[RonF]

Well, your reply deserves detailed consideration, which I don't have time for at the moment. Later on that. However, I can answer one right away:

"Consider the numbers of such chickens which must have escaped in all of recorded history; look in the sky overhead: where are all of their wild-living descendants??

Why are there no wild chickens in the skies above us???"

1) Because many of the qualities that domesticated chickens have work against their survival in the wild. Chickens have huge breast muscles that go far beyond their needs to fly, and that, plus various other modifications they've been bred for, means that a chicken wouldn't be able to fly fast, far, or nimbly in the wild. Therefore, an escaped chicken would quickly become food for some other animal.

2) Domesticated chickens also have various other dependencies on their domesticators that make them unsuited for wild survival.

3) People go to great lengths to keep their chickens from escaping, so there haven't been that many.

4) Escaped chickens would have to survive, find other escaped chickens, breed, and be able to protect their progeny from predation in order for you to see wild chickens. Don't forget how few male domesticated chickens make it past puberty, too, so there's going to be vanishingly few escaped male chickens to help out with the above effort.

Nice idea, but the wrong one to hang your hat on.

[medved]

One thing I forgot to mention which should be obvious is that the escaped chicken is working from a gigantic numerical base while the velociraptor bird-wannabe is working from a miniscule base. The odds would favor the chicken over the wannabe by orders of magnitude.

The reason the escaped chicken can't regain decent flight is fairly simple. He started out in life as a wild fowl weighing a pound or two or three and then was bred into a domestic bird which was heavier than that without his wings getting any larger in the process. Similarly, a dinosaur trying to evolve into a bird would not have any way of knowing how big his wings needed to be at the end of the process and there's no reason to think he'd do any better.

[Gumlegs]

It's been refuted many times right here on FR. That Medved seems complled to repost it robotically speaks volumes.

[gore3000]

Escaped chickens would have to survive, find other escaped chickens, breed, and be able to protect their progeny from predation in order for you to see wild chickens.

You may not like the example, however it did show you the problem with evolution: the chickens (or whatever animal) has to eat, it has to keep itself from being eaten, it has to find mates to evolve with. See how difficult evolution is? Not the piece of cake Darwin made it to be.