Paleontologists Peddle Transformation Tall Tales

Scientists have four 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. 

(4) Understanding the orgin of flying mammals such as bats. 

Scientists have made no great progress in any of these areas. An example of their lack of progress can be seen when we consider the question of origin of flying insects. An example of the current tall tale told about such an origin is the paper here, a paper by Bruce and Patel entitled "Insect wings and body wall evolved from ancient leg segments." In that paper some scientists attempt to convince us that flying insects evolved from crustaceans. The paper tries to suggest that a little leg (or lobe on the leg) on the front of a shrimp-like organism transformed into a big wing on the back of an insect organism.  It says, "two ancestral crustacean leg segments were incorporated into the insect body, moving the leg’s epipod dorsally, up onto the back to form insect wings."  Really, and while that mystifying migration and radical transfiguration occurred, a shrimp-like crustacean was also turning into a vastly different type of animal, into an insect? 

This speculation is as silly as the theory that animals got arms after their toes moved up the side of their body and turned into arms. 

	Crustaceans	Insects
Body segments	2	3
Number of antennae	2 pairs	1 pair
Wings?	Never	Sometimes
Chewing appendages	Usually 3 pairs	1 pair
Location of appendages	Cephalothorax and abdomen	Head and abdomen
Respiration	Gills	Tracheal system

See here for this table's source

In Figure 1 of this paper by Bruce and Patel we have a drawing designed to show us some structural similarity between a part of a crustacean leg and an insect leg. The drawings aren't labeled as diagrams, but are labeled as  "cartoons," which doesn't exactly inspire our confidence.  When we compare these two "cartoons," we find the structural similarity isn't even very strong. So we get no visual reason for thinking one structure evolved from the other.  Since the authors have claimed that insect wings evolved from a crustacean leg or part of such a leg, why aren't they showing a diagram comparing the details of an insect wing and some part of a crustacean? It's because nothing on a crustacean looks anything like an insect wing. 

Recently the science news sites had another example of paleontologists making dubious boasts claiming some progress in understanding the origin of flying reptiles. One of the stories appeared in the BBC News, which for many, many years has displayed the most child-like credulity in uncritically parroting any evolution story coming from professors, no matter how ridiculous  such a story may be. The story is entitled "Scottish fossil revealed to be pterodactyl ancestor." There is a claim that a creature called Scleromochlus was an ancestor of flying pterodactyls.

There are some gigantic problems here:

(1) We see a skeletal "reconstruction" of this Scleromochlus, along with a visualization of it taken from a scientific paper, and neither shows signs of any wings or wing bones. 

(2) Pterodactyls were flying animals with very large winspans of about 6 meters. But in the BBC article we see a photo of a fossil of this Scleromochlus, and the fossil easily fits in the palms of someone's hands. So this Scleromochlus was no more than a few inches long, about the size of someone's palm. So claiming tiny Scleromochlus creatures (without even the beginning of a wing) as some explanation for how we got pterodactyls with huge wings is preposterous, rather like claiming that albatrosses arose from acorns. 

In the BBC article a professor claims that these tiny Scleromochlus creatures had "wings of skin attached to a single long, skinny finger."  Wings of skin? We see nothing in the visuals in the article justifying any such claim. No such wings are shown. One of the  visuals shows a tiny whitish something in the shoulder area of these creatures, with such a tiny whitish something being no more about a thirtieth of the length of the creatures. But since the creatures were palm-sized, such a whitish little something could not have been even half as long as a pea. Calling things so tiny "wings of skin" is baloney, since whatever such little bumps were, they could not conceivably have been wings. And referring to "fingers" on these palm-sized creatures as "long" is also baloney, since such "fingers"  must have been very tiny, less than half the size of a pea.  

The tale that pterosaurs with 6-meter wingspans arose from tiny wingless Scleromochlus creatures is a transformation tale comparable to Cinderella's white horses arising from Cinderella's white mice, but maybe even harder to believe, because at least the white mice and white horses had the same types of limbs. Why should we have much trust in the statements of paleontologists when they make boasts so dubious, and make ancestry claims so unsubstantiated?

A 1992 paper on the origin of flight in bats tells us that "the fossil evidence for bat origins is extremely sparse," and that "all fossils available only complicate matters." A 2005 paper discussing the origin of bats states "The phylogenetic and geographic origins of bats (Chiroptera) remain unknown." After noting that the earliest bats date from the early Eocene era, we read that "skeletons of these early taxa indicate that many of the anatomical specializations characteristic of bats had already been achieved by the early Eocene, including forelimb and manus elongation in conjunction with structural changes in the pectoral skeleton, hind limb reorientation, and the presence of rudimentary echolocating abilities."  The paper then tells us that "evolutionary intermediates between bats and their non-flying ancestors are not known from the fossil record." Quite the missing link. 

Paleontologists also have no credible theory to tell of the origin of birds. They tell us that birds evolved from reptiles, but not flying reptiles such as pterosaurs, but non-flying reptiles.  Paleontologists  have no credible theory to tell of how something as hard-to-achieve as flight could have appeared through any gradual Darwinian process. 

With the origin of flight, we have a classic case of a requirements threshold, an extremely important concept that paleontologists and evolutionary biologists like to ignore. A requirements threshold is a minimum level of parts and organization of such parts that must be achieved before something is useful. Consider an airplane. There is a certain number of parts that must exist and be arranged in a suitable manner for the airplane to reach the requirements threshold of being able to take off and land without killing people. Meeting only 60% or 70% or 80% of such a requirements threshold results in an aircraft that is useless but harmless (incapable of lifting off), or worse than useless (being something so unsafe it will tend to kill people riding in it). Below is a table with some rough estimates regarding levels of completion in meeting a requirements threshold for a flying animal:

 

Level of completion	Effect
10% of flying requirements threshold	Useless
30% of flying requirements threshold	Useless
50% of flying requirements threshold	Useless
70% of flying requirements threshold	Worse than useless. An animal trying to fly will tend to fall and kill itself, or have useless wings that will make it easier for predators to bite it.
90% of flying requirements threshold	Worse than useless. An animal trying to fly will tend to fall and kill itself,  or have useless wings that will make it easier for predators to bite it.
100% of flying requirements threshold	Useful. Animal can fly, and escape predators.

You have a similar situation regarding the construction of a bridge across a river. Building 50% of a bridge that leads halfway across the river does not result in something 50% useful that transports half as many people across rivers. Building 50% of a bridge that leads halfway across the river results in a suicide machine suitable only for leading drivers to their deaths at the bottom of the river. It's the same thing for building 70% or 80% or 90% of a river bridge: that merely gives you suicide machines that will dump drivers at the bottom of rivers. Requirements thresholds constantly appear in both biology and engineering, and when we properly ponder them, very many a gradualist origins tale will dissolve like the morning mist. 

Some have tried to suggest a gradual evolution of flight from animals that could jump between trees. But animals such as flying squirrels first appear in the fossil record about 31 million years ago, while paleontologists claim that birds appeared more than 100 million years ago. You could make a table like the one above, listing levels of completion for being able to jump between trees, and it would be something as problematic as the one above. The problem with jumping between trees is that unless it is done very reliably, it will be worse than useless. An animal that can only jump between trees with 90% reliability will quickly kill itself jumping between trees, as it falls from high distances. Also, animals such as flying squirrels don't look anything like birds. Such animals have arms that birds that don't have, and web-like structures between arms and legs, unlike anything in birds. So it is hard to imagine any transition between tree-jumping animals and birds.  

For the orthodox Darwinists there are countless problems of this type: how did nature “climb the staircase” to reach some top level of anatomical innovation, in such a way so that each step added to the reproductive value or survival value of an organism, so that each step was useful? Under Darwinian assumptions, each step must be useful, or we can't explain it. One of the biggest “climbing up the staircase” problems involves the evolution of wings. It is very hard to imagine that a small part of a wing would have any use. 

Faced with this issue, Darwinism apologists tend to cheat. One cheat is to try to give a reasonable-sounding answer to the question of "what good is half a wing?"  We may be told speculations such as half a wing is useful for keeping warm, or that half a wing may be useful for picking up food. Speaking like that is cheating, because it is starting halfway up the stairway, when you should be starting at the bottom of the stairway. The question that should be asked is not “what good is half a wing?” but “what good is an eighth of a wing?” or “what good is a wing stump?” To explain this problem under orthodox Darwinian assumptions, one would need to offer a scenario by which a species might progress through this series: (1) no wing; (2) an eighth of a wing; (3) two eighths of wing; (4) three eighths of a wing; (5) four eighths of a wing; and so forth. One would need to explain how each of these progressions involved an increase in either reproductive value or survival value.

Evolutionary biologists are unable to credibly explain such a progression. It doesn't work to suggest that organisms began to develop wings to keep them warm, because that can't explain the first two steps in the stairway; it can't explain why a species would start to evolve a wing stump or just an eighth of a wing. A wing stump or an eighth of a wing is worthless for keeping you warm. If you doubt this, I suggest the following experiment. Break a chopstick in half, and paste a few feathers on it. Then tape that feathered half chopstick on your shoulders, and go out on a cold night. You will not feel any warmer.

It has also been suggested that partial wings were useful for gliding. This does not work, for two reasons. A lesser reason is that gliding is only useful for certain types of animals (such as tree-dwellers); but it is believed that birds evolved from reptiles that did not live in trees. The larger reason is that to get even a capability for gliding, a wing must be quite well developed, much more than just a wing stump. So a gliding hypothesis cannot explain why an organism would evolve the first eighth of a wing or a wing stump.

In general Darwinism fails to credibly explain the first stages of useful new complex structures. This was pointed out very clearly in Darwin's time by the biologist Mivart, who wrote the following at the beginning of Chapter II of his book On the Genesis of Species: "Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may later become." Mivart devoted Chapter II of that book to many examples of "incipient stages" that Darwinism could not explain well.  You can read online Mivart's many examples here.  Without even reading that, it is easy to think of many examples of incipient stages that would not be useful, such as the first small part of any limb (such as an arm or leg) or the first small part of a wing or the first small part of a mammary gland. Other examples are the first small part of a penis, testicle, or an ovary.  On the microscopic level, there is the fact that the first small part of almost every protein molecule is useless. 

There is a general reason why all Darwinist attempts to explain the origin of flying animals are doomed to failure. The reason is that DNA does not specify anatomy. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up proteins. Since DNA does not specify anatomy, there are no conceivable mutations in DNA that can explain the origin of flying animals. Wings are an example of very impressive anatomical innovations, and you cannot explain very impressive anatomical innovations by imagining changes in DNA. So how could you ever get dramatic new anatomical innovations? That's something that Darwinism cannot credibly explain.