[EnderWiggins]

"In real life, there’s no such thing as gaining new functionality on a macro level."

You call slight changes in wing size "new functionality on a macro level?" Well that's your problem, right there. You think too small.

That sort of change doesn't even require new genetic information. By evolutionary standards it's an easy change for a species to make. The only reason chickens don't make it because we don't let them.

But a real example of "new functionality on a macro level" would be the innovation of tricolor vision in primates. For it to happen, it required a 50% increase in genetic information for opsin, and then a number of subsequent point mutations that tuned the new gene for a different frequency of light.

And it happened not just once "in real life," but two different times in the primates alone!

Now that's "new functionality on a macro level!!"

[muawiyah]

Or, alternatively, a species of bacteria adept at transferring genes from one species to the somatic cells of another simply snatched color vision from birds (living in trees) to primates (living in trees).

The implication is clear ~ the bacteria we need to find to try that again live in trees!