The Truth of Evolution (Evolution)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Thursday, September 18, 2008, 23:35 (5707 days ago) @ David Turell

Thanks for the link to your site, the article is more readable there:
http://www.sciencevsreligion.net/american_problem_of_science_and_.htm - Here are a couple of responses to particular points in your article: - David Turell: 'Natural selection' is actually circular reasoning: who survives, the fittest. How do we know they are the 'fittest'? They survived. - This is a very old and cheap canard! A dead duck. In a sense it is true. There is no harm in a tautology. It is a truism. But it is not circular reasoning. The "fittest" in a given environment are those individuals whose inherited characteristics give them a better chance of survival or reproduction (e.g. extra speed to escape from predators or to capture food, or extra furriness to provide protection from the cold due to a change of climate). - David Turell: As an example of large jumps in evolution, the scientists have no explanation for the 'Cambrian Explosion' in animal development. - Here is an explanation that seems more than adequate to me, 
quoted from wikipedia: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion#Uniqueness_of_the_explosion - The "Cambrian explosion" can be viewed as two waves of metazoan expansion into empty niches: first, a co-evolutionary rise in diversity as animals explored niches on the Ediacaran sea floor, followed by a second expansion in the early Cambrian as they became established in the water column. The rate of diversification seen in the Cambrian phase of the explosion is unparalleled among marine animals: it affected all metazoan clades of which Cambrian fossils have been found. Later radiations, such as those of fish in the Silurian and Devonian periods, involved fewer taxa, mainly with very similar body plans. - Whatever triggered the early Cambrian diversification opened up an exceptionally wide range of previously-unavailable ecological niches. When these were all occupied, there was little room for such wide-ranging diversifications to occur again, because there was strong competition in all niches and incumbents usually had the advantage. If there had continued to be a wide range of empty niches, clades would be able to continue diversifying and become disparate enough for us to recognise them as different phyla; when niches are filled, lineages will continue to resemble one another long after they diverge, as there is limited opportunity for them to change their life-styles and forms. - There is a similar one-time explosion in the evolution of land plants: after a cryptic history beginning about 450 million years ago, land plants underwent a uniquely rapid adaptive radiation during the Devonian period, about 400 million years ago.