Boogieman:
"Certainly a great many of them have to me more than a “small baby-step”.
Every step where the altered child can no longer breed with the parent species is an insurmountable hurdle, since it’s an evolutionary dead-end..." Surely you know that's not how it works, don't you?
For sake of discussion, let's consider a hypothetical example -- critter-X, beginning population 1,000, reproduces every year.
Critter-X is perfectly adapted to its environment, but over geological time the environment changes.
As the climate grows colder, baby-X's born with longer hair & stubbier legs survive better, so over time, the entire population gets more winterized.
Now the environment grows hotter & dryer, new predators arrive and only Critter-X's built for more speed survive.
In time the climate grows very wet and now Critter-X's who swim do better.
Adaptions to new environments can happen slowly, resulting in occasional population collapses, down to just a few breeding individuals.
Then populations explode when adaptions better match environment.
Multiply these changes times millions and at the end of that time there's no way the offspring could still interbreed with their ancestral population.
And yet at no time during this was any offspring ever born in a different species from its parents.
Sure, some "baby-steps" are more rapid than others, but none is ever a giant leap forward.
That's evolution theory, which our deniers claim is contradicted by fossil records.
The fossils show "sudden appearance" and then "stasis", they say.
But it's important to notice that still 99%+ of species have not been found.
And we do have one rather important sequence of fossils transition forms:
“Surely you know that’s not how it works, don’t you?”
“And yet at no time during this was any offspring ever born in a different species from its parents.”
Sorry, but that line of reasoning simply can’t result in the variety of life that we can observe. Species that evolutionists tell us are ancestors of other species have different numbers of chromosomes than their ostensible descendants, some quite radically different. You are not gaining or losing a chromosome in “baby steps”, it is an all or nothing proposal, and when it happens, that is going to be a quite insurmountable barrier to breeding with members of the “ancestral” population, therefore, it would be an evolutionary dead end.
Yet, evolution requires that somehow, millions of times, some miracle happened to allow such a dead end to breed and continue to pass on their genes.
“The fossils show “sudden appearance” and then “stasis”, they say.
But it’s important to notice that still 99%+ of species have not been found.”
Pure speculation. If you haven’t found them, then they are simply figments of your imagination, and slapping a percentage sign on how many species you imagine might exist does not make it any more scientific.
“And we do have one rather important sequence of fossils transition forms:”
It’s really more deceptive than important. Ape skulls and human skulls have a few similarities, but that doesn’t prove common ancestry. Even among the clearly human skulls that seem to show a progression, if you look at the dating of the finds, it does not add up, as more “advanced” forms can be found before the more “primitive” forms, or even in the same layer in the same location, as in this find in Georgia, where four morphologically different hominid skulls dated to 1.8 million years old were found in close proximity, showing they all lived in the same place at the same time:
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/131104_lumperssplitters
That doesn’t suggest a progression through different species, it suggests a natural variation of one species, that scientists have misrepresented to fit their preferred narrative.