That's one of the problems with evolution - the creature must remain fully functional while all these changes are going on. These creatures must be able to survive while the supposed improvement is occurring. What is more, these improvements must be integrated with the rest of the organism. For example a mutation to allow the growing of a wing has to replace the hands with something in the meantime to enable the organism to feed itself without hands. Until the wings are operational, the organism would be less fit than other individuals without this improvement. You see the problem with evolution is time, it takes time to evolve. The organism does not know that once the new trait is fully developed, it will be better off. All it knows is that the new as yet undeveloped trait makes him less fit at the moment.
Maybe if you stopped thinking as if it's just one organism that's doing the evolving. It's generations upon generation of a whole population that do the evolving.
You don't know how to think in evolutionary terms at all.
Are mixed drinks "less fit" than other drinks???
Dear sir, do you ever read the entire posting, or do you pick out a few words here and there and argue against them to claim victory -- you sort of remind me of the Japanese holdouts from WWII occassionally still found in the Pacific (quick, medved, excerpt that line above, but make sure you don't take it in context!).
The "half-wing half-arm" as you would call it served a very useful function -- it allowed for the rapid climbing of trees to escape predators, a theory, by the way, you "commented on" only two months ago on these threads, so I know you are not unfamiliar with it. Just to enlighten you, a researcher watched young birds with half-formed wings flap those half-wings while climbing trees. After a bit of observation he saw the flapping of these protowings was holding the bird to the trunk, allowing the bird to run with ease up its side.
I've noticed something on these threads: whenever anyone comes up with a rational explanation for something you immediately chime in with a diatribe on that explanation never being observed. But when the rational explanation is supported by evidence, you either ignore it, claiming you never saw it, or you twist it saying it doesn't apply to extinct animals. One must come to the conclusion that:
1) There is more than one person masquerading as gore3000, and the individuals involved do not keep one-another apprised of the current state of the argument;
2) gore3000 is a realtively unsophisticated string of code consisting of a search function and a standard stock of replies (this theory is bolstered by your choice of screenname and your inability to update your replies between threads);
3) gore3000 is a relatively unimaginative (remember, imagination is the tool of the devil) individual who considers outright lying to be alright as long as one does it for God. In this case, I don't want to be anywhere nearby when you go to meet your maker.
Aside from your adoption of more colorful fonts (which seems to be all the rage in creationist circles), your diatribes have not changed one iota since the first day you posted on these threads. You are an example of why Christianity is on the outs throughout most of the world -- why Europeans are abandoning it in droves. You refuse to see the evidence in front of, instead clinging stridently to an increasingly untenable position. When the undecided see the evidence before them, and then here how that evidence means nothing because Godidit, they are going to dismiss the latter view as primitive and irrational. The Roman Catholic Church (Praise the Lord) having been burned by the Galileo gambit, understands that interpretation of Scripture cannot fly in the face of evidence or the Church becomes irrelevant and is replaced by something else. This is why the Catholics interpret Scripture in light of the evidence and why it continues to be the largest church both inside and outside the U.S. Fundamentalist Christian denominations (by which I mean those who take the first book of the Bible as being a word-for-word, no ifs, ands or buts, literal account of how things were done) have made very little headway in regions where science is understood.
If Christianity is to survive, it needs to get with the times. This does not mean abandoning its core teachings -- those are timeless. What it means is, if the evidence is overwhelming that a literal interpretation of Scripture is wrong, then either Scripture is wrong (which is the conclusion many of the undecided draw) or the interpretation of Scripture is wrong. You seem to tread a third path -- that the evidence is wrong, or that a cabal of Satan-worshipping scientists faked the evidence even though no conspiracy could be maintained with the literally tens of thousands of individuals involved. Continue fighting your rearguard action -- I'm sure it makes you feel good -- but a thousand years from now the fundamentalist movement will have joined the long list of extinct heresies.