A Tall Tale

Casey Luskin authored Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig Rebuts Latest Tall Tale of Giraffe Evolution at Evolution News & Views. Quoting from the blog entry (in blue):

Darwinists sometimes think that they can account for the evolutionary origin of a complex biological feature simply by citing some kind of experimental or theoretical evidence showing that the complex feature would have provided a selective advantage to its owner. However, such Darwinists forget that, as many have recounted, natural selection only accounts for the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest. Evidence that a given feature—when fully formed—provides some selective advantage does not demonstrate that the feature can be evolved in a step-wise, mutation-by-mutation fashion.

In fact it is a working assumption that functional advantage explains the origin of a given feature. Functional advantage addresses a causal process from a sifting point of view. It does not explain a generating process or a sequence of events. In fact the actual sequence of genomic events is vaguely presented. Although we cannot actually observe a process involving changes over geologic eons, we should demand a theoretical description with more details than has been forthcoming The cited evidence for change over time lies at the molecular level. But if we look at genes connected with the giraffe neck we find little indicating how a sequence of incremental events unfolded.

Here is an amply illustrated paper by Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig which discusses details ommitted by the overly simplistic evolutionary accounts which are all too prevalent.