I really love the whole issue of flight and birds.
It's just amazing to me to see them so
effortlessly be able to just take off, glide, land.
You go through a lot of stuff to try to get
mechanical things to fly,
and the beauty associated with it as well.
Oh yeah, yeah,
you can see a number of different forms there.
There's a lot of doves in here.
They're a member of a single created kind.
And the one with the really long tail -
oh yeah, the really long tail, definitely a mating display.
That is very attractive to female birds.
Oh, is that right?
Oh yeah, definitely.
Well Todd, here's the question.
because I've been involved with flight.
and it's a complex thing.
I mean, it's not an easy thing
when we try to take some mechanical thing -
you have to have an aerodynamic structure,
you have to have
a proportion system, you have to have a really light wings,
control surfaces,
all of those things and and it took us a long time
before we could just get one up,
and yet we see these creatures -
different, very different creatures, they -
They do it naturally.
Yeah.
How do you see that, as a biologist?
It's amazing.
And it's not just birds.
So if you're thinking of this in sort
of evolutionary terms you'd have amazing attributes like this,
you would think would have a single origin,
but this one has at least four origins.
At least four.
So we see powered flight in birds,
we see it in bats which are mammals,
we see it in pterodactyls which are birds or mammals,
we see it in insects.
We've got at least four times that powered flight originating.
And then you've got all the gliders.
You know, the flying squirrels,
the flying frogs, the flying fish,
all those things that just sort of glide they
still have the aerodynamics they just can't keep themselves up.
And for me,
I'm thinking, you know, this is a lot easier to explain
if God created the flying things,
and that's where flight came from.
I don't have to worry about getting all my ailerons right,
and all my aerodynamic things,
and make sure my wing angles are correct -
we don't have to think
about that more than four or five or what -
however many times in evolution,
because we just have one origin of flying things
on day five of creation.
it seems to me a lot simpler way of explaining things.
So we obviously have a radical difference here,
between these two paradigms
when it comes to the issue of flight.
Yeah.
So the conventional paradigm,
that ability to fly is still coming
out of that one trunk, isn't it?
It's got to evolve somehow, yeah,
so it's gonna evolve multiple times.
It'll evolve into the bats, it has to evolve in the birds.
When, in the creation model,
you just have one origin of flight because God
designed things to fly.
All of those complex attributes that all have to be right?
Well, that's because God made them all that way,
just to be right.
So when we look around,
we would expect to see possibly multiple created kinds of birds,
and that's exactly what we see.
So, we've seen here, we've got these dwarf geese,
and this teal,
which is kind of like a duck, that's a single created kind.
We've got a number of doves in here -
Whoa - He just flew through.
That was awesome.
A number of doves in here that -
those are also members of a single created kind.
So there's diversity
once you have the ability to fly,
but the ability to fly isn't the thing
that's being generated during that process.
It is a unique, designed feature of these creatures.
So the conventional paradigm would have to somehow come up
with the flight characteristics
in various places to bring them to where they are.
Yeah, and it's got to get all of them, right?
So it's got to have all the - it's got to be light,
it's got to have a big wing surface,
it's got to have some kind of flapping ability,
all that sort of thing has to be all in place
before they can start flying.
Now, they might,
and the hypothesis is, you know, they start on trees
and they jump off and they start as colliders,
and then they learn how to flap their wings,
and then keep themselves up off the ground.
But yeah, flight's a complicated thing.
and even when you look at an insect,
radically different, of course,
from a - you know -
from a bird, I've often thought just
how complex a mosquito is,
that he has the ability to fly,
and land, to detect its target, to recognize a threat,
all of that built in a tiny little creature.
A tiny little creature that barely has a brain, right?
That barely has a brain.
And, somehow it can do all those things and still fly.
Well, Todd, do we have evidence
in the fossil record that helps us understand any of this,
or does it make it more complicated?
Well, that's a good question.
So I got one right here.
I got a model of a very famous fossil.
This is Archaeopteryx, right?
We've seen it.
So this - yeah, of course you have.
This is from the British Museum -
or, the original is in the British Museum.
Beautiful fossil,
it's got beautiful flight feathers on both wings,
you can see the beautiful flight feathers on the tail,
but you can also see up here on the wings,
it has claws,
which is not something that we have in modern birds.
Modern birds don't have claws on their wings.
We also see there's a long bony tail
which is also another attribute that's absent in modern birds.
They have little stumpy tails.
And when you look up really close, you'll see
the mouth is full of teeth,
which is not something that we see in modern birds.
So in fact, in that respect,
this thing is more similar to dinosaurs
than it is to modern birds.
But is it a dinosaur?
That's the question, right?
So the conventional model would say this is
the transitional form, or close to it,
that leads to birds.
Now I've looked at this myself,
several different studies on this that have been published,
and I can tell you this isn't like Mesohippus,
that horse thing
that we could say "this is part of the horse kind."
This is one of those
intermediate forms it has traits of two different created kinds,
but it's its own created kind.
It's its own separate group.
So now we can wonder about well why does it have these traits
of more than one created kind?
but it's not really a transition.
It's separate from dinosaurs, and it's separate from birds.
It's different from both.
It's its own thing.
So it's not really what we would think
of as a transition, right?
There was never a transition there,
so it's not a transition.
We'd have to call this an intermediate,
which is why I like that word intermediate better
than I like transition,
so I don't have to imply that there was a transition.
This is a form of mosaic.
That's the term we use for a creature
that has different traits from different created kinds.
This, however, is its own unique created kind.
So that's Archaeopteryx.
And it obviously has, I mean I can see here,
I mean these are beautiful feathers
that were on this creature.
Yeah, we've got multiple fossils of Archaeopteryx
showing those feathers,
and they all got those claws on their wings,
and they do have those beautiful flight feathers very clearly
shaped for flying.
Now whether this thing actually flew or not -
it might be a glider, we don't really know,
because you know, it's dead,
but it definitely has those fascinating combination
of traits in its own unique created kind.
Todd, are there any creatures alive today
that we would look at and say,
"that's a mosaic"?
Sure, Duck-Billed Platypus, right?
Oh, yeah.
so Duck-Billed Platypus's got that beak like a bird,
it's got fur like a mammal, makes venom like a snake.
It's got all these weird traits all sort of jumbled together
into a single critter,
which makes it a mosaic,
much like Archaeopteryx here is a mosaic.
So yeah, they're alive now.
So people might look
at the Duck-Billed Platypus today and say
that's a transitional form?
Sort of.
The way they would phrase it is a "Stem Mammal."
Okay.
And the stem mammal would mean,
on the stem that leads to mammals,
this is a side branch.
So they wouldn't necessarily say it's the actual transition,
there's other things they would use for that.
But it's definitely sort of representative
of the face of the mammal tree.
But you know, from a creationist's perspective, it
is its own unique created kind,
and I can show that again with our analyses.
So for me, it's better understood as a mosaic,
and the better question is why does it have traits
from multiple created kinds,
since it's not really a stem mammal and it's
not really a transitional form?
And so, that question is,
how does it have all of those traits?
And the answer is, I don't know I wish I did.
And that's good.
It's a research topic -
Yeah, a great research topic for the next generation.
I've been working on those for years
but I've not gotten a good answer.
Oh we need some students to come along and do that.