There was an unusually fascinating portion of this show. Bob and Fred Williams are explaining why some birds in New Guinea are flightless, under a YEC scenario. Two things to note – 1) see how credible you think their reason is for the loss of the ability to fly, and 2) Listen to them clearly elucidate Darwinian evolution as a mechanism.
Starting at 19:44:
These are just birds, different kinds of birds that God created. And they lost their ability to fly. In this article they talk about how that may have happened. They say in part of the world, like in Indonesia, New Guinea, and Australia – parts of the world that it was harder for land-dwelling animals to get to. There were birds that got there first, as animals began to disperse around the world, beginning from the Middle-East.
The author here talks about the tropical thicket, how it can make it hard for these birds to take off.
… Creationists agree that natural selection occurs. … So you’ve got forest and rain forest, but also you don’t have predators. You don’t have land-dwelling predators that can kill these birds. So normally a bird taking off and flying away from a predator is a tremendous survival mechanism. But when there are no such predators, then the ability to take off and fly isn’t going to make it more likely that your descendants will have a better chance of survival than others that cannot fly.
So some of the offspring are going to … likely had a mutation that it couldn’t fly. But that’s going to favor them in some degree because the flight isn’t necessary to survive and reproduce. And over time they take over the population.
My questions:
a) How long might it have taken for the predatory land animals to get to New Guinea (from the Ararat region)?
b) How fast would the population of birds grow in New Guinea, especially without pressure from predators?
c) Is the loss of flight due to a relatively simple (and thus more probable) mutation, or is it something that has happened in stages?
d) What is the chance that such a mutation would spread completely through the bird population and eradicate the ability to fly before the predators showed up?
e) Now that the predators are on-site, and the ability to fly would be beneficial to escape predation, is there some magic at work that forbids the “reverse” mutation?
