Bird brain? You wish!
by KrauzeHere's some interesting research on hummingbirds from the scientific journal Current Biology. Susan D. Healy and her colleagues exposed hummingbirds to artificial flowers that were refilled at different intervals and noted that the fast-filling flowers were visited more often than the slow-filling flowers. As they write: "Not only is this the first time that this degree of timing ability has been shown in wild animals, but these hummingbirds also exhibit two of the fundamental aspects of episodic-like memory (where and when), the kind of memory for specific events often thought to be exclusive to humans."
This casts doubt on Stephen Jay Gould's argument, in his book Wonderful Life, that rerunning the "tape of life" would have produced a vastly different outcome. If the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct, Gould said, mammals would never have had a chance to branch out from their roles as small nocturnals, scurrying around in an age of reptiles. And since dinosaurs allegedly didn't have a physiology for evolving big brains (relative to their body size), human-like intelligence would never have arisen.
For more on the intelligence of birds, here's an old post of mine from the ARN Forum.
March 12th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
It's a wonder to me that evolutionists seem to require the "emergence" of mammals to be tied to the extinction of dinosaurs. A far better explanation is that there was a change in global atmosphere right after a global Flood. Apparently, if there had been a water canopy, it would have increased the atmospheric pressure and oxygen content of the air, much like current "hyperbaric" recovery chambers in hospitals do (at least, in terms of the oxygen content). This increased pressure would have allowed giants - giant snails, giant sloths, giant pygmies, giant dragonflies, giant pteradactyls (spelling?), etc.. As it is, with our present atmosphere, such things couldn't have existed, or at least couldn't have functioned. Such huge birds and dragonflies wouldn't have been able to get off the ground (from what I've read, if I recall correctly).
Comment by Douglas — March 12, 2006 @ 5:53 pm
March 12th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Hi Douglas,
This isn't the place to discuss the Flood, so I've responded to your post here.
Comment by Krauze — March 12, 2006 @ 7:30 pm
March 12th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
Krauze,
Actually, I wasn't intending to discuss the Flood, necessarily, though it is directly relevant to the following claim by Gould to which you refer:
"If the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct, Gould said, mammals would never have had a chance to branch out from their roles as small nocturnals, scurrying around in an age of reptiles."
Comment by Douglas — March 12, 2006 @ 8:06 pm