On Transitional Species (SUMMATION MESSAGES ONLY)

O_oDo you have any idea how diverse bats are? One in five mammal species are bats. 1 in 5! Bats aren't some obscure offshoot of rats, they're an extraordinarily diverse and variable group of animals.Bats are an order of mammals, equivalent in significance to the group Carnivora that includes dogs, cats, seals, weasels, bears, red panda, civets and so on. Are you really suggesting that they can be written off as rats who saw the sky and wanted to fly? Orville's more successful rat relatives?Come on! "Wings and radar [sic]" are minor adaptations? What can possibly count as a "non-minor" adaptation then? If you're happy with bats, all 1100 species of them, evolving from rats in just 4000 years, and evolving sonar and flight in that time what on earth is the limit that stops evolution explaining the rest of life's diversity?

But this is simply not true. The strongest evidence for Evolution is all drawn from living species.

It's sonar not radar! They're radically different things! Humans can be trained to make a clicking noise with their tongue and discern their environments from the sound bounced back. While this is an impressive technique it does not remotely compare to the high resolution sonar of bats, nor the remarkable physical adaptations they have to it. No human could ever be trained to follow the flight of a moth by sonar.And humans have huge, highly plastic, brains capable of learning remarkable skills. Bats have far smaller, less plastic, brains. It's stretching credulity to pretend they simply learn echolocation, and it does nothing to explain the physical adaptations of bats or the genetic differences you recognise in your own posts.And you still haven't dealt with flight. Over a thousand species, crossing a wide diversity of size scales and diet types. Some very highly specialised - such as vampire bats. All arising from a single ancestor within a century.You believe this is possible, yet you blithely deny that it's possible over 50 million years. Speciation and the development of novel morphological, physical and behavioural traits occur, but there's "no evolution as such"?!?Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.

Again. Not true. You see, unlike you, I've actually studied evolution, and while the fossil record is used it is far from the major source of evidence. About the only exception to that I can think of is the bird-dinosaur link. That can only be because you haven't looked. There has been a very large amount of research looking at confirming and analysising the theoretical side of Evolution by experimental biology; and vast amounts of work establishing the evolutionary relationships between organisms based on their genetics. This is, in fact, now the primary way of doing so; replacing the previous method based on morphology (which also looked at living organisms primarily).Even Darwin's Origin - where modern evolutionary theory began - barely draws on fossils as evidence.

I believe Mr. Byers is referring to this news story.I'd be quite willing to describe the boys ability as 'echolocation' or 'sonar'.Edited by Mr Jack, : No reason given.

I'll note that this does not address what I actually said and then leave you to reply to the others who've picked up on this. Apart from the hierarchical arrangement of species, developmental biology, homology, gene sequences, endogenous retroviral sequences, gene families, protein families, pseudogenes, and on and on and on. I find school books a pretty poor source of scientific information. They're aimed at a very ill-informed reader and their primary basis for presenting evidence is heavily constrained by time and the need for the evidence to be understandable to its audience. This is simply incorrect. Most lines of morphological evidence require no fossils (although fossils may support them), and many lines of morphological evidence are used in the absence of fossils - as they were in Darwin's time.

Again, this is simply not so. Have you studied evolution at post-secondary level? I have. And I can tell you that a degree level evolution course spends little time on fossils. Fossils support and inform evolutionary theory but they do no from its centrepiece.

This was another thread rapidly derailed into a tiring attempt to explain basic biology to yet another Creationist who feels able to judge modern biology without ever bothering to learn about the subject.It is difficult to see how progress can be made when one party not only knows nearly nothing about that which they argue, but is apparently almost entirely unaware of it.