by Edward Webber

Created on: September 19, 2008   Last Updated: January 29, 2012

Many believe that evolution is just an "idea" and is not proven or is on shaky ground. However, a theory is much more than just a "guess" as so many mistakenly think. A theory is a hypothesis, supported by facts to substantiate it. Evolution is one of the most substantiated theories in science and with recent discoveries, is not even questionable any more.

When people question evolution, it is mostly because they know nothing about it, only what they've been told about it, usually by someone as equally uneducated on the subject. The evidence for evolution however, is massive. There is evidence in the fields of paleontology, anthropology, cosmology, biology and not just ancillary evidence, but observable, testable, statistical evidence. The main areas of evidence however, are in the fossil record and genetics.

The fossil record, although very compelling to science, is for some reason dismissed by creationists and other skeptics as either not evidence at all, or non-existent. For example, science has very detailed records of fossils showing the evolution of primates, horses, whales, dolphins, dinosaurs, amphibians, reptiles, birds and many other species. There are so many fossils that haven't even been classified yet. Literally there are thousands of intermediate forms that have been identified that it takes a true blind eye to dismiss them. These fossils, all dated, show clear transitions from fish to amphibian, amphibian to reptile, reptile to bird, etc. The truth is, no matter how many fossils are found, creationists will always dismiss them because basically they believe for some reason that evolution is against their bible and their god, so they will stop at nothing to discredit it. The fossil record however, is very complete considering how difficult it is for a fossil to even form and be preserved.

The strongest evidence for evolution however is in the field of genetics. Just about everyone has heard that humans are 99% similar genetically to chimpanzees, 96% similar to Gorillas and have other strong genetic similarities to other modern day primates. Creationists will say that it indicates a common designer, however if this was the case, then we would be 99% similar to all other species and there would be little to no variation. This however is clearly not the case. The best evidence however, came from the decoding of the human and chimpanzee genome. You can literally see, line by line in our DNA, our differences and see where we diverged as species. There

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