[redleader]

In order for an arm to grow from a fish (one of the basic steps in the evolutionary theory of man) there would be many thousands and thousands (millions) of years of transition period of complete uselessness for that trait. For example a dog from its legless predecessor. 4 limbs being nubs, each having 1000's of useless mutations to provide for bone size, muscular attachment, claws, and ultimate design enabling efficient running. Each thousand years having its own fossil evidence.

But dogs didn't evolve from fish, they were created by humans from earlier mammals which evolved from earlier reptiles (?) which in turn evolved from amphibians, which evolved from some ancient common ancester of the modern fish which is now extinct. The jump wasn't made overnight, rather there are many thousands of intermediate species, each of which left there mark on the shape of a modern dog. In the end the final goal is not to make the dog, the dog is just something humans bred because they thought it would be useful to their ends. Its just one more species that will eventually pass to make way for others.

Therefore there are no useless mutations (at least none that surivive), each was a solution to some problem that existed at the time of its adaptation. The sum of these adaptations becomes new species as populations diverage and the genetic markers on their protiens change enough that sexual reproduction between individuals that had been of the same species is no longer possible. Then simple genetic drift takes over and eventaully you get something that is a dog for a while.

In a similar argument, how many millions of favorable mutations across the biological board must occur daily in our living ecosystem and be successfully passed on genetically via a mate? Shouldn’t we see these daily to keep the pace of constant evolution is to be maintained?

We do see some of these traits actually. However since most species are not visable to humans (molds, yeast, other microorganisms make up most of the life on the planet). Yeast are the area I'm doing my current research in. Theres actually a lot of adaptation going on in yeast in real time. We can trace back the evolution of yeast pretty well for the last few hundred million years, mostly because we still have so many closely relates species of yeast. You can actually work backwards and calculate the specific mutations that creates some species of yeast. However its not very glamerous to see how protiens change over time in the mold that raises your bread, so no one ever notices. If you want to see elephants adapt spots, or some other change in a macroscopic organism, you'll have to wait many thousands of years because the life spans of macroscopic organisms are, well, macroscopic.