The alleged absence of "observable progression" in fossils is a key argument among anti-evolutionists.
It works well for them because regardless of which fossils you show them, and how similar-but-different the fossils might be, they can always claim -- with a straight face -- "yes, but where is the intermediate fossil between those two?"
Indeed, the more similar fossils you present, the more intermediates they can claim are missing!
So it's a beautiful argument, and they often get away with it.
The example in my post #50 of intermediate forms should be adequate, I'd think, for anyone approaching the subject in good faith.
Fightin Whitey"...my question has to do with the seemingly sudden appearance of civilization after millenia of savagery and near savagery."
Imho, science will never find a better explanation than the one in Genesis 2:7 -- "7 Then the Lord God formed a man[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being."
What came before was "pre-human", after is "fully human".
Non-human beasts do not recognize God, fully human beings do, even when they refuse to admit it.
Just my opinion.
Fightin Whitey: "Supposedly someone like you can tell me how fishies somehow became birdies and yet no one seems to have a clue how modern man sprang into being."
Rest easy, FRiend, no fishie ever became a birdie.
Of course, fishies did, and still do, crawl out on land for various reasons, some eventually evolving to live on dry land except for their eggs, amphibians.
A few amphibians evolved to lay eggs on land, becoming reptiles, diverse of which grew feathers and... well, you might guess, right?
And all that, the fossil record tells us, happened over not years, or even millions of years, but hundreds of millions of years.
By contrast, the ascent of pre-human kind from chimps is just a few million years, and real civilization (i.e., farming) less than 10,000 years.
Fightin Whitey: "...puzzled over the obsession of scientists as to why the Neatherthals died out as opposed to any curiosity about where/why WE came into being."
Perhaps that author was not so familiar with the literature.
In fact there is huge scientific curiosity about the origins of modern-man, and whether this happened in only a single location, in Africa, or was it more wide spread, with lots of interbreeding going on amongst various pre-humans?
But remember, we are making a distinction here between biologically-modern mankind (i.e., Cro-Magnons), and let us call him, farming-civilized God-fearing mankind.
How do we procure true belief. It seems we form a belief by cognitive faculties, and only if the function as these faculties operate in a proper cognitive environment for the way those faculties were designed to function and when that design plan is aimed at obtaining truth. In order to be designed for acquiring truth (knowledge = warranted true belief) those cognitive faculties must operate normatively (as they were designed to function), not statistically usual
It is easy to understand normative function in, say a carburetor, intelligently designed and we know it functions as it was meant to work. So it seems that knowledge presupposes that those beliefs were produced by cognitive operations operating normatively (as designed). Therefore knowledge presupposes a designer. It seems the atheist, naturalist, Darwinist owes us an explanation of what it would mean have proper cognitive function and reliable knowledge acquisition without proper designer of that cognitive function selected for to acquire knowledge.
The issue is this: if knowledge exists and if properly functioning mental (not neurological) requires a designer of those faculties, which cannot be explicated from a naturalistic standpoint, isn't it reasonable to conclude that metaphysical naturalism is false? I would remind you that this 'natural selection' selects for fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fornicating (reproduction). Your theory does not say it selects for true beliefs. In fact it is violative of naturalism to say invariant abstract entities even exist, and truth is an abstract invariant entity. There are many theories which say there is no survival value for truth. So, I ask you, "Why do you believe in anything at all?"
One final question......
Do you KNOW it is TRUE that Darwinian evolution accounts for the diversity of biological life on earth today? This is a yes, no, or I do not know question. I am not interested in explaining why you believe yes, no, or I do not know.....
Thank you.