[jrestrepo]

I'll give you the yaks, but I am pretty sure that bison go fairly far south in the US. So then let me swap yaks for buffalo.

If you want to discuss cold-climate, the polar bear has to be the most awesome example out there. A white furred, black skinned animal where the fur is fiber optic in nature. The black skin is highly effective at absorbing radiation and the fiber optic fur transfer heat down to the animal...

Whales can swim in temperature that would a freeze a human in seconds, yet they have now fur. Their skin does not get frost bite and the blubber is an exceptional insulator.

Ridge vent worms along the bottom of the ocean withstand temperatures that kill everything else out there and have biological processes which seems alien to us.

I still stand by what I have been saying. Without knowing where the evolution was going these changes would have never occurred. Climate change is rapidly occurring event (relatively and not like that stupid movie) and there is not enough time to change for extreme heat or cold, yet there are animals that are dialed in to extremes. Evolution as it is taught, required millions of years to make changes, not thousands.

I appreciate the arguments you have presented, but I start from a basis where I need the theory to be proved to me and I do not take it for granted. From that perspective there are too many holes. Simply enough, life violates the universal law of entropy, yet it flourishes here in extreme places. Consider how many mistakes, evolution-wise, there had to be and how many coincidences there had to be to get ridge vent worms. Just consider that, no response is required.

It is not evolution if knowledge of the outcome is required to direct the changes.

"God does not play dice." - Einstein

[megatherium]

I appreciate the arguments you have presented, but I start from a basis where I need the theory to be proved to me and I do not take it for granted. From that perspective there are too many holes.

I'll grant you that explanations in evolution often read like "just so stories".

But it might help to understand that the theory of evolution makes several different claims.

The first claim is that the Earth is old, many millions of years old. The evidence for this was already persuasive by 1800. The second claim is that all creatures on Earth descended from a common ancestor. This idea predates Darwin, indeed his own grandfather Erasmus published these ideas. The evidence for this by now is extremely strong: the relationships between species visible in their anatomy are now observed to be mirrored in their genes (where related species even share harmless mutations or "spelling errors" in the genome). It must be emphasized that these two ideas have essentially no opposition in biology.

But the third claim of evolution is the mechanism for the formation of new species: natural selection, where chance and necessity sculpt life. This is where there is debate, and exactly where you point out. The controversial theory of punctuated equilibrium was introduced to why evolution appears to happen in relatively rapid spurts separated by long periods of little change.

The weakest points in evolution is agreed to be the lack of credible explanations for the origin of life itself (3.8 billions years ago, the date of the oldest fossil-bearing rocks). It certainly wouldn't surprise me if there was "intelligent design" involved. But I am confortable with the idea that God used evolution to sculpt life; life capable of evolutionary change would be resiliant and adaptable, and I can imagine God taking pleasure in the unexpected and beautiful outcomes of evolution. This is as the Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant Churches teach (I am Episcopalian). (It also wouldn't surprise me if intelligent design, God's active intervention in evolution, was also behind the very rapid rise of modern humans.)

By the way, life does not violate the law of entropy (the second law of thermodynamics). This law states that closed systems cannot tend towards greater complexity. But the Earth is not a closed system: it receives a huge amount of energy input from the Sun. And, to the point, most life is powered by the Sun (through photosynthesis by plants). (Except for those ridge vent worms, which live off the bacterial communities that feed on the chemicals and heat from the vents.)

[Dick Holmes]

"God does not play dice." - Einstein

That's an interesting quote, for at least two reasons. First, it was triggered by Einstein's revulsion at contemplating quantum theory. He thought a better, more elegant particle theory could be devised that would be more in tune with his notions of how the universe's laws should work. So far, nobody has come up with one.

Second, when Einstein mentions God, he doesn't mean what most folks think of as God:

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.

So, you could say Einstein was wrong about God on both counts!