Evolution seems to hold together to me. In particular it meshes well with chaos theory, where evolution is one of many non-linear processes, leading to ‘punctuated equilibrium’.
Darwin did hundreds of experiments, and it was his work to explain why various species were in some places, and not in others absent human intervention that convinced most people of his day.
Darwin was ignorant about the complexities of even the smallest of living cells or even the means of heredity, save perhaps, in the latter case, for a certain friar. It’s easy to imagine a wolf “evolving” into a dog, even though all you really have is a loss of genetic information through selective breeding. The premise of evolution is that new things can be created through random mutation, but when you look at something like, perhaps, the mechanism a cell uses to produce ATP, you’re looking at a complex system of proteins which, if you look at the 3D models, literally resemble a working machine pump all bundled together tightly and, if even one is out of the place, would be rendered utterly useless. Yet the evolutionist glosses over all these fine details to point us toward broad assumptions.
I missed a phrase in that first sentence. It should have read ‘Darwin and the people of his era were ignorant of... save perhaps for a certain friar.”