"The Origin of Specious Nonsense"

J C wrote: »

Probably because He thought that they looked better with wings.

sephir0th wrote: »

Science and JC...

J C wrote: »

Probably because He thought that they looked better with wings.
The presence of flightless birds with wings argues for a designer, because such structures cannot be explained by natural selection for the simple reason that they confer no known survival advantage ... and should have been eliminated by NS.

Doctor Jimbob wrote: »

I think I'd look better with wings. Why didn't god give me any? What the hell did a kiwi do to deserve wings. Screw you god.
On a (slightly) more serious note, don't you think it's a bit strange that the only flightless animals with wings just happen to be similar in a lot of other ways to those which can fly? You know, it's almost like they might have had some kind of common ancestor. Crazy talk, I know. It's much more likely that God made the kiwi, thought 'hmmm that looks a bit like that flying thing I made, I think I'll give it the flying things to, but not let it use them. Just for the laugh.'
Seriously J C, things just aren't instantly eliminated by natural selection just because they don't have a use. Over the course of a few million years, it's possible that these flightless birds will lose their wings. Or maybe not. If they don't have a clear disadvantage either (which as far as I am aware, they don't) why would they be selected against?
Your entire last paragraph once again shows your limited understanding of natural selection. It's not a case of a feature just disappearing instantly the moment it becomes useless. That's just absurd.
I have no expectations of you actually addressing any of the points I just made, I'm sure you'll just come out with your usual waffle about me being sectarian or some nonsense like that.

dlofnep wrote: »

You've never seen a Kiwi, have you? Their wings are NOT visible. What an utterly absurd response. Admit it, your schtick is up.





Arguing from ignorance again I see? Only natural selection can explain flightless birds. Flightless birds like the Kiwi, have very little danger when foraging on the ground. Therefore, it is advantageous to be wingless and more mobile on the ground where there are no predators to cull the population.

Secondly - in other flightless birds like the Ostrich, wings do have a survival advantage - in that they give balance to the ostrich whilst running at high speeds, and are used to shade their young from the soaring heat.

Penguins use their wings to their advantage to propel them through water.

Only natural selection can explain this. Not a deity. You lose, game over.

joseph brand wrote: »

Now THAT'S funny.

I suppose god had a box of leftover wings and started sticking them onto animals that 'looked better' with them. rofl :D:D

koth wrote: »

30 seconds in and they're making a lot of references to 'mistakes' with regards to evolution. Sounds like the same misinformation you've been peddling on-thread.

Sarky wrote: »

Antibiotics do buggerall to viruses. They're just bits of DNA or RNA in a protein shell. They're mostly not affected by antibiotics because they don't metabolise, they're not even alive in most senses of the word. Until they get into a cell, whereupon they hijack a cell's machinery to replicate themselves in a variety of interesting ways.

Generally they insert their own DNA into the host's chromosome (it's quite easy to see that parts of the human genome contain bits and pieces that are obviously viral in nature) and force that region to be translated over and over again, producing protein shells and replicated viral DNA/RNA to put inside them.

The process is error prone like everything else (More so in the case of RNA viruses, as their genomes don't have the double helix structure to provide extra stability), and often a virus will copy too much or too little, and the new viruses can contain bits and pieces of host DNA/RNA. Their lack of repair enzymes allows for plenty of mutation and variability as errors go uncorrected, especially given the number of viruses even one host cell can produce before it dies from exhaustion or bursts open after producing too many viruses or any number of other factors. They're orders of magnitude above even bacteria for replication numbers. Evolution is extremely obvious in viruses for these reasons. Well, viruses themselves are extremely hard to see, being only a few nanometres in length, but we can measure their effects on cells and we can easily examine their genomes.

This is mostly 1st or 2nd year undergrad biology stuff, and the fact that J C doesn't seem to know about the intricacies of basic microbiology like this either means that his "conventional scientific qualification" has nothing to do with the topics covered here (rendering it useless for trying to add weight to his claims), or that he has no qualification at all. Given his lack of honesty about pretty much everything else, I'd suspect the latter, but he could always put such speculation to rest by growing a pair and telling us.

Sarky wrote: »

Well, no. Antibiotics only really affect cells, but they aren't at all picky. If a cell possesses the kind of chemical pathway that an antibiotic can f*ck up, then the antibiotic will f*ck it right up. The most commonly used ones are relatively harmless to humans, but mess up bacterial or fungal cells. There are plenty more that are really dangerous to human cells. Some of those are used in cancer treatment. Some require taking other medicine to counteract the nasty side effects. Antibiotics are essentially poisons that are less effective against some creatures.

There's virtually nothing available to medicine that's effective against viral infections, you have only your own body to thank for getting rid of those with some cleverly evolved defences; swelling makes movement in that area difficult, infected areas often do mass cell suicides in a scorched earth kind of defence (that's where the white colouration and most of the pain in a sore throat comes from. Your body does not f*ck about with infection), white blood cells create swarms of antigens that disable "sick" cells by sticking to the new proteins showing up in the cell membrane and disabling them or tagging them for suicide, or immobilising bacteria or viruses in a sort of sticky mass of themselves, leaving them easy prey for the white cells that eat and dissolve foreign bodies.

All your body's own work. It is able to recognise things that shouldn't be there and come up with a highly effective defence. It evolves to adapt to new infections. Which creates a selective pressure for bacteria and viruses different enough to slip past the new defences. Which in turn creates selective pressure on the body. A never-ending arms race of sorts. There's no malice, just cause and effect.

That terrifies people like J C.