Birds of a Feather

According to a summary published
in Science Daily, researchers at Oregon State University have made a “fundamental new discovery” about the nature of birds that makes
the evolution of birds from dinosaurs pretty much untenable. Recapping a research article published in The Journal of Morphology, they explain that the femur (leg bone from hip to knee) of
all birds (and unlike all other land vertebrates) is in a fixed position in
relation to the hip. Otherwise, they could not hit the massive transfer of air
into and out of their air sacs as is necessary for flight. So what?
So birds did not evolve from dinosaurs. “It’s really strange that no one realized this before,” says Devon Quick, because “this is fundamental to bird physiology.” Fundamental and they
just now noticed.
I’m really not as interested in bird physiology as I am the reason it went unnoticed in the last hundred years of the advancement of science. Quick was quick to say (sorry, I couldn’t resist
that one), “We aren’t suggesting that dinosaurs and birds may not have a common ancestor somewhere in the distant past.” That would be a surefire career-killer. So
they couch the statement by suggesting “birds and dinosaurs may have shared a
common ancestor, such as the small reptilian thecodont.” Remember? You’ve seen them in every family tree of dinosaurs. It’s the little guy at the bottom of the chart, placed there as if it really was an animal species. It isn’t.
It’s a grouping of animals that paleontologists know have a few common characteristics, but no common decent. The scientific word for it is paraphyletic, but the easier to understand word is “myth.” So why even invoke the word? The inconvenient truth is that it saves face for the fact that there are no common ancestors.
But the Science Daily article even goes on to quote another scientist as saying, “There’s a lot of museum politics involved in this, a lot of careers committed to a particular point of view even if new scientific evidence raises
questions.”
There! I can’t believe they really said it. Will next year’s high school biology books leave out the picture of the thecodont at the bottom of the dinosaur family tree? Will the bird femur problem make it into those same books? Ever? What do you
think? After all, if they did, who would buy all those feathered
dinosaurs everyone has invested in?

This entry was posted on July 13, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Politics, Notable Quotes, Science and faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.