TOE and the Reasons for Doubt

Indeed, the darker skin is considered the more ancestral phenotype. This should be obvious considering that Africa is the area that modern humans are thought to have migrated out from. There are advantages, the migrating populations who moved to cooler temperate regions like northern Europe would not recieve the same benefit of the melanin in terms of sun protection, and might in fact suffer due to a reduced production of vitamin D in the weaker light. Darker skinned children in cooler temperate climates are consequently at higher risk of suffering rickets although diet or supplementation can address this. Therefore the loss of high melanin levels is beneficial in the cooler temperate environment.Your point about heat absorption is arguable since in more Arctic regions populations like the Inuit do indeed have darker skin, the most current explanation I have seen of this phenomenon however is again related to vitamin D, namely that the Inuit diet is high in oily fish which naturally contain high levels of vitamin D.TTFN,WK

I'm not sure what question you are really asking here. If you are asking ..."If we remove any specific part of a modern living cell will it cease to survive?"Then the answer is no. There are some parts whose removal will compromise the cells viability, but there are others whose removal will still allow the cell to function. Depending on the specific flavour of irreducible complexity you prefer this either does or doesn't make a living cell irreducibly complex.If on the other hand you are asking ..."If we remove all the parts of a living cell will it still survive?"Then clearly the question is nonsensical because having removed all of its parts there will be no cell left to survive.TTFN,WK

Well then see the answer I gave to that interpretation of the question back in Message 460.TTFN,WK

If not ignorant then at the very least redundant. You seem to have reduced the concept of Irreducible Complexity down to a tautologous core, 'a cell cannot live without all the parts it needs to live.'Of course you used function rather than live, and that raises a question. Cells can have many functions besides the simple one of allowing the cell to reproduce, and a number of these functions can be removed without impairing the cell's ability to reproduce. So the question becomes, what is a cell's function? Is it simply to reproduce or does it encompass all the other accessory functions that cell may have? If we take the wider view then your tautology becomes, 'a cell cannot properly function without the parts that allow it to function properly'.Either way, neither of these formulations says anything meaningful about evolution. As has been pointed out repeatedly the existence of an IC system, in the straightforward sense of a system which is rendered non-functional by the removal of any one of several contributing elements, is not a barrier to evolution and there are many evolutionary frameworks for the evolution of IC systems.TTFN,WK

That's pretty much the basis of all modern cladistic taxonomic trees, looking for shared derived features or as they are technically known synapomorphies.A synapomorphy is a novel feature, feathers in your example, which is shared by 2 or more taxa and their common ancestor but which was absent in that ancestors own ancestors. The current evidence still points to the first feathers arising in dinosaurs before the diversification of the aves. So all feathered dinosaurs and birds are considered part of a clade which has feathers as a synapomorphic feature.TTFN,WK

They would if what you wanted was the instantaneous de novo creation of reproduction capable cellular life. But that isn't how most origin of life scenarios proceed. If you can start with acellular or proto-cellular genetic reproduction then building cellular architecture around that does not require passing through impossible intermediate stages.TTFN,WK