[trashcanbred]

Actually... no it isn't. All of those qualities you mention can happen over a relatively short period of time. Bird groups that have been geographically separated from their natural environment have had noticeable physical changes take place. The Nene from Hawaii (which is my favorite example). It looks very similar to a Canadian goose but it has feet better suited for walking on rocks and it doesn't fly anymore. All of this happened in a relatively short period of time (thousands of years). Plus... the Nene doesn't fly.

Given enough generations a number of these traits you mention could and would take place.

Of course if you do not believe me, go outside and take a look around. Their existence is the proof.

[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.