Ancient Birds Flew On All Fours

eurekalert ^ | Spet. 22, 2006 | Nick Longrich

[Dimensio]

You're reaching too far to make a point. A dog is a dog. A fish isn't a dinosaur.

I fail to see how the above relates to the theory of evolution.

[Quark2005]

There is no possible way for flying birds to have evolved, period. A flying bird needs a baker's dozen highly specialized systems including a light bone structure, flowthrough lungs, high-capacity heart, flight feathers, specialized balance parameters, tail, a beak, and every bit of that would be anti-conducive to survival until the day the whole thing came together. The chance of all that evolving is zero.

Come on, now, you believe the force of gravity was smaller in prehistoric times than now, right? Doesn't this mean that birds wouldn't need these adaptations to fly? You should incorporate bird evolution as corroborating evidence for your neo-Velikovskian hypothesis!

[Vaquero]

You are right, shitzu's aren't dogs, they are more like tribbles.

[Quark2005]

One astronomer has floated the idea that the reason we see red shift in distant galaxies is not because they are travelling away from us, but because time travels at a slower speed there. It could be false, but is it really any more far fetched than string theory or so many other hypotheses that have been floated?

Actually, yes. Off the top of my head, for a couple reasons.

Gravitational lensing (a general relativistic effect) is observed for distant galaxies. If time travelled slower, there would be aberrations in this effect that aren't observed.

If the redshift didn't correlate to motion, it would mean our galaxy is in a unique gravitational potential well. Gravitational field equations would need a corrective term that is not in any other way corroborated.

We don't know what we don't know, but there are definitely ideas we can rule out.

[RobRoy]

Gravity is a theory. Although we can fairly accurately predict it's effects, because we don't really know the mechanics of how it works, we do not know what we do not know about gravity.

[petro45acp]

"Are you attempting to make a statement?"

Not one I am willing or desirous of rattling over by typing on a thread.

Simply, evolutionists have their opinions, others perceive differently. Both arguments have "science" to back their claims.

Relax, it's just a forum.

Still America, still free-ish.

Enjoy!

[WizWom]

Sheesh, I can't beleive people are still trying to do research with Archaeopteryx. It's a fraud... a faked fossil!
http://www.tccsa.tc/articles/hoax.html

[WizWom]

So, I guess the scientists secretly built fake fossils with feathers, wishbone, claws and teeth just to trick everybody?
Er, no, to make money, a disreputable father and his son did it. And hoodwinked all the scientists who didn't bother to look close. The British specimen doesn't "match up" which any real fossil would.

[Dimensio]

Simply, evolutionists have their opinions, others perceive differently. Both arguments have "science" to back their claims.

I have not seen an argument against the theory of evolution that employs actual science. As an example, you referenced the book Godless, which uses a number of non-scientific and frequently false claims to attack the theory, but employs no actual scientific claims.

[tomzz]

The chances of evolving all the features you'd need to be a flying bird would be a tenth or twelth order infinitessimal as a best case.

In real life it's a lot worse than that. In real life, assuming you somehow magically evolved the first such feature, then by the time another 5000 generations rolled around and you evolved the next, the first, having been anti-functional the whole time, would have de-evolved or become vestigial.

Consider that flying birds are supposed to have evolved from small velociraptors having none of the needed features.

Consider also the common chicken; chickens are not too big to fly well, ducks and geese which are larger fly perfectly well. Chickens started out as a 1.5 lb jungle fowl and then were BRED into a five or six pound bird, but they still have the 1.5 lb bird's wings, which is why they do not fly any better than they do.

Nonetheless, compared to the velociraptor bird wannabe which started out with no such features and a tiny numeric base, chickens the flight feathers, the wings, the flowthrough hearts and lungs, the light bones, the necessary balance parameters and conformation, and basically all but the very tiniest bit of what it would take to regain the skies.

If the velociraptor's journey to being a flying bird is a thousand miles, the chicken only has an eighth of an inch to cover and evolutionary theory demands that somewhere over the last five or ten thousand years out of all the chickens which have ever gotten loose, some should have regained whatever is lacking for full flight capabilities and retaken the skies. We should see chickens when we look overhead.

But we do not. In real life, if you ever lose the tiniest bit of come complex capability or for whatever reason fail to have it, that's the end of the story. You'll never see it or see it again.

It's like cutting hair. It's relatively easy to cut it off, while getting it back on again is impossible.

[Coyoteman]

Sheesh, I can't beleive people are still trying to do research with Archaeopteryx. It's a fraud... a faked fossil!

http://www.tccsa.tc/articles/hoax.html

You are citing a creationist website as scientific evidence? What a joke!

They don't do science, they do apologetics.

[VadeRetro]

Under the supervision of professor Anthony Russell, Longrich examined Archaeopteryx fossils and determined that the dinosaur's leg feathers have an aerodynamic structure that imply its rear limbs likely acted as lift-generating "winglets" that played a significant role in flight.

Oh, but it's a bird! Just a bird! Really!

Just a bird with teeth, unfused forelimb claws, lots of tail bones, a flat sternum, and--now we see--flight feathers on its legs.

For a better known and more obvious "four-winger," see Microraptor gui.

Google.

[PatrickHenry]

You got no evidence!
</creationism mode>

[stormer]

"There is no possible way for flying birds to have evolved, period."

Thanks for clearing that up. I'll be looking forward to the next issue of Nature so I can read the paper in which you defend your position.

[contemplator]

....because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: -II Thess.2:1

Interesting, but logically that passage uses the same circular logic as this hypothetical one:

The Purple Spaghetti monster created the earth and all it's inhabitants. There will people who do not accept this truth. For this reason the Purple Spaghetti monster shall cause those people to create alternate theories in order that they have a lie to believe in. - I Contem. 12:2

[Dimensio]

IT doesnt need explained, it is obvious, anything that is on it's face, or can be possibly shown to be yet another in the litany of shortcomings of evolutionism, will be grafted onto the system by the Handy Dandy Evolutionism Taffy Puller, and made to fit. Once that is done, it is simply declared to have been explained by evolutionism.

If it is "obvious", then it should be trivial for you to provide evidence to support your claims. Why do you not do this?

[VadeRetro]

I'll be looking forward to the next issue of Nature so I can read the paper in which you defend your position.

I think it's interesting that people "rebut" hard physical evidence that a thing happened along a certain specific path with general handwave dismissals and nonsensical mathematical strawmen. More and more, we have the evidence trail. More and more, we go from not knowing which of many proposed scenarios to homing in on details of one. The professional naysayers don't know, don't care and never will know or care.

Before he was banned, we used to have this nutcase named "medved" who would post that "by every precept of Darwinism, the skies should be full of flying feral chickens." People such as myself would point out that the presence of well-adapted fliers already plentiful in the skies would make it hard for a poor flier to gain a foothold, much less to completely take over and drive the eagles and hawks from the sky.

Before he was posting that nonsense here and getting laughed off the threads, he was posting it at the Talk Origins newsgroup to the same effect. A decade of having his nose rubbed in the absolute absurdity of his nonsense has produced no effect. Banning him produced no net effect. If anything, the nutcases are winning on FR.

[Verginius Rufus]

"Two wings good! Four wings better!"

(With apologies to George Orwell.)

They fail to address the central issue: Did it taste like chicken?

[bert]

....The chance of all that evolving is zero....

Except of course that it did.