Well, I do not accept your demands...you insist that the beginning of life, and evolution of life, are necessarily tied together...now, that may be your own personal view, but it does not hold true for other people...other people may have 'speculate' about how life began, but also understand, that simply because they do not know how life first began, is not an obstacle to supporting evolution...there can be and are many speculations about how life first began...the Christian God as the creator, seeding from outer space, any one of many other gods in various creation stories, chemical evolution, and on and on and on...the problem is, how does one prove any of these?...
You illustration of telling a child about Santa Claus, and then speculating that the child will necessarily ask about the origin of Santa, falls short...some children will ask about Santas origin, and others simply wont care so long as Santa brings his gifts...
You wish for there to be somewhere a verifiable strata of earth, that contains kind of like an evolutionary ladder, all in one place, showing the slow progression from one form of life to another...well, good luck with that...I dont know that it is going to happen...that any living being actually survives to become a fossil, is chancey at best...all conditions must be just right for this to happen...that is why, fossils taken from one site, one strata, are compared with others found around the world, in other strata...
People cry foul and whine when new discoveries cause certain speculations to be readjusted, or new ideas to come forth due to the new evidence...they claim that evolution cannot be supported, because it is constantly changing, being made to accomodate the new evidence...I ask why is this a bad thing?...the theory of evolution itself, is not in question, but rather what we have thought about certain particular fossils may have to be readjusted...I mean, if medicine was not readjusted and modified to accomodate new research, and new discoveries, they would still be practicing medicine like it was practiced long ago...
I do thank you for your response, and tho I dont agree with you, your post and your ideas were interesting, and thought provoking...
Some interesting calculations on that from Frank J. Sonleitner (paragraphs added):
It is unreasonable to expect to find long continuous chains of transition forms in the fossil record. Consider the evolution of the modern horse from eohippus, which occurred over a period of 60 million years.
If we assume a generation time of three years, that corresponds to 20 million generations. Let us further assume that it takes 1 foot of sediment to bury a horse (probably not enough for the larger, more recent horses, but more than enough for the dog-sized early ancestors, so 1 foot is a reasonable average). To get a really complete series of transitional forms, we would require at least 1 specimen from each generation. But, if every three years, a river flood buries one horse or horse ancestor under 1 foot of sediment, that eventually amounts to 20 million feet of sediment! Which translates into 3,788 miles, a figure almost equal to the radius of the earth!
The total thickness of the Tertiary sediments in western North America that contain the fossil equid sequence is a bit under 10,000 feet. Thus only a tiny fraction of a complete transitional series could have been preserved. Yet, the known fossil horses provide a fairly continuous record with only one or two small gaps.
Source:
http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/2142_51_sonleitner_what39s_wr_11_24_2004.asp