Why do people deny evolution?

You really are blind,,quahog, aren't you?
You really have no idea of actual biology or what evolution says happened, do you?
You have absolutely no idea of what an "intermediate form" actually is, have you?
Just your fantasies of what you think evolution should show us.
We've shown you dozens of intermediate forms, from apes to humans, from dinosaurs to birds.
All you've come up with is "half a nose" or "half an eye" as your criteria for imtermediate forms, and complained about "complete forms".
OF COURSE A TRANSITIONAL FOSSIL IS A COMPLETE FORM. IT IS ALSO A TRANSITIONAL FOSSIL ANYWAY[/b].
By definition, a transitional fossil is going to be a fully functional living organism, i.e. a "complete form" in your terms. it has to be to reproduce and produce a next generation.
I suggest you actually look at the DATA, TONS OF IT, which exist on such topics as evolution of the eye, or the evolution of birds, which you clearly haven't done, since you're worefully ignorant of what is KNOWN on those topics. There are, for example, living organisms with DIFFERENT FORMS OF EYES, which represent different stages of functionality and form and different complexities and capabilities between the aaarchaic sensitive patches on the skin and the multifarous forms of eyes found today--there ARE analogues of what you MAY mean by your ambiguous term "half an eye" (which so far only YOU use, so gods alone have any idea what you actually mean by it) . In the human evolutionary tree there are multifarous forms intermediate showing the transition from arborealism to walking upright (and in hands forms that show ability for fine manipulation rather than tree swinging)and from small brqins to much larger and more complex brains, which are the two major series of changes that made modern humans. The evidence is there as we have shown you. REPEATEDLY.

As I say, the evidence is there.=, if you weren't an intellectual coward and refused to look. It's as plain as the half a nose on your face.

Not at all quahog, I'm telling you what evolutionary theory says a tansitional fossil would be like and what the many, many, MANY photos and research studies have shown. My brain is perfectly fine and unfucked-with, thank you very much. I do have to tell you, though, we still aren't clear as to whether or not you actually have a brain you could **** with, at all, or whether you just have a tape player loaded with creationist rants as the sole contents of your skull, and occasionally you stick a finger up your nose and press the "PLAY" button.

The Fossils In General

"Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of 'seeing'
evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the
most notorious of which is the presence of 'gaps' in the fossil record.
Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does
not provide them ..."

David B. Kitts, PhD (Zoology)
Head Curator, Dept of Geology, Stoval Museum
Evolution, vol 28, Sep 1974, p 467

"The curious thing is that there is a consistency about the fossil gaps;
the fossils are missing in all the important places."

Francis Hitching
The Neck of the Giraffe or Where Darwin Went Wrong
Penguin Books, 1982, p.19

"The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major
transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our
imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been
a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
"Is a new general theory of evolution emerging?"
Paleobiology, vol 6, January 1980, p. 127

"...Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when
they say there are no transitional fossils ... I will lay it on the line,
there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight
argument."

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist,
British Museum of Natural History, London
As quoted by: L. D. Sunderland
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 89

"We do not have any available fossil group which can categorically be
claimed to be the ancestor of any other group. We do not have in the fossil
record any specific point of divergence of one life form for another, and
generally each of the major life groups has retained its fundamental
structural and physiological characteristics throughout its life history
and has been conservative in habitat."

G. S. Carter, Professor & author
Fellow of Corpus Christi College
Cambridge, England
Structure and Habit in Vertebrate Evolution
University of Washington Press, 1967

"The history of most fossil species includes two features inconsistent with
gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during
their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the
same as when they disappear ... 2. Sudden Appearance. In any local area, a
species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its
ancestors; it appears all at once and 'fully formed'."

Stephen Jay Gould, Prof of Geology and
Paleontology, Harvard University
Natural History, 86(5):13, 1977

"But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed,
why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the
earth?" (p. 206)

"Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such
intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely
graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps is the most obvious and gravest
objection which can be urged against my theory (of evolution)." (p. 292)

Charles Robert Darwin
The Origin of Species, 1st edition reprint
Avenel Books, 1979

The Abundance of Fossils

"Darwin... was embarrassed by the fossil record... we are now about
120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been
greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the
situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still
surprisingly jerky and, ironically, ... some of the classic cases of
Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse
in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more
detailed information."

David M. Raup, Curator of Geology
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"
Field Museum of Natural History
Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25

"Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological
exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely
more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been
discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are
filled with over 100-million fossils of 250,000 different species. The
availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit
objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What
is the picture which the fossils have given us? ... The gaps between major
groups of organisms have been growing even wide and more undeniable. They
can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection
of the fossil record."

Luther D. Sunderland (Creationist)
Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems,
4th edition, Master Books, 1988, p. 9

"My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more
than 40 years have completely failed. ... The fossil material is now so
complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack
of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to the scarcity of
material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled."

Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist
As quoted in: The Earth Before Man, p. 51

Five Proofs of Evolution

In this article, we look at five simple examples which support the Theory of Evolution.
by Richard Peacock
1. The universal genetic code. All cells on Earth, from our white blood cells, to simple bacteria, to cells in the leaves of trees, are capable of reading any piece of DNA from any life form on Earth. This is very strong evidence for a common ancestor from which all life descended.

2. The fossil record. The fossil record shows that the simplest fossils will be found in the oldest rocks, and it can also show a smooth and gradual transition from one form of life to another.

Please watch this video for an excellent demonstration of fossils transitioning from simple life to complex vertebrates.

3. Genetic commonalities. Human beings have approximately 96% of genes in common with chimpanzees, about 90% of genes in common with cats (source), 80% with cows (source), 75% with mice (source), and so on. This does not prove that we evolved from chimpanzees or cats, though, only that we shared a common ancestor in the past. And the amount of difference between our genomes corresponds to how long ago our genetic lines diverged.

4. Common traits in embryos. Humans, dogs, snakes, fish, monkeys, eels (and many more life forms) are all considered "chordates" because we belong to the phylum Chordata. One of the features of this phylum is that, as embryos, all these life forms have gill slits, tails, and specific anatomical structures involving the spine. For humans (and other non-fish) the gill slits reform into the bones of the ear and jaw at a later stage in development. But, initially, all chordate embryos strongly resemble each other.

In fact, pig embryos are often dissected in biology classes because of how similar they look to human embryos. These common characteristics could only be possible if all members of the phylum Chordata descended from a common ancestor.

5. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics. Bacteria colonies can only build up a resistance to antibiotics through evolution. It is important to note that in every colony of bacteria, there are a tiny few individuals which are naturally resistant to certain antibiotics. This is because of the random nature of mutations.

When an antibiotic is applied, the initial innoculation will kill most bacteria, leaving behind only those few cells which happen to have the mutations necessary to resist the antibiotics. In subsequent generations, the resistant bacteria reproduce, forming a new colony where every member is resistant to the antibiotic. This is natural selection in action. The antibiotic is "selecting" for organisms which are resistant, and killing any that are not.

These common characteristics could only be possible if all members of the phylum Chordata descended from a common ancestor.

The antibiotic is "selecting" for organisms which are resistant, and killing any that are not.

Nobody, even creationists, claims that life on earth did not "change over time."

Quote:

These common characteristics could only be possible if all members of the phylum Chordata descended from a common ancestor.

That's certainly an overstatement. That's one possible explanation, but far from the only possible one.
...

I'm all ears.

I'm all ears.

Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different lineages. Convergent evolution creates analogous structures that have similar form or function, but that were not present in the last common ancestor of those groups

Although phylogenetic trees produced on the basis of sequenced genes or genomic data in different species can provide evolutionary insight, they have important limitations. They do not necessarily accurately represent the evolutionary history of the included taxa. The data on which they are based is noisy; the analysis can be confounded by genetic recombination, horizontal gene transfer, hybridisation between species that were not nearest neighbors on the tree before hybridisation takes place, convergent evolution, and conserved sequences....
Also, there are problems in basing the analysis on a single type of character, such as a single gene or protein or only on morphological analysis, because such trees constructed from another unrelated data source often differ from the first, and therefore great care is needed in inferring phylogenetic relationships among species.

Quote:

I'm all ears.

Well, even within a strictly neo-Darwinian frame work there's always this possibility, for one, eh, FBM?:

As a matter of fact that is precisely what creationists do claim

LGT (laeral gene transfer) provides a bank of organisms (predominantly single celled ones) . The concept pf genetic variability is therefore maintained . nat Selection is the "how" the organisms develop resistance. Variability produces a variant that is resistant to a drug or provides new disease characteristics.
It works back to a two step process, random mutation, with natural selection of a "favored race