I have a hard time with fossels because time could change them to look like things were different than they were. They could be incest babies that were dwarfs. I guess I am not getting anything out of this because you keep using animal groups that are not apes to show evolution. That does not help at all.
My other question would be, were did that first life come from then?
Wait -- how is time going to change them? Fossils tend to be within single layers of deposition, even in most catastrophic deposits -- about the only exception I can think of is a sudden volcanic event, but often that doesn't leave fossils so much as fossil casts or cavities.
Even if time could change them, there are obvious controls, because very few fossil species have been found in just one place, so to get any changes you're going to have to posit a geological event or process across a huge area that results in the identical deformation everywhere. Since fossils are found in all sorts of orientations, that's so unlikely as to have a probability effectively zero. So given geological processes, we know that the forms are unchanged, and thus that what we're looking at in the fossil record are accurate representations of the creatures themselves.
The notion that malformed individuals make up the fossils used to show evolution can be easily discarded: when two or more identical fossils are found in different geographical locations, then in order for them to be something like "incest babies that were dwarfs" becomes stretched WRT credulity. When the number of fossils expands to more specimens in more places, the odds of something like that being the case drop to nil. It's a simple matter of statistics: not all members of any species were fossilized, so what we're finding is a very random sample. Malformed offspring are not common, so even if all were fossilized, they were still be few in comparison to ordinary members of a species. Yet the possibility is ludicrous in the first place, because it has been common among mammals, when it becomes plain that one offspring can't keep up and is doomed, to abandon it, at which point it will tend to be eaten, and not fossilized -- and even if not abandoned, the deformed are the most common target of predators, and again the individual won't survive in a form suitable for fossilization (nor likely in any place suitable).
As for using other animal groups to show evolution, that's because other lines are clearer. Where exactly the pieces fit in the hominid/primate line is a matter perennially under dispute. The standard procedure in science is to look at where clear evidence of something lies, and if that is found in sufficient instances, it is extrapolated to the rest. That was exactly Darwin's procedure: observing the plain descent among birds, and extrapolating to all creatures. Even to the Christian, that's an obvious procedure, because if God is faithful and not arbitrary, then the same rules will apply to all living creatures.
In the case of primate/hominid fossils, the line of descent isn't always very clear, even when dating puts the various types in chronological order. But DNA analysis is helping straighten that out, by showing how close the DNA of one kind is to another. So while it isn't plain which type descended from which with certainty, what is plain is that there is in fact a line of descent. It's something like a very complex game of Mastermind, trying to discern the order of the pegs -- without knowing for sure the number of pegs, or the number of colors.
