And here I thought all life came from the sea.
The problem most of us who have our reservations about evolution have is in regards to the extent of adaptations. Sure - we can accept the idea that populations will diverge from each other in simple terms - finches with evolutions to their beaks, for example. What is a different story, entirely, is the conversion of hands into fins or the complete shift of something like an otter into something like a whale. The problem with evolutionary theory, in general, is the lack of selective power. Evolution of an otter into a whale becomes far more plausible if you allow me to take the most whale-like male and female otters and breed them together, exclusively, every generation for millions of years.
However, it's not as if the otters with mildly thicker webbing on their feet are going to be -that- much more successful than their peers. In order for evolution to work - the gains need to be fairly substantial and selective pressures need to be very stable over history in order to push a species into the extremes of morphological changes. Evolution of cellular structures and entirely new proteins that fill a function are another story.
I would buy the story of a penguin evolving into a whale before I bought one of a cow evolving into a dolphin. But we still have a very, very long way to go before I'll buy the story. Namely, we have to come to the realization that the past didn't actually exist as we understand it to, and much of our universe exists as a macroscopic consequence of quantum mechanics. If the universe were thought of as a bose-einstein condensate, then the only state that exists with any amount of classical physics is the 'observed' state - being the energy absorbed and re-radiated by the condensate. From this observed state of present - a past and potential range of futures can be projected. The past never existed as a concrete thing, however, as the bose-einstein condensate existed as a null state, prior. Alternatively, a sufficiently isolated energetic state can be considered coherent in a similar fashion to a bose-einstein condensate. These systems allow for more persistent states of 'present' - but are sufficiently more quirky than what we are used to working with in classical physics, as the entire notion of causality is under QM.
In other words - the fact we are here in the world has created the world. It exists in the present state which means events in the past are subject to the effects of QM - and you can have things occur with far greater efficiency than they would under classical physics - such as having the result of the most beneficial adaptations toward a set of morphological changes compiled across members of all generations (regardless of whether they lived millions of years apart) and compile them into one entity. This is the "random walk" of QM computations on a macroscopic scale.
I could buy evolution in that case - but then we are talking about a very different view of physical reality that is well beyond most people's experiences and understanding of reality.
For the umpteenth time, modern animals do NOT evolve into other modern animals, who told you that ? No reputable biologist ever claimed that a modern cow evolved into a dolphin or a penguin evolved into a whale. These animals simply had a common ancestor if we were to travel far back enough in time, that was emphatically NOT a modern animal itself but a predecessor to modern species. It’s amazing how people who ‘disagree’ with evolution have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is.
Well I have no background or interest in quantum mechanics but if you’re argument is that the past does not exist, well yes it’s undeniably possible that the world started 5 minutes ago, and we were all sent here with implanted memories and are all victims of a giant confidence trick, played out by being part of someone else’s computer simulation. Why such an argument is never used for any other discipline or study, like the study of history or archealogy is beyond me. I could argue, using your logic, that president Reagan never existed but was an implanted memory in the hearts of all neo cons .
Nevertheless, biologists dont distinguish between divergence in ‘ simple’ terms and the longer scale macro evolution, which is essentially the same process over a larger time frame.
Lack of selective power? Have you seen the variation of animals, even within the same species in a single generation? Let alone multiple hundreds of thousands of generations that are involved in a larger time frame. The domestication of the dog, is a very illustrative example of marked physical change over relatively short time frames . Also look up ‘belayevs fox experiment’ for further elaboration. What we find from this and countless other case studies, is that variation and on rare instances, mutation occur within populations all over the natural world. Some of those survive better, and since these variations are heritable(I.e can be transferred to the next generation), then it automatically and obviously follows that populations change over time. The selective pressures can range from anything like artificial or man made pressures, to pressure for mates (sexual selection, incidentally the reason why male hens and male peacocks are more colourful and have more adornments than females of the same species, because females over generations only mated with males who had those traits, till selective power made a few bright feathers into the remarkable sight that is a fully expansive male peacock), pressure to hunt prey, to evade predators(with adaptations like the chameleon) and to carve out a niche and survive, natural selection.
If you still insist on macro evolution being a stretch, consider the division of animals, into sub groups. Like mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish etc. Or further subdivisions like the cat family, the great apes, etc. Not only do these groupings fall into a perfectly hiearchial family tree (each individual species being the branches), the DNA similarity between animals is exactly what we should expect if they had evolved from common ancestors, and the similarity being directly proportional to the proximity of the animals to each other within said tree.