The Toucan’s Beak: Intelligently Designed Thermoregulator

A toco toucan (Ramphastos toco). Image courtesy of Leon Petrosyan, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).


Joel Kontinen

The toco toucan (Ramphastos toco) has an enormous beak, roughly one-third of its total length. Evolutionists have proposed at least two explanations for this:

Charles Darwin thought its size could be explained by sexual selection.

Latter-day evolutionists assumed that the bird ate fish because its beak looked like it did.

However, both guesses were as wrong as wrong could be. Many animals that look carnivorous actually eat vegetables or fruit.

Bagheera kiplingi is a spider that eats acacia leaves. Fruit bats drink nectar and eat tropical fruit. The giant panda mostly eats bamboo. Tiarajudens eccentricus, an extinct a dog-sized, sabre-toothed animal, ate plants.

And Moschus cupreus, a sabre-toothed mammal that still lives in Afghanistan, is not a predator.

A paper in Science suggests that the toucan’s beak

“serves primarily as a thermoregulator. Infrared thermography techniques, which allow detailed observations with minimal disturbance to the birds, show that the birds alter blood flow to the bill according to ambient conditions, effectively using it as a radiator to ‘dump heat’.”

The abstract gives some details:

“The toco toucan (Ramphastos toco), the largest member of the toucan family, possesses the largest beak relative to body size of all birds. This exaggerated feature has received various interpretations, from serving as a sexual ornament to being a refined adaptation for feeding. However, it is also a significant surface area for heat exchange. Here we show the remarkable capacity of the toco toucan to regulate heat distribution by modifying blood flow, using the bill as a transient thermal radiator. Our results indicate that the toucan's bill is, relative to its size, one of the largest thermal windows in the animal kingdom, rivaling elephants' ears in its ability to radiate body heat.”

This suggests a major dilemma for Darwinians: How many toucans perished during a heat wave before evolution found a cure through increasing the size of their beaks?


Source:

Glenn J. Tattersall, Denis V. Andrade and Augusto S. Abe. 2009. Heat Exchange from the Toucan Bill Reveals a Controllable Vascular Thermal Radiator. Science 325: 5939, 468–470.

Ostriches’ “50-Million-Year-Old” American Cousin Is a Darwinian Dilemma

Ostriches have an American cousin that they hadn’t heard from – until now.



Joel Kontinen

It seems that each new fossil discovery presents a fresh dilemma for Darwinian evolution. Two exceedingly well-preserved bird fossils found in an ancient lake-bed in Wyoming are no exceptions.

A paper published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History describes a bird now known as Calciavis grandei.

At least the first part of the name is a misnomer. Calci means ‘hard’ or ‘stone’ and avis ‘bird’, but according to a report posted on Science Daily, the specimens are “completely intact with bones, feathers, and soft tissues.”

The flightless birds are roughly the size of a chicken. They are assumed to be “50 million years” old and relatives of ostriches.

Ostriches are flightless African birds, but some of their cousins must have succeeded in getting over to America, or evolution had to find another solution to their close kinship with the Calciavis grandei.

Darwinians will now have to choose to believe in either rafting or convergent evolution.

1. The birds rafted from Africa, much like the old world monkeys had to do, as a wide ocean separated Africa and South America.

While continental drift might have brought the continents a bit closer, hundreds of kilometres still separated them. The birds would have been expert mariners.

Evolutionists also have to assume that tarsiers rafted from Asia to Africa and back again – several times, that old world monkeys rafted to South America and then either swam or rafted to Central America.

2. The birds evolved in both Africa and America. While Darwinists often invoke convergent evolution, it makes their case even less credible.

So, they’re welcome to pick their favourite fable. In either case, it’s anything but credible.

Source:

Virginia Tech. 2016. Ostrich relative lived in North America about 50 million years ago. Science Daily. (5 July).

Too Heavy to Fly? Darwin-Defying Design in Huge Pterosaurs

Intelligently designed for flight. Image courtesy of Hugo Salais López, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).





Joel Kontinen



Some pterosaurs were as big as giraffes. With a wingspan of 10–11 metres (32–36 ft.), they seemed to be too large and too heavy to fly.

So, how did they do it?

A recent post in The Conversation suggests that in a way they resembled giant bats, with exquisitely designed features:

“Unlike birds with feathered wings, pterosaurs had a membrane that stretched from the end of an elongated fourth finger to their legs (more similar to a bat than a bird). This membrane had internal structures called actinofibrils to strengthen the wings, and provide structural support. They also had a unique bone in their wrist called the pteroid, which controlled the leading edge of the wing.”

But it seems that like some extinct mosaic-like animals (such as Archaeopteryx and Tiktaalik) and some living mosaics (for instance, the duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteater), they also shared some features with another kind of living animal, viz. the bird:

“Pterosaurs also had a highly specialised respiratory system, similar to that of birds, with air sacs in addition to their lungs. This is a much more effective breathing system, which is important for providing the large amounts of energy needed for flight. Pterosaurs had air sacs in their necks and trunk, and larger creatures also had them in their wings. In many cases, the air sacs invade the bones and hollow them out, making their wing bones extremely thin-walled. This is referred to as skeletal pneumaticity and is another important element contributing to large pterosaurs' ability to fly.”

The take away message from this post is that the pterosaurs were designed for flight.

Darwin-defying top-down design is very evident in these amazing creatures of yesteryear.

Source:

Martin-Silverstone, Elizabeth. 2016. Pterosaurs should have been too big to fly – so how did they manage it? The Conversation (30 June).

Jumping Genes and “Alien DNA”: The Octopus Is Clever and Weird

Image courtesy of Albert Kok, Creative Commons, (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

When describing the octopus, journalists tend to run out of superlatives. A writer in Nature described it as an eight-legged marvel and another used the expressions octopus ballet and uncanny intelligence.

Few animals can match its intelligence.

And its genome is also full of surprises. When researchers sequenced its genome they found that the octopus has more protein-coding genes (33,000) than we do.

Popular science websites concocted intriguing headlines from the octopus genome. Some suggested that the octopus had alien DNA or at least weird DNA and that it was not of this world at all.

The genome abounds in transposons or transposable elements (TEs). Also known as jumping genes, they can move from one place to another within the genome.

Jumping genes move about in the part of the genome once dismissed as junk.

Now we know that it was a misnomer and it has important regulatory functions.

Octopuses are marvels in others ways as well. Some are able to live 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) below the surface.

And octopuses are living fossils that have hardly changed in “95 million years”.

Source:

Science World Report. 2016. Octopuses Are Aliens With Weird DNA And Superpower Capabilities. (June 13).

Almost Like Eden: Lioness Herds Sheep Instead of Eating Them

A lioness in India. Image courtesy of Rupal Vaidya, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).



Joel Kontinen

On a farm in Russian Dagestan, a lioness runs after a flock of sheep.

But instead of having them for dinner, Mashka rounds them up. She herds them like a sheep dog and brings them home.

The lioness has been on the farm since she was a cub. The farmer says that she’s very obedient.

She does eat meat, though, but only the beef that her owner gives her.

According to the Darwinian story, nature should be red in tooth and claw. However, at times it isn’t.

Even more or less fierce felines can defy evolutionary expectations.

Recently, we heard of a cat on an Irish farm that adopted ducklings.

This reminds us of Eden, when bad things had not yet happened. Thorns did not grow, and death did not reign in the animal kingdom. Small creatures did not fear big ones or even humans.

Hybrid felines, such as a liger and savannah cat, suggest that Genesis is a more credible source on the cat kind than The Origin of Species.


Source:

BBC News. 2016. The lion herding sheep in Russia's Dagestan. (2 July). The BBC report includes a brief video.

Homo Naledi Might Be Too Young for Human Evolution

H. Naledi was put together from tiny bits and pieces. Image courtesy of the Lee Roger Berger research team, Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0).





Joel Kontinen

While the entire idea of human evolution has always been more or less fuzzy, it has now turned out to be a total mess.

We can thank a new assumed date of 912,000 years BP (before present) for Homo Naledi for this devolution.

In 2015 Lee Berger and his colleagues published a paper on what they claimed to be a new human species. Their discovery consisted of 1,500 pieces of teeth and bones.

Lee Berger is also known for the discovery of the very controversial Australopithecus sediba that was once touted as a human ancestor but was later practically tossed aside.

The success of purported human ancestors tends to be very brief. Some, like nutcracker man and Taung child a.k.a. Australopithecus africanus, have fared a little longer.

Soon after Berger and colleagues published the discovery of H. naledi in the rather obscure journal eLife, some anthropologists voiced their scepticism of its inclusion in the human family tree. They even doubted that all the bones and pieces belonged to the same species.

This scepticism hasn’t gone away. And the fossils were never dated.

Several studies have suggested that radiometric dating cannot be trusted, as it tends to give too old dates for fossils.

However, it seems that Darwinists can come up with a date for fossils without actually dating them. In their method, the evolutionary tail wags the Darwinian dog:

Mark Collard, a biological anthropologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and his colleagues developed a computer model with which they could analyse skull, jaw and tooth features of assumed human ancestors.

The model suggests a date of 912,000 years BP for H. naledi, which would make it too young for a human ancestor, as the oldest specimens of the fully-human H. erectus are much older.

The Hobbit or H. floresiensis has likewise rocked the Darwinian paddleboat that is now drifting in the wrong direction.

Source:

Choi, Charles Q. 2016. Newfound Human Species Suggests Africa Was Evolutionary Melting Pot. Live Science (29 June).

Car Evolution: Gross Misuse of the E-Word

This museum specimen did not evolve through a Darwinian pathway.




Joel Kontinen

An article recently posted in the UCLA Newsroom suggests that we can use evolution to explain “the ‘births’ and ‘deaths’ of every American-made car and truck model from 1896 to 2014.”

The researchers invoke the fossil record to make their case:

“Applying an evolutionary biology approach worked so well because the automotive industry’s technological records are very similar to the paleontological fossil record,” says Michael Alfaro, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

However, the thinking behind the two approaches is diametrically different. Whereas Darwinian evolution is supposed to have no ultimate goal or direction, with natural selection acting on random mutations to come upon a solution of sorts, each car make and model was designed by human engineers, who used their intelligence in the task.

One of the things that evolution does not do is designing.

With the passing of years, the cars looked different, as engineers found new ways of improving them, for instance.

Things change, but calling it evolution is a gross misuse of the E-word.

Evolution is without doubt one of the most misused of all words, due to its variety of meanings. And all too often Darwinists tend to muddy the waters and use different definitions of evolution in the same article.


Source:

Wolpert, Stuart. 2016. Technique from biology helps explain the evolution of the American car. UCLA Newsroom (24 June).