Evolution Again!

[_Ceeboo]

Hello all.
First, please allow me a moment to do a bit of housekeeping (Thanks)

I know my departure/break from the MDB was very brief (less than 24 hours) but there are reasons.
A few of them are:
Things that some of you said/shared with me over the last day that have impacted and influenced me quite a bit.
Realizing that I handled a situation very poorly (I own that!)
Understanding that the very reason I participate here is because I choose to, because I enjoy it, and perhaps most importantly, because of the individual members that make up this community.

Although I appreciated/appreciate the "bring back Ceeboo" thread, I am hoping that it soon finds its way to a new home that is located somewhere other than the first page of this board.

Now, on the much more interesting topics:

Evolution (again!)

Don't worry, there will be:
No polls!
No votes!
Just interesting conversation/discussion/sharing that will surely get everybody to truly hate each other!

Dinosaur to bird:

Okay, birds evolved from bipedal dinosaurs (theropods), right?

Questions:

In the geologic column, why do we see the theropods roaming around 75 million years after the birds appear?
Why are theropod fossils found in cretaceous rocks, while birds are found in jurassic rock? (Out of order, no?)
Did dinosaurs really evolve from birds?


What about the completely unique lung system that we see only in birds? (One way air, etc, that allows for an extremely high rate of gas exchange that is required for flight)
What about the fixed femur bone that makes birds unlike all other legged land animals? (This fixed femur design (or maybe not "design" but a mere result of random mutations and natural selection ) has been determined to keep the air-sac lung of birds form collapsing when they inhale)


Speaking of birds - Another mind-bender (to me anyway) is migration in general. Let's take a look at just one!

Migration of the Golden Plover:

The Siberian species of the Golden Plavor migrates from Alaska to Hawaii each winter.
A 2,500 mile journey that requires non stop flying - no rests (no islands in-between) with a flight time of 88 hours.
Prior to departure, the Golden Plavor puts on an additional 50% of body weight in a short time (extra fat used as source of fuel)
So, even with the extra fuel, it has been calculated that they would still end up about 500 mile short of the final destination (water/death below).

So without map and having a fuel problem, how do they arrive at their destination?

They fly in a V-formation.
This allows the Golden Plavors to fly an additional 1,400 miles.
Since the lead position at the apex of the formation draws the brunt of the work, the birds share turns at the apex position.

Question:

Considering that this strategy must be well known and in place before leaving to a far away destination, and considering that this surely is an amazingly precise 'flight plan', what possible naturalistic explanation could account for this?

What say you?

Peace,
Ceeboo

[_Res Ipsa]

Welcome back, Ceeboo. I'm glad you changed your mind.

The answer to your first question is the same answer to the question: if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes? Have we covered that one yet? ;-)

[_Nightlion]

Hello all.
First, please allow me a moment to do a bit of housekeeping (Thanks)

I know my departure/break from the MDB was very brief (less than 24 hours) but there are reasons.
A few of them are:
Things that some of you said/shared with me over the last day that have impacted and influenced me quite a bit.
Realizing that I handled a situation very poorly (I own that!)
Understanding that the very reason I participate here is because I choose to, because I enjoy it, and perhaps most importantly, because of the individual members that make up this community.

Although I appreciated/appreciate the "bring back Ceeboo" thread, I am hoping that it soon finds its way to a new home that is located somewhere other than the first page of this board.

Now, on the much more interesting topics:

Evolution (again!)

Don't worry, there will be:
No polls!
No votes!
Just interesting conversation/discussion/sharing that will surely get everybody to truly hate each other!

Dinosaur to bird:

Okay, birds evolved from bipedal dinosaurs (theropods), right?

Questions:

In the geologic column, why do we see the theropods roaming around 75 million years after the birds appear?
Why are theropod fossils found in cretaceous rocks, while birds are found in jurassic rock? (Out of order, no?)
Did dinosaurs really evolve from birds?


What about the completely unique lung system that we see only in birds? (One way air, etc, that allows for an extremely high rate of gas exchange that is required for flight)
What about the fixed femur bone that makes birds unlike all other legged land animals? (This fixed femur design (or maybe not "design" but a mere result of random mutations and natural selection ) has been determined to keep the air-sac lung of birds form collapsing when they inhale)


Speaking of birds - Another mind-bender (to me anyway) is migration in general. Let's take a look at just one!

Migration of the Golden Plover:

The Siberian species of the Golden Plavor migrates from Alaska to Hawaii each winter.
A 2,500 mile journey that requires non stop flying - no rests (no islands in-between) with a flight time of 88 hours.
Prior to departure, the Golden Plavor puts on an additional 50% of body weight in a short time (extra fat used as source of fuel)
So, even with the extra fuel, it has been calculated that they would still end up about 500 mile short of the final destination (water/death below).

So without map and having a fuel problem, how do they arrive at their destination?

They fly in a V-formation.
This allows the Golden Plavors to fly an additional 1,400 miles.
Since the lead position at the apex of the formation draws the brunt of the work, the birds share turns at the apex position.

Question:

Considering that this strategy must be well known and in place before leaving to a far away destination, and considering that this surely is an amazingly precise 'flight plan', what possible naturalistic explanation could account for this?

What say you?

Peace,
Ceeboo

With time all things are possible.

[_Ceeboo]

Hey Brad

The answer to your first question is the same answer to the question: if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes? Have we covered that one yet? ;-)

Wait, what?

The first question (among other things) is why do we see dinosaur fossils higher than bird fossils (in the geologic column) if birds evolved from dino's?


How is that the same a Men/Monkey?

Peace,
Ceeboo

[_Res Ipsa]

It's the same question. A million years from now, archeologists will find ape bones higher in the stratographic column than the bones of some humans. If we descended from apes, how could that be? ;-)

[_Sethbag]

There were a great many dinosaurs, and they were spread out over large territories of land. There were lots of different populations that were separated from each other through time, natural barriers, ecological barriers, etc. With so many creatures alive at once, the processes of evolution were at work in a massively parallel fashion. Not all dinosaurs were in the lines that turned into birds. Some did. Others turned into other kinds of life, such as the reptiles, the mammals, and so forth. You might just as well ask, if dinosaurs evolved into mammals, why are there reptiles?

It's just like the way others have explained about humans and monkeys and apes. We have a common ancestor with chimps and bonobos, but not all of the offspring of that common ancestors were in lines that turned into humans. Some of those offspring were in genetic lines that evolved into humans, some into the common ancestor of the chimps and bonobos, which separated into two distinct species a much shorter time ago.

[_Tarski]

In the geologic column, why do we see the theropods roaming around 75 million years after the birds appear?
Why are theropod fossils found in cretaceous rocks, while birds are found in jurassic rock? (Out of order, no?)
Did dinosaurs really evolve from birds?

What is the problem exactly? We also see chimps walking around hundreds of thousands of years after humans appear. Is that a problem?
(I think you are picturing the process as linear instead of a branching process).

What about the completely unique lung system that we see only in birds? (One way air, etc, that allows for an extremely high rate of gas exchange that is required for flight)
What about the fixed femur bone that makes birds unlike all other legged land animals? (This fixed femur design (or maybe not "design" but a mere result of random mutations and natural selection ) has been determined to keep the air-sac lung of birds form collapsing when they inhale)

What is your problem here other than you can't come up with a plausible story to tell about how the evolution took place?
Look, do you expect nature to stop in the middle of a complex process of evolution and say to itself "oh I better not go down that path because humans will never think of it and I don't want any of my pathways to be anything but obvious"?

The ability of the little brain of one particular mammal to be able to intellectually reconstruct an evolutionary pathway without time for research and some really lucky insight (or in your case without training in molecular biology) seems pretty irrelevant.
Suffice it to say that it doesn't seem implausible to me and I don't think there is anything wrong with my brain.

Ceeboo, just as in history, we won't be able reconstruct how everything happened. Quite a few things will seem weird (how could that have happened? we will ask). But, every time we get lucky and figure it out, we get that sensation of "oh, I see now". We should learn from that. The evolution of the eye once seemed implausible but now we can recount a very convincing scenario. Mysterious things seem easy once you see the trick. But we can't always see the trick--(or what may be a sequence of millions of micro-tricks). Nevertheless, the evidence for evolution as a whole is already overwhelming and the number of things it throws light on is huge. So, it would be foolish to throw it out every time we find something else that we can't quite reconstruct--especially since we keep eventually figuring out initially mysterious things. I can't explain the production of the Book of Mormon but I am sure there is a simple explanation and if I could watch it happening I would just laugh to myself at how simple it was and how my imagination was just so weak to not have thought of it.
Nature is convoluted and it doesn't try to keep things neat and understandable just for us.

[_Ceeboo]

I am still confused by the posts! (Imagine that!)

Yes or No:

In the geologic column, are the bi-pedal dino fossils above the bird fossils?

Peace,
Ceeboo

[Guest]

Ceeboo,

Regarding bird migration, please see the excerpt below my post on lulu's quantum entanglement thread, and the two links therein.

From another thread:

Turns out that there are a variety of interesting (and possible quantum related) phenomena that have shown up in the magneto-sensory and electro-sensory systems in a wide variety of animals all along the phylogenetic scale from bacteria to mammals, including sharks and rays (elasmobranchs), salmon, migratory birds, and Siberian hamsters.

It appears that the biological mechanisms in play here evolved separately and utilize different organs in the bodies of the various animals. Since static and low frequency electromagnetic field sensing is not nearly as important or useful as light sensing and vision, it seems that nature (evolution) elaborates this capability as needed, using a wide variety of physiological structures.

Since the fields at issues here are extremely weak, quantum mechanical phenomena have been looked at, by a number of labs, as a possible aid or means in transducing these low energy fields into neurological signals. Recent examples of some of the thinking in this area are described here, and here.

A number of years ago, our group did work in this area, some of which has been published. To see more, have a look a look at the quantum mechanical entanglement thread.

[_Tarski]

I am still confused by the posts! (Imagine that!)

Yes or No:

In the geologic column, are the bi-pedal dino fossils above the bird fossils?

Peace,
Ceeboo

Lets say yes for argument. So what?

Chimp fossils are above human fossils too. That's because we branched out from whatever lead to modern chimps and we are not descended from chimps. The bipedal dinosaurs above some of the birds in the strata are not the ancestors of birds either. The they and the birds may have a common ancestor though (an earlier bipedal dinosaur). It is utterly simple.