@gungasnake,
I agree with farmerman on every point. I just thought I might add some other reasons.
Quote:Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, 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 design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
Firstly, who ever said that you would 'want' to become a flying bird? Birds fly not because they wanted to, but because they somehow ended up with wings instead of hands with the passage of time.
Secondly, all those specialized things don't need to be evolved at once. Let's say you were a lizard, and you happened to be born with a flat piece of skin underneath each of your arms. You experiment with it for a while, then you realize that the piece of skin actually helps you jump farther by enabling you to glide a bit. It's unstable, but it works. You thus live slightly longer than your friends, which let you have slightly more kids. Some of those kids have the piece of skin as well. Over generations, lizards with the piece of skin start dominating the lizard population in your area. Then, another lizard(a descendent of yours) is born with slightly bigger pieces of skins. After hundreds or thousands of generations, another happens to develop flatter tails, all of which help the lizards fly. After millions or trillions of generations, they have evolved into birds.
Saying that evolution is not possible since the possibility of getting a perfect wing is nil is like saying that an arm is no use at all unless you have all 10 fingernails.
Quote: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 feature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Let's say you're a prehistoric cow. You still only have 1 stomach, and you have sharp teeth despite recently having turned into a herbivore. By a mutation, you are born with dull teeth, perfect for eating plants. Soon, most of the cows in your area have dull teeth. After a thousand years, another cow develops a second stomach. According to you, the teeth should have DE-EVOLVED back to being sharp, and the stomach wouldn't have had that much use. However, since dull teeth definitely helps a cow survive, it's still there.
The thing is, a trait wouldn't evolve if it wasn't useful to survival. Thus, it wouldn't disappear into thin air, it would still be there.
Quote:PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
Why would the 'tiny peripheral groups' seek to conquer others? A tiger with sharp teeth is bound to beat a tiger with dull teeth nine times out of ten, in a fight, let alone competition for resources. You seem to think the 'taking over' of the planet by the new breed of animals would look something like "mutants vs. the world". No. It would rather look something like "mutant vs. original vs. original vs. mutants vs. original vs. original vs. ..."
Animals don't care whether the other guy's and 'original' or a 'mutant'. To them, it's just a competitor to be chased away.
Quote:The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
Same as above
Quote:Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
The age of life on earth is about 4.5 billion years. That's a long time.
If I have managed to convince you that your 'flaws' don't hold up, great! If I didn't, go read "The selfish gene" by Richard Dawkins. It might correct a misconception or two of yours.
