I can't help noticing that pete, as well as being a bit of a gullible, arrogant dork, is a sort of 'digital' person, i.e. he thinks only in 0s and 1s, yes's and no's and black and white.That's probably why he didn't get my 'joke' about absolutes. pete's religion represents, to him, absolute truth; anything which contradicts that truth must be wrong.

I suspect that, deep down, pete is terrified by the complexity of the world/universe - so he tries to simplify the world/universe by adopting fundamentalist religious beliefs and making himself wilfully blind to any of the difficult bits of reality.

Of course much of the world/universe isn't digital. Most sets and classes of things exhibit natural variability. So members of a specified population will display a range of values for a particular parameter or characteristic. For example, all adult men within a specific ethnic group, will display a range of heights but these heights will be clustered around a mean value with exceptionally short and exceptionally tall men in the 'tails' of the distribution. This is a statistical concept and statistical thinking is central to many areas of science - including evolutionary biology. It's not difficult to see that when a species is subjected to changes to its environment, such changes may tend to select sub-populations in a tail of a distribution and the mean will tend to shift in the direction of that tail. Such changes, accumulating over long periods of time, will mean that one species may change into a new species.

Have you ever studied statistics, pete? Silly me! Of course you've never studied statistics - you've only ever studied the pages of www.redneckcreation.com - haven't you? For the record, I spent most of my working life making measurements and analysing the data statistically - that's one thing that qualifies me to compare the claims of the science of evolutionary biology with the pathetic pseudoscience of 'creationism'.