What drove bird evolution?

What drove bird evolution??The basic answer is nothing. If there's anything in this world which provably could not evolve, it's flying birds.Any other sort of creature, in order to evolve into a flying bird, would need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers (which are totally unlike down feathers or anything else used for insolation), the system birds use to rotate flight feathers on upstrokes, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized tail feathers, a beak ( since it will no longer have
arms or hands with which to feed itself), specialized general balance parameters etc.For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of obtaining any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.All of that is the best case of course. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march
towards a future requirement which evolution requires.And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/ antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

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Jeez, redwolf, did you read any of the other posts on this thread before you wrote this reply?

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Yeah, but I was feeling charitable and didn't say anything about them.

Try educating yourselves...http://www.nhm.org/birds/guide/pg004.html

Bats aren't a counterexample. They don't fly anywhere near as fast, as far, or as high as birds do.The basic reality is that birds need the kinds of hearts and lungs they have, and no other creature seems to have them. How are you going to evolve something like that? Why and how would anything which didn't fly end up with them and how would anything which did fly (the way birds do) function without them? Flight feathers same thing, beaks same thing, tail feathers same thing, light bone structure, same thing.....

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Why do flightless birds have them, then?

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beaks same thing

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Flightless birds have evolved/devolved from flying birds. That is microevolution, which nobody disputes. (Micro) Evolution is good at LOSING features and complex capabilities; it is not good at producing them. Sort of like cutting hair; it's easy to cut it off, and much harder to put it back on if you cut off too much.In the cases of the ostrich, moa, and other larger flightless birds, in the ones which survived the changes in gravity which killed off the larger dinosaurs, they had gotten too heavy to fly (~30-lb limit in our present world) and the wings became vestigial.In real life, you not only cannot evolve a complex capability, but having lost the tiniest bit of such a capability, you can't ever even get the tiny bit back.Thus in the case of the domestic chicken we observe a 2-lb forest bird having been bred into a 6 - 8 lb domestic bird which still has the wings for a 2-lb bird, and can fly just well enough to hop up into trees and over fences. Now, with all the billions of chickens around, with them not having been kept in fences or cages untill very recently and with all the billions of such which must have escaped and become feral over the millenia, if there was anything to evolution at all, you'd think that some small number of those would have retaken the air, that you'd look overhead, and there their progeny would all be.As I noted however, having lost even part of the ability to fly, in real life, it doesn't come back.Now, the coelurosaur/bird ancestor needed flight feathers, wings, and a baker's dozen things he didn't have, while the escaped chicken HAS all of those things and lacks only the tiniest iota of whatever is involved in full flying capabilities. Moreover, the coelurosaur bird-wannabes would have been starting from a microscopic numeric base while the escaped chicken is working from a base of billions.If the chicken can't make it that final quarter inch, how is the "bird ancestor" supposed to make it the thousand miles??

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How about those stick insects, that evolved wings, lost them, and then evolved them again?

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Kind of sounds like there might have originally been flightless versions and flying versions. It's not obvous how fossils could show the difference.

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I wasn't aware there was a selection pressure on chickens for flight.

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The advantage to chickens (of being able to fly better) would be immense: better access to more distant feeding areas, easier escape from predators, ability to move to optimal climates by season, you name it.

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How about that beak thing? You keep ignoring the fact that not all birds had beaks.

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Sorry, but I never saw one that didn't and google searches on "beakless bird" don't turn up anything meaningful or anything indicating that such actually exist.

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Oh, and if you're going to talk about that ridiculous fiction of "changing gravity"...

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Basically, you've probably still got a handful of geniuses on talk.origins who would still tell you that the idea of a gravity change was ridiculous, nonetheless they've already lost the war on that one and they don't even know it. A google search on dinosaurs and gravity will turn up 40K hits or more, one of the directors of Los Alamos has told me that the topic is a now a safe one there, and when serious scholars went to put together a documentary on the topic last winter, they came to me and not to the geniuses at talk.origins. How about that?Japanese Office Workers ViewingThe basic reality is that the question is no longer even about whether or not gravity changed, but over what caused it. A lot of the web sites which discuss gravity change argue for an expanding earth theory of one stripe or another. My own little book argues against that.http://www.bearfabrique.org/books/books.html

Humans never bred chickens to "stay put". We bred them to lay eggs and taste good. Until very recently they were never kept in cages and often ran loose, often becoming feral with feral chickens living for some generations in various areas.Moreover any other non-flying creature which you might suppose to be evolving into a flying bird would have no plausible way of ending up with wings of the "right size". Evolution would have to take care of that for them and, if that were possible, it would have happened in the case of the escaped chicken long since.

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And where might we view this documentary?

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I've already posted a link to a few snapshots from it. Had you been in Tokyo last Feb 22 around 8 PM, you could have turned on your TV set and watched it.

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Do you know the name of the director at Los Alamos whom you spoke with? I am sure a man of your sincerity would share these things with us Hmm?

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The man doesn't really get anything out of talking to rude people or idiots, and I'm not going to send you to him asking questions, if that's what you had in mind. Sorry.

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but you're right, in some respect. at one point in the history of the earth, gravity here did in fact change. but only a little.

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It's provable that you'd need something like a 3-1 attenuation of the acceleration due to gravity for the largest sauropods and that's just from the weight requirements. When you look at the torque requirement for holding their necks outwards, it's probably more than that.

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Did you forget we are the same people you argued this with before? That in this thread you attempted to defend the idea and failed (miserably)? Did you think we would forget?

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All you're remembering is your own failure to deal with reality.Like I say, you can do your own google search on dinosaurs and gravity, and see the results. I caught every sort of grief for this one at first but, basically, everybody who's ever come along since then and done the numbers has come to the same basic conclusion, at least as far as large dinosaurs being possible in present gravity.I am no longer the only person on Earth claiming that sauropods would not be possible in present gravity.My own original papers on the topic are at:Dinosaurs Snapshots from the Japanese documentary on the topic are at:Japanese Office Workers Viewing

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The simplest explanation for them is the evolutionary one; i.e. that birds are descended from organisms who had teeth and not bills.

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The simplest explaination for them is the possible one, i.e. that birds were genetically re-engineered from some previous creature, in such a way as to have the whole basic plan for a flying bird in place from day one as would in fact be necessary.

I never said chickens couldn't fly; I said, they couldn't fly DECENTLY. They can't fly terribly far, terribly high, or terribly fast. You don't see them 500' overhead the way you do normal birds.Ducks for instance are ballpark for the same size as chickens, and fly perfectly well because their wings are the right size for ducks.If there were anything to evolution, chickens would regain the ability to fly as well as ducks fly. There isn't, and they don't

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Sure. Since the "genetic engineer" you refer to can only be natural processes, you've essentially repeated the evolutionary explanation with different language.

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"can only be a natural process"? Why's that?? Recent studies in fact indicate that humans appear to have been fabricated using the same techniques which we ourselves are now starting to use in bio-engineering projects, which are anything but natural:http://www.bearfabrique.org/evorants/bioEngineering.html

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You are either joking, or seriously do not understand even the basic concepts of evolution.

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What you might have noticed, is that I reply to posts which strike me as halfway serious, but not to anything which starts off with some sort of indication of the poster being a legend in his own mind or anything like that.

You might get an exception at 40 lbs once every 50 years or so which can still fly. Most of what I've read has indicated that bustards get up to around 33 lbs, as I'd stated. Eagles get to around 25 lbs and then they start to have insurmountable problems taking off and landing. The argentinian teratorn, however, an ancient bird very close to an eagle in structure, had a 25' wingspan and weight estimates vary from around 170 to around 250. That can't happen in our present world due to gravity.