Kiwi bird and its wings

Hi,
I am really fascinated with ID and have been educating my self on that topic for about a year now.
One thing which puzzles me is what is the explanation for kiwi bird's wings - they are so tiny and do not seem to have any use, or that could use it in future. How do you explain it best?

Thank you.

Thread copied here from the Kiwi bird and its wings thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

agepeto writes: One thing which puzzles me is what is the explanation for kiwi bird's wings - they are so tiny and do not seem to have any use, or that could use it in future.

You're looking at it the wrong way round. The kiwi's wings are not used for flight because they evolved in a niche where flight was not required. Instead they grew large and heavy.

There are two views, one is that the birds never had flight and the more modern one based on DNA evidence that they lost it after migrating to countries where flight was unnecessary about 60 million years ago.

I should think it would be difficult to explain the kiwi, and all flightless birds, within an ID paradigm. Was the intelligent designer being capricious, mean, hateful? Why take a perfectly good bird and chop off its wings?

In an evolutionary paradigm the kiwi, as with all flightless birds, makes sense. In environments where flight was of minimal to no advantage slowly losing that ability over a few hundred generations would not hamper survival and fitness. Flight is an energy intensive way to get around and is unnecessary when all you need do is amble over a few meters to the next smorgasbord in a land free from predation.

ID is not really that interesting. It’s primarily a coalition of anti-evolutionists hoping to force their views into the educational system.

It had it’s moment in the sun with the publication of Darwin’s Black Box and The Design Inference but neither really contributed much to the debate. That’s one of the reasons that ID has largely faded.

The kiwi’s wings seem to be a fairly clear example of a vestigial structure, which IDists tend not to like.

agapeto writes: One thing which puzzles me is what is the explanation for kiwi bird's wings - they are so tiny and do not seem to have any use, or that could use it in future. How do you explain it best?

This question seems to imply that you expect all aspects of every creature to have a current, or future use.
Why would you expect such a thing?

We have things in our own human bodies that are unrequired - like the human tail-bone.
What's the use for us to have a tail bone? What's the future use?
There is none, currently - and evolution doesn't "plan" for the future, it adapts to the present.

We have a tailbone because we evolved from mammals that used to have tails.
It doesn't need a current or future use.

Same with the kiwi bird's wings.
The kiwi bird has wings because it evolved from birds that used to have wings.
It doesn't need a current or future use.

If you think a current or future use is required - that's simply an incorrect assumption about evolution and reality.