_ of sex. Take the orgins of transitional forms. Why did mammals leave their terrestrial environment to become seagoing whales when they were presumably reasonably well adapted to their terrestrial environment and any shift toward becoming a whale would only decrease their immediate adaptation to their current environment, and should be eliminated. In short, evolution
is generally silent on the topic of origins. Would you agree?"
Not really. The problem is there are a number of misconceptions in your statement. For one thing, natural selection is a mechanism of biological evolution, but abiogenesis ("the origin of life") is not a phenomenon of biological evolution but of chemical evolution. Natural selection is not a mechanism of chemical evolution, so you would not expect natural selection to have anything to say about abiogenesis. Biological evolution simply describes how life diversified once it began; chemical evolution would tell us how life began. However, it would use different mechanisms from biological evolution.
And laboratory research into abiogenesis has by no means stopped, as any examination of a biomedical electronic database would attest to. Just now I went to the NIH website and used their Entrez literature search program at <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Entrez/medline.html>. Just putting in the words "origin of life" in the search field got me 1354 rking in water, but still adapted to life on land. The next stage after that would probably be something similar to a sea lion, now much better adapted for life in the sea, but still able to get around on land. When finally the proto-whale was able to mate and give birth in the water, it could finally advance to the dolphin stage (or the manatee stage in the case of the sirenae), and complete its adaptation to a completely aquatic existence.
The point is that each stage of whale evolution could have been adapted for an amphibious life of varying degrees, without compromising the species' adaptation to land or sea. There is no hindrance here to evolution.
Kevin L. O'Brien