THE HUMMING BIRD
To anybody with a soul, humming birds – little as most are - must surely rank with the butterflies as being among the most beautiful creatures on the planet. Just look at those beautiful, iridescent colours, on this picture below which is but a poor reflection of the real thing.
I’ve watched them hovering at the throats of Ixora flowers, at Hibiscus flowers and at various trumpet-shaped flowers, seeking and sipping the nectar the flowers may contain.
It is a most astonishing sight to the non-hardened observer – because these little birds are nothing if not unique.
They fly forward like almost all other birds. They hover like seagulls, some terns, kestrels and others of that family.
So far, so good.
Then they add the miraculous to their already spectacular accomplishments.
They fly backwards. Some even fly upside down!
No other bird can do this. Some insects do, but birds? No. Here is a diagram showing the different wing movements in the various flight patterns:
Source:
http://www.mschloe.com/hummer/huminfo.htm#anatomy
What is even more remarkable (from an evolutionary POV), is the fact that the earliest humming bird fossil is easily distinguishable as such. It can be classified right down to the genus Eurotrochilus which is a genus of modern humming birds. It therefore follows that this earliest specimen (details here:
SpringerLink - Naturwissenschaften, Volume 95, Number 2) was able to fly backwards! So there is no question of evolution having occurred. It quite simply didn’t.
In the human world, VTOL aircraft, like the Harrier Jumpjet, and helicopters can hover and fly backwards – but they are extraordinary examples of intelligent design by intelligent designers.
I very much doubt if any hardened evolutionist would dare to put his shirt on the line by claiming that a Harrier or a Sikorsky was the product of an explosion in a junkyard, or some other ridiculous scenario. The aircraft manufacturers would have the shirt off their backs in no time flat for malicious and libellous statements.
Now here we have the little humming bird.
It spots a likely flower, and goes visiting. It flies to the mouth of the flower, performs what seems to be an inspection while hovering there, little wings doing a hundred to the dozen. It’s an amazing sight.
Then, it flies forward by a distance limited by the length of its beak and the depth of the flower, inserting it to the base of the flower where the nectar usually pools, sucks up the nectar, THEN FLIES BACKWARD OUT OF THE FLOWER, and goes to another flower or goes home.
If you see this frequently, then it becomes commonplace – which is a great pity, because miraculous a feat as it is, it represents the most stupendous piece of evolutionary problem-creation it is possible to imagine.
The very fact that there are so few human examples of backward-flight capable aircraft shows how difficult a problem it was to invent such machines. So many aerodynamic and propulsion problems had to be solved before such craft could fly! Yet, brainless evolution is alleged to have solved all the problems involved here: and we won’t mention the fact that the bird can reproduce itself with ease.
Anatomical Problems
In the case of the humming bird, the articulation of the shoulder joint is completely different to that of other birds.
From this description of them (wiki) you will immediately see the vast differences which exist:
Hummingbirds have many skeletal and flight muscle adaptations which allow the bird great agility in flight. Muscles make up 25-30% of their body weight, and they have long, blade-like wings that, unlike the wings of other birds, connect to the body only from the shoulder joint. This adaptation allows the wing to rotate almost 180°, enabling the bird to fly not only forward but fly backwards, and to hover in front of flowers as it feeds on nectar and insects.
The shoulder joint allows 180 degree movement of the wings. The elbow and wrist joints are fused and cannot bend – so the blade-like shape of the wing is retained permanently. The wings, like those of the bats, are formed from what we would call the hands:
Hummingbirds fly with their hands. The upper arm and forearm bones are very short, and the elbow and wrist joints can't move. The shoulder joint to which the wing attaches can move in all directions plus rotate about 180 degrees. Hummingbirds don't flap their wings, they fly with their hands. Hummingbirds fly with their bodies held upright, not flat like most birds.
http://www.mschloe.com/hummer/huminfo.htm#flight
If you look at the following diagram, you will see that the normal bird wing is powered by two muscles which are attached to the humerus (the bone that in our arms, runs from the elbow to the shoulder). One pulls the wing up, the other pulls it down.
Look back at the diagram of the humming bird wing. You will see that the humerus is arranged entirely differently to that of the normal bird. The elbow joint is fused, so it can’t really move, while in the normal bird it is flexible - necessarily so - and so is the wrist joint. Only the hand moves.
The logical question to ask, is: how did the humming bird wing evolve from the normal wing? No intermediate steps are possible. The humming bird clearly has a very highly specialised wing, and if evolution did take place, it came about as a modification of the less specialised, normal bird’s wing, if there is indeed such a thing.
But as you can clearly see, it could not happen. All the intermediates would have been unable to fly while the process was taking place. While the elbow and wrist joints were becoming fused, no flight at all was possible. Imagine a cricketer whose elbow and wrist joints became fused, by some disease, arthritis, maybe. How much cricket could he play while that was going on? None, I submit.
In the case of the proto-humming bird, death and extinction would have supervened while that was going on, because it couldn’t fly and therefore couldn’t feed – so another evolutionary brick wall stares us in the face.
The beat of the wings is in most humming birds, extremely rapid.
Small hummingbirds beat their wings 38-78 times a second, larger hummingbirds 18-28 times a second.
Changing that to per minute figures show that those range from 1080 to 4680 times per minute! The fastest helicopter blade rotation I’ve seen mentioned is 500 rpm, but there are doubtless faster ones.
Quite incredible, really.
The Instincts Required
All this wonderful piece of wizardry is entirely useless without the powering instincts which are an absolute requirement – not optional extras.
Suppose we put a pilot who had no training in the operation of a Harrier jump jet, and told him to fly the plane backwards, or he’d be shot out of hand. Death and disaster would surely be the consequence. Even worse is the scenario where he had no flight training whatsoever. He probably wouldn’t even get off the ground.
Now imagine the scene one sunny morning when the first bird hatched out from the reptile egg or whatever.
It’s got wings on its back, feathers, and the one-way respiration system unique to all birds. Everything, in fact, needed to fly.
But in its head, it is still a reptile. It has no clue as to what it should do with these wings.
So it jumps off a tree or a cliff – and promptly breaks its arm, leg or neck in that order, and gets eaten by its forebears.
I’m sure you can see that the flight instincts are an absolute requirement – AND THEY HAD TO BE THERE RIGHT FROM THE WORD ‘GO’! Complete, entire, perfect and faultless. Extinction is the price of their absence. Ask all those pre-Kitty Hawk flyers! If you can dig ‘em up!
But there’s an evolutionary problem.
How does this intangible instinct get into any genome? All birds have forward-flying flight instincts in there somewhere, but where? And how did they get there?
And to add insult to injury, here are these humming birds flying BACKWARDS.
Explanations please?
PS Apologies for not being able to upload the images required. Anybody know how?
]of Humming Birds in existence today, is it really any wonder that you might be able to find one that this prehistoric Humming Bird somewhat resembles;).].
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