Flight: If You Can’t Evolve It, Model Your Imagination

This is silly. A robot model with outstretched arms cannot begin to say how dinosaurs took wing.

“Robot dinosaurs help unlock the evolution of flight” shouts a headline at New Atlas. Michael Irving uses standard hype language to try to interest a bored public dazed by non-stop evolutionary myths:

On the timeline of the evolution of flight in birds, gliding seems like a logical first step. But new research suggests that some species could have made the jump straight to flapping flight without a gliding phase in the meantime, which could force a rewrite of our understanding of avian evolution….

Although it couldn’t fly, Caudipteryx‘s wings might have flapped when it ran, which in turn could have led to the eventual evolution of active flight.

He describes how evolutionists at a Japanese university built a robotic model of Caudipteryx, one of the disputed “feathered dinosaurs” (CMI). They designed the model to run, and as it ran, hold out its arms. Who is surprised that the arms flapped as it ran? That was built into the model. What can this possibly say about flight? Nothing. Without a living Caudipteryx to watch, there is no way to tie it into the “evolution of flight.” And to think that any animal could suddenly leap off the ground and fly is to exercise fact-free imagination to the extreme (see Illustra Media documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds to understand the anatomical and physiological requirements for powered flight).

One might as well say that children are evolving flight when they flap their arms while running. If this were a law of nature, kangaroos and lizards are on the way to flying, too. They “could have made the jump to flapping flight,” couldn’t they? The “could have” phrase allows for anything. The paper in PLoS Biology has such a high perhapsimaybecouldness index (use of “might have” and “may have,” etc.) it’s ridiculous. One can only hope the toymakers had some fun goofing off on the job.

For comic relief, watch this historical YouTube video of man’s ridiculous attempts to fly by attaching wings to the arms. Powered flight by humans only made headway through biomimetics: imitation of the best flyers on the planet — birds.

They refer to Ken Dial’s partridge-family theory for the origin of flight, one of the stupidest cases of evolutionary storytelling ever reported on CEH (19 July 2016). Dial watched living partridge chicks running up ramps, and imagined they were reliving their evolutionary heritage of their dinosaur ancestors beginning training for flight. That theory survived for over 15 years in the literature, not because it was sensible, but because evolutionists had nothing better to offer.