tyreth said:
First of all, the steps leading up to transformation of reptile into bird are completely unobserved. They are hypothetical. No one has observed a lump on a population spread rapidly through a population, and observed successive mutations on that lump make it larger until it eventually enables some sort of limitted flight. It is a completely hypothetical statement with no observations.
lump? I think that would be a limb. It is the forelimbs that have evolved for flight, and we have seen it through the fossil record too, since there are a bunch of intermediaries, which are subsequently better and better adapted. Even if you don't accept that these represent different ages or whatever, you must still accept that these organisms represent a range of organisms for which different levels of wing specialisation conferred some advantage.
Second, such a lump (whether it be a supposed leg on a whale or something else) is clearly a disadvantage. Such physical abnormalities would also make a creature less likely to reproduce, as others would shun a less appealing partner.
well first of all, you are still relying on the lump, which is a flawed analogy, but I will let it rest for a moment. However then you make a faulty leap that somehow this will make animals "less appealing" The problem is that you are inserting zour human consciousness and values into animals, and this quite frankly won't work, particularly the lower we get in brain sizes. An example of this is stickebacks: Sticklebacks have red bellies and will threaten other sticklebacks with red bellies, but then they will also threaten extremely crude dummies that look nothing like sticklebacks, purely because they have something that looks like a red belly. There is even an anecdotal tale from Niko Tinbergen, that once he was studying sticklebacks and a mail van drove by outside, and all the sticklebacks rushed over to the sides of their tanks and threatened it vigorously. Similar tests can be done fooling the males into thinking that there is an attractive female nearby, with a swollen silvery belly. The ultimate stickleback is actually a silvery pear shape, which you will admit looks nothing like a stickleback at all. We even see these examples in birds too, with oystercatchers sitting on ostrich eggs, reed warblers feeding foster cuckoos that are several times their size, and look nothing like them:
ground nesting birds that have evolved a typical response to eggs rolling out of their nest: they roll them back in. but not only eggs, but hens eggs, wooden cylinders and even cocoa tins (Tinbergen et al). Crude dummies can solicit feeding behaviour from chicks, and defence/attack behaviour from adult birds. note that these dummies are extremely crude i.e. a black ring painted on a wooden cone on the end of a rod of wood.
as you can see, attractiveness really is in the eye of the beholder, and many animals such as birds actually go about things in an extremely primitive way, so saying what an animal would find attractive is fallacious at best.
Third, this lump would make a creature less fit. Such mutations are a hindrance long before they are an advantage.
again, the lump argument. I will not address it again, hopefully you realise it is wrong by now
An ad-hoc answer to this is that they perform an unrelated advantage until such a time as natural selection completes its creative work. Imagine wings though - what function would an incomplete wing incapable of flight provide that gives a selective advantage? While one step may provide an advantage, there is no guaruntee that the next step will. And, again, unfortunately for Darwinists this is unobserved.
this is where the fossil evidence, and evidence from living organisms come in. The fossils show a series of organisms with better and better adapted wings, each better for something than the ancestors. When we look at the eye, we see organisms alive today with a whole range of eyes from eye patches, to primitive cups, to our eyes and to even bifocal eyes in anableps anableps.
as for what advantages. early wings would no doubt have had either a spoiler effect, like on the back of a car (there are bird chicks that use their wings in this manner to run up extremely steep walls before their wings are fully developed, I forget the species now, sorry) or alternatively they might provide a bit of lift and allow the animals to leap further - this could be very useful for a predator, being able to go alot faster than your prey. successively improved wings would then allow perhaps for primitive flight, and then along with other adaptations, more specialised flight, until you get birds. Wings are one of the easiest examples to explain. If it is the case that the only step from A to B is via a retrograde step - one that is disadvantageous - then all other things being equal, I cannot see how B would evolve, except via some hopeful monster scenario.
There is absolutely no proof that a lump could transform into a wing at all, given a billion years or more.
again, not a lump. and there is significant evidence from the fossil record. I implore you to look at it at the very least to convince yourself, that if nothing else, there exists a series of intermediate organisms with increasingly adapted wings. Otherwise you are just argueing from a position of ignorance, and this is equivalent to me saying something stupid like "Jesus never spoke in parables" if I haven't even looked at the bible.
Another problem with Darwinist evolution - over a period of 70 million years, we are supposed to believe that some species changed tremendous amounts (eg, ancestors of humans), yet other species such as the coelacanth, remain unchanged? This is not at all a prediction of Darwinist evolution, but such facts are transformed into predictions of Darwinism after the fact.
Darwin himself predicted a fossil record full of transitional forms, but when that failed to be true, it was quickly turned into an asset of Darwinist evolution. Again, what it predicts was changed after the fact.
well it is a prediction that Darwin made himself, and explained in the first ever book on evolution. I and others have already addressed this.
Now not wishing to sound harsh, but you really are argueing from ignorance and incredulity here. You have given several examples there, such as the lump-> wing, percieved attractiveness, coleocanth and so on which are all completely wrong as I have hopefully demonstrated. Now one doesn't have to get really complex books or dig up fossils to get all this evidence, you can read it in normal laynams books. Dawkins is very good, although I will admit that he doesn't stop himself from criticising religion where possible. This does not detract from the biological quality of his books, but one has to ensure that one can see past his religion based comments. I have just started reading "The Theory of Evolution" by John Maynard Smith, which is an excellent read, though he does caution that it gets quite complicated later on. Origins is obviously worth reading, to see how the whole thing started, but again I must advise a bit of caution. It is over a hundred years old, and while the core stands firm, some of the examples are incorrect - for example fish swim bladders -> lungs, if I recall.
