Replies

<< Exactly. Creationist calls for physical evidence ("Where o where is the missing link?") which you already have lawyered away as meaningless are a simple rude waste of everyone's time. You demand the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West, with the implication that you would acknowledge such a thing as proof. You won't, and anyone who has watched the Creationist Dumbshow before knows it. >>

No matter how many times you resort to your "better arguments" (those devoid of fact, ad hominem, and insults), the TRUTH remains that just because one creature resembles another in some ways is NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that either is a transition.

This is obvious to any rational man because of how many living things have common features, yet we know they are not transtions to each other. Bats have always been bats, but if they did not exist today, you would surely be offering them as a transition to birds, flying squirrels, or maybe F-16's.

If there were no actual platypuses and you found one in the fossil record, you know you would herald it as a transition and evidence for evolution. You try to do it with creatures with less common features than a platypus has - like your proposed feathered dinosaur.

Snakes have scales, fish have scales. Is one evolving into the other?

Octopi have eight legs, spiders have eight legs. Will we see an octupus spinning a web in a few kazillion years?

Horses have manes, lions have manes. Is it moving up the neck or down?

So if some dinos have feathers, then some dinos have feathers. Some mammals have wings, that doesn't make them transitional.

Yell and fuss and kick and whine and mock all you want, similarity doesn't indicate transition. Similarity indicates common plan of design. The answer will be the same for EVERY creature you offer as a transition because it is valid for every creature you offer. Transition is your *interpretation* of the facts, it's not a fact itself.

Creatures with similarities have them for different reasons. Sometimes it's because these speicies shared a common anscestor, sometimes because of parallel evolution.

You are quite right that it is ludicrous to think of, say, humans as evolving from chimpanzes. Good thing that has never been suggested by evolution. Humans did not evolve from chimps, both humans AND chimps evolved from a common ancestor. That ancestor probably looked more like a chimp than humans do, but that doesn't mean that modern species are in the process of evolving into each other. Similarities in anatomy between humans and chimps are due to this common ancestry, not a direct transition between the two species.

Parallel evolution, as I'm sure you are aware, is when two species have similar traits because of common enviornmental conditions. Sharks and dolphins have similar sleek shapes because that is ideal for moving through water quickly. It is a desirable trait in an animal of that size that lives in water. Bats and birds both have wings because it is an amazing advantage to be able to fly. There is considerable debate (I think) as to whether they actually came to the solution of wings by the same means. I think that birds are thought to have evolved wings to help them run faster and jump higher on the ground (the ground-up method) and bats grew from something that glided to help it jump like a flying squirrel (top-down). The result-a creature that can fly-was the same either way.

These similarities show remarkable evidence for evolution. Yes, the theories I have presented to you are INTERPRETATIONS not FACTS. But that is precisely what theories are. As more facts are available the theories will modified or discarded as need be, but they are not pulled from thin air.

Bats have always been bats, but if they did not exist today, you would surely be offering them as a transition to birds, flying squirrels, or maybe F-16's.

Why would someone be offerring them as transitions to birds? Just because they have wings. Maybe in your strawman version of what passes for evolutionary science that would be the case. The bird wing and the wing wing are totally analogous. They have the same function and they're derived from tetrapod forelimbs, but that's it. The structures of the two wing types are totally different.

If there were no actual platypuses and you found one in the fossil record, you know you would herald it as a transition and evidence for evolution.

Let me guess. Transition between a duck and an otter or a beaver. More strawmanning. Even without living specimens, the platypus would be classified as a mammal based on its skeletal features.

Snakes have scales, fish have scales. Is one evolving into the other?

Octopi have eight legs, spiders have eight legs. Will we see an octupus spinning a web in a few kazillion years?

Horses have manes, lions have manes. Is it moving up the neck or down?

So if some dinos have feathers, then some dinos have feathers. Some mammals have wings, that doesn't make them transitional.

All strawman examples. Biologists do not take species and class them as related or transitional due to one character without taking into account everything else about them. Creationists might do that when they insist that the platypus "bill" is actually a duck-beak that has been stuck onto a mammal body just because it is superficially similar, but biologists judge transitional species by taking into account their combinations of derived and ancestral characters. The platypus "bill" is totally mammalian in structure. The lower jaw is made up of the same dentary-squamosal system possessed by all other mammals. If those feathered dinosaur species were actually feathered mammals, they wouldn't be classified as transitional between dinos and birds because the rest of the skeletons wouldn't support such a hypothesis. The confusion over which pigeonhole in which to place Archaeopteryx shows that your analogies are totally false.