Making new evolutionary innovations: bat wings (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, May 12, 2025, 08:57 (10 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: My guess would be that pre-bats gained an advantage from developing their leaping ability, and this eventually followed the same course as whales’ adaptations, with the relevant parts of the anatomy gradually perfecting themselves for flight. You seem to think that only immediate perfection can survive. Of course it’s only speculation on my part, but so is the concept of an unknown sourceless mind specially designing animals de novo (not to mention the rest of your theory of evolution).NOBODY knows the truth, but whatever it may be is mind-boggling!

DAVID: Your just-so explanation has a problem in the fossil record where there are none.

You have ignored my comments on this:
dhw: 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.
And:
dhw: We are lucky enough to have sufficient fossil evidence to trace the history of whales. Apparently it took them approximately 50 million years to adapt fully to life in the water. 50 million years would cover…how many…five million generations? The oldest bat fossils also go back about 50 million years, and so any pre-bat fossils would need to have survived well over 50 million years.

DAVID: Flying squirrels fit your story, but they never grew wings for their jumps. The Darwin approach always involves a good imagination.

Yes, bats are unique. And yes, it is difficult to imagine ANY explanation for all the complexities of life and evolution. This includes the imagining of an eternal, sourceless, omnipotent but inefficient form of consciousness that designed every creature that ever lived – including 99.9 out of 100 which he didn’t actually want to design and therefore had to get rid of.

dhw: There are now over 1400 bat species worldwide. I presume you do not believe your God designed each one individually, and indeed on occasions you have accepted the possibility that he gave cells sufficient autonomous intelligence to make what would have been minor changes in response to different conditions. But still you refuse to consider the POSSIBILITY that their intelligence might extend to a gradual improvement leap by leap that would lead to the finished product we know today.

If you can imagine a small degree of autonomy, I still find it hard to understand why you can’t accept the POSSIBILITY of a large degree.