A Flock of Dinosaurs Flies South for the Winter
Now when you’re as young as I was when I first got interested in dinosaurs there was this one crazy theory that made absolutely no sense but sounded very appealing. Dinosaurs evolved into birds. Even most scientists at the time thought the idea was crazy and gave it little attention. But the idea of that the descendants of dinosaurs are still around now was great for the imagination of a grade-schooler. I always imaged the Velociraptor from Jurassic Park growing feathers and somehow becoming this large bird that survived past the extinction of the dinosaurs and gave rise to the birds we have today. Well obviously millions of gigantic birds didn’t walk around unaffected by the meteor impact while all the dinosaurs died. The first question this brought for me was how it happened. But in the end, two more important questions should be realized, one that is crucial to evolution and science in general. What exactly is a theory and how does a question develop into a theory?
To most people a theory is a guess, or at least that is the image I have noticed given out by those who argue against evolution. But a theory is more than that. It begins with a hypothesis, which is a guess that attempts to explain something that happened. After a period of time of being tested against, it becomes a theory. The best theory is one that not only explains something but also makes predictions that have been proven and it must be open to testing, meaning that it can’t be so broad that nothing can prove it wrong. A theory can’t always be proven right or wrong by seeing whether or not it’s there. Atoms, viruses, bacteria and energy all have never been directly observed. Upon that, direct proof that the earth was round was never found until 1961, even though it was known for long before that. So what kind of evidence does evolution provide? Well let’s begin with birds.
Ok so we have a hypothesis that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Well evolution predicts that there must be transitional fossils showing a gradual progression from dinosaurs to birds. The earliest known fossil comes from Protoavis. It arrived soon after the dinosaurs did. It had a bigger brain, had large eye sockets like many birds do today, but it could only cruise through the air. Another early one is the popular Archaeopteryx, who also could not fly but could glide and fly very short distances. Later was a bird called Sinornis. While lesser known than Archaeopteryx, it had separated fingers in its wings that allowed it to do more than just glide. It was capable of sustained flight and maneuvering. As you can see in the pictures attached, even Sinornis looks like a dinosaur in some ways. However during the Cretaceous in Antarctica there was Polarornis. It was a loon that looked very similar to a modern bird.
Now if this were all black and white though I could say this argument is over. Evolution is clearly right and everything else is clearly wrong. But it isn’t. What I just described was once believed to be the way birds evolved but it is wrong. Protoavis was more sophisticated than Archaeopteryx and Archaeopteryx is generally believed not to be a link but more of a side branch to the evolution of birds. So the original argument isn’t completely true. But does this mean that evolution is false? That is the response that I hear quite often. Because one part of the theory cannot explain every detail it must mean that all of evolution is flawed. But the truth is that while the original argument is wrong it does nothing to the theory as a whole. All it means is that we chose the wrong species. Since then a long list of intermediate species has been known, of which I will not go through the boring process of listing them all, which would make this entry twice as long, but if you would like to know send me an email at jxk155@cwru.edu and I’ll be glad to help.
So if the previous explanation was erred and didn’t provide proof against evolution is that a confident way of implying that nothing can disprove evolution or that it would be nearly impossible to? No. Actually it could be much easier for a fault in the theory of the evolution of birds to be used to disprove evolution than one might think. For instance what if a modern-like bird was found in the Triassic? This would mean that birds appeared fully developed and either stayed that way or varied in ability since then. It would put a huge hole in the theory, especially since no bird-related species have been found prior to the Triassic. Something else that could disprove the theory has to do with the order of animals that evolution predicted. In the broadest sense, evolution predicts that fish were first, then amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals, and lastly birds. So if for example, bird fossils were found prior to the Triassic, before dinosaurs ever appeared, it wouldn’t just put a hole in the theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds, it would completely demolish it. It would also put evolution in doubt, same as it would if any of the other groups of animals were found out of order. These are only two of the ways that could disprove both the theory of birds evolving into dinosaurs but also of evolution in general. But even with these two I’m sure we can say that it is quite possible to provide some proof against either theory if one is indeed false.
Even given all this I hear stuff like “well this person found human bones with dinosaur bones at this one place so evolution must be false.” Many people against evolution accept this as a kind of smoking gun to disprove evolution. But that is not the way science works. One or two examples are not enough to disprove a theory. First of all it has to be considered that it can happen geologically along with evolution. And even if it can’t be explained, you need enough examples to support another hypothesis, and I mean many more then a few. But as I have shown, parts of evolutionary theory have holes and other parts have been proven wrong. Realistically we must be aware of that. But there is enough evidence to show that dinosaurs did indeed evolve into birds. It’s only a matter of how it happened.
In future entries I will get into other predictions made by evolution, how they can be proved correct and how they can be proved false. I will also talk about some of the oddities of the world like snakes found with legs, people found with tails, or cave fish, which never see any light during their lives and have no use for eyes, still have primitive eyes. I hope it captures your interest and imagination like it has mine for so many years now.
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