Dr. Turell, - > > You are getting to sound more and more like a creationist! It seems perfectly possible to get from no wings to wings in small steps. In the case of wings on birds it is evident from the bone structure that they developed from limbs and hands. Flight with flapping wings can be reached via a gliding stage. 
> 
> 'Can be' is not proof.
> 
> > In the case of the whale evolution we were discussing earlier. I don't see where your "macro-evolution" is necessary. The processes involved are smooth transformations like stretching or contracting or deforming. There is no evidence for any part of this process happening suddenly.
> 
> Nor is there any evidence of this happening slowly. - It seems to me that your argument here again comes down to the necessity for evolution to be 'proven' true (a specious claim because natural science relies on evidence-based inference not proof) is a specimen from every generation or at least say, 1 every 1000 years. In the case of the whale, considering that we can geologically age the samples I think that shows fairly well that the process is slow. At least with whales. - - > 
> My answer to both pargraphs above is the same. There are fossil gaps, so we cannot answer the question of whether there are the tiny steps always or are there occasions for giant steps. I don't know. I can't answer that question from the evidence we have presented to us. We do not know if Darwin'as proposal in true or not. You want to believe in it with no evidence, just theory. I want evidence. Yesterday I presented a paper that defined three species of horned toad on good evidence: genetic, morphologic, and environmental. Fine paper. Good proof. That is all I am asking, and I admit that with the proper evidence Darwin will be proven correct. But not so far. - Maybe its your use of language but George is right that you seem to say evolution is right, and then evolution is wrong in the next breath. I think what you mean to be skeptical about is the specific means of evolution and not evolution itself. It takes a few more keystrokes but I think it would clear up some confusion about how you present your views if you would perhaps criticize the 'by natural selection' part when referring to Darwin's original theory.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"

Look at the article "From Simple to Complex". The genomics studies are finding many genes in single-celled organisms that prepare for multicellularity. I still view this as pre-planning in DNA by the UI.
> 
> http://www.the-scientist.com/2011/1/1/38/1/-
Another genome article on the sponge, which turns out to be a very complex genome, 18,000 genes, very much like US, with many genes for future use. Genes for nerves, and the sponge has none! Pre-planning?-http://f1000.com/4788960?key=q7cvxd7y9w7mcc6

I'm still trying to get my head round the article David has drawn our attention to, concerning the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity:-http://www.the-scientist.com/2011/1/1/38/1/-Some of the scientific details are outside my range of comprehension, but the implications of the section headed "complexity breeds cooperation" could hardly be clearer. "An incredible amount of cooperation is required for individual cells to come together and function as one, and with Natural Selection acting at the level of the individual cell, there will be significant evolutionary pressure to cheat the system and sabotage the success of the multicellular whole."-Regardless of the unknown origin of single-celled organisms, why and how did these individual cells come together in the first place? And since they took on different functions (the author compares the multicellular organism to colonies of insects), why and how did they do so? The implication seems to be that individual cells have their own intelligence as well as the ability to combine and adapt ... reminiscent of BBella's contention that intelligence is in all things. -The fact that single-celled organisms contain genes common to multicelled organisms (revolutionizing previous views of fungus/animal evolution, but surely also providing important evidence that later forms of life did evolve directly from earlier forms) is viewed by David as evidence of pre-planning by a UI. Maybe, but if the ultimate goal was humans, as you and Tony believe, why the following? "...such transitions are not always smooth, as conflict can arise when selfish mutations result in cheaters that attempt to benefit from the group without contributing their fair share." Quite apart from the wonderful parallel this presents to human society, it suggests to me that if there was pre-planning, it stopped at the stage of allowing infinite combinations. Once the mechanism for combining and adapting is in place, there seems to be a gigantic free-for-all. Hence the vast variety of species, extinctions, innovations*** ... anything is possible, and natural selection simply decides which combinations are to survive. Were humans inevitable? I don't see why. And although we're presumably going through a period of evolutionary stasis now, nor do I see why in the next billion years or so there should not be more environmental changes and mass extinctions, after which these intelligent cells may again come up with new combinations, perhaps more advanced than us humans. Though we may not be around to find out how they do it! As the article puts it: "The origins of this intriguing phenomenon remain shrouded in mystery."-*** My thanks again to David for his post (6 January at 15.10) summarizing a study which again cannot explain the mechanism for innovation. (I don't know why Natural Selection can even be considered as a source, since it doesn't originate anything.) We know that all of us animals do actually unite a variety of "intelligent" systems that function independently of our own volition (the senses, digestion, circulation, immune system etc.). So maybe the concept of intelligent cells forming new combinations can at least give us a different angle of approach from the highly unsatisfactory one of random mutations, even if it still doesn't offer an explanation.

A whole new theory supported by optical measurements that much better vision on land encouraged terrestrial life:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-did-life-move-to-land-for-the-view-20170307/?utm_sou...

"Life on Earth began in the water. So when the first animals moved onto land, they had to trade their fins for limbs, and their gills for lungs, the better to adapt to their new terrestrial environment.

"A new study, out today, suggests that the shift to lungs and limbs doesn’t tell the full story of these creatures’ transformation. As they emerged from the sea, they gained something perhaps more precious than oxygenated air: information. In air, eyes can see much farther than they can under water. The increased visual range provided an “informational zip line” that alerted the ancient animals to bountiful food sources near the shore, according to Malcolm MacIver, a neuroscientist and engineer at Northwestern University.

"This zip line, MacIver maintains, drove the selection of rudimentary limbs, which allowed animals to make their first brief forays onto land. Furthermore, it may have had significant implications for the emergence of more advanced cognition and complex planning. “It’s hard to look past limbs and think that maybe information, which doesn’t fossilize well, is really what brought us onto land,” MacIver said.

"MacIver and Lars Schmitz, a paleontologist at the Claremont Colleges, have created mathematical models that explore how the increase in information available to air-dwelling creatures would have manifested itself, over the eons, in an increase in eye size. They describe the experimental evidence they have amassed to support what they call the “buena vista” hypothesis.

***

"But once you take eyes out of the water and into air, a larger eye size leads to a proportionate increase in how far you can see.

***

" They found that there was indeed a marked increase in eye size — a tripling, in fact — during the transitional period [to land]. The average eye socket size before transition was 13 millimeters, compared to 36 millimeters after. Furthermore, in those creatures that went from water to land and back to the water — like the Mexican cave fish Astyanax mexicanus — the mean orbit size shrank back to 14 millimeters, nearly the same as it had been before.

***

"In water, a larger eye only increases the visual range from just over six meters to nearly seven meters. But increase the eye size in air, and the improvement in range goes from 200 meters to 600 meters.

***

"MacIver’s background as a neuroscientist inevitably led him to ponder how all this might have influenced the behavior and cognition of tetrapods during the water-to-land transition. For instance, if you live and hunt in the water, your limited vision range — roughly one body length ahead — means you operate primarily in what MacIver terms the “reactive mode”: You have just a few milliseconds (equivalent to a few cycle times of a neuron in the brain) to react. “Everything is coming at you in a just-in-time fashion,” he said. “You can either eat or be eaten, and you’d better make that decision quickly.”

"But for a land-based animal, being able to see farther means you have much more time to assess the situation and strategize to choose the best course of action, whether you are predator or prey. According to MacIver, it’s likely the first land animals started out hunting for land-based prey reactively, but over time, those that could move beyond reactive mode and think strategically would have had a greater evolutionary advantage. “Now you need to contemplate multiple futures and quickly decide between them,” MacIver said. “That’s mental time travel, or prospective cognition, and it’s a really important feature of our own cognitive abilities.”

"That said, other senses also likely played a role in the development of more advanced cognition. “It’s extremely interesting, but I don’t think the ability to plan suddenly arose only with vision,” said Barbara Finlay, an evolutionary neuroscientist at Cornell University. As an example, she pointed to how salmon rely on olfactory pathways to migrate upstream.

"Hutchinson agrees that it would be useful to consider how the many sensory changes over that critical transition period fit together, rather than studying vision alone. For instance, “we know smell and taste were originally coupled in the aquatic environment and then became separated,” he said. “Whereas hearing changed a lot from the aquatic to the terrestrial environment with the evolution of a proper external ear and other features.'”

Comment: Fascinating theory. Raises the issue again of why pre-whales entered the water.

Every living organism has the purpose of survival:

https://evolutionnews.org/2022/11/a-closer-look-at-the-science-of-purpose/

"The first thing to notice is that there really cannot be a science of organisms, i.e., biology, without understanding purpose. That this fact has been so neglected is, of course, a consequence of neo-Darwinism, which purports to show that purpose and design in life are only apparent, not real. Organisms that survive simply appear to be purpose-driven because those that are not driven by purpose suffer extinction as imposed by natural selection.

***

"In biology we are dedicated to studying the behavior and physiology of all living things. Extraordinary examples of animal behavior include the 70-mile trek by some emperor penguins to feed their young, the 1,000-mile journey that sockeye salmon may navigate to return to the small stream of their birth in order to spawn and die, and the 3,000-mile annual migration of certain caribou in North America.

"Yet as a physician I am equally if not more astounded by the dazzling display of goal-attainment that takes place in every human body in every second of life. Your heart has been pumping since a time about eight months before you were born. Your kidneys filter metabolic waste and retain life-sustaining fluid and electrolytes without fail and without interruption. The hemoglobin in your red blood cells procures, transports, and delivers life-giving oxygen to every corner of your body, every second of every day. And this can only happen because your lungs expand and contract, again without fail, ceaselessly, even while you sleep. Your body cannot survive outside of a very narrow range of temperatures and fluid and electrolyte concentrations. These are assiduously and jealously monitored, adjusted, and normalized. Without this oversight, your life would come to a rapid end.

"Purpose is the sine-qua-non of life. It permeates every organism, in every ecosystem.

***

"The short answer is that biology grew up out of the physical sciences. Even Isaac Newton himself was at pains to eliminate purpose, i.e., teleology, from his science. But Newton’s motivation was entirely different from that of modern scientific atheists. Newton believed firmly in the reality of teleology and purpose, but he also believed that it was outside of the ability of the human mind to reduce God’s purposeful wisdom to scientific terms. Some 250 years after Newton, and following the success of the Industrial Revolution, 19th-century scientists began to see themselves as understanding the world without God’s help. Then along came Darwin. As we all know, he said that creatures survived and speciated based on the random and blind — that is, purposeless — actions of a thoroughly uncaring natural world. He made it all seem so simple: survival of the fittest was all there is to it.

"Today, modern science embraces Darwin, in part because biologists want to be physicists, and also because it allows them to continue to leave God out. So the myth of Darwinism, in its new guise of neo-Darwinism, endures.

***

"Realizing that, we recognize that the entire edifice of Darwin’s theory is based on a single, demonstrable falsehood. Darwin looked at the natural world and observed organisms of every kind striving to survive, competing for food, shelter, and mating privilege. This was the struggle for existence at the core of his theory.

"The struggle, however, depends on something else that Darwin didn’t see, something more fundamental. Antecedent to it is the desire to struggle, that is, to act in keeping with the organism’s purpose, to live. Only with this desire does the living thing then go out and fight for its life. The point may seem subtle but it really is not. If as we are told, life is ultimately purposeless and organisms have no innate purpose… then why struggle?

"Simply put: Teleology, the purpose-driven innate property of life itself, precedes natural selection as the primary source of agency that explains evolution. Darwinism utterly misses this elementary fact."

Comment: so, the will to survive precedes survival itself as the driving factor. Why does that will come from? Why must it exist? If the survival struggle is so hard, why struggle? what agency implanted that drive?