[orionblamblam]

> A wing with or without feathers is an arm.

Indeed so. Add feathers, and a wing can become an arm. So the "irreducible complexity" issue is shown to be nonsense: take away one thing and a structure might not do what it does... but it might be perfectly capable of doing something else.

> However, a wing without feathers won't fly.

Tell that to bats. And to pterodactyls. And to insects.

[Elsie]

An arm WITH feathers won't fly; too much loading, too little power.

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

Not so. A wing is an arm whether or not it has feathers. It is a specialized arm designed for flight. Take away the feathers which are a part of the design, you lose flight. Thus we see, in this case, that feathers are an irreducibly complex component for the function of flight. Since a wing is specifically a forearm designed for flight, removing that capability renders it useless for that design.

And yes, you can come up with examples of organs or body parts which have multiple functions (the esophagus, for example), Your wing example was just not a good one.

However, this still begs the question. How do the irreducibly complex parts of a cell get together and create a living organism? Direct Darwinian Paths are generally ruled out, even by hard-core evolutionists themselves. Indirect paths are the favored method of many Darwinists, but a lot of assumptions go into these calculations - including the one that it will eventually be solved in the future sometime. Sorry, but that is neither falsifiable nor testable.

I thought that we were talking of birds in particular. If you are going to generalize to other forms of flight, why stop with bats, insects, etc.? Why not include mankind?

BTW, bats are an interesting study. There are two main types (big bats and small bats) whose evolutionary pedigree are totally different. What are the odds against, not only a complex organism like the bat evolving the way Darwinists say, but a parallel evolution with the same form and function?