Another Groundless Boast of Progress in Understanding the Origin of Flying Organisms

Scientists have three main problems in trying to understand the origin of flying organisms:

(1) Understanding the origin of flying insects, the oldest known form of flying organisms.

(2) Understanding the origin of flying reptiles such as pterosaurs. 

(3) Understanding the origin of birds. 

In a previous post I discussed a recent case in which some scientists were making a groundless boast of having made some progress on the first of these problems. The reported progress was merely a very silly speculation that shrimp-like crustaceans had a lobe on their legs, that this lobe had moved on to their back and up their back, and that this feature had somehow transformed into the wings on a flying insect (at the same time that crustaceans with two body segments were transforming into insects with three body segments and other major body differences). I compared this story to the tale that Cinderella's white mice and pumpkin transformed into a coach pulled by white horses.  Unsupported by any fossil evidence, this "leg lobes drastically migrating and turning into wings" story is as silly as the claim that animals got arms after their toes moved up the side of their legs and turned into arms. 

Recently on our science news sites we had another groundless boast of progress in understanding the origin of flying animals. We read one headline saying "Scientists clarify origins of pterosaurs, the dinosaur era's flying reptiles."  The story claims, "Scientists may have solved one of paleontology’s enduring mysteries - the evolutionary origins of the flying reptiles called pterosaurs that ruled the skies at the same time that dinosaurs dominated the land."  We read this: "Researchers said on Wednesday a poorly understood Triassic Period reptile group called lagerpetids, known from a few partial skeletons from the United States, Argentina, Brazil and Madagascar, appears to have been the evolutionary precursor to pterosaurs."

A paleontologist named Martin Ezcurra is quoted as saying, "We show that lagerpetids are the closest-known relatives to pterosaurs and bridge the anatomical gap between pterosaurs and other reptiles." The story conveniently has no picture showing what these lagerpedtids looked like. Another news story has a similar credulous headline, telling us "Pterosaurs evolved from small, wingless reptiles called lagerpetids, fossils suggest." But this story does have a visualization of what these lagerpetids look like. We see nothing in these lagerpetids that look anything like wings, and we can see that these lagerpetids looked nothing like flying dinsoaurs. So the claim that these lagerpetids "bridge the anatomical gap between pterosaurs and other reptiles" is just plain false. 

The story quotes Ezcurra as giving some not-at-all persuasive reasoning to try to back up his claim that lagerpetids "bridge the anatomical gap between pterosaurs and other reptiles." Ezcurra is quoted as saying this:

" 'If we considered the original position of lagerpetids as closer to dinosaurs, we needed very quick evolutionary rates to get the dinosaur body plan,' Dr Ezcurra said. 'But when we see lagerpetids as the closest relatives of pterosaurs, these evolutionary rates are lower and actually not different to other main groups of reptiles. So that shows that lagerpetids fill, not completely, but in a large degree, this anatomical gap between pterosaurs and other [earlier] reptiles.' "

This is sophistry. Lagerpetids had no structures resembling wings or even a predecessor of wings. So the claim that these lagerpetids "bridge the anatomical gap between pterosaurs and other reptiles" is just plain false.  In a Scientific American article on the topic, another paleontologist makes this very untrue claim: "Lagerpetids are essentially flightless pterosaurs."

The visual below shows how utterly false this statement is. 

Credit for the left image: link.

Note the many differences above.  The heads have a very different shape. The arms on the left animal are short, and the arm-like bones on the second animal are very long. The legs on the first animal are long, and the legs on the second animal are short. One animal has huge wings, and the other has no wings, and nothing even a little like wings. The animal on the left has a very long tail making up a major fraction of its total weight, while the animal on the right has no tail at all. The second animal is six times bigger than the second. So it is a very obvious falsehood to claim,  "Lagerpetids are essentially flightless pterosaurs." That's like saying mice are essentially elephants without trunks. 

Scientists have no credible tale to tell of the origin of flying dinsosaurs, flying insects or flying birds. Flying dinosaurs appear in the fossil record fully-formed, and no trace of an intermediate fossil has ever been found. The same thing is true about flying insects. 

Before anyone pontificates about  biological origins, he should study and ponder at great length very many things:

• He should make a very thorough study of the organization, order, dynamic behavior, and complexity of living organisms, their cells, and their proteins, to help weigh whether such things can be reasonably explained through any known theory of natural origins. 
• He should make a very thorough study of development, morphogenesis, and the origin of individual human bodies, to see whether there is any known natural explanation for such things (it being senseless to claim you understand the origin of a whole species when you do not even understand the origin of a single organism of that species).
• He should make a very thorough study of cells, their complexity  and their reproduction (it being senseless to claim you understand the origin of a species when you do not even understand how a single cell is able to reproduce). 
• He should make a very thorough study of claims about the source of common human mental phenomena, such as memory, self-hood, imagination, thinking and creativity, to judge whether the origin of such things can credibly be explained by some mere hypothesis of an increase in brain sizes.
• He should make a very thorough study of exactly what is in DNA, to judge which side is correct, the many that keep describing DNA as a blueprint for making an organism, or the many other biology authorities who say that DNA is no such thing, being merely a repository of low-level chemical information (this question being of crucial importance to whether any credible theory of natural biological origins exists).
• He should make a very thorough study of the apparent fine-tuning of the universe's laws and fundamental constants, to see whether they show evidence of design that might be relevant to the question of biological origins. 
• He should make a very thorough study of the question of the origin of life, to see whether such a thing may show evidence of design that may be relevant to the question of the biological origins of particular organisms. 
• He should make a thorough study of evidence for paranormal phenomena, to judge whether or not there is evidence of some psychic abilities in humans that cannot be explained though any mere evolutionary account of an increase in brain size. 
• He should study fossils suggesting which organisms existed in  previous times. 
• He should study evidence regarding the genomes of various organisms, living and extinct. 
• He should study engineering, either mechanical engineering or software engineering, to help judge whether or not incredibly organized functional systems ever arise though any process in which there are innumerable tiny changes that each produce an improvement, or whether such hard-to-achieve systems almost always require a coordinated and purposeful effort in which multiple coordinated changes are introduced at the same time to help achieve the same functional end. 
• He should study great mysteries such as the origin of language, the origin of writing, and the origin of culture, to help judge whether such things can be easily explained by simple ideas such as a mere increase in brain size. 
• He should study the origin of the universe and the origin of large-scale order in the universe, to judge whether there is any sign of some creative force that might have had a role in biological origins.
• He should make a thorough study of the behavior of mammals, and the most remarkable achievements and performances of humans, to judge whether there is any truth in the very strange claim made by Darwin that "there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." 
• He should study probability mathematics, to help understand whether it is credible to think that millions of different types of  protein molecules in the animal kingdom (most having hundreds of parts arranged in just the right way to achieve a functional end) might have arisen though some set of random mutations, each one changing only one such part, or whether the chance origination of each such protein innovation would have involved a likelihood like the likelihood of someone throwing a deck of cards into the air, and them all accidentally forming into a house of cards. 
• He should study the sensitivity of protein molecules, to learn about how they so often become non-functional when only a very small change is made in them, a consideration relevant to the likelihood of their natural origin by chance.
• He should study sociology and psychology, to judge whether popular triumphalist claims about understanding biological origins may be examples of cultural bandwagons and groupthink rather than very solid hardcore science based on direct observation. 

But paleontologists do not study or ponder most of these things at any considerable length. They mainly just study fossils. So paleontologists are rather like someone trying to understand Yellowstone National Park by only studying rocks from such a park.  A paleontologist thinking that old bones tell us how organisms arose is rather like some Marxist claiming that class struggle explains almost all historical events.

Over the years many paleontologists or their satellite press workers have been guilty of dubious procedural techniques. One technique involves recruiting  artists to draw paintings of organisms with an unknown appearance, and failing to label such speculative visualizations as mere conjectures. Another common technique is to collect together bone fragments found at various places at a site, and arrange them to look as if they were parts of a single skeleton or a single skull, even though it may not even be known whether the fragments were all part of a single organism's skeleton or skull.  For example, according to the New Scientist magazine one of the bones of the famous arrangement of bone fragments called "Lucy" was found to be a baboon bone unrelated to the other fragments.  Then there is the technique of often displaying in museums structures that countless visitors think are fossils, but which are merely fiberglass or plaster artworks inspired by some data obtained from studying fossils.  One large natural history museum confesses that only 85% of the specimens in one of its exhibit halls are actual fossils. 

Over the years some paleontologists have made very many misleading statements, and such misstatements keep appearing again and again.  A very misleading statement often made by paleontologists is when they use the term "early humans" when describing organisms that lived more than 100,000 years ago. A paleontologist may refer to some organism corresponding to a fossil that was dated to 500,000 years ago or 1,000,000 years ago, and call such an organism "an early human."  The defining characteristic of a human is the use of symbols and the use of language.  The oldest evidence for the use of symbols or language is not older than about 65,000 years old. Lacking any evidence of the use of symbols, culture, language or technology prior to 100,000 years ago, we have no evidence that any real humans existed before 100,000 years ago.  If there lived  organisms with bodies rather resembling humans at some time way before 100,000 years ago, we have no basis for calling such organisms "early humans." 

Postscript:  Darwinists have no credible explanation for the origin of winged pterodactyls in the fossil record.  A common attempt to explain a gradualist origin of birds is to imagine the evolution of birds from so-called flying squirrels, animals that can jump from one tree to another. But flying pterodactyls appear in the fossil record about 200 million years ago, which is 170 million years before the earliest appearance of squirrels in the fossil record.  Also, birds appear in the fossil record 30 million years before the first squirrels.