Evolution will be postponed...

After a couple of emails from less-than enthusiastic readers, I've decided to shelve my evolution project. Apparently reading pages and pages of me regurgitating Evolution for Dummies was not nearly interesting as pictures of my baby doing amusing things!

In any event, all that research I did into evolution did teach me a lot of things and really expanded my perspective.

Evolution's a pretty incredibly thing and thanks to more and more fossils being discovered, plus the wonders of DNA, scientists can now plot more and more of the evolutionary path life on Earth took.

It really isn't just a theory. Aside from the fact that fossils have been discovered that show almost all the important transitional phases of evolution, DNA now confirms how life on Earth developed. Doubt that idea that birds descended from dinosaurs? Take a look at their DNA - it proves that they're relatives.

I think the biggest question the doubtful have about evolution is the concept of one creature becoming another. How did a fish become a bird, for example?

Well, it took hundreds of millions of years, but we have fossils that explain the process step by step. How fish became 'tetra pods' and ventured onto land. How those tetra pods became reptiles. How, as the millenia progressed, some reptiles stayed in the form of lizards, while others became more bird like.

Ever seen Jurassic Park? The 'bad guys' in that movie were the man-eating 'Velociraptors.' The movies had made them a bit bigger than they were in real life, but we have fossils of 'raptors in museums to prove they existed.

Although they were bigger and incapable of flight, it was creatures like the Velociraptor that would eventually evolve into the predatory birds we know today - eagles, kestrels and the like (all from an avian family called, just to highlight the link, 'raptor'.)

As I've said before, evolution doesn't rule out the existence of a higher power. Many people believe that a higher power laid a 'blueprint' for evolution that wound up with the development of mankind.

I think that's a valid theory - but my research actually strengthened my belief that there isn't a God. Cornell University, doing a study in a big cauldron, discovered that protobionts, the precursor to life as we recognize it, could spontaneously appear in conditions like those on Earth four billion years ago. There didn't need to be a God to put life on the planet.

Life on Earth might seem miraculous, but it might not be! There are millions of planets in the universe - many others must have Earth-like properties. We might never know for sure, since they're too far away, but it's perfectly possible - even probable - that life exists on them as well.

Life on Earth isn't an incredible coincidence. It's merely an inevitable coincidence.

As for the idea of a heavenly 'blueprint?' Well, there were plenty of evolutionary experiments that failed. Fossils reveal that there were all sorts of 'dead ends' that died out (from early forms of segmented worms to human-like creatures such as neanderthals.)

Darwin's idea of 'survival of the fittest' left a lot of casualties.

There are still unanswered questions - like how the universe began in the first place. But when it comes to the beginning of life on Earth and how it developed, more and more of those questions are being answered every single day.

Evolution is a theory that fits all the observations. Any other theory, like creationism, relies on some of the data being 'false.' If you have to cover up the facts to shoehorn your theory into credibility, it's clearly not a very good one.

But for those of you who still insist that God created the Earth in strict accordance with scripture (like, in six days, six thousand years ago), I'd like you to ponder this question: If we discovered life on other planets, how would that fit in with Scripture?