WK writes:
Sounds more like a failure of design inference to me.
Exactly.
The strange thing about Dragoness's husband (a Dragon?) and other creationists using the platypus is that the animal can be used as a very good illustration of evolution. Aren't monotremes the closest living things to the mammal-like reptiles that evolutionary theory predicts as our ancestors?
What's interesting about them is that they show clearly that breast feeding comes before live birth in our lineage, which seems to me to make sense, as the former would facilitate the latter.
It's fun playing at speculative evolution, and my guess is that our branch of the common ancestor with the modern monotremes was in an environment in which its eggs were vulnerable to a predator or predators, so that any shortening of the period between laying and hatching would be an advantage, leading eventually to instant hatching, then live birth. (That's probably either so obvious that it's standard theory, or completely wrong for some reason I haven't thought of!).