Tag Archives: Flight

News

Scientists trying to mimic the design of hummingbirds with nanorobots

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From Evolution News.

Excerpt:

In the Illustra documentary Flight, Dr. Thomas Emell of the University of Florida asks us to consider the speed of the synapses firing during the birds’ wingbeats (more than 100 times a second) and heartbeats (1,250 times a minute). Now, we see that each wingbeat, taking place in less than 10 milliseconds, involves even more control: tuning the wing shape at each position to optimize lift.

Masateru Maeda, a PhD student at Chiba University in Japan, captured the footage.

The ultimate aim of his measurements of the movements of the wings is to copy their function in the design of flying robots.

If something works, it’s “not happening by accident,” Discovery Institute Fellow Paul Nelson reminds us in the Illustra film. He describes how the unique shape of the shoulder bone allows the wing to invert on the reverse stroke, creating lift on both strokes. Now, Maeda has found that hovering also requires the hummingbirds to be able to sense their wings’ shapes and respond accordingly.

Mr Maeda said that the birds must have a very acute sense of their wings’ shape in order to remain so still in the air.

“If the wing shape isn’t optimised,” he explained, “it will fail to produce lift and the bird will start to sink.

“So it must be able to sense this and correct the shape of its wings.”

What this implies is that the wing shape (involving control of the flight feathers’ ability to slide as they flap), is under instantaneous control of the hummingbirds’ central nervous system. The speed of signals from brain to flight muscles now becomes even more astonishing.

In the documentary, viewers see a robotic hummingbird called the Nano Air Vehicle able to hover in mid-air. Its wings, however, perform simple back-and-forth movements while its stiff body floats upright in a fixed position. It has no internal guidance system, no heart or brain, and no fine control of wing shape. Without the human operator and his joystick, it would crash into the nearest wall. No wonder Nelson says that, despite its being a “sensational piece of engineering,” it is still “light years behind the bird that inspired its creation.”

What the Evolution News article didn’t mention is that even if the scientists and engineers can mimic the flying capability of hummingbirds by intelligently designing robots, they are missing out on a valuable aspect of what makes a humminbird a hummingbird. Can you guess what it is?

Take a look at this video:

Isn’t that amazing? Now, everyone knows that I am huge admirer of birds, and I have had birds as pets for most of my life. I know what these amazing little creatures can do firsthand. Not only can they fly, but they can build relationships with human beings – trusting them not to hurt them. No robot hummingbird can do that. Hummingbirds are exquisitely designed, and their design cries out for an explanation.

News

New peer-reviewed article argues for irreducible complexity in birds

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From Evolution News.

Excerpt:

In a peer-reviewed paper titled “Evidence of Design in Bird Feathers and Avian Respiration,” in International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, Leeds University professor Andy McIntosh argues that two systems vital to bird flight–feathers and the avian respiratory system–exhibit “irreducible complexity.” The paper describes these systems using the exact sort of definitions that Michael Behe uses to describe irreducible complexity:

[F]unctional systems, in order to operate as working machines, must have all the required parts in place in order to be effective. If one part is missing, then the whole system is useless. The inference of design is the most natural step when presented with evidence such as in this paper, that is evidence concerning avian feathers and respiration.

He further notes that many evolutionary authors “look for evidence that true feathers developed first in small non-flying dinosaurs before the advent of flight, possibly as a means of increasing insulation for the warm-blooded species that were emerging.” However, he finds that when it comes to fossil evidence for the evolution of feathers, “[n]one of the fossil evidence shows any evidence of such transitions.”

Regarding the avian respiratory system, McIntosh contends that a functional transition from a purported reptilian respiratory system to the avian design would lead to non-functional intermediate stages. He quotes John Ruben stating, “The earliest stages in the derivation of the avian abdominal air sac system from a diaphragm-ventilating ancestor would have necessitated selection for a diaphragmatic hernia in taxa transitional between theropods and birds. Such a debilitating condition would have immedi¬ately compromised the entire pulmonary ventilatory apparatus and seems unlikely to have been of any selective advantage.” With such unique constraints in mind, McIntosh argues that the “even if one does take the fossil evidence as the record of development, the evidence is in fact much more consistent with an ab initio design position – that the breathing mechanism of birds is in fact the product of intelligent design.”

Let’s take a step back and ask what counts as evidence for (macro) evolution for people who actually care about evidence.

Here’s what counts as evidence:

  1. A smooth sequence of fossils showing the gradual emergence of different body body features across a wide spectrum of body plans. Not just horses and whales, not just micro-evolution. Major changes in body structure, which properly dated fossils, from a wide range of body plans.
  2. A lab experiment that derives a new organ type or body plan from an unmodified organism, like the Lenski experiments tried to do on a smaller scale.
  3. A computer simulation that shows a string of mutations that occur on one organism that would give it a new feature or organ within a reasonable amount of time (less than 4 billion years). The mutations must be probable, and the organism must have improved functionality at each stage of its development. And a calculation would have to be done to show that each beneficial mutation would spread to the rest of the population and survive in the next generation, which is a separate question.

Do we have that evidence in the case of bird evolution (feathers and lungs)? Of course not.

Do we have that evidence in the case of evolution as a whole? Of course not.

People who embrace evolution embrace it on the basis of non-rational, non-evidential factors.