You could equally postulate they were developed in a lab by aliens and dropped off here to see if they would form a viable ecosystem in the existing chemical environment, as a package. What leftovers survived from the last faunal assemblage are just germs in the petri dish. Go ahead, disprove it.
Okay, say we accept the missing transitional and ancestral forms as permissable "holes". Lots of roads, but the intersections are only implied, not documented.
If this is a viable and natural process, it should be occuring now, today. But the damning point is that there are no modern examples. Evolution involves more than killing off the unfit, there must be something new arise from all the fracas. Unless I am wrong, there have been no documented newly formed species. Simple as that. If you assert that there have been, please provide me a reference.
At that point aliens seem more probable for those who are willing to believe. (I choose not to.)
Yes, you can cut yourself on Occam's razor.
Plate Tectonics is far, far better substantiated--simply because continental drift is occuring on a daily basis. Those data exist. The plates jostle and grind, and we have earthquakes, subduction zones, ongoing crustal deformation, volcanoes, fault movement, new islands and volcanoes, new crustal formation at the ocean ridges, and even the occasional tsunami to show for it. Seismic data show what is down there. It can be measured, with repeatability.
The movement of the plates and their boundaries are measurable, again, with repeatability. The process can be observed.
Or do you believe that a scientific theory must be perfect and have no unaswered questions (i.e. holes) to be acceptable?
Like I told the other guy, don't put words in my mouth. A theory is a theory. Until you prove it, don't market it as fact. I have no problem with it being presented as a theory, a set of working assumptions, but not a fact.
Of course scientific theories have holes, without them, there would be nothing to research and the grants would dry up.
I notice you, too have this thing with asserting the correctness of your position by attempting to insult me.
How professional, how scientific.
If that is the state of scientific research, no wonder we are saddled with wailing about anthropogenic global warming and secondhand smoke.
I said that the theory of evolution is just that: a theory, unproven. You say :Theories can never, ever be proven.
So just what is there for you to take issue with?
Or would you rather decry one who provides the essential element of well conducted scientific inquiry, that of doubt?
Change the subject, shout them down?
Without doubt, any wild eyed assertion can be waved about as fact. Without doubt, there is no need to even attempt to develop proof, (which you say cannot be done). It is doubt which holds all scientific inquiry to higher standards, including that of peer review. Without some form of proof, empirical, repeatable, and documented, you only substitute a godless catechism for reason.
> The holes are simple enough in "evolution": No transitional forms.
If only you realized just how ridiculous that claim is. It's one of the more blatantly dishonest ones that the more blatantly dishonest creationists tend to make.
> Plate Tectonics is far, far better substantiated--simply because continental drift is occuring on a daily basis.
By your analysis, no, it doesn't. You only have evidence from when readings are made. You have no evidence of *transitional* locations of the continents between readings. You cannot prove that when nobody is looking, the continents don't just quantum tunnel those few parts of a millimeter before the next reading.
When you look at the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, you have no evidence that the car actually moves between one frame and the next... there are no *transitional* frames.