rationalskepticism.org

newolder wrote:

Wortfish wrote:...

I would appreciate it if you would actually engage with my three points rather than just talk about a time before this and that.

I would appreciate you understanding evolution by means of natural selection but that ain't gonna happen either.

I am referring to Darwin because he came up with the idea that biological structures, like the eye, could be built up gradually over successive and related steps through the selection of random variations. It is an interesting idea, but it doesn't really have any supporting evidence, and there are serious theoretical problems in supposing that the hypothetical incipient stages in the evolution of a new structure would be sufficiently useful to be preserved by natural selection. I refer you again to St. George Mivart's devastating critique of the theory of natural selection: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Genesis_of_Species/II

Natural Selection, simply and by itself, is potent to explain the maintenance or the further extension and development of favourable variations, which are at once sufficiently considerable to be useful from the first to the individual possessing them. But Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may afterwards become.

This is true of the vertebrate eye, the tetrapod limb, the avian feather, the cetacean fluke etc...