Full story: http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/08/health/dinosaur-tail-trapped-in-amber-trnd/index.html
I’d love proponents of both evolution and ID to tell me how their theories predicted this, along with supporting documentation from before the discovery. Thanks!
So natural selection does not have the power to select the more useful and less superfluous option.
Interesting,
Just what of value does NS do then?
peace
You mean feathers on geese were selected for their warmth? And then they just so happened to allow them to fly?
I wonder if there are different types of feathers? I guess that is just too ridiculous to imagine
Penguins evolved feathers to stay warm?
Man, you evolutionists can tell some wild tales.
phoodoo,
Just answering your question “ And yet we have no examples of modern animals using feathers for insulation.“
And yet we do.
Yeah, so what? So did amphibians.
Same for the tuatara’s relatives.
If your ancestors didn’t evolve feathers you don’t get to use them for insulation.
Maybe it’s your own superfluous arguments that make you think that superfluity evolves.
Down is certainly cheaper insulation for the calories, although it would hardly matter if fur were better for the animals that evolved feathers and not fur (a big point is that fur and feathers simply are not options for lineages that evolved one or the other, unlike actual designed features). Maybe you should start to think about these matters, rather than simply throwing your considerable ignorance at them.
Glen Davidson
Wonder why penguins don’t have fur then? Interesting design choice
You would have to assume that feathers evolved before the avalian lineage split of from non-avialan dinosaurs. I don’t think there was any evidence this should be the case before feathered dinosaurs were actually found. I believe some scientists even refused to accept Caudipteryx was not a bird because it had feathers.
Like nearly all birds, including kiwis and other flightless birds.
Just phoodoo being massively wrong, as usual.
Glen Davidson
I always skip his posts, thank for quoting this gem, what a laugh!
Rumraket,
Haha, yes, I took a stroll over and see I’m subject to my very own OP too, over my use of the phrase ‘phylogenetic nested hierarchy’, claiming it a contradiction in terms. In evidence, he links to a lengthy piece by his go-to authority on nested hierarchies, Knox, without in any way indicating how it supports his claim.
Feathers are useless unless they are used in flight? Did you realize what that means for quite a number of creations from you brilliant Designer? 😀
That is exactly my point.
Dinos evolved feathers when it would have be less superfluous to evolve fur.
Yet feathers turned out in hindsight to be just the ticket when it came to taking flight when fur would not have been.
Like I said it’s amazing
peace
No, it was an evolutionary prediction, that feathers would have first evolved for reasons other than flight. That’s why it’s a prediction, it comes prior to the evidence, from the theory.
If so, they weren’t thinking very clearly. But it can be tricky to figure out whether some flightless feathered organism is or is not a bird, because some early flightless birds would appear rather dinosaurian (not avian), after all. I know that some of what were once thought to be feathered (non-avian) dinosaurs were later thought to be birds that evolved flightlessness.
Glen Davidson
My theory of retarded creationists (excuse the redundancy) predicted this thread would cause creotard ruffled feathers
Uh, because they are birds and not mammals
Using the materiel you already have for different purposes is good design 101
peace
There’s no “less superfluous to evolve fur.” You don’t get a choice. And you completely ignored the fact that feathers are better insulation for the calories, which doesn’t at all suggest that feathers are “superfluous” in any way (it’s hard to know for sure if they always were better insulation, but it could be).
Yes, it’s amazing that you utterly ignore the value of feathers as insulation, then ignore the fact that bats don’t get feathers even though they’re excellent for sculpting aerodynamic shapes.
The obvious point (to those not hating evolution, anyway): No one designed bats by fitting structure to needs, rather, heredity determined what bats were able to use for flight. Not what’s reasonable to expect of a spectacularly intelligent designer, but quite what one expects of known evolutionary processes.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
Any temperate latitude passerine. The list goes on.
I don’t dispute that. But feathers could still be restricted to avialan dinosaurs, if they evolved after the split from other dinosaur lineages.
Heh, in hindsight things are so much easier. But the scientific consensus that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs came surprisingly late (in the 1980s and 1990s). There is a nice lemma on wikipedia about the debate.
I think there are a few million bats who would disagree with you.
Geese evolved feathers for insulation! Comedy gold.
So bats can fly because they have fur???
The general absence of fur on bat wings would seem to point to fur being a hindrance rather than an asset when if comes to flight.
The lack of bat species active in cold climates in winter would also argue that fur is not the best possible choice when it comes to flight.
peace
Of course not. Natural selection is not a magical being, it’s a natural phenomenon. It can only select from what’s available in a given population, not from what’s available in a different population.
But your original claim was “the supposed ruthless power of natural selection to remove anything that is unnecessary and superfluous.”
You were originally talking about removal of anything superfluous and unnecessary, not about alternative solutions to a problem. Not the same thing, but nice try.
Yeah! You’re pretty good at missing your own point! That’s very interesting.
Value? It’s a natural phenomenon (more like a bunch of natural phenomena). I don’t think of natural phenomena in terms of value, more like in terms of how much I understand about how the world works. I never thought of it this way. Interesting. What of value does gravitation do? Feels weird to think on those terms.
The important point is the absence of feathers on bats.
Shouldn’t the “designer” have reused his wonderful feathers by putting them on bats? Wouldn’t that have been “good design 101” , as you called it? Why didn’t he ?
So bats have a suboptimal design?
Fair Witness,
Dang, you beat me to it!
Why do that??
We already have birds.
Not at all.
Bats have great design especially considering the fact that they don’t have feathers
peace
Peterosaurs, too. Neither feathers nor fur.
Do you know what “optimal” means?
uh
The alternative to superfluous and unnecessary would be necessary and not superfluous.
I thought that was obvious
OK so you don’t see features like feathers as valuable for flight and installation.
Instead things just are the way they are because the world works that way.
How is Darwinism not just the truism. “Things are what they are”
peace
yes, Do you?
Optimal does not mean perfect it means the best possible given the constraints you have
peace
What constraints? Feathers on bats are not possible because … ?
because they are mammals and not birds. Duh
peace
Feathers are not optimal for mammals because … ?
I’m quite sure if your designer/god/idiot savant wanted feathers on fish it could make it so.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day6am2.html#day6am889
Yeah, that pesky common descent seems to constrain things a bit, doesn’t it?
Funny how that works.
And what constraints does the maker of universes and their laws have, precisely?
So your idiot savant god is into recycling? Why, when it can simply create matter from nothing?
No, pterosaurs did have fur, or at least hair.
Glen Davidson
Well, pycnofibers. Apparently they coined a new term for it, since it’s distinct from mammalian hair.
Glen Davidson
because mammals are defined as
quote:
: any of a class (Mammalia) of warm-blooded higher vertebrates (such as placentals, marsupials, or monotremes) that nourish their young with milk secreted by mammary glands, have the skin usually more or less covered with hair, and include humans
end quote:
from here
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mammal
no, omnipotence does not mean you can violate the law of non-contradiction
peace
God can create matter from nothing but because of the law of noncontradiction he can’t put feathers on a mammal
I really wish they would teach basic logic in school, It would make discussions like this a lot easier
peace
The Designer is constrained by the definition of mammals in the Merriam-Webster dictionary?
ETA: correction
Selection between options implies disappearance on some options in favour of another. Not exactly the same as removing some unnecessary characteristic.You were talking about a “ruthless power of natural selection to remove anything that is unnecessary and superfluous.” Then you moved to selection of most useful and less superfluous option, which was wrong again on two accounts: it can only select from available options, and of those, the best won’t necessary prevail. It all depends on how strongly is one favoured over the other.
I’m impressed by your ability to miss your original points and still make it appear as if you were right all along. You’re a very talented bullshitter. Truly impressive.
Wow! That talent of yours is astounding! A feature is not the same as the natural phenomena that might be behind how it came to be. Natural selection results in features that can be pretty dangerous to us, pretty useful, pretty useful to some other life form, pretty who-cares for us, etc. So, assigning value to the phenomenon sounds weird to me. But I’m not stoping you. It’s just a point of view. If you like that kind of thinking that’s all right. You don’t need to justify it to me. You don’t need my permission.
I do not understand why you would blame Darwin for things being the way that they are. It’s like blaming Newton for things being the way they are. Things are the way they are because the world works that way, whether you think that the world works that way because some magical being made it so, or not. You might move your truism one step at most: the magical being is the way it is just because that’s the way it is. The magical being is what it is. The world is the way it is because the magical being wanted it to be what it is. Not very impressive.
Why did you go crazy out of a meaningless point? All I said is that I never thought of natural phenomena that way. That I found it weird. That doesn’t mean that you need my permission to think that way. If it feels natural to you, you’re welcome to have it.
Yes, I second that.
That last sentence, that is.
The options in this case are feathers verses non feathers or GlenDavidson’s pycnofibers I suppose. I thought that was obvious.
I find it weird that you spend bandwith on telling stuff like that when you could have just as easily moved on with your life with out telling us about your own personal subjective feelings.
but that is just me
peace
Yet he could make both with homologous bones (you know, from before divergence), and a host of homologous genes (again, from before divergence).
But heaven forbid that he sculpt bats aerodynamically using feathers. Somehow he can’t transfer anything newer between bats and birds, only the older stuff. Just like evolution.
Glen Davidson
no just logic.
Words have meanings.
That fact is not changed by where the meanings are recorded
peace
If he did they would not be bats any longer. They would be birds. We already have birds
come on man think
peace