A lesson in science media gullibility. This time it concerns a duck.
Tag: birds
The textbooks are wrong: Birds CAN smell
At Science: “Other bird species may also respond to “calls” from injured plants, recent evidence shows. Two European birds, the great tit and the blue tit, locate insects that are attacking pine trees by detecting the volatile chemicals the stressed trees release … “
Birds: Magnetic field reception for navigation is a complete mystery
But it may be a quantum mechanical phenomenon, researchers say — thus solvable, as long as we are willing to work with quantum mechanics.
Some features of bird brains are remarkably similar to those of mammal brains
Are certain brain structures are essential for high animal intelligence or will alternative structures work?
In previously unpublished letter, Einstein suggests that new physics discoveries might come from studying animals
Would Einstein count birds’ use of magnetic sensing for migration?
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig offers ten reasons birds are not living dinosaurs
Life would be simpler and more emotionally satisfying if birds were surviving dinosaurs but maybe they aren’t.
Claims for random evolution overlook the fact that life needs software as well as hardware
Richard W. Stevens points out that a bird does not fly just because it has wings; it needs a Explanations of the evolution of flight do not account for that.“flight” program in its brain.
Asked at The Conversation: Could dinosaurs re-evolve?
We are told no. But just a minute. According to the story, some dinos evolved into birds. If so, massive changes ARE possible. It’s not clear why changed circumstances could not cause some of those changes to be reversed.
At Smithsonian Magazine: Why birds survived but not dinosaurs
Researchers: Beaked birds had the advantage that they could live on seeds from destroyed forests until new vegetation grew again.
Tiny 99 mya bird (?) skull trapped in amber raises many questions
But get this: Benson goes on to explain that one of the “bizarre” features of Oculudentavis is qualities present in lizards but neither in birds nor in dinosaurs. It is smaller than most hummingbirds but had over a hundred teeth… The more research we do, one suspects, the more of this type of thing we’ll find and the harder it would all be to explain to our old Darwinian schoolteacher.
Michael Egnor: The bird does NOT do math
Egnor: Dr. Pepperberg could have been more forthright: Parrots can’t do statistics. No animal (except man) can do statistics, because statistical reasoning is abstract and only human beings are capable of abstract thought. Parrots think concretely—they think of particular things and relations between particular things, but they cannot think without particular things—they can’t think abstractly.
Coffee!: All the wildlife that use a fallen log bridge
Maybe you didn’t even know they were out there but the hidden camera catches them.
Even bird droppings can confute science expectations
Apparently, bird droppings are not corrosive or hard to remove because of uric acid because there is little uric acid in them. As the wag once said, it’s not what we know that’s the problem; it’s what we know that ain’t so.
Birds must choose between big brains and big guts
This is further indirect evidence— not, of course, drawn out here—that the human brain did not develop the way it did simply to enable survival.
Researchers: 50 million years needed to recover extinct NZ birds! No, alas,, it’s impossible
Apart from cloning, to get the exact same birds, we’d have to rent the multiverse (if it existed). And then we would have an infinite number of planets with islands like New Zealand, including these birds. Never mind one…