The goal of these articles is not to outright insult creationists - a useless undertaking at best - but to point out the obviousness of evolution in the course of life on Earth both from the fossil record and the obvious fact that the characteristics of plants and animals can change dramatically under natural selection and selection by humans (who would have believed that both Great Danes and Chihuahuas could be descended from the same ancestral wolves?)

Creationists advance arguments which superficially SOUND logical, but which on closer examination are definitely not.

One argument is: "If humans are descended from apes, why are there still apes?"

The first counterargument is: "Is your shirt made of cotton? If your shirt is made of cotton, then why is there still cotton?"

This isn't as flip an answer as it may seem. The cotton in your clothing represents a small portion of the cotton in the world at the time when some of it was subjected to conditions different from that of other contemporary cotton. Namely, it was sent to a factory in which it was processed into fibers and woven into cloth. That didn't happen to all the cotton in the world.

Similarly, evolution - simply change - occurs when mutations happen. These may die out (even favorable mutations can still be lost to sheer bad luck in the original organisms in which they occur). A mutation which is useful, or at least not harmful, may begin to spread out through the population. But not every descendant of the entire population of organisms will get the new gene. Not all humans have the genes for blond hair or blood type O. If groups of a species are isolated so no gene flow occurs between them, more mutations will happen and also be confined to their respective groups. Now, mutations are, to a first approximation, random events. A mutation which happens in one population of a species may not happen in another. And further mutations will occur. Some mutations in one group of protohorses may set them on the road to becoming modern horses. Another group, once identical, may start to move toward being zebras. Or donkeys. Every farmer who tries to establish a new variety of beet or chicken understands how this works. As the different groups become more different, it becomes harder to interbreed. African Cichlids which have only recently begun to explosively diversify can mostly still be interbred. Horses and donkeys have diverged to the point where interbreeding can produce viable embryos (mules) but are too different for mules to be reproductively competent. Likewise, lions and tigers can still be crossbred to produce "ligers". Further apart, and genetic mechanisms are too different even for functional embryos to form