Evolution is the best theory for the diversity of life.

My opponent states that "they are. .. did lose the ability to fly, this wouldn't prove evolution as a valid theory. What I was referring to was the specific complexity of the feathers and muscles that match those of flying birds. Feathers, most notably, are incredibly complex and used in flying in most other cases where they exist (excepting, of course, other flightless birds). And obviously I never claimed that this fact alone proved evolution because, as I said, science doesn't prove things. "Then my opponent questions the. .. vestigial structures in the human body, sufficient to make of a man a veritable walking museum of antiquities'"I must have missed the part about his original list being expanded, that's my fault. Anyway, I still await a list of the functions attributed to all of these organs that supposedly were uncovered. Judging by the rhetoric of your source and the fact that they provided no citations, I'm suspicious of the accuracy. I have no doubt many and maybe most of the organs have been assigned functions, but just a cursory glance at some of the organs listed on the Wikipedia page showed that several of the ones I chose at random still don't have a well-established function. Yes, and my point was that there are no true vestigial structures since functions are always found (eventually). Obviously we're using different definitions of vestigial. At any rate, that is quite a bold claim to make, saying that all vestigial organs will eventually have a function assigned to them. As for the Beetles. .. is common in ectoparasitic insects that have no use for wings, and inquiline insects with socially parasitic life strategies that do not require functional wings"If you'll note that the article I gave you was not about the beetles, but brachyptery in general. Neither of the insects used as examples in the article were the beetles I showed you, which were Apterocyclus honolulensis and several members of the genus Colophon, the former of which has fused wing covers over functional wings, and the latter of which have functional wing covers over Brachypterous wings. (. http://daphne.palomar.edu...) The left side of this page has the first beetle and mentions its functional wings covered by fused elytra. (. http://www.biodiversityexplorer.org...) The photo on the left in this link is the second example, with wings that are reduced vastly from the size that other beetles have. In fact, the excerpt you gave yourself gives several reasons for the evolution of brachyptery and also acknowledges that many of the cases of brachyptery are totally vestigial in the sense that they have no function. I suspect that at least one of these above beetles fit that mould. I have done this but I am happy to do it again. A common reptile has no feathers. . .. it couldn't fly (due to incomplete feathers). The creature would die off easily. Therefore transitional forms could not have survived in the first place. I finally found where you're misunderstanding this. First off, there's nothing in evolution that says one trait has to completely or even mostly disappear before new traits can evolve. As such, birds didn't evolve from just "common reptiles," with only scales, the reptiles that birds evolved from would have had feathers before they could fly. It's already well-established that many theropod dinosaurs had feathers or proto-feathers, including velociraptors (. http://science.sciencemag.org...), Sinosauropteryx (. http://news.nationalgeographic.com...), and Archaeopteryx (which I'll even cite a creationist source for, since Mr. Gish at least got the part about its feathers right, while not much else on this page) (. https://www.icr.org...). My favorite piece of indirect evidence (although it could be seen as direct, I suppose), is the fossil Oviraptor that is brooding her eggs like a chicken. Without feathered wings to cover the nest, a position like this (. https://www.newscientist.com...) would not be of much use (. https://www.q-files.com...). So not only were the first animals to have early versions of feathers not birds, they weren't even avian dinosaurs and much closer to these "common reptiles" that you reference. What happened was that "the discovery of fossil tracks in the Zachelmie mountains of Poland, in rocks dated twenty million years earlier than the Canadian find, forced an embarrassing second look"This displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what "intermediate" means. I certainly know I didn't claim that it was the one link from fish to tetrapods, but I can't speak for anyone else. The point of this piece of evidence wasn't necessarily that Tiktaalik is the one and only transitional animal. No, as the heading suggested, it was that scientists predicted that they'd find an animal morphologically between fish and tetrapods on this particular island, and that they then went and found it where they expected. It was the predictive power of the theory, because predictive power is one of the most important aspects of a scientific theory (and part of the reason that creationism doesn't qualify). The claim that Tiktaalik has somehow been "dethroned" by this finding of earlier footprints is not accurate. It still represents a near perfect morphological intermediate within the time period expected. The only thing that may happen is that it is no longer considered the first proto-tetrapod, but it still is a proto-tetrapod by any measure. The earlier footprints could well have been from tetrapods (which is still highly debated, by the way, but we'll assume your creationist commentators are correct), but that doesn't matter because nothing in evolutionary theory says that tetrapods couldn't have evolved earlier. It could be the case that these earlier tracks represent the first tetrapods, and Tiktaalik represents a second or third transition from water to land, because the fact that it is morphologically transitional is not in dispute. I will repeat again: Tiktaalik is a clear transition that was discovered only because a team of researchers knew what data had already been collected and knew where to look based on the fossil record. I was not using it as an example of the first proto-tetrapod because we don't know that it is. It is simply an illustration of the predictive power of evolution. All I am saying is that when you use an analogy to show evolution and instead it shows intelligent design, that makes the analogy help me more than it does my opponent. As I explained before, the analogy you gave helps to explain my piece of evidence. It showed that systems that are subject to intelligent design are not constrained by nested hierarchies like evolution is. Here's a video explaining why since I'm running out of characters and apparently haven't been able to articulate myself in a way that will get you to understand (). In fact, have two: (). And I'll also try one more time to explain this myself. Starting with an arbitrary example, we know that all animals with hair or fur lay (or possess) amniotic eggs. Then, all animals with amniotic eggs have four limbs (tetrapods). All tetrapods have vertebrae, and all vertebrates have notochords and eukaryotic cells. Outwardly there's no reason for this perfect hierarchy to exist. You will not find an animal that has amniotic eggs that does not also have a notochord. You won't find an animal with fur or hair (or feathers for that matter) that does not have four true limbs. You also will not find an animal that lays eggs with hard shells that are not amniotic, or without four limbs, vertebrae, and etc. .. . All you'd have to do to blow a huge whole in evolution would be to find a couple examples of violations of these nested hierarchies. Machines, however, don't fit. There's no way to arrange them to form a perfect, unviolated nested hierarchy. There are no sweeping statements you can make about machines' traits because they aren't subject to descent with modification except in the loosest sense. I can easily pop a jet engine (which, in evolution, would only exist in flying machines with cylindrical cockpits, wings, wheels, etc. .. ) on my car and produce a machine that violates a nested hierarchy. This is because intelligent designers can mix and match parts from different machines to produce more machines, whereas evolution only builds on what already exists in an animal's ancestors, and adds to it. This is why all vertebrates are chordates, which are all eukaryotes, while not all machines with wheels necessarily share any characteristic other than wheels. Evolution can't tinker to mix and match parts, and that's why we don't find truly mix-matched parts in animals today. The point of the nested hierarchies argument is that the nested hierarchies we see in nature are indicative of an evolutionary sequence. If we know the specific traits of any animal we can always, without fail, trace the rest of its classification. You can't take a specific trait of a machine and derive the rest of its broader characteristics; we know all diapsids are amniotic, tetrapodal vertebrates with bilateral symmetry and eukaryotic cells, but not all things wheels also have engines or a composition of metal or any other trait other than wheels. Descent with modification. Evolution only builds on what already exists and can't borrow from neighboring branches like intelligent designers can. * You didn't at all address my point about the hierarchies in ERVs, and instead construed it to be something about junk DNA that I didn't mention. As far as your last paragraph, all I can say as that it seems that your God went to great lengths to make it look like we evolved.