NONE OF THAT IS EVIDENCE OF EVOLUTION!!!!
I'll explain why I think it is, in a moment.
I wish that there was some sort of magic set of words that I could use that would make you see it. I really honestly do wish that.
Maybe, we can eventually make some progress to at least understand the thinking of each other.
Everything you've said here is evidence that humans and apes are biologically similar.
Much more than that. It's evidence, for example, of a chromosome fusion, wherein two chromosomes became a single one, accounting for the difference in chromosome number. We find numerous transitional forms between forest apes and modern humans, intermediate in many different characteristics.
It does not argue FOR evolution because if God created both humans and apes, there's no reason to think that He would have to reinvent the wheel every time He made a different creature. What works for apes would work equally well for humans and where a difference is needed or desired then a difference is made.
This is an important point. If God made similar organisms, and did it by separately creating them, he would surely use the same components again,and again. So we would see the same sorts of structures for apes and humans, dolphins and sharks, bats and birds, and so on. Those things functionally alike would be biologically and genetically alike as well.
But this is not what we see. dolphins are functionally very like sharks, but they are genetically and anatomically more like us than like sharks.
On the other hand, we and ostriches are bipeds, but we are genetically more like quadrupedal primates.
This goes to homology vs. analogy. Dolphins and sharks are analogous, but they aren't homlogous. They are functionally quite similar, but the actual structures are quite different. The fact that dolphins swim with vertical movements and sharks swim with horizontal movements is due to their ancestry. The first whales had no flukes, and used broad rear feet to swim as otters do, which is a modified running movement common to mammals. Sharks move laterally, because the first chordates used that movement, and passed it on to fish.
Many, many such examples show that evolution is the only adequate way to understand life's diversity.
The differences don't have to mean a complete re-engineering of the entire system. If two creatures have similar biology one would expect them to have similar DNA whether they were created or whether they evolved.
Let's look at that primates,(including humans) and guinea pigs have similar biology with regard to vitamin C. Both of them have a gene to produce vitamin C, but it's broken, and no longer works. Because both primates and Guinea pigs have diets that normally give them all the vitamin C they need, it doesn't matter that a mutation inactivated the gene in primates.
But the gene in humans is broken in the save way as it is in every other primate. And it's different than the way it's broken in Guinea pigs. So same biology, but a different genetic change. And the change happens to fit nicely into the prediction of evolutionary theory that it should be different in Guinea pigs.
A piece of data that can work equally well as an argument on either side of the debate, doesn't count as evidence for either side. And if I have to be an evolutionist in order to see a piece of data as evidence for evolution then that's called begging the question and, therefore, that piece of data isn't evidence either. Every piece of "evidence" for evolution that I can ever recall being presented with falls into that category.
I don't see how you can put a creationist interpretation on this. As Kurt Wise points out, the fossil record of whales is not comprehensible in creationist thinking. Granted, he puts faith in his understanding of scripture ahead of evidence; he quite honestly says so. And one has to give him credit for maintaining his faith.
Take the comment you made about mites being a transitional form of spider (arachnid - whatever). It isn't a transitional form at all. Spiders and mites both have eight legs (usually) and sort of look like similar creatures but their life cycles are dramatically different
Spiders themselves have dramatically different lifestyles. Mammals do, too.
and there is no evidence at all that spiders used to be mites or that mites are somehow on their way to becoming spiders nor is there any such creature that is sort of neither a spider nor a mite but something inbetween the two.
That's not what a transitional is. Archaeopteryx is a transitional between dinosaurs and birds. However it is not an ancestor to birds, but an offshoot from the line that led to birds. Transitional forms are those that have apomorphic characters of two different groups.
Mites have a number of characteristics of less evolved chelicerates, and a few of those of spiders.
I think I mentioned in a previous post that Darwin's "slight successive variations" has been turned into "significant quantum leaps". Mites just very simply are not "transitional forms" and the only reason you see them as such is because you think evolution happened. That is THE ONLY reason!
Do you think this is a spider or a mite? Or what?
