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To: Gladwin
I am willing to open this point to the rest of the people on this thread.

What, you can't figure it out for yourself? Try reading through your own stupid link and see if you can find anything about features devolving while others are evolving, and report back to us. Basically, the discussion you linked to was a sort of a lame attempt to link mathematical entropy theory to evolution arguments somehow or other. It's not even clear that the poster (on t.o) makes any sort of a point which is relevant to evolution at all, much less to the specific argument which I use about features devolving.

52 posted on 06/13/2002 3:58:29 AM PDT by medved
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To: Gladwin
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

In medved's post, he said that my link on information theory didn't really critique the above argument. Since my ego isn't invested in the game of Cretigo, I will concede this point. Still, this does not imply that the argument above is correct. As I read it more closely, this is a form of the argument against the evolution of the eye. It argues that a half-formed eye is of no use at all, and is more likely to be selected against. Thus, there is no transitional path to a human eye, or an insect eye. The same argument is made against mammalian hearing.

So, this appears to be an argument against transitional forms. As such, it corresponds more closely to Argument M in the Cretigo list.

I apologize to everyone for having to re-mark your Cretigo cards ;)

81 posted on 06/13/2002 9:30:28 PM PDT by Gladwin
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