Eh, I was close. It’s been a few years since we discussed this in my biochem class.
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Well, somebody has to keep the home fires burning.
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Obviously we all wish to eat nothing but the tender new leaves from the top of acacia trees; the giraffes just got there first!
Mangetout said:
So you quickly referred him to my Mailbag article covering that specific topic, right? 
Ah, would that this were possible, but you see the Internet is not only a dangerous virus-ridden place, but it’s a mere flash in the pan.
First, I’m not trying to advance some Creationist propaganda. I believe that evolution works, I’m just trying to figure out how. My religious beliefs basically amount to there being no such thing as a universe, and thus no Creation. Don’t worry, as soon as I work out in my mind the simple matter of how we got here from there, I’ll start asking questions about how we got there.
Second, I’m going to start answering my own questions.
About the fin to leg problem, from http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html:
Basically, anything can happen as long as it doesn’t adversely affect reproduction. It will be passed along by those who are just going about their business. Is that right?
What’s troubling me the most is how genotypes work their way into phenotypes. A few people explained the amino acid basis behind sickle cells. Who knows some more explanations like these for other traits?
I’ve also learned to be much more careful about figurative speech. Ravenous wolves…
Who caught the joke right there?
I find dangerous what Mangetout said about replacing evolution with another theory. I think it’s better to disprove your current theory and be left with nothing than to not question it because it’s all you have (I’m not saying that’s happening here).
The brick wall analogy does work when you think about it. You have 10 bricks that make a brick wall. When you replace one with a stone, you don’t have a brick wall or a stone wall. You have a wall made of 9 bricks and 1 stone. That’s too complicated to use, and one reason why this whole thing is so confusing. My problem is further compounded by not knowing which animals came from which other animals. All this time, I’ve been saying a fish grew legs. I’m sure someone’s pieced together the evidence and worked out a few of these chains. Directions please?
Wow, I just found http://talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html
I’m basically thinking out loud here. I’ll cut that out.
Trust me, people don’t mind watching someone educate themselves. It’s rather refreshing, actually. Kinda gives you hope that the system works.
evilyam wrote, back near the top of this thread:
Close.
Different species are classified as such due to their inability to produce fertile offspring when they mate with members of other species.
A horse and a donkey are members of different species. While they can mate to produce a mule, the mule will be sterile. You cannot breed mules together and make more mules. Likewise, a tiger and a lion can be cross-bred to create a “liger”, and while ligers can breed and produce offspring with pure lions or pure tigers, they cannot breed with other ligers.
Another analagy:
Bell’s first phone evolved into a better phone, into yet a better phone, into all phones with cranks connected to “Central,” into dial phones with only a few without dials still connected to Central; then all phones having dials, then push-button phones but with dial phones still in use, then 99.9 percent push-button phones, now cell phones and satellite phones.
So phones shrank from the huge wooden dinosaurs on walls to those that slip into pockets and need no wires to connect.
Asking why monkeys are still here is like asking why mechanical dial phones are still here. The cell phone branched off years ago, but it left the trunk (bad pun) intact, even as cell phones branched off to satellite phones, as dial phones branched off the trunk in the far, distant past , again with the trunk unaffected…
But behind the obvious evolution of the phone is the pressure it put on the operator, who was forced to evolve with the phone. Once all male, operators became all female. Then when dials came along, the uncountable thousands of operators died off, leaving only a relatively few. Now with push-button phones and digital sound and recordings, there are even fewer operators. They are becoming extinct.
Can phone evolution be considered a sin? The question is meaningless.
Now the dinosaur phone is in a museum. But as in any modern species, the appendages on a modern phone can be traced, like arms and legs back to fins. The wooden wall phone has listening aparatus, an aparatus to speak into, a crank to generate the power to ring Central’s bell and huge dry cells to increase the volume — now a ni-cad battery.
If you have never seen a wall phone before, you would know what it is. Form follows function, as it does in nature’s evolution — scales into feathers, fins into arms and legs. If you hooked up that dinosaur or any phone from the past 130 years, you could still carry on a conversation — and monkeys still swing from trees.
It gets better, folks:
-Ben
I’m not so sure; my understanding of the scientific method (IANAScientist, by profession at least) is that it works something like this:
[list=1]
[li]Observe a phenomenon[/li][li]Formulate a theory of cause[/li][li]Based on the theory, make testable hypotheses (i.e. "if theory is true, then I should find lots of X, but should never be able to find Y)[/li][li]Go looking for X and Y[/li][li]If you can’t find X, or you can find Y, then either scrap the theory entirely and return to step 2, or refine the theory and return to step 3[/li][li]If your hypotheses are supported by abundant instances of X and apparent non-existence of Y, then accept them as ‘provisional fact’, but keep refining the theory and returning to step 3 anyway[/li][/list=1]
The point being that finding a theory unworkable doesn’t leave us with nothing, it leads us back to revising the theory.
Not to further beat this dead horse, but I think it’s important to emphasize that identifying a speciation event is not easy & clear-cut. Of course, organisms have more than 10 parts. So, if there was 1 stone out of a million, or a billion bricks, you would probably still call it a brick wall. And if one stone was inserted every 100,000 years, then you may even define a brick wall as having a certain number of stones in it. (Seems like I’m babbling, but sometimes people forget that evolution is an ongoing process or that changes can take a long time. Where are all the transitional species nowadays? They’re everything that isn’t going extinct.)
Glad you found the TalkOrigins link. Of course, fish didn’t grow land legs in the water and then walk out. They developed stronger fins in the water (such as for scooting along the ocean floor or whatever) that could double as something to scoot around on land. Consider the mudskipper.
Brick by brick slow transition from water-only to 99%water-1%land to…many steps…99%land-1%water to land-only. Perhaps allowing for some Punctuated Equilibrium of course. 
Exactly. However, the classification scheme that we have arbitrarily decided to use for living things requires that every thing be classified into one “bucket” or another. The scheme does not allow for things that are “in between buckets”. Going back to the stone wall analogy, suppose you are forced (for no particularly good reason other than that’s the decision we’ve made) to classify the wall as “stone” or “brick”? You might classify it as “brick” when there’s more brick than stone, you might classify it as “stone” when it’s more stone than brick, and when it’s 50/50 stone/brick you just pick whichever word you like most.
But we should not confuse the classification scheme we have decided to use (and it’s useful) with the reality, in which there is a near-continuous variation between one species and another related species.