Re: Archaeopteryx flight

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> Is all of this talk of Archaeopteryx being unable to fly proven theory or
just speculation?

> > While I am at writing about bird relatives... I've found the following
> > yesterday and no rebuttal of it, at least not before mid-October 1994:
> > http://www.cmnh.org/fun/dinosaur-archive/1994Sep/0022.html
> > Says *Archaeopteryx* was incapable of flying [in air B-) ] because its
wing
> > feathers aren't asymmetric _enough_.

Well, Nature doesn't usually publish speculations, and there are testable
measurements. The really strange thing is that I have never seen that paper
mentioned anywhere else...

Speakman, J.R., and Thomson, S.C. 1994. Flight capabilities of
Archaeopteryx. Nature 370:514.

BTW, theories are never proven. Real proofs occur in the "formal sciences"
maths and logics, but not in anything else... (and maths relies largely on
definitions and circular logics, not to mention it has some gaping holes, as
shown by Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the number Omega.)