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questions for evolutionist that they can't answer
- Thread starter hailtofire
- Start date
Split Rock
Conflation of Blathers
Sorry for playing necromancer with this. End of final year = crazy.
Now that I have my degree and had my sleep, I'm kind of back...
Congrats all around!!
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congrats from me too! now i am feeling jealous, i need to get back to school, this fall semester if all goes well.
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lucaspa
Legend
You did?
You cribbed this from Georges St. Mivart in 1866. Fortunately, we now have the answer. Insect and bird's wings are excellent examples of exaptation. That is when a feature evolves for one function but, in the process, acquires a different function.
In the case of bird wings, feathers are modified scales. In fact, all you have to do is modify the amount of time BMP is expressed to turn a scale into a feather. Feathers initially provided sexual display. As more and more of the body was covered by feathers, they also became insulation. First exaptation. So now we have a small theropod dino covered with feathers. It is already bipedal, so the forelimbs are not used for running. It chases smaller prey and is chased by larger predators. It turns out that if the feathered forelimbs are "flapped", it helps the animal run up inclined planes! Even up vertical surfaces and past vertical! Think how useful that would be in chasing prey or avoiding predators.
It turns out that when the adaptation is at its best for running up an inclined surface (110 degrees) is also when that flapping gets the animal airborne!
3. Kenneth P.Dial, Wing-Assisted Incline Running and the Evolution of Flight. Science, 299: 402-405, Jan 17, 2003.
For insects, it turns out that the wings are modified gills. They started out as heat exchangers to help the insect warm up or cool down, depending on ambient temperature. Just at the point where the wings operate best as heat exchangers is exactly the point where they start to lift the insect off the ground. Voila! Instant flight.
It's not at all the same. A tall person can do many things, but teeth are specialized for the type of food that is eaten. Plant eaters need grinding teeth to grind up the plant material. Their incisors are also flat because they only have to shear off plant stems. Predators need very sharp and prominent incisors and canines to tear through skin and rip off pieces of meat. So yes, the teeth of T. rex tells us it was a meat eater. All you have to do is compare the teeth of living carnivores and herbivores to see how teeth shape is correlated to diet.
How do animals act? Don't we? We eat plants and other animals for food, don't we? So we act like animals and not plants. We mate like other animals. We groom each other. Not all animals congregate in social systems, but many do. So do we.
"Vestigial" means it has little function and removal does not result in harm. Normally, food bypasses the appendix and it plays no part in digestion.
Surely you must have seen this! Chromosomes occasionally fuse. The chromosomes fused somewhere along the hominid lineage. We can even see where they fused.
There are many more than that. Go to www.talkorigins.org and look at the FAQ of Transitional Fossils. It is true that there are not as many transitional individuals as we would expect IF large populations all transformed to new species. The explanation is that most speciation in the past occurred in small, geographically isolated populations that faced a new environment. It's a large planet with very few paleontologists. The odds that that particular geographical area will be exposed on the surface so we can find the fossils is poor. Also, much speciation takes long in generations but less than 60,000 years. Yet laying down the average layer of sedimentary rock takes 60,000 years. So the transition happens faster than the rock can be laid down.
Take a hypothetical population of animals with the average weight of 40 grams
about the size of a mouse. Then assume that generation by generation, the
members of the population increase in size at a mean rate of 1/10th of 1
percent of the mean weight at any generation. This rate is so slow, relative
to differences in weight between individuals belonging to any particular
generation, that the difference between the means of two successive
generations could not be calculated because of sampling errors and because
slight differences in nutrition affect non-hereditary differences in weight.
Indeed, this change would be almost unmeasurable over a human life span.
Nevertheless, an increase at this almost imperceptible rate over 12000
generations would produce a population having a mean weight of 6,457,400
grams, which is about the size of a large elephant. If the mean duration of a
single generation were about five years, which is much longer than that of a
mouse, but shorter than that of the elephant, the elapsed time required for
this tremendous increase in size would be 60,000 yrs.
They don't? I've seen baby monkeys in zoos.
Just how many is "so many"? 100? Less than 100? Not many. There are a number of possible reasons, from an honest mistake at seeing a log and thinking it was the Loch Ness monster to deliberate hoaxes like Big Foot.
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