Re: Bird origins

["Caleb Lewis" <christianwarior7@hotmail.com>]

>Caleb,
>George is right.  When a parent has offspring, each of those offspring
>(with the possible exception of identical twins) is just a bit 
different
>from each of the others.  When the environment is changing, some of 
those
>offspring are just a bit different in a way that fits the changes in 
the
>environment better than their brothers and sisters fit those changes.  
So
>the animals with the lucky changes in the appropriate direction are 
more
>likely to grow up and have more offspring than their siblings do.  And 
some
>of these new offspring are different from their siblings in the same 
sorts
>of way, and their children fit the new conditions even better.  This
>continues on for generation after generation, and the process is called
>natural selection.  Sometimes it happens very quickly, and sometimes it
>takes millions of years, but 'evolution' doesn't 'know' ahead of time 
what
>to evolve.  It's just that random changes in each generation make some
>animals fit the new conditions better and some fit worse, and the ones 
who
>are unlucky and don't have the appropriate changes can't get as much 
food,
>and more of their eggs don't hatch, and their young aren't as likely to
>survive to adulthood.  So their contribution to the total population
>diminishes and vanishes, and the animals with the lucky changes 
contribute
>more and more to the new population until they make up all of it.
>
>I'll leave the dino-to-bird thing to folks who know more about it than 
I
>do.


   The truth is, this has  been a question that has ben bugging me about 
evolution for some time. I'm still not sure that I get it. However, I 
suppose that a mistake that I made was when I anthropomorphized 
evolution. Out of pure curiosity (and not some Creationist desire to 
thwart evolution), how often does something like this, different 
offspring thing occur? Are there ny documented cases? If so, I would 
like to know, and was wondering if you would be kind enough to supply me 
with some places where I could actually get more info on the case.



Caleb Lewis
Come to my domain @ www.calebsdomain.home.ml.org !!!


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