"Nature Always Finds a Way"

Wow. It takes a ridiculous amount of blind "faith" to be a hard-core naturalist. We watched a movie in biology about how mutations allow evolution. One example was that two-winged insects evolved from four-winged insects, and to "prove" it, they showed a specimen from a a group of drosophila (a two-winged species) that had been bombarded with enough radiation to mutate a blue whale into chihuahua. This fly had been mutated so that it had four wings, like its supposed ancestors. Sure, it couldn't fly and died pretty quickly, but since it's possible for a two-winged fly to mutate into a four-winged fly, no matter how dysfunctional, it must be possible for four-winged insects to evolve into fully functional two-winged insects. The conversation following the video went something like this:

• teacher: "Isn't incredible how they can prove evolution?"
• me: "Have they been able to do anything in the opposite direction? Like produce a two-winged bug from one with four wings, like they think really happened?"
• teacher: "Oh, I'm sure they have. They can get all sorts of mutations to show up if they try long enough,"
• me: "I wonder if they could have used the wings. The fly in the video couldn't fly with its extra pair of wings," (as a side note, I wonder what you call a fly that can't fly?)
• teacher: "I seriously doubt it could have. I mean, that's a pretty major mutation and it probably messed up a bunch of things,"
• me: "How could it have passed the genes for four wings to a new generation if it would die before mating because it can't fly away from predators?"
• teacher: "Oh I'm sure most of the first ones died,"
• me: "Then how would they pass it on? How did it help them survive?"
• teacher: "They would eventually have learned."
• me: "How? If they keep on dying, how would they learn to fly with two wings?"
• teacher: "I don't know. That's a really good question. But nature always finds a way. Nature always finds a way."

At this point, I gave up on the argument, because it clearly wasn't going to go anywhere. But some of my classmates looked interested, so hopefully they aren't so willing to blindly accept something that seems so unlikely.