I'm reading a book titled, The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder. Schroeder is a PhD graduate of MIT who has been teaching in Israel for 30 years. I'm not a bio-science guy, my background is physical sciences, and specifically analytical methodologies. But what I've read here on evolution is fascinating. Someone like botnst can jump in and correct my errors. Here's what I've just read.

1. Water formed on the earth about 3.8 billion years ago.

2. Live started in the ocean about 3.5 billion years ago.

3. The formation of live within a few hundred million years cannot be explained by the classical 'chance combination' model that you and I were taught as kids. Prior to the discovery of life 3.5 billion years ago scientists believed that live originated in the atmosphere (lighting creating amino acids) and then 2 billion years of chance occurrences produced life. That is now known to be false.

4. Once life started 3.5 billion years ago it basically remained unchanged until 650 million years ago. Then, in a remarkably short period of time 90 to 95% of life died off and whole new species, with no records of intermediates appeared. Some of these creatures seem to have evolved over literally thousands (not millions) of years.

5. The 5 phylla of creatures with eyes in the world all have the same genetic coding responsible for vision yet the only common genetic link they share was back during the sponge-like or protozoa phase (creatures without eyes). To create the genetic code in anyone of these phylla involves 20 different amino acids and 130 different possible binding locations. That is a total of 20^130 which is ~10^170. So each one of these separate creatures went through ~10^170 different random variations and then, in each case, came up with the exact same structure. Or their common ancestor (a sponge without eyes) had this pattern and passed it on (with no known evolutionary advantage) to its descendants.