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Originally Posted by Bohemianwrapsody
So all those things exist…
My point still stands.
All of those examples the genetic code to have those things existed w their parents.
It still makes zero sense why if all life comes from water why we would develop lungs and no longer be able to breath under water. It’s de evolution when you think about it… I mean how often do things evolve to do less?
Adaptations and survival of the fittest implies after years the more positive traits survive while the less desirables get left out.
It would be more desirable to be able to breath both above and below water but for some reason a frog can do that but a human can’t. It seems frogs are higher on the evolution process than us humans?!
Are you being intentionally obtuse? You are implying that “breathing water” and “breathing air” are two completely separate things and that there’s a major transition from one to the other. Those examples of modern species show that there is no such major transition; species can go gradually from gills to lungs via intermediate states where they are capable of living both in water and on land.
In a wider sense, though, still aren’t getting it. There is no “higher” or “lower” on the evolutionary process. There is no evolutionary process. There’s no end goal to which organisms evolve. There is no “de-evolution”. If a given organism has the ability to breathe air and water, but later descendants lose that ability, that’s evolution. Evolution can and does result in loss of structures and functions when such a loss confers an advantage to the organism (and here’s the critical part so I’ll do all caps) IN ITS ENVIRONMENT.
It doesn’t matter that it might be advantageous in some rare instances for a land animal to have gills. If an animal is land-dwelling, having gills is not enough of an advantage to overcome the energy cost of maintaining that structure. Do you really think, as an extreme example, that a desert-dwelling reptile would benefit greatly from possessing gills.
You are looking for design in an evolved system. Designed systems should be globally optimized; evolved ones are not. Evolved systems can be expected to be flawed; a variant of an ancestral species only needs to outcompete other variants to become dominant; it doesn’t have to have the best possible design. A designed system should, if the designer is competent, be optimized.
Given your opposition to evolution, I’d assume that you think life is such a designed system. I repeat a question I asked earlier then: why don’t whales and dolphins have gills? If these mammals evolved, lack of gills is expected. If they were designed, then they were incompetently designed. What competent designer would create an aquatic animal that could drown if it doesn’t surface every 20 minutes or so?
Last edited by stremba70; 08-20-2021 at 10:05 AM.