Viceroy wrote:Birds simply can not evolve into horse because the condition over millions of years, are just so???
Sigh. No matter how determined I am to not get involved in these silly discussions, this argument from the creationists always sticks in my craw. This right here is the major failure in communication between the two parties. It doesn't work that way and you can't use this as an argument no matter how much you desire it so.
At what point does yellow become green? Green to blue? So on and so forth. This is why you won't find the "transitional specimen" creationists are always trying to use against evolution (although there are several that demonstrate early branching). It is not a tiered process.
To use your example, let's say a sizable portion of a species of birds (not too small to go extinct but not too large to inhibit genetic drift and heritable mutations) is isolated due to some event. The population won't regress to some earlier form and then evolve to a horse because the conditions favor the horse. That's common sense. I can think of very few events where the benefits of wings would be disadvantageous. The birds will likely forever remain bird-like as birds are highly evolved and well adapted to many conditions. Look at penguins: flightless, but they retain feathers and wings. The wing muscles of birds are extremely powerful for their frames and size, and they function well under water as flippers. But imagine if one penguin, through a mutation which could be passed to offspring, developed even the slightest ability for gas exchange from water to epithelial surfaces of the lungs. This bird and its offspring would no longer be what we classify as "birds" since birds by one of our definitions must breathe air.
Why is it so hard to understand that something as complicated as the DNA Code Sequence of Life could not have occurred by accident. I give you that natural selection is a process by which species mutate and adapt (up to a certain limit) for the purpose of survival. But that does not explain the origin of Life. Nor does it explain that from single cell organism arose the many variations of life.
Viruses aren't alive and many have DNA, single or double strands. I'm willing to bet I know quite a bit more about DNA and its processes than you, and to chalk it up to an intelligent designer because it's complicated is lazy. The formation of DNA or RNA and its part in protein syntheses is just chemistry, nothing more, nothing less. There's nothing magical about it. I'm also curious as to your so-called "limit?" True, mutations are far more likely to have little effect or be deleterious than they are of conferring some benefit, but to operate under the assumption that there's some limit to the deviation is unfounded. Some sequences are more essential to the functioning of organisms and are less likely to mutate: those which get these mutations die quickly. Other sequences are peripheral and not so harmful: hair and eye colors, for example.
-TG
