I am not certain if most people agree with that.
I can't speak for most people, but I can show it to be widely held. Quickly, the wiki article for birds says:
quote:
Birds are categorised as a biological class, Aves. The earliest known species of this class is Archaeopteryx lithographica, from the Late Jurassic period. Modern phylogenies place birds in the dinosaur clade Theropoda. According to the current consensus, Aves and a sister group, the order Crocodilia, together are the sole living members of an unranked "reptile" clade, the Archosauria.
Thus: birds are in the dinosaur clade. It might be that, strictly speaking, birds aren't a special kind of dinosaur - instead they are a special kind of [something much like a dinosaur]. The consensus (ie most cladists) is that they are one of the few remaining special kinds of Archosaur.
As long as you are saying that birds have something in common with dinosaurs that can put them in that same kind.
Well, birds have scales, three toed feet, feathers, and a wishbone. Many dinosaurs likewise. There are quite a lot. The thing about kinds is that they are a bit vague. Evolution helps us classify easily - it hands us a classification system...forces it upon us. The creationists have a problem. They can say that all birds are all the bird kind because they have inherited them from an ancestral bird with some specialisations along the way. However they stop there and refuse to carry on the argument...special plead for their perceived kinds. Special pleading is not science.
In the case of birds they don't say - but birds all have features that seem to be derived from this other group. Thus birds are a therapod kind. Evolutionists use the same logic applied to the 'bird kind' to define what 'kind' a bird is. And what 'kind' that is (eg a vertebrate kind) and so on and so forth.
However, birds did not spring up from dinosaurs without wings.
Quite right. They probably sprung up from special kinds of dinosaurs/[something like dinosaurs] that had wings or wing like structures. Those structures became more wing like and less arm like.
Since this requires new functions, as in instead of forelegs, we now get wings.
They would have been forearms, much like a bats wings, rather than forelegs. Yes, it would require new functions and creationists have a hard time arguing that new functions cannot arise because they have been observed. They have to say that those functions were there all along but we weren't able to see that, or that the function existed, mutated away and then mutated back, or somesuch.
Nevertheless, 'new' functions are simply slightly different ways of doing an older function.
It is the random processes that create information that lacks any evidence. For where do we see information being randomly assembled? Nowhere.
Indeed. If evolution relied on animals just randomly getting better I along with many other smart people would have long ago laughed at it. Fortunately, heredity and selection are not random - they have a statistical element but random is an entirely inappropriate word for it.
Simply because some of the variation in life is down to chance doesn't mean that evolutionary biologists assert that the variation in life was acquired purely by chance.
Information can only come from other sources of information (like intelligence). Which we see all the time. (engineers making new designs, cell duplication, us chatting right here on evc, etc).
The environment contains a lot of information, and it is the environment that decides who passes on the genes and who doesn't. That is where the information comes from, it is a copy.
For example, one can look at a bird's design and conclude that it came from somewhere with an suitably viscous atmosphere and a gravity that wasn't too strong.
Here is the wonderful thing when you are doing science - you go away and do the test yourself. First define information. Then calculate how much information is in an organism. Each generation calculate the information. Repeat for say, 1,000 generations. Collate the results and decide if information has increased or decreased and calculate the confidence level and error bars.
Then: ask the theory of evolution: what do you predict that information, as I have defined it, will do?
If your experiment is at odds with the theory of evolution - you have a point. If ToE fails that prediction we have an issue that needs to be addressed!
If creationists are doing science, I'm sure you'll be able to find an example of them doing this rather trivial piece of science. The Discovery institute said they have spent millions of dollars on ID recently - perhaps they have done this scientific experiment to confirm or falsify this common claim?
A quick aside: rather than posting generic posts - which get a little confused, try using the reply button attached to the post you want to reply to. It makes it easier to follow the debate then. It helps keep the threads tidy. Also I realise the existence of the 'pile on' going on here, but always try to keep focussed on the topic at hand. You have done so, I think, for the most part. However, I can see this kind of post sparking a divergence from the main topic quite easily. Just a friendly tid bit there, keeps the admins happy, you know?
With that in mind - is there any positive science that creationism has done? It all seems to be focussed on trying to falsify evolution. What explanatory framework can we spring board off using God did It, that can help us predict things as well (or better) than evolution?
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