The interpretation is what is wrong. You dig up fossils and see fossils that look similar and determine that this is because one evolved to the other. When you see a fossil and you determine anything other than "this animal has been dead for a very long time", then you are going beyond what is necessary.
"Beyond what is necessary"? If you don't mind me saying, that's a very strange attitude. Why would you do anything less than try and glean as much information as possible from what we can find?
I agree, fossils exist. We can see them. They are there. No arguments here.
...
Of course they are. No arguments here.
Good.
I am open to the evidence.
Good - so are there any fossils, for example the miacids we were talking about earlier, the ages of which you think have been misidentified? There are numerous different ways in which ages of fossils are determined: do you need any pointers as to how to evaluate whether these methods are reasonable & accurate enough for determining fossil ages?
What I mean is, are you happy that if I talk about a miacid fossil as being 60 million years old, so you're not going to come back to it later as something which hasn't been agreed.
Of course they can. Every animal that has been fossilized can be categorized into the same categories that we classify the animals of today. Some may have their own categories (and by "own" I mean different categories than there are today), some may be under the same categories that we have today. But yes, of course they can be categorized.
OK.. I'll come back to this once you've agreed we can agree on fossil ages.
The problem I have is the 3 reasons I gave in a previous posts. Not to mention the fact that naturalists have a big problem. You guys have to explain life from non-life, and the problem of entropy, and the problem of infinity. Before you get to evolution, these three things have to be explained, and I would like for someone to explain those three things.
I hate to say this, but no, none of these things need explaining before you get to evolution: what we're doing with the evolutionary explanations is looking at the evidence we have and seeing where that leads. Looking at fossils, etc. can tell you how life has changed over the aeons, but it won't tell you anything about what came before lifeforms were capable of being fossilized.
But as for the theory itself, why can't we simulate the right circumstances at which we can observe these macro changes occur?
That is a legitimate question, right?
I'll answer a question with a question: is a wolf a dog?
..from a taxonomic perspective, they're not the same species (although you might consider them the same "kind", you have to agree that they are similar but different enough that they cannot interbreed). A Russian scientist, Belyaev,
selectively bred foxes, using selection for friendliness to humans, which has also resulted in physiological changes.
These foxes are still foxes, but they are significantly morphologically different to the rest of the fox population. This has not become what you would define as macro-evolution (yet - the Russians are continuing the experiment, even though Belyaev died 30 years ago), over half a century of selection for specific traits. So this is the sort of timescale you need to be thinking about: it's not about a fox giving birth to a non-fox, it's about allowing changes to accumulate over the generations.
To answer your question "why can't we simulate the right circumstances at which we can observe these macro changes occur?", we can: we just need a bit more patience.
