Originally posted by lotrfreak
so what you are saying is that a dinosaur changed into a monkey?
no...

since I find it hard to put this into my own words...

"It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun."
- R. C. Lewontin

"A few words need to be said about the 'theory of evolution,' which most people take to mean the proposition that organisms have evolved from common ancestors. In everyday speech, 'theory' often means a hypothesis or even a mere speculation. But in science, 'theory' means 'a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.' as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it. The theory of evolution is a body of interconnected statements about natural selection and the other processes that are thought to cause evolution, just as the atomic theory of chemistry and the Newtonian theory of mechanics are bodies of statements that describe causes of chemical and physical phenomena. In contrast, the statement that organisms have descended with modifications from common ancestors--the historical reality of evolution--is not a theory. It is a fact, as fully as the fact of the earth's revolution about the sun. Like the heliocentric solar system, evolution began as a hypothesis, and achieved 'facthood' as the evidence in its favor became so strong that no knowledgeable and unbiased person could deny its reality. No biologist today would think of submitting a paper entitled 'New evidence for evolution;' it simply has not been an issue for a century." - Douglas J. Futuyma

... I hope that's enough... I don't want to get into a big debate about this... I had enough of doing that in the past