Cognostic: What are we doing wrong?

Responding. Engaging.

Once it becomes apparent that the poster is a troll, like the "Anne" thing, we should ignore it until its posts drop below the horizon and its tiny little attention span withers and drops off.

@ rat spit

Because the platypus is a monotreme mammal. The precursor to modern placental mammals. All animals were egg layers in the more ancient evolutionary "tree" (wish we could come up with a better term than tree, but it still works). Even the first endothermic mammals were egg layers. Eventually, mammals became placental. Just because older evolutionary animals still exist has NOTHING to do with any deity of any kind, regardless of what one may think.

Look at trees. Gymnosperms are an older evolutionary version of the trees. Most, if not all, coniferous trees are gymnosperms. Angiosperms are the latest most evolved version of the trees. Almost all deciduous trees are angiosperms. And you still have the most ancient of plant forms known as pteridophytes and bryophytes.

From a report paper I wrote in college:

Reproductive Mechanisms

Plants can be divided into two categories depending upon their reproductive mechanisms. The largest grouping is the plants that reproduce through seeds. The other group reproduces through spores which includes two major groups:

Bryophytes include the true mosses, peat mosses, and liverworts. Presumably they have never, in geologic history, been very dominant among plant communities, except in localized situations.

Pteridophytes are ferns, horsetails, and club mosses (which are not true mosses). During much of geologic history, great forests of tree ferns, giant horsetails, and tall club mosses dominated continental vegetation, but they are less dominant today.

Plants that reproduce by means of seeds are encompassed in two broad categories:

The more primitive of the two, the gymnosperms (naked seeds), carry their seeds in cones, and when the cone opens, the seeds fall out. (For this reason, gymnosperms are often called conifers.) Gymnosperms were largely dominant in the geologic past; today the only large surviving gymnosperms are cone-bearing plants such as pines.

Angiosperms (vessel seeds) are the flowering plants. Their seeds are encased in some sort of protective body, such as fruit, nut, or pod. Trees, shrubs, grasses, crops, weeds, and garden flowers are angiosperms. Along with a few conifers, they have dominated the vegetation of the world for the last 50 or 60 million years.

One plant that defies both above classifications is the Magnolia. It is an angiosperm in that it is a flowering shrub, but it is also gymnosperm in that it contains its seeds in a cone that does open at the beginning of a cold season and drops individual seeds. However, it can also contain its seeds inside the cone, acting almost like a fruit, dropping like a fruit to later sprout other plants. Additionally, magnolias, although shrubs, can reach heights of 15 meters (≅ 50 feet) rivalling many of the other trees within the same biome.

rmfr

EDIT: repaired HTML entity

Just joking. Believe it or not I heard this argument on the radio a few years back. Don’t ask me why I was listening to radical evangelical Christian radio ... I was bored I guess.

Happy new year everyone gal and guy!!!

@Grinseed: evolution was driven solely by natural selection.

I think that interpretation of Darwin's ideas also spawned the nasty set of ideas known as "social Darwinism", which was one of the inspirations for Nazi ideology.