JohnR7 said:
It maybe false to you, but I see the signature of God written all over it.
Maybe I just have an active imagination to think that there is a God who created these things for me to enjoy because of His love for us.
John, the issue isn't WHETHER God created biological organisms, but HOW. You think God had to directly manufacture each species. The data says that each species evolved by descent with modification. Darwin stated that this process of descent with modification is the "secondary cause" used by God to create species.
Now, Bagfullofsnakes and Jet Black are drawing you into the atheism vs theism debate. In the process they are inadvertently showing you the danger of your position to Christianity. They also equate the existence of God to special creation (direct design/manufacture of species) just like you do. By showing special creation false, they are (they falsely think) directly attacking the existence of God. And see, you believe they are too!!
Atheism can be successfully fought, but NOT from your position. Insist on this position and you have let atheists maneuver you so that they can invalidly falsify the existence of God. So, why do you let them do that?
Now, on a science note, I spent a happy 30 minutes online last night researching how natural selection designed shells. Below is some sources and relevant quotes of the material:
http://www.biology.duke.edu/rausher/cepea.htm
" The snail Cepea nemoralis exhibits variation among populations in the banding patterns on its shells. In particular, two sets of loci control shell pattern. One locus determines whether the background pattern of the shell is brown, pink or yellow. Another set of loci determines the number of dark bands on the shell, which ranges from 0 to 5. Throughout Europe, populations differ in the relative frequencies of the shell color variants, and hence differ in the frequencies of the alternative alleles at the loci influencing color. A study by Cain and Sheppard (A.J. Cain and P.M. Sheppard. 1954. Natural selection in Cepea. Genetics 89-116) examined the relative frequencies of the different color morphs in populations around Oxford, England. They found that there was a very non-random distribution of color frequencies with respect to the type of habitat the population occupied, as shown by the figure below. In particular, populations living in wooded habitats tended to have a high frequency of unbanded brown or pink shells (circles in figure), while in more open habitats (hedgerows and fields; squares and triangles in figure), yellow, banded shells predominated." This "non-random distribution" is due to natural selection. Designing the color patterns on the shells.
http://library.thinkquest.org/19926/text/tour/01.htm?tqskip1=1&tqtime=0702
"For selection in a changing environment, let's take a look at the ocean-dwelling Gryphaea. The Gryphaea is related to the oyster but differs by having a variably coiled shell. The shell of this fossil became increasingly coiled during the lower Jurassic Period, around one hundred eighty million years ago. Also during this period the seabed changed from one that was rocky to one that was muddy, so we can guess why the change in the Gryphaea took place. On rocky substrata, the flat Gryphaea could live with its upper valve facing upwards, and take in food and water through a gap between this valve and its shell. When mud became more common, a coiled shell was of advantage, because it lifted the upper valve clear of the sea bottom, and prevented mud from entering the cavity in which the Gryphaea lived. Hence, the Gryphaea with flat shells did not live and did not reproduce, while the Gryphaea with the progressively more curved shells lived to reproduce other Gryphaea with curved shells."
http://www.fiu.edu/~rawlings/LECTURE_3_OUTLINE.pdf
"3) Shell polymorphism in land snails:
Cepaea nemoralis
- selection for pink uniform shells in dense woodlands
- selection for banded shells in more open habitats"
http://www.pbs.org/safarchive/4_class/45_pguides/pguide_604/4564_shell.html
http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~GEL3/coevolution.html
"Some marine snails drill holes in clams. To do this efficiently, they must make a decision on a cost-benefit to them. It takes time and energy to drill a hole through the clam shell: is the effort going to be worth it in terms of the food gained? You might predict that if snails are drilling holes through clam shells, then those clams that happen to have thicker shells will survive better than those that do not: so as natural selection takes its course, clams with thicker shells will have more offspring, and clams will evolve thicker shells. If the snails were stupid, this would probably happen. The snails are subject to natural selection too: those that make a clever decision on which clams to attack will gain more food and will have more offspring. Clever snails strike just the right balance between clams to drill. As a result, the clams evolve in a counterintuitive way. They do not grow meaty enough to make themselves an obvious target for a snail. They grow a little body in a thin shell (cheap), and they begin to reproduce early, when they are still small. That way they have offspring, and if the snail drills them later, when they are bigger, they have already passed on their genes. So, over geological time, we see a trend in shells that says the coevolution between drilling snails and clams produces smaller, thinner-shelled clams, just the opposite of what we might have expected before we really began to analyze it."
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/jones.html
Boulding, Elizabeth G., et. al. Changes in selection on gastropod shell size and thickness with wave exposure on Northeastern Pacific shores. Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology 232 (1999): 217-239.
Kirby, Richard R., et. al. Variation in mitochondrial DNA in a cline of allele frequencies and shell phenotype in the dog-whelk Nucella lapillus (L.) Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society 62 (1997): 299-312.Quensen, J.F. and D.S. Woodruff. Associations Between Shell Morphology and Land Crab Predation in the Land Snail Cerion. Functional Ecology Vol. 11, Issue 4 (Aug 1997): 464-471.
http://www.wavelengthmagazine.com/1999/am99neigh.php
Design of molluscs out of their shells.
http://www.wavelengthmagazine.com/1999/am99neigh.php
"We identify two avian predators of the Neotropical apple snail, Pomacea flagellata, and estimate the strength, direction and form of multivariate natural selection by these predators on size and colour of snail shells. Limpkins are tactile predators and act as agents of disruptive selection on snail size, selecting average-sized snails disproportionately more often than small or large snails. In addition, we were able to identify variation in handling behaviours and snail size selection among individual limpkins. Individual limpkins showed preferences for snails of different sizes and punctured the snail shells opposite the aperture mainly when handling large snails. Snail kites are visual predators and seem to be agents of directional selection against lighter coloured snails. The ecological interaction between the apple snail and its predators provides a powerful system to further explore the role of predation in determining evolutionary changes in snail behaviour, morphology and life history. "
