There are some critical misunderstandings of evolution out there, and I’d like to help clear some of them up. Ray Comfort is offering $10,000 to the first person who provides evidence of a ‘living transitional form’, and he defines this as a species giving birth to an entirely different species, such as a squirrel giving birth to a bird, or a chicken giving birth to a snake. Now, I personally think Ray is being patently dishonest, but this raises a good point about what people seem to think evolution is all about. Let’s say that you are a paleontologist, and you have discovered fossils of a previously undocumented animal. What you are looking at is a snapshot in time, as it were. A ‘species’ is just that - it is a group of animals with particular shared characteristics, and when you look at a particular species, you are actually seeing the ‘current version’ of that genetic lineage. If you take our hypothetical fossil find, you can determine approximately when that creature was
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