[HN Gopher] Feathers are one of evolution's cleverest inventions
___________________________________________________________________
Feathers are one of evolution's cleverest inventions
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 277 points
Date : 2024-04-17 12:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| matrix2596 wrote:
| archive link plz
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| Just append archive.is/ to the beginning of the url. Chances
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| jmckib wrote:
| Thank you, that's so convenient!
| hubrix wrote:
| https://archive.is/20240416202627/https://www.scientificamer...
| isolli wrote:
| Pet peve: I don't like superlative descriptions. They're often
| counterproductive, because they call for a rebuttal.
|
| How many other evolutionary inventions have you included in the
| comparison? What comparison criteria have you used?
|
| I would prefer: "Feathers are an incredibly clever invention of
| evolution."
| rsynnott wrote:
| Well, as somebody who likes complaining, I don't like your new
| title either; evolution doesn't 'invent' anything, and
| anthropomorphising it just confuses people (see also generative
| ai, grumble mutter).
| isolli wrote:
| Oh, I agree! But I did not want to make more than one change
| at a time ;)
| cies wrote:
| > evolution doesn't 'invent' anything
|
| Really? I think it kind of does invent. Trial and error. Back
| propagation. Mutation. Some randomness at conception. Sure
| it's a personification, but not a bad one.
| thfuran wrote:
| Evolution doesn't do back propagation.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| The evolutionary fitness of a particular adaptation helps
| spread the genes that causes the adaptation. I think
| backpropagation is a very apt description for that
| phenomenon
| klyrs wrote:
| That's propagation.
| owlstuffing wrote:
| There is zero science to back that up, natural selection
| [?] evolution.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| I thought "one of" is a weasel qualifier here?
| isolli wrote:
| Indeed, but it still unconsciously invites controversy (in my
| opinion) -\\_(tsu)_/-
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > Pet peve: I don't like superlative descriptions. They're
| often counterproductive, because they call for a rebuttal.
|
| Pet peeve: People who HAVE to rebut things like superlative
| descriptions. They're always counterproductive, because
| literally nothing actually called for a rebuttal. It clutters
| up the conversation much worse than "well, actually"
| corrections.
| thfuran wrote:
| >literally nothing actually called for a rebuttal
|
| Aside from the initial false claim, you mean?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > Aside from the initial false claim, you mean?
|
| Well, yes, we're talking about the superlative in the
| title. Everything else might be nonsense and is fair game.
| gromneer wrote:
| i don't like people who spam "well ackkktually" and make it so
| entire categories of phrases need to be eliminated to appease
| their neurosis.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| It's a form of tone policing ... " _I_ don 't like
| superlatives so _you_ don 't get to use them."
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's a great breakdown of feather technology. TIL...
| gumby wrote:
| Wow, what an interesting article, not all about feathers. There's
| so many genetic mysteries about skin appendages still to be
| uncovered e.g. in humans, how do nails and hairs manage to grow
| only in one direction (and perhaps even more remarkable, always
| so).
|
| I was drawn to this side point though: the _microraptor_ has
| _four_ wings. Not like a dragon, of course, which has to be an
| insect, but an ordinary quadruped that used all four limbs to fly
| (compare that to mammals with a membrane between the forelimbs
| and hind limbs on each side). I imagine it must have looked like
| an F-35 when flying.
|
| Seems like it turned out to be optimal to stick to two, not just
| for terrestrial mobility, but due to the (bidirectional!)
| optimization of the wishbone and the chest musculature. It's
| probably hard to get enough power into the dual-mode hind limbs.
| Sadly the Wikipedia article on the _microraptor_ doesn't explore
| this.
| cies wrote:
| > in humans
|
| Nails are a much older "invention of evolution" than humans: so
| we have to investigate there...
|
| > how do nails and hairs manage to grow only in one direction
|
| Like all things evolution: nails that grow backwards to not
| have an advantage (prolly a disadvantage), where nails that
| grow forwards have an advantage (climbing, clawing,
| scratching).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "nails that grow backwards to not have an advantage (prolly a
| disadvantage), where nails that grow forwards have an
| advantage (climbing, clawing, scratching)."
|
| That still doesn't describe the underlying mechanism of the
| growth itself.
|
| Looking at the work of Dr. Michael Levin regarding electric
| communication of cells, I tend to believe him that the main
| factor in actually creating tissues in their intended,
| correct shape, is incessant electric chatter among individual
| cells.
|
| An interesting corollary would be that cancer = cells that
| don't cooperate/communicate with their neighboring cells
| anymore.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Another interesting question is how development
| distinguishes left and right. As I understand it, there's a
| small object that develops that has cilia in a tilted
| configuration. The rotation of the cilia causes a flow of
| fluid to one side that is determined by the sense
| (clockwise or counterclockwise) of the cilia's rotation.
| That flow is sensed and sets off signals that drive
| development.
|
| Where does the rotational sense of cilia come from? From
| the stereochemistry of proteins, and therefore from amino
| acids. The left-vs-right handedness of the base chemistry
| of life is exploited to get a macroscopic signal.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Wow, you amazed me. That is a journey of several orders
| of magnitude.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| That journey of orders of magnitude is the journey of all
| life on Earth from its genesis to today.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| I hear this kind of "it exists because it has to exist" thing
| from non-bioscience types a lot. Essentially, this is just a
| tautological statement.
| morley wrote:
| I don't read "it exists because it has to exist" in the
| parent's statement. They're saying that there's an
| advantage one way and a disadvantage another, and evolution
| favors advantages. I wouldn't characterize a statement like
| that as a tautology, and I don't think the author deserves
| your dig for it.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| In my opinion there's a general fundamental
| misunderstanding on the purpose of theories. I see it all
| the time -- attempts to explain why something is useful
| simply because it exists (re: popular science evolution).
| There are loads of suboptimal traits that are
| counterbalanced by something else.
| bane wrote:
| Tautologies may be unsatisfying, but there's nothing
| specifically wrong with them.
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| It is what it is.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Yeah that's not how it works. Fitness is not determined for
| every single attribute.
|
| For example, observation A might be maladaptive, but it is
| caused by gene B which also causes observation C, which does
| provide an advantage.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Seems like it turned out to be optimal to stick to two
|
| You can't conclude that. Evolution is noisy and random.
|
| Besides, birds are not unambiguously the most optimized flying
| vertebrates around.
| freedomben wrote:
| > You can't conclude that. Evolution is noisy and random.
|
| You're correct that you can't conclude that evolution is
| perfection/optimized, but it's also not correct to say it is
| random. The genetic variation is random, but natural
| selection is very much _not_ random[1][2].
|
| [1]: https://evolution.berkeley.edu/misconceptions-about-
| natural-...
|
| [2]: See Number 7.
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat01.html
| vcg3rd wrote:
| Regardless, it doesn't have agency and isn't clever.
| Personally I belive in a Designer, but since middle school
| I've been bewildered by the way evolution is almost always
| presented, outside of rigorous scientific literature, as if
| there is agency, intelligence and intent behind it.
|
| I don't have a problem with that, but materialists don't
| have that luxury and use language in bad faith when do it.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Evolution in humans, from an atheist perspective, is
| consistent with the idea of a designer: humans are the
| designer.
|
| Sexual selection in humans is a psychological phenomenon,
| and it's subject to all of our most hifalutin ideas.
|
| You have an opinion about what "god" wants and express it
| through sexual selection, thus influencing our collective
| evolution in that direction.
| stuaxo wrote:
| But why do they want what they want, and how much agency
| is there really anyway ?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Also ironically, by the time we became able to conceive
| of and communicate about such ideas, natural evolution
| has long stopped being the driving force behind how
| humans and human groups look and grow and evolve.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| It's hard to explain an animistic force of nature to
| another human without using words that imply agency. It
| feels like our language and our ways of thinking are
| hard-wired to see everything through that lens because we
| have agency. It's like a fish trying to imagine what it's
| like to be outside of water.
| 48864w6ui wrote:
| Bruce Lee's injunction "be like water" probably means
| don't overcomplicate with agency and opposed
| consciousnesses, just evolve the lagrangian (towards
| victory).
|
| (Speak not of the relevant XKCD)
| Yeul wrote:
| Didn't Darwin write a book that did just that?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Dude, that's just the language. "Water wants to flow
| downhill". It's a model, man. Everyone learns this pretty
| quickly. I don't get how this position is so popular on
| HN/Reddit. The language is giving you tools to model the
| world.
|
| "The water doesn't want anything. It's just the laws of
| gravity."
|
| Intelligence comes from being able to efficiently
| compress highly predictive models. Any computational
| mechanism that is unable to do this is a low-grade
| intelligence. If you need the whole thing spelled out
| carefully for you, you're NGMI.
| gumby wrote:
| You might enjoy Dennett's "The Intentional Stance" for
| some enlightening exploration of this metaphor, e.g. "The
| thermostat tries to keep the temperature between 67 and
| 69" not only makes sense but is a useful way to think of
| it even when we don't believe the thermostat has agency.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I've observed this as well. People who believe in
| evolution can't seem to stop themselves from using
| "intelligent design" language to anthropomorphize
| evolution.
| prerok wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment. I also heard of some books
| that say stupid things like humans have not yet reached
| the maximum of human evolution.
|
| Of course we have not reached the end of our evolution.
| That will exist only when we are all extinct.
|
| As for the direction... that is something else. Maybe we
| will evolve into higher intelligence, but as the Dick's
| story "The Golden man" or "Idiocracy" show, is the
| intelligence really the driving force of today?
| mulmen wrote:
| > is the intelligence really the driving force of today?
|
| Yes, certainly. More than anything intelligence
| differentiates us as a species.
| prerok wrote:
| I don't agree. Women, in general, don't find men
| attractive because of intelligence. It's other factors
| more like, whether their life is in order, they are fit,
| or the classic, if they are symmetrical.
|
| So, we are visually, materiallistically oriented. Not
| all, of course, but evolution works on population size,
| not exceptions. Exceptions only come into an overbearing
| effect on cataclysmic events.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not that kind of intelligence that matters. Don't
| think in terms of being good at chess, poetry, or
| multiplying numbers in your head. Think wheel, writing,
| domestication, agriculture, petrochemical engineering,
| nuclear weapons, computers, genetic engineering.
|
| Our intelligence is what allows us to acquire and improve
| new adaptations without having to change our own
| genetics. We're able to change living environments and
| adapt to them multiple times in a single life span, and
| we went from basic language to walking on the Moon much
| faster than evolution is able to make meaningful changes
| through natural selection. It takes however many million
| years for a species to grow fur to adapt to cold climate;
| it took a spear for us to adapt by stealing other
| animals' fur, and couple hundred years to figure out how
| to make synthetic ones at scale. In that time, we adapted
| to almost every environment on the planet.
|
| Intelligence very much _is_ the driving force behind
| humanity.
|
| EDIT: and we're also beating natural selection from the
| other end - modern medicine allows many people to live
| and reproduce, who without it would've died from genetic
| diseases. We're very good at denying the "fitness"
| criteria nature uses.
| bdamm wrote:
| While I agree with your general slant, it's not correct
| to say that evolution can't act quickly. Evolution can
| act, and does act, slightly faster than a single
| generation. Populations change rapidly, and the success,
| failure, life and death of individuals and their guiding
| behaviors, change with it. The introduction of online
| dating, for example, has already caused evolutionary
| changes in our species. Only time can tell if these
| changes are going to last. Just because we haven't yet
| generally grown thumbs adapted for interacting with
| iPhones doesn't mean that the more subtle changes haven't
| happened.
| Nevermark wrote:
| As humans we do things for teleological reasons. Meaning
| we can say we did X in order to accomplish Y.
|
| Ascribing teleological explanations to evolution is
| technically wrong, since it doesn't look ahead.
|
| However, it does something very similar. Our brains
| process competing options, from plausible to nonsensical,
| before selecting an action, partly in sequence
| (ideation), but also in parallel (competition
| processing).
|
| Evolution tries many options in parallel and sequence
| too. Just by actually doing them and then selecting which
| of those choices to keep repeating (better survival), and
| those to forget (extinction of genes, clusters of genes,
| or whole species).
|
| So over longer time periods, it acts very teleologically.
| A kind of reverse teleologic by hindsight.
|
| The same is true for the "brilliance" of this teleology.
| Evolution tries so many things, that it can solve very
| difficult problems in very novel ways.
|
| Is that "intelligence"? Our casual usage of intelligence
| isn't defined precisely enough to say one way or another.
|
| One person would say evolution is blind, and in the short
| run it is. But another person might point out that
| evolution is anything but blind. It is an epic version of
| Edison's lab, where millions or billions of false
| solutions are continually tried and ruled out, to find
| each new fitness enhancement.
|
| It relentlessly experiments and follows the "data".
|
| On longer timescales, evolution is effectively
| teleological, highly creative and very intelligent.
|
| _And all three aspects compound over time, just like
| human learning and research_ , because evolution doesn't
| just find new features, but new abstractions and
| modularity. Such as flexible reusable gene systems for
| encoding body parts, epigenetic reuse of features in
| different kinds of cells for different purposes or
| triggered and "run" by different conditions, nervous
| systems, etc.
|
| Thus evolution "learned" to speed itself up over time,
| letting it more rapidly optimize larger more complex
| solutions. I.e. orders of magnitude faster creation of
| new novel animals, than it originally took to optimize
| the first cellular life, colonies of cells, etc.
|
| Watching evolutions first billion years would not have
| suggested that the plethora of different intelligent
| animals, from octopus, parrot to human, would have been
| remotely possible in the time it took. Evolution's
| compounding meta learning created brains, our "true"
| teleology, and its expansion into technological and
| economic expressions of the pursuit of survival. All meta
| extensions of evolution, found by evolution.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > natural selection is very much not random
|
| Except where punctuated by (subjective) catastrophe.
|
| But then it is not the mechanism of evolution itself that
| is random.
| prerok wrote:
| Well, it's never random, is it? It's only random when all
| is equal, otherwise it's biased. That's why it works.
|
| Consider birds. There was a good article a few days back,
| on why only non-toothed birds survived. Until the meteor-
| strike, 65M years ago, all was equal and they survived
| along-side. Until they were the only survivors.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| The asteroid that created the Chicxulub impact came from
| a rather random location but had a deterministic effect
| given where it struck.
|
| And here we are, with beaked birds. ^_^
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
| Retric wrote:
| Random doesn't mean all outcomes are equally likely, a coin
| rarely ends up on its edge.
|
| Thus evolution is often random _between local optima._
| People's organs don't represent perfect left /right
| symmetry but there's no particular benefit for which of the
| two options were chosen overall. Ie swap just which lung is
| smaller and you get lots of problems, but swap everything
| and it all works.
| m463 wrote:
| Maybe optimized for their niche.
|
| I remember reading something about bombers maybe during ww2.
| I think if fighters were chasing them, the bombers could
| escape because with their large wings, they could fly high
| and slow and turn inside them.
|
| the analogy being - some birds might be set up for ground
| operations and chasing prey, others living in a different
| ecosystem with high altitude cruising over long distances.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| Dragonflies are pretty much the best flyers among the insects,
| and they have four wings. Maybe not directly comparable, but
| still.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Generally, all insects have four wings, but they are not
| always used for flying.
|
| Flies in particular are also among the best flyers, and yet,
| they use only two of their wings for flying, the other two
| shrank to became halteres, a sensory organ acting like a
| gyroscope.
|
| Dragonflies may be the best fliers in the insect world thanks
| to their four independently controlled wings, but flies may
| be the second best, and they achieved that by _losing_ two of
| their four wings. Evolution is interesting.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Hummingirds are the best flyers among vertebrates, with only
| two wings. They can hover very precisely, and they can also
| fly backwards.
| gumby wrote:
| insects are so different from vertebrates (e.g. multi
| compartment bodies thanks to how they express the HOX gene)
| that the flying strategies are also quite different.
|
| At the current level of O2 in the air I don't believe that
| flying insects can grow as large as even a hummingbird, much
| less an eagle.
| huytersd wrote:
| Because nails and hair are produced at a fixed site. The nail
| itself is dead cells and do not grow.
| gumby wrote:
| That isn't the question (in a prior job I studied the
| physiology of the nail unit). Most cells don't normally have
| an orientation, so you'd think that thefollicle would push
| out a hair in some random direction, sometimes towards the
| outside world and sometimes in the direction of your bones.
|
| Obviously they don't (!) but the question is how?
|
| The nail is the same: the lunula emits these keratinocytes in
| only one direction; even more weirdly it's a planar
| structure.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Obviously they don 't (!) but the question is how?_
|
| Don't cells "just" orient themselves using
| mechanotransduction [1] or am I missing something? That's a
| bit hand wavey but since cells don't form 3d structures in
| tissue themselves, they orient against the extracellular
| matrix using mechanotransduction and other growth factors.
|
| The development of multicellular life was essentially cells
| learning how to orient themselves into a digestive tract.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanotransduction
| ghaff wrote:
| Not always.
|
| On two different occasions, I've had ingrown toenails that had
| to have a procedure done because, once they started ingrowing,
| they wouldn't stop doing so. (It's still outward growth but
| still.)
| tylerchilds wrote:
| i've had those procedures-- super painful. i've ended up
| doing surgeries to cauterize the roots to prevent the ingrown
| growing direction.
| ghaff wrote:
| Wasn't my experience FWIW. (Mostly commenting so others
| won't necessarily avoid.)
|
| Just an in-office procedure using some local anesthesia and
| acid I think. The first time the whole cycle went on for
| months while I was regularly going to the podiatrist
| because of a fairly severe foot fracture of the same foot
| which may or may not have been connected.
|
| This last time--a good 15 years later symmetrically on the
| other foot--I was pretty much just "Let's do this" after a
| couple times trying to just cut the toenail.
| Balgair wrote:
| For others that have had this issue too: Cut your toe nails
| in a straight line. I used to cut them in a curved line, a
| 'C' kind of shape. Don't do that. Cut them in a '|' kind of
| shape. Yes, you'll have a big overhang on the edges, but give
| your toe time to adapt.
|
| I've had a few of these procedures too and it never really
| stuck for me. Ingrown toenails kept being a problem. Then I
| started cutting my toenails in the flat / straight '|' sort
| of way and I've not have a problem since.
|
| I figure it's worth a shout out to the few of you out there
| that need the help. But, again, it may not work for you too.
| djtango wrote:
| My friend told me this like 15+ years ago. I was skeptical
| but it really works. I then just use a file to take a bit
| of the edge off until its a curve
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| Wow, amazing. Why does this work? I would think that the
| nail bed has no knowledge of what the end of the nail is
| shaped like.
| Kubuxu wrote:
| It keeps the side from curling in and causing the
| irritation/cut that results in what we call ingrown
| toenail.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Ingrown toenails basically don't happen in cultures where
| people don't wear shoes.
|
| I suspect the cause is socks or shoes pushing against the
| skin at the end of the toe, causing it to grow
| incorrectly over many months.
|
| An untrimmed nail pushes any sock/shoe away, solving the
| issue.
| gumby wrote:
| Despite the terminology, "ingrown" doesn't mean the nail
| grows in the wrong direction. The lunula continuously emits
| keratinocytes in a single direction; these form both the nail
| bed and the nail itself.
|
| The "ingrown" phenomenon occurs well after the nail has
| formed (it's getting pushed out from the lunula end) and is
| due to a combination of your toe's (hallux I assume)
| ideosyncratic geometry and environmental conditions, likely,
| as another commenter pointed out, how you innocently cut your
| nail.
|
| Sorry for the pedantry but when I worked in drug development
| I used to research the nail unit, which, it turns out, few
| people do.
| atombender wrote:
| The most interesting thing I've learned about nails is that
| they're now thought to be part of an organ -- the enthesis
| organ [1], which is the tissue structures around the site
| where the tendon attaches to the bone. This is relevant to
| spondylarthropathies, some of which show up as nail changes
| many years before enthesitis occurs.
|
| [1] https://www.enthesis.info/anatomy/enthesis_organ.html
| snarfy wrote:
| The hair on your head grows indefinitely. The hair on your arms
| and legs grows to a certain length and then stops. You can
| shave it off, but it grows again, but only to that same length.
|
| How does the hair on arms and legs 'know' how long it is?
| m463 wrote:
| Does it drop off after a certain time period (= length)?
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-
| science/wp/2...
|
| Different anagen phase durations.
| harshaxnim wrote:
| Still doesn't answer - How does the follicle know that I
| cut my hair and needs to grow again to that length?
| mkaic wrote:
| IIUC, it doesn't. Hair grows for a certain time period,
| falls out, and regrows. The follicle has no knowledge of
| the length of the hair it is producing, it is simply on a
| grow-stop-shed cycle with a certain period.
| guerrilla wrote:
| So hairs are actually excretions, like sweat and shit.
| bdamm wrote:
| There are possible physical answers; it could be lack of
| inertia on the hair triggers growth. It could be that
| when you rub your arm, an action as innocent as a yawn,
| you are also informing the growth of hair. Could it be as
| simple as looking at your hair or knowledge of shaving
| causes a subconscious trigger? We already know that these
| high level shortcuts into low level processes exist
| (Pavlov's dog anyone?)
| someotherperson wrote:
| It doesn't know. Hair cycles are constant. If you didn't
| cut it, it would eventually fall out as it is replaced by
| another hair. It grows to the point where the epithelial
| column contracts and starts forcing it out. This is based
| on environment, nutrition and genetics and varies from
| person to person and is affected by everything from
| stress to blood flow.
|
| You can observe this on many people by looking at hair
| miniaturization of people who have MBP or similar -- the
| follicle constricts in size and the resulting hair that
| comes out is progressively shorter in length and diameter
| until the follicle is so constricted that it no longer
| produces hair.
| nektro wrote:
| and then other parts of skin know not to grow hair at all!
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania
|
| According to simulations of plate tectonics, these two
| locations would have been somewhat closer... 100m years ago.
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| > The flat, broad, flight-enabling feathers we see across most of
| the wings and much of the body surface of living birds are called
| pennaceous feathers. (Fun fact: these are the feathers people
| used to make into quills for writing, hence the word "pen.")
|
| I get the author's point, I think, but the etymology of "pen"
| according to wiktionary.com:
|
| > From Middle English penne, from Anglo-Norman penne, from Old
| French penne, from Latin penna ("feather"), from Proto-Indo-
| European _peth2r ~ pth2en- ("feather, wing"), from_ peth2- ("to
| rush, fly") (from which petition). Proto-Indo-European base also
| root of *petra-, from which Ancient Greek pteron (pteron, "wing")
| (whence pterodactyl), Sanskrit ptrm (patram, "wing, feather"),
| Old Church Slavonic pero (pero, "pen"), Old Norse fjodr, Old
| English feder (Modern English feather);[1] note the /p/ - /f/
| Germanic sound change.
|
| So pens aren't called pens because we used _pennaceous_ feathers,
| but because they were made of _feathers_ , period. At least
| that's how I get it.
|
| "Pennaceous feather" is a funny term too, then, meaning something
| like "featherlike feather"?
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| ...and penknives were originally the small blades one used for
| trimming pennaceous feathers into writing-pens.
| gruez wrote:
| The article has another factual error as well:
|
| >covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For
| comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly
| that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 [...]
|
| The Boeing 787 and the Airbus A350 have ranges exceeding that,
| with ranges of up to 8,790 mi and 11,163 mi respectively,
| depending on the variant.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner#Specific...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350#Specifications
|
| edit:
|
| Turns out there's even more aircrafts that exceed that range.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A330neo#Specifications
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380#Specifications_(A3...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A340#Specifications
| corpMaverick wrote:
| In Spanish. Pen=Pluma. Feather=Pluma.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| In Mandarin Chinese a pen is Bi , obviously derived from the
| word for a paintbrush, Bi . Feathers don't come into it -
| Chinese is traditionally written with a paintbrush - but the
| pattern is the same.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > "Pennaceous feather" is a funny term too, then, meaning
| something like "featherlike feather"?
|
| I'd probably render it as more like "typical feathers" or
| "standard feathers". Note that "typical feathers" and "feathery
| feathers" mean the same thing, but one is perfectly normal
| phrasing and the other isn't.
| busyant wrote:
| > from Latin penna ("feather")
|
| Also in Italian. Although I believe penna can also mean the
| more modern "pen."
|
| Penne pasta is basically plural of this.
| jeremiahbuckley wrote:
| Excited to anticipate next-gen airplanes with slotted wingtips
| and their vanes controlled by AI for optimal performance.
| mhb wrote:
| Also the new swimsuits inspired by penguin feathers.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Props for ships with knobs inspired by whale flukes.
| nyc111 wrote:
| It may be misleading to look at only to the design of the
| feather. Flight and such a long and sustained flight can only
| happen because of the sophisticated programming. Evolution must
| be a great programmer too.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| One with lots and lots of time on their hand and countless
| trial and error, and parallel projects.
| umvi wrote:
| > and countless trial and error
|
| Is it countless though? Earth is "only" 4.5 billion years old
| with life appearing "only" 800 million years later, which
| seems pretty short for something chaotic and unorganized to
| self-organize into the nearly unfathomable sophistication we
| have now. Of course, humans are bad at grokking large
| numbers, and I might be too biased as a God fearing man... to
| be clear I don't deny the realities of evolution, but I
| currently tend to believe that as far as
| abiogenesis/evolution goes, life was "seeded" in some way on
| the planet, i.e. given a head start vs arising spontaneously
| from primordial soup within 800M years. I realize that this
| belief doesn't really contribute anything to the scientific
| discussion, just musing that 800M years to create the initial
| life seed doesn't seem that long considering we use super
| computers to simulate trillion+ iterations of various models
| and have failed to observe similar phenomenon in terms of
| self-organization without outside influence.
| hammock wrote:
| I first thought the headline was "Fathers are one of evolutions
| cleverest inventions". To which I agree
| jcims wrote:
| I'd say DNA is one of evolution's cleverest inventions, buuut. xD
|
| *ducks*
| wongarsu wrote:
| Two things can each be one of evolution's cleverest inventions
| xandrius wrote:
| So you're saying that two can be one?
|
| 2 = 1 proven?
| daveguy wrote:
| They are saying "one of" does not mean the only one.
|
| One of my cat's eyes is blue. One of my cat's eyes is
| green.
|
| Both can be true at the same time.
| SamBam wrote:
| Really good article.
|
| I know some of the early evolutionists wondered about the
| evolution of the feather and wing, since it seems hard to evolve
| in a gradual way -- a _little bit_ of a feathery flap doesn 't
| offer any advantages if it's not enough to glide on.
|
| I know one of the leading theories is that they evolved to keep
| animals warm, since they're also good insulators. Is this still
| the main theory?
| swores wrote:
| I have no knowledge in this area, this is purely a guess and so
| I am sharing it not to inform anyone but in the hope someone
| who does know can tell me if I'm wrong:
|
| When I thought about this in the past, I assumed they evolved
| in sea creatures first - where even very small flaps or mini
| wings/fins could improve hydrodynamics and/or swimming control,
| without needing to make a single jump from useless to being
| able to fly. But I've not looked into whether that is the case.
|
| Edit to add two quotes from a quick search:
|
| _" Thus, early feathers functioned in thermal insulation,
| communication, or water repellency, but not in aerodynamics and
| flight."_ - https://www.britannica.com/animal/bird-animal/The-
| origin-of-...
|
| _" Two major rival published theories are based on the roles
| of feathers in insulating the body against heat loss and in
| providing an aerodynamic surface for flight. However, because
| of the lack of knowledge about the roles and ecological
| relationships of protofeathers and of the most primitive
| feathers, it is not possible to test strongly either of these
| theories, or others as proposed in this symposium, against
| objective empirical observations to determine which is
| falsified or is the most probable"_ -
| https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/40/4/478/101404#
| sampo wrote:
| > it seems hard to evolve in a gradual way
|
| There seems to be 4 different hypotheses. So there is no
| consensus on this question.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_avian_flight#Hypothe...
|
| A video about the "wing-assisted incline running" hypothesis:
|
| "The Origin of Flight--What Use is Half a Wing?"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMuzlEQz3uo
| bluishgreen wrote:
| I read it as "Fathers Are One of Evolution's Cleverest
| Inventions".
|
| It completely made sense. I heard some research where starting
| about 500K year ago humans started to pair bond as a way to
| prevent mom and child mortality during and after childbirth and
| indeed Fathers are a clever invention. So yea, feathers are cool
| - fathers too! (for more info/reading here is a book suggestion:
| Eve)
| Gravityloss wrote:
| If the world warms back to the saurian sauna for a few millions
| of years, maybe mammals will not be on top of the game anymore.
| Time to welcome our new avian overlords. Maybe they'll evolve
| from crows. They're more optimal in so many ways anyway. Too bad
| they won't have coal, oil or natural gas reserves to build an
| early industrial civilization on.
| holoduke wrote:
| They have microplastics. Enough to power the new society for
| 200 years.
| wongarsu wrote:
| But getting large amounts of copper, iron and aluminum will be
| so much easier with all the work we have already put into
| mining and refining it. At worst you have to invent the
| technology to turn wood into charcoal and charcoal into coke to
| get the fire hot enough to smelt iron. But aluminum is pretty
| rust resistant and can be smelted with a good wood fire, and
| avian species will likely prefer the lighter metal anyway.
| Simplicitas wrote:
| Another feature that make birds really remarkable, if not
| mistaken, is that they take in oxygen when they inhale AND
| exhale. Feathers are great, but a creature such as B6 still needs
| a lot of energy to fly for 10 days straight.
| delecti wrote:
| It's more that their respiratory system is kinda circular. When
| we exhale, there's still a bit of gas in our lungs, and that
| reduces how efficiently we can extract oxygen. But the oxygen
| extracting parts of a bird's lungs are more like a heatsink,
| with air rushing past it in a consistent direction, rather than
| back and forth.
| xeonmc wrote:
| So human lungs are piston engines whereas bird lungs are
| turbojet engines.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Dinosaurs were actually Chocobo
| xandrius wrote:
| Chocobo -> Dinosaurs -> Chicken
|
| Checks out!
| cushpush wrote:
| is a feather a discovery or an invention? (am actual
| philosophical inquisition)
| xandrius wrote:
| Discovery implies that it already existed before and it wasn't
| found yet.
|
| I'd say invention is closer but does seem to imply agency.
|
| I think feathers _are_ the evolution here. Something evolved
| into a feather.
| Yeul wrote:
| Doesn't clever imply a conscious designer? Not very scientific.
| willturman wrote:
| > did not land, did not eat, did not drink and _did not stop
| flapping_
|
| My understanding is that these incredible distances are
| achievable less by "flapping" and more by leveraging small
| adjustments to harness the incredibly powerful forces found among
| and between air currents and waves as they traverse across the
| ocean.
|
| For example, here is an _unpowered_ remote control glider
| achieving measured speeds of 548+! mph using nothing but natural
| energy harnessed from wind and gravity.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eFD_Wj6dhk
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_soaring
| nonameiguess wrote:
| You see this even more in the ocean. There are sharks who,
| being cold-blooded, have the ability to slow their metabolism
| to very near zero and simply ride a current for thousands of
| kilometers to entirely different parts of the globe where
| feeding is better without expending any energy to do it. It's
| probably why sharks have been around so long. They can be
| extremely resistant to famine conditions.
| elliottkember wrote:
| I met that guy at a glider meetup a few months after that
| record. That Transonic plane is huge. He managed to fit the 3m
| wingspan into a regular car, lengthwise.
|
| I never got out to Parker Mountain but those guys had great
| stories. 100G will find the weak point on your model, often
| explosively.
|
| Also fun is pelicans surfing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEFrSycTvRk
| willturman wrote:
| That pelicans surfing video is perfect - there's certainly
| not a whole lot of flapping going on.
|
| _100G will find the weak point on your model_
|
| You know, just a casual glider built to withstand 10 times
| more gravitational force than an F-15 and 15 times more than
| a Formula 1 car. Wild.
| etangent wrote:
| > My understanding is that these incredible distances are
| achievable less by "flapping" and more by leveraging small
| adjustments to harness the incredibly powerful forces
|
| That is not correct. This particular bird (Bar-tailed Godwit)
| has never been observed to "dynamically soar" nor does it have
| the proper wing shape for that type of flight. If you ever seen
| Godwits in the wild, you will know why, it's a flapping only
| bird, they have no other mode of flight.
|
| Albatrosses on the other hand do employ dynamic soaring and fly
| even greater distances than Godwit does (they can
| circumnavigate the Southern Ocean several times) although
| albatrosses have additional advantage of being able to use
| water for rest (Godwits cannot).
| nyrulez wrote:
| I love the science of evolution in that there's no need for an
| underlying model for such an invention to actually verify the
| science and the possibility of it, just that such an invention is
| possible. Basically anything and everything is possible with
| evolution and that doesn't really feel like science to me.
| prerok wrote:
| To me, it sounds like science at its finest.
|
| Only what works, survives, regardless of the politics, i.e.
| what others think of it.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| Great article. But I hesitate to call feathers one of evolution's
| cleverest inventions. The natural world is chock full of amazing
| evolved engineering from the huge (the hearts of blue whales) to
| the intricate (the brains of hominids) to the diverse (the
| various forms of eyes from compound to pinhole, to lensed), to
| the tiny (white blood cells). Everywhere you look there are feats
| of engineering that would awe anyone.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record
| that few people outside the field of ornithology noticed. Over
| the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from
| its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in
| Tasmania, covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break...
|
| Many factors contributed to this astonishing feat of athleticism
| --muscle power, a high metabolic rate and a physiological
| tolerance for elevated cortisol levels, among other things._
|
| Additional fun fact the article doesn't mention:
|
| Birds sleep with only half their brain at a time when making
| these long distance flights. That's why they don't doze off and
| fall out of the sky.
| dadjoker wrote:
| Wow, they are so incredibly intricate, it's almost like they were
| designed....
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