Making new evolutionary innovations: bat wings (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, May 10, 2025, 17:35 (11 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: No evolution in fossils:
https://evolutionnews.org/2025/05/professor-stern-cardinale-stumbles-on-bat-wing-evolut...
The membranes, wing bone pattern with elongated digits are mostly novel.
They have unique embryonic pathways.
Uses structural proteins already present.
No evolutionary explanation.
Comment: pure evidence for design.

dhw: Out of pure interest, I logged onto the website, which ended as follows:

"At Evolution News, Behe said that bat wing evolution was unexplained by neo-Darwinian processes alone. He wrote, “The killer question is, what could build cool new features, such as bats flying or whales living in the ocean? What could drive the construction of animals that had never before been seen on earth?” Evolution, unlike intelligent design, can’t explain those things, and Behe was right.”

It always astonishes me that these people never mention Shapiro’s theory of evolution, which blends Darwin’s theory of common descent with the concept of cellular intelligence. Animals and organs that had never before been seen on earth would have evolved through intelligent cell communities cooperating in response to new conditions, either by adaptation or by innovation. Bat wings are variations on the forelimbs of other animals, as are whales’ flippers. The lack of transitional fossils is hardly surprising, given the fact that tens if not hundreds of millions of years have passed, and each new fossil is regarded as a kind of miracle. The argument is simply that Intelligent Design can be achieved by intelligent beings, and Shapiro calls cells cognitive (sentient) entities. He is far from being alone in this view of cells, as advocated earlier by Margulis and McLintock and currently championed by scientists in different fields, as we have learned from several articles David has published. This does not preclude the existence of God, but it changes the “killer question” to what designed the intelligent cell. The significance of the theory is that it explains the ever changing history of life on Earth, as organisms have come and gone according to changes in conditions. Raup attributes survival to sheer luck, whereas David attributes it to his God’s sheer incompetence in his pursuit of a single goal (humans plus food).

The questions posed in my last post on “New Miscellany” revolve around the latter concept. From my agnostic position on the fence, the free-for-all concept, based on cellular intelligence, can fit in with any theist or atheist starting point, as it leaves wide open the question of how life originated. As you have not answered them, I am proposing answers for you! See the new post.

Let's take bat wings. They must be designed for easy flight in the future. dhw wants a bodies' cells to imagine the future flights and make the legs into wings. Yes, cells act intelligently in their functional activities guided by instructions in their DNA. It does n kot make them designers for future function.