@gungasnake,
gungasnake wrote:
Flight feathers, easiest disproof of evolution
Chuck Darwin said:
Quote:"If it could be exhibited that any complex organ was, which could not maybe have been organised by numerous, successive, little adjustments, my theory would utterly break down."
The modern synthesis of evolution posits that evolution is driven by a combination of mutations and natural selection: mutations create new kinds of plants and animals and then selection weeds out the "unfit" from amongst those new kinds. In particular, natural selection does not create anything, it's an agency of stasis and not of change. It generally weeds out anything an iota to the left or right of dead center for a given species and is the cause of the stasis which the fossil record exhibits.
Consider feathers, which come in more than one form. Down feathers serve for insulation and are not that much different from hair or fur. An evolutionist could talk about fur mutating into down feathers and not sound totally stupid. But flight feathers are so totally different from down feathers that you'd need TWO mutations to get to them i.e. one mutation to get from fur to down feathers and then another to get from down feathers to flight feathers.
Flight feathers are asymmetric (one side shorter than other) and they pivot so as to open and let air pass through on upstrokes and close again on down-strokes and a the short side is the locking side. Flight feathers involve a complex system of barbules and hooks as the image shows to create the strength needed to bear weight. Down feathers don't have any of that stuff.
The question is, what kind of a mutation would cause down feathers to mutate into flight feathers
ONLY ON THE CREATURE'S ARMS where they will be needed after other mutations turn those arms into wings??
Evolutionism basically amounts to a belief in magic. Flight feathers are one of the most easily grasped instances of this, but there are others which are just as bad.
You clearly do not understand what evolution is.
You are working from a premise that if a bird has wings that the wing was necessary and fully functional in ancient birds. No. That is absolutely wrong.
You are also wrong about natural selection. How it works is a species within a particular niche environment has flexibility if elements within that niche change, such as a food source, climate, predators, ect. Now what this means is if the species can adapt to changes in say the climate (which changes slowly) by adding additional fat layers to insulate itself or on the flip side to reduce fat layers if the temperature rises then slowly over many generations the species will have less comparative fat than it's ancestors.
So let's take the example of a bird. Penguins don't fly yet they also have feathers. There is well documented phases of bird evolution where early birds had feathers but they did not fly. How do they know it didn't fly? Because of the bone structure and positioning of those bones did not enable it to utilize flight. As the generations progressed the arm bones altered enough to allow later generations to climb trees and swoop down from heights to catch their prey. They didn't fly, but instead glided. Why did they climb trees? To get a better view on potential food. Then we progress further where the species branches again towards birds that could sustain flight longer until they reach a point when later generations were able to fly consistently.
Any time you work from the premise of "how is this feature possible now if it requires it's full function now?" That is just plain ignorance of how the whole process works.
Every species, both once living and living today ARE constantly (but slowly) evolving. The process is very gradual and the environment plays a huge role on weather or not this species can maintain supplying offspring. If it can't it goes extinct. Some times a branch species may have the ability to cope with the changes and it survives where as it's counterpart species dies.
Anyone who denies that evolution is happening is just ignorant of what evolution means and how the process works. They make assumptions without fully having enough data. In other words they generally and almost always lack an education on the subject.
