If evolution is true, where did flying creatures come from?

You did not have a point.

Nonukes, my point was that we should at least think about what the other group has to say, and look at the evidence with an open mind, before calling them wrong. From now on, if anyone has something to say to me that is not about wether or not flight could have evolved, pleaee pm me. We are cluttering up the thread with arguing and insulting each other! If you want to argue,argue about evolution/creation and present evidence. Also, anyone who wants to insult me go ahead and pm me that as well. That way you wont look like jerks. (To everyone else at least.)

I see that both Cat Sci and Tangled have provided information for you. Is that sufficient to answer your questions?

I not only think about what creationists say, I've read many, many of their writings. Given the level of understanding that the typical creationist has about evolution, I'm quite confident that I've read a LOT more creationist product than they have read science.

Subbie, what you say is Sad yet true,this is another reason i started the backwards debate. I wanted for both sides to understand each other. It is sad that we say that others are wrong without even knowing what the other has to say. To creationists: what would jesus say about how you just attack another persons belief without listening to what they have to say? The bible says "do unto other as you would have them do unto you!" And to evolutionists: did our ancestors crawl/slither/ooze/flop out of the ocean just so that their descendants could argue all day without at least thinking about what our opponent has to say? And to everyone: I know several children who act more mature than you lot! The least you could do is read what the other side has written, pay attention to what they say, and appreciate the effort they put into supporting what they believe!Be you creationist, evolutionist, or somewhere in between, please listen, care, and understand. We dont have to be enemies just because we disagree.Edited by Bookworm7890, : First sentence made no senseEdited by Bookworm7890, : Accidental insult and a typo

I hope you'll forgive me if I doubt the sincerity of this. The fact that you could even ask the questions you asked at the beginning of this thread demonstrates quite clearly that you have read very little, if any, about the Theory of Evolution. If in fact you are saddened by the things you claim, I'd suggest the best first step for you to take would be to follow your own advice and read something about the Theory of Evolution before you start taking badly aimed potshots at it.

You may be indulging in some projection here. Given the religious demographic of North America, the majority of people who understand and accept evolutionary theory were raised in creationist homes. I know I was. Unlike you, I do understand the subject from both sides.It was an honest appraisal of just how little substance supported my efforts to cling to belief over evidence that led me to accept that I was wrong. You should understand that "the effort... put into supporting..." an idea is irrelevant. What matters is evidence. Creationists appear to have none.

Why do you assume that this hasn't happened? At least when I call creationists wrong, this is indeed the terminus of extensive research into the evidence and of an unnecessarily long and painful study of what creationists think. Now I get to call them wrong.

That's exactly what most of them say. And for the few that don't say it, that's their core reason. They look at the complexities of life and declare that it must have been designed.I have some sympathy for this view, until you examine the evidence for evolution it's hard to imagine. The biggest barrier though is not lack of education and imagination, it's a previously held belief in ancient religious books and their particular shaman's teaching of what they mean.

If I say that that's only the third dumbest thing I've seen all week, that's only because you have some very talented competition.

Probability is a tricky area, and you're making the mistake of looking at the odds of the particular result, instead of the odds of a successful result.A fair analogy is the lottery. For our non-UK readers, the lottery here chooses 6 numbers, from 1 to 49. The odds of any one particular combination occurring are around one in 14 million.However, the odds of a successful combination occurring is (I'm guessing from the number of rollovers) currently around 3 in 5. This is obviously due to the number of tickets people buy.Evolution doesn't require a particular winning combination. It just requires any winning combination, whatever it may be.And with every organism in a species getting a free ticket, the odds of successful evolution in that species are very high.So the odds of me, Vimesey, being the end product of millions of years of evolution, sitting here in Brum, typing this - vanishingly small. The odds of some life form being here filling the biological niche I fill - virtually certain.Evolution fired its arrow at the wall, and hit it where I am. You're looking to paint a target around the point of impact, and claim that the arrow must have hit there by design, because the odds of it hitting that particular point on the wall is tiny.In reality, evolution just has to hit the wall.

By implication you're saying that because you had set of reasons X, and you come to believe you were wrong, that that makes creation and creationists wrong. By implication if you say, "I was wrong" that would mean we are also wrong.If that is the case, you commit the Ad Logicam fallacy.If two people share the same conclusion, this does not mean that if one person's reasons for inferring that conclusion are wrong, that the other person is wrong.EXAMPLE:1. mike is a pig. pigs are animals, therefore mike is a human.
2. mike has every element that makes a human, therefore mike is human.Captain, you are saying that because you personally came to the belief in Creation, and you think you are now wrong, that this means creation is wrong, creationists are wrong and there is no evidence for creation because we all believe and reason as you believed and reasoned. But it seems to me your abilities to reason are still the same.It does not follow. If you are saying that your reasons were wrong, so that is why you believe creation is wrong, then that means that you have believed in a non-sequtir, ad logicam fallacy, for if I believed that gravity was true because I hate Mondays, that would not mean gravity is not true when I came to discover that Mondays doesn't mean it is true.Chances are, the way you see things and reason, always spoke more about you than about the clear-cut Creation evidence all around us.

You're a smart guy. But then answer always comes in the end. I admit this is a challenge to me, and I seldom feel challenged. You've got mikey on the ropes but he's a rope-a-dope. And the last rope-a-dope was, "the greatest." This is Begging-The-Question because it assumes that you can compare a certain outcome with evolution, and thereby you have assumed that evolution is a "certain outcome". You have conflated a "certain outcome" with a posteriori-knowledge. A lottery win is certain, because the chances of anyone winning is close to 1 in 1, but is the chances of evolution happening, a "certain outcome"?Example:It is a certain outcome or nearly 1 in 1, that SOMEONE will win the lottery. But for a particular person to win the lottery is 1 in 14 million.So let's say Jane wins the lottery, you could then say:" You're looking to paint a target around the point of impact, and claim that the arrow must have hit there by design"BUT, the difference is that someone was going to win certainly. Whereas you have to prove that evolution was going to happen. It's only fortuitous that our knowledge of SOMETHING happening, is posteriori, which means we already know we are "here". I would equate a "free ticket" as an equivocation of what we mean. You're very smart but like you say, probability is tricky, and first you have to prove free-tickets by showing that the mechanisms of evolution inevitably lead to new information in gene pools, and novel designs. You have not proven that evolution is unlimited, and the facts show that a culling and a loss of information, is usually prevailent and the general picture that we observe, as direct evidence, whereas we don't observe new machinery such as a new motor in the ATP synthase or the Kinesin motor. These small machines should be easy-tickets for evolution yet we don't see that the limited abilities of adaptation can achieve anything of the sort. Herein lies the easiness of knowledge-from-hinsight - what can anyone know about what evolution would produce, apriori?Probability is only useful BEFORE. Is it "probable" that evolution can create at least 40 eyes by convergence? even if we say it is very easy, say 1 in 3, we have to multiply the consecutive coincidences, including not just eyes, but the chances of life being there by chance to begin with, and the chances of all of the homoplasies that exist, etc...Would you say to me, "well, that spider appeared on your wall, but the probability is irrelevant because we know it's there!"No - because if it happens again in the same place, we MULTIPLY the probability. So then if ONE thing evolved we could argue, "ah well, it was a free ticket" - but to argue the same thing again would be to argue the spider to the next night, appear on the same spot, the circle you drawn on the wall. Now the spider appears there on the same spot, every night, for 40 nights.It's the same with evolution, we look into the past and we know that the same things would have had to happen consecutively, hundreds and hundreds of times, if we invoke "convergence" and mathematically, your example, though clever, can only be equated to evolution happening once, mathematically.I could be wrong. But I doubt I am. Unusual things aren't guaranteed to happen, if they are still very unusual to the extreme. I can expect a "12" on my toy, but if it happens every day for the next year? Then that would be equatable to evolution's probabilities, coupled with the chances of abiogenesis, which are the same as a solar system packed with people, all solving a rubix cube consecutively.Now would you then say after the event, "well, it was bound to happen, people win the lottery". LOl! RoFLmAO!!Probability, in regards to one event, is not the same looking back in time, as a set of events. So your analogy would have to be multiple lotteries, because evolution argue multiple homoplasies.Edited by mike the wiz, : No reason given.

Now if you could just say what is "dumb" about it. Did you mean the typo-error? I pressed "2" instead of "3".Is it dumb that when flipping a coin, the chances of getting heads are 1 in 2. So then to achieve a heads 100 times in a row, would be 1 in 2 multiplied by 2, onwe hundred times. And my opinion is that you are a highly intelligent person, knowledgeable, and I often enjoy our encounters because that comes across when you put forth a goof challenge and may you have a pleasant day. Bless you sir.

Fair enough, I misunderstoof your intentions. It seemed you were making it easy to believe in an eye evolution as something guaranteed, sorry for the error.(Sorry if I can't answer everyone all the time, usually I have to answer many posts, and sometimes it's best to just choose one or two randomly if you are debating many people.)