As a follow up to my post last week on feathered dinosaurs, I received this question over e-mail:

How would a creature get feathers in the first place? I figure there would be some intermediary stages between no feathers and fully feathered, but what would these stages possibly be? No other family of species seems to have anything remotely like feathers. Also, what would be the evolutionary advantage of having feathers be specially since the dinosaurs discovered in China were flightless and (to the best of my knowledge) flying dinosaurs like the pterodactyl were already featherless. Any light you could shed would be appreciated.

The e-mail comes from someone who accepts evolution (not a denier), but is genuinely confused about the above questions. This is an excellent question, one that Darwin himself confronted. This also remains one of the common denialist tactics of the creationists, despite the fact that Darwin gave a very cogent answer in Origin of the Species.

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