I continue to be swamped with work related to my faculty position, so
this reply is over 5 days late, and is probably the only Usenet post I'll make today.
Because, unlike Jillery, I am familiar with the way mainstream creationists express themselves,
and Axe was aiming the video at them.
> Jillery gave their interpretation, if you disagree, you don't need
> to rely on divination, you can just follow the link provided.
I did. The second half minute -- from 30 seconds to 1 minute into the video --seems
to have gone completely over jillery's head.
> That seems
> to be basic research and reasoning skills. When criticizing, or
> defending, a book or article the rational way to do it is to actually
> read what the author said, rather then baseless speculation of what you
> think he should have said, no?
This is really funny, and makes me wonder whether you bothered to look
at the video, or whether the crucial portion went over your head.
> >> Otherwise you're just blowing hot air out of your puckered sphincter.
> >
> > I wouldn't dream of emulating you in that way. In fact, I now amplify the PS
> > that you so cravenly deleted.
> >
> > I challenge you to cook up a scenario, using the kind of mutations you know about,
> > which will take a glider like a so-called flying squirrel or a so-called flying phalanger
> > [two kinds of gliders, not flyers] to a creature with wings like a bat, with each and
> > every step either favorable to natural selection or at least neutral.
> >
> > Note, I wrote "like a bat," not "like a pterosaur". Four long digits for the wing,
> > only the pollex [1] free for climbing trees, getting along on the ground, manipulating
> > objects, etc.
> >
> > [1] thumb, to people with as little interest in university level biology as yourself
One could hardly imagine a challenge that has *less* commonality with mine
than the one you've cooked up below. But you are excused, because you
have not shown the slightest knowledge of paleontology.
> And I challenge you to give an account of Wellington' victory at
> Waterloo that takes a "deployment of troops to eventual victory"
> scenario that accounts for the trajectory of every bullet fired. Would
> be about as meaningful
We have NO known fossils of any gliding mammals, let alone flying ones, before the
first bat fossils, which had wings almost exactly like modern bats. It's as though
historians knew that armies of Britain and Prussia were arrayed against
Napoleon before the battle, and then knew that Napoleon had become a captive of the
British after the battle, but no records or artifacts were known of the Battle
of Waterloo itself, and they had to figure out what MIGHT have happened during the
battle just on the basis of what is known of battles in general.
Wait, it's even worse: there are no known examples of any mammals, fossil or living,
with elongated fingers for gliding or flying through the air, EXCEPT for bats.
[Of course, the flippers of seals and whales have elongated finger bones, but
those are for a different purpose.] It's as though Waterloo were the only battle in human history
where the ruler of a country was captured in the immediate aftermath of a victory.
I could go on to tell you about the anatomical aspects of my challenge, but the
relevance of pterosaurs to what I wrote immediately after mentioning them seems
to have gone over your head, so I wil close here and see whether anyone will
take up the cudgels for you.
Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos/