Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, explains the evolution of winged creatures:

What use is half a wing? How did wings get their start? Many animals leap from bough to bough, and sometimes fall to the ground. Especially in a small animal, the whole body surface catches the air and assists the leap, or breaks the fall, by acting as a crude aerofoil. Any tendency to increase the ratio of surface area to weight would help, for example flaps of skin growing out in the angles of joints. From here, there is a continuous series of gradations to gliding wings, and hence to flapping wings. Obviously there are distances that could not have been jumped by the earliest animals with proto-wings. Equally obviously, for any degree of smallness or crudeness of ancestral air-catching surfaces, there must be some distance, however short, which can be jumped with the flap and which cannot be jumped without the flap.

Or, if prototype wingflaps worked to break the animal's fall, you cannot say 'Below a certain size the flaps would have been of no use at all'. Once again, it doesn't matter how small and un-winglike the first wingflaps were. There must be some height, call it h, such that an animal would just break its neck if it fell from that height, but would just survive if it fell from a slightly lower height. In this critical zone, any improvement in the body surface's ability to catch the air and break the fall, however slight that improvement, can make the difference between life and death. Natural selection will then favour slight, prototype wingflaps. When these small wingflaps have become the norm, the critical height A will become slightly greater. Now a slight further increase in the wingflaps will make the difference between life and death. And so on, until we have proper wings. -- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 89-90.

Here is irrefutable proof of the existence of kamikaze snakes, which, by Dawkins' argument, based on the principle of natural selection, must inevitably evolve into flying serpents:



We must also fear an inevitable invasion of flying frogs:



I'm sure all evolutionists agree that natural selection is the science that explains all this:



How dare dissidents doubt the just-so stories of the world's greatest evolutionists?



Any questions?

The Funnel of Smoke wrote: [Darwinian evolution] is easily simulated in computer programs and does indeed produce ordered complexity spontaneously. The process is not a fantasy, and not even a mystery. Its a perfectly ordinary result of iteration. And please do not disqualify yourself from further consideration by making the banal claim that the computer is designed. Its not the point, and you know that.

In the April issue of Scientific American (1975) there is a thoroughly hilarious news story about a computer chess program that learns from its mistakes. A high speed computer with this program was set to play against itself, taking both sides and completing a game on an average of every 1.5 seconds. The machine ran steadily for about seven months. At the end of the run, an extraordinary result was announced. It was established, with a high degree of probability, that pawn to king’s rook 4 is a win for White. This was quite unexpected because such an opening move has traditionally been regarded as poor. World Chess champion Bobby Fischer reportedly said that he had developed an impregnable defense against P-KR4 at the age of 11. Fischer then proposed a human vs. computer test of the program and offered to play in a competition against the highly evolved computer program, provided that arrangements could be made that he (Fischer) was guaranteed a win-or-lose payment of twenty five million dollars.

I assert that humans are being fooled by claims that nontrivial computer programs are evolving to a high order by means of evolutionary algorithms. A more relevant example of simulated Darwinian evolution (which is not a joke) would be something useful, like a continually evolving computer operating system that gets better and better via random code mutations with new features continually being added the longer it is turned on.

Suppose that Charles Darwin had studied a grand library of all the books and journals currently in print. Indisputably, great similarities, adaptations, spin-offs and plagiarisms would have been easy to recognize. I believe that Darwin would have rationalized the history of the grand library by imagining its highly ordered present-day existence to have come about by random and incremental variations. According to Neo-Darwinism, the following empirically unverified procedure is a valid method for building a library and acquiring knowledge:

"Begin with a meaningful phrase, retype it with a few mistakes, make it longer by adding letters, and rearrange subsequences in the string of letters; then examine the result to see if the new phrase is meaningful. Repeat this process until the library is complete." — Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, Wistar Institute Press, 1967, p. 110.

I'm hoping that there is an evolutionist here who would be willing to give a reasonably brief while still conceptually detailed explanation of how legs evolved.

What use are paralyzed legs or uncontrollable stubs? How did legs get their start? Many animals don’t have legs. But if prototype legs worked well enough to confer a small advantage for an animal to get closer to food or to escape a predator, then it doesn't matter how small and un-leglike the first legs were. However slight an improvement can be, it can make the difference between life and death. Natural selection will then favour slightly better, prototype legs. When these inefficient legs have become the norm, then a slight further increase in leg functionality will make the difference between life and death. And so on, until we have proper legs. -- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 89-90.

I'm hoping that there is an evolutionist here who would be willing to give a reasonably brief while still conceptually detailed explanation of how consciousness evolved.

What use is a paralyzed brain or uncontrollable neurons? How did consciousness evolve? Imagine a time when no animal attained the threshold of consciousness. If a prototype consciousness worked well enough to confer a small advantage for an animal to get food or to escape a predator, then it doesn't matter how unthinking and poorly conscious the first consciousness was. However slight an improvement can be, it can make the difference between life and death. Natural selection will then favour slightly better, prototype consciousness. When these inefficient consciousnesses have become the norm, then a slight further increase in consciousness and brain functionality will make the difference between life and death. And so on, until some species of animals have a highly evolved consciousness. -- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, pp. 89-90.