Mister Agenda wrote:Now where did you get that piece of nonsense from, I wonder? Have you ever had a look at the difference between any given scale and say, a flight feather? This is an iguana, which has a load of different types of scale on its body.
Why on earth would you jump straight to flight feathers when no one thinks dinosaurs did? Something resembling down, maybe.
Your theory is immediately in deep doo-doo. As it always is when required to be specific. Here's what I mean:
A flight feather is essential to flight in birds. (Bats and insects are another kettle of fish which I propose raising shortly).
But a flight feather bears no resemblance, fancied or otherwise, to a scale. Correct me if I'm wrong here.
So what happened? Did the flight feather evolve IN ORDER TO allow flight? (That's teleology).
If it didn't, then what was the benefit of having them?
Don't even mention 'insulation'. The down feathers, if you have a look on google, bear no resemblance to a flight feather either. Their function is to insulate - but insulation is not flight.
asyncritus wrote:Add to that the difficulty that there are about 10 different types of feather ON A SINGLE BIRD, your problems increase exponentially.
Start with any kind of feather, then diversify. Not so astonishing when you're not advocating some cartoon version of evolution where they all spring forth fully formed for their future functions.
Diversify? What's that? More pipe dreaming? Those questions I've just raised above need answering, not waving away.
asyncritus wrote:Could, could, could... Sure pigs can't fly?
I think the point is that there is no good reason to believe those features didn't appear prior to flying. In fact, the pneumatized vertebrae of therapod dinosaurs when they are preserved in enough detail indicate their lungs were similar to the lungs of birds, and consistent with continuous flow-through breathing (O'Conner and Claessens).
O'Connor and Claasens have entirely failed to address the main problems in bird lung evolution, as I've shown.
Please try and see these problems:
1 Bird lungs are inelastic (unlike ours/reptiles'). Now suppose a reptile's lungs begin to harden up. What happens? Death and disaster, because it can no longer inhale.
2 Air enters a bird lung on the EXHALATION part of the cycle. On inhalation, it passes directly into the air sacs.
That alone puts the case out of court, because of the sheer impossibility of inhalation-entry into the lungs changing to exhalation-entry.
3 I don't know whether you know it or not, but air in reptilian lungs enters alveoli, which are like little blind-ended air sacs.
In birds, they
pass through tubes, not sacs, called parabronchi. Question: how did sacs evolve into tubes? Answer: they didn't.
asyncritus wrote:Honestly, H, can you see any possible way for the left type lungs to become the right type lungs? I can't see it myself, but maybe you can. If you can't, then you're admitting that brainless, blind, and purposeless mutation plus natural selection is much more intelligent than we are. Well, you are maybe!
I'm sure that brainless, blind, and purposeless mutation plus natural selection is much more intelligent than any of us are, given millions of years to blindly explore 'possibility space'. We're still playing catch up on understanding the results of evolution.
But you don't have impossibility space. 'Millions of years' can't make the impossible happen.
asyncritus wrote:But why should they do so? Surely you're not saying that an organ/metabolism/whatever else can evolve IN ADVANCE of being needed. Somebody said words to the effect that something can't evolve in the Cambrian because it might be of use in the Jurassic. So true.
Very true. But an endothermic metabolism and efficient breathing mechanism have advantages of their own, whether you have wings or not.
I fully agree. But you have to admit that going from a reptile's sluggish ectothermic metabolim to the highest endothermic metabolic rate in the animal kingdom is a leap of fantasy, rather than scientific possibility, don't you think?
asyncritus wrote:Now the questions:
Bird hatches out from reptile's egg, as Goldschmidt suggested, because he knew that there's no other way for this to happen!
At no point would the offspring of an animal be a different species (or subspecies, or race) from the parents. It will be only slightly different from the parents, but if that slight difference gives it a slight advantage, natural selection will tend to conserve the change.
Goldschmidt knew all that as a geneticist - yet he was forced to present this silly theory: because the difficulties in every other method were so enormous. They haven't been reduced in all these years, merely ignored.
The spectacle of a little dinosaur with feathers stuck up its horse's patoot, becoming able to fly from Argentina to California is quite simply, pure nonsense. And if you start saying 'it happened in little steps', then you're back in Lamarck's arms with a vengeance.
asyncritus wrote:To be perfectly honest, when I add up the vast differences between a bird and any given reptile, the impossibility of one evolving from the other becomes positively gargantuan. I've indicated some of the difficulties above, and I'm sure that even you can feel the force of some of those points.
If all the steps are possible, and there's enough time for the steps to happen, it's not impossible.
'If they're possible' is the question that haunts you guys. Is it? Is it really? Could a scale really become a flight feather? Or an ectothermic metabolism become an endothermic? Could a reptile really somehow acquire the flight instincts necessary? Is all that possible?
And if they did, then WHY would they do so? You surely can't see a reptilian proto-bird thinking, Hey, if I could fly, I'd get away from these predators. And that wish becoming the fact. Can you really see that happening? I can't.
You see. teleology is raising its ugly head everywhere, as is the spectre of extinction. A partly formed wing is useless. A perfectly formed wing is equally useless, as asynctropy points out,
if the powering instinct is absent. But instincts, being immaterial, cannot evolve. So where do you go from there?
asyncritus wrote:They could evolve from fish as far as I'm concerned. The question I'm asking is a deeply fundamental one. For A to evolve into B, there are major instinctual questions that need some sort of evolutionary answer. For any function, not existent in A, but existing in B, there MUST be pre-existing instincts powering that function, which have entered the genome. (The whole question is raised, expanded and answered in the book 'How does instinct evolve'. You'll find it on google somewhere.)
At no point is there suddenly a novel function. Flying squirrels and lemurs are gliders who clearly wouldn't have to adjust their instincts too much to transition from leaping to gliding in small steps. After all, at first a small gliding membrane would only let you leap a little farther. Their brains would have the opportunity to co-evolve the instincts to take better advantage of gliding capability. It's not difficult to imagine the descendants of one of these animals transitioning gradually from gliding to true flying in baby steps that let its instincts keep up.
But gliders never become fighter planes, no matter how long they glide!
And that is what you're saying. A lemur can never become either a bat, or a peregrine falcon stooping at 200 km/h. Can you see that happening somehow?
asyncritus wrote:Are yo asking me why a blanket can't evolve into a wing?
More like why fur can't evolve into quills, or down into true feathers.
Simple answer: they can't. The down feathers on a chick are REPLACED by the other 9 types of feathers including flight feathers, which BTW, are of several different kinds, not just one. That's what I mean by saying that your difficulties increase exponentially. If the probability of a scale evolving into type 1 feather is 1 in n, then the probability of 10 types of feather is 1 in n^10. Big number!
asyncritus wrote:Because any of the changes required in that change would be immediately fatal. I might as well quote Denton's remarks on the subject for you. You know he's an evolutionist, but not the usual starry-eyed variety.
Just how such an utterly different respiratory system could have evolved gradually from the standard vertebrate design is fantastically difficult to envisage, especially bearing in mind that the slightest malfunction leads to death within minutes.
So one mutation affecting the structure of the lung meant death immediately. One mutation producing a hole in the bottom of the lung meant death. So where do you go from there?
A hole in the bottom of the lung leading to an air sac would not only not mean death, it could be advantageous. Air sacs are known to have developed in chameleons, snakes, some lizards, btw. The development of flow-through lungs would be easily survivable if they went through a mixed stage. We have the amphibian's three-chambered heart between the fishy two-chambered one and mammalian four-chambered heart to illustrate how we got from two chambers to four without keeling over. We don't have that intermediate stage to illustrate the development of avian lungs, but it isn't THAT hard to come up with a scenario where the animal has lungs that can do both bi-directional and one-directional air flow. Birds HAVE some bi-directional air flow.
Fishy is the right word here! And birds have some bidirectional air-flow? In their lungs? Impossible. Where did you get that from?
asyncritus wrote:I don't argue from incredulity. I make inferences to the best explanation, something that all science does all the time.
So what's the best explanation?
Brilliant Creation.
asyncritus wrote:What could the new bird do with the brand new flight apparatus? After all, he's still a reptile in his head. Can you see it? 'Duhhhh! What the hell do I do with these things'? Jumps off cliff. THUDDD! End of bird evolution.
I'm sure a branch hopper would see immediate benefit from being able to leap a few inches farther thanks to feathers already present on its forearms getting a little longer in the right direction.
Yeah…. And then gradually work its way up to a 5.600 mile two way trans-Pacific crossing between Hawaii and Alaska. You really think that’s possible? ( That’s the Pacific Golden Plover, BTW)
Richard Goldschmidt certainly thought so, or he would never have proposed his Hopeful Monster theory.
That was in the 1930s, right? If only we had learned anything more about evolution in the last 70 years.
One thing I know is that the 'hopeful monster' idea was controversial at the time and has been discarded since.
Not quite.
From:
http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/52/richa ... ldschmidt/ How then can we evaluate, 40 years later, Richard Goldschmidt’s work? To begin with one must realize that even though his ideas were at the time laughed at and generally derided, no one questioned his eminence in the fields of genetics, developmental biology and evolutionary biology.
Nor did all the members of his peer group reject his ideas. For instance, the great British geneticist and embryologist C. H. Waddington, himself a critic of neo-Darwinism as far back as 1952, described The Material Basis of Evolution as “one of the most important of recent contributions to the theory of evolution.”
Stephen Jay Gould describes him today as “one of the premier geneticists of our century”. He also notes that in the last ten years, many of the basic assumptions underlying the neo-Darwinian thesis have been seriously questioned and as a result there has been “a strong reawakening of interest in Goldschmidt’s views among evolutionary biologists.”
Do you know why it was ‘discarded’? Because it sounded too much like Creation. If only Goldschmidt had thought of the asynctropy law, then the whole thing would have been belly-up in the Pacific.
asyncritus wrote:You see, if the whole thing didn't appear in one go, then of what use was the intermediate?
A lung capable of both bi-directional and one-directional air flow would be more efficient than a lung not capable of one-directional air flow at all.
I can’t see it as being possible. A car can’t go forward and in reverse at the same time.
Szent-Gyorgi proposed his negentropy theory, but the new Law of Asynctropy takes the whole thing to a new level. It says that Every one of the functions of life depends on a POWERING INSTINCT. If the powering instinct is not present or available, THEN THE FUNCTION ITSELF IS ABSENT OR IMPOSSIBLE even if the necessary organ is present.
Google returns no results for the term 'asynctropy'.
Poor google!
asyncritus wrote:Again, here's Bird A who's got the equipment, but can't fly. He takes off, narrowly avoids breaking his fool neck, survives and reproduces. How does the information regarding flight enter the genome? Answer, it can't.
But that information MUST enter the genome somewhere along the line - otherwise birds can't fly, ever. So where and how? I read somewhere that some Chinese palaeontologist found the most ancient bird fossils, and the bird could fly. Well, it got those flight instincts somewhere. But where?
THE ABILITY TO LEARN HOW TO FLY
MUST BE THERE, or the wings are useless. It's that instinct again.
Mr A:
To leap an inch farther thanks to a rudimentary gliding surface doesn't take new instincts. However, any instincts that let the animal get another inch by using the surface it has more efficiently would certainly be conserved. And so on.
So are you saying that jumping ‘inch by inch’ further will eventually result in being able to fly the 7,800 miles from Argentina to California? And arrive there on the same date every year (March 18th)?
asyncritus wrote:Remember if Critter A learns how to fly without breaking it's neck, then it CANNOT pass that information down to its offspring who have to start from scratch again - otherwise you're in Lamarckism again. (But I see Dawkins trying to sneak it in by the back door again! Why, because he knows just how ridiculous his theory really is).
If Critter A has a minor change in its brain wiring thanks to genetic variation that makes it glide slightly more efficiently, that mutation or gene combination or epigenetic configuration will tend to be preserved. By the time you get to critter Z+n, you have fully developed wings and the instincts to go with them because at every single point the offspring with the genetic variation likely to be conserved was the same species as the parent.
But we’re not talking about ‘minor changes’. Development from any given reptile into a bird is a major undertaking.
Natural ‘selection ‘ can only select from what’s already there. It cannot
create new information, which is what we need here, to transform a land based creature into an airborne one. On a more earthy level, consider the problems involved in changing a tractor or a motor car into a helicopter or an aeroplane capable of flying from Argentina to California, or 7000 miles non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand (as in the case of the godwit – good name that, hey?). ‘Minor changes’, you say, huh?
Well, I’ve got news for you, Mr A.
asyncritus wrote:Don't you see how hopless (
} that proposition really is? Bird A (with 1 wing) flaps, is spotted by a predator, gets eaten and the whole thing has to start again.
Again, here's Bird A who's got the equipment, but can't fly. He takes off, narrowly avoids breaking his fool neck, survives and reproduces. How does the information regarding flight enter the genome? Answer, it can't.
[…]. And yes, if it gets eaten before reproducing, it wasn't the ancestor of modern birds and some other therapod with slight longer forearm feathers had that honor. Not so implausible once you clear away the straw.
Not straw. Pieces from the crash, or the bones from the predator’s dinner. Totally implausible, I say.
asyncritus wrote:Here we are again:
A (can't fly) --------------X---------------> B (can fly)
How many X's do you want? How many intermediates between A and B? It matters not. Somewhere in that chain, one of them learned to fly AND PASSED THE INFO DOWN TO OFFSPRING.
Unless of course, you want to say that suddenly, a whole flock of fliers appeared. Which is merely another word for creation.
As I see it, you are on some pretty painful horns here. The instinct question, detailed in How Does Instinct Evolve, will kill off evolution theory once this new development of it becomes known.
I suppose the cartoon version of evolution with hopeful monsters and crocoducks might be challenged by it, as it is by pretty much anything.
But you haven’t got much else Mr A.
You are facing a gargantuan heap of gigantic problems. And all you can propose – and Dawkins couldn’t do better than you, with his ridiculous Mount Improbable tripe – is feathers growing longer on some reptile’s scaly forearm, and it becoming a champion long jumper!
Mount Impossible is what you’re facing, and don’t you forget it!
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