Animals with bad design.

Aaron writes:What does it mean to be perfect? Let's push Jerry Coyne's suppositions further. Why didn't God create sea turtles with another set of limbs with sharp claws to fend off predators. Wings would have been nice too just in case it needs a quick getaway.Why can't mice run 60 mph to escape the swooping owl? Why aren't all plant species poisonous to fend off hungry herbivores?Ahh yes, that's more like it - a world where every species has the maximum level of offensive and defensive capabilities.But wait - how long do you think a world like that would last? If every plant and animals is perfectly equipped to fend off every potential snack seeker - nothing would get eaten, nutrients wouldn't be exchanged, the complex circle of life would come to a grinding halt.When it comes to creating a complex interdependent ecosystem, vulnerability is necessary to keep the whole thing going.

Dawkins writes:Note that the arms race is run in evolutionary time. It is not to be confused with the race between an individual cheetah, say, and a gazelle, which is run in real time. The race in evolutionary time is a race to build up the equipment for races run in real time. And what that actually means is that genes for making the equipment to outsmart or outrun the other side build up in the gene pools on the two sides. Second - and this is a point that Darwin himself knew well - the equipment for running fast is used to outrun rivals of the same species, who are fleeing from the same predator. The well-known joke, which has an almost Aesopian ring to it, about the running shoes and the bear is apposite. When a cheetah chases a herd of gazelles, it may be more important for an individual gazelle to outrun the slowest member of the herd than to outrun the cheetah.

Aaron writes: God designed this world for a specific purpose - in order to make it possible for the perfect world yet to come.

Aaron writes: you are looking at it from a human perspective. You are reading your ideas of human suffering into the animal kingdom.

Aaron writes:Again, I think you are reading into it from your human emotional perspectives.

barbara writes:Fine then why don't you list at least 10 examples of species that are actually extinct and 10 examples of species that are descent with modification and how exactly that you determine this to be a fact.

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Extinct_species writes:Descendants may or may not exist for extinct species. Daughter species that evolve from a parent species carry on most of the parent species' genetic information, and even though the parent species may become extinct, the daughter species lives on. In other cases, species have produced no new variants, or none that are able to survive the parent species' extinction.
Extinction of a parent species where daughter species or subspecies are still alive is also called pseudoextinction. Many of prehistoric extinct species have evolved into new species; for example the extinct Eohippus (an ancient horse-like animal) was the ancestor of several extant species including the horse, the zebra and the donkey. The Eohippus itself is no more, but its decendants live on. It is therefore said to be pseudoextinct.