GROK:
IMHO you are what the whole shazam is about.

I believe in the holiness of doubt.

I love the story of Darwin as portrayed on BBC's: "The Voyage of Charles Darwin." The story of his voyage as a relatively young man on a ship captained by a capable (and very doctrinaire old school Christain) Robert Fitzroy, the connections he made by his various experiences around the world, particularly experiencing a major earthquake in South America, and noticing the differences among the isolated species of the Galapagos, he came to conclusions that were uniquely his. He wrote most of it up, told his friends, and sat on his work (metaphorically) for half a generation, until another bright young Englishman, who had also circumnavigated the globe, put forward the almost identical theory. So Darwin came out with his work, and as he expected, inspired a furor in the scientific and religious world which exists to this day.

You may have noticed that I'm not answering your questions, Grok. That's because
A) I'm not the best source of the answer, people like Stephen Jay Gould are way better suited, and I haven't read any of his works. and
B) I'm willing to bet that at least some of your questions are yet to be convincingly answered. I personally wonder how one set of chromosomes (which have a fixed size and count per species) makes the change into another set for another species. There may already be a good answer to it, I don't know what it is.

But what I definitely believe is that the path we are on with modern biology and concepts of natural selection is more rewarding, accurate, informative, and will continue to produce results whereas creationism is a feeble attempt to reconcile a certain amount of observed fact with ancient texts not even meant to be taken literally.

I am encouraged by the history of genetics, which didn't even exist at the time Darwin's theory of Natural Selection gained notice. Genetics was mostly started by the work of a monk, Gregor Mendel. But genetics and the quite recent discovery of the structure of DNA get us a long way towards understanding the stuff of life, and they provide insight into how nature actually works.

What a biologist versed in evolution will tell you, Grok, is that mutation and coincidence drive the engine of life as we know it. The statistical analysis of DNA is turning up species relationships. While the creationists try to use statistics to say that by pure chance life is impossible, they ignore the statistical similarities between the great apes. They are much more implausible on the bare face of their arguments. And we all know that life is possible.

So rather than try to give answers I'm not prepared for, I will simply point out that utilizing the theories and concepts of genetics and evolution we are making actual changes in our environment, which is more than we can do utilizing the concepts of Creationism.

No one has even brought up my favorite bogus argument for God, the story of the person who finds a watch. If there is a watch, you don't think on whether it grew, the watch implies a watchmaker. The argument, deeply flawed, went on to posit that a living creature implied a maker. Our knowledge of the workings of biology have improved to the point that that old argument has no merit, yet I still see it utilized in some of the more primitive religious tracts.

And just as I think our government is too dangerous to be left in the hands of scientifically ignorant people, I think there is another danger in having our kids undereducated in the biological sciences, or mis-educated, when there are important decisions to be made in the immediate future regarding genetic research, cloning, cell research. I think there is a moral component to these decisions, and I want the religiously motivated people to be involved. But I went them to bring to the table a good education, not claptrap (which is what creationism is).