Reasons to Reject Evolutionism

"It's fairly obvious to most people that complex capabilities like flight or the sonar which whales use could not evolve; ...."

It's not obvious to me that such things can't evolve; perhaps you could expand on this statement?

"It's fairly obvious to most people that complex capabilities like flight or the sonar which whales use could not evolve; ...."

It's not obvious to me that such things can't evolve; perhaps you could expand on this statement?

Suppose you aren't a flying bird, but you desire to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

An idea of how hard it would truly be for "proto-bird" (TM) to make it to flying-bird status can be gotten from the case of the escaped chicken.

Consider that man raises chickens in gigantic abundance, and that on many farms, these are not even caged. Consider the numbers of such chickens which must have escaped in all of recorded history; look in the sky overhead: where are all of their wild-living descendants??

Why are there no wild chickens in the skies above us???

A flying bird requires a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including flight feathers, wings, a special light bone structure, specialized flow-through design hearts and lungs vastly more efficient than ours, specialized tails and balance parameters, and a number of other things. Now, you can imagine the difficulty involved for something like a dinosaur which did not have any of these things to evolve them all, but the feral chicken

already has all of these things!!!!!

In other words, if there's any chance whatsoever of a non-flying creature evolving into a flying bird, then surely, surely the feral chicken, close as it is, could RE-EVOLVE back into being a flying bird. They're only missing the tiniest fraction of whatever is involved.

They've got wings, tails, and flight feathers, and the whold nine yards. In their domestic state, they can fly albeit badly; they are entirely similar to what you might expect of an evolutionist's proto-bird, in the final stage of evolving into a flight-worthy condition.

According to evolutionist dogma, at least a few of these should very quickly finish evolving back into something like a normal flying bird, once having escaped, and then the progeny of those few should very quickly fill the skies.

But the sky holds no wild chickens. In real life, against real settings, real predators, real conditions, the imperfect flight features do not suffice to save them.

In real life, if you ever lose the tiniest part of some complex trait or capability, you will never get it back. In the real world, if you lack the tiniest part of some complex trait or capability, then, other than possibly via some genetic engineering process, you will never get it.

Thus we see that "proto-bird" (TM) not only couldn't make it the entire journey which he is supposed to have, he couldn't even make it the last yard if we spotted him the thousand miles minus the yard.

The basic question is: How in hell is some velociraptor supposed to make it the thousand miles, if history proves that a creature which amounts to the final stage of such a development cannot make it the final yard of such a process?

The point of the discussion about gravity above might not have been as obvious as I intended. The point was that the real cause of the demise of all the largest animals of this planet, i.e. the change in gravity, occurred within the age of man, and not 70 million years ago, and that there's no way in which to fit any version of macroevolution into the few thousand or one or two tens of thousands of years which actually separate us from the age of dinosaurs.

Well, your reply deserves detailed consideration, which I don't have time for at the moment. Later on that. However, I can answer one right away:

"Consider the numbers of such chickens which must have escaped in all of recorded history; look in the sky overhead: where are all of their wild-living descendants??

Why are there no wild chickens in the skies above us???"

1) Because many of the qualities that domesticated chickens have work against their survival in the wild. Chickens have huge breast muscles that go far beyond their needs to fly, and that, plus various other modifications they've been bred for, means that a chicken wouldn't be able to fly fast, far, or nimbly in the wild. Therefore, an escaped chicken would quickly become food for some other animal.

2) Domesticated chickens also have various other dependencies on their domesticators that make them unsuited for wild survival.

3) People go to great lengths to keep their chickens from escaping, so there haven't been that many.

4) Escaped chickens would have to survive, find other escaped chickens, breed, and be able to protect their progeny from predation in order for you to see wild chickens. Don't forget how few male domesticated chickens make it past puberty, too, so there's going to be vanishingly few escaped male chickens to help out with the above effort.

Nice idea, but the wrong one to hang your hat on.

"According to evolutionist dogma, at least a few of these should very quickly finish evolving back into something like a normal flying bird, once having escaped, and then the progeny of those few should very quickly fill the skies."

And I'd challenge this statement entirely. I've never seen any proponent of the evolutionary process state that it's a rapid process. And for the progeny to fill the skies, even if they did successfully reproduce, they'd have to find and successfully compete for a environmental niche currently non- or under-exploited by existing organisms. Since the evolutionary niche they've been bred for is "food for humans", they'd have to undergo extensive modifications to find some other niche.

Actually, this can be tested. Buy some chickens. Let them go. See how long they last. Not too long, I'm betting.

One thing I forgot to mention which should be obvious is that the escaped chicken is working from a gigantic numerical base while the velociraptor bird-wannabe is working from a miniscule base. The odds would favor the chicken over the wannabe by orders of magnitude.

The reason the escaped chicken can't regain decent flight is fairly simple. He started out in life as a wild fowl weighing a pound or two or three and then was bred into a domestic bird which was heavier than that without his wings getting any larger in the process. Similarly, a dinosaur trying to evolve into a bird would not have any way of knowing how big his wings needed to be at the end of the process and there's no reason to think he'd do any better.

It's been refuted many times right here on FR. That Medved seems complled to repost it robotically speaks volumes.

Some useful references:

Major Scientific Problems with Evolution

EvolUSham dot Com

Many Experts Quoted on FUBAR State of Evolution

The All-Time, Ultimate Evolution Quote

"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all came from slime. When we died, you know , that was it, there is nothing..."

Jeffrey Dahmer, noted Evolutionist

Social Darwinism, Naziism, Communism, Darwinism Roots etc.

Creation and Intelligent Design Links

Evolutionist Censorship Etc.

Catastrophism

Big Bang, Electric Sun, Plasma Physics and Cosmology Etc.

Finding Cities in all the Wrong Places

Given standard theories wrt the history of our solar system and our own planet, nobody should be finding cities and villages on Mars, 2100 feet beneath the waves off Cuba, or buried under two miles of Antarctic ice.

Intelligent Versions of Biogenesis etc.

Talk.origins/Sci.Bio.Evolution Realities

Actually, the escaped chicken is working from a miniscule base. And because her wings have been clipped, and she's too damn fat, and she's been comparatively immobilized to keep her fat and keep her laying eggs, she goes from miniscule to zero pretty quickly. But the raccoons and foxes get fat.

Yeah, but I'm glad of the references. It's useful as a reference so I know what cockeyed presumptions I'll be hearing. I especially like the parts where he/she keeps referring to an apparent desire on the part of one animal to evolve to another. Rampant anthromorphism.

I've been trying to decide for generations now what I'd like to evolve into. The decision is fraught with consequences.

I live in a fairly enlightened area of the country, but I still keep a watchful eye on the local school district. God forbid they get an idea in their heads to dump science and start recognizing "creationism" and "intelligent design" as topics fit to teach in schools. There'd go the property values.

Well ... my son just finished fifth grade. Mathematical concepts he understood thoroughly at the end of fourth grade he is now so hopelessly muddled on that we're putting him in Sylvan learning centers. So, if the teachers do the same swell job teaching Creationism that they do on math ...

So, if the teachers do the same swell job teaching Creationism that they do on math ...

Your private school is not working. Send him to another.

he/she keeps referring to an apparent desire on the part of one animal to evolve to another. Rampant anthromorphism.

You really need to analyze a little bit better. He is being sarcastic.

And I'd challenge this statement entirely. I've never seen any proponent of the evolutionary process state that it's a rapid process. And for the progeny to fill the skies, even if they did successfully reproduce, they'd have to find and successfully compete for a environmental niche currently non- or under-exploited by existing organisms. Since the evolutionary niche they've been bred for is "food for humans", they'd have to undergo extensive modifications to find some other niche.

Actually, this can be tested. Buy some chickens. Let them go. See how long they last. Not too long, I'm betting.

Interesting take, but even Talk Origins understands some of Ted's points. They don't agree with them, but they understand them

Talk Origins

Why are there no wild chickens?

There are wild chickens. But what Ted means here is, why haven't chickens living in the wild evolved better flight in 5000 years. And the answer is simple: 5000 years is too short a time to do so, not to mention that Ted has demonstrated no selection pressure in that direction, and the gene pool of "escaped chickens" Ted refers to is constantly being "pumped" with fresh escapees.

Aaaargh!

Escaped chickens would have to survive, find other escaped chickens, breed, and be able to protect their progeny from predation in order for you to see wild chickens.

You may not like the example, however it did show you the problem with evolution: the chickens (or whatever animal) has to eat, it has to keep itself from being eaten, it has to find mates to evolve with. See how difficult evolution is? Not the piece of cake Darwin made it to be.

God forbid they get an idea in their heads to dump science and start recognizing "creationism" and "intelligent design" as topics fit to teach in schools. There'd go the property values.

You are very wrong. Evolution is anti-science. Evolution tries to tell science how to think and it has been ignored and disproven many times. It is ID and what you call creationism that is in step with real science.