Paul of Eugene
New Member
Its as plain as the nose on your face those scraps of bone are unnecessary. Helen mentioned they are "attached" to things. Of course they are. But the muscles and gristle at that point in the whale body clearly don't NEED any further attachment than the backbone, and a few whales get along just fine without them, just as a few humans get along just fine without our vestigal tailbone.Originally posted by Scott J:
Three fallacies to answer here. First, just because you don't know the function doesn't mean there is none. Could these be useful in reproduction or something else? Maybe.
Furthermore, the fossil record shows more complete, more obvious leg structures in whale species that are now extinct.
Furthermore, the occasional actual live sticking out whale LEG has been observed in whales today!
So your denial remains psychological denial.
Oh - the 'ol "no positive only deleting" mutation idea again. Any fossil evidence of BALEEN WHALES with FULLY DEVELOPED LEGS? The BALEEN whales developed AFTER the legs were lost, and the baleen mechanism of feeding is just the kind of thing that theory declares to be impossible - the development of a macro change of a positive nature.Two, I didn't say that God did create it that way. Maybe He did or maybe whales did in fact have rear appendages at some point and lost them due to a radical deletion... which provides no help to your idea of the ascension of species.
Well, you are yourself tied to a "God wouldn't have done it that way" theory - you believe God would have described the origin of the universe literally and wouldn't have left it in a parable or poetic non-literal narrative.Third, your rhetorical question at the end implies a metaphysical proposition about God. God is sovereign. He can create a whale any way He chooses for any purpose He chooses. Your question is dealt with at length in the book I suggested. It was the idea that "God wouldn't have done it that way" that largely gave rise to evolution in the first place.
What right do you have to tell us all you know God would never allow a non-literal creation story in the Bible?
The problem with this is that statistically the mutation is just as likely to happen twice as it is to happen once. Seeing that similar genetic design was used for humans, apes, and monkeys only makes it far more likely to have occurred under the right environmental conditions.</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />[qb]Primates in general have a defective gene for making vitamin C. It has been identified, the same defect is shared by us all. Defects in genes happen randomly, not systematically, so it is no use saying they all got that way after the fall due to the curse; the damage is too uniform, to much exactly the same between species. Something else caused the same damage over the whole primate class. Evolution explains it by common descent from a single defective gene in the common ancestor.
</font>[/QUOTE]Strictly nonsense. Every analysis of genetic damage from whatever source always shows there is no way for the damaging agent to seize on a particular segment. The damage is randomly distributed. At most, some segments are somewhat more likely than others to be targets . . . and that's probably a selection effect, some areas kill the organism more quickly if edited and therefore remaining edits are rarer.
I'm curious how you'll hang yourself on that issue if I give you more rope. What do you mean by "otherwise they belong with others of their type?"Before you scream foul... consider that evolutionists believe that evolution accounts for the eye... via 12 lines of convergent evolution whose boundaries aren't always as distinct as would be expected. Further, they believe that Tasmanian wolves and a few other species developed by convergently because they have a marsupial reproductive system... yet otherwise they belong with others of their type.
LOL! Where do you GET the SAME MUTATION FROM? You have'nt solved that problem.If you want a speculation, I would offer that a plague among primates before they were well dispersed wiped out the ones who didn't have this mutation.
Had the blueprints been the least bit defective, all life would have ceased. Instead, it simply began to die.
Note the completely contradictory logic, folks. Why pay attention to someone who reasons like this?BTW, I caught something very interesting in UTE's last post concerning the origins of exons and introns. He even said the latter was once active but is now "junk". That sounds to me like genetic complexity, order, flexibility, and code that was lost in the past. IOW's, the answer to your question lies in the current construction of the gene itself. It isn't the same. It isn't as good perhaps. But it still functions.