Anti-Creationists......time to speak your clout

[whar]

"Goose bumps in humans may, however, have taken on a minor new role. Like flushing, another thermoregulatory mechanism, they have become linked with emotional responses - notably fear, rage or the pleasure, say, of listening to beautiful music. This could serve as a signal to others. It may also heighten emotional reactions: there is some evidence, for instance, that a music-induced frisson causes changes of activity in the brain that are associated with pleasure." - New Scientist

Please note the language here. It is far from absolute. And it does nothing to change the fact that goose bumps are vestigial. Even if a function for a vestigial organ or feature remains if the original function has been lost the item is vestigial. That is the definition. Regulating internal temperature was the original purpose and goose bumps no longer do that in humans.

Whales still have leg bones.

Horse still have finger bones.

Human have a tail bone.

Humans have an appendix.

Apes have tail bones.

Blind mole rats have eyes.

These types of structures are expected in an evolutionary process. If they did not exist it would stand as strong evidence that our theories on evolution are all wrong.

 

[bambu]

Please note the language here. It is far from absolute. And it does nothing to change the fact that goose bumps are vestigial. Even if a function for a vestigial organ or feature remains if the original function has been lost the item is vestigial. That is the definition. Regulating internal temperature was the original purpose and goose bumps no longer do that in humans.

But then you say absolutely that.....

in humans they serve no purpose since they no longer are tied to standing hair on its end to increase size.

But now you say....

Even if a function for a vestigial organ or feature remains if the original function has been lost the item is vestigial.

However....

The whole assumption is quite unscientific, and is based entirely on insufficient knowledge. These "non-functional organs" were in fact organs whose "functions had not yet been discovered."

The appendix (above), which evolutionists thought to be a vestigial organ, has now been understood to play an important part in the body's immune system. The coccyx at the lower end of the vertebral column is also not a vestigial organ but provides an attachment for our pelvic organs so that they will not collapse.

 

[Bodhi]

@bambu, @whar; hope you don't mind. I'm bored @ work and I'm going to jump in, having read what was being discussed between the two of you.

However....

The whole assumption is quite unscientific, and is based entirely on insufficient knowledge. These "non-functional organs" were in fact organs whose "functions had not yet been discovered."

The appendix (above), which evolutionists thought to be a vestigial organ, has now been understood to play an important part in the body's immune system. The coccyx at the lower end of the vertebral column is also not a vestigial organ but provides an attachment for our pelvic organs so that they will not collapse.

^^ From:http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/embryology_02.html

@bambu, cite your sources.

 

[Bodhi]

@bambu

Vestigiality does not necessarily imply that the structure, or organ, is completely useless. The point of vestigiality is that the structure, or organ, has lost a purpose. What is the reason for this loss? Evolution, of course.

Opponents of evolution always raise the same argument when vestigial traits are cited as evidence for evolution. "The features are not useless," they say. "They are either useful for something, or we haven't yet discovered what they're for." They claim, in other words, that a trait can't be vestigial if it still has a function, or a function yet to be found.

But this rejoinder misses the point. Evolutionary theory doesn't say that vestigial characters have no function.
http://jerrycoyne.uchicago.edu/excerpt.html

Darwin says

An organ, serving for two purposes, may become rudimentary or utterly aborted for one, even the more important purpose, and remain perfectly efficient for the other.

An organ rendered, during changed habits of life, useless or injurious for one purpose, might easily be modified and used for another purpose.

Again, an organ may become rudimentary for its proper purpose, and be used for a distinct object: in certain fish the swim-bladder seems to be rudimentary for its proper function of giving buoyancy, but has become converted into a nascent breathing organ or lung.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section2.html#vestiges_functional

Vestigiality does not state that a structure has to be completely functionless.

vestigial. a. Of, pertaining to, or of the nature of a vestige; like a mere trace of what has been; also, rudimentary. In biology vestigial has a specific application to those organs or structures which are commonly called rudimentary, and are rudimentary in fact, but which are properly regarded, not as beginnings or incipient states, but as remains of parts or structures which have been better developed in an earlier stage of existence of the same organismm, or in lower preceding organisms, and have aborted or atrophied, or become otherwise reduced or rudimental in the evolution of the individual or of the species.

(The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language 1911)

it is incorrect to state that to be vestigial an organ must be non-function
http://rac.myweb.uga.edu/papers/Naylor1982.pdf

Ostrich and penguin wings, for example, have new uses but the original purpose for flight was lost.

All flightless birds have wings. In some, like the kiwi, the wings are so small—only a few inches long and buried beneath their feathers— that they don't seem to have any function. They're just remnants. In others, as we saw with the ostrich, the wings have new uses. In penguins, the ancestral wings have evolved into flippers, allowing the bird to swim underwater with amazing speed. Yet they all have exactly the same bones that we see in the wings of species that can fly. That's because the wings of flightless birds weren't the product of deliberate design (why would a creator use exactly the same bones in flying and flightless wings, including the wings of swimming penguins?), but of evolution from flying ancestors.

A trait can be vestigial and functional at the same time. It is vestigial not because it's functionless, but because it no longer performs the function for which it evolved. The wings of an ostrich are useful, but that doesn't mean that they tell us nothing about evolution.

http://jerrycoyne.uchicago.edu/excerpt.html

@bambu

The wing of the ostrich resembles those of the gyrfalcon and the hawk. Who does not know how the speed of the gyrfalcon and hawk in flight exceeds that of other birds? The ostrich certainly has wings like theirs but not their speed of flight. Truly, it has not the capacity to be lifted from the ground and gives only the impression of spreading its wings as if to fly; however, it never supports itself above the earth in flight.

It is exactly the same with all those hypocrites who pretend to live a life of piety, giving the impression of holiness without the reality of holy behaviour. They certainly have wings, as far as appearance goes, but in terms of action, they creep along the ground, because they spread their wings only to give an illusion of holiness, but they cannot possibly raise themselves from earth, weighed down as they are by the weight of worldly preoccupations.
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/translat/41v.hti

 

[Bodhi]

Did early matings with Neanderthals increase our ability to fight disease?

"Our ancestors’ liaisons with Neanderthals and Denisovans may have made them less susceptible to local infections, proposes Stanford immunologist Laurent Abi-Rached, giving them a survival advantage as they migrated out of Africa to Europe and Asia. “Breeding with our evolutionary cousins may have facilitated the spread of modern humans by preventing them from getting sick.”"

Because diseases can be endemic to specific regions of the world, these genes exist in thousands of versions, known as alleles.
http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/80#.UMuc3IaQ8sc

DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other.
http://amjca.blogspot.com/2009/04/human-genome-project-confirms-that-race.html

 

[Bodhi]

WTF now we came from reptiles that what you trying to say.............Nigga they got your mind, lol......... i heard it all now, not only you believe that you came from apes or ape like creatures but the ape like creatures ancestors are reptiles....WOW

@waterproof

Restoration of Procynosuchus, a member of the cynodont group, which includes the ancestors of mammals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_mammals

Plesiadapis is one of the oldest known primate-like mammal species which existed about 58-55 million years ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plesiadapis

Fully rendered timeline of evolution here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution#Timeline

 

[Bodhi]

 

[whar]

The simple fact that you can cut out the appendix and a person lives a long and healthy life shows that it is not important to the person's health.

The fact the the coccyx anchors muscle does not change its vestigial status. Its function is to provide the bones to a tail. It lost that function but still remains.

 

[whar]

that's it i am done with this, this is some of the most outlandish, off the wall shit in the history of man....... and the black man got's to be the one closet to the ape, lol.......

All people (as a population) have evolved. Black people are not the closet to the apes. For all we know if we did an experiment where we compare our two DNA sequences to some random chimp I would show more similar to the chimp than you.

 

[bambu]

@bambu

Vestigiality does not necessarily imply that the structure, or organ, is completely useless. The point of vestigiality is that the structure, or organ, has lost a purpose. What is the reason for this loss? Evolution, of course.

Darwin says

An organ, serving for two purposes, may become rudimentary or utterly aborted for one, even the more important purpose, and remain perfectly efficient for the other.

An organ rendered, during changed habits of life, useless or injurious for one purpose, might easily be modified and used for another purpose.

Again, an organ may become rudimentary for its proper purpose, and be used for a distinct object: in certain fish the swim-bladder seems to be rudimentary for its proper function of giving buoyancy, but has become converted into a nascent breathing organ or lung.

However.....

Your hero also says...

There remains, however, this difficulty. After an organ has ceased being used, and has become in consequence much reduced, how can it be still further reduced in size until the merest vestige is left; and how can it be finally quite obliterated? It is scarcely possible that disuse can go on producing any further effect after the organ has once been rendered functionless. Some additional explanation is here requisite which I cannot give.

There is no need to cite common knowledge......

For example....

Apes possess an appendix, whereas their less immediate relatives, the lower apes, do not; but it appears again among the still lower mammals such as the opossum.....

 

[Bodhi]

Your hero also says...

There remains, however, this difficulty. After an organ has ceased being used, and has become in consequence much reduced, how can it be still further reduced in size until the merest vestige is left; and how can it be finally quite obliterated? It is scarcely possible that disuse can go on producing any further effect after the organ has once been rendered functionless. Some additional explanation is here requisite which I cannot give.

This does not contradict what was quoted earlier from the same man.

For example, disuse of the kiwi's wings has not produced much further effect after they have been rendered functionless for flight. As a consequence, the wings have been reduced in size because they do not serve much of any other purpose, if any.

Again, vestigiality does not necessarily state that the structure is completely useless.

But if the structure is rendered completely functionless, the structure will reduce until not much of anything, if anything at all, is left.

You've got to learn how to comprehend what you're reading.

 

[Bodhi]

Apes possess an appendix, whereas their less immediate relatives, the lower apes, do not; but it appears again among the still lower mammals such as the opossum.....

Incorrect information.

Lemurs, for example, are part of the lower primate family and

several living species, including certain lemurs, still have an appendix attached to a large cecum which is used in digestion.

In addition,

[Scientists have] even looked in animals that don't have an appendix at all, and there's a part of the gut in those animals called a cecum. It serves as a digestive organ, but if you look at how the biofilms are laid out in those animals, as you get further and further into the back end of the gut, you find a lot more biofilms. [Scientists have] looked at mice, rats, humans, and done a little bit of work in nonhuman primates. It looks like, across the board [in mammals], there's something there, probably not as effective as the appendix, that maintains and harbors those beneficial bacteria.

 

[bambu]

And how exactly was the kiwi "wing" supposed to function????

Most birds have a raised central keel on their breastbone, to which feathers are attached. But ratites have a flat breastbone. This etching, which appeared in Richard Owen’s Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand in 1879, illustrates the absence of a keel in kiwi."

Again...

Apes possess an appendix, whereas their less immediate relatives, the lower apes, do not; but it appears again among the still lower mammals such as the opossum.....

 

[Bodhi]

Again...

Apes possess an appendix, whereas their less immediate relatives, the lower apes, do not; but it appears again among the still lower mammals such as the opossum.....

Again...

Incorrect information.

Lemurs, for example, are part of the lower primate family and

several living species, including certain lemurs, still have an appendix attached to a large cecum which is used in digestion.

In addition,

[Scientists have] even looked in animals that don't have an appendix at all, and there's a part of the gut in those animals called a cecum. It serves as a digestive organ, but if you look at how the biofilms are laid out in those animals, as you get further and further into the back end of the gut, you find a lot more biofilms. [Scientists have] looked at mice, rats, humans, and done a little bit of work in nonhuman primates. It looks like, across the board [in mammals], there's something there, probably not as effective as the appendix, that maintains and harbors those beneficial bacteria.

 

[Bodhi]

And how exactly was the kiwi "wing" supposed to function????

No ratite posesses a keel, including the ostrich. This is a result of their adaptation to a terrestrial life. This is why we call them "flightless" birds. They can't fly.

Like your friend says,

After an organ has ceased being used, and has become in consequence much reduced.. ..[it will be] further reduced in size until the merest vestige is left.. ..[until it is] finally.. ..obliterated

 

[bambu]

And how exactly was the kiwi "wing" supposed to function????

No ratite posesses a keel, including the ostrich. This is a result of their adaptation to a terrestrial life. This is why we call them "flightless" birds. They can't fly.

However.....

Not all "flightless" birds are in the ratite family.......

Struthionidae - ostrich

Rheidae - rhea

Casuariidae - cassowary

Dromaiidae - emu

†Aepyornithidae - elephant bird

†Dinornithidae - moa

Apterygidae - kiwi

Several other species of flightless birds....

What makes you so certain that the kiwi "wings" are for flight????

 

[Bodhi]

However.....

Not all "flightless" birds are in the ratite family.......

^^^ More incorrect information.

Ratite is defined as

Relating to or being any of a group of flightless birds having a flat breastbone without the keellike prominence characteristic of most flying birds.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ratite

and

a bird with a flat breastbone; especially : any of various mostly flightless birds (as an ostrich, rhea, emu, moa, or kiwi) with small or rudimentary wings and no keel on the sternum that are probably of polyphyletic origin and are assigned to a number of different orders
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ratite

Struthionidae - ostrich

Rheidae - rhea

Casuariidae - cassowary

Dromaiidae - emu

†Aepyornithidae - elephant bird

†Dinornithidae - moa

Apterygidae - kiwi

Several other species of flightless birds....

These are families; the order is Struthioniformes, which refers to all ratites, or flightless birds.

This is a small order with some very remarkable birds in it. It includes 5 families all of which were until recently given ordinal status in their own right, however, modern DNA information and cladistic analyses have brought them all together in one order. These five families are called Ratites and are all flightless birds without a keeled breastbone. They are all primarily herbivorous to omnivorous.
http://www.earthlife.net/birds/struthioniformes.html

What makes you so certain that the kiwi "wings" are for flight????

wing

One of a pair of movable organs for flying, as the feather-covered modified forelimb of a bird or the skin-covered modified digits of the forelimb of a bat.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/wing

1a : one of the movable feathered or membranous paired appendages by means of which a bird, bat, or insect is able to fly; also : such an appendage even though rudimentary if possessed by an animal belonging to a group characterized by the power of flight b : any of various anatomical structures (as of a flying fish or flying lemur) providing means of limited flight
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wing

 

[bambu]

However.....

Not all "flightless" birds are in the ratite family.......

Struthionidae - ostrich

Rheidae - rhea

Casuariidae - cassowary

Dromaiidae - emu

†Aepyornithidae - elephant bird

†Dinornithidae - moa

Apterygidae - kiwi

Several other species of flightless birds....

What makes you so certain that the kiwi "wings" are for flight????

These are families; the order is Struthioniformes, which refers to all ratites, or flightless birds.

For example there are.......

Anseriformes (Waterfowl)

Campbell Teal

Moa-nalos (extinct)

Bermuda Island Flightless Duck †

Fuegian Steamer Duck

Falkland Steamer Duck

Chubut Steamer Duck

Auckland Teal

Campbell Teal

Dromornis †

Genyornis †

Chendytes lawi †

Talpanas †

Cnemiornis †

Galliformes (Wildfowl)

New Caledonian Giant Megapode †

Podicipediformes (Grebes)

Junin Grebe

Titicaca Grebe

Atitlán Grebe † (reportedly flightless)[5]

Pelecaniformes (Pelicans, Cormorants and allies)

Flightless Cormorant

Flightless Cormorant

Sphenisciformes (Penguins)

Penguins

Coraciiformes (Kingfishers, Hornbills and allies)

Giant Hoopoe †

Ciconiiformes (Herons, Ibis)

Apteribis †

Jamaican Ibis †

Réunion Sacred Ibis †

Leptoptilos robustus †

Gruiformes (Cranes, Rails)

Weka

Great Auk

Cuban Flightless Crane †

Red Rail †

Rodrigues Rail †

Woodford's Rail (probably flightless)

Bar-winged Rail † (probably flightless)

Weka

New Caledonian Rail

Lord Howe Woodhen

Calayan Rail

New Britain Rail

Okinawa Rail

Guam Rail

Roviana Rail (flightless, or nearly so)[6]

Tahiti Rail †

Dieffenbach's Rail †

Chatham Rail †

Wake Island Rail †

Snoring Rail

Inaccessible Island Rail

Laysan Rail †

Hawaiian Rail †

Kosrae Crake †

Ascension Crake †

Red-eyed Crake

Invisible Rail

New Guinea Flightless Rail

Lord Howe Swamphen † (probably flightless)

North Island Takahe †

Takahe

Samoan Wood Rail

Makira Wood Rail

Tristan Moorhen †

Gough Island Moorhen

Tasmanian Nativehen

Giant Coot (adults only; immatures can fly)

Adzebills †

Charadriiformes (Gulls, Terns, Auks)

Great Auk †

Diving Puffin †

Falconiformes (Birds of prey)

Dodo

Terrestrial Caracara †

Psittaciformes (Parrots)

Kakapo

Broad-billed Parrot †

Columbiformes (Pigeons, Doves)

Dodo †

Rodrigues Solitaire †

Viti Levu Giant Pigeon †

Caprimulgiformes (Nightjars)

New Zealand Owlet-nightjar †

Strigformes (Owls)

Cuban Giant Owl †

Cretan Owl † (probably flightless)

Andros Island Barn Owl †

Passeriformes (Perching Birds)

Stephens Island Wren †

Long-legged Bunting †

The majority of this list possessing a keel......

Most birds have a raised central keel on their breastbone, to which feathers are attached. But ratites have a flat breastbone. This etching, which appeared in Richard Owen’s Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand in 1879, illustrates the absence of a keel in kiwi."

[/quote]

 

[bambu]

wing

One of a pair of movable organs for flying, as the feather-covered modified forelimb of a bird or the skin-covered modified digits of the forelimb of a bat.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/wing

1a : one of the movable feathered or membranous paired appendages by means of which a bird, bat, or insect is able to fly; also : such an appendage even though rudimentary if possessed by an animal belonging to a group characterized by the power of flight b : any of various anatomical structures (as of a flying fish or flying lemur) providing means of limited flight
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wing

Your definition fails to describe the Fuegian Steamer Duck......

a flightless waterfowl, who has allegedly killed adults of various other waterfowl species with their powerful, spurred "wings".......

 

[Bodhi]

My mistake.

Penguins and other flightless birds outside of the ratites are not considered to be ratites since they lack the flat breastbone but their wings are strong solely due to adaptation; for example, penguins and other water birds swim by use of their wings.