[Note: the rest of the post is great too, but I just took two really great bits]
Cats try to catch birds but birds fly away. Evolution predicts that cats should grow wings to compete with birds. However this has never happened.
If life evolved then elephants should not exist in Africa. This is because elephants need lots of water but in Africa there is mainly desserts. If evolution was real it would favor evolution of elephants in the northen hemispere. Either that or africas' desserts would have adapted into lakes.
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a.) Africa is not "mainly desserts" it is primarily composed of jungles and savannah. There are two deserts in Africa, the Saharra and that other one in South Africa, but they hardly make up the majority of the continent.
b.) Elephants don't live in the deserts of Africa, they are usually to be found in the savannahs.
Actually, evolution would take the easiest course, this course being cat going to eat something else instead of all that time and energy being spent in radically alterring the bone structure and mass of said cat.
The elephants didn't die out because evolution said "lol, adaption" and the elephants managed to adapt to their landscape. Also, Africa isn't pure desert. And where it is desert... I know this may sound funny to you but... you don't find many elephants there.
Weird, I know.
Third, the land does not evolve to adapt to the animals. It doesn't have a genetic structure with which to biologically evolve with. It doesn't even evolve in the more symbolic sense. The land doesn't NEED the animals or plants around it. It's going to be dead dirt and dead rock no matter what's going on.
"Cats try to catch birds but birds fly away."
This is patently false. My cats caught birds all the time.
"Evolution predicts that cats should grow wings to compete with birds."
No, evolution predicts that cats would either develop some why to catch birds or adopt a different food source.
"However this has never happened."
This is true, no cats with wings. However, cats are clever, slealthy hunters with lightning quick reflexes. With a little observation you can actually watch cats hunt and catch birds.
Also, cats DO have other food sources such as rodents and even insects.
"If life evolved then elephants should not exist in Africa. This is because elephants need lots of water but in Africa there is mainly desserts."
Sundaes!? Cake!? I never knew.
The word is "deserts," you dolt.
Africa has huge amounts of desert... and savannah... and jungle. Outside of the sahara and the kalahari there are plenty of rivers and lakes in Africa.
"If evolution was real it would favor evolution of elephants in the northen hemispere. Either that or africas' desserts would have adapted into lakes."
Inanimate objects such as lakes do not adapt. Only the most boneheaded Fundies persist in this view of evolution.
Zadic - please don't say that!
When a violent cataclysmic climate event occurs, some animals will be more suited to the change than others. What then is to stop the egocentric fuckers saying the loving God of 'meteorites' for instance, blessed them with his presence and changed the environment for them and this is proof of his eternal love.
It's all relative, and these stupid fuckers, although wrong will not have a detached perspective.
So, you're saying elephants can't survive in Africa, but they do, therefore they didn't evolve?
WHAT THE F**K???
Ugh... the beginning of the post...
"Before I studied biology in depth, I was an evolutionist who believed in evolutionism of animals. However immediately after I read a lot of science books it became oblivious to me that evolution was wrong and is in crisis.
Here is my case against evolution
DNA is made up of lots of amino acid."
Jesus... I can't buy that this guy studied shit. I don't even think you could find this in a book on creation "science".
"DNA is made up of lots of amino acid."
I predict that very soon, someone somewhere will make the claim:
"If DNA is made of acid, why doesn't it disolve everything?"
Of, course. This may have already happened.
Wow, that post is simply dumbfounding
DNA is made up of lots of amino acid. This acid burns in a reaction to produce code which are small computer programs that run the body. But everyone knows computer programs are intelligently designed. Would windows XP appear from nowhere? None of the evolutionists have thought of these problems before or they would be ex-evolutionists.
Evolutionists claim that natural selection increases information. What is information? Information measures the ammount of chemical reactions in your DNA (not just amino acid reactions - it is a little more complicated than that). The problem is that natural selection removes DNA so information can only decrease! It took a long time for evolutionists to reaslise this but instead of admiting evolution was wrong they invented mutations to try and explain it away. But many real scientists now doubt mutations are possible.
That's possibly the largest collection of fallacies and non sequiturs that I've ever seen in one place. DNA containing acids that burn to produce computer programs.
Also, the denial that mutations exist simply beggars belief. Even most Creationists wouldn't be as stupid to deny that as it's trivially observable.
Actually, what evolution predicts is that cats WON'T grow wings because they don't have the right developmental pathways in their genetic makeup to do so. There's no history of such a pathway existing anywhere in the phylogeny of Carnivora that would lead anyone who knew the first thing about biology to predict that cats will grow wings anytime in the next hundred million years. The number of mutations that would have to accumulate in order to achieve such a radical alteration is staggeringly unlikely to occur. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but it would require a tremendous span of time because cats are already highly adapted creatures. The only mammals with wings are bats, and they could only develop wings because the Chiroptera are the immediate descendants of unspecialized insectivores and diverged very early in the mammalian line from an ancestor with much larger genetic diversity than the immediate ancesors of modern cats. So no, evolution doesn't predict that cats have wings. Only people who are ignorant of the basic mechanisms known from the last 150+ years of research in evolutionary biology and the last 50 years of genetics would predict such a thing.
This kind of ignorant argument stems from the profound misunderstanding of evolution as a either a random or goal-directed process. It isn't. There are very well-defined rules for what is and isn't possible over given time spans. There's a very good reason why ALL vertebrates have only four limbs, why ALL fish have gills, etc. Cats can't grow wings for the same reason that you can't buy a six-legged horse.
If the Neo-creationist movement has accomplished anything, it's in giving people who haven't the first clue what they're debating against to pretend to have knowledge of that thing. Where I come from, that's generally known as acting like a jackass, but it seems to be the standard MO in America these days.
Actually, what evolution predicts is that cats WON'T grow wings because they don't have the right developmental pathways in their genetic makeup to do so. There's no history of such a pathway existing anywhere in the phylogeny of Carnivora that would lead anyone who knew the first thing about biology to predict that cats will grow wings anytime in the next hundred million years. The number of mutations that would have to accumulate in order to achieve such a radical alteration is staggeringly unlikely to occur. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but it would require a tremendous span of time because cats are already highly adapted creatures. The only mammals with wings are bats, and they could only develop wings because the Chiroptera are the immediate descendants of unspecialized insectivores and diverged very early in the mammalian line from an ancestor with much larger genetic diversity than the immediate ancesors of modern cats. So no, evolution doesn't predict that cats have wings. Only people who are ignorant of the basic mechanisms known from the last 150+ years of research in evolutionary biology and the last 50 years of genetics would predict such a thing.
This kind of ignorant argument stems from the profound misunderstanding of evolution as a either a random or goal-directed process. It isn't. There are very well-defined rules for what is and isn't possible over given time spans. There's a very good reason why ALL vertebrates have only four limbs, why ALL fish have gills, etc. Cats can't grow wings for the same reason that you can't buy a six-legged horse.
If the Neo-creationist movement has accomplished anything, it's in giving people who haven't the first clue what they're debating against to pretend to have knowledge of that thing. Where I come from, that's generally known as acting like a jackass, but it seems to be the standard MO in America these days.
It's damn annoying when desserts adapt into lakes. I remember the last time my gateau turned into a huge block of water. Spent weeks cleaning that up, I did.
And by the way, elephants can quite easily survive in Africa, as is indicated by the fact that they live there.
Vyoma - do you think animals with lateral skin flaps such as gliders will evolve longer arms and wings, or does it need to come from finger webbing?
It could come from either pathway; the developmental pathway has to exist first, though. Going by what we see in nature in both birds and bats, though, it's probably a combination of both traits that ultimately leads to flight. There's another trait known in reptiles for gliding, and that's an expandable rib cage (certain tree snakes have evolved along these lines). The organism started out with an expandable ribcage in this case; snakes have such an arrangement in order to be able to digest organisms that otherwise wouldn't fit inside them. Snakes that had more expandable ribs could swallow larger prey, so the trait was selected over time and eventually produced snakes that could stretch their ribs wide enough to make a difference in how fast they fall.
Gliding treefrogs rely largely on webs between their digits. Toe-webbing is a trait that made their ancestors better swimmers, was selected, and led to the "exaggeration" of the trait that we now see.
Cats, however, don't have any traits which predispose them to flight upon which to select in the first place, so starting from where they are now, it would require numerous mutations to occur and result in some trait that contributes to the fitness of individuals that possess it. Once the alleles that gave rise to the trait approached fixation in a population of cats, we would then expect to see selection continue to act upon it. Since mutations arise in unpredictable ways, however, it's not possible to predict which specific pathway an organism will follow before the pathway arises in the first place.
Damn I wish my cat knew this about evolution so she would stop leaving me dead birds on my patio.
And there isn't enough water in Africa to support elephants, thats why there aren't any elephants in Africa. In fact, I've never even heard of elephants.
Why should cats evolve wings? They evolved into being cute, fat, lazy, bossy animals with the ability to make their human slaves feed them and wait on them hand and foot. That's better than wings any day!
Bob, bob, bob. When will you learn to learn? Elephants have EVOLVED into dealing with the water supplies in their homeland which is generally central and western Africa, NOT the desert at the top of the continent. There are rivers a plenty where they live, and they have adapted just fine.
And maybe cats don't have to grow wings since they do a fine job of catching them anyway. you see, cats have evolved into a smarter creature then the sparrow, robin or the fundie.
David, I think you are right. In fact, I saw on a thread on another board where he, or at least someone with the intials B.S. admitted to the others on the thread that he was pulling their legs and the initials should have been their clue.
Arruckus. The dessert planet. A planet completely devoid of entrees.
It is here that Pall Agamemnidies, known to the universe as Mauve'Bib, will face his destiny. For it is only here, on Doon, that you can find the mind-altering substance known as ... beer.
Amazingly, the Hannity board (at least in the linked thread) seems to be full of evolutionary biologists, and BobSmith gets short shrift. You'd think there'd be one or two equally deluded fundies there.....
Cats try to catch birds but birds fly away. Evolution predicts that cats should grow wings to compete with birds. However this has never happened.
Can't don't need wings to survive, so they'll never grow them.
If life evolved then elephants should not exist in Africa. This is because elephants need lots of water but in Africa there is mainly desserts. If evolution was real it would favor evolution of elephants in the northen hemispere. Either that or africas' desserts would have adapted into lakes.
The part of Africa that has elephants has plenty of water. They can also travel nearly 40 miles a day to reach water if they need it.
The moon is mostly dessert, too = green cheese.
BobSmith? Normal Bob, is that you, fucking with us?
@ Redhunter
cats have evolved into a smarter creature then the sparrow, robin or the fundie.
The fundie isn't really a true avian, though it seems to have developed the brain.
But since cats still catch birds, despite a bird's wings, cat's don't really need to get airborne. Cats have grace, agility, and stealth, all of which go a long way to kill birds. And should the bird get away, cats can still eat mice, fish , squirrels, grasshoppers, whatever happens by.
Also, elephants are adapted to dry climates. Yes, they drink water. They don't travel very far from water. There are lakes and rivers in Africa, so they have plenty to drink. And yes, there were elephants in the Northern Hemisphere. They were called mammoths. We killed them all about 10,000 years ago.
Cats don't only need to catch birds, and there is plenty of water in Africa (where only a relatively small proportion of the continent is desert.)
Unless he really did mean desserts. Well, of course we do have plenty of those. However, most of Africa is not covered in chocolate mousse or creme caramel.
I give you the next step in feline evolution, which has proven very effective in grabbing birds as they try to take off:
image
The polydactyl cats don't need wings.
If cats needed wings, they would have them. Cats obviously don't need wings, those would just hamper them while they hunt for mice and other rodents.
My male cat has caught many field-mice while on a long leash. Guess stealth and quick reflexes are more advantageous than wings.
Life does evolve, and there are elephants in Africa, as well as in India and Sri Lanka. The Asian ones have smaller ears, which makes sense with evolution, not so much with Divine Design.
Guess you failed geography along with biology in school, Bobby. Do yourself a favor and stop spouting off on subjects you know very little of. M'kay?
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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