I am far from an expert in this area, but surprized that no one has mentioned some well documented cases of current, rapid man made evolution:
(1)About 300 years ago (and more) in London area all moths of some varity were essential white or light in color. London was growing rapidly and began to burn coal. By modern standards, the air was extermely poluted. In less than 200 years, those moths adapted to the change, became dark grey. I do not know what color they are today, perhaps "light" is making a come back.
(2) I forget the details, but there was even an intentional "evolution experiment" done. Perhaps a preditor was introduced or perhaps it was already there, below the water fall in a small river and some of the prey fish were transported above the water fall and released. In any case, in a surprizingly short period (20 to 40 years? again I do not remember exactly) the "above water fall" fish became larger and delayed their sexual maturity relative to their sisters below the falls. Those "low level sisters" went in for early sex - had selection that promoted reproduction before they were eaten but the above water fall ones could have more eggs when they were larger and older etc.
(3) Same sort of thing happens in humans. There are more male babies born by a few percent than females in cultures where there is no ability to determine the sex prior to birth. Males tend to be more agressive, adventursome, etc. and have a higher mortality rates so that in the reproductive ages there is essentially a one female to one male ratio. In cultures where female infanticide is practiced and has been for a long time, I bet there has been an increase in the number of females born to try to keep this equality during the fertal period. Based on how rapidly the prey fish adapted the sexual maturity etc. I bet a careful examination of rual Chinese birth ratio would show that the excess of males at birth is less than in western Europe, where female infanticide is rare. Thus, one can even make testable predictions on human evolution theory as well as the many natural and some artifical experiments that have supported evolution theory.
As far as tiny wings being useless initially, in addition to the two uses already mentioned in this thread, cooling surely was one also. That is why Elephants have big ears. A big thick-skined warm-blooded creature has a cooling problem in the tropics or shadeless non-polar regions. Not sure of the name (They keep changing them, and my memory for such arbitary things was never very good.) but big fat dinosaure StagaSaurous had lots of "dorsal wings" = vertical triangles on his back. (Not well placed for evolution into flying wings, but if that Yucatan impact had not occured, perhaps we could now watch the "stagoHipo" sailing up river when a good wind was blowing.) These primative wings (or sails?) not only greatly reduced his "volume to surface" ratio but also to me at least they look like they could fold to the sunny side and quasi fit together to give significant shade - sort of a natural sun umbrella. Some may object that volume to surface ratios are not very important for a cold-blooded animal - probably true - but how do you know he was cold-blooded? If birds came from dinosaurs, (currently well accepted, especially after feathers were found on a dinosaur like creature in China.) they may have come from the "warm-blooded sub set" of all dinosaurs. Flying takes a very high metabolic rate, so non soring birds all have body temperature well above mamals, like humans. Surely the flyng dinosaurs were warm blooded. If not, they with their clumbsy wings on ground on a cold day would be easy prey.
Often special features like wings or eyes have developed independantly more than once. (bat's wing are not at all related to bird wings) Humans and most creatures vaguely related got the less efficient eye design - the photo sensitive retina cells are behind at at least two distint layers of processing nerves (mainly doing data compression to find the contrast boundaries, as there are nearly 100 retinal receptors for every "output wire" (optical nerve fiber). These receptors are also behind all the blood vessels - that is handy if you need laser photo coagulation of a leaking vesel, but some how I don't think either "God" or "evolution" was thinking that far ahead when our type eyes were designed. The octopus and many marine creatures got the good design - photo recepters in front of all this trash light coming to ours must pass.
Who said Zuse was more powerful than Neptune? God Neptune at least knew what he was doing. Zuse was too busy seducing women to think much about how things should be done "top side".