This is going to be a bit cumbersome to reply to Bex, but I'll do my best. Maybe I should have listed one or two things for you. My time is going to be more limited soon and it will be easier to write and address shorter posts.
Linda, your own posts are cumbersome. There is a lot to reply to, including more stuff you throw in on top of it.
You seem to be saying that the hind limbs which have been observed to form and disappear in whale embryos are not what they appear to be, like the so-called gill slits. I've looked into this and I've seen pictures of them. They form briefly and then they do indeed simply disappear -- they do not turn into anything, form any other body parts, indeed there seems to be no use for them. But they are also a small part of a bigger picture, when you look at vestigial parts -- we can focus on the whale here. Rod-like vestiges of pelvic bones, femora (thigh bones) and tibiae (shin bones) have been seen embedded within the musculature of whales. They are more pronounced in earlier species. Whales also have vestigial olfactory structures. Some whales possess rudimentary ear pinnae, which serves no purpose for an animal with no external ear.
The so-called "vestigial hind legs" are not useless at all, but appear to help/ strengthen the reproductive organs-the bones are different in males and females. Not understanding a function, should not quality as a "non functioning" vestigial organ. They are "copulary guides’ and in sperm whales act as an anchor for the muscles of the genitalia. To describe these bones, which actually carry out important functions, as ‘vestigial organs’ is nothing but Darwinistic prejudice.
Also, how do they know that these bones "were" hindlimbs in the first place? Again this is based on huge assumptions. These bones in comparison with the whale are very small. The body of a whale is immense and these bones attached to the pelvis serve functions that the evolutionist seems to be ignoring as having any other function other than being "leftovers", because they have already decided that whales were once land dwelling animals, therefore these bones must be the remnants of hindlimbs. How do they know this? If these bones were hind-limbs, then where are the front ones? Unless of course this apparent once land dwelling animals walked around on only hind legs ;-) Oh no that's right, the front legs evolved into.....flippers!!! (according to the evolutionist).
As for snakes, the so-called vestigial "hind limbs" ( little claws near the tail end). These are also used during mating. I think I have repeated this for the second time now. maybe the flippers on mammals were actually once wings. I mean why not? If legs can turn into flippers, why not wings too?
If they were legs, how is this evolution? What possible advantage could a land-dwelling animal have to lose its limbs? I thought evolution was a gaining of information, not a loss of information. Why are we not seeing this today by the way? Why are we not seeing any kind of land-dwelling animal evolving? Why is it always "well it happened in the past", the lonnnngggg distant past, the one where none of us were there to "conveniently NOT see it happen.
Some whales possess rudimentary ear pinnae, which serves no purpose for an animal with no external ear.
The whale's hearing is to a whale what eyesight is to us. I am not sure if I'd be so quick to dismiss this as having no purpose. There will be a reason why they're there and usually later, it is figured out "why". How long are evolutionists going to keep making the same old mistakes? the same ones they made with the gill slits, egg sac and all those things. Absolutely embarrassing, but also very revealing and something that should cause anybody to consider very carefully the things we are being told. Fancy calling all those things evolution in babies, when instead they were the essential part of its development.
To add to this, genetics can tell us how species are related to each other, and we can see that whales are more closely related to ungulates than they are to all other mammals, through genetic analysis.
Why do you assume that this must mean it evolved? Obviously they are different creatures and have different functions. Is it so illogical that same Creator could produce different types of creatures using many of the same biological parts and much of the same bio-chemical technology. Why would he do otherwise? once again, you are asking us to believe something you nor your superiors have never seen happen, just because it's excludes intelligent design. Name your bias, because this is exactly what this is about. It just depends which bias you want to be bias with. This isn't science Linda. Common design does not exclude any of these things. Are the boat, plane, and car related? No. They are similar because they were all designed for a similar purpose - transportation. And they all came from the mind of man - creations.
First, how do you define "species" then? How many "variations within a kind" do you accept? And how do those variations occur?
Can anybody accurately define anything??? A species to me is any group capable of interbreeding. Variations are the differences within the same kind (e.g. german shepherd dog - terrier - poodle etc). How many do I accept? I don't know how many there are. Sorry. Well for me to know how these variations occured, I would need to go right back to the beginning and have a look at all the originals. How many were created originally before breeding emphasized certain traits? How much is in the genetics to allow for such variation through breeding to occur? These are questions that I cannot conceivably answer as I wasn't there. And hate to break it to you....but neither were you ;-) Did God create the first "two" dogs with the wide range of genetic potential to allow for such variation?..... Or did evolution produce this? we can take guesses at the origins, unfortunately they remain unqualified guesses because we can't see it happen and haven't seen it happen.
There are no birds with mammary glands. There are no bats with feathers; they all make do with the general mammalian architecture, including fur. This is an odd feature if species, or "kinds," are separately designed for their particular roles, but is a typical pattern for groups of organisms resulting from common descent with modification. Families of documents hand-copied from a common original fall into consistent nested hierarchies, as do families of languages, but designed organisms do not. This same nested hierarchy is reflected in genetic and biochemical traits. Humans share pseudogenes (nonfunctional "crippled copies" of functional genes) with chimpanzees and other primates, with those in chimps more similar to those in macaques, but all disabled in the same way.
They all "make do" very well as they are don't they? I would say they do very well with how they were designed. First of all, you cannot prove they descended from anything, other than the observation that they reproduce after their own kind and always have done, as far as history has been able to show us. Again, how does patterns and similarities disprove a common designer? Evolutionists love to tie us up with primates and telling us that we all evolved from a common ancestor simply because we share similarities....I guess I have to ask that according to you we share similarities to a fruit fly and a worm....what exactly did we evolve from Linda and why are there worms and fruit flies still? Why are they not evolving into anything else? The monkeys only went so far too. What stopped them from achieving further developments? We're still trying to get them to talk. parrots do much better, perhaps we are more closely related to them considering their speech capacity?
We've found out recently that the human genome consists of 25,000 genes rather than the predicted 120,000. We also know that some genomes are more complex than the human one, and that some species also have more genes than we do. So where is all the extra complex coding for all the future morphologies that are supposed to be pre-programmed? And how do we know that God has programmed for all possible contingencies that the organism will find itself involved in forevermore? I think this pre-existing program isn't there but you're welcome to try to show with some evidence that it is.
I'd be interested to find how and from where new information is added to a "simple cell" that then becomes a highly complex ordered machine/creature. Otherwise, it seems that the most simple cell is ALREADY highly complex and ordered. You want people to believe that this is the result of chance.....I don't know of anything that starts of simply and evolves. I cannot think of a thing. I mentioned earlier that the tree is the result of a seed, but the seed contains already complex information for a tree to grow from it. Without that complexity, how can anything be possible? Who or "what" puts the information there or adds the new information to the seed to tell it to grow a tree....all of this requires intelligence/purpose in the very beginning.
What you need to be mindful of when you are using the argument from incredulity is that something isn't necessarily impossible just because you think it is.
You need to be mindful of the fact you're doing the same thing. Anything is possible Linda, perhaps aliens dropped us off here from another planet. Whatever it is, stop calling it science. You can fit anything into your belief system, but it doesn't mean it happened. Our origins are most definitely a mystery. I believe in ultimate design. You believe in....well it seems chance/coincidence being responsible for order and incredible complexity and wonder.
No evolutionist says that life sprang fully-formed out of the oceans, with all the complexities that it now entails. From fossil evidence we can see that life on earth consisted of nothing but single cells for a few billion years.
Near enough to, they just add a lot of time and slowwwww development in order to make their theory sound apparently "credible". .How does a simple single cell, on it's own, develop into such a complex, highly ordered structure? From where does it get this information? Again how does time perform the miraculous? What miracles does time achieve Linda? What is it about time that for you makes a random exploxion/ process into a well functioning universe/solar system with laws? Chuck on a few billions years and have people believe anything and it works. People do. Time makes all the difference. Time to me has only shown that things grow, things age, things eventually die. But it sure doesn't do the miraculous, unless of course there is some kind of intelligent intervention involved. I can't imagine time itself is a creative intelligence.
Beneficial mutations, however, have been observed to occur <http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.html>. If they are an advantageous adaptation to the environment then natural selection can act on the population.
Give me an example where a beneficial mutation has caused one kind of creature to evolve into another? Where do we observe this? And how does a muck up / loss of information prove that all things evolved from simple celled organisms? I can't find anything in what you are throwing at me, here, and there is a heck of a lot of it, that tells me that intelligence or design is not responsible. Mutations or not, it does not prove one kind becoming something else.
More to the point of the thread, though, does creationism consist of anything other than trying to discredit evolution and by default claiming victory for its own ideas? Is there nothing else to present other than "it says so in the Bible"?
Actually, you did a pretty good job of getting OFF the point of that thread. This is a debate forum, therefore expect to have your theories questioned/challenged. I'm not claiming victory for anything, only God can do that. It's His handiwork afterall.
