i am personally a believer in evolution but i believe that every step has had the hand of god to guide the process. my ap biology textbook brilliantly put the process of evolution as "hoping that a random bullet through the engine block of a car will help increase engine performance" with this i believe that evolution would not be possible without god's help.
1. it is said that the very first living organism was a protazoa. from the protazoa we get bacteria which eventually evolved into all types of live. no one knows where the protazoa came from for all we know aliens could have dropped one off on our ocean just to see what happened or god combined Carbon diligently with other natural components and gave birth to life. until scientes tell me how carbon and other chemicals came together to create life those are my two theories.
2.hmmmmmmm (i hear my brain smoking) wiki says The long-running puzzlement about the appearance of the Cambrian fauna, seemingly abruptly and from nowhere, centers on three key points: whether there really was a mass diversification of complex organisms over a relatively short period of time during the early Cambrian; what might have caused such rapid change; and what it would imply about the origin and evolution of animals. Interpretation is difficult due to a limited supply of evidence, based mainly on an incomplete fossil record and chemical signatures left in Cambrian rocks" so by the sounds of it the reason it's omited is because no one understands it that well. but some of the teories as to why it took place include: in creased oxygen, the appearnce of the HOX gene which is what controls the development of an embroyo into an organism, a race between predator and pray, End-Ediacaran mass extinction: Mass extinctions are often followed by adaptive radiations as existing clades expand to occupy the ecospace emptied by the extinction. However, once the dust had settled, overall disparity and diversity returned to the pre-extinction level in each of the Phanerozoic extinctions.
3. "convergent evolution" this one is the easist for me to answer out of your questions so far. take humans, chimps and apes. we are all very very smiliar from the shape of our hands, the way we think differently from other animals and our errect posture. in evolutionary terms we are "cousins" due to our smiliarities. so by looking at these traits we can look back and find that all three of us once had the same ancestor whcih is who all three of use got the same traits. no differnet then a grandfather having a big nose and passing it onto all of his grandchildren.
4. my AP bio studies centered themselves around the human embryo as the example because that it what most of use were going to school for anyway. i was taught that it's durning the blastular stage that all of the vertebrates look alike. this blastula stage is shortly after the ball of cells move towards the outer shell and start hollwing out, then the cells start to move inward in the same manner starting with the digestive system. after this the form starts to look differnet and this is where the varation between species begins: http://www.cbu.edu/~aross/embhome.htm
5. ah! i watched an enter episode of Nova dedicated to discuing this guy! and just this problem! they site this as a trail. it has many similarities to normal birds such as the feather but the suspect it is an unsuccessful branch of the common ansetor between archaeoptery and today's birds. meanign that if todays birds were give the letter "a" and archaeoptery were given the letter "c" they are still looking for "b" which the two have incommon.
6. ahhh the story of the pepper moths. from what wiki says they do rest on tree trunks "From their original data, Howlett and Majerus (1987) concluded that peppered moths generally rest in unexposed positions, using three main types of site. Firstly, a few inches below a branch-trunk joint on a tree trunk where the moth is in shadow; secondly, on the underside of branches and thirdly on foliate twigs." and wiki veiw on evolution of the peppered moth: "The evolution of the peppered moth over the last two hundred years has been studied in detail. Originally, the vast majority of peppered moths had light colouration, which effectively camouflaged them against the light-coloured trees and lichens upon which they rested. However, due to widespread pollution during the Industrial Revolution in England, many of the lichens died out, and the trees which peppered moths rested on became blackened by soot, causing most of the light-coloured moths, or typica, to die off due to predation. At the same time, the dark-coloured, or melanic, moths, carbonaria, flourished because of their ability to hide on the darkened trees."
7.this is a short term perspective. while it is true that durning the corse of the study no net evolution occured you must think in terms of thousands of years. if the drough were to of lasted more then the couple of decades it did the change of the beack would of become perminate due to the complete disspearance of the other beak. but due to the shortlived nature of that particular drought the other group was able to make a come back instead of competly dying out.
8."fruit flies have a simple genome which makes them a favorite of scientists. It is useful to study mutant fruit flies, as their quick reproduction rate allows scientists to observe the advantages and disadvantages of certain mutations. These fruit flies are also helpful in determining whether certain stimulants cause mutation. " they are used as the proof of how genes are passed on. surprise this comes from the orkinman!
9.this picture is considered highly inacurate and ost evolutionary scientiest would wish that that picture had never been created because it shows more or less our current cousins and the smiliarities to them rather then where all of us came from. this was a picture created during darwinian times before there was a better understanding. when dealing with fossils there's always differnet interpertations of what the creatures would have looked like. fossil experit still flight over what color a dinosaur should have been and many times the fossil experets keep going back and scaly dinosaurs that i grew up with are suddenly getting featers due to new proof that keeps coming out. there is no way for us to currently hop back in time ad take a picture of our ancestors, what we have currently is just a vaguge patch work. there was a discovery channel special not to long ago wich displai the life of our ansestors and what we currently believe they looked like and thought like.
10. the "misrepresentations" of the facts were true in their era. such as the question above about the monkey to human picture. at that time that was easily believed even though it is false. what is true about the drawin's evolution is the statement "survival of the fittest" which is only the fittest in nature are able to reproduce and leave offspring. this is true. only those able to reproduce are able to account for the process of evolution. there was once an experiment done with 2 types of bacteria. they consumed the same amount of the same food, they fit the same "nitch" but one reproduced slower the the other. after some time the bacteria that reproduced slower was whiped out by the group that could reproduce quicker and use the food more efficiently.
now as i said at the start i believe that evolution is true and occurs but it's god's guidance which makes it possible and that it's god which even gave us life in the first place.
now it's not letting me post so i'm going to try puttig my sources in here and if that'll help....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_ex…
http://www.cbu.edu/~aross/embhome.htm
nova-education made painless
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_mo…
http://www.orkin.com/flies/fruit-fly/mut…