If evolution is a result of random combinations, how do we explain birds talking?

Question

Birds don't have vocal cords like humans have, which is very important for talking. But when trained by a human they start learning to speak. But actual evolution theorem says that for a major change to happen it requires millions of years. Even pets become more smart as we train them while wild animals of similar species remain as they are. How is it possible?

I am not confusinh nature with nurture. I am trying to disprove the basis of evolution( not that evolution hasn't happened, but its defintion of how it happened) that it is due to random combinations. For animals to adapt some new things it requires millions of years. But I see some getting smarter every day. How is that possible?

Aviator: You want me to prove evolution? I could do that more simply than you imagine.
I think it would be simpler if I define soul as it is mentioned in scriptures. This is the true concept of soul. There is only one eternal soul with infinite capabilites. And its true self is eternal bliss. It can multiply itself if it feels too confined or get back to its origin by detaching whereever it has been wandering. This is what is the actual unaltered concept of soul.
A soul starting from single celled ones feeling too confined starts multiplying itself and ultimately formed many species due to its infinite capabilities. But soul due to its nature of getting illused as a part of what it embodies(again as mentioned in scriptures. Never mind which ones) it remains in a specific species as long as it does not realize that it is still confined. Once it realizes it begins to evolve to better forms.
Just because I don't know some aspects of evolution, I don't become a stupid.

I admit that I learnt today that its all about mimicing. But you can't trash out the core points using that as a base reasoning. You haven't given a proper reasoning for why pets tend to be smart so fast. Can nurture contribute to evolution as per its originial theories. It has been to be millions of years for an animal to change its livinf style. Some carnivore pets simply live with vegetable habitat. Isn't that too fast evolution?

secretsauce: Thanks for your patience and a very good response. I wish i could bow my head to your patience.
I have couple of questions. If you are saying what one nurtures during a lifetime has got nothing to do with evolution, then could we assume that a person who happens to become a very smart one by all his efforts during one's lifetime will not give his/her children any smartness he acquired? For instance lets think that a man exercises and becomes taller and retains all his by lot of exercise (though his parents were all short and bald headed). Won't his children get his height and good hair?

saucepan: to prove what I said earlier I am a live example. My grandfather and my father both had bald hair. My elder brother also has become bald. I was at some stage about to lost hair but got very determined and started doing vigorous exercises. Now I have full hair and not even a trace of white either, though I am 35 years now.

saucepan: I liked the way the explain the answers:). By pets going for vegetarian habita, I was referring to dogs which are purely adapted from normal canine species. People of some countries own dogs that are as good as wild but I know that they are not even given any meat as they canot afford that for pets. They simply give rice or milk which is almost freely available in rural areas. It would be good to see if there are any genetic diffrences in the domestic as compared to the wild ones. Then we can say with surity that yes they have not really evolved much in a short time.
I agree that I should learn more before i start saying things wildly :)

secretsauce: My sincere apologies. I happened to refer ur name twice as saucepan. Sorry for that. I was thinkiing somewehere else while simply typing.

Answer 1

It's a good question ... but asked in an awkward way because someone has given you a lot of misinformation about biology.

First, evolution is NOT just a result of random combinations. It is also the result of NON-RANDOM selection ... traits that have some advantage get more common in the population, traits that have disadvantage disappear from the population.

Second, evolution doesn't happen to individuals ... it always, always, always affects *populations*. (See previous paragraph, and focus on the word "populations.") That's why it takes so long ... it requires many generations.

Third, birds do not "talk", in the same sense that humans talk. Many species of birds have very elaborate feathers used to attract mates. Many have elaborate vocal abilities. Some birds have such amazing vocal abilities that they can mimic sounds they hear ... they can mimic the human voice, or a car engine, or a chainsaw. They are better than humans at this skill of mimicry. But this is not "talking."

Fourth, the ability for animals to *learn* things within their lifetimes doesn't have anything to do with evolution. In fact, animals can acquire all sorts of things in their lifetime (they can get permanently injured, they can develop some skill, they can lift weights and get huge biceps) but these things are not passed on to offspring. Evolution is always, always, always about traits that get *inherited*.

What I think you're trying to say is that "talking" obviously isn't a trait that would do birds any good in the wild, so why are they able to "talk" when in the presence of humans for only a few weeks or years?

That is not an unreasonable question.

But I hope you understand now that birds do not have an innate ability to "talk". They *mimic* sounds, and they can be extremely bright and actually understand what a handful of those words mean (you can teach a bird that "cracker" means something yummy to eat).

And both mimicry and intelligence DO have advantages in the wild.

It's a good question ... but you really piss people off when you say things like "I am trying to disprove the basis of evolution ... that it is due to random combinations." You really do not have enough of an understanding of evolution to try and "disprove" it. Tens of thousands of scientists have been living, eating, and breathing these issues for 150 years. You are not likely to "disprove" it if you don't even understand what it says.

Just ASK genuine questions, and people will be GLAD to respond with polite answers and explanations. And please don't just ask people or read web sites that claim that evolution is false. They are obviously giving you a lot of bad information (as evidenced by the number of mistakes you made in even a short question). Again it was a good question, wrapped in a lot of BAD science understanding ... this is not an insult, just an observation that I hope you can now see for yourself.

Again, I am not saying *accept* evolution. I'm saying get an accurate *understanding* of it first before you *reject* it.

Please. You owe it to your intelligence. Birds are better mimics ... but we are (supposedly) more intelligent.

---- After additional details ----

I don't know if any of the above got through ... so I have to address your additional details:

You wrote: "You haven't given a proper reasoning for why pets tend to be smart so fast."

They are not "so smart, so fast". They are either born smart (as a result of millions of years of evolution), or not. If they are born smart, we can train them. The specific training is new. The smartness is not.

For example, you were born smart enough to learn language. But you had to be *taught* English. You were not born with the ability to understand English ... you were born with the ability to acquire language (which *is* the product of evolution).

You continued: "It has been to be millions of years for an animal to change its livinf style. Some carnivore pets simply live with vegetable habitat. Isn't that too fast evolution?" Yes. But that's not evolution. A cat (carnivore) cannot survive on a completely vegetable habitat. There is animal protein in cat food. Yes, its behavior is not like it would need in the wild ... but a domestic cat is the result of a few thousand years of domestication ... these are not wild animals brought into a different environment. Even a few thousand years is enough to change behavior (only the smaller, more docile individuals are bred) ... although not its digestive system ... which is why we make cat food that suited to a cat's requirements.

In ALL cases of pets ... the animal still has traits that have specific advantages in the wild, and are therefore the product of millions of years of evolution. But domesticated pets (dogs, cats, horses, etc.) are also the result of thousands of years, or even tens of thousands of years of domestication (living around humans). And in many cases, they are the product of evolution by *artificial selection* (as opposed to *natural selection*) ... also known as "breeding." And if you don't think that evolution by artificial selection can produce RADICAL changes, you should note that the difference between chihuahuas and great danes is the product of just a few *hundred* years of artificial selection (selective breeding).

Keep asking questions. Don't just try to "disprove" evolution, until you know a *lot* more. And don't just trust those anti-evolution web sites. They are filled with BAD science information.

Answer 2

The answers above are all excellent.

However, most of them do not point out some of the incorrect 'facts' you are asking for explanations of.

1 - Not all birds can talk. There are only a few groups, who already possess the adaptive capability of mimicry, which are able to produce sounds in their syrinx which approximate human speech. Parrots are the best known example, but ravens, lyrebirds and several others are also talented mimics. But no matter how much you try to get your duck or your canary to say 'Polly want a cracker', it'll never happen, because they haven't evolved that adaptation.

2 - Pets don't become 'more smart' when we train them. The animals are already very smart. The smart ones are able to learn tricks or commands we teach them, but we didn't make them smart, we just made them educated.

Some domestic animals have had their evolutionarily inherited intelligence tweaked through human selective breeding - such as border collies, and probably horses, but others have been specifically bred to make them stupider (i.e. turkeys, sheep, cattle to some extent). This also makes them more docile and easier to handle. Wild turkeys and sheep are a lot smarter than their domestic cousins.

Considering that your assertions are not actually true, it would be rather difficult to explain them.

Answer 3

A bird learning to make human sounds is not "evolving". Evolution involves genotypic changes (changes in DNA), which in turn sometimes result in phenotypic changes (changes in observable traits or behaviors.) But some phenotypic changes are the result of events during an animal's lifetime, and those changes do not affect the animal's genotype.

Changes during an animal's lifetime can often be dramatic, but they are not genetic. They aren't passed down to the next generation, so they don't constitute evolution. Whether a bird is truly "talking" or just "mimicking" is irrelevant. The point is that its genes aren't changing. In other words, a bird that has learned to talk will not give birth to another bird that already knows how to talk.

For another example, look to chimpanzees that have been taught to use human sign language. This type of learning is probably much more complex than simple mimicry, but it still doesn't constitute evolution. In all the years that chimpanzees have been learning sign language (several decades now) no chimps have been born with an increased capacity for language inherent in their DNA.

Here's an analogy: Imagine dyeing a bird's feathers pink. This would be a drastic phenotypic change, and it can happen in a very short time. But the bird's offspring would not be born with pink feathers. That sort of change would take thousands of years of looking for the birds with the pinkest feathers and breeding them together. That would be evolution. (It would be evolution by artificial selection, not natural selection, but it would still be evolution.)

Answer 4

Various animals who live in forests where line of sight is limited have evolved better vocal abilities so they can communicate. i.e howler monkeys. There are a lot of different species of birds so the ability to make different sounds can be a great advantage. Birds do of course have vocal cords different to ours but still capable of various sounds. Your question does show a basic misunderstanding of the process of evolution which creationists do try to exploit and that is that we do not know a lot of things about the process. Research into the evolutionary process is goes on all the time in many different universities all over the world so while it is likely that there is vastly more to discover than we know at present more is discovered almost every day. If some said that we know exactly how evolution works in all its aspects then you could dismiss the whole thing as nonsense just as we can dismiss the story or creation in the bible as a piece of fiction

Answer 5

Somebody else has cleared up the mimicry point, but there is more than one take on how fast or slow the process goes.
There is good evidence that many changes took place over a relatively short (in geological terms) in responce to various cataclysmic events.
Your point about people getting smarter over a lifetime is debateable. I would say that individual has a) been encouraged to reach their full potential and/or b) they have not got smarter, merely better informed.
Somebody showing you how to do something, or how something works is not making you smarter, they are helping you increase your range of skills or your knowledge, or your understanding. They have not increased your actual intelligence, merely nurtured it.
That is defined by the genes that made you.

Answer 6

The answers above deal with your question well, but I'd like to point out that you have fundamentally misunderstood the process by which evolution is driven, natural selection. It is not a 'result of random combinations' - that is a straw man definition put forwards by creationists and other idiots. It is anything but random. Read Dawkin's 'Blind Watchmaker' or one of Steven Gould's many excellent essays on the topic.
In fact, birds learning to talk is an example of unnatural selection that serves as an analogy - When a bird makes a sound that to the ears of it's owner/trainer sounds like human speech, it is encouraged, reinforced. So out of the birds vocabulary of developing noises, those that mimic human words are preferentially encouraged. Not random at all!

Answer 7

Birds "talking" has nothing to do with evolution.

Firstly, birds don't talk. They make sounds that approximate to human words. However, they have no understanding of what these words mean and no ability to use them to construct arbitrary sentences.

Secondly, the ability to form these words is not because they suddenly develop vocal chords. It is because they are good at mimicry, and are able in some circumstances to use this talent to make sounds that are similar to words. They don't make the sounds in the same way we do, and they don't use vocal chords to do it.

That said, the birds' talent to make a wide variety of sounds is indeed an evolved trait. For various reasons, it can be beneficial to make distinctive sounds - so that potential mates can identify you through the jungle - as well as to mimic other creatures - so that potential predators think you are something other than what you are.

Answer 8

You're confusing learning with evolution.

Evolution is the change in GENETIC material over time. Genes, gene ratios, proteins produced by genes, that sort of thing. The evolution of a critter's brain, its ability to learn, is not at all related to evolution.

Parrots have imitative skills for one reason or another, and many animals have language skills (whales, dolphins, almost all birds). So it shouldn't come as a surprise that particularly smart birds, like parrots, can learn other languages or at least learn to imitate other animals outside of the ones they adapted to imitate.

Answer 9

The birds are just mimicking the sounds we make. I'm not saying evolution is true, because it isn't. Wild animals are not necessarily less smart than the domesticated ones.Wild animals know how to hunt and stay away from hunters while domesticated animals do not.
There are better ways to blow up evolution. (haha BANG!!!!) "Yes I believe in the big bang theory. God spoke and BANG! it happened."
For instance, ask them about the Cambrian Explosion. (wow, another bang) Those organisms were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. (lol)

Answer 10

birds arent speaking.. they are mimicking what they have heard and reproducing it...just like a mobile phone ringtone..

and evolution occurs only in the zygote at conception. thats where DNA gets recombined...

the wild dog pet dog scenario.. well, the wild dog if seperated from mum early and reared by humans would develop the characteristics of a family pet... and he couldnt be released back into the wild as he would die, being totally unable to fend for himself or hunt effectively... look at hand reared foxes...

youre confusing nature with nurture... which is whole other debate