Apos
Tank
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Ok: so? This is exactly what the fossil record shows them developing.
Again, so? Creatures have obviously figured out all sorts of ways to handle this, and the development of new ways is not implausible. Reptiles today, for instance, often manage body temperature simply by moving in and out of the sun and water.
You are raising issues with moving from water to land, but I'm not sure why. Sure, land has all sorts of different challenges. But evolution is exactly about how these challenges were met. If your implication is that dealing with them is an "all or nothing" proposition, then you are simply mistaken. It's not. Dealing with them is part of moving onto land, but becoming fully land based and accustomed to that lifestyle took millions of years of different gradual modification, and many creatures still haven't made the transition completely even today (in part because there is nothing special or inevitable about the transition: frogs do just fine being partly aquatic and partly suited for land: they don't necessarily NEED to become more land based).
Most lobed fishes ALREADY had a lung system. It wasn't "perfect" but it worked decently enough to allow them to get air out of the atmosphere. Again, like all the rest, it wasn't something that had to happen overnight. There are all sorts of papers on the evidence of how each and every one of these traits evolved.
But again, this is just assuming that to make it in life, you must have full and perfect flight just like a modern bird. Why assume that? It's not even clear that feathers arose for flight in the first place: several dinosaurs had them that clearly could never have flown, and they may have used them for warmth instead.
There is a cotinuum of usefulness from being a fast runner on ground all the way to flight. Being able to glide, even for short distances, for instance, has advantages. Evolution only needs a tiny amount of advantage for some trait to be selected for. It doesn't forsee flight and design towards it: it simply selects traits that happen to play a role in improving survival in some environment, and then, if its still useful to do so, keeps building on them.
Nonsense. I already linked one. Ancient birds didn't have the eact same flight capability and exact specialities and variations of birds today, but they had traits that worked in their ecology and which are distinctive and obvious ancestors of traits that all birds share today.
If anything, this goes against your case. Piltdown man was indeed a careful fraud, but it was discovered so late in part because it wasn't paid much attention to in the first place: it was considered unremarkable other than being somewhat of a questionable anomaly in that it didn't really fit in anywhere obvious with all the other fossil finds. When it was exposed as a fraud, it was scientists that exposed it as a fraud! The fact that someone made one or two frauds out of THOUSANDS of legitimate fossil is hardly much help in trying to hadnwave away human evolution. You can't wave away all that evidence by mere reference to the fact that someone passed off a fraud for a while when that fraud was basically not very remarkable.
Cite for this research showing that it is "impossible"? I mean, come on. Even some apes around today can walk bipedally, some for short distances, but a few almost all the time. Is it just a coincidence that apes are partially bipedal, and that their hips have only slight balancing differences from ours?
First of all, no. This isn't part of evolutionary theory proper: it's generally referred to as abiogenesis. The two theories aren't dependent on each other, because they involve different mechanisms and one can be true without the other being true.
Second of all, no one thinks that likfe started with anything that looked even remotely like a modern cell. It would have been far far simpler. It may not have even had a cell membrane, for instance.
Again, no, not likely a cell, or at least, not anything like what we call a cell today.
This is a bizarre statement. No, we do not have a complete picture of how life began: what it looked like, even which elements of life came first (metabolism? heredity?) But that doesn't mean that there is nothing scientific about the inquiry, that we have learned nothing, and that the field isn't worth pursing. It's steadily delivered all sorts of fascinating results as to how early life could have evolved.
We haven't really studied any other planets for life, so we'll just have to wait and see on that.
Nope. This is a straw man. No one thinks a complex modern cell is what early life was like. That's, in fact, almost 100% backwards, because modern cells are the MOST evolved structures on the planet: they are the furthest from early life of anything.
These calculations are pure nonsense even if it hadn't already made the mistake of using a bacterium (of which even the simplest is still a vastly more evolved and complex strucutre than early life would ahve been). You cannot model chemical reactions or early ecologies as random assemblages. It makes no sense. The probabilities aren't all indepedent, you don't know the conditions, and the idea that a SPECIFIC protein has to be created is as ludicrous as me dealing you a hand of poker and telling you that the odds on getting that hand are a million million to one, and so it must have been a miracle. There's so much wrong with the logic here it's hard to even know where to start.
Again, while we don't know everything about the evolution of everything, the arguments that evolving these things was impossible, or that they needed to be "all or nothing" simply doesn't fly. It isn't so. If you actually read actual papers concerning the evolution of these things, or even just look at actual living life today, you'll see all sorts of different ways for different systems to work and evolve.
[qote]Mutations caused are unlikely ever to be useful. During tens of thousands of experiments on creatures to see if any positive mutation came out, there was not an affirmative result.[/quote]
Simply not true at all. I mean geez: there are hundreds of papers every YEAR in biology journals that would make no sense if this were true. Of course, what a "positive" mutation is is probably more complicated than you are aware of, but that's a discussion for another time.
Those things that would make it worse are generally almost immediately discarded, leaving only those things that are neutral and/or beneficial.
Ok. Isn't it interesting how Cyt-C is in nearly all life, and yet the variations of it match up almost exactly to the same tree of life we can build from, say, the fossil record? That is, the creatures who have the most in common with us in their verision of Cyt-C are those that are most closely related to us in terms of evolutionary ancestry.
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