[jlgreco]

If you accept an old earth (and I assume a similarly accurate timescale for how long life has been around), how would you expect life not to evolve? Given that much time, it's really just inevitable. How could it possibly not happen?

If you're a catholic-style "theistic evolution" type, then I suppose that is another thing. I'm mostly just curious how you stretch a non-evolution creation/development of life out over more than a couple thousand years. Catholics do it by just calling evolution "divinely guided" or whatever. Of the origin thoughts that involve deities, "young earth/no evolution" and "old earth/theistic evolution" seem the most logical to me.

[MartinCron]

That touches on one of the biggest conceptual problems holding people back from understanding evolution. The timescale is big. Really big. Bigger than human brains are typically capable of handling. I sometimes think that teaching shared ancestry as a starting point is the wrong approach, and that we should focus instead of the science of how old the universe must be (based on things like astronomy and earth science) and how iterative adaptive systems reflect changes over billions of years.

From there, people can arrive at common ancestry all on their own.