Unintelligent Design - Why A New Zealand Flighless Parrot Comes In Two Colour Forms

New Zealand kākāpō, Strigops habroptilus showing two colour forms

From, Urban, et al. (2024)

Female kākāpō and chick

Flightless parrot in New Zealand developed different feather colors to evade predatory birds | ScienceDaily

The flightless kākāpō of New Zealand, a critically endangered member of the parrot family comes in two colour forms - olive and green - and neither seems to convey any obvious advantage over the other.

As an example of intelligent [sic] design, this would be an example of muddle and incompetence since, no matter how slight, one colour form would be better than the other so there would be no point in having two. It might be easier to manufacture one set of pigments for example, and having the ability to produce two different color forms with variants of the same genome when there is no advantage of one over the other is an unnecessary complexity of which any half-decent intelligent designer would be ashamed.

But as an example of what evolution by natural selection can produce, it makes perfect sense, especially when whatever environmental selectors produced the two colour forms might not now exist, so the cause might not now be obvious to a casual observer, unaware of the historical environment in which these traits evolved.

Creationism in Crisis - A Tiny Bird Refutes Creationism - Again

Titipounamu, Acanthisitta chloris

Photo: Dr. Kristal Cain.

Titipounamu, Acanthisitta chloris

Photo: Dr. Kristal Cain.

Tiniest bird delivers evolution lesson - The University of Auckland

In case any creationists are still under the delusion that mainstream biologists are abandoning the scientific Theory of Evolution (TOE) in favour of their childish magical story involving a magic man made of nothing who magicked everything into existence out of nothing with some magic words, here is an example of how the TOE is used to understand and make sense of the observable facts.

It addresses the question of how the ability to learn and imitate sounds evolved in birds.

Basically, ornithologists had thought that birds could be divided into two groups - those which can learn sounds (parrots, songbirds, and hummingbirds) and those which can’t - and that this ability in the former group had evolved sometime after modern birds had diversified from their avian dinosaur ancestors, but the fact that a small New Zealand bird, the titipounamu or rifleman, Acanthisitta chloris, has the rudiments of this ability suggests it may have been present in the common ancestor of both groups.

In other words, the ability to learn and imitate sounds may be evidence of common descent.

Creationism in Crisis - How Order Emerges From Chaos - Naturally

A 'murmuration' of starlings

Press Releases - SCHOOL OF SCIENCE THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO

It's a fundamental mantra of creationism that you'll see chanted over and over again as though it’s a proof that their god must exist, "You can't get order from chaos". It’s as fundamental, and as mindless, as the mantra, "You can't get life from non-life".

Both of them ignore the evidence and neither of them can be explained any more so than a parrot can explain its squawks.

And now a Tokyo University team has demonstrated that order can indeed emerge from chaos at different levels from the quantum to the macro level of flocks of birds, when there is a force acting between the particles to make it what they term an 'active matter'. They explain their findings in a highly technical, mathematical paper, the maths of which is quite incomprehensible to me, in the journal, Physical Review Research. The basic requirements for 'active matter' are that the particles (agents) are moving and that there is repulsion between them. In the case of a flock of birds, the repulsion is in the form of maintaining a distance between the individuals.

The researchers have explained their findings in a news release from Tokyo University:

How Science Works - Tracking How Great Tits In An Oxfordshire Wood Are Responding To Climate Change

Wytham Wood, Oxfordshire, UK

Early morning, Wytham Wood

The great tits in this Oxford wood are adapting their breeding times as climate changes – here’s how

This article caught my eye because it concerns the birds in a wood which is local to me - Wytham Wood, near Oxford, to which I have licensed access. This is reputedly the most intensively studied area of woodland in the world, belonging, as it does, to Oxford University.

Wytham Woods form an iconic location that has been the subject of continuous ecological research programmes, many dating back to the 1940s. The estate has been owned and maintained by the University of Oxford since 1942. The Woods are often quoted as being one of the most researched pieces of woodland in the world, and their 1000 acres are designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

The wooded parts of the Wytham Estate comprise ancient semi-natural woodland (dating to the last Ice Age), secondary woodland (dating to the seventeenth century), and modern plantations (1950s and 60s). The fourth key habitat is the limestone grassland found at the top of the hill. Other smaller habitats include a valley-side mire and a series of ponds.

The site is exceptionally rich in flora and fauna, with over 500 species of plants, a wealth of woodland habitats, and 800 species of butterflies and moths.

https://www.wythamwoods.ox.ac.uk/

Through intensive observation over successive years, researchers are able to measure changes in behaviour of species such as the Great Tit, Parus major with some of the best examples of observational biology in the form of research papers. For example, a few years ago a team of researchers showed that the British race of Great tits were diverging from their European relatives with changes in the beaks probably reflecting the fact that we in Britain provide feeding stations for birds to sustain them through the winter much more frequently than other Europeans, so the British Great tits are evolving so they can get the food in the bird feeders in British gardens.

In the following article, ecologist, David López Idiáquez, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Behavioural and Evolutionary Ecology, University of Oxford, explains how their research is measuring how Great tits are responding to climate change. His article is reprinted here from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, with photographs from Internet sources:

Creationism in Crisis - Bird Watching In The Age Of Dinosaurs - About 70 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Hesperornis

Jaime Chirinos

Archaeopteryx

Credit: Dotted Yeti/Shutterstock

A brief guide to birdwatching in the age of dinosaurs

What would it have been like to go bird-watching in that very long period of pre-'Creation Week' history just before a cataclysmic meteor strike cause the extinction of almost all the dinosaurs, 66 million years before creationists believe their god created a small, flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle-east?

At that time, Earth had a large population of dinosaurs, some of which were later to become modern birds which evolved to fill the vacated niches formerly occupied by the dinosaurs, while another survivor, a small rat-like early mammal, the descendant of mammal-like reptiles radiated into modern mammals.

For a period, these early birds, the avian dinosaurs which had evolved from the bipedal theropod dinosaurs, formed two major groups - the ornithuromorphs and the enantiornithine.

Evolution News - How the Environment Made a Difference with Penduline Tits

Eurasian penduline tit, Remiz pendulinus

Chinese penduline tit buries eggs to prevent them from blowin’ in the wind | Science Linx News | Science LinX | University of Groningen

First off, if you came here attracted by the title, hoping to see something about large busty substances, you're in the wrong place. This is about a couple of closely related birds known as the Eurasian and Chinese penduline tits and about how subtle differences in their environments can cause differences in behaviour that act as barriers to hybridisation and so reinforce the evolving divergence into different species. If you're so shallow as to be looking for the former on line, you're probably too shallow to be interested in the latter.

The Eurasian penduline tit, Remiz pendulinus, is so called because males build a relatively large, dangling (penduline) nest on the end of thin willow branches or reeds, often over water. He then tries to attract a female to use the nest and, if she approves, he mates with her, and she begins to lay a batch of eggs over the next 14 days but won't permit the male to enter the nest. This choice of location is probably to make it difficult for predators to reach the nest.

The strange thing is each day she covers the eggs in the bottom of the nest before going off to feed herself. This is thought to be due to inter-sex rivalry because either one or the other parent is going to take responsibility for the incubation of the eggs and rearing the chicks and the female needs the male to hang around to mate with her and the male needs her to stay and use his nest so his offspring are in the eggs she lays.

When the batch of eggs is complete, the female, more often than not, incubates them and the male leaves to find another mate, but frequently, it's the female who leaves the male to do the incubation and rearing. Very occasionally, neither parent takes responsibility, and the nest and eggs are abandoned. But the male won't start to incubate the eggs until the batch is complete. Burying the eggs is thought to be an evolved strategy for keeping the male interested until the batch is complete.

Chinese penduline tit, Remiz consobrinus

However, a closely related species, the Chinese penduline tit, Remiz consobrinus, has a different pattern of behaviour. The make builds the next in the same way and in a similar position to his Eurasian cousin, and attracts a female to use it. However, she doesn't exclude him from the nest but they both roost in it together at night, and both sexes share responsibility for incubation and rearing the chicks. But, like her Eurasian cousin, the female Chinese penduline tit still assiduously buries her eggs every day. The question is, if this isn't due to inter-sex rivalry as with the Eurasian species, what is it due to? The answer has turned out to be due to subtle environmental differences.

To investigate this difference and the lack of aggression between the sexes by which the Eurasian female keeps the male from entering the nest while she is laying her batch of eggs, Jia Zheng, who had completed her master’s degree under Professor Zhengwang Zhang, from Beijing Normal University, and was now completing her PhD at the University of Groningen, conducted a number of experiment to test out various hypotheses.

The Groningen University News release explains how she went about it:

Rapid Evolution of Barn Swallows

Barn swallow, Hirundo rustica

Roeselien Raimond Photography

Barn swallow, Hirundo rustica

Barn swallows may indeed have evolved alongside humans

Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) are one of only a handful of species that have co-evolved with humans but are not parasitic on us. This commensal evolution depended on the ecological niches we have provided during our own evolution and, in this case, as with House sparrows, particularly the social evolution of agriculture and settled dwellings on and in which to live. Barn swallows nest almost exclusively in man-made structures, hence their popular name.

Now researchers have tentatively established when the species took up residence with humans and when they radiated relatively rapidly into the six regional subspecies now recognised.