Misconceptions of Christian theology

[Esquilax]

I think you're missing the point. "Miniscule" advantages make no difference. Or to be more specific, as I've consistently said, they do not provide enough of an advantage to drive evolution.

Hence the need for them to build up over time. It's the same thing that we do with dogs; breed for the traits that we find desirable, and watch them slowly entrench in the animal over time. You can see those changes occurring.

Think about it this way. DNA is already versatile. You only have to look at identical twins in humans - some are very much the same, some are very different to each other, easily as different as two humans with different DNA altogether. DNA doesn't determine a lot of things. Education for instance, that's determined well outside of the control of DNA. Strength is another - while it's true DNA can provide some help, going to the gym and training will win out against the so-called "help" that you get from your genes.

Granted. And nobody is saying that genetics are the only things that determine survivability anyway; after all, it took a massive extinction event to displace the dinosaurs from their position as dominant species on the planet in order for mammalian life to get a foothold. But in animals that do not educate or train themselves in the same strict and focused way that humans do, those genetic advantages do make quite the difference.

The Cuckoo bird flies in the face of evolution. It needs to do way too much work for the benefit of the egg swapping, in fact it does so much work that it'd be much better off just building its own nests and raising its own chics. Yet it is too stupid at this point to realize that this would be an advantage to it, so it continues doing something highly inefficient and disadvantaged evolutionarily.

Again, even if you were correct about the Cuckoo- and you're not, by the way. Aside from laying the eggs, all of the work raising the chicks is farmed out to other species- evolution does not select for efficiency. The fact is, the Cuckoo's method works well enough for it to breed a new generation, that is the sole success criteria that evolution has.

In fact, evolution can be startlingly inefficient, by dint of being a slow accumulation of changes (by the way, this inefficient design is yet another argument against creationism.) Look at the human spinal nerves, as I've said. Look at the giraffe, which has a long, winding nerve connection up and down its neck, when there's a much more efficient pathway that could have been taken. Look at the human eye; the image comes into the optic nerve upside down, the light receptive cells are facing the wrong way, and without massive compensatory work from the brain we'd be seeing a nice large blind spot in our vision. But the human race is successful enough to propagate, so all the inefficient design that works against us doesn't matter.

The animal works, even if it could work better.