---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
Re "Don't suppose you'd accept enhanced cuteness as an explanation?": Nope. (But the beauty of the world around us does suggest that Mother Nature is an artist at heart.) But a more serious objection to Darwin's natural selection hypothesis (beautifully simple and powerful as the idea is) than weird monsters from our prehistoric past is the prevalence of homosexuality (in humans if not our animal cousins). How can behaviour that is sterile possibly have evolved according to a theory that claims Nature favours acts that increase an organism's chances of sexual reproduction? Anyone want to attempt an answer? A gay man or woman is walking, talking proof that natural selection is either wrong or (more likely) radically incomplete as an explanation of how we got to be the way we are. Currently, the human race could use any means of slowing down their reproductive rates and if gay men and women want to take credit for that then I applaud them. I consider my environmental contribution to be the fact that I never had children. That would mean some other couple could have three kids and have no more impact on the over population of the planet than if they had two and I had had my one. Kind of like those carbon credits those big corporations can accrue. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote : Survival of the fittest? This is what the original looked like of that fossil just found in China (the Zhenyuanlong suni - a cousin of the better known Velociraptor). But it couldn't fly so those wings are surely (as the tired old cliché has it) about as much use as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking contest. Let's see those neo-Darwinians explain this one! Hmm, maybe they were originally for keeping warm and became useful for catching insects or mating displays. Or maybe they just helped it run faster? Feathers are deformed scales so they must have had some sort of advantage early on or they wouldn't have got very far. Don't suppose you'd accept enhanced cuteness as an explanation? If I had a time machine this is the sort of problem I would work on... http://tinyurl.com/p8kf48h http://tinyurl.com/p8kf48h http://tinyurl.com/p8kf48h http://tinyurl.com/p8kf48h http://tinyurl.com/p8kf48h View on tinyurl.com http://tinyurl.com/p8kf48h Preview by Yahoo
