"Penguins are superb swimmers, well adapted to their Antarctic climate. They use their wings to
“fly” in a different fluid—water, not air. The sight of a swarm of penguins darting through the water under the ice with speed and grace makes for dramatic film footage. Most of the major science news sites are claiming that the “puzzle” of penguin flightlessness has been “solved” in a new study published in PNAS. Earlier theories suggested that the lack of predators led to flightlessness, or that evolution had a hard time producing a wing that was good at both flying and swimming.
An international team took a different approach. They measured the energy demands of flight. There’s no question that maintaining flight in the air is costly. Some birds, like cormorants and penguins, are good at both. But if aerial flight is not required for successful feeding, a bird could focus its wings, feet, and other body parts on just the swimming.
The authors measured the energy cost of flying for the guillemot, a bird that looks remarkably like a penguin but can fly. They found that its wings allow it to barely stay aloft; it is exhausting for the bird, that swims effectively to catch fish. They feel the guillemot is near a “tipping point” where it might some day reach an “evolutionary trade-off” to give up aerial flying. They also compared the energy expenditures for murres (10/27/11) and cormorants (5/24/04), two other kinds of fishing seabirds. One co-author put it, “Basically the hypothesis is that as the wings became more and more efficient for them to dive, they became less and less efficient for them to fly.” The abstract says,
None of the articles, in addition, exhibited a chain of fossil birds leading to the penguin. On the
contrary, National Geographic offered only speculation:
An international team took a different approach. They measured the energy demands of flight. There’s no question that maintaining flight in the air is costly. Some birds, like cormorants and penguins, are good at both. But if aerial flight is not required for successful feeding, a bird could focus its wings, feet, and other body parts on just the swimming.
The authors measured the energy cost of flying for the guillemot, a bird that looks remarkably like a penguin but can fly. They found that its wings allow it to barely stay aloft; it is exhausting for the bird, that swims effectively to catch fish. They feel the guillemot is near a “tipping point” where it might some day reach an “evolutionary trade-off” to give up aerial flying. They also compared the energy expenditures for murres (10/27/11) and cormorants (5/24/04), two other kinds of fishing seabirds. One co-author put it, “Basically the hypothesis is that as the wings became more and more efficient for them to dive, they became less and less efficient for them to fly.” The abstract says,
These results strongly support the hypothesis that function constrains form in diving birds, and that optimizing wing shape and form for wing-propelled diving leads to such high flight costs that flying ceases to be an option in larger wing-propelled diving seabirds, including penguins.
But how is the change explained in evolutionary theory? Surprisingly, none of the articles mentioned natural selection, even though National Geographic’s headline quipped, “Why Did Penguins Stop Flying? The Answer Is Evolutionary.” There was no mention of a mechanism for evolving a penguin out of a flying seabird. Presumably, the loss of aerial flight occurred by some kind of negative selection, or “de-evolution.” This doesn’t explain, though, why some seabirds maintained both swimming and flight. Guillemots do not seem to be evolving into something else. In the 7/23/12 entry, researchers found that the birds maintain their energy fitness into old age, even though flight is costly. Certainly, none of the flightless birds thought about exercising an “option” to go swimming only. Somehow, the adaptation had to make it into the genes, otherwise it sounds like Lamarckism (use and disuse, inheritance of acquired characteristics).None of the articles, in addition, exhibited a chain of fossil birds leading to the penguin. On the
Scientists don’t have fossils of flighted penguin ancestors, and the earliest known penguin dates to just after the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (58 to 60 million years ago).
“It is tempting to speculate that the evolution of penguins happened in that explosive radiation [of mammal species] that happened just after the K-T event,” when many species went extinct, Speakman said. “However, there is no direct evidence to support this, and it could have happened any time during the late Cretaceous.”
So the first fossil penguin was already a penguin. The phrase “explosive radiation,” further, offers no mechanism for evolution to produce complex creatures like elephants and giraffes with new organs requiring large increases in genetic information. Penguins, by contrast, contain all the same basic features as other birds. With their modified wings, they continue to fly—underwater." CEV
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
Genesis 1:20
