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There's a paleontologist named Neil Shubin who "discovered" an intermediate organism that was one of the first to hit land.  Let me clarify the intermediate comment.  THERE'S NO MISSING LINK.  If we think about "missing links" then there's an endless void to fill as far "missing links" are concerned.  So this is one of many intermediates.  The species is called Tiktaalik.

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Published in his 1982/1984 books Evolution from Space (co-authored with Chandra Wickramasinghe), Hoyle calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell was one in 1040,000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (1080), he argued that even a whole universe full of primordial soup would grant little chance to evolutionary processes. He claimed:

    The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

Hoyle compared the random emergence of even the simplest cell to the likelihood that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." Hoyle also compared the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cube simultaneously.[8]

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smmu said:

to answer diaboleros, I would remind him that natural selection is usually not evident in such cases... what you are referring to is more a case of sexual selection than natural selection. Perhaps it is an advantage in countries where the climate is very cold to have very white skin because females find it more attractive... so the males with fairer skin will pass their alleles on to their progeny more often.

natural selection is evident over millions of years, usually not the thousands of years that humans have been around will we be able to notice significant changes like what we are discussing.

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deCypher said:

Please, read some Richard Dawkins.

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redgreenvines said:

often the reason for members of a cultural group in a locality having a high simmilarity to eachother
such as in regions of scandinavia, china or africa etc.
is that the strangers (who did not appear like the rest) were told to leave and those that remained beyond their welcome were killed;
probably raped robbed and then killed.

this is consistent with what we know about xenophobia, superstition, and dominant alpha male type bullies.

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Diaboleros said:

According to natural selection, everyone who's skin doesn't match the amount of sunlight, isn't able to reproduce, or isn't able to survive?! According to natural selection, people don't gain a certain skin, but people with the wrong skin just simply get extinct? And the gaining of the correct skin doesn't happen through intelligent adaptation, but through random mutation of the genes? What a coincidence huh, that random mutation leads to perfect correlation between skin color and sun exposure?

Wouldn't it be more logical the other way around, that people actually intelligently adapt to the amount of sunlight? Isn't tanning a good indication that we actually do so?

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bradley said:

Is it possible for complex structures to evolve without any sort of guiding intelligence, or did we and everything else come into being in the way an image of Jesus appears on the wall after using an uncovered blender?

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bradley said:

Quote:

Published in his 1982/1984 books Evolution from Space (co-authored with Chandra Wickramasinghe), Hoyle calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell was one in 1040,000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (1080), he argued that even a whole universe full of primordial soup would grant little chance to evolutionary processes. He claimed:

    The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.

Hoyle compared the random emergence of even the simplest cell to the likelihood that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein." Hoyle also compared the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cube simultaneously.[8]

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The idea just needs to be enough to get you started, because, for me, whatever follows is a process of action and reaction. It's always a process of building and then destroying. And then, out of this destruction, discovering a thing and building on it. Nature plays a huge part in it. Putting difficult materials together - like baking something in sunlight, or using one material that fights another material - causes its own organic reaction. Then its a matter of sitting back and studying it and studying it and studying it; and suddenly, you find you're leaping up out of your chair and going in and doing the next thing. That's action and reaction.

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