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Feathers came first, then birds
- fit2rule 7y agoSo, this settles it. The egg comes first.
- misnome 7y agoIt's always been the egg. The egg is laid by a proto-chicken and has the genetic mutation required to tip it into the "chicken" classification.
- saalweachter 7y agoIs a chicken-egg an egg laid by a chicken or an egg that yields a chicken?
- philbarr 7y agoNice try - but the original question doesn't state the egg has to be a chicken-egg, just "the egg".
- ukz 7y agoBut a bird's heavier than feathers.
- sbarker 7y agoBut when birds of a feather flock together, many hands make light work.
- stronglikedan 7y agoAnd it's known that a bird in many hands is just a gross bunch of fleshy bits with feathers sticking out.
- sharperguy 7y agoEggs were laid long before birds even evolved. If that's the criteria then the question becomes much easier to answer.
- misnome 7y agoWell, if you want to turn it into a semantic argument then we can go on to discuss whether a plane can take off on a conveyor belt.... (It can, unless you want to argue the semantics of the question, in which case gestures at internet)
- saalweachter 7y agoI mean, as considered by Aristotle, et al, the question was really asking "If you have a sequence of alternating events going infinitely far into the past, which came first?", which is more a math problem than a biology problem. (To which Aristotle, admirably, reached the conclusion that there wasn't a first event and it was a meaningless question.) It was only in the context of the Biblical creation that people decided it had a definitive answer (the chicken), and like 70% of "the egg came first" is really saying "Biblical creation was wrong!!1!", which is fun at first but kind of boring in the long haul. A more useful point of meditation in the modern world is this: which is more important, the design (the egg) or the implementation (the chicken)? Was the chicken "created" when the first egg containing the design for a chicken was laid, or when the first chicken was fully implemented (the egg-laying chicken)? Obvious parallels to technology, engineering, and startups, etc.
- dictum 7y agoIt just occurred to me that the chicken-and-egg problem, Schrödinger's cat and the ship of Theseus are essentially the same question, with slightly different contexts.
- EGreg 7y agoSeriously though, I have done a bunch of “wikipedia research” on how flight evolved. It’s all a bunch of “just so” stories and theories, which struggle to prove any evolutionary advantage to intermediate forms that can’t achieve flight or even gliding. I think the evolution of flight is one of the clearest examples that the standard theories of evolution purely by mutation and natural selection are still lacking explanatory power. I understand that the theory of Common Descent has ample evidence but let’s not conflate that with the other theories (about HOW genetic drift happens in macroevolution) and turn “evolution” into a religion in our quest to replace creationist accounts. It is a catch-all umbrella term to describe many theories, from “punctuated equilibria” to the “modern synthesis”, which still are in their infancy as the luminiferous aether or phlogiston as physical theories. I find there is too much suppression of dissenting views in evolutionary and climate science, for my taste. I am talking about universities and publishers taking concerted political action against what is perceived as going against the current establishment. A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. - Max Planck In many circles, publishing anything critical on scientific grounds is like publicly criticizing capitalism in USA or Islam in Saudi Arabia. A lot of time you get instant downvotes and hostile responses from laypeople. If you’re curious what I’m talking about, here is probably one of the better treatments of the mathematics behind current theories, for example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1880582244/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_r.M9CbRRG16AF https://www.amazon.com/dp/1880582244/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_r....
- pif 7y ago> I find there is too much suppression of dissenting views in evolutionary and climate science, I think idiots are not ignored enough in our current society. Science is about what can be observed. Theories are only useful as long as they predict right results. Opionions are irrelevant.
- EGreg 7y agoExactly. Theories are only useful as long as they predict right results. That’s what separates, say, the theory of common descent, from the current crop of theories about HOW flight evolved. They have ZERO predictive power. They are closer to “just-so” stories. Such theories should be rightly called unscientific compared to theories that have far more falsifiability and predictive power. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
- mikorym 7y agoI thought that this was known already? But I guess that this is the Feathers Could be First (2019) version.
- ncmncm 7y agoKind of obvious, of course. For a while there was a "Birds Came First" insurgency, insisting birds were not in Dinosauria because ... well, because they liked birds but hated dinosaurs? The argument never made sense, and it finally died down. People who like birds and hate dinosaurs are like people who like tetrapods and hate fish. It's allowed, but not something for vertebrate biologists to pay attention to.
- Balgair 7y agoPBS's Eons is a great Youtube channel that covered the evolution of feathers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOeFRg_1_Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOeFRg_1_Yg