My God but the conversation in this thread is pathetic. Obviously an awareness of the various factors driving the evolutionary process has not penetrated the American school system. (All this **** about ostriches!)
1) Fossil evidence is scanty and difficult to obtain and by its very nature provides a very incomplete picture but recent discoveries (in China mainly)trace the avian families back to a feathered therapod right at the commencement of the tertiary. I'm not talking about speculation - I'm talking about several thousand individual fossils that fairly demonstrate the initial flurry of feather design. Imprints which clearly demonstrate barbule and tack feathers of a very modern form on bipedal dinosauria.
2) Recent work regarding intermediate forms kinda conclusively demonstrates that many of the 'miracle organs' like eyes and 'wings' are entirely explicable utilising direct organic corollaries that still here and still swimmin and kickin.
3) Darwin started the ball rolling but, as in all science, he is now just one of a host of individuals who have added to the paradigm that is evolutionary biology. Sexual selection and the delimiting effects of environmental pressures on schismatic population elements give rise to longer term evolutionary dynamics such as 'punctuated equilibrium' - so 'survival of the fittest' is now considered a vital but hardly unitary driving force.
Hey Craig - it's good to see you fighting the good fight (agree with earlier comments about the spamming - complain often and loudly)
I can see the argument happening across purposes here. The same breakdown in communication that you see forever occurring in this debate. The chasm is not one that can be breached by any rational consideration of data - it is a gap of understanding.
Steinbeck addressed this very issue in a subtle, brilliant, and little known book 'Log from the Sea of Cortez'
Cause and effect are embodied within understanding. We think teleologically.
How orange is orange? The answer, of course, is to find the right metaphor to describe the hard data that is there for everyone to consider. The whole science of Cladistics was born and flourished for a hundred and fifty years prior to the modern digital age to define various shades of orange - but the answer that the anti-science brigade want us to provide is an impossible one to give.
Their questions are forever coached in a manner that makes any answer impossible. The teleology inherent in the worldview substantiating the various hypothesis submitted dictates that a valid answer is impossible!
Q: Define Orange?
A: Well how about we rationally address the argument by precisely defining the point of differentiation between species as the point at which a certain percentage of the genome is so differentiated that it doesn't allow for successful progeneration of offspring - then going by several hundred years of study of fruitflies then....
Response: No define orange in fifteen words or you lose.
A: ... as i was saying the several thousand volumes of data is to some extent internally incoherent because we are probably ill-equipped to ask the questions that we should be asking but...
Our own interest lay in relationships of animals to animal. If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational to the point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And then not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it. Then one can come back to the microscope and the tide pool and the aquarium. But the little animals are found to be changed, no longer set apart and alone. And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known as unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things -- plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tidepool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.
from John Steinbeck The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Evolution is not a theory, it is a process. You might as well say time doesn't exist. Anyone who says we cannot entirely describe the evolution of complex organs or account for the myriad diversity or wonderful complexity of life is plain wrong. Let them argue their case in the halls of academia amongst the myriad of streams of concurrent hard data and those that tend them.
We can clock the rates of random mutations in the background noise of a genome.
