Thank you. You are honest and pleasant as well and I enjoyed our discussion.
I'm sometimes bent out of shape by these discussions because I'm a Christian who works in biotechnology, although my degree is in physics. I'm routinely accused of atheism or some other such thing because I can see that evolutionary biology has an enormous weight of evidence behind it that creationists and ID'ers aren't aware of, or discount out of hand.
If a scientific theory is going to replace evolution, it's got a lot of work to do and I don't see anyone doing it. My personal point of view is that God created the universe and all of us in it. And He created the processes that we learn as we fulfill the destiny he has planned for us. Evolution is just one of them.
I'm not completely up on the history of cell biology but modern theories of cells date to around Darwin's time or just before. He would've had the latest information that large organisms were made up of billions to trillions of cells. I think the Popes tend to rely on their scientific advisors to understand these issues, although I know they'll request audiences with outside scientists periodically to get the latest word on developments.
The reason that plants are good subjects for study is that they reproduce rapidly, are easy to care for in human habitats and they're large enough to easily manipulate. It makes it easier to look at a lot of generations in a short period of time. Also plants are a lot weirder than terrestrial animals so there's more to see. Now if we could get some of the samller sea critters to breed in labs we could work with some weird animals.
I love talking with sincere people, whether they agree with me or not. I like to know how people arrive at their conclusions.
What got me to first delve into the fact that there has been no proof that one species can become an entirely different species is when I read it in a book by Judge Bork (the judge who was borked :) ).
Judge Bork is not someone who is devoting his life to the ID theory, but wrote a book(s) on a number of things covering culture, the Constitution, etc. He only devoted one or two pages to his antievo view out of his entire book, hardly a person who is devoting his life to ID, so probably at one time quite open-minded about the evo theory.