Well, rudimentary wings can have a few uses. They could be used as flippers underwater. They could be used for gliding. They could be used for a little boost in leaping and running. They could be used almost like rudders during running.
I’m thinking bats evolved from gliders (they think) and birds… I’m thinking it was the running and leaping aspect, but I don’t recall.
Running, jumping, climbing, even swimming. Those organs were not fractions of wings, as such, they had other functions first.
They think feathers came first, and that lent some aerodynaomic benefits to running and jumping which eventually led to gliding and flying.
As I recall from a Gould essay (and this applied to insect wings rather than bird wings), the answer is thermal regulation. Basically, a 1/16th or 1/8th of a wing is useful for temporarily increasing surface area to heat up in the sun or cool off in a breeze. And after your heat regulators have hit a certain size, hey, they can be used for gliding! And eventually flying.
Dio explained it well. It’s not that all the other moths died and our little rocky mutant was the only survivor (be a bit difficult to breed in that case), but that he and his offspring had a higher likelihood of surviving.
He’d start out as only 1 out of 100 moths in the vicinity, but the next generation would have a higher percentage of rocky moths because he’d reproduce more often than the other moths (due to living longer), and then the next generation would have a still higher percentage of rocky moths because they’d all be more likely to survive and reproduce, and so on.
Why wouldn’t there be? Fibonacci was describing something that occurs in nature when he talked about these numbers - his example was rabbits breeding. It’s just adding the two previous numbers to get the next number in the sequence, and it’s easy to see how that can occur in nature.
The patterns are efficient - they pack the most possible petals, etc in - so it’s not surprising that some successful plants and animals have this pattern, since such efficient packing gave them an advantage. It’s also not surprising that, if you’re looking for Fibonacci numbers, you’ll see a lot of them, not noticing so much the ones that don’t conform.
You might as well ask, “When did you lose your faith in clam chowder?”
When I had it from a can. shudder
All those seemingly-impossible adaptations that David Attenborough so loves are why I got interested in studying evolution in the first place.
[Attenborough] indeed…[attenborough]
I love him…I’ve loved him since …
And by the way… what fool thought it would be an improvement to substitute Sir David’s narration with Sigourney Weaver and, god help us, Oprah, in the recent Planet Earth and Life BBC series? Are they that out of touch? There’s no one better than Attenborough.
He’s 87 years old and in failing health.
Attenborough clip fest. This bird, from nearby where I grew up. (I always thought it was called a liar bird)
I don’t ever recall doubting the reality of evolution. In fact, when people express doubts about it I feel an urge to question their grasp on reality.
http://www.google.com/images?q=angler+fish&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=-VvfTLWeFoT-nAeQ89GSDw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQsAQwAA&biw=1600&bih=835 This angler fish has a wiggler that it dangles in the water and wiggles. It buries its body in the dirt and waits for a fish to go after the bait. So it is a fish that fishes. It gulps the small fish in one swallow.
Sexual reproduction allows for much greater genetic diversity. Before sexual reproduction, you had to wait along for a random mutation. Once it came along, though, genes were able to be mixed, and there was the potential of the less beneficial ones not being passed on, while the more beneficial ones were.
No one’s mentioned the platypus yet? If animals were invented in a lab this one would be the one thrown together at 4:56 PM on a Friday just to get it out the door. It’s venomous, lays eggs, but lactates and has fur. I suppose it must be evolutionarily advantageous somehow, but hell if I know why. Then there’s the panda and koala bears. Their diet is only one particular plant, and even that isn’t very good for them so they eat a LOT. Pandas apparently don’t like sex either and are struggling to stay not-extinct.
Nothing, since I have no “faith” in evolution. The evidence for it is so mountainous that disbelieving in it would be like pretending that gravity doesn’t exist. And on top of that, evolution is a natural consequence of reproduction with variation in an environment where some variations reproduce better than others; evolution is something which would take extreme measures to prevent from happening.
For those who keep showing up to say evolution is true and they don’t doubt it…that’s kinda missing the point of the thread, which is basically: what organisms astonish you with how perfectly they are what they are, and how unlikely what they are is…like octopuses that can look exactly like what they land on.
Lighten up.
On the subject of evolution, one “a-ha!” moment for me was Dawkins explanation of how sexual selection speeds up evolution.
i.e. a peacock has genes for a flashy tail, a peahen has the genes for attraction to the tail. Their offspring whether male or female will help spread those genes in a positive-loop sort of way.
Like much in evolution, it is elegant and obvious (once pointed out to you)
Speaking of moths… we’ve watched them change in reaction to changing conditions. The peppered moth of England.
I don’t need to have faith in facts. 
Faith is for things which can’t be proven one way or the other.