Maybe I'll be able to ask some questions later and get honest answers not just flame.
ahh
and I bought popcorn and everything!
but srsly, ask away
This is where it would be good to have either a better memory or a bigger wallet because I read Language of God and Case for a Creator a year or so ago but don't really remember the details of either book at all.
I spend a lot of my time at church where just about everyone is of course a creationist and one that I hear most often is the transitional species. Cause thinking about how many changes it takes to get from one species to another its quite a large number. A good few thousand changes. Since we have thousands of intermediate animals for every transition shouldn't we have more fossils of transition species? Yea, I know its difficult for fossils to form and all but does anyone have any information on this specific example? Say, number of transitional fossils found, how many different species, etc. At worst I have some ammo to throw at my creationist friends.
The problem is that most of those changes are invisible as far as the fossil record is concerned. A lot of them will be on the cellular level - making slightly different amounts of various proteins/enzymes, or having a better immune system, or being more intelligent, or something like that. Some will be for coloring, some will be behavioral, and so on. Since all you get is basically the bones, the only changes that the fossil record can tell you about are the physical ones.
Now, because all of the small physical changes are (typically) in the same direction, you'd see a gradual change over time, rather than discrete steps. In practice evolution is rarely as simple as saying that a group of animals become taller and immediately the rest die out - rather, the species as a whole might slowly become taller (on average) over time, because the tallest individuals are more likely to pass on their genes and the shortest are less likely. Since change is so gradual, the definition of species is fluid at best... asking for a species between a given two related ones can sometimes be like asking for a color between yellow and orange - even though you can imagine a color between there, most people would describe it as a yellowish orange or an orangish yellow, and indeed it's probably not different enough from either one that it deserves to be called a new color.
What I mean by this analogy is that when two species are already relatively similar you begin to not be able to tell the difference between things that are on the border between them. If we find a fossil that looks very similar to a species we know about, it would be much more correct (and much more likely) for the discoverer to identify it as a member of that species - even if it did belong to a population that was (on average) different from the species we're familiar with, it could also have just been a member of that species who was a bit different-looking. So, while you may be able to find transition fossils for some relatively widely separated species, if you try to fine-tune it too much you will end up finding that any intermediate creature which looks significantly different from the first fossil will look a lot like the second, and vice versa.
