The real
phenomenon, meanwhile, is that Feduccia doesn't mention lots of evidence against
BAND in his writings. I prefer to believe that he simply doesn't know it, but
that implies that he doesn't read e. g. Nature, let alone JVP... I'm not
comfortable with saying that.
I mean, he still says that conical,
unserrated teeth are a special characteristic of birds and don't occur in any
"dinosaur". This is doubly wrong -- firstly, such teeth could simply be an
autapomorphy of birds and not say anything about where birds came from,
secondly, there are Pelecanimimus, Byronosaurus,
Microraptor, and parts of the dentitions of many others. He never
mentions those. Same for the semilunate carpal -- he says "only 4 dinosaurs"
have it, which is likewise doubly wrong (these 4 could be the closest relatives
of birds, and much more than 4 species have it). Same for feathers -- against
all evidence he maintains that the stuff on Sinosauropteryx consists
solely of internal collagen fibers and presents 0 arguments for this, as well as
0 arguments against the arguments that they are protofeathers. And so on. It's
even worse with his "avimorph thecodonts" -- all they share
with birds are a pointed skull and a relatively long neck, but they aren't even
archosaurs, all of them.
He
has his idea that BAND, and then he goes out to attack, by almost whatever
means, everything that he can find that doesn't support it. This is not
science.
In
his 1999 second edition of his 1996 book, he writes (judging from a review; I
haven't read the book) that all similarities between Compsognathus and
Archaeopteryx are due to convergence. Then he argues that
Compsognathus, like Sinosauropteryx, was an aquatic lake
dweller, while Archaeopteryx is totally arboreal! Convergence is caused
by similar selective pressures, usually or always caused by similar ways of
living, no? BTW, I really wonder where Feduccia gets a freshwater lake (or even
a salt lake) from in Solnhofen, but maybe that's not implied and he talks of a
lagoon. Or so I hope.
Has been done.
Such an investigation is called a cladistic analysis.
The sheer number of characters that would
have to be convergent under BAND (over 100) is a good argument.
Genes can probably be shut off for "a
while" (imagine a mutation that destroys the start codon, and then another that
repairs it), but not for "very long", because shut-off genes (called
pseudogenes) can accumulate mutations, without natural selection working on
them, that would prevent them from working should the start codon happen to come
back. No idea on the actual amounts of time involved.
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12. Thou shalt not get married
before thou finishes[t] thy research work. But then thou mayest need an
inexpensive typist for writing thy thesis.
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