Here is a news release about a study of how grasshoppers fly.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0917144125.htm

Very interesting! But it still amazes me how anyone can really think such a complex yet efficient system "evolved"!
I guess it might have evolved the same way the Ford Model T evolved into the Lexus!

Agreed! Just like the eyeball.

Kurt

Let us not hijack the thread, but here is an overview of eyes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye

Let us not hijack the thread, but "believed to have evolved some 540 million years ago" and

"believed to have taken only a few million years to develop."???????


Kurt Bozarth

Edited to add the question marks!

No fossil of an "eye" has ever been found to my knowledge, so I'd like to know where they come up with that 540 million years theory. Even if they do have a fossil, the age of that fossil is still undeterminable. I don't care what they say about radio carbon dating or geologic columns, both have been proven unreliable. But the anatomical information about the eye is pretty fascinating. How it effects insect flight is also pretty amazing. Have you ever watched a honey bee very closely when it lands on a flower? Very precise work!

Hover flies are incredible. They hover, then zip off somewhere and come back to exactly the same spot as close as anyone has been able to measure. Talk about a GPS system!

I'm familiar with most of what was said in the eye thing. However, I didn't know trilobites had calcite lenses in their eyes. Calcite has two refractive indices. If you look through a clear piece of calcite at an object, you will see two objects, and they will move if you rotate the piece of calcite. I wonder how the trilobites used or adjusted for that characteristic.

Both articles are very interesting, Jim; thanks!

Interesting view. There are lots of phenomena that are quite counterintuitive, but still occur. In addtion to evolution, quantum phenomena and our very own fluid turbulence are in this category, in my view. All 3 have been extensively studied and documented, and there's no longer any reasonable doubt that these surprising phenomena indeed occur in our world. Quite an interesting universe in which to live.

banktoturn

Indeed.

It is harder to wrap one's head around things that actually happen, than what our ingrained beliefs let us assume to be true.

The universe is turning out to be a far stranger place than we could ever dream.

I'll agree with you on 2 of the 3. Evolution has no evidence whatsoever that could be included in the definition of Imperical science. It takes as much faith to believe it as it does any other un-provable theories!

�Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.� Albert Einstein

Virtually every biologist on the planet would vehemently disagree with you regarding the evidence. Those people who have successfully refuted and overturned previously accepted theories have generally been well trained in the disciplines involved. If evolution is an important issue for you, your best bet would be to learn as much as you can about biology. The less rigorous approach of being amazed that anyone would believe it doesn't achieve anything.

banktoturn

If you look around on Science Daily, you can find a number of studies of insect flight. Different insects do it differently. My BS and MS are in geology, PhD in zoology, 32 years as an active biology professor. If you google around you can find some of my publications (including two in Model Aviation). So I view the world based on that professional life.

I believe you are incorrect. Every biologist on the planet does not buy into this theory, but you are correct that many do. As far as my own opinion, I think I have a pretty good handle on biology, at least enough to know that no biological proof of evoloution has ever been observed, documented, or recreated in a lab. Yes we can play with genes and select or reproduce certain traits like luminescent tobacco plants, mutated flies, or cloned animals. And I applaude all the research and real knowledge that is being gained from this. But no "improvement" or "evolution" has ever been observed or achieved, all mutations are detrimental in some way. Even if they yield a desirable trait, there is some detrimental effect. This is not "evolution", it is "selection". Natural or artificial selection and changes within a species are the only things that are observable, reproducable, or documented in any way. The rest of the "theory" is just that. A theory, which is propped up by a lot of incorrect assumptions and "evidence" that is proported as fact when it is not!

I could continue this discussion as long as you like, and back my opinion up with plenty of references, facts, and "real science",. My opinion comes from my own effort to answere some questions and a lot of my own thinking about those answeres. But I'm content to acknowledge that we will probably never agree and leave it at that. You can believe "540 million years" if you want, I don't. The reason I commented on it to begin with is this: I hope anyone who reads this thread will do some research of their own and come up with an original opinon instead of one that's been spoon fed to them by the so called "experts" who can print anything they like in a magazine, but can not back it up with real scientific facts!

Probably best to acknowlede that we won't agree. One thing we do share though is the hope that interested parties will educate themselves to form their judgements.

banktoturn

The term for this interesting refractive anomoly is 'dichroic'! Nature is truly amazing. I sure hope I will be able to meet the 'Inventor' of it all!

If there is an inventor (for which there is no empirical proof) I would rather hope to meet the inventor's inventor.

http://www.twitt.org/BIRDS.htm

Hope ya do, too!

Totally off topic...
I was moderately disturbed when my opthamologist's assistant told me she'd been "created", and didn't come from slime.
I silently hoped her beliefs didn't interfere too much with her medical expertise, but I bet it does.
As soft tissues fossilize poorly if at all, relying on the lack of exactly what a soft tissue was as an indicator there was no soft tissue at all, ignoring the other features that supported the soft tissues, such as bone structures, which do fossilize and are comparable to extant specimens is naive and superficial.
"The eye" exists in many forms, all of which suit the animal possessing them, and some animals have lost the eye itself, while retaining the structures that supported it when it was useful to the ancestor of the current animal. Other needs for survival negated the expenditure of the energy to generate and support a useless organ.
It's Darwinian.

I'm not sure how all this got missed the first time around but this thread is quickly evolving to a thinly veiled metaphysical debate over evolution vs creationism. As such it does not pertain to flight of any sort so it has been locked.