http://www.northern.edu/natsource/mammals/northe1.htm
“Because walking is so awkward with the membrane between their wrists and ankles, being on the ground makes them very vulnerable to predators. Protection is found by both living in the trees and being active after dark. “
amd:”The change from a glider to a flier would be a gradual process if the flier experienced an advantage.”
In which case, the intermediate arm/wing would not be suitable for either flying or walking, leaving them vulnerable to predators, much as the flying squirrel is.
amd: “Similarly a river living mammal could easily develop a multipurpose leg that also had function as a flipper, like a seal. A seal has not lost function of its front legs, they are now better flippers than legs.”
Plenty of animals swim just fine with the legs they have.
*would be*. *could be*. It’s all speculation. Nobody knows for sure, including the scientists who propose these explanations.
A seal's front legs work just fine as legs.
A “gliding” squirrel hasn't lost the use of its arm, and neither has a bat.
The intermediate need only be of general use for both for it to differentiate into solely or mostly one purpose or the other. Just like a flying squirrel or a seal when compared to a bat or a dolphin. Obviously I am not saying one is an ancestor of another, but the transition from gliding to flying or semi aquatic to fully aquatic are not transitions for which we have no living (or fossil) examples.
As I said. In a question you refused to address.
If you believe all species descended from what few could fit on a boat a few thousand years ago, you believe in evolution that is much stronger and faster than anything supported in the scientific literature.
And what mechanism do you propose stops this ROBUST evolution, hundreds of times stronger than what biologists propose, from moving the animal beyond “kinds”?
There are species of spiders that ‘live’ underwater and ‘breath’ underwater- of course they only briefly make forrays into the water, and can only breath by tapping into trapped underwater airbubbles, but by golly, since they are ‘aqautic spiders’ I must hterefore assume they are descended from Brown Trout, which as we all know, have been known to briefly ‘breathe’ out of water, and since they can leap great distances in the air this would of course indicate that htese brown trout are descended from air breathing ‘flying Squirrels’, who as you know, simply could not make a go of it on the ground, and feared becomming extinct, so, while some million or so other ground dwellers did just fine on the ground, these critters took to the trees (Which apparently had no predators), and since these ‘flying’ squirrels are able to glide from tree to tree- gliding right over hte heads of all the other poor saps on the ground who were surviving just fine, and since flying squirrels like to drink water, then this must hterefore mean that ‘flying squirrels’ are henceforth descended from ‘flying fish’.
Evidence? How dare you request any evidence?!!! Skin flaps under squirrels armpits evolved into fully functional wing structures, and squirrels evolved avian lungs and muscle structures all in anticipation of one day soaring high in the sky dag nabbit! And that is that! Just look around you at al lthe hological ‘similarities’- that should be proof enough that everythign descended from pond scum right there! How dare you quesiton Sir god Darwin?!!!
An often overlooked point in the following passage is the underlying Hebrew words, “muwth muwth” which are translated “surely die” but literally mean “die die.”
Blessed and holy [is] he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. – Revelation 20:6
There is one Wind (pneuma) blowing through existence, though, which can. "The wind blows where it wants to, but you can't tell where it comes from or where it's going. The same with everyone born of God's Pneuma."
The life that we have with Christ in God is not subject to physical death or the second death. It can never die, because He lives. His Name is I AM.
For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. - Colossians 3:3
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 8:38-39
For instance, as she and allmendream have noted, what is called random (really meaning, unpredictable ) in nature does not stand as proof that God does not exist.
However, the insistence that there is no purpose to the physical creation – especially the physical life of men – denies of the power and Person of God. And for that reason, such a claim is an affront to all of us who know Him and love Him.
Whereas science may exclude purpose on the principle of “methodological naturalism” to do its work, it is just as far out its league to suggest there is no purpose as it is to suggest there is no God or indeed anything supernatural. The scientific method does not apply to such questions, science does not have the right toolset to address such questions.
And truly many scientists know this and stay away. But of course there are a few – like Dawkins – who do theology under the color of science. So naturally the reaction from the Judeo/Christian community is swift and severe.
Conversely, there are some who do theology under the color of science. In my opinion, that glorifies the creature, not the Creator, and therefore is ill conceived. And predictably, the reaction from the science community is swift and severe.
If it were up to me, I would center the debate on the principles, like betty boop and metmom and xzins have tried to do on this thread.
metmom for instance raised the principle that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. And truly, that is an important principle in what I would call the “hard” sciences like physics, chemistry, astronomy and microbiology.
The “historical” sciences like paleontology, archeology, anthropology and Egyptology hold to the opposite principle: the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Obviously, their physical evidence is spotty at best because not every thing that once lived left a physical record of itself. So they fit the evidence they uncover “into” a theory of a continuum, a blueprint, a paradigm. It is only when the evidence cannot fit (e.g. if they were to find the fossil of a man in the same place as a T-Rex) that the theory is falsified.
With the hard sciences, the theory itself is subjected to rigorous and continuing tests – any one of which could falsify the theory.
The theory of evolution has a foot on each side. In the microbiologist’s lab, mutations can be provoked and/or observed. In the paleontologist’s dig, the fossil is fit “into” the paradigm “tree of life.”
And the principle betty boop and I keep trying to drive home is not to overstate any of it, not to project the one onto the other. That the paleontologist observes different species in different strata does not ipso facto mean that each variation was brought about strictly by naturalistic means such as observed in the microbiologist’s lab. Nor can it say that therefore God does not exist. Nor can it say that it was not purposeful.
It may be true that every atheist believes in evolution. But not everyone who believes in evolution is atheist. To make such a condemnation is equally an overstatement.
And moreover, is the language still used by some of the most eminent biologists of recent times. For instance, the Nobel prize-winning biologist Jacques Monod, who insists that everything we see all around us in nature, biological and otherwise, is the product of "sheer, blind chance."
I dunno, xzins. Seems to me if a claim like that were true, it would refer to a process nothing short of the miraculous. For a chain of accidents is to be credited with the order of the natural world. On this principle, order rises, spontaneously you see, from disorder.
But jeepers, when exactly did Darwinists start believing in miracles like this?
Order cannot rise from chaos in an unguided physical system. Period.
Even the atheist must admit to space, time, physical laws and constants as “guides” to the system. And science has no materialistic explanation for the origin of space, time, physical laws and physical constants.
Moreover, science has no effective materialistic explanation for the origin of life, inertia, information (successful communication), autonomy, semiosis, consciousness or conscience.
So when some scientists like Dawkins – using the reductionist “methodological naturalism” and the scientific method – look over the upper rim of their glasses at us Christians and declare that the spirit and soul do not exist or that the mind is just an epiphenomenon of the physical brain or that there is no ghost in the machine or that God is a delusion – we understandably shake our heads. Conversely, it is just as annoying to them when we do theology under the color of science.