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

I know, my posts are a "splurge", I need to focus.Think of it like this, sure - I appreciate that if a race-car crashes into an armco barrier, the chances aren't relevant pertaining to that particular barrier because crashes happen all of the time. Likewise, it seems amazing when someone wins the lottery, but we tend to forget all of the people who lost. In the same way we forget the other 999 armco barriers the crashed car did NOT hit. BUT the rules of mathematical probability show that you have to multiply the available options. So then, we might draw a circle around the armco barrier and say, "see, by design" but we all know nobody would do that. But would they do it, if during the next lap of the race at the re-start, there was a crash, and the same armco barrier was hit? To quote Niki Lauda at the British Grandprix this year, he said, (paraphrase) "what are the chances of a crash at the same barrier, yet they have stopped the race for one hour to repair it - the chances are ZERO". I laughed because everyone knew it was just a matter of Health-And-Safety rules gone mad.So then, even small coinicidences must be multiplied. If you toss a coin and get heads once it's 1 in 2 because there are two possible outcomes, but if you get two heads in a row, there are now 4 possible outcomes.Imagine if Lauda was wrong, and on the restart the barrier was hit again? Maybe that was 1,000 X 1,000 = a million to 1, but even with very highly likely odds, separate coincidences are very unlikely. We would say AFTER the race, "it was unusual for the same armco barrier to be struck fourteen times."But from what you are saying, we shouldn't be amazed by such an occurrence. So then you equate evolution with a likely occurrence rather than proving that it is, and you do that by saying, "ah but we can always draw a circle around it after the fact!"Would anyone with any sanity, say that if the armco was struck 14 times on 14 consecutive laps? "Ahh but that was likely, because it's happened now and any one can attack relevance after the fact!" I don't think so somehow.And in the very same way, evolution of echoclocation, separate times, with a sharing of 200 of the same genes, is a highly unlikely event to put it midlly. So is the outcome of 40 separate eye-evolutions. All of these homoplasies have to be multiplied and the odds are relevant. Each one is added up - what is the chance of having a turtle-version of a tortoise? One is clearly a land-version, the other is clearly a sea-version, it would be like there being a land-rover with wings and a land-rover with wheels, one a plane, one a car. There is no reason for it to happen unless it please God, it is obvious that He wanted a land version and a sea version. To argue, "it's inevitable" would then to be to argue that there should be convergent turtles all over the world, in every location, 4 thousand of them, because it's "inevitable because of convergence".High nonsense, there is no reason for a turtle and yet a tortoise to be so close in appearance, except by design.

In fact, I said or implied no such thing. I responded to a series of posts claiming that by explaining why that claim is not true. Setting aside the incomprehensible hash you have concocted from stirring together your misunderstanding of logic and your misrepresentation of my words, I will address one important idea you inadvertently brushed up against. What I came to realize as I became educated in both science and religion (at a religious college, BTW), was precisely that I had not "come to a belief" in creation. In reality, I had absorbed it from the culture around me as unconsciously, and as unthinkingly, as I had absorbed my language. When I assessed my creationist beliefs I discovered that I had not, in fact, applied my ability to reason to them. I came to understand the difference between the "believing" of my religious experience up to that point, and the tentative, always tested, acceptance of evidence that characterized a rational view of the world. So yes, my ability to reason is still the same, it simply had not been used in the development of my religious faith.

Gosh! However could different species come to share the same genes?!?!? It's almost as if they had something in common, like... like... an ancestor or something!!!!!!

You mean 3 instead of 2. No, what's dumb is the assumption that what you're talking about is the equivalent of 100 heads in a row.Let's think about your simplified model of evolution. You assume getting vision is a lottery with a 1 in 2 chance of winning, heads they see, tails they don't. We'll let that pass for now. But you also tacitly assume that the winners were the only ones to enter the lottery! That's the only context in which your math makes sense. If there are also an equal number of losers who didn't get vision, whose coin came down tails, then there is nothing particularly remarkable about the result; on the contrary, it's what you'd expect.Well, there are plenty of groups that don't have eyes. These would be the losers in your hypothetical vision lottery.

An aside: "The greatest" was not a rope-a-dope. Rope-a-dope was a strategy employed by "the greatest."--Percy

Ooh, I know! What if they're related!(It just came to me in a flash.)

No. They crawled, slithered, oozed, flopped and eventually flew because they could. In some cases the ability to crawl, slither, ooze, flop and fly was beneficial to survival and was passed on to their descendants; in other cases maybe not.The ability to distinguish good ideas from bad is a separate line of evolution. Our species manages to survive even though some individuals lack that ability.

Modern animals descend from prokaryotes, then through eukaryotes to modern animals. Scientific fact. Not debated in scientific circles.What's your question?

But you're still making the same mistake - you're still looking at the particular result and saying that the odds of that particular result occurring are tiny. Whereas evolution simply needs a successful result, whatever that particular result's configuration is.And in order for your racetrack analogy to work when applied to evolution, you would have to run your 14 laps millions and millions of times. To use your analogy, a successful mutation, which led to a species-wide change, would equate, say, to a barrier being hit once on each lap. Which barriers are hit, in what order, doesn't matter for evolution - all that needs to happen is that a barrier gets hit on each lap. And over millions and millions of races, that's going to happen.You're making the mistake of looking at one race, and applying probability to the outcome of that one race. But evolution has millions of races and millions of drivers.You go on to try to extend this to the unlikelihood of 40 separate eye evolutions. However, what you should be asking is how likely it is, given observed mutation rates, observed natural selection and a sod of a lot of organisms over a hellishly long period of time, that something would have evolved to detect light in an increasingly sophisticated way. It could have been an eye - it could have been light sensitive skin - hell, it could have been a sprungle on the end of a grollit's dringle stalk. That it was an eye is irrelevant - that it was a successful series of mutations is all that matters.

Yes there is. They could be related to each other. That is a pefecty cromulant reason for their similarity.

Though there is disagreement among biologists, most agree birds evolved from dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx is the first good example of a "feathered dinosaur." It was discovered in 1861, found in the Solnhofen limestone in southern Germany Archaeopteryx is a transitional fossil, with features clearly intermediate between those of non-avian theropod dinosaurs and birds.I think what puzzles creationists is a failure to appreciate the time involved for even very small changes. Sometimes these changes take millions of years to be noticeable. And contrary to a creationist misunderstanding, the old species does not necessarily die out when a new one evolves. That's why we still have many different kinds of apes, including one with a very bad back that has not finished adapting to walking erect. This ape is sometimes called "homo sapiens."

Welcome to the fray Zatara, We actually have a number of fossils besides Archy, and a new one has just been found in China: The oldest record of ornithuromorpha from the early cretaceous of China (Nature Communications, Article number: 6987 doi:10.1038/ncomms7987 Published 05 May 2015)

quote:

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Ornithuromorpha is the most inclusive clade containing extant birds but not the Mesozoic Enantiornithes. The early evolutionary history of this avian clade has been advanced with recent discoveries from Cretaceous deposits, indicating that Ornithuromorpha and Enantiornithes are the two major avian groups in Mesozoic. Here we report on a new ornithuromorph bird, Archaeornithura meemannae gen. et sp. nov., from the second oldest avian-bearing deposits (130.7 Ma) in the world. The new taxon is referable to the Hongshanornithidae and constitutes the oldest record of the Ornithuromorpha. However, A. meemannae shows few primitive features relative to younger hongshanornithids and is deeply nested within the Hongshanornithidae, suggesting that this clade is already well established.

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Figure 1: Holotype of Archaeornithura meemannae gen. et sp. nov., STM7-145. Holotype of Archaeornithura meemannae gen. et sp. nov., STM7-145.

(a) Main slab; (b) counter slab. Anatomical abbreviations: al, alular digit; ba, basicranium; co, coracoid; cv, cervical vertebrae; d I—IV, pedal digit I—IV; fe, femur; fi, fibula; fu, furcula; hu, humerus; ma, major digit; mi, minor di

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Ornithuromorpha is the clade of birds that all living birds but not Enantiornithes nest in refs 1, 2. Until now the earliest record of this group was from the lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation (125 Ma), ... Therefore, the Huajiying Formation is the second oldest avian-bearing deposit in the world, only after the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen Limestones that preserve Archaeopteryx in Germany ...

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Lots of good stuff in the article, including images of the fossils of the feathers.Enjoy

Your post saddens me.You make the same tired argument about probability that has been debunked many times, and I'm sure that it will be rebutted in the same way here.At some point one would hope that the dialog would evolve to attacking the actual arguments that proponents make in response, but that seemingly never happens. Instead the creationist deals out the same old tired lecture about probabilities. Sigh.

But what's so odd really, is that very noticeable changes occur within a few generations when you isolate a small number of a Species. Darwin demonstrated this with pigeons, getting extreme variations in a very short period of time just by breeding to enhance a chosen trait. They always reverted to type left to their own reproductive devices. All this demonstrates is the great variability that is built in to a Species, that develops through microevolution if the breeding pool is isolated. Isolation can occur either artificially by human manipulation, or by natural factors such as migration of a small number of a Species in the wild. Either method will produce a new type or breed or race or variety.Change is built into the genome, but it can only vary the traits of the particular Species that are programmed into its genome, it can never produce something that is not already genetically available to that Species. Oodles of time isn't going to make one Species into another if the genetic program for all the characteristics of a given Species is limited to what is already packed into its genome. This is macroevolution's ultimate downfall. If the Species is genetically equipped for fur it isn't going to grow feathers no matter how clever you are at breeding strategies. OR, if you get something in the direction of feathers by assiduous selection, you will sacrifice so much else to the effort you may not even have a viable living creature at all in the end. That is, if you try to breed from an anomaly you will most often get disease and deformation. That is, Species are capable of change but there are limits. Extreme change, even if produced by a series of small changes, is more likely to lead to extinction than further ability to change. Thus dies the Theory of Evolution.Fossils show what once lived, they do not necessarily show whether they were related to other fossil forms or not. The idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs is based only on some morphological similarities and position in the fossil record. We can tell if a fossil was related to a currently living thing by its morphology, but it's sheer speculation to claim descent from one Species to another.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Real genetics is more interesting than genetics you made up.