What survival benefit does a half-leg/half-wing give a mutated freak? Why would such a clumsy fellow, who could neither fly nor run on all fours, nor easily seize prey with his forelimbs, survive better than his more ordinary neighbors to live to reproduce and continue on the road to birdhood? Until he has a useful wing (and the musculature and know-how to take advantage of it), the thing is a liability, if anything.
I remember reading that early winged dinosaurs could not truly fly, but climbed up trees and glided down. While that sounds like fun, I'm wondering what the big evolutionary advantage was to such behavior. A few squirrles do that. Are they evolving into birds, too?
Maybe I'm confused about the whole survival-of-the-fittest thing, but even if something is shown to have come about slowly, incrementally, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is the product of blind chance. Okay, you've got a picture of something that might be a lizard with some sort of little wing. What does that say about the mechanism by which that turns into a bird?
Also, what do all the skulls prove? It is accepted that there were different hominids that were not ancestors of Homo Sapiens. There are also gross differences even among skulls of modern Homo Sapiens (of different races).
What land animals turned into whales? Darwin thought it was bears. My kid's science book speculated it might have been dogs that hung around the water too long (Labs no doubt). How do these transformations come about? How do mutants, who are not specialized to their environment nonetheless prosper so well they stick with their in-between forms long enough to develop a winning strategy in the evolutionary sweepstakes?
How do you get multiple system components that make no sense individually coming together beautifully at just the right time? Why is complexity favored when simplicity can do the job of blindly transmitting the genes at a heck of a lot less energy expended?
I don't think I'm an idiot, too (although that's never a safe assumption). These are questions that should be easily answered, since they are pretty common-sense ones, really, and I'm sure have been asked many times before.
Bottom line is, once you have proven the regular transformation of one species into a completely different one (and I'm not sure that's been done) you still have to explain why and how that happens. A theory that mutations confer survival benefits even during the transitional period where they would seem to be less useful than the preceeding form is illogical.
"Bottom line is, once you have proven the regular transformation of one species into a completely different one (and I'm not sure that's been done) you still have to explain why and how that happens."
There are hundreds of observed speciations. There is not that much difference between mother and daughter species. There are only an average of 4 speciations in an organism in nature in a million years. It takes quite a bit of time for allele changes to accumulate enough to designate a new Genus or larger group.
I posted the picture and you think you wish it away by not understanding how it lived? The limb in question is on an early (Cretaceous) bird. Before someone brings it up, it wasn't the most "modern" (as we would now consider it) bird species in the world at the time, but I'd say that's a good answer to your attempted point. It had an adaptation. Its seeming "throwback" status (being less developed in one certain direction than some other bird) did not hurt it at the time. The wing has unfused "hand" bones which clearly show the creature's quite recent saurian descent, but the bird could fly. Maybe it still made some use of the forelimb as a grasping claw from time to time, or maybe that potential was a useless vestige by then.
Not every bird is a wonderful flyer now. Some of them can't fly at all now. There are or were in recent times flightless bird species on many of the islands of the world. It is always one species per island except in the case of swimmers like penguins and auks. That's either because each island evolved its own species that originally flew there but lost flight over time, or else The Designer never resuses designs for flightless birds unless they can swim.
Maybe I'm confused about the whole survival-of-the-fittest thing, but even if something is shown to have come about slowly, incrementally, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is the product of blind chance.
Yes, you are confused. (That's how Creation Science is done!)
Natural selection is not blind chance. Variation is more or less random, a distribution about a population average. Natural selection is a bias, a pruning.
I don't think I'm an idiot, too (although that's never a safe assumption). These are questions that should be easily answered, since they are pretty common-sense ones, really, and I'm sure have been asked many times before.
Ah, the wail of unsatisfied intellectual curiosity! I'll help you out. Here's the hurdle you're stumbling over. Most people in the middle of these debates suspect that those who really want to learn about evolution will go to the library and check out a book, or Google up a non-creationist website. Everyone is born innocently ignorant of everything. Past a certain age, they address it in school or by self-education in various ways.
The people who wander through these discussions bludgeoning evolution with their ability to play "Twist and Shout" upon it and slaughter strawman versions of it are suspected of not maybe telling the whole truth about who they are and what they are up to. Especially since none of them ever remember Jack from one thread to the next.
So that's your problem. One burning question of these threads is whether "ID," the accumulated disingenuous misunderstandings to date of seething evoluton deniers (99 percent of whom only know the kind of "science" available on sites like ICR and AiG) deserves a slice of the science curriculum in High School.
I'm curious. You concede you might be confused. Are you willing to go into a High School and present your confusion as evidence against evolution? I've been debating creationists for six years now on FR. There are no good pennies among the creation/ID arguments. I don't know of one that bears up under examination. Any and all can be torn to shreds by any of several posters that I can name. I see it done repeatedly, and it never matters. The essence of the opposition is that, so long as they are confused, they're right.