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The evidence that all evolution deniers and people like Ray Comfort and Ken Ham are wanting does not exist. There will never be an experiment whereby a fish is kept in a laboratory and observed over generations and suddenly we will see it transformed into a lizard, this is because there is a misconceived perception among most religious followers that everything is evolving towards a “goal”. This is not the case, every fish is not standing inline waiting to become a lizard and every ape is not waiting for their turn at being a human. Every creature on earth has evolved to what it currently is. This does not mean that everything has stopped evolving it means that when fish or apes do evolve over the next million plus years they will evolve into a new species, the likes of which we have currently never seen. The primary example of observable evolution we have is in bacteria but as Ray Comfort always likes to say “bacteria turning into bacteria is not evolution”. Unfortunately for Ray and all other evolution deniers, they have no understanding of basic biology – I will explain below:
Classification of Living Things
Kingdom: Most textbooks now list 6 kingdoms -- animal, plant, protists (amoebas and such), fungi, bacteria, and archaebacteria (also called extremophiles).
Phylum: There are more than 30 phyla in the Animal Kingdom and 9 or 10 in the Plant Kingdom. Phylum Chordata is the one we're most familiar with -- it includes mammals, birds, fish, and all other vertebrates (animals with a backbone). Phylum Arthropoda includes insects, spiders, lobsters, etc. Arthropods have segmented bodies with the segments grouped into two or three distinct sections. They have hard external skeletons, or exoskeletons, that are shed and regenerated as the animals grow.
Class: The various phyla are divided into classes -- Phylum Chordata is divided into the classes: amphibians, birds, mammals, reptiles and fish.
Order: Scientific groupings don't follow hard and fast rules. Once we get to the "order" of a living thing, there sometimes begins to be some disagreement about where it belongs. You may find that different sources group creatures in different orders or families. And you may find that a creature has its order or family changed as more information is learned.
Family: The family is a relatively new scientific concept. It is a way scientists group similar genuses together. This is not the "mom, dad, brother and sister" type of family!
Genus: Two or more species that share unique body structures or other characteristics are considered to be closely related and are placed together in a genus. Sometimes a genus might include only a single species if there is nothing else in the world that has similarities with it. The genus is the first part of the scientific name of a species.
Species: A species can be defined as a group of individuals that breed together to produce fertile offspring. Most individuals of a species cannot breed with other such groups. It is sometimes possible for different species to breed, but the offspring will be sterile.
One of the biggest mistakes evolution deniers make is when they refer to “kinds”, now I understand what they are trying to say, but their mistake comes when they group, for example dog “kinds” and horse “kinds” with fish “kinds” and bird “kinds”. You see fish and birds are their own Class, a more accurate comparison will be mammal “kinds” and fish or bird “kinds” but this doesn’t gel with their agenda because a mammal turning into another mammal is proof of evolution but because we, in general conversation, lump fish into a singular group, a fish turning into a fish does not seem to be evolution. – Make sense?
Now we come to bacteria. Bacteria are their own kingdom, same as plants, same as all animals therefore a bacteria evolving into another bacteria is the same as saying an animal evolved into another animal or a plant evolved into another plant. Now the proof that evolution deniers are asking for is plain to see in the bacteria kingdom because if you would accept an animal turning into another animal as proof of evolution, what logical reason do you have for not accepting bacteria turning into bacteria as proof of evolution?
