Quote:
Originally Posted by Demigrog
This is a good example; feathers on a mammal would be pretty odd, as their most recent common ancestor with birds easily predates the evolution of feathers. So, if we found such a case it would be good evidence that either evolution is wrong or we’ve seriously misread the fossil record.  The lack of such anomalies is good support for evolution.
Actually though, you can occasionally find cases similar to this in nature, like tails on humans and teeth in birds. This is evidence for common descent, as clearly the genes for traits in the ancestor are still around in the modern animal and can be reactivated by mutations. On the other hand, ID has a hard time explaining this kind of thing without invoking demons. |
Although I understand what you're saying, you have to be careful not to sound like you're making a circular argument: lack of feathers in mammals is evidence of evolution -- their presence would support common descent, which is also taken as proof of evolution!
Perhaps you should make a clearer distinction between
sporadic cases of feathers in mammals, which would be expainable by common descent + random mutation, and a
systematic presence of feathers in most individuals of some species of mammals, which, combined with its equally systematic absence in other species of mammals, would indeed constitute a big challenge to the theory of evolution.