Evolution: explosion of birds (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, February 23, 2024, 17:23 (272 days ago) @ David Turell

Bechly again presenting the Big Bang of birds:

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/02/fossil-friday-the-big-bang-of-tertiary-birds-and-a-ph...

"Indeed, modern crown group birds appear and diversify so abruptly that it has been called a “Big Bang of Tertiary birds” by some paleo-ornithologists (Feduccia 1995, 2003a, 2014, Ksepka et al. 2017). Some of their colleagues did not like such an explosive view for obvious reasons (e.g. Dyke 2003, van Tuinen et al. 2003), but Alan Feduccia addressed and rebutted all critics (Feduccia 2003b), and emphasized that “a rapid, explosive Tertiary radiation best explains why resolving phylogenetic relationships of modern orders remains intractable.”

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"Not just that rocks and clocks conflicted, but phylogenomic studies increasingly supported the Big Bang of Tertiary birds so that now molecular trees conflicted with molecular clocks. The Big Bang view was most strongly confirmed by the seminal study of Jarvis et al. (2014), a genome scale phylogenetic analysis by more than 100 authors (!), who found that “even with whole genomes, some of the earliest branches in Neoaves proved challenging to resolve, which was best explained by massive protein-coding sequence convergence and high levels of incomplete lineage sorting that occurred during a rapid radiation after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event about 66 million years ago.” This result was widely reported by the popular science media with sensational headlines about the mapping of the “‘Big Bang’ of Bird Evolution” (AMNH 2014, Duke University 2014, BGI Shenzen 2014, Smithsonian Insider 2014), or as Time Magazine titled “There was a Big Bang for Birds” (Kluger 2014), or “Rapid bird evolution after the age of dinosaurs unprecedented, study confirms” (University of Sydney 2014). Casey Luskin (2014) then also reported for Evolution News how this “massive genetic study confirms birds arose in Big Bang-type of explosion.”

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"We can conclude that fossil and molecular data conflict in terms of the question when and how quickly modern birds originated, and molecular and morphological data conflict in terms of the reconstruction of the assumed bird tree of life. Why is there such a stark conflict, when Darwinism would naturally predict that different lines of evidence should converge towards one true evolutionary history of birds. Again, a quite obvious explanation could be that there just was no such history, or at least that totally different causal mechanism were at work.

"The most important take home message from this article is this: in spite of the new study by Wu et al. (2024), there is overwhelming evidence, recognized by the vast majority of mainstream experts, that there was an explosive diversification of modern birds (Neoaves) in the Lower Tertiary (Paleogene). There was an abrupt origin, a burst of biological creativity with a genuine Big Bang of modern birds, which is best explained by an infusion of new information from an intelligent agent outside the system. What do evolutionary biologists suggest instead? They say that the global collapse of forest ecosystems after the end-Cretaceous impact killed off all arboreal bird lineages and the remaining ground-dwelling ancestors of modern birds experienced a rapid diversification afterwards (Field et al. 2018). Yet another description of the problem, rather than an explanation, which seems to be a recurring theme in evolutionary biology." (my bold)

Comment: Bechly's approach is that there are many Big Bangs in evolution, based on the fossil record. The bold is ehv whole point of intelligent design theory.