The "surprise" to me, if any, is that fact that you are yet comfortable enough with roust-a-bout Debate to still tolerate the current atmosphere of Free Republic. As I said, I don't spend as much time here as I used to. The intellectual... atmosphere... has declined, in my elitist and insufferably-arrogant opinion.
I think your opinions are idiotic. You think the same of mine. I'm prepared to say so, and so are you... So be it!! But these days, it seems to me as if the simpering sycophants infesting this Forum have an obnoxious tendency to take things personally... especially if one questions the Dagon-God of modern "compassionate conservatism". This place just isn't as smart as it used to be. And it's a lot more hyper-sensitive.
You're a throw-back to the old days, Vade. A Dinosaur in your own time. "Sticks and Stones may break your bones, but Words will never hurt you." Ahh, for times gone by. It's not the same anymore (JMHO).
This is not particular to rats becoming bats, which is just as well since rats and bats are not particularly related. (Rodents are not postulated as ancestral to bats.) Doc is making an argument that you can't get from A to C because B in between is neither fully A nor fully C and thus useless. However, "useless" does not follow from "being between A and C."
For the record, Confusiornis is even rather less related to the entire Class Mammalia, given that this species belongs to Class Aves.
So what your Kentucky Fried Hoatzin has to do with Bats, is still beyond me.
Gee! Somehow you missed that what a dinosaur can do, a tree-dwelling insectivore mammal can do.
Well, other than the fact that you are hop-scotching across entire Phylogenetic Class Boundaries and an (alleged) 100 Million years of evolutionary time...
The Confusiornis is still a Bird. Still a second-cousin-twice-removed of the South American Hoatzin, NOT AN IGUANA. Just as the Duck-Billed Platypus is phylogenetically closer to an Otter than it is to a Duck.
So what the Confusiornis has to do with Bats is not only beyond my Ken, its relation to the development of Flight and Sonar among Bats remains more the province of a creative writing class, than anything remotely related to Science.
And being lightweight is already useful in an arboreal species which may have to crawl far out on the ends of branches, and maybe leap or glide from there. Here, for instance is a gliding lemur which has independently evolved a lot of bat-like characteristics without being a bat.
You'll forgive me if I explain to you that Flying Squirrels are not, in fact, Bats. Shocking, isn't it. And as to "independently evolved" -- show me, don't tell me.
At the point that you have a BAT on the one hand, and a FLYING SQUIRREL (etc.) on the other... you have a Bat and a Flying Squirrel (or Lemur). Have you any evidence whatsoever for Evolution? No, you have merely assumed evolution.
That which could just as well be the Intelligent Design of two different mechanisms (Flying and Gliding), and which shows up in the fossil record as two different mechanisms (Flying and Gliding), does not prove Macro-Evolutionary progression. You have only assumed as much.
I also notice you've ignored the rest of my post, a considerable body of material refuting the very essence of your spastically flailing arguments. This of course allows you to reappear dumb as a stump tomorrow, trolling for suckers.
I thought the latter half of your Post was burdened by the same assumptions as the former half. Lots of Assertions, little Argument.
If you think I missed anything Relevant, please bring it to my attention.
Altogether, It seemed pretty irrelevant to me.
Best, OP
Gee! Imagine that! You still don't understand, even though I told you exactly what it has to do with bat evolution. It demolishes the particular eyes-jammed-shut thought-experiment that you can't have a wing that's only halfway a wing and halfway something else. The_doc clearly and unambiguously made exactly that argument. It's a perfectly ridiculous example of creationist science in action and I demolished it with one picture of one fossil.
Granted, bats have a lousy fossil record. This may mean no more than that much of their evolution took place in an upland forested environment which is very unlikely to have left any fossils at all. When you look at the fossil record, you see mainly lowland/tidal swamps, sea bottoms, lake bottoms, and maybe a lowland river floodplain. Other topographies, especially the more raised ones, tend to wash away over time. They have essentially no fossil record. The mountains where I live have been eroding since before the Permian-Triassic extinction. That's what mountains do. They wear down.
That's a big gap in the fossil record between the topsoil layer and the first solid rock. There is no fossil-record proof that anything lived here between the time when salamanders ruled the earth and the Indians dropped a few stone arrowheads, but it's ridiculous to suppose that nothing did.
The absence of early bats only means something if you buy the creo nonsense that all absence of evidence is evidence of absence. (Especially when you consider that the fossil record of practically everything else is so much better. You're basically like the old High School bully at the 20th class reunion picking on the only guy left who hasn't bulked up bigger than he is.) If you were going to be consistent about that, the finding of a new fossil to fill a gap would prove something to the gap-gamers. Presence of evidence should be evidence of presence (or the absence of absence, whatever).
But the finding of a new fossil never proves anything to the gap-gamers. What does that tell us? For them, it's clearly not about the actual content of the fossil record at all.
When Darwin first wondered where all the missing links were (and skeptics took up the mocking chant), he was boldly predicting that the very sketchy evidence of his day would be fleshed out further. He said that some kind of Precambrian life would turn up, some kind of link from land animals to whales would surface, some kind of link from apes to man would be found in the fossil record, some kind of link from dinosaurs to birds was likely ...
So was he the luckiest charlatan of the 19th century or what? The actual track record is better than what I outline above. Compare this link to the teats-on-boar-hog "God could have done that" one-answer-fits-everything retrodiction of creation "science."
Note the difference between saying that bats have no fossil record and that bats cannot have evolved. Note the difference between rejecting something on an intellectually honest basis and bludgeoning with how many different ways you can misunderstand and mischaracterize it.
I think your opinions are idiotic. You think the same of mine.
Your opinions are understandable to me, but only in psychological and historical senses. You're stuck in the cultural heritage of an oogedy-boogedy magical past, a 21st-century witch-doctor shaking his rattle at devils and denying both science and logic. The cognitive dissonance of all the evidence against what you believe has driven you nuts. I'm fascinated by the pathology, can hardly look away.
I thought the latter half of your Post was burdened by the same assumptions as the former half. Lots of Assertions, little Argument.
I'm not going to repeat everything in every post, but I have, since your reappearance on this thread, posted to you links to a library worth of evidence that transitional fossils exist and that independent lines of evidence converge to point to evolution. You have only your ability to ignore, wish away, and mischaracterize.
Of course there is a relationship between Vade's use of Confusiornis as an example for bat evolution. The answer is in the name of the bird - to create confusion. there is no way that a bat can in any way be compared to it or have descended from it, but the point here is to create confusion and just to say something which will make it sound like he has refuted your example. The bat is unexplainable by evolution for the many reasons you stated as well as for some additional ones shown in Amazing Creatures .