Originally posted by Heike
...but still have issues with how dinosaurs developed feathers and became chickens, or question the lack of a definitive "missing link" between primate and human.

Originally posted by cyberpilot
I don't get it, even Darwin himself said he was wrong...

Lloyd Pye has written an essay that completely dismantles the theory of evolution however, he does not believe it was God but rather aliens.
Its too large to copy and paste more than an excerpt but is certainly worth reading, Enjoy.

"Nearly all domesticated plants are believed to have appeared between10,000 and 5,000 years ago, with different groups coming to different parts of the world at different times. Initially, in the so-called “Fertile Crescent” of modern Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon came wheat, barley, and legumes, among others. Later on, in the Far East, came wheat, millet, rice, and yams. Later still, in the New World, came maize (corn), peppers, beans, squash, tomatoes and potatoes. Many have “wild” predecessors that were apparently a starting point for the domesticated variety, but others—like many common vegetables— have no obvious precursors. But for those that do, such as wild grasses, grains, and cereals, how they turned into wheat, barley, millet, rice, etc., is a profound mystery.

No botanist can conclusively explain how wild plants gave rise to domesticated ones. The emphasis there is on “conclusively.”

Botanists have no trouble hypothesizing elaborate scenarios in which Neolithic (New Stone Age) farmers somehow figured out how to hybridize wild grasses and grains and cereals, not unlike Gregor Mendel when he cross-bred pea plants to figure out the mechanics of genetic inheritance. It all sounds so simple and so logical, almost no one outside scientific circles ever examines it closely.

Gregor Mendel never bred his pea plants to be anything other than pea plants. He created short ones, tall ones, and different colored ones, but they were always pea plants that produced peas. (Pea plants are a domesticated species, too, but that is irrelevant to the point to be made here.) On the other hand, those Stone Age farmers who were fresh out of their caves and only just beginning to turn soil for the first time (as the “official” scenario goes), somehow managed to transform the wild grasses, grains, and cereals growing around them into their domesticated “cousins.” Is that possible? Only through a course in miracles.

Actually, it requires countless miracles within two large categories of miracles. The first was that the wild grasses and grains and cereals were useless to humans. The seeds and grains were maddeningly small, like pepper flakes or salt crystals, which put them beyond the grasping and handling capacity of human fingers.

They were also hard, like tiny nutshells, making it impossible to convert them to anything edible.

Lastly, their chemistry was suited to nourishing animals, not humans. So wild varieties were entirely too small, entirely too tough, and nutritionally inappropriate for humans.

They needed to be greatly expanded in size, greatly softened in texture, and overhauled at the molecular level, which would be an imposing challenge for modern botanists, much less Neolithic farmers.

Despite the seeming impossibility of meeting those daunting objectives,

modern botanists are confident the first sodbusters had all they needed to do it: time and patience. Over hundreds of generations of selective crossbreeding,

they consciously directed the genetic transformation of the few dozen that would turn out to be most useful to humans.

hundreds wow And how did they do it?

By the astounding feat of doubling, tripling, and quadrupling the number of chromosomes in the wild varieties! In a few cases they did better than that. Domestic wheat and oats were elevated from an ancestor with 7 chromosomes to their current 42, expansion by a factor of six. Sugar cane expanded from a 10-chromosome ancestor to the 80-chromosome monster it is today, a factor of eight. The chromosomes of others, like bananas and apples, only multiplied by factors of two or three, while peanuts, potatoes, tobacco and cotton, among others, expanded by factors of four.

This is not as astounding as it sounds because many wild flowering plants and trees have multiple chromosome sets. But that brings up what Charles Darwin himself called the “abominable mystery” of flowering plants. The first ones appear in the fossil record between 150 and 130 million years ago, primed to multiply into over 200,000 known species. But no one can explain their presence because there is no connective link to any form of plants that preceded them.

Gymnosperms

Sharon D. Klavins and others (International Journal of Plant Sciences, v. 164, p. 1007-1020) described an anatomically preserved cycad pollen cone from the Triassic.