Quote:
Originally Posted by zoltan
Please explain why humans are more "complex," and in what ways, than a coelacanth.
There are ways that people have measured "complexity" - they usually have to do with the number of different tissue types or number of different cell types that an organism possesses.
As for the rest of the argument, grunching heavily but I think people don't understand what evolution is because they a) don't know the definition and b) it is difficult to see in action to the layperson.
As has been stated (then nickpicked heavily, thanks to Aaron), evolution is simply a change in allele frequencies. If Generation 1 has a 50/50 ratio of two alleles and Generation 2 has a 52/48 ratio, congrats, your population has evolved. Of course, this is not something the average person will probably have a chance to see or recognize because most people don't go around measuring the allele frequencies in a population of some species. Microevolutionary processes are very tiny in their effect - a new mutation here and there, natural selection causing small changes in allele frequencies in each generation, etc. It is only continued additive microevolution that produces the large-scale evolutionary processes that cause the production of new features or cause speciation events. These take quite a bit of time - and we only live for 80 years or whatever.
We can't observe a process such as chimps and humans evolving from a common ancestor, but scientists have been able to observe species evolving significantly (peppered moth), even to the point of speciation (apple maggot fly).
And of course, religion is probably the main thing for a lot of people.