Some more crap from Dr. Carl Werner:
It is true that we don’t have a good understanding of how bats evolved.
There used to be a huge debate over whether Chiroptera were monophyletic or paraphyletic. It was once argued that megachiroptera were more closely related to primates because they had similar morphology to lemurs, but DNA evidence shows that bats are all derived from the same common ancestor. Bats are not related to primates at all. Genetic evidence shows that they are most closely related to Carnivorans, pangolins, and odd-toed and even-toed unglates (which now includes whales and dolphins).
But we don’t know how bats evolved.
The two oldest bat fossils date to 52.5 million years ago. The were discovered in the Green River Formation in Wyoming. One of these had claws on all five digits on the “hands” that comprise the bat’s wings. Bats, in case you didn’t know, have hands that have evolved extensive webbing between the digits to form the wing. Modern bats usually have claws on only two or three digits, but this one had five. There is some debate on whether this bat had echolocation skills. Most initial studies suggest that it did not. It also had longer tail than modern bats.
The other primitive bat had shrew-like teeth and a much longer tail. It also was more flexible and likely lacked the connective tissue around on the hind legs that modern bats exhibit.
These two primitive bats don’t show us the transition from a “normal” mammal template into a flying bat. However, they do show part of this process.
As more evidence comes in, it may someday become possible to see how bats evolved from normal quadrupeds.
But because bats are such an ancient group of mammals and because fossils of small mammals from that far back are hard to come by, it’s been very difficult to figure out how they evolved.
But just because their evolutionary past is hard to figure out doesn’t mean that they were specially created.
We just don’t know how it happened, but we know that it happened.
We have lots of evidence about how many different animals evolved, including our own species.
If we are to use the lack of evidence for bat evolution to assume that they were created, then we have to find ways of denying the evidence behind human evolution– which is much more completely understood.
Because if we don’t do that, we’ve created an absurdity for creationists. If we have evidence that humans evolved but are now assuming that bats were created, then we have to come to the conclusion that bats are God’s chosen creatures!
Of course, denying overwhelming evidence is old hat for creationists. Indeed, they wouldn’t be creationists if they could deny all the evidence.
And when they find a spot where the evidence isn’t clear, they automatically assume that it destroys the entire theory of evolution.
It does not.
It just means that there are things we don’t know yet.
And science is okay with that.
Maybe we won’t find out how bats evolved.
But we can be certain that they did evolve.
Ah that’s an easy one Scottie, rats and flying squirrels (they’re the same “kind” don’t you know), interbred and the result was a bat. Its so obvious (LOL).
The evidence for evolution of flight in bats may not be clear, but it is pretty well established that gliding has evolved many times in mammalian taxa, beginning well before the first fossil bats. Eg. this reference relates to finds from 70 million years ago, ~20 million years before the Green River bat finds.
A Mesozoic gliding mammal from northeastern China
Jin Meng1,2, Yaoming Hu2,3, Yuanqing Wang2, Xiaolin Wang2 & Chuankui Li2
Nature 444, 889-893 (14 December 2006)
Mammals are thought to have evolved as small, largely arboreal, animals in the Mesozoic. This niche would have favored flight, particularly for insectivores.
btw, the most recent evidence has put echo-location back in the running for the Green River bat fossils. Veselka, N. et al. (2010) A bony connection signals laryngeal echolocation in bats, Nature 463, 939-942. Though the ??’s remain. They’re hard to eliminate in paleo.
This reminds me of lyrics from a song I wrote about twenty years ago: “The scientists argue how it happened; they argue why. But they agree it did happen; it’s senseless to deny!” Look up “evolution song” and “bicycling guitarist” in any search engine if you want more. thanks
The facts are clear . .. . dinosours, man, birds, bats, and star fish lived TOGETHER. Take those facts to mean what you will, but there they are.
From what I see, to you:
Facts = things idiotic preachers and discredited and lying “scientists” say.
If you think that, you’re quite lost. There’s no hope for you.
I guess the dinosaurs didn’t pay the rent and that’s why they went extinct, right?
No, silly, dinosaurs were just big lizards that lived before the flood. Then man hunted them to extinction. We called them dragons.
No . … facts are not merely what someone claims . . facts are what is real. In science . .. .facts are sometimes hard to figure out. But I tell you what, they just found protein in T-Rex bones, comodo dragons are dinosaurs, and many fosills have been found in places where only dino remains are supposed to be . . . including the remains of modern birds. To me this is very suggestive that dinos really did live with man. Then you have the carvings and drawing of the indians in early America. They depicted dinosaurs. Well, are we interested in facts or not here?
Actually, I am, but you obviously don’t know what you’re talking about.
Birds actually are dinosaurs, and several ancient birds do look like the current ones. They are not exactly the same as modern birds, however.
“Commodo” dragons are lizards. Lizards are lepidosaurs. Dinosaurs (and birds) are archosaurs. A Kommodo dragon is a very big lepidosaur, but there are vast differences between lizards and dinosaurs.
Watch this and education yourself:
If you’re not going to educate yourself, then you’re just going to be willfully ignorant.
And we can laugh at you.
But you didn’t read the comment guidelines on creationism, did ya?
PS; I’m really serious about being as much like a machine as possible when it comes to the scientific method. Now you want me to be honest, I do come from a very religious background. However, my faith in itself (or what I still have left of it) is just a belief system that is only as good as the facts that support it. I can’t really prove (excluding all logical possibilities) that man lived with dinosaurs, but the very really evidence I have just mentioned seems to suggest it strongly. I read your comment guidelines. . .. listen . . . I know exactly how it feels to get fed up with religion . . . I have had some . . unpleasant experiences with it. I mean the whole speaking in tongs stuff, casting out demons, sign seeking . .. very very hard not to find all that rather strange and . . . ehm . .. it is difficult if not impossible to prove. but . . . as you can see I am no lier. Things have happened that have made me deeply want to know actual facts. When it comes to where I came from . . .I find it hard not to believe in ID. I have been reading the arguments going back and forth . . .so far the evolutionists just haven’t sold me on it yet. But if you have any facts that you are sure would crack up my position, by all means send them. Give me the facts . . . truth . . . beautiful . . . or sometimes ugly . . .truth. Please don’t take offense to my post. I have good reason to question both religion and non-religion these days.
I’m not an evolutionist. I’m a reality person. I looked at all the evidence. Creationism has nothing but lies and unsubstantiated claims (especially the nonsense about the appearance of design, which is an illusion). Evolution has withstood heavy scrutiny. All the evidence points in that direction.
But your mind is already made up.
You obviously don’t understand how science works. Otherwise, you’d be able to see that the vast bulk of the evidence points to it being true.
You’re one of these people who would argue that the sky is green if it said so in the bible.
And if I provided you clear evidence that it was blue, you’d still deny it.
So who’s dealing with an empirically verifiable reality here?
You obviously aren’t.
And I don’t have time for it.
I refuted your claims about kommodo dragons being dinosaurs. Anyone with even an elementary school level of biology can tell that dinosaur, though it means terrible lizard, doesn’t actually mean that lizards are dinosaurs. You don’t even understand the difference between lepidosaurs and archosaurs, and no matter how many times I show you the error of your thinking, you’re going to pontificate (“I have a religion.”)
My religion is simply what is demonstrable using empirically-based inquiry.
It’s not really my religion. Because unlike your religion, mine adjusts itself to new information. It can be corrected. Yours cannot. The only way yours gets corrected is through throwing out parts of the scripture or simply ignoring. And all Christians do this. If you don’t agree with me, then why don’t you defend biblical marriage as it really was– one man and many wives, some of whom he may have raped.
Mine doesn’t work that way. If something cannot be proven or “empirically verified,” then it is cast aside. The body of knowledge changes and is adjusted to fit that new reality.
you have me all wrong . . . I’m not the “only if the Bible says” type. I have run into such people and belief me it is irritating. My beliefs have been corrected. I used to believe the KJV was infallible. I used to believe demons where going around the earth. I used to believe everything was a sign from God. Clearly you have me as a person wrong. Sure you caught me in a moment of aha I think I’m right about this . . . but everyone has those moments. At one point I considered Deism because I still felt there was a strong argument for ID. I’m not going to beat a Bible over your head. You would have to go deeper south for that.
Nope. You don’t understand the scientific method– at all.
I’ll have to do is prove one or two things wrong, and the bible is wrong on a great many scientific and historical things. And the bible also includes lots of things that we’d consider immoral– like God calling for the execution of disobedient children and the genocide of people who aren’t the chosen ones living in the land God.
Look, you’re too stupid to know that a Komodo dragon is absolutely not a dinosaur, so I’m not going to listen to anything else you say.
Your ignorance of biology is telling. No credible authority on reptiles thinks that a Komodo dragon is a dinosaur. Only people with very little knowledge about them would say something that unbelievable.
As I told you before, we have big division in reptiles: lepidosaurs and archosaurs. Both of these lineages were once quite a bit larger, but they no longer have this diversity. The only two living archosaurs are crocodilians and birds (avian dinosaurs). Dinosaurs have nothing to do with the reptiles living today that we call lizards. The lizard body type is the primitive reptile body type, and earlier ancestors of all these things looked more or less like lizards. Archosaurs are quite derived. Within lepidosauria, there are two subclases: Rhynchocephalia (tuataras from New Zealand, which look like lizards) and Squamata (lizards and snakes). Genetic and fossil evidence suggests that these lineages splits maybe 200 million or more years ago.
You know how we date rocks? Not by the fossils. Who told you that was either a liar or an ignorant fool. The rock layers are dated using radiometric methods, which are based upon the half life of isotopes, which we know decay at a very constant rate. When different isotopes from rock layers are compared, what’s interesting is we get the same ages for rock layers, which is how we know the earth is 4.5 billion years old. Oh, the Bible was wrong there, too!
And then we have phylogenetic trees drawn from DNA. DNA allows us to trace common ancestry just as well as it proved that O.J. hacked up his wife. And what it has found is that the basics of the phylogenies of organisms that were drawn from comparative morphology are not necessarily that far off. When we’ve had to correct them– say when we found out that anteaters and pangolins were not closely related as morphology suggested– we were still dealing with animals that had been classified as mammals.
To disprove evolution and prove creation, you’d have to find that DNA had nothing to do with how animals were classified, say pangolins come out as archosauria and anteaters as closely relation. A creator god can do just about anything. He could create horses with wings that aren’t related to anything like regular horses. He would have the ability to create just about anything in the same way we can make sculptures out of different mediums.
That’s not what phylogenies drawn from DNA have shown.
Now, about intelligent design: you think all these organisms are intelligently put together. They are not.
All organisms evolve out of their ancestry. All adaptation is based upon the historical legacy of the ancestry. So we have giraffes with a recurrent (inferior) laryngeal nerve that detours as much as 15 feet in a giraffe and it detours about 18 inches in us. If it were intelligently designed, it would be only about 2-4 inches long for it comes off the back of the head and links to the larynx. In humans and giraffes it goes down into our chest and comes back up. Why does it do this? Well, when our ancestors had gills, that was the the most direct route, but since we’ve evolved lung and longer necks, it’s had to modify out of that lineage.
Whales are inefficient swimmers when compared to fish. Their tails go up and down. Fish have tails that go side to side. If whales had been created, they would have been given side to side motion with their tails. But they don’t. Their tails go up in down for the same reason that if you watch an otter swim, its body makes a very similar motions. Whales did not evolve from otters, of course, but most mammals move their back ends up and down when they swim. Our spines don’t go side to side that well. So whales clearly evolved out of a land mammal lineage, but because they did, they are inefficient swimmers.
The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, but you’re not going to listen to any of this. Your mind’s already made up. Evolution is one of the best supported theories in all of science. I have given you just bits and pieces of some of the evidence.
The only evidence you have is “the bible says this,” which is not a good way to convince anyone. You’re trying to convince me that the bible is true, but you’ve not. Because all you’re saying is that the bible is true because it’s the bible.
And then your best scientific evidence is a claim that Komodo dragons are dinosaurs, which is simply false, and only someone who didn’t know anything about reptiles would try to pass that claim off as true.
So what you’ve given me is a bunch of weak sauce. Almost all of it, I’ve heard before, and then you say something that is demonstrably false, which destroys any credibility you have on the matter.
Some people try to say that radiometric dating methods are based on faulty assumptions, but if that were true then nuclear power plants would not work either because those are based on the same scientific principles. Since nuclear power plants DO work, radiometric dating methods are NOT bogus.
Some people also deny the evidence of the fossil record saying there are no transitional fossils. They obviously are badly misinformed about such stunning finds as Tiktaalik. But even if we had never discovered any fossils at all, none, there is still way more than sufficient evidence of other types that clearly show evolution happens. Many different types of measurements (such as the placement of endogenous retroviruses in the DNA) result in patterns of nested hierarchies of the data that all produce the same tree of life showing the degree of relatedness of different species. That these patterns MATCH is itself strong evidence that evolution happens.The tree of life produced by analyzing these patterns also matches what we find in the fossil record.
Human chromosome 2 is practically a smoking gun showing the common ancestry of humans with the other great apes. It shows many clear signs of being two ape chromosomes fused together end to end.
As you point out, for anyone to deny the fact of evolution is just as ridiculous and just as wrong as if they seriously believed the earth was flat in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Even Michael Behe, the star “scientist” of the intelligent design movement, admits in his book The Edge of Evolution that humans a common ancestor with chimpanzees and other great apes, but then he says that fact is “trivial.” Go figure.
I wrote a song in 1991 about this controversy that is (sadly) still relevant. Look for “bicycling guitarist” and “evolution song” in any search engine to check it out. I should have a new YouTube video up within a week or so showing me playing this song at a recent live performance.
All I want . … . is the truth. If my Bible had said that the sky was green . . . . and I saw blue . .. . ide say something isn’t right with my Bible.
The Bible has lots of things in it that aren’t true. For example, there is no historical evidence of the Exodus. It’s only found in the Bible. And saying that Egypt never recorded defeats is a cop-out. That’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. Noah’s flood is impossible from a population genetics perspective. The Pyramids were built not long after this flood happened (which required a great many people), so how on earth could that many people have come from Noah’s family? There are unicorns and dragons in the bible, as well as talking snakes.
It’s really nothing more than a series of Bronze Age myths, coupled with those of the ancient world, and then a story about the followers of a beloved rabbi during the Roman occupation of Judea.