Nope, they show lizards becoming different kind of lizards, etc, etc.

Show me a lizard giving birth to a Bird. Not a different kind of lizard...but a bird. That's what evolution says had to have happened.

"Where did birds come from?"
"They evolved from reptiles"

Ergo, at some point some lizard gave birth to the first bird(or rather laid an egg that would hatch into a bird)

No one has ever seen that before. No one has ever seen a reptile give birth to a bird, or a mammal, etc, etc...but according to evolution, birds came from reptiles.

So show me the money.

Today we could probably clone lizards to have wings too. Intelligently, and a hell of a lot faster. A form of intelligent design at work. And you don't need to theorize about it either. It is quite real.

No need for me to flame, it's typically not my style. Like I said, I am not an evolutionary biologist, but I think there is good evidence that birds were once flightless dinosaurs - lizard-like things. Some major discoveries in China a few years ago, IIRC.

I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants (scientists!) re this evolution thing. All the evidence is only a Google away, and a curious mind should have no trouble finding it.

I'm still not aware of any current scientific studies regarding ID at any major institution, but would promise to try to view them without bias.

Best,

Kurt

My emphasis added.

This is not a flame, but evolution does not make the claims you state above, I do know this fundamental information intimately.

Maybe one day you can reckon the reality of evolution with your faith as many other devoutly religious folks have! Heck, even the Catholic Church made the switch. :)

This is also my stop to get off a train of thought that is going nowhere!

Best,

Kurt

I am not religious, i have no faith.

Evolution tells us that birds are evolved from reptiles. So at some point some reptile MUST have laid a bird egg. If that's not the case, then birds aren't evolved from reptiles.

That's pretty clear, and you don't have to be a scientist to comprehend it.

Couldn't at some point, a reptile laid an egg that contained an individual reptile which, because of some genetic mutation, had some very miniscule, bird-like characteristic that none of it's precedessors had?

Sure.

But at some point some legitimate reptile had to lay an egg that would hatch and give birth to an animal that could be legitimately called a bird.
If that didn't happen, the whole theory falls flat on it's face. I am just an ignorant unwashed instagator of the masses, but it seems to me that without that event, "we can't get there from here", as they say.

Birds either evolved from reptiles or they didn't. What trekkor was saying, and all i'm agreeing with, is that no one has ever seen that, and it's a pretty gigantic educated guess a lot of people are betting on until someone does.

Scientists long thought that life evolved from a simple sponge, but recently they've changed their whole course of thinking and point to some (suprisingly much more complex) jelly fish like organism. I just read about it in the last few weeks or so.

So if life didn't really evolve from sponges, did birds really evolve from reptiles? Scientists say yes, but until very recently, they said yes about all life evolving from sponges too. They now admit they were wrong.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,350688,00.html

That isn't the article i read, but it covers the same topic, and should be a good starting point for anyone who wants to actually dig for some comprehensive facts about these latest findings.

EXCERPT: "Earth's first animal was the ocean-drifting comb jelly, not the simple sponge, according to a new find that has shocked scientists who didn't imagine the earliest critter could be so complex."

""This was a complete shocker," said study team member Casey Dunn of Brown University in Rhode Island. "So shocking that we initially thought something had gone very wrong.""

Like i said before, it is important to remember that science is not set in stone, and most likely in 100 years a hell of a lot of what we consider gospel today will be shown to be way off base.

As far as i'm concerned, cloning and genetic splicing and all that good stuff is a form of intelligent design. And really, i keep bringing it up, and people keep dismissing it, but the birth of AI -at such a time as that may occur- will be defacto proof that one life form can intelligently design another from scratch, thus intelligently designing and creating life from nothing.

So the question begs..if we can do it, why can't someone or something else?

And i will make all the $1 gentleman's bets you fellows want that we create living AI before anyone makes spontaneous life from primordial goo.

That's the whole issue. Science is not gospel and can change theories as new discoveries and methods become available. That is the very premise of science. To continue to research, study, change ideas and the way of thought. It is not, as you say, set in stone, like some peoples opinion of the bible.

I think you're oversimplifying a vast process that can take millions of years to occur. To put it in a different light, picture a Roman chariot and then put a Bugatti Veyron right next to it. To someone who knew absolutely nothing about vehicles, they could not comprehend how a simple Roman chariot "transformed" into a Veyron. But it didn't. There were thousands of years and thousands of intermediate steps of technological leaps (and sometimes setbacks) between the two.

Now, don't read into this analogy that I am talking about design, I'm merely using two extreme ends of a spectrum to make a point. What the average person does not see when looking at evolution is the millions of steps over millions of years in between point A and point B. A lizard did not give birth to a bird just like the ACME Roman Chariot company didn't just start making Veyrons one day. Read Richard Dawkins', "Climbing Mount Improbable". Good discussion on the subject.

How about a simple google search and a little reading? How many generations do you suppose separate modern birds from their reptilian/dinosaurian ancestors? Evolution is accumulative and incremental taking millions of generations between reptiles and modern birds. The argument that one species giving rise to another suddenly is a straw-man argument and used on the uninformed regularly by the creationists. It is an example of the degree of intellectual dishonesty they are capable of since they know better and have been repeatedly challenged and corrected on it.

Sinosauropteryx prima. A dinosaur covered with primitive feathers, but structurally similar to unfeathered dinosaurs Ornitholestes and Compsognathus (Chen et al. 1998; Currie and Chen 2001).


Ornithomimosaurs, therizinosaurs, and oviraptorosaurs. The oviraptorosaur Caudipteryx had a body covering of tufted feathers and had feathers with a central rachis on its wings and tail (Ji et al. 1998). Feathers are also known from the therizinosaur Beipiaosaurus (Xu et al. 1999a). Several other birdlike characters appear in these dinosaurs, including unserrated teeth, highly pneumatized skulls and vertebrae, and elongated wings. Oviraptorids also had birdlike eggs and brooding habits (Clark et al. 1999).


Deinonychosaurs (troodontids and dromaeosaurs). These are the closest known dinosaurs to birds. Sinovenator, the most primitive troodontid, is especially similar to Archaeopteryx (Xu et al. 2002). Byronosaurus, another troodontid, had teeth nearly identical to primitive birds (Makovicky et al. 2003). Microraptor, the most primitive dromaeosaur, is also the most birdlike; specimens have been found with undisputed feathers on their wings, legs, and tail (Hwang et al. 2002; Xu et al. 2003). Sinornithosaurus also was covered with a variety of feathers and had a skull more birdlike than later dromaeosaurs (Xu, Wang, and Wu 1999; Xu and Wu 2001; Xu et al. 2001).


Protarchaeopteryx, alvarezsaurids, Yixianosaurus and Avimimus. These are birdlike dinosaurs of uncertain placement, each potentially closer to birds than deinonychosaurs are. Protarchaeopteryx has tail feathers, uncompressed teeth, and an elongated manus (hand/wing) (Ji et al. 1998). Yixianosaurus has an indistinctly preserved feathery covering and hand/wing proportions close to birds (Xu and Wang 2003). Alvarezsaurids (Chiappe et al. 2002) and Avimimus (Vickers-Rich et al. 2002) have other birdlike features.


Archaeopteryx. This famous fossil is defined to be a bird, but it is actually less birdlike in some ways than some genera mentioned above (Paul 2002; Maryanska et al. 2002).


Shenzhouraptor (Zhou and Zhang 2002), Rahonavis (Forster et al. 1998), Yandangornis and Jixiangornis. All of these birds were slightly more advanced than Archaeopteryx, especially in characters of the vertebrae, sternum, and wing bones.


Sapeornis (Zhou and Zhang 2003), Omnivoropteryx, and confuciusornithids (e.g., Confuciusornis and Changchengornis; Chiappe et al. 1999). These were the first birds to possess large pygostyles (bone formed from fused tail vertebrae). Other new birdlike characters include seven sacral vertebrae, a sternum with a keel (some species), and a reversed hallux (hind toe).


Enantiornithines, including at least nineteen species of primitive birds, such as Sinornis (Sereno and Rao 1992; Sereno et al. 2002), Gobipteryx (Chiappe et al. 2001), and Protopteryx (Zhang and Zhou 2000). Several birdlike features appeared in enantiornithines, including twelve or fewer dorsal vertebrae, a narrow V-shaped furcula (wishbone), and reduction in wing digit bones.


Patagopteryx, Apsaravis, and yanornithids (Chiappe 2002; Clarke and Norell 2002). More birdlike features appeared in this group, including changes to vertebrae and development of the sternal keel.


Hesperornis, Ichthyornis, Gansus, and Limenavis. These birds are almost as advanced as modern species. New features included the loss of most teeth and changes to leg bones.


Modern birds.


http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CC/CC214.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_birds

Try Donald Prothero's book "Evolution". It has a chapter on bird evolution and is a good layman's introduction to the current fossil record.

Quiz time! Who can identify what part of the body these bones come from? What animal?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1209042362.jpg

That's obviously a snake that is about to give birth to a cow. With wings. And gills. :D

Close! It's a whale.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1209042993.gif

Why would a whale need fingers? Looks remarkably similar to a terrestrial "hand" don't you think?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1209043067.gif

And aren't cows related to whales, or am I thinking of something else?

Pretty hard for science to change it's views when you 'science types' in the peanut gallery shout down all attempts at discussion with insult laden tirades.

Close, Mike, but it's dolphins, not whales!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1209046031.jpg

That's actually a Mama dolphin with her baby - evolution takes another abrupt turn. :)

Best,

Kurt

ID is not science.

I am not moved by the 'oversimplification' argument.

At some point, for evolution to be true, a lizard MUST have laid an egg that hatched into a bird. If that DID NOT HAPPEN then Birds DID NOT evolve from lizards.

There may have been a 'million steps' along the way, but at some point some lizard somewhere MUST have laid an egg that hatched into the first bird.

There is just no way around it.

If at NO POINT did a lizard give birth to an egg that hatched into the first bird, then the premise of birds evolving from reptiles is false.

I have no doubt winged lizards can evolve from lizards, but until someone can show us the step of a lizard actually producing a bird egg...

Sounds to me like both sides are relying on "Faith" in this discussion.

Likewise, until someone can show life spontaneously spring forth from primordial goo, the whole chain of events relies on the individuals FAITH that this could actually happen.

Cause no one has ever seen that, and no one can replicate that, hard as they may try.

You can repeat that all you want, it doesn't make you right. IMO, and by the definition i would use, cloning is Intelligent design, literally.

Cloning, by any definition of the word, is science.

How about a little condenscention?

That is the theory evolution proposes, i will agree with that.

Bull****. It is a damn good common sense question that Evolutionists have so far not been able to answer with laboratory experiments or actual observation.

Evasion is you cherry picking what to answer, and then dismissing legitimate, common sense questions with (yet another) flurry of insults. As far as i'm concerned, you have no credibility left whatsoever on this topic.

SHOW ME A BIRD COME FROM A LIZARD EGG THAT CAME -NATURALLY- FROM THE BELLY OF A LIZARD.

Until you can show that you are relying on FAITH that it can happen. So far, no one, ever, anywhere, has ever seen that happen.

Period.

You can take on all the superior tones you want, but the fact is, i am right.

In order for evolution to be true at some point a lizard laid an egg that hatched into a bird. It may have taken 10,000 generations, but at some point- and yes- this is a FINITE point in time- the lizard stopped being a lizard, and began being a bird.

There is simply no way for you to dismiss or insult your way out of admitting, "We've never seen that yet."

You want to talk about dishonest, insulting me repeatedly in an condescending tone just to avoid saying "we've never seen that yet." is what i'd call dishonest.

Let's, just for fun, say that whales are related to cows.
Why are there still both?

Why the similarities between the species? Same creator.


KT