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Clanad - "... Birdie says of course he/she has read her own links, yet fails to understand what the links are saying."
As I've previously stated, I have read and understood the links. It is you who doesn't appear to understand. Once again, the old "psychological projection" rears its ugly and disingenuous head.
Many people have now taken issue with your deliberate obfuscation of the argument yet you seem unable to respond in any coherent way to any of those criticisms. For example, you say, "... in fact species arise in the fossil record fully formed, remain that way for a greater or shorter time period and disappear..." and you quote Stephen Jay Gould, "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.".
In your mind, this demonstrates that evolution isn't happening. The fact that few intermediary fossils have been found is because of two things: a) intermediary species are extremely difficult to identify and b) fossilisation happens exceedingly rarely. So rarely in fact that,
"... Only about one bone in a billion, it is thought, ever becomes fossilized. If that is so, it means that the complete fossil legacy of all the Americans alive today—that’s 270 million people with 206 bones each—will only be about fifty bones, one quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say of course that any of these bones will actually be found. Bearing in mind that they can be buried anywhere within an area of slightly over 3.6 million square miles, little of which will ever be turned over, much less examined, it would be something of a miracle if they were. Fossils are in every sense vanishingly rare. Most of what has lived on Earth has left behind no record at all. It has been estimated that less than one species in ten thousand has made it into the fossil record. That in itself is a stunningly infinitesimal proportion. However, if you accept the common estimate that the Earth has produced 30 billion species of creature in its time and Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin’s statement (in The Sixth Extinction) that there are 250,000 species of creature in the fossil record, that reduces the proportion to just one in 120,000. Either way, what we possess is the merest sampling of all the life that Earth has spawned. Moreover, the record we do have is hopelessly skewed. Most land animals, of course, don’t die in sediments. They drop in the open and are eaten or left to rot or weather down to nothing. The fossil record consequently is almost absurdly biased in favor of marine creatures. About 95 percent of all the fossils we possess are of animals that once lived under water, mostly in shallow seas..." [Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything]
Despite this vanishingly small likelihood of finding intermediary species, palaeontologist have done just that - despite the fact that you think that the word "species" cannot be defined.