Originally Posted by CTD
Originally Posted by RAZD
You're lying again, CTD:

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Then to see him asking for help because he himself cannot imagine this.
This is not the first time you have made a completely false claim about me. I guess when you can't prove my argument wrong you have to falsify what I said eh?

Originally Posted by RAZD @ EvC
Topic: How do you evolve a BAT?


Originally Posted by RAZD @ EvC
This is meant to be a little light-hearted, not strictly scientific (so "Is it science" is probably the best forum):

How do you evolve a BAT?

There now. Whether you bother to edit/delete over there, we have it here.
Which doesn't prove your point in the slightest. It is not a serious discussion, but intended to be fun. If you want to add to the discussion, please feel free.

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RAZD is asking for help concocting an evostory for bat evolution. Call it what you want. I call it funny.
This is your opinion, one we know is questionable. Do you see the word "help" in that post? Do you see an appeal for assistance?

The funny part is that what is going on is having a little fun, an intellectual exercise, hypothesizing on the behavioral path leading between known ancestor and known descendant. You raised the question of imagining the link, and I thought it might be a fun thing to do. That does not make it a scientific process or even necessary to the current knowledge on bat evolution. It is just hypothesizing on the part of evolution that does not fossilize, the behaviors of organisms, but that is the link between known fossils with shared traits.

No, I am not asking for "help" to imagine the evolution of the bat, I can imagine quite well, however I can also distinguish the difference between imagination and fact. Apparently you still have some trouble with that.

The facts are the fossils, and the fossils show evolutionary links by the shared traits: these are not imaginary.

Hypothesizing intermediates between known fossils has lead to some new fossil finds, like Tiktaalik, but the hypothesis can easily be invalidated by the next find.

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What's even funnier is he omits some important parts. Take the fingers on your hand & lengthen them - unevenly. Longer and longer... pretty useless. Okay, extremely useless. In fact, most folks who consider the matter objectively must give up and laugh right here.
Now there YOU go imagining things, YOU are imagining the order in which these elements evolve: pretty silly to do without any evidence, of course, so you must just be doing it for fun.

Try looking at the aye-aye if you think this is funny.

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I like to continue, for even more laughs. Add webbing. Add it at any point that's convenient.
Nothing has stopped you yet from mocking what you don't understand.

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Now your hand still won't be a batwing. It'll be useless as a hand and useless as a wing. In order to make it open and close like the wing of the bat, you still need to rotate your knuckle joints 90 degrees. (Just look at one of the bat skeletons & try to lay your hand out like that - you'll see what I mean.) Now at some point between 30 and 60 degrees of knuckle rotation, you're going to achieve optimal uselessness. You can't really grasp anything (don't forget the uneven lengths), and you sure can't fly.
So why then do YOU imagine that the hand rotated at that time?

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Don't forget, every bit of this only proceeds because it is "more fit" than what was before! How a long-fingered shrew's supposed to manage? I can't say. But it not only has to somehow get by, it has to out-compete the others. I don't care if it's a regular shrew, a tree shrew, or a water shrew. None of them are better off with useless paws.
Which probably means that what YOU imagined didn't happen. Of course you could post your hypothesis on that forum and see how well it is received, after all you, your ability to do simple math, your frequent misrepresentation of facts and your failure to substantiate your position are well known there.

Of course your own complete failure of imagination on how the wing of a bat evolves, does not mean that the bat did not evolve from a tree climbing shrew-like insectivore that happens by chance to have the same kind of teeth as bats.

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You had to see RAZD go on and on about bats evolving.
Curiously, you have not shown a single thing about a single one of the various fossils NOT being intermediate in form, or in any way invalidated bat evolution from 75 Mya old shrew-like animals with homologous teeth and other shared traits with bats.
Awwww. With so many "shared traits", how can it be hard to imagine up a story? Indeed, with no intermediates to get in the way, you have a lot more creative freedom than you would if any had been found.
Of course, and the real fun would be when they find the next intermediate fossil and you can check your hypothesis against the facts.

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All you have are mockery and false representation. It's all you do, on and on, ad nauseum.
Stop mocking science. Stop mocking the intellectual capacity of each and every potential reader. Then what will I have left to mock?
And yet all you have on this post is more mockery.

And you STILL have not addressed the fact that the bat fossil is STILL an intermediate form between the ancestral shrew-like organism with homologous teeth.

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So how about raising your post level out of the gutter, drop the third grade attitude, and actually deal with the issue/s: fossils exist that are intermediate in form between ancestral fossils and descendant fossil, (whether they are bats, whales, foramins, horses, hominids, pelycodus, therapsids, fishibians, or whatever). They are, in fact, along the line of descent with transition from the ancestral form of organisms to the descendant form of organisms, the are by definition transitional fossils. As predicted by Darwin.
Say what? You make a lot of assertions there. But they fail to impress. You have presented pictures, conclusions, and speculations. You should be thrilled if any of your junk has not been debunked.
And still you avoid the issue of actual fossils of actual intermediate forms between ancestral forms and descendant forms. I don't expect you to be impressed, I expect you to show people why you think they are not intermediate. You were the one who asserted there were only a handful or two of transitional fossils, and we are way beyond that number. Either you demonstrate why they are not intermediate forms, or you have rather remarkable hands, or your assertion is demonstrated false.

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See if you can do that without misrepresentation and falsehood.
Must eat you up that I don't need to resort to such. Stop projecting your mentality onto creationists and maybe you might learn something yet.
Yet it has been demonstrated.

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Now I expect folks to say I "just made up" the bit about the fingers getting longer and useless, and no evolutionist actually believes this. Look at A and look at Z. Look at shrew and look at bat. It's no wonder they don't believe it, and wish to imagine something else. But what else can anyone possibly imagine? Shrew - to - bat. They claim it. They require us to accept it. I refuse.
Now that is just another one of your misrepresentations, CTD. Nobody requires you to do anything, you are free to remain ignorant of the way evolution works and the way evolutionary science is actually done by evolutionary biologists.

Enjoy.