Evolution Logic

Hi, SWC! What are you trying to say here? Scales and feathers don't reproduce, and don't do like X-men and morph into something new with titanium claws.Animals with scales and feathers, like chickens with scales on their legs, do reproduce, and the chicks don't exactly copy every feature of the parents. Some fancy breeds of chickens even have feathers down to their feet - where their ancestors had scales. Is this what you're driving at?

The Nylon Bug.Long story short, it is a bacterium that had a frame-shift mutation that caused it to produce an enzyme that can metabolize nylon. Such a change would qualify it as a new species. Since macroevolution refers to speciation, that is an example of macroevolution.

Hi, you're using my nickname already, do I know you from other forums? If not, just ignore this. Ok, here's what I meant. Evolutionists say that reptiles evolved into birds. Reptiles have scales for a covering, birds have feathers. So, if reptiles evolved into birds, the scales would have to have evolved into feathers. Um, I would not say that speciation is macroevolution. Macroevolution would have to evolve one kind of an organism from another kind. Like a human from a monkey. A bird from a reptile. Etc. That is what I am looking for, not speciation.

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"If you’re living like there is no God you’d better be right!" - Unknown

As in the example I gave you, where the main selection pressure for the evolutionary event happened to be human desire for goofy-looking chickens. Leg scales ----> feathers. QED.No, I don't know you - I'm a lazy, slow typist and abbreviate things sometimes.

No, but see, that is breeding artificially, what you brought up. I want to see something in nature, happening without humans intervening. And, it would have to be a reptilian scale evolving into a bird feather, like a fossil of this.

If you mean a human individual born from a monkey individual, or a bird hatching from an egg laid by a reptile, these are not things that are expected according to evolutionary theory. They are silly creationist straw-man ideas of what evolution is. What you want is not macroevolution (which is really just the result of an accumulation of microevolutionary changes), but something more like saltationism.

In that case you need to look into the large selection of bird-like dinosaur and dinosaur-like bird fossils that they just keep on finding in China, Madagascar, and Argentina. I'll have to dig out my file on them to give you names to Google - there are examples of a variety of not-quite-feathers on dinosaurs all the way to flight-like feathers on "birds" with teeth and long bony tails.That would make a mighty nice thread, btw, if some of you palaeo freaks would help out.....

well, what we have is the proof that one gene alters a condition which must previously exist. birds had feathers on all four limbs prior to developing scutes. in fact, we see confirmation of this in the fossil record: we have some nice four-winged dinosaurs.but your post makes an additional error. while scutes and feathers are very similar in composition, scutes/feathers and reptilian scales (such as the ones found on the bottom of a bird's foot) are not the same at all. feathers evolved from something else. all of the earliest feathers we have are more similar to hair than to scales.Edited by arachnophilia, : typod

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we have quite a lot of examples with stuff similar to down. we even have a tyrannosaurid (dilong paradoxus) now that has downy feathers.added by edit: kind of a funny term. birds ARE dinosaurs. so you can have bird-like dinosaurs, but not dinosaur-like birds. more primitive, yes. more similar to non-avian dinosaurs, yes.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

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No, that is not what I want. What you described with the reptile laying an egg with a bird is the "hopeful monster" theory which some have made after rejecting Darwinism. That is not macroevolution.What I would mean, by a human from a monkey, is a REAl fossil(s) of this transition, one that is valid and relative. I know you believe evolution takes time and goes in steps. So show me the REAL steps of a monkey turning into a human, or something to the sort.And no, microevolution does not accumulate to make macroevolution. They are two different things. Microevolution, I like to call it "variations within a kind", is those changes that happen within a kind. Macroevolution, real evolution, is when one kind of an organism evolves into a different one.

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"If you’re living like there is no God you’d better be right!" - Unknown

But see, if reptiles did indeed evolve into birds as evolutionists claim, then the scales would have to have evolved into feathers, and the one lung type would have to have evolved into the other one, and so on... I would like someone to show me a fossil of this transition, or evidence that it could happen in the genetic code, or something to the sort.

But would these finds show transitions from reptilian body parts to bird body parts? Scale-feathers? Or something else?

Whale evolution is a GREAT place to start.These things you want to see certainly exist.Philip D. GingerichEvolution: Library: Whale Evolution

no. not at all. for starters, not all reptiles have scales in the manner that you are probably thinking. quite a lot are rather smooth skinned. and, we have a number reptiles, and things descended from sauropsids, that have hair. while early mammals/thecodonts are not the best example, pterosaurs are much more closely related. they are also archosaurs, reptiles, and many have hair.feathers are hair-like structures, and simplest feathers (like down) are nearly analogous to hair in almost every way. first one strand per follicle, then many (down) and then twisting together into harder spines (the sorts of feathers chicken feet grow). as the spines continue to twist, you start seeing strands extend from them. from there it's just barbules to aid in rigidity, and assymetry to aid in flight. we have examples of many of these types of feathers. we have a whole thread on the avian lung. it's a little hard prove definitively, since internal organs fossilize so rarely. but one thing is actually somewhat certain: theropod dinosaurs had lungs VERY similar to modern birds, and long before they could fly. we know this because many had pneumatized bones, like birds. in a bird skeleton, the hollow bones are actually linked to the respiratory system, via the air sacs. so the fact that a dinosaur like velociraptor has hollow bones means it almost certainly had air sacs as well. the system as a whole appears to have gone from a normal reptilian lung (lacking diaphragm), to a single-cycle air sac system, which used the sacs somewhat like a diaphragm. from there, the process just becomes two-cycle, instead of one. the curious point of this that all the while, dinosaurs remain "rib breathers." and that includes modern birds -- which still use the motion of their chests to aid respiration.you may want to look at my message 24 of that thread for a more complete explanation. Edited by arachnophilia, : typo

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That does not show macroevolution. And, if it were true, it would not help evolution, it would show just the opposite, a whale losing legs. While evolution requires GAINING them. This would only prove the point that creatures can't gain new body parts that are not of their kind.

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"If you’re living like there is no God you’d better be right!" - Unknown