Birds and Flight: Evolved or Designed?

Credit to Prof. McLintosh! Excellent lecture.

Evolution needs to explain how intricate designs can come about by purely natural selection operating on random variation. Given any amount of time, the theory fails to explain what we see around us.

Darwinism points to uncontroversial micro-evolution (changes within species over time) and extrapolates with a lot of arm waving to gloss over the details. Despite the title, Origin of Species does not explain the origin of species. The lecture highlights that the more we learn the more implausible Darwinism becomes, not less!

Prof. also addresses the problem of the fossil record relating to birds. Evidence does not match the imaginary "tree of life."

Evolution is a religion. Nothing more. As Darwinist Richard Dawkins said (as quoted in the lecture) it takes "faith" to believe it. I'd argue that you need a awful lot more faith to accept Darwinism that infer an intelligent designer.

I enjoyed his lecture and learned several new, very interesting facts about the mechanics of flying etc.

However, when it came to the problem for the evolution of the avian lung from diaphragma-mechanisms I was curious and did a little web research. Sure enough, I turned out a Nature 2005 paper (Basic avian pulmonary design and flow-through ventilation in non-avian theropod dinosaurs, Vol 436|14 July 2005|doi:10.1038/nature03716) that mulls Ruben's Science paper from 1997, presented by Prof. McIntosh. This is so typical for creationism: Proponents argue that, because we don't understand how something evolved, it therefore MUST have been created by a supernatural being with a purpose.

As research continues and time progresses, the area of unknowns becomes smaller and smaller with active research. However, the creationist attitutude is that evolution must be false and should not be considered as a fact, and not further be researched, because it does not fit the creationist believe.

The situation resembles me of what my (of course Christian faith believer) father told me when I was a child: "Our solar system is the only one with a planetary system, and there are no other planets like Earth in the universe." Of course, we now have more than 250 exoplanets just 25 years after his claim. I have no doubt that in the not so far future smaller exoplanets will also become discovered, and personally I have no doubt that there is biological life on other planets as well. We are NOT special (The Earth is not center of the universe, the sun is not center of the universe, and we are not living in the only planetary system of the universe; the universe was NOT created for Man IMO).

It is easy to forget taht evolution happens very gradually during hundreds or even thousands of generations.

The lack of understanding of the huge amount of time that takes for something happen is the big mistake of the simplistic explanations that people give for what they see.

Cancer is a proof of the deep flaw on the design of the living beings and how this flaw causes extream changes on the DNA during time.

Evolution works.