Re: Ruben Strikes Back

[dbensen <dbensen@gotnet.net>]

>>As I've mentioned before, the ground-up hypothesis requires us to accept a
miracle, namely, that an array of features each of which evolved
independently as an adaptation for cursoriality, terrestriality, or predation
suddenly gave us an animal fully adapted for flying. This is the part that
the ornithologists simply don't buy, and why they will not accept dinosaurs
as bird ancestors despite overwhelming cladistic evidence that this is the
case. All that needs to be done is to decouple the ground-up hypothesis from
the cladistic analyses--the cladistics does >not< show that flight evolved
ground-up, because it says nothing about the lifestyle of the common
ancestors at the nodes along the lineage leading toward birds. These common
ancestors could well have been much more birdlike and much less dinosaurlike
than we have imagined; the cladistic analyses would remain the same.<<

I would like to interject here to ask a question.  What about Greg Paul's "trees
sideways"?  Why couldn't dinosaurs have origionaly been cursorial, then radiate
into aborial niches and go through the same process that fly squirrles are going
through?