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. 

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. The pterosaur is many times larger than the lagerpetid.

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. 

A 2025 press release is entitled "Fossil brain scans show pterosaurs evolved flight in a flash." We read that "giant reptiles living as far back as 220 million years ago may have developed the ability to fly at the very start of their evolutionary history." We read this:

"Fabbri notes that pterosaurs also had enlarged optic lobes. Outside of this trait, however, he explains that their brain shape and size differed considerably from those of the lagerpetid.

'The few similarities suggest that flying pterosaurs, which appeared very soon after the lagerpetid, likely acquired flight in a burst at their origin,' Fabbri says. 'Essentially, pterosaur brains quickly transformed acquiring all they needed to take flight from the beginning.' "

Such statements undermine the credibility that pterosaurs could have evolved from lagerpetids through any type of gradual Darwinian process. Scientists lack any credible account of the origin of pterosaurs, which appear so suddenly in the fossil record, with such dramatic anatomical innovations (such as huge wings). 

Implausible Boasts Keep Blighting Our Science News Sites

 When you read science news sites, you will typically read a great deal of shameless hype.  Runaway hype and exaggeration  is currently going on in Internet sites reporting scientific research. Major websites have learned the following fundamental formula:

                                     Clicks= Cash Income

The reason for this is that major websites make money from online ads. So the more people click on a link to some science story, the more money the website makes. This means that science reporting sites have a tremendous financial incentive to hype and exaggerate science stories. If they have a link saying, “Borderline results from new neuron study,” they may make only five dollars from that story. But if they have a story saying, “Astonishing breakthrough unveils the brain secret of memory,” they may make a hundred dollars from that story. With such a situation, it is no wonder that the hyping and exaggeration of scientific research is at epidemic levels. Call it a "hypedemic."

Part of the problem is university press offices, which nowadays are shameless in exaggerating the importance of research done at their university. A scientific paper reached the following conclusions, indicating a huge hype and exaggeration crisis both among the authors of scientific papers and the media that reports on such papers:

“Thirty-four percent of academic studies and 48% of media articles used language that reviewers considered too strong for their strength of causal inference....Fifty-eight percent of media articles were found to have inaccurately reported the question, results, intervention, or population of the academic study”

Let us look at a recent example of such a thing.  At the widely read site www.phys.org we have a headline reading this: "How the insect got its wings: Scientists (at last!) tell the tale."  The story attempts to persuade us that scientists have finally discovered how the first wings appeared.  We have this boastful triumphal-sounding prose:

"It sounds like a 'Just So Story'—'How the Insect Got its Wings'—but it's really a mystery that has puzzled biologists for over a century. Intriguing and competing theories of insect wing evolution have emerged in recent years, but none were entirely satisfactory. Finally, a team from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, has settled the controversy, using clues from long-ago scientific papers as well as state-of-the-art genomic approaches."

Who is it who has made this boastful claim? When we look at the article byline, we find that there is a byline of "by Marine Biological Laboratory." That should make us suspicious.  We have a press release by the Marine Biological Laboratory, boasting of some alleged accomplishment made by people at the Marine Biological Laboratory.  That kind of "blowing your own horn" puff piece is rather like some politician's PR desk releasing some press release talking about what a great job he's doing.

We then read a claim that makes no sense. Here is the story told:

(1) First there was some crustacean with a little lobe or outgrowth on its leg.

(2) Then this little lobe moved up along the back of some animal. 

(3) Then that turned into a wing on an insect. 

The article quotes a scientist telling this tale: "The leg lobes then moved up onto the insect's back, and those later formed the wings." 

Later in the news story we are told once again one of the biggest myths of modern biologists, the very untruthful claim that genes contain instructions for anatomical structures. We are told that a scientist was "comparing the genetic instructions for the segmented legs of a crustacean." Genes do not contain any instructions for anatomical structures. Genes do not specify the structure of limbs, organs or even cells. Genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as the polypeptide sequences that are the starting points of proteins. 

We are told little else by the press release of the Marine Biological Laboratory. There is a reference to a paper that is behind a paywall. But at the link here you can read an open-access paper by the same scientists mentioned in the press release, Bruce and Patel, one in which they discuss their thoughts on the origin of insect wings. Figure 1 shows a shrimp-like crustacean, with one of its little legs highlighted; and above that is an insect with a big wing, and the wing highlighted.  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. 

These scientists have done nothing to prove this silly theory about the origin of insect wings, and in their paper they repeatedly refer to their speculation as being a "model." In physics a model usually involves some complicated mathematics, but a model in biology is a mere speculation, and may be a mere "just so" story.  There is a rather obvious reason why the story is unbelievable. Some primitive structure moving from the front of a shrimp-like organism to its back (or the back of an insect descended from such an organism) would have no use in such a place while the structure was some preliminary fragment of a wing.  So you cannot trace any path from front leg-like structures in crustaceans to back wings in insects, with each stage being useful. A similar difficulty would apply to any sort of attempt to explain an origin of insect wings, the difficulty that half-wings or quarter-wings would be useless, so there's no reason why they would appear. 

Why is such "grasping at straws" occurring? Because scientists have no credible theory of the origin of insect wings. In a previous story on phys.org a scientist states, "Insects evolved their wings long before birds and bats, yet, we do not know how their wings evolved."  There is no compelling evidence that insects evolved from crustaceans, and the evidence for such a thing is so weak that the current wikipedia article on "evolution of insects" merely says (rather hesitantly) that "insects may have evolved from a group of crustaceans." A science site tells us this: "Differing mostly in their body parts, insects, such as ants, flies, wasps and dragonflies, have tri-segmented bodies consisting of the head, thorax and abdomen; crustaceans, such as crabs, lobsters, shrimps and crayfish, have only two body segments — the head and thorax."  No one has a credible explanation of how a two-segment organism without wings could change into a three-segment organism with wings. The idea that a shrimp-like animal evolved into a flying insect is very far-fetched, rather like thinking that chickens evolved into monkeys. 

Darwinists have no credible explanation for the origin of anatomical structures.  Since DNA does not specify anatomical structures, we cannot postulate the appearance of a useful new anatomical structure by imagining lucky random mutations in DNA. DNA does not specify anatomical structures, so no amount of lucky changes in DNA can explain how useful new anatomical structures could arise. Evolutionary biologists often try to bridge this gap by using deceptive language trying to make it sound as if DNA was some kind of blueprint for an organism. We know exactly why it can be no such thing.  The "language" used by DNA (the genetic code) is a "bare bones" poor-man's language capable of specifying only low-level chemical information.  And if some molecule in the body were to contain instructions for making something as immensely organized as an organism, they would be instructions so complex there would be nothing in a body capable of interpreting them. 

"The genome is not a blueprint," says Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. "It doesn't encode some specific outcome."  His statement was reiterated by another scientist. "DNA cannot be seen as the 'blueprint' for life," says Antony Jose, associate professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland. He says, "It is at best an overlapping and potentially scrambled list of ingredients that is used differently by different cells at different times."  Sergio Pistoi (a science writer with a PhD in molecular biology) tells us, "DNA is not a blueprint," and tells us, "We do not inherit specific instructions on how to build a cell or an organ." Michael Levin (director of a large biology research lab) states that "genomes are not a blueprint for anatomy."

Nowadays when scientists have merely come up with a silly speculation, they may do something like putting up a big shiny achievement trophy on their mantle, making it sound like they're the first to explain some long-standing mystery.  That's what happens all the time in scientific academia: professors boasting about mighty achievements they did not really accomplish, and bragging about understanding things they do not at all understand, like someone crowning his own head with a laurel wreath, or sewing a self-devised merit badge on his own shirt. 

I can imagine how it would work if national news sites worked the same way as science news sites.  The national news sites such as www.cbsnews.com would be filled with "puff piece" stories that just repeated word-for-word press releases straight from the PR desks of politicians. You would read all these "news stories," and say to yourself, "Wow, I never knew my mayor was such a world-changing wonder-working epoch-making genius." 

In my next post I will discuss another recent example of an unjustified boast on science news sites, the very incorrect claim that the AlphaFold2 software of the DeepMind company has solved the long-standing protein folding problem. 

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.