Creationists and research

[LorentzHA]

The claims of intermediaries of dinos to birds is toatally false as there has been many c,aims but NONE of said claims have stood inspection! The bones in whales which are used to prove eviloution are in the underbelly of the whale & are actually anchor points for muscles which are used in the birhting process. You eviloutioinists thrive on complication as it is the only way you can conceal your deception. I dare say there is not a single iota of evidence for ANY of the Eviloutionary schemes, they are ALL unsupported by the evidence philosohical dogmas with a single political agenda, that being to turn the hearts of the lost from the Truth of God & His word contained in the Bible! This is the ultimate war we are in today, to control the mind & thus the very soul of mankind. I bekieve it was Kruschev who said they would defeat America without firing a shot; you see he/they the communists are full aware of this agenda of dominating the mind & Eviloution is a central part of this domination. Look at the history of the socialist nations; Eviloution is central to their education.

You are so scientifically ignorant it is scary. The saddest part is, you want to stay that way!

 

[Jet Black]

snip

I am sorry, but I cannot reply. what are we talking about here, lumps evolving into bird wings/reptile bird evolution, atavistic whale hindlegs, human breeding practices, bird breeding practices or what? I can't discuss anything if you are going to jump all over the place like that. can we focus on just one thing please?

I will focus on one line though:

that all animals would have a similar/identical method for choosing a mate

this is trivially completely wrong.

 

[Physics_guy]

Then you would probably fit the definition of a neo-Darwinist. This is one who believes that all life came through mutations guided by natural selection.

Neo-darwinism is not even all that "neo" any more and has since be superceded by the Modern Synthesis. Are the biologists of the world to be called Modern Sythesists? This is getting inane.

By the way, YEC is not only contrary to the Theory of Evolution, which only deals with the divergence of life on Earth, but also virtually of astronomy, cosmology, and geology.

 

[Jet Black]

I have never quite got all this neo darwinism and modern synthesis malarkey. it's just old fashioned evolution with a couple of things like DNA, mendelian inheritance and mutation tacked on for good measure isn't it?

 

[Physics_guy]

I have never quite got all this neo darwinism and modern synthesis malarkey. it's just old fashioned evolution with a couple of things like DNA, mendelian inheritance and mutation tacked on for good measure isn't it?

Yeah, basically as I understand it. Then again my name is Physics_guy not Biology_guy.

 

[Aggie]

It was a "lump" on whales that was claimed to be a vestigial leg.
Can you please point me to these intermediaries? I would like to be specific where possible.

I already described them in detail in the two threads I linked to. Here are some pictures:

http://www.dinosauria.com/jdp/archie/sinosaur.htm
These is some photographs of Sinosauropteryx. It had very few adaptations for flight, but its fossil preserves a furry covering that was a precursor to feathers. These structures were too primitive to have any aerodynamic function, but they may have been useful for insulation or camouflage.

Here is an artist's reonstruction of how it looked when it was alive: http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=1455

http://www.peabody.yale.edu/exhibits/cfd/CFDcaud.html
These are some photographs of Caudipteryx. Its feathers still were not useful for anything aerodynamic, but they had been elongated on its arms and tail into display structures. This is something that could have been useful to intimidating rivals or attracting potential mates.

Here's an artist's reconstruction of how it looked when it was alive, along with one possible way it could have used these display structures. http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=52

http://faculty.uca.edu/~benw/biol4415/lecture8a/sld032.htm
This is Sinornithosaurus. It had the same sort of fringes of feathers that were present on Caudipteryx, but they were signifigantly larger and may have had some type of aerodynamic function. Sinornithosaurus had the same muscle setup that modern birds use for flapping their wings, although this function may have evolved in Sinornithosaurus only to help it grab onto its prey.

Edit: found a better set of photos of it. It's part of a slide show that has a whole bunch of useful information about the evolution of complex structures; you might want to look at the rest of it, too.

Here's how it looked when it was alive. It's very bird-like, but it's still considered a dinosaur. http://dino.lm.com/images/display.php?id=239

Here's a page with a whole bunch of information about Microraptor, which had the same sort of fringes present in Caudipteryx, but had modified them into an airfoil. which was at pretty much the last step in the evolution of flight before true powered flight: http://www.geocities.com/skews_me/microraptor.html

Finally, there's Archaeopteryx, which is extremely similar to Microraptor, whose aerodynamic capabilities had evolved only slightly past what was present in Microraptor--enough for it to fly under its own power, but possibly not enough for it to take off from the ground. Talkorigins has a large article on it here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/archaeopteryx/info.html

I would like to remind you that I am not talking here about WHEN these animals lived, because most of them are what this thread has been calling "living fossils" even when they were alive--animals that went for a long time without changing, even as their close relatives continued to change. When there's not an advantage to developing flight any further for the animals in a particular area, they stop changing in that respect--that's what happened with dromaeosaurs like Microraptor, whose fossils are from about 14 million years after those of Archaeopteryx.

How would brain size make a difference? If neo-Darwinism is correct, then surely humans are just animals - and that all animals would have a similar/identical method for choosing a mate. After all, a selective advantage is, essentially, whatever enables you to reproduce better.

And are you denying that humans evolved? Because otherwise you need to explain our different reasoning (rejecting that which we should desire as a mate).

Yet humans are still a legitimate example, since you claim that we have evolved. So whether or not my example exists for the stickleback or for particular birds, it still exists for humans. The logical prediction of evolution is that all creatures should desire those of their species that are different from the norm. However, this does not bear out in reality, for humans at least. I'm not familiar with the breeding tastes of animals.

The more intelligent an animal is, the more thought it can put into different aspects of its life. Let me use a different example: For a leopard, storing its food for future consumption involves climbing a tree with the antelope it killed, and sticking it in a fork in its branches to try to keep other animals from reaching it. for humans, it involves buying tupperware, ziploc bags, refirigerators, and glass and plastic jars, learning how to use them, and figuring out which food items should be stored in which of them in order to keep them from going bad as long as possible. Some food items are also frozen, which requires an additional purchase of a stove or a microwave to defrost it, and an understanding of how to prevent these items from being ruined when doing so.

The basic need that motivates this behavior is the same--leopards and humans both sometimes have more food than they can eat at the moment, so they want a way to save some of it to eat in the future. However, because humans are more intelligent than leopards, we can devise ways of accomplishing this that require more thought than leopards are capable of.

When any animal is choosing a mate with which to reproduce, its basic needs are always very similar. It needs to find a member of the opposite gender that is fertile, healthy, and is willing and able to provide whatever his or her offspring will require from their parents.

The better an animal is able to judge this sort of thing, the better its chances are at finding the sort of mate with which it will be able to reproduce successfully. Humans have the highest intelligence of any known member of the animal kingdom, so we also are able to have extremely intricate requirements for what they look for in a mate. These sorts of exacting requirements increase our chances of finding the sort of mate with which we can reproduce successfully, so they evolve in any animal that has enough intelligence to make them possible.

If you look at an animal like a wolf, that is intelligent compared to most other animals but not as much as humans, you'll see a system that's fairly complex but not as much as our own. Some of it is described here: http://www.wolfcountry.net/information/WolfReproduction.shtml . You'll notice that this page mentions that mating is only an option for wolves at the top of their pack's social heirarchy. There is a completely separate set of requirements for a wolf to end up in that position, which this page doesn't go into.

The less intelligent an animal is, however, the more corners it has to cut in this area, since it won't be able to consider as many factors as a more intelligent animal would when choosing a mate. Male Sticklebacks being attracted to something round and silver is a very simple way for them to try to identify the females that are most likely to be healthy and fertile--bright silver feathers usually mean a female is healthy enough to produce the pigments that give its feathers that color, and their searching for something shaped like a pear is their way of making sure they don't end up trying to mate with a shiny rock.

Most of the time, female Sticklebacks are the only silvery pear-shaped objects around, so this method works fairly well. Even if their idea of an ideal female isn't exactly the same as what a real female looks like, a male searching for the most silvery pear-shaped object he can find will still probably end up selecting a female. It's possible that a more complex method of choosing a mate would work slightly better, but Sticklebacks don't have enough intelligence to look for anything much more complex that that.

By the way, I'm not even sure that HUMANS' idea of an ideal female is exactly the same as what real women look like. Most males' ideal seems to be something with the approximate proportions of a Barbie doll, which no one is likely to find in a real woman.

Please give examples for the series of wings.
As for the eyes, you are aware that all the different types of eyes around are shown to not be related to each other? ie, if neo-Darwinism is true, then the eye has evolved around 40 times. In other words, you can't use this as an example of transitional stages.

OK, I gave the wing examples. I've heard creationists say before that eyes couldn't have evolved, and I've also seen this argument refuted by articles like this: http://www.aps.org/units/dbp/newsletter/jun02.pdf (pdf reader required). If you have any arguments about eyes' inability to evolve that haven't already been refuted, you'll need to tell us what they are.

Precisely. Wings are not easy, you say they may have a spoiler affect or help running up steep walls easier. But there would have to be a stage before it was even good for that, when it would become a selective disadvantage. Bear in mind that beneficial mutations are so rare (if at all), that natural selection must be very precise - it cannot afford to let a beneficial mutation die.

You don't appear to understand this very well. If the first stage of feathers--the fiber-like covering on Sinosauropteryx--was an advantage, then the descendents of the animal in which they evolved who also have this covering will be more likely to survive than those that don't. The siginificance of a beneficial mutation is that it makes the animal that has it LESS likely to die before it has babies. the more beneficial a mutation is, the less likely it is to die with the animals that have it.

For the same reason, natural selection must also be ruthless in its selection against harmful mutations. Meaning that when the beginnings of a wing comes, it would be selected against from the very start. Only after many successive disadvantageous mutations could it become advantageous (assuming, of course, that mutations could produce such a thing at all - even when directed by intelligence).
Also, feathers are not simple constructs. They would be ugly and useless far before they become useful.
The hopeful monster scenario seems like the only possible answer - yet even then I cannot imagine all the right "switches" being in place to suddenly form some kind of useful, limitted "wing".

This is no longer an ad hoc argument on the part of the evolutionists--each of the stages in the evolution of flight is now ducumented by fossils of the animals that had it. I've already mentioned most of them. The fiber-like covering on Sinosauropteryx would be an advantage to any endotherm living in a cold environment, an animal that had such a covering would often have something to gain from elongating the fringes of feathers on its arms and tail in order to make itself appear larger and more impressive, and as these fringes were elongated there would begin to be an advantage for certain groups of the animals that had them if they were modified into an airfoil.

Feathers themselves have undergone a similar development. The fiber-like covering on Sinosauropteryx would have been made a more effective insulator by having a branching structure, and elongating them would make them a more effective mechanism for display. Both of these adaptations are present in Caudipteryx. Once these display feathers were long enough, an animal who had them that lived in a tree (such as Microraptor) would be able to use them to steer its leaps from branch to branch, and allowing the feathers' branches to interlock would make this work even better. The last stage of development is the asymetrical stucture in Archaeopteryx, which allows an animal that FLAPS its wings to push itself up with each downstroke more than it pushes itself down with each upstroke.

The right "switches" did not appear all at once, but one at a time, and each one of them provided a different advantage to the animals that had it.

...

Perhaps I do not know of the example of wing transitional forms you refer to (maybe I do, I won't know until you point me there). I do know that in Darwin's time he predicted numerous transitional forms, but even today the fossil record clearly shows stasis.

Sometimes it shows stasis, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes animals end up in a situation where no single change can make it any easier for them to survive, and in that case they don't change very much until changing would provide an advantage. When a new set of niches opens up for a particular group of animals, however, they diversify very quickly. This happened in birds when they gained powered flight, as well as in mammals at the beginning of the Tertiary period when all of the niches prevously held by dinosaurs suddenly became vacant.

I've explained what the transitional forms are in the case of wings.

The lump was an example. I could easily have been talking about a leg, or any other limb. Attractiveness which is present in humans who also are claimed to have evolved. The coelacanth I'm assuming you are talking about it's differences to the ancient ones?

Jet Black already explained this, and I think you understood it.