In a message dated 6/2/99 Adam wrote:
<<The question for YECs and other sceptics of evolution is "why did God
bother
making all these curious creatures that cross the boundaries of supposed
'kinds'?" It all so naturally lends itself to an evolutionary interpretation
so I wonder why God didn't contrive the world to be less confusing - "he is
not a God of confusion" - and less misleading, since his nature and power
are supposed to be clearly seen in Nature. None of it makes sense unless
evolution is true. Else God is a bigger liar than Satan, or this world has
evolved.>>
I'm not a YEC, but I am a skeptic of evolution as creative force in nature,
if evolution is defined as _natural selection_. One of the fundamental
characteristics of natural selection is that it cannot foresee the future.
You wrote about the article in _Nature_ "They're obviously not flight
feathers, but they are a possible preadaptation ready for transformation in
gliding arboreal dinos or leaping cursorial dinos."
If natural selection cannot operate beyond adaptation to the immediate
environment how can filaments be foreseen as later bases for feathers?
Unless they have some immediate adaptive value, the genes expressing them
would be eliminated from the gene pool.
Which is to say, I do not see how natural selection is the process that
produced these "filamentary integuments".
Of course, if you define evolution as any _change_ that occurs in nature,
then by definition, evolution produced them. But such an explanation
explains nothing.
Best regards,
Bob