Granting this, all it tells me, VR, is that humans had other than "modern" form before 100K years ago. That doesn't necessarily mean they were apes back then, and then on some magic date were somehow magically, alchemistically transformed from simian to man.
You're bending over backward to avoid inferring the obvious.
Sorry, VR, but it is not obvious to me. To me, it just flies in the face of reason that a thing "suddenly" becomes something it is not -- absent divine intervention, of course. :^) All that I have ever been able to observe in my life is that new individuals coming into the world always are of the same species as their parents. It would require a great leap of faith for me to "infer" a situation where this is not the case.
When I was a very little girl, I had a wonderful book on natural history that I simply loved. I was a real "horse nut," so was delighted with the beautiful color illustrations of the evolution of the horse -- from eohippus, to mesohippus, etc., etc., to the modern horse.
I understand now that what I was looking at in the pages of my favorite book was an example of microevolution. A horse is a horse is a horse, though it may have a great variety of forms over time, and still does in modern times.
But eohippus-to-modern-horse is not an analog of simian-to-human. The latter, of course, would be an example of macroevolution. Forgive me, but I simply cannot see what mechanism in nature could account for a thing changing into something that it is not. It's just that simple.
True, "proof is for geometry class." I stand corrected on that. But just to note -- "proof" is not something that philosophy is interested in. What philosophy is interested in is truth. And that's a very uncertain and sometimes quite slippery proposition....
Not a valid dismissal. A horse is still a horse, except it started as something that only in retrospect was importantly different from a basal condylarth.
Fig. 22. Skeletons of condylarth and fossil equids. All are drawn to approximately equal length to facilitate proportional comparisons.From a good horse-evolution site.a: Phenacodus, corrected after Scott.
b: Hyracotherium, corrected after AMNH mount.
c: Mesohippus, after AMNH mount.
This is a logical fallacy. I'm sure a philosophy buff knows which one it is.
But the new individuals are not exactly the same as their parents.
Right again, BB. These things aren't sudden. It happens gradually, over many generations, mutation by mutation. Those individuals which are better suited for survival pass on their genetic material to the next generation. For any one individal, his relationship to his immediate parents is blindingly obvious. But over a stretch of a thousand generations, the progenitor at the start of your watch and his distant offspring might look rather dissimilar. If you could live long enough to watch the generations progress, you would actually see it happen. Alas, we can't do that. We have to make use of the fossil record and then reconstruct the past events. I know that you understand this. And I understand your reluctance to accept it. But if the Pope can deal with it, so can you. Keep mulling it over.
When cornered, the evolutionists will say there is no proof. Essentially they are taking a totally skeptical view of reality which says that essentially nothing can be proven. However, for reasonable people there is such a thing as reasonable 'proof'. It is the kind of proof we see in courts that if someone was there, had a gun in his hand and the other person ended up dead, then he killed them. Then there is the duck test - if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks, then it is a duck. Science also provides us with proofs. Objects fall at a certain rate of speed, we can show this again and again. E=MC2 and this has been shown to be true also - both ways. Science gives us not only repeatable proof, but it also gives us proof by being able to apply the theories to practical matters. It further gives proof by being able to construct new theories based on old theories and applying them. Now this is not complete, absolute, proof, however it is the kind of proof that we can and should expect out of a theory which claims to be scientific. This kind of proof evolution does not give us.