good grief, Pete... you repeat things I/we have explained 10 times!

Gould did not 'admit' anything serious. His only concern was that his phrasing would be used... as it has been... to make it sound like he was embarrassed. No one could EVER find all the 'missing links'... be we have tens of thousands of representative links, with obvious

the whole process is far from established fact , and to quote snail " show me some evolution "

It IS established fact.... as a process... 'most' evolutionary changes do not happen so that they can be displayed & photographed in a lab....but.... SOME DO! Fruit flies have thousands of documented generations, with mapped DNA showing which genes have changed.

" you could show me natural selection, but that is not the same thing "

It is not THE means, but it is one of the means...or more precisely, it is what happens when a change in an organism either helps or hurts its survival & reproductive chances.

and... "..God could have used evolution over aeons......but then he would be a liar, because he told us different !."
No, Pete.... some guys who cobbled up some old manuscripts "told us different". If a 'god' wanted to be sure we got the right message, he wouldn't trust the message to a few people 2000-4000 years ago. Expecting his poor, fallible 'creations' to remember and get the quotes right in thousands of documents & languages is a bit silly for an omniscient Being.

This IS the issue... you want to quibble with supposed flaws in science, yet you have no problem 'believing' in ONE interpretation of ONE version of ONE selection of musty, crumbling documents written by MEN who claimed to have heard it from.... some reputable source. If this were about anything but Creation, you'd laugh at that kind of evidence. You LIKE the story... and it's a valuable story in many respects, but it doesn't hold up to the hard questions. Some things in science need to be reevaluated at times... but they are willing to look at new data... you aren't.


But... here I go, trying to explain again. Let me give you one-more-thing to read...

http://arachnoid.com/evolution/index.html

There's a lot of reading there, some of which is fascinating in its own right, but if you don't care to indulge, you may scroll to almost the bottom, where he has a paragraph on his CONCLUSION... and under that, really relevant links- some better than I have offered.

Oh... and welcome back from vacation... I hope it was pleasant.