• This is a new section being rolled out to attract people interested in exploring the origins of the universe and the earth from a biblical perspective. Debate is encouraged and opposing viewpoints are welcome to post but certain rules must be followed. 1. No abusive tagging - if abusive tags are found - they will be deleted and disabled by the Admin team 2. No calling the biblical accounts a fable - fairy tale ect. This is a Christian site, so members that participate here must be respectful in their disagreement.

Evolutionists: How did legs evolve?

iouae

Well-known member
There isn't any which is the point. God's creation allows for adaptation and that is what we see in evolution. Animals adapting to changing conditions.

God is a Creator God. Not a has-been-Creator. If He no longer created, He would no longer be a Creator God.

God creates past, present, and future. And from the fossil record and how He boasted to Job of his creation, God obviously enjoys creating. The world could have comprised man and ten domestic plants and ten domestic animals, and God could have still saved man. The heavens could have had just sun and moon and no universe. God just goes wild and overdoes everything, to His glory and for His pleasure.
 

CabinetMaker

Member of the 10 year club on TOL!!
Hall of Fame
God is a Creator God. Not a has-been-Creator. If He no longer created, He would no longer be a Creator God.

God creates past, present, and future. And from the fossil record and how He boasted to Job of his creation, God obviously enjoys creating. The world could have comprised man and ten domestic plants and ten domestic animals, and God could have still saved man. The heavens could have had just sun and moon and no universe. God just goes wild and overdoes everything, to His glory and for His pleasure.
So you are saying that God continued to create after the 6th day. [MENTION=5235]RightDivider[/MENTION] will want you to provide biblical proof of that.
 

Right Divider

Body part
Correct. It is also called evolution.
I was taking issue with your comment "He continued to create long after."

Continued variation is not creation.

The term "evolution" is so badly abused that I think that it always needs to be qualified with more details than just that single word.
 

iouae

Well-known member
So you are saying that God continued to create after the 6th day. [MENTION=5235]RightDivider[/MENTION] will want you to provide biblical proof of that.

God creates in bursts. This is coming after Christ returns (the Milleniocene). Animals will be re-engineered.

Isa 11:6
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

Isa 65:25
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the LORD.

Even heaven and earth will be changed, and probably repopulated with new plants and animals, such as the tree of life bearing different fruit each month.

Isa 65:17
For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.
 

6days

New member
The Barbarian said:
'You're still angry because you got caught in a lie. You denied that Wise called intermediate forms "transitional forms"
You are being dishonest. Wise does not believe in "intermediate forms", and calls the word 'transitional' an ambiguous word. He actually says that there are interpretations of fossils that can be understood to support macroevolution... But, "It is my understanding, for example, that the claim of an old earth denies the veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis", and that fossil evidence often better fits the Biblical account.


The Barbarian said:
It's "Dr. Wise" and he says as you also know that the existence of the transitional forms he referred to is "strong evidence" for evolution. Instead of trying to revise what he said, learn from it.

Yes... He is an honest paleontologist who rejects the common ancestry belief system. He actually says that there are interpretations of fossils that can be understood to support macroevolution... But, "It is my understanding, for example, that the claim of an old earth denies the veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis", and that fossil evidence often better fits the Biblical account.


Dr. Wise says "conventional theory is much less successful at explaining some of their fossil evidence (namely the horse series) series then is the creation model." (Contrary to your dishonest claim that Kurt Wise
 

CabinetMaker

Member of the 10 year club on TOL!!
Hall of Fame
I was taking issue with your comment "He continued to create long after."

Continued variation is not creation.

The term "evolution" is so badly abused that I think that it always needs to be qualified with more details than just that single word.
You might want to go back and look at that original post. You have taken that quote out of context.
 

Right Divider

Body part
These animals did not exist at the same time, they are separated by time. If they are transitional then it follows they are transitioning from the original created kind to something else God intended. If they are not transitioning that would mean that God didn't finish His creation in 6 days. He continued to create long after.

You might want to go back and look at that original post. You have taken that quote out of context.
Please explain how I took that out of context.

The Bible says that God created everything in six days and yet your say that "He continued to create long after."


 

CabinetMaker

Member of the 10 year club on TOL!!
Hall of Fame
Please explain how I took that out of context.

The Bible says that God created everything in six days and yet your say that "He continued to create long after."



This is why you took it out of context, it needs to be read with the previous sentence to maintain proper context:
If they are not transitioning that would mean that God didn't finish His creation in 6 days. He continued to create long after.

Let me paraphrase it for you:
If they are not transitioning that would mean that God didn't finish His creation in 6 days then He continued to create long after.

Make more sense now? Context is rarely a function of on sentence or even one paragraph. Some of the very worst theology comes when people take a phrase or sentence or paragraph out of a book in the Bible. It can destroy the context of the original text.
 

The Barbarian

BANNED
Banned
Thanks for the comprehensive post Barbarian.

I have no axe to grind one way or the other whether there are fossils in Romer's gap or not.

I personally do not believe the taphonomy excuse, that fossils just did not preserve well in Romers gap, or the fossils are yet to be found.

I'm looking at it from the perspective of a lifetime in biology. When I started out there were no transitional forms for whales, turtles, birds, frogs, land vertebrates, ants, termites... (very long list) and now we have them for all of these. The fossil record is spotty and until we figure out where to look, we overlook a lot of things.

I have a few doubts about Pederpes, since the link you gave says "Pederpes was discovered in 1971 in central Scotland and classified as a lobe-finned fish." Maybe they were right the first time and it is a lobe-finned fish.

At that point, the difference is very tiny. Acanthostega, for example, has limbs like any tetrapod, but is clearly a fish. The whole point is that if evolution wasn't a fact, we wouldn't have these transitionals. Even more to the point, the fact that we don't see transitionals where they shouldn't be is powerful evidence for what transitionals are.

All later land tetrapods have pentadactyly or 5 toes, this one 6.

The lobed-fin fishes found so far, have been variable. So another example of transitional features.


"Carboniferous tetrapods[edit]
See also: Carboniferous tetrapod
Until the 1990s, there was a 30 million year gap in the fossil record between the late Devonian tetrapods and the reappearance of tetrapod fossils in recognizable mid-Carboniferous amphibian lineages. It was referred to as "Romer's Gap", which now covers the period from about 360 to 345 million years ago (the Devonian-Carboniferous transition and the early Mississippian), after the palaeontologist who recognized it.

During the "gap", tetrapod backbones developed, as did limbs with digits and other adaptations for terrestrial life. Ears, skulls and vertebral columns all underwent changes too. The number of digits on hands and feet became standardized at five, as lineages with more digits died out. Thus, those very few tetrapod fossils found in this "gap" are all the more prized by palaeontologists because they document these significant changes and clarify their history."


My belief is that there were certain times in the geologic column, that God experimented, whenever there would be a big change and the new organisms might need a tweak. For instance I see the Ediacarans, possibly those in the Romer Gap, and certainly Pleistocene Hominids as God experimenting to get some new animal functioning correctly. Not a person on this forum agrees with me that God needs to experiment, or believes that God is a Scientist, and sometimes learns from failures too. What others think does not trouble me.

I get that. I don't agree with you, but you're logically consistent. What puzzles me is that your view is much more consistent with evolution than YE creationism can be.

In the end, I believe John 1:3 that every plant and animal was created by Jesus. I differ from YEC in that I add "not just 6000 years ago, but at different times in the geological past". To me, every fossil just adds to the glory of God. If this present biome was not great enough, 99% has died out and can only be admired as fossils.

In the 1700s, when it became clear that a six-day creation a few thousand years ago could not be true, scientists (who were then almost entirely theists) had much the same opinions as you have.
 

6days

New member
The Barbarian said:
No one cares about your counter-accusations.
You may or may not care... But if you continue with dishonest comments on what Kurt Wise says... I will continue posting his actual words. Wise does not believe in "intermediate forms", and calls the word 'transitional' an ambiguous word. He actually says that there are interpretations of fossils that can be understood to support macroevolution... But, "It is my understanding, for example, that the claim of an old earth denies the veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis", and that fossil evidence often better fits the Biblical account.
 

CabinetMaker

Member of the 10 year club on TOL!!
Hall of Fame
You may or may not care... But if you continue with dishonest comments on what Kurt Wise says... I will continue posting his actual words. Wise does not believe in "intermediate forms", and calls the word 'transitional' an ambiguous word. He actually says that there are interpretations of fossils that can be understood to support macroevolution... But, "It is my understanding, for example, that the claim of an old earth denies the veracity of the first 11 chapters of Genesis", and that fossil evidence often better fits the Biblical account.

If that is true, why do we never find the remains of modern animals (i.e. horses, cattle, dogs, humans, etc) in the same bone beds that we find dinosaur bones in?
 

The Barbarian

BANNED
Banned
On the diagram showing the spider family tree, what's supposed to be off the left side of the page and what sits at the first two branches? Where's the creature that's sort of a horse shoe crap and sort of a sea spider but not really either one? Was there ever a creature that didn't have eight legs and slowly but surely turned into a creature that does have eight legs?

There's a lot of fossils not shown here. I'll see what I can find. The important thing is that morphology is not always a good guide to descent. King crabs, for example, are genetically closer relatives to hermit crabs than to other "crab-looking crabs."

And because tagmosis is the way that arthropod body plans change, loss of legs is relatively simple, with changes in homeotic genes governing development. The ur-arthropod would have been something like a centipede, with little difference in each biramous segment.

By "biramous" I mean that each segment would have a pair of gills and a pair of legs. The evidence shows that gills were largely lost in terrestrial arthropods, but one or two pair became wings. And yes, there are transitional forms like stoneflies.

biramous.gif


Tagmosis reduces the number of segments, and alters the development of appendages. In spiders, the cephalothorax is comprised of a number of body segments, greatly altered. The chelae and pedipalps are modified legs, each with their own (no longer distiguishable) body segment.

Again, I really am not trying to focus on spiders here. It's just turned into a convenient avenue to go down toward the final destination.

Like chordates, they are bilaterans, and the Hox genes are related in many ways to those of chordates.

Also, notice that there is DNA for legs or there isn't, right?

Yes. But those genes are modified by developmental genes for each segment. So the appendages might be legs in one segment and chelae in others, and not developed at all in others. It's kinda like phalanges in vertebrates. There's no code directly specifying how many digits a vertebrate has. The limb bud, in development, has a bit of tissue that grows and hooks across the front of the bud. As it goes across, it pops out digits. The length of time it takes to do that determines how many, and that is determined by other genes that mediate development. This is why large dogs often have a sixth digit; they take longer in development and thereby get an extra one.

I mean, where did the DNA code for legs come from? How long is the DNA code for legs, hundred of base pairs, thousands? Is it longer or shorter than the DNA code for fins, or is it just different (i.e. not longer or shorter just different)?

It's different for arthropods and vertebrates. But the earliest organisms with "legs" in the line that leads to arthropods were onychophorans:

th


How much different is it? Is it a lot different or just a little incy-wincy bit different.

It's not a simple set of instructions. There's a basic plan, common to all of these organisms, and then a developmental plan that modifies the basic plan. And I'm greatly oversimplifying here.

(See what I did there! "incy-wincy spider" - get it? :) )

Yep. :chuckle: Depending on what the gene is, a small change can have very great effects.

Great questions; this is a very productive thread.
 

The Barbarian

BANNED
Banned
If that is true, why do we never find the remains of modern animals (i.e. horses, cattle, dogs, humans, etc) in the same bone beds that we find dinosaur bones in?

Because the swift sloths outran the slow velociraptors during the flood.

(can you say "swift sloths" three times, really fast?)
 

6days

New member
iouae said:
My belief is that there were certain times in the geologic column, that God experimented, whenever there would be a big change and the new organisms might need a tweak.
Your belief a in a God who can't get things right is heretical.

iouae said:
In the end, I believe John 1:3 that every plant and animal was created by Jesus.
It seems you think the Gospel and words of Jesus are like a buffet meal, where you pick a few things you like and reject the rest. His works, and His ways are perfect. Your god seems to have a few billion years of imperfect works. The God of the Bible created everything in six days... perfect. That perfect creation was subjected to entropy only after first Adam sinned.
 

CabinetMaker

Member of the 10 year club on TOL!!
Hall of Fame
Because the swift sloths outran the slow velociraptors during the flood.

(can you say "swift sloths" three times, really fast?)

Damn. I forgot how slow those darn velociraptors were compared to swift sloths. My bad.

And no I cant.
 

Right Divider

Body part
This is why you took it out of context, it needs to be read with the previous sentence to maintain proper context:
If they are not transitioning that would mean that God didn't finish His creation in 6 days. He continued to create long after.

Let me paraphrase it for you:
If they are not transitioning that would mean that God didn't finish His creation in 6 days then He continued to create long after.

Make more sense now? Context is rarely a function of on sentence or even one paragraph. Some of the very worst theology comes when people take a phrase or sentence or paragraph out of a book in the Bible. It can destroy the context of the original text.
Thanks for the clarification.
 

Clete

Truth Smacker
Silver Subscriber
Okay, I think I've gotten basically all I'm gonna get here. I do want to thank The Barbarian for participating so enthusiastically and with intellectual honesty, not to mention some pretty thick skin.


What I got in answer to my question really is surprisingly less than what I expected to get. That's probably because I don't often discuss evolution. It, if I can be blunt, doesn't really interest me all that much because, to an objective mind, its just so patently ridiculous that I just can't take it seriously enough to devote the time it would take to debate it. It's one unsubstantiated claim after another, all of which are themselves presented as substantive evidence. It's just the most unfalsifiable gobbledygook in existence. How anyone can consider it science is beyond my comprehension. Fortunately, there are those here who do an excellent job of debating it and I can focus on other forms of ridiculous gobbledygook like Calvinism and time warping gravity wells.

The reason I started the thread is because biology, a real science, just keeps mounting up the evidence against evolution and I happened across something I hadn't seen before the other day while wasting some time watching YouTube videos. There are at least a dozen different things in the video that I could have focused on as things that evolution has no prayer of explaining but I chose to focus on legs because I knew that none of you would have engaged the debate has I asked about the origin of replisomes or any number of the other biological machines at work in every cell in your body, all of which are created due to instructions encoded in the very DNA that they are themselves required to replicate. I chose the legs because near the end of the video the scientist's computer animation shows a motor protein walking down a microtubual with legs that have a knee and ankle joints and feet and that work perfectly well and COULD NOT POSSIBLY have evolved. There is no transitional forms that are even conceptually possible, never mind in existence, no matter how primitive the species in which these machines are found. There are several different kinds of motor proteins but none of them are simpler forms of other motor proteins, they're just altogether different. Not only that, but it seems that they are all necessary. One motor protein can't do the job that a different motor protein does. Each one can do what it does perfectly well but cannot be substituted if another one calls in sick that day. They either all show up for work or the cell dies, failing to pass on it's genetic information to the next generation. A point, one of thousands that exist in every single cell of every living creature in existence, that flatly falsifies evolution to any mind that isn't blind to his own confirmation bias and/or dead set against the existence of a Creator.

One last point. The speaker in this video gives some lip service to Darwin at the beginning of the video. Biologists who are about to disprove the theory of evolution with whatever it is they're about to present ALWAYS do this! I mean, its uncanny! It doesn't matter what the venue, whether its in a classroom, on television, in a textbook, a magazine article or on YouTube or wherever! You can always tell when a scientist is about to throw Darwin under the bus because they will bring up Darwin himself or evolution in general out of the clear blue sky, giving it a touch of positive lip service before presenting something that just burns the whole thing down and blows the ashes in your face. As often as not this lip service will come in the form of simply stating, without any presentation of how or why, that what's being presented is "evolution in action" or something along those lines. It's hard to tell if this behavior is really the way the scientist thinks or if its just him covering his professional backside for fear of being accused of being some sort of Christian wolf is scientific sheep's clothing.

Anyway, here's the video. If anyone would like to venture a wild guess as to how anything so wildly complex (irreducibly so in many cases) could possibly have evolved, I truly would love to hear it. Clearly, the legs on those motor proteins didn't evolve from fins.

 
Top