"Intellectually honest people who don't embrace the blind-faith macroevolutionary religion, and don't worship at the altar of Darwin, and who have been noticing my interaction with you on these threads, know better. The opinions of the others don't count."
This is ridiculous. I cannot count the number of times I have witnessed creationists describe evolutionary theory as "religious" in nature. It is nothing of the sort. What is really behind that claim is that creationists believe that the Theory of Evolution challenges their religious beliefs so they conclude that it must be either an attack on religion or a religious dogma of its own. Evolutionary theory depends upon the following:
EVIDENCE:
There is a wealth of evidence in the fossil record, which is uniformly consistent as confirmed in Stratigraphy and accurately dated using radiometric dating.
METHODOLOGY:
In Geology, Microbiology, Chemistry, Biochemistry, Physics, Zoology, and more there are established methodological approaches that must be applied to assessing and testing the evidence for evolution. No "acceptance on faith" of the validity of these methodologies is required, because they are open to criticism and alteration if superior approaches can be demonstrated. These methodological approaches are rejected out of hand by creationists.
RIGOR:
This is a companion to methodology, but I think it deserves to be stated separately because "intellectual honesty" -- to use your term Matchett -- demands that evidence and findings be assessed in good faith, especially in terms of their completeness and context (the recently-posted comments taken from Stephen Gould fail this test), that theoretical constructs are treated coherently (no "straw man" arguments are allowed), and that argumentation is based upon scientific principles that are capable of being disproven through rigorous application of scientific method. Creationists fail all of these tests and do so repeatedly.
HONESTY:
I apply this term much more readily to "New World Creationists" than I do to proponents of Intelligent Design, though even some of the latter group fall in here as well. Simply put; creationists either argue from ignorance, lie outright, or both and the proof is that they refuse to honestly address rigorous arguments from evidence to the contrary.
There is no "religious" attachment to the Theory of Evolution and "Darwinianism" only exists in the minds of creationists. It's a loaded term used to unite opponents of evolutionary theory in a symbolic cultural struggle that pits science against religion. Many who see the Theory of Evolution as offering the only explanation for the origin of species that is capable of submission to logical demonstration are also quite religious in their own personal lives. Though I confess myself to be a sinner, I fall into the latter category as I consider myself to be a Christian of strong religious faith. And I am angered when my own faith is denied, which for my own part is a sin in and of itself, but which I confess openly.
Now regarding the Pope, the Catholic Church, and Evolution, I suggest we go right to the source, Pope John Paul II's address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (October 22, 1996), usually referred to by the title Truth Cannot Contradict Truth. By way of disclaimer, I should state that I am a practicing Roman Catholic and the views the Pope has offered are entirely in accordance with my own.
To give a brief summary of the views of the Catholic Church towards the Theory of Evolution it could be stated that the Catholic Church recognizes that the Theory of Evolution is more than just a hypothesis and that it has been supported by significant evidence, that there is no conflict between the Theory of Evolution and the doctrine of faith, that the Theory of Evolution must be treated on its own epistemological terms as a materialist doctrine that falls within the larger realm of Naturalist Philosophy, and that the human body may take its form from pre-existent matter but the human spirit or soul originates with God. There is no argument put forth that God intervened in the material sense to create man, the intervention was a spiritual one. You can read all of this at the above-cited link. If anyone wants to contest that the opinions of the Catholic Church towards the Theory of Evolution are different than those I have just stated I am prepared to engage them because I have been involved in numerous discussions with some very learned ordained priests on this topic.
Now; to the charge that "there is no evidence for Macroevolution." Bull! This falls under the rubric of ignoring contradictory evidence. I'll post an excerpt from the U-Cal San Diego link I cited earlier. I quote as follows:
"Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have uncovered the first genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans were accomplished during the early evolution of animals.
In an advance online publication February 6 by Nature of a paper scheduled to appear in Nature, the scientists show how mutations in regulatory genes that guide the embryonic development of crustaceans and fruit flies allowed aquatic crustacean-like arthropods, with limbs on every segment of their bodies, to evolve 400 million years ago into a radically different body plan: the terrestrial six-legged insects.
The achievement is a landmark in evolutionary biology, not only because it shows how new animal body plans could arise from a simple genetic mutation, but because it effectively answers a major criticism creationists had long leveled against evolution—the absence of a genetic mechanism that could permit animals to introduce radical new body designs.
'The problem for a long time has been over this issue of macroevolution,' says William McGinnis, a professor in UCSD’s Division of Biology who headed the study. 'How can evolution possibly introduce big changes into an animal’s body shape and still generate a living animal? Creationists have argued that any big jump would result in a dead animal that wouldn’t be able to perpetuate itself. And until now, no one’s been able to demonstrate how you could do that at the genetic level with specific instructions in the genome.'
The UCSD team, which included Matthew Ronshaugen and Nadine McGinnis, showed in its experiments that this could be accomplished with relatively simple mutations in a class of regulatory genes, known as Hox, that act as master switches by turning on and off other genes during embryonic development. Using laboratory fruit flies and a crustacean known as Artemia, or brine shrimp, the scientists showed how modifications in the Hox gene Ubx—which suppresses 100 percent of the limb development in the thoracic region of fruit flies, while its crustacean counterpart from Artemia only represses 15%—would have allowed the crustacean-like ancestors of Artemia, with limbs on every segment, to lose their hind legs and diverge 400 million years ago into the six-legged insects
'This kind of gene is one that turns on and off lots of other genes in order to make complex structures,' says Ronshaugen, a graduate student working in William McGinnis’ laboratory and the first author of the paper. 'What we’ve done is to show that this change alters the way it turns on and off other genes. That’s due to the change in the way the protein produced by this gene functions.'
'The change in the mutated protein allows it to turn off other genes,' says William McGinnis, who discovered with two other scientists in 1983 that the same Hox genes in fruit flies that control the placement of the head, thorax and abdomen during development are a generalized feature of all animals, including humans. 'Before the evolution of insects, the Ubx protein didn't turn off genes required for leg formation. And during the early evolution of insects, this gene and the protein it encoded changed so that they now turned off those genes required to make legs, essentially removing those legs from what would be the abdomen in insects.'
The UCSD team’s demonstration of how a mutation in the Ubx gene and changes in the corresponding Ubx protein can lead to such a major change in body design undercuts a primary argument creationists have used against the theory of evolution in debates and biology textbooks. . . ."
That's about all I have to say on these matters for now. I have more responses to other posts I need to make to catch up.