Intermediates

No problem. Well, when we look back we do see where there were changes, and we've kind of grown used to the high vaulted skulls of modern humans rather than the lower vaults of Neanderthals.But if you were raised in a population of Neanderthals you would consider that lower vaulted skull and the large brow ridges the height of style and beauty. (And the tail array of a peacock is just the thing to turn on a peahen.)The book The Clan of the Cave Bear explores the human/Neanderthal perspective at some length. You might give it a read.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Hi again AndrewPD, sorry I though you already had been around long enough to learn the basic ropes, or I would have given you some tips. Correct, which is why creolution (what you think is evolution) is false and (actual) evolution is not - evolution (the real version) does not claim in any way shape or form that such derived hereditary traits occur due to a single mutation, and certainly that no derived hereditary trait such as you mention occurs in a population, much less an individual, "over night" - rather that they occur over many generations and involving many mutations along the way.Curiously such things are actually documented in real evolution. See the discussion on the development of the eye by accumulated stages. Again correct, and again this is also what evolution actually says: that natural selection removes less viable individuals from the breeding population, so that the mutations that cause deformities are also removed from the genome of the population. And I'm betting that you did not pay attention to what he said about them.Yes, the Hoatzin has claws when young - a feature that you would expect in a real intermediate between wing-clawed feathered non-flying dinosaurs and non-wing-clawed feathered flying dinosaurs. As do the other derived hereditary trait homologies (feet, breast bones, lungs, etc etc etc) between wing-clawed feathered non-flying dinosaurs and non-wing-clawed feathered flying dinosaurs. This claw is also, interestingly, in the same location as claws seen on Archeopteryx, another indication that you are seeing an intermediate derived hereditary trait. Curiously the claw does not contribute to (nor hinder) the ability of the Hoatzin to fly: it is a vestigial remnant trait, kept to enable the young to climb in trees before they can fly, and is lost in adulthood. Curiously, reality is totally unimpressed by your opinion or what you can "read" into the clouds in the sky. It blithely continues to actually be reality, including evolution, including speciation, including descent from common ancestors, including the mountains of evidence for evolution that turn up every year, almost like clockwork (perhaps it's designed that way?), including the evidence of the skulls shown. Do you think these are the ONLY ones known? or do you have some inkling of the multitudes of evidence for many of these intermediate stages in the evolution of man? Is it possible that over 100 skulls from the same general location in time and space are all deformed in exactly the same way while simultaneously there are no fossils of non-deformed skulls in those same time and space locations? In a word - I know that you have. You have a very very very poor understanding of what evolution really involves, and your ignorance, whether due to your inability\unwillingness to learn the facts first, or your being deluded by the falsehoods of others (no fault of your own), is your problem - only you can solve it, and it is possible to solve it ... by learning what evolution is really about.See Evolution 101 - Understanding Evolution for a basic introduction and a self-directed educational program from a university that actual teaches the real thing.Start by discarding what you think you know - it's mostly wrong, misinformed, ignorant and false. This is true to such an extent that what you think are "problems" for evolution are actually why evolution is correct. This is why you are actually correct when you say things that you think evolution has wrong, like:

• None of these can be produced in one mutation (over night) and
• Yet deformed/ill humans find it hard to survive long enough to procreate.

For these are examples of what evolution actually says, and what you are "disproving" is not evolution but the creolutionist falsehood you think is evolution. In other words, whatever you think is evolution, is more likely to be the opposite of what evolution really involves.Enjoy.

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What does aesthetically pleasing have to do with anything. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder man. I can think of plenty of current "fully formed" (as if there were another option) species that are definitely NOT aesthetically pleasing.....here's a few off the top of my head I find downright ugly....aye-aye of madagascar, a deep sea angler, a camel spider, leaches, a star nosed mole, & this dog.....http://www.untoldentertainment.com/blog/img/2009_09_09/uglyDog.jpg I see no difference aesthetically between a short necked giraffe or ancient horse to their modern counterparts.Lets consider which modern species today had more aesthetically pleasing ancestors. The aye-aye for example has a common ancestor with all other lemurs of madagascar. Lemurs exist only in madagascar but their are dozens of different species which are all furry cute aesthetically pleasing critters......except the aye-aye, they are hideous. This is just my opinion, maybe others find them cuddly. According to wikipedia though, even the locals of madagascar see them as a sign of evil & death. But thats the point aesthetics are a matter of opinion & have nothing to do with it.....its form & function....if this means aesthetically pleasing.....then all species are & have been such. No species has had "half-formed" stages.....it just doesnt work that way.

Like this guy?: (it's an okapi, btw)

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Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people
-Carl SaganFor me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
-Carl Sagan

They don't have to be aesthetically pleasing to me, just sexually attractive to each other. That's a matter of taste. And a peculiar one. You find three-toed horses and short-necked giraffes ugly? Why? And yet while you condemn them as "half-formed", you are baffled as to why they were replaced by creatures that you presumably regard as fully-formed.Your misconceptions seem inconsistent.

But Dr A, you should know by now that God created them all to please us!This is the first time I have ever heard the Aesthetically Pleasing Argument as a reason to reject evolution.

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What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty PythonYou can't build a Time Machine without Weird Optics -- S. Valley

Curiously, male okapi have horns that are like giraffe horns too. enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : code

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Homo is a tad special in this regard. We have gotten smarter as we evolve allowing us to remain in the old habitat even as we enter new habitats. We, therefore, competed directly with our ancestors and off shoot populations of Homo.Contrast this with bears. Polar bears developed the ability to enter a new environment NOT in competition with brown bears. Both bears thrive in their separate habits in which each can out compete the other. This is the case for most species.

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The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it cannot break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.

What do you mean by stage of development?There are organisms with less complex eyes because that is all they need. They are not passing through a stage of development.A mollusc doesn't need a humans eye and the eye of a cat will never develop into a humans eye.But to get from a simpler eye to the human eye you would surely need numerous beneficial mutations and at no stage from simpler eye to extremely complex eye could the mutation create a disadvantage.And this is part of my thread concern you would need numerous stages to get from species to new species. So many stages that many should still exist. If the creature that bore the "advantage" died out it couldn't leave ancestors.I don't see the logic of drawing the conclusion that because there are similar eyes and skulls and genetic patterns that we are related.If you see a professional Tom Cruise look-alike you don't assume he's directly related to Tom just someone randomly with a striking resemblance.The skulls being found are of species that didn't survive yet we are to believe ourselves their offspring.Edited by AndrewPD, : No reason given.

Yes aesthetics and subjective taste is controversial. But if you took a sample average I am sure that you'd find people thought a butterfly was generally attractive and a moth less so.Apparently one of the reasons we find people attractive is because of signs of fertility.
So if we find a deformed human unattractive it is because they don't look fully functional.
Likewise we could judge by another animals appearance whether it is fit. We can look at an animal and see whether it's ill. So I see no problem in looking at an intermediate species and having the same sense of speculation.Aesthetics not relating to sexual selection is hard to explain but we seem to have it. We don't just find beauty in fertility but equations, logic etc.

I LITERALLY just explained this to you.If you have nothing but an eyepatch that detects light and you have an offspring which has 1 slight mutation resulting in a dimple of the skin under the eyepatch - that offspring has a MORE complex eye which not only determines if there is light, but can determine WHERE it's coming from.That's just from one minor change in morphology.Each small change is a slightly better eye. That wasn't the conclusion drawn. The point was you were claiming that eyes which are less than human in complexity couldn't work because they aren't fully formed.They _ARE_ fully formed. They _ARE_ fully functional.As for drawing conclusions, morphology and more simple features is good evidence for evolution, but is not in and of itself the best or only source of evidence for evolution.In fact, in my opinion, ERVs are the best evidence for evolution. I'm pretty positive that had we completely skipped Darwin and not even heard of evolution prior to the discovery of ERVs, we'd have been able to puzzle it out strictly from their evidence. Is your great great grandfather alive?He didn't survive. Why do you believe you are his offspring?

What I am saying here is that the ancestors of humans had to be healthy enough to survive long enough to produce, so why would they die out at all?I am saying that it is precisely because a mutation has to survive through being beneficial that it is strange for an intermediate to die out.As I mentioned with the Dodo it died out and left no beneficial mutations because it wasn't wily enough. Things that go extinct don't appear to be replaced by better models. Rather they are replaced by a completely different species.

As I have said a snake doesn't need a human eye so why would you class a human eye as "better"?A snake will never evolve a better eye because it doesn't need one.For a human to survive in its current body it has to have good eyesight immediately it cant afford to wait for beneficial mutations. An owl has to have good night vision as well as the ability to fly.The human eye is part of a bigger package that all has to survive not just an eye mutation. But wonderfully all the neccesary mutations coincide.But I don't think the presence of a simpler eye or knee proves that you can remove a part of the human eye or knee and it still function. There are simpler and more complex computers (abacus). But because they are only conceptually related you couldn't take much from your computer and it still function.

Not a pretty butterfly
Butterfly Pictures #4A very pretty moth
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/49/146397616_d4d4b9d5c2_o.jpg You are mixing and matching.Symmetry is the hallmark of beauty.
Deformation is deviation from the norm.
Signs of fertility are secondary sexual characteristics. (big boobs). Let's say that humans are evolving into those tiny gray aliens everyone claims exist. (They aren't, evolution doesn't suggest this - but I need you to be able to visualize where we're gonna end up for this exercise).So, current humans are like you or me.
Humans 20 million years from now are like the grays - short, hairless, big eyes, tiny nose, tiny mouth.Here is an example of a human who is one step further in the evolution toward the grays than I am. She has a more "gray-like" skull. Bigger eyes. Small mouth and chin.That's a couple variations closer than my big square heard, normal sized eyes, big mount and jaw.Clearly, she's not a hideous monster with whom no human would dare mate.Edited by Nuggin, : No reason given.

"better" in this case means more complex and able to preform more functions.A snake doesn't "need" a better eye, but a snake WITH a "better" eye is "better" suited than his brother who has a typical snake eye. He's therefore more likely to survive and pass along his genes, thus increasing the percentage of snakes with "better" eyes until they all have the "better" eye. There is a range of eyesight in living snake species. Some see better than others. Can you list this "bigger package" for us because I've explained it to you twice and repeating myself a 3rd time clearly isn't going to make a difference.What mutations occur in the human eye which are located no where else in primates, or mammals for that matter. That's also wrong. I have a typical PC. It has a floppy drive, a DVD drive, a keyboard, a mouse, 4 blocks of ram, a monitor, a case, a power supply, two hard drives, a sound card, ethernet card and a graphics card.If I removed the floppy drive, the case, the DVD, one of the harddrives two of the RAM chips - the computer would still allow me to post to this website and do all my normal activities except that I could only install software from a download.If I removed my sound card and my graphics card, I would no longer be able to play the games I enjoy, but I could still come here and post.If I removed the mouse. I could still come here and post, it would just be a much slower process.If I removed the ethernet card, I could still write all these messages in a text program. I just couldn't post them.If I removed the monitor, I could STILL write the messages, however I would likely make A LOT of mistakes while doing it.If I removed the remaining hard drive, I wouldn't be able to use the computer as I normally use it. However, it would still function as a heat generator, as a fan, as a "beep" maker.If I removed the power supply, it would stop functioning as a machine. However, it would still be a fully functional tool for other uses (paperweight, etc).Just because something doesn't work EXACTLY AS IT DOWN RIGHT NOW, doesn't mean that it has NO function whatsoever.