Bird's didn't evolve from dinosaurs?

[D H]

Boltzman must be an American. He has the typical American befuddlement when confronted with the application of statistics and probability to extremely large numbers. The Second Law says that entropy tends to increase, not that it increases monotonically.

FFS! Please google the name Ludwig Boltzmann.

 

[scifes]

Imagine an animal that lives in and around trees. It spends a lot of its time in trees jumping from branch to branch and, occasionally, falls off. When falling, suppose the animals spread their arms and legs to increase wind resistance and slow their fall.

Animals with longer arms and legs and a lot of fur or loose skin might be better at surviving such falls. Eventually, a wing like structure might evolve that not only increases the animals chance of surviving a fall, but allows it to sort of glide like a "flying squiril".

It's not too far from there to full flight.

well i grudgingly agree that that process is well within the scope of evolution:grumble:
thanks for your time..

 

[iceaura]

I mean, given they believe in a God. Well OK. But why KNOWINGLY Lie? How does that achieve their goal?

Michael Behe's book "Darwin's Black Box" has been sold in more than half a million copies.

And Behe probably was sincere, in that book. The lesson is not lost, regardless.

 

[synthesizer-patel]

It's just so irrational.

I mean, given they believe in a God. Well OK. But why KNOWINGLY Lie? How does that achieve their goal? What is their goal?

Money and power

Duh!!!

 

[Dr Mabuse]

It's just so irrational.

I mean, given they believe in a God. Well OK. But why KNOWINGLY Lie? How does that achieve their goal? What is their goal?

"The worst deluded are the self deluded" - Christian Nestell Bovee

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

FFS! Please google the name Ludwig Boltzmann.

Thanks! It helps to spell it correctly. He certainly seems like a respected scientist. Nonetheless, I think he had a blind spot when contemplating the manifestation of infinitesmial probability in infinite space and infinite time.

any proposed mechanism for dino's evolving wings? my main catch, flying is just way too complex to be naturally selected from a set of one generation mutations. i mean longer necks in leaf eating animals i understand, but flying??

Something that was only discovered a few years ago, using high-speed photography, is that wings can also generate negative lift. Flightless birds can run straight up sheer cliffs, and even cliffs of greater than 90 degree slope, to evade a predator. Their wings aren't strong enough to lift their body weight off the ground, but they don't need anywhere near that much strength in the opposite direction to keep their feet in good contact with the ground while running. That gives evolution something to work with.

We see gliding in other orders of vertebrates. "Flying squirrels" are really only gliders. And "flying fish" aren't even really that, they're more like really strong jumpers with parachutes. Either of those animals could evolve true flight in a few tens of millions of years. Well maybe not the fish, they'd have to evolve lungs too.

I'm always suprised that nobody ever wonders how and why bats evolved flight.

We know about bees, they evolved contemporaneously with the angiosperms. Flowers need pollenation and bees need pollen.

It's just so irrational. I mean, given they believe in a God. Well OK. But why KNOWINGLY Lie? How does that achieve their goal? What is their goal?

Having recently been turned on to some fascinating studies of terrorists (right here on SciForums) I see an amazing similarity between them and the creation scientists. They don't really expect to convince their enemies to adopt their policies. Their purpose is to impress their own people in order to create greater solidarity among them.

If they ever achieve that, then they'll have to figure out what to do next.

 

[scifes]

"The worst deluded are the self deluded" - Christian Nestell Bovee

"the worst deluders are the self deluding"- Me.

Something that was only discovered a few years ago, using high-speed photography, is that wings can also generate negative lift. Flightless birds can run straight up sheer cliffs, and even cliffs of greater than 90 degree slope, to evade a predator.

you need high speed photography to shoot a kiwi\ostrich running up a sheer cliff?
but otherwise, that's AWESOME, certainly something i've never thought of before, i wonder if human arm mcles can generate enough flapping force in the downward direction..

Their wings aren't strong enough to lift their body weight off the ground, but they don't need anywhere near that much strength in the opposite direction to keep their feet in good contact with the ground while running. That gives evolution something to work with.

:scratchin:..
actually that's an even more complex puzzle, how did those birds develop THAT ability?
how could an animal figure that out? how could there be an evolutionary process(mutations and natural selection) for that?

We see gliding in other orders of vertebrates. "Flying squirrels" are really only gliders. And "flying fish" aren't even really that, they're more like really strong jumpers with parachutes. Either of those animals could evolve true flight in a few tens of millions of years. Well maybe not the fish, they'd have to evolve lungs too.

so why are they starting late?

I'm always suprised that nobody ever wonders how and why bats evolved flight.

good one!!
and their ultra sonic waves and their brains which can actually unscramble those waves in such speed and accuracy to catch flies!
so what were bats before they evolved? especially them being mammals..

We know about bees, they evolved contemporaneously with the angiosperms. Flowers need pollenation and bees need pollen.

that makes no sense, evolution and natural selection don't "serve" the survival of species, you're kinda implying a direction for evolution no?
how did insects, small tiny squishy weak insects, evolve flight?

flies:
1-double thrust wing movement(no negative thrust whatsoever.)

http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/2006/Flycross-section.jpg

2-

The common housefly is an extremely maneuverable flyer, the best of any species, insect or otherwise. What's more, its flight control commands originate from only a few hundred neurons in its brain, far less computational might than you'd find in your toaster.

Whereas the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most advanced fighter plane in the world, takes a few measurements--airspeed, rate of climb, rotations, and so on--and then plugs them into complex equations, which it must solve in real time, the fly relies on many measurements from a variety of sensors but does relatively little computation.

combine that with it's iMAX vision angle and it's super fast image processing..no wonder you have a hard time hitting them..
source; one of the most awesome magazines i've read in my life.

 

[iceaura]

actually that's an even more complex puzzle, how did those birds develop THAT ability?

how could an animal figure that out?

Almost all bipedal animals use their arms, tails, etc, for balance - flapping one's feathered appendages for balance is no unusual activity.

I'm always suprised that nobody ever wonders how and why bats evolved flight.
”
good one!!
and their ultra sonic waves and their brains which can actually unscramble those waves in such speed and accuracy to catch flies!
so what were bats before they evolved? especially them being mammals..

As far as the echo-location etc, mammals are almost identified by their superior ear structure and sound-processing ability. It's one thing mammals do really, really well. Lots of different kinds of mammals can echo-locate to a degree - even people can "hear walls" and construct fairly useful three dimensional landscapes by ear.

And lots of people have wondered how bats came to have flight capability - their lineage traces back to groups rich in arboreal species, many with gliding abilities of various kinds, (and a bat's wing is a big webbed hand or paw, a common feature on a smaller scale) so it doesn't seem mysterious exactly, but it's a gap.

Evolutionary speculators are often accused of creating slack, convenient "Just So Stories" for the development of this or that, but it's actually far more common among the anti-evolution speculators to create slack, convenient, "One Can't Imagine" vignettes,in which their ignorance and lack of imagination are presented as arguments in favor of their assertions.

example:

how did insects, small tiny squishy weak insects, evolve flight?

Insects are not small, squishy, or weak.

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

you need high speed photography to shoot a kiwi\ostrich running up a sheer cliff?

The birds I saw them photographing were not ratites. They were normal-looking birds, just particular species from their clades that weren't flyers.

i wonder if human arm mcles can generate enough flapping force in the downward direction.

That's the beauty of this evolutionary path. There's no such thing as enough. Even the tiniest bit of downward force gives you some extra traction on level ground, and the ability to climb a slightly steeper grade, both of which are advantages in escaping predators.

actually that's an even more complex puzzle, how did those birds develop THAT ability? how could an animal figure that out? how could there be an evolutionary process(mutations and natural selection) for that?

Nobody "figures anything out." This is all coincidence. Coincidence is an enormously powerful force in the context of evolution, when a species passes through ten thousand generations in ten thousand years, an eyeblink in the history of our planet. We don't know how many other odd mutations occurred that were evolutionary handicaps and quickly died out.

so what were bats before they evolved? especially them being mammals.

The ancestry of bats is quite a mystery. Since they live above the ground, and since their bones are lightweight and fragile (just like those of birds), they don't leave a lot of fossils. About all I've ever read about ancestral bats is that they weren't such good flyers and did a lot of gliding. Hopefully we'll know more about their phylogeny when DNA analysis becomes cheaper and faster and we have a larger catalog of genes to compare critters to.

that makes no sense, evolution and natural selection don't "serve" the survival of species, you're kinda implying a direction for evolution no?

Pardon my metaphorical language. The contemporaneous evolution of bees and flowering plants was just a coincidence that happened to result in a happy partnership. Again, we have no idea how many other pairings occurred by chance that were incompatible. A mutation that pops up in one location and dies off in a couple of generations because it didn't work is just not going to leave us a fossil record to regard with pity.

how did insects, small tiny squishy weak insects, evolve flight?

Uh.... perhaps you should re-read the section on exoskeletons in your biology book. For a smaller animal, an exoskeleton is really strong and really efficient. It's basically living inside a girder!

The reason that exoskeletons don't work for large animals is that the mass of their three-dimensional internal organs increases as the cube of linear measure, whereas the surface area of their two-dimensional exoskeleton, merely a surface rather than a solid, only increases as the square of linear measure. The organs become too heavy to be supported by an external "wrapper"; they need internal "struts," or bones.

The exoskeleton of an animal that is four times as tall as a smaller one will have sixteen times as much surface area as the smaller one, but its internal organs will weigh sixty-four times as much, and they will collapse inside the exoskeleton.