"Which comes first, the anatomic variation or the ability?"

"jack syme" <drsyme@cablespeed.com> writes:
>Again this leads to my question, which comes first the anatomic variation
>or
>the ability?

ED: Good question. I always keep in mind that the earlier types all
died, became extinct, including early cetaceans, early feathered gliding
reptiles, as well as primitive apes and our homo cousins. The earliest
cetaceans were not suited to spending their entire lives in the ocean.
They hadn't fully developed underwater hearing and hadn't even gotten to
the stage where their nostrils exited their heads, but their nostrils were
merely halfway up their snouts. And it was only after the nostrils
reached the head that the echolocation ability arose (in toothed-whale
species; since the other whales, the ones that lost their teeth and
evolved baleen, never evolved echolocation). Some whales still have
paired nostrils coming out of the skulls instead of a singular blowhole.
And the Right Whale still has rudimentary hind legs, including pelvis,
femur and tibia, connected by ligaments, inside its blubbery body.

As for flying reptiles, the earliest had small keel bones to attach their
flight muscles to. Modern day species have enormous keel bones the length
of their torsos to which to attach far larger and more effective
wing-flapping muscles. Early flying reptiles had long BONY tails that
created drag, and unfused wrist bones that made any long flights or glides
unsteady. Also, as you know feathers evolved before gliding reptiles
ever did.

The same story for man, we know of over 30 species of extinct primitive
apes, all with longer arm to leg ratios than modern apes. So the
primitive ape already was nearer to what was to become the genus homo's
arm to leg ratio, than it was to modern ape arm to leg ratios. And as you
know all the species of primitive ape became extinct, as well as other
primates and cousins of the human lineage. A lot of extinct species.

I am also reminded of the earliest fish that resembled amphibians, and how
their digit numbers varied, some had eight little piggies. But five
little piggies won out among evolving species of early amphibians and
later, reptiles.

There seems to be a lot of whittling down in the genome too, since whole
genome duplication appears to have occurred in yeast, as well as in our
pufferfish evolutionary cousins, then the wholly duplicated genome later
got whittled down. It was in the latest Nature magazine.

When I look at our cosmos, and all of the planets that do not contain
life, empty real estate, and wasted solar energy beating down on them,
makes me wonder if that's not part of a cosmic whittling down process too.
  Not to mention the fact that on our own planet, seven or more major
extinctions of life have taken place, whittling down the dinosaurs,
leaving the mammals, that radiated out a lot of weird species, from giant
Guinea pigs to Mammoths, that also got whittled down. Is that the
Designer's way, is the Designer a whittler or perhaps a Tinkerer?

And what about the hypothesis of multiple cosmoses? What if the Designer
tinkered around with lots of different original constants before whittling
down cosmos after cosmos and arrived at ours? Everything else I have
mentioned above would seem to suggest such a thing, at least
theoretically. But then, is a Divine Whittler (or Divine Tinkerer),
really so far from Darwin's hypothesis of some sort of mutation and
selection going on?

Cheers,
Ed

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Received on Sat Nov 6 00:22:44 2004