Over on Triablogue, Steve made some comments on evolution, which resulted in the cowardly anonymous freaks showing up. (Note: I’ll modify my Why-Steve-Should-Ban-Anonymous-Comments Argument slightly…it’s impossible to tell them apart now!!! At least with a pseudo-name, you’d have something beyond “Anonymous said X, Anonymous disagreed, then Anonymous said both of the previous Anonymous posters were idiots…etc.”)
Anyway, on the point of this blog entry. Why is it that the evolutionist assumes that if you disagree with evolution it must be that you don’t understand evolution? For instance, after I asked this question regarding the evolution of gills to lungs:
When the marine critter began to come up on land, he had to be able to breathe both in and out of water. What survival advantage would there be to losing one of those two methods.
Anonymous responded with:
I strongly suggest you look at Tiktaalik Rosae and lungfish to help you understand what you’re trying to get at here.
Listen, anonywuss: I already know and fully understand what I’m “trying to get at here.” I know far more about evolution than the average person in America (not that that is an achievement). I probably know more about it than the vast majority of scientists. After all, evolution doesn’t affect anything in physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. It doesn’t even actually affect anything in biology aside from theoreticals–everything else is simple observation. Thus, scientists don’t actually use evolution and they’ll defer to the so-called experts.
I, on the other hand, have read plenty on evolution. I have studied the philosophical implications of the theory. I’ve actually invested the time and energy into understanding what it teaches. Frankly, the more you know about it the less appealing it is (especially in terms of Darwinism).
So, anonycoward, I am not the one who needs to understand what I am getting at; you are the one who needs to understand.
And I have no problem re-explaining the problem.
An Organism is going to move from:
A: Gills
to
B: Gills & Lungs
to
C: Lungs only.
First note: B -> C looks to me more like devolution than evolution.
Second note: B -> C does not seem to logically provide a survivability advantage to the organism. After all, logically speaking an organism that had both lungs and gills would be more adapted to the environment as a whole than those organism with only one of those.
Consider it.
Option 1: if you have only gills and there is a drought that dries up the pond you live in…you die. If you have gills and lungs, you survive.
Option 2: if you have only lungs and there is a flood that swamps you…you die. If you have gills and lungs, you survive.
Under either option, the organism with both lungs and gills will survive. But perhaps there is a survivablity disadvantage to having both gills and lungs…
In which case one must ask how A -> B happened. That is, if there’s a disadvantage to having both that does not occur with just having gills, why would any organism evolve both? (By the way, this would also be a problem for the theory that it would cost more in terms of food needed for the Organism to have both lungs and gills, which is why the gills were then dropped.)
In short, either A -> B breaks, or B -> C breaks.
Anonydork’s arguments don’t address this issue. Instead, s/he argues:
Once a fully functional tetrapod appears, there is no selective pressure to retain systems like gills for terrestrial vertebrates. … Therefore, freely (without cost to survival), mutations then may occur that change gill-features into pharnygeal pouches, eustachian tubes, earbones, etc.
The problem is that in the two illustrations I gave (Option 1 & 2), there remains a survivability advantage for the one with both gills and lungs. Selective pressure would remain every time there was a drought or a flood (things that occur quite frequently in nature). The simple fact is that something that can live in multiple environments will always have a survivability advantage over the organisms that can only live in one environment in the long run. If one environment becomes hostile (as it invariably must at some point) the first organism can escape; the second must die.
Secondly, the above is nothing more than a say-so story by anonyfreak. This is how it could have happened…if one assumes that this is how it could have happened in the first place. Forgive me for demanding the evolutionist prove this, not just state this.
