Hummingbirds and Evolution.

[swestrup]

_sps_ sent me a pointer to this article on how hummingbirds fly. While interesting in its own right, the part that made it worth alerting me to, was the last paragraph:

"The one big caveat is that an engineer can start from scratch - biological evolution doesn't ever start anew. It's encumbered with the trappings of one's ancestry." -- Dr. Douglas Warrick, of Oregon State University.

It is surprising how few folks, even in the Biological sciences seem to understand how basic a principal that is to understanding and analyzing life on this world, or on another. Its actually very refreshing to find someone who has that clue.

Comments

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Depends on how one defines a "god"... some are easily disproven, and thus have fallen by the wayside over time. Like the old joke about the Communist teacher who tells his students to ask God for a ruble and then ask the teacher, or the priest who tosses the money from the collection in the air and says "God can keep whatever he can catch".

People - well, MOST people - no longer believe in a God which acts in physical, immediately human-understandable, obviously intentional and supernatural ways (ie, extremely improbable, against-the-laws-of-physics "miraculous" actions). Some of them think that there might have been that kind of a god once, but that now it's "hiding" or trying to "test their faith".

Myself, I think the more metaphysical "First Cause" type of a god may be possible - not necessarily provable, though - but that it's a waste of time to sit around waiting for it to tell us what to do - and foolish to believe others who claim to be able to speak to that hypothetical god, much less obey them on that basis...