What do you think of the points I make in posting 223?
What do you think of the points I make in posting 223?
No offense, but it could use a lot of work.
As for your first paragraph, there are many fossils showing the transition from sea-based life to land-based life. And, in fact, with the cetaceans, of the reverse, as well. And when the founding species of a higher-level taxon begins to split, it initially would look no more different from the trunk species than subspecies do today. It is only with massive amounts of time do members of separate taxa take on strongly divergent morphology. For example, we wouldn't expect the most recent common ancestor of birds and mammals to look like half-bird, half-mammal, because the defining characteristics of each arose later. It would be something whose morphology is not evolutionarily inconsistent with either birds or mammals.
The second paragraph is based on the common misunderstanding as to the role of random mutation in evolution. In fact, you seem to express the creationist (although I'm not claiming you're a creationist.) obsession/misconception with the notion of randomness in evolution. Evolution through natural selection is not a wholly random thing. And, in fact, to the extent randomness is a factor, it is usually (but not always) randomness of the most mundane kind. It is the randomness that says, "if you measure the heights of all the men in a particular city, they will exhibit a variation around the mean." It is the next step, the natural selection in light of environmental pressure, that is the more interesting aspect.