Flight feathers: simplest disproof of evolution

I would first recommend that you read the following,

Chaterjee ,S. and R. J. Templin, 2004.Feathered coelurasaurs from China; New light on the arboreal origin of avaian flight feathers. inFeathered Dragons,p251-281Indiana University Press ,Bloomington Indiana.

This is a nice easily understood chapter on how , by following the fossil record on featherd dinosaurs and dawn birds, we can see the development of the calamus and barbule (the "Stems" of a birds feather). The evolution of the calamus and barbule can be followed from a very simple stalklike structure in the early Jurassic to a complex structure that first developed a rachal ridge and then became fully differentiated for flight. These barbules have been cross sectioned from fossils and studied to death and the evolution of their structure from simple downy body covers , to symmetrical display and finally flight feathers is not a "mystery" as gunga wants you to believe.

That's still needing to get lucky way too many times and it doesn't answer the question: What kind of mutation is going to turn down feathers into flight feathers ONLY ON THE CREATURE'S ARMS, WHERE THEY WILL BE NEEDED AFTER OTHER MUTATIONS TURN THOSE ARMS INTO WINGS??

I always wonder how an anti-evolution argument can be made with this kind of statement. I mean come on, really? As opposed to what? God miracled the feathers into existence all the sudden?

Haven't you ever made or created or designed anything?

Chaterjee discusses that by recounting the fossil record of various feather sequences on dino and bird fossils. I guess your real comment of disbelief is predicated upon an assertion that 110 MILLION years aint enough to develop flight feathers from primitive spicules and "Downy feathers"
All I can say is that the cross sectioning of barbules has revealed a fairly good progression to flight.
Certain pre bird Jurassic dinosaurs had feathers all over their extremities

Sorry, but talking about the fossil record is not "discussing that". Stop avoiding the question: What kind of mutation is going to turn down feathers into flight feathers ONLY ON THE CREATURE'S ARMS, WHERE THEY WILL BE NEEDED AFTER OTHER MUTATIONS TURN THOSE ARMS INTO WINGS??

since no genetics of the ancient ones is possible, the fossil record is as compelling a feature as possible. This includes the clear stratigraphic sequence that shows the appearance of structured barbules came with deep time in the Cenozoic. That sequencing of feathers v time is pretty damn convincing. We weren't there so our speculation of the origin of flight feathers is based upon "the present being key to the past" and looking at embryological evidence .
The genetics of various feather structures in several existing ratites ,buteos, hummingbirds and parrots (there are hummingbirds and parrots that have symmetric primitive flight feathers) as well as those of jungle fowl (these produce downy chicks) have shown differences in their genes that
Chaterjee has analyzed with comparisons to the fossil record barbules. To clearly show that the advnces in feather structures HAD HAPPENED during a brief 110 million year period is pretty compelling.

ANYWAY, Im certain that no scientific evidence would satisfy your worldview. Being satisfied with fairy tales tht have NO evidence in being, is far superior, in your mind, to using inductive reasoning working on interdisciplinary evidence

Nothing happens on one big jump. Fluffy down doesn't turn into the final form of flight feathers with one mutation. Different aspects of flight feathers evolved slowly for different reasons. One reason is that feathers also provide water proofing as well as insulation, so not all of the characteristics of "flight" evolved originally for "flight". They were selected for different reasons and only later adapted for flight when they were beneficial for flight.

You are hung up on overly simplistic and inaccurate understandings of how evolution actually works.

Gung I'm afraid I'll have to agree with Ros. To decry evolution on that basis is a lot like dismissing the existence of other galaxies on the basis that each one looks like an individual star

I don't follow the logic of that at all. So far, nobody has answered the basic question here: What kind of a mutation is going to change down feathers into flight feathers, only on a creature's arms where they will be needed for flight after other mutations change those arms into wings? What is the difference between believing in that sort of thing and believing in magic?

Evolution is supposed to be driven by random mutations, and not purposeful mutations which would amount to the same thing as engineering changes or re-design. A random mutation which changed down feathers into flight feathers would almost certainly do so over the creature's entire body and even were that not the case, would be just as likely to change only the feathers on the creature's feet or head as on his arms.

Incidentally here's Dawkins deep detailed explanation of how birds evolved, based on years of deep scientific study-
“My guess is that both bats and birds evolved flight by gliding downwards from the trees" (Climbing Mt Improbable p 113/14)

In other words he's saying animals were in the habit of throwing themselves out of trees and getting splatted, until one miraculously sprouted wings!
Haha he's a funny guy..

It seems far-fetched to reject an otherwise very consistent theory on the basis of a single apparent exception

The theory is totally snaffed and most of the evidence of this is deliberately kept from the public.

The following is a minimal list of entire categories of evidence disproving evolution:

• The decades-long experiments with fruit flies beginning in the early 1900s (decades of attempts to produce macroevolution in the lab produced only fruit flies).
  
• The discovery of the DNA/RNA info codes (information codes do not just sort of happen...). This in fact explains the failure of the fruit fly experiments, i.e. our living world is entirely driven by information and the only information there ever was in this picture was that for a fruit fly.
  
• The discovery of bioelectrical machinery within 1-celled animals.
  
• The question of irreducible complexity.
  
• The Haldane Dilemma: the gigantic spaces of time it would take to spread ANY genetic change through any halfway large group of animals. People who have studies thi sone speak in terms of quadrillions of years.
  
• The increasingly massive evidence of a recent age for dinosaurs, including soft tissue being found in dinosaur remains, petroglyphs showing known dinosaur types, and actual radiocarbon dates for dinosaur remains yielding dates of 20K - 40K prior to the present.
  
• The DNA analysis eliminating Neanderthals and thus all other hominids as plausible human ancestors.
  
• The total lack of intermediate fossils where the theory demands that the bulk of all fossils be clear intermediate types.
  
• The question of genetic entropy.
  
• The question of flight feathers, which could not plausibly evolve.
  
• The question of paranormal things (ganzfeld exsperiments etc.) which could not plausibly evolve.
  
• The arguments arising from pure probability considerations which Fred Hoyle noted.
  
• The question of computing elements at a cellular level ( http://programmingoflife.com/watch-the-video ).
  

Like I say, that's a minimal list.

Thanks Gung for that list and I can't refute any of it but I suspect the volume of arguments supporting evolution is more convincing; while it's hard to believe that there hasn't been any speculation accounting for the listed exceptions

BUT of course I could be dead wrong. Maybe one drawback of a scientific tendency is to give the preponderance of evidence more weight. It's just that if the flight-feathers issue is typical then I'm even more assured that the "disproof" notion is wild exaggeration

It only takes one counter-example to disprove any theory.

Bt that is, Gung, if the example itself bears no exception

I believe the argument about flight feathers satisfies that requirement, as does the question of the decades-long experiments with fruit flies.

I am not familiar with the fruit fly experiments. What were they doing with them?

As an aside, if flight feathers did not evolve, then how do you explain them? What is the alternative theory?

God or possibly somebody else, possibly an employee of God's, designed and created flying birds.

If you aren't a flying bird and you want to become one, you'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through lungs and a similarly high-efficiency heart, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters, and a number of related features.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitesimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

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.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events. That stands everything we know about mathematics and modern probability theory on its head. There is no way to view believing in such a system as respectable any more.