If you accept Darwin’s premise that evolution is just Selective Breeding guided by necessity, then we should be able to selectively breed a horse with wings. We can’t.
I do a lot of driving, and during that time I have a lot of time to ponder(keeps the voices in my head at bay,lol)
Here are a couple of thoughts
Why are there so many varieties of trees and especially within certain groups like oaks, red, white, pin…. What is the “evolutionary” benefit to that?
This lead me to fruit trees. Ostensibly the fruits of the trees are simply seed pods, but most trees don’t go to that extreme. Takes lots of energy to grow an apple or a pear compared to other tree seeds. One person said it is so animals eat them and then spread the seeds…, but my response was, have you ever been walking through the woods and came across an apple tree or pear tree. Sure there are examples, but I have done a lot of hiking in my days and never have.
Could it be that these trees were created as a good food source for others, mind you a good source for others is not an evolutionary benefit for the tree.
That lead me to(yup lots of time) to chicken eggs. Again what’s the evolutionary benefit to the chicken to lay a consumable egg, nearly one a day, to the chicken? Benefits is, gives us a nice food source, but to the chicken it is again a highly energy intensive effort with little if any benefit to them. Additionally name me any other bird that does the same egg laying pattern.
Lastly and not my thought but someone else’s that made me think, say the lightning strike on the ooze created the first life, did it also create the food source to feed this life
Random thoughts sparked by this thread
Given enough time — centuries, millennia, hundreds of millennia — you might be able to, however that doesn’t mean that it would fly.
The fact that horses with wings haven’t already evolved probably should have discouraged you.
Wings on a horse aren’t necessary to the horse’s survival or even useful, so it’s not surprising that they didn’t evolve already.
I read Darwin’s: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”
I found his “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” largely unreadable.
My understanding of Darwin and neo-Darwinism is that there are mutations and there is selection.
Mutations, as I remember, are little more than birth defects, or failures to replicate properly for whatever reason. Birth defects seem like an unlikely path forward. Even extreme Darwinian environmentalists don’t seem to favor swimming by nuclear reactors. How else are we going to get X-men (fictional superheroes)?
Natural selection seems plausible enough, but I view it as a conservative mechanism. Three legged dear and myopic eagles are likely to be selected out. Darwin got his idea of natural selection, at least in part, from artificial selection, otherwise known as breeding. We breed cattle, dogs, cats, horses, etc with considerable effect. Artificial selection is more powerful and rapid than natural selection.
However, there are limits to selection. We cannot breed a horse to have wings as you say. The material just isn’t there in the gene pool. Happy accidents, such as might be induced by irradiating testicles and eggs, are unlikely to bring about the necessary changes, no matter how well you breed any surviving offspring.