Physicists and engineers decide how to analyze evolution

Hang on folks -- I couldn't get previewing of my post to work so I have posted it, and then I can see the error messages. Wait for it ...

OK, it is sort-of-formatted now, so please comment. I am not sure why I cannot stack the lines of the citation without putting blank lines in between them, but let that pass.

Am I being too negative about the relevance of engineering? Hypersensitive?

By the way, aerodynamic engineering has been applied to analyzing bird evolution at least since the work of John Maynard Smith (an aircraft engineer turned evolutionary biologist) in 1953 (Birds as aeroplanes in New Biology).

Well this is expected. If following the anti-evolution war over the past decade or so has taught me anything, it's that engineers are always the supreme experts on evolutionary biology!!

:)

Oh no, they used the "D" word. I can confidently predict that creationists will be citing this paper for the next hundred years as proof of design in nature and the ability to detect design in nature. IT doesn't matter if it makes any sense or not. It doesn't matter if the paper proves the exact opposite. Little things like that aren't going to stop them.

The engine mass is proportional to the body size: this scaling is analogous to animal design, where the mass of the motive organs (muscle, heart, lung) is proportional to the body size.

Wow! So...selection pressure is selection pressure? Whodathunk?

So, what is the unit of heredity for an airplane?

Ugh. I just looked at the figures. Please tell me that this is a joke like the Sokal hoax.

I'm surprised to know that the jet engine evolved from the internal combustion engine and propellers.

It's not like airplane evolution includes revolutionary changes as well as evolutionary changes, while biologic evolution doesn't, is it?

Glen Davidson

This isn't as bad as the usual intrusion of physicists into biology, in which they tell us that we're doing it all wrong, and then proceed to reinvent some result of R. A. Fisher's from 1930.

Ooh, Fig. 1 gives a nice impression of diffusion away from an absorbing barrier.

John Harshman said: This isn't as bad as the usual intrusion of physicists into biology, in which they tell us that we're doing it all wrong, and then proceed to reinvent some result of R. A. Fisher's from 1930.

I suppose that it should be noted as well that no way could any animal manage to evolve to the size of even a small plane and be able to sustain powered flight, rather than being merely held up by updrafts. Invention and engineering came up with engines that are far more powerful than are muscles, which utilize materials that are practically barred from biologic evolution.

We did what the Designer could not do. Unless, of course, we're going to fall for the dreary, "we don't know what the Designer wants," which is utterly wrong anyway, since clearly said "Designer" wanted to work within the limitations of biologic evolution, rather than within the less limited options of intelligence and design. Cause the Designer is analogous with humans, except that it works very differently from us, and for different (inscrutable--aside from revelation) purposes.

It took humans to make large and fast flying machines. The Infinite Designer couldn't, chose not to in its Infinite Wisdom.

Glen Davidson

Maybe a biologist should submit a paper to the same journal teaching engineers about the circulation of airplanes' bodily fluids.

Has anyone tried to compare phylogenies of engineered objects to biological systems? Engineered items might make for a better control in Figure 1.2.1 here: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2014/06/meyers-hopeless-3.html#more since it wouldn't be a completely random distribution.

chriscaprette said: So, what is the unit of heredity for an airplane? Ugh. I just looked at the figures. Please tell me that this is a joke like the Sokal hoax.

Which reminds me: which airplane has the same design as the turkey?

As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

So I think I follow this. If you extend the concept of evolution to include anything that changes over time, then anything that changes over time is a form of evolution. And therefore, if you loosen the definition of "understand what's going on" sufficiently, it follows that physicists understand everything that's going on. QED. Physics FTW!

But I think one of the crucial points of Darwinian evolution is the fact that there is nobody intentionally selecting the traits to be inherited in "new models", which is a marked contrast from aerospace engineering. Even domestication is a wholly different process from evolution. It seems silly to me to claim that the modern dairy cow "evolved" in its present form, though it had the same constraints of inheritance as other living things. (You could speak of a symbiotic relationship between humans and domesticates, but this is not a useful way of understanding how domestication itself works, though it may put it in a large context.)

I don't see how there is any value in extending evolution even further to engineered machines.

Actually, there is something I was thinking about recently (I'm sure I'm not the first) that if anyone got really serious about studying "design" and its properties, there would be one mark of design that distinguishes it, namely the violation of common descent.

Lateral gene transfers are hypothetically possible but very uncommon. Lateral technology transfers occur all the time. You can't make a silk purse out of a cow's ear, but you can make a leather purse following a similar fabric pattern. The zipper is used as a fastener in many unrelated places. It is fabricated of different materials, but is recognizably a zipper, very often to the point of non-functional similarities, such as having a little hole in the pull.

Whenever something with similar function (e.g. fish fins and mammalian flippers) is seen in unrelated living organisms, by contrast, the differences are always more significant than between different kinds of zippers. A designer doesn't have this constraint, indicating that common descent is an important distinguishing characteristic of living things that is better explained by evolution than by design.

One thing that is not an indicator of "designed" technology is any rational basis for a design. Serendipitous discoveries are recorded throughout technological history. It seems to me that to a first approximation, the main advantage a human "designer" has over natural selection is the ability to transfer designs freely rather than any magical ability to originate them.

Hmmm... How do they account for the proportions of the U-2 and the Super Guppy?

I looked at that paper the other day and did a double take. Who were the reviewers anyway? Could this be a joke?

If engineers are really following the laws of physics in their designs, they would be evolving more compact machines with increasing energy densities and efficiencies. They would be following naturally occurring aerodynamic trends in order to make these machines slip through the air with less energy loss per unit of distance.

They would be designing some machines optimized for distance, others for speed, others for carrying capacity, and still others for hybrid uses.

No matter what craft they build, energy considerations, cost, efficiency, and durability would be factors going into the design. But the designs also have to conform to human constraints; and that may cause some deviations from optimal design of a particular feature. So we would find statistical correlations rather than one-to-one correlations in the evolution of the design of specific features. Sometimes these optimal features are found by trial and error (e.g., put different shapes into wind tunnels and pick the “best” one).

Well, DUH, guess what? You might get something that looked a little like it was sculpted by natural selection. In fact, engineers have often discovered already optimized designs they can copy from nature. We don’t try to build machines that violate the laws of physics – well, not unless one is a crackpot.

And nature isn’t a crackpot designer either; it doesn’t violate any laws of physics, and it finds approximate optimal features by trial and error. It may often miss the optimal shapes and structure if something works “well enough.” Evolution moves on before “optimization” can occur. Organisms can occupy niches in their environment, just as engineered products can find niche markets.

Living organisms don’t violate the laws of physics either. Larger animals like elephants are constrained to have shapes and frames that can withstand gravitational forces. Spiders can’t be scaled up to the size of elephants. Whales can grow big and develop the shapes they have because buoyancy takes away gravitational constraints.

Why these engineers and “physicists” didn’t think of comparing their “insights” with artificial selection rather than natural selection escapes me. Actually, why they wrote the paper at all escapes me. The paper seems a bit sophomoric to me.

The functional shapes of powered flying objects are constrained by physics, and two different processes of development and diversification of these flying objects over time will result in similar shapes for similar functions as flight "designs" mature.

That's about all there is to it. The IDiot mistake (or fraud, whether intuitive or deliberate) is to pretend that development of functional possibilities simply must be due to design, either by Meyer's bogus "standard" that design is all that produces substantial function today, or just by pretending that function necessarily indicates design.

But yes, biologic evolutionary development of function and design improvements of function will tend to produce convergence, due to physical constraints.

Kinda obvious.

Glen Davidson

Golkarian said: Has anyone tried to compare phylogenies of engineered objects to biological systems? Engineered items might make for a better control in Figure 1.2.1 here: http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2014/06/meyers-hopeless-3.html#more since it wouldn't be a completely random distribution.

callahanpb said: So I think I follow this. If you extend the concept of evolution to include anything that changes over time, then anything that changes over time is a form of evolution. And therefore, if you loosen the definition of "understand what's going on" sufficiently, it follows that physicists understand everything that's going on. QED. Physics FTW! But I think one of the crucial points of Darwinian evolution is the fact that there is nobody intentionally selecting the traits to be inherited in "new models", which is a marked contrast from aerospace engineering. Even domestication is a wholly different process from evolution. It seems silly to me to claim that the modern dairy cow "evolved" in its present form, though it had the same constraints of inheritance as other living things. ...

W. H. Heydt said: Hmmm... How do they account for the proportions of the U-2 and the Super Guppy?

Here is an engineering optimization problem.

You want to store lots of sand on your property for future use. You want it to occupy the maximum volume for the minimum amount of area taken up on your property. You don’t want to invest in containers because that costs money for material and labor. What do you do?

Well, a pile of sand will occupy the largest volume within that smallest area if it is stacked in a conical shape at the angle of repose of a sand pile, which is the arctangent of the coefficient of static friction between sand particles.

So, just dump it in a pile wherever you want it, and let nature do the rest.

Mike Elzinga said: Here is an engineering optimization problem. You want to store lots of sand on your property for future use. You want it to occupy the maximum volume for the minimum amount of area taken up on your property. You don’t want to invest in containers because that costs money for material and labor. What do you do? Well, a pile of sand will occupy the largest volume within that smallest area if it is stacked in a conical shape at the angle of repose of a sand pile, which is the arctangent of the coefficient of static friction between sand particles. So, just dump it in a pile wherever you want it, and let nature do the rest.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said:

Mike Elzinga said: Here is an engineering optimization problem. You want to store lots of sand on your property for future use. You want it to occupy the maximum volume for the minimum amount of area taken up on your property. You don’t want to invest in containers because that costs money for material and labor. What do you do? Well, a pile of sand will occupy the largest volume within that smallest area if it is stacked in a conical shape at the angle of repose of a sand pile, which is the arctangent of the coefficient of static friction between sand particles. So, just dump it in a pile wherever you want it, and let nature do the rest.

For similar reasons, you should have spherical cows in your barn. Glen Davidson

This post has also been commented on in a post by P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula.

I wanted to get it up here quickly once I saw that the airplane paper was getting a lot of media attention. It was only a matter of time before someone argued that it was a brilliant validation of evolution, and I wanted to point out the problems early on.

The paper argued that their results flowed from something mysterious called Constructal Theory, though they never clarify what that is. They do give references to earlier papers of theirs on this.

I'll remember this event when biologists venture outside their discipline.

As a mechanical engineer I must say that that is one of the dumbest papers I’ve read, and I’ve read some pretty dumb papers! My god who reviewed this??? I review technical papers all the time and I would have laughed this one off.
I can certainly see the whack job ID people running with this one.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said: For similar reasons, you should have spherical cows in your barn. Glen Davidson

Anybody who has read D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form should not be surprise by physical constraints on the evolution of biological structures. Thompson pointed out the correspondence between biological forms and mechanical phenomena.

And how about Galileo’s writings on The Two New Sciences in which he laid out what has become some of the central ideas in kinematics and strength of materials?

I skimmed over the paper. It seems like one of its major results (besides that airplanes are getting bigger) is that all fixed-wing aircraft look alike in the sense that they have wings, and those wings are fixed.

Among the weirder coincidences (at least this week) is that just about two hours before I read this I was looking out the window and saw something I have never seen flying by. I am pretty sure it was an Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. I've seen pictures. But there was one flying in plain sight.

This paper is wrong in a number of areas. Planes are designed to be economical to manufacture. That is why they stopped having organic shapes like the Lockheed Constellation and resorted to straight "pipes". They are no round for aerodynamics but because it is the most economic shape to contain the pressure differential. The speed of sound limits aircraft design.

Bigger is not always the fastest. The biggest plane flies slower - Antonov An126. So do the aircraft parts transporters made by Boeing and Airbus.

Concorde was only a "dead end" because it was old and noisy because the same problem of the speed of sound causing shock waves.

The paper also doesn't mention the work on blended wing aircraft which is where research is headed.

Another problem I have is with their belief that there is some sort of Constructal principle that predicts increases of flows (or whatever).

I have colleagues here working on experimental evolution in yeast. Those are single celled organisms (ordinary brewer's or baker's yeast). Now exactly how are we supposed to apply the principles about flows to the life of a yeast?

Re: Chris Pollard...

Consider the Supermarine Spitfire and its American derivative, the North American P-51 Mustang. The Spit had full elliptical wings. The P-51 went with straight taper and bolted on a more powerful engine.

W. H. Heydt said: Re: Chris Pollard... Consider the Supermarine Spitfire and its American derivative, the North American P-51 Mustang. The Spit had full elliptical wings. The P-51 went with straight taper and bolted on a more powerful engine.

I think it's Constructal Theory.

You'd have to read one of the papers they cite in the airplane article.

Chris Pollard said: Planes are designed to be economical to manufacture.

Joe Felsenstein said: I think it's Constructal Theory. You'd have to read one of the papers they cite in the airplane article.

But, But - How do they know this is how airplanes evolved???

After all - were they there?

... What?

Oh... um... undermind.

Joe Felsenstein said: I think it's Constructal Theory. You'd have to read one of the papers they cite in the airplane article.

Mike Elzinga said:

Joe Felsenstein said: I think it's Constructal Theory. You'd have to read one of the papers they cite in the airplane article.

It is apparently being "constructed" by David Deutch. I have looked at it before, and all that comes to mind at the moment is this Sydney Harris cartoon. It seems to me that much of this is what has been routinely referred to in physics as phenomenology

John Harshman said: What? I have never heard that the Mustang was derived from the Spitfire, and it seems extremely unlikely. Both Spitfire and Mustang used the Rolls Royce Merlin engine, so your second claim also seems unlikely.

Told you.

callahanpb said: Among the weirder coincidences (at least this week) is that just about two hours before I read this I was looking out the window and saw something I have never seen flying by. I am pretty sure it was an Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. I've seen pictures. But there was one flying in plain sight.

John Harshman said: ... Are Constructor Theory and Constructal Theory the same thing? After having read some of both, I can't tell.

John Harshman said:

Mike Elzinga said:

Joe Felsenstein said: I think it's Constructal Theory. You'd have to read one of the papers they cite in the airplane article.

It is apparently being "constructed" by David Deutch. I have looked at it before, and all that comes to mind at the moment is this Sydney Harris cartoon. It seems to me that much of this is what has been routinely referred to in physics as phenomenology

Are Constructor Theory and Constructal Theory the same thing? After having read some of both, I can't tell.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to title this as:

Physicists and engineers decide how to analyze design/

eric said: I saw one around 6:30pm. Either we live in the same general area, or there were multiple parallel exercises, or both. :)

Both of these people are in the UK.

Here is a Wikipedia article on Bejan’s “constructal law.” The name was coined by him.

The article speaks for itself; and it is pretty muddled-headed “science.” It appears to be trying to replace imprecise or incorrect statements of well-known physical ideas with “more fundamental” principles.

It has not shaken the physics, chemistry, and biology communities to their foundations. It’s pretty much a lot of pretentious hype.

I would tend to categorize it as an engineer's version of What the Bleep Do We Know? It makes engineers look bad.

W. H. Heydt said: Hmmm... How do they account for the proportions of the U-2 and the Super Guppy?

W. H. Heydt said: Re: Chris Pollard... Consider the Supermarine Spitfire and its American derivative, the North American P-51 Mustang. The Spit had full elliptical wings. The P-51 went with straight taper and bolted on a more powerful engine.

Dave Luckett said:

W. H. Heydt said: Re: Chris Pollard... Consider the Supermarine Spitfire and its American derivative, the North American P-51 Mustang. The Spit had full elliptical wings. The P-51 went with straight taper and bolted on a more powerful engine.

As pointed out above, the comment is factually incorrect. The P-51 was a completely different and separately derived aircraft from the Spitfire, using newer alloys in the airframe and spars, and with less attention paid to aerobatic performance, but with extreme streamlining for higher speed, and better dive characteristics. It was light but very strong, capable of far higher payloads than the Spit, hence able to carry a fuel load that could take it to Berlin and back, far beyond the range of the Spitfire. It was originally designed with an Alison engine, but both supply and performance considerations indicated the RR merlin, which by that time had been cured of its carburetion problems in the dive. You might say tha of course, like domesticated animals - for different environments. The Spit was a pure interceptor, fast to height, very manoeuverable, capable of carrying a couple of 20mm cannon (though the advantage of that was not realised at first), but with limited range. The Mustang was the escort fighter of the war, capable of staying with the Forts and Liberators all the way, and matching it with German interceptors all along. Both great designs. It would be interesting to see, if one added reproduction and selection to the design process, and accurately modelled the technology (which advanced, of course) and the changing environmental demand, whether the same thing would happen through natural selection.

I think it was S. J. Gould who looked at the "evolution" of Mickey Mouse. IIRC he determined that neoteny was a key factor. But, since you weren't there, I guess we'll never know for sure.

TomS said: Wasn't the combat environment, which played itself out in unpredictable ways, what did the selection?

Mike Elzinga said: Here is a Wikipedia article on Bejan’s “constructal law.” The name was coined by him. The article speaks for itself; and it is pretty muddled-headed “science.” It appears to be trying to replace imprecise or incorrect statements of well-known physical ideas with “more fundamental” principles. It has not shaken the physics, chemistry, and biology communities to their foundations. It’s pretty much a lot of pretentious hype. I would tend to categorize it as an engineer's version of What the Bleep Do We Know? It makes engineers look bad.

natural design and the constructal law unite all animate and inanimate systems.

• Constructal Law: Evolution Governed Science Of Airplanes Science 2.0
• Survival of the Flight Test: Airplanes Evolve, Too livescience.com
• Law of Physics Helps Explain Airplane Evolution engineering.com
• Physics Law Explains Airplane Evolution: Researcher Nature World News
• Airplane designs evolve like flying animals do, say scientists Christian Science Monitor
• Airplanes followed a pattern of biological evolution, physics study says Tech Times

stevaroni said: But, But - How do they know this is how airplanes evolved??? After all - were they there? ... What? Oh... um... undermind.

TomS wonders about 20mm aircannon, and the advantages thereof.

Essentially, a 20mm shot makes about five times the size of hole in a plane than a .303. When shooting at bombers, this is often crucial, and the slower rate of fire can be accepted for that purpose, because the target is bigger and slower, but typically more able to absorb damage.

On the other hand, the Mustang's 50 cal mgs were a compromise suited to its combat role and environment - it was an escort fighter, meant for shooting down other fighters to protect the bombers. Hence, shooting at smaller and more elusive targets that could take less damage. Smaller calibre guns with higher rates of fire made sense in that environment.

Spitfire and Mustang - you could say that they were both top predators, but specialised to different prey.

eric said: ...The Spit started production between 1936-38. The Brits kept refining it during the war, but AIUI the basic design could not have been a response to the WWII combat environment because it happened before WWII. So, rather, the design was perhaps a superb human anticipation of that environment. :) Making that design decidedly not evolutionary in the Darwinian sense.

I am downloading the PDF as I type - haven't read the paper - but at first blush I like the idea because it sounds similar to what I have been proposing at several websites over the years: that evolution is a general process consisting mainly of:

1) Random generation of something (in biology, proteins; in human design and intelligence, ideas; etc.).
2) A selection process to filter the output of 1) (in biology survival and reproduction; in design survival of the fittest in the marketplace; etc.).
3) Some form or forms of memory to preserve the output of 2) for further incremental improvements (in biological evolution, genes; in design, brain memory, language, blue-prints, computer files, etc.).

(This doesn't explicitly include neutral evolution but I think it implicitly does.)

It first consciously occurred to me about ten years ago when a creationist friend of mine pointed to a car parked next to a tree and asked me, "Can't you see that they both were designed?" To which I replied, "It's clear to me that they both evolved - you've seen cars evolve in your lifetime!" [Which went back to the 1950's - lots of evolutionary changes in cars, telephones, etc. since that time.

Based on this idea, I like to say that the problem with IDers is that a) they don't understand design; and b) they don't understand intelligence. Both are evolutionary processes, I believe. It's all evolution, all the way down. It's an algorithm which works in this universe - otherwise we wouldn't be here and neither would cars. How else would evolved creatures think and design things?

I was a design engineer for 38 years. I can give numerous examples of random generation of ideas, trial and error, lucky accidents like the cat who invented Lexan, horizontal gene transfer from lathes to turbine vanes, Thomas Edison's 1000+ unsuccessful ideas for lightbulbs, and so on. Design is not magic. Our 76 billion neurons churning random permutations in the background (which I am guessing is how we get ideas) seems like magic because our conscious minds are like the CEO's of large corporations who don't know what is going on in the mailrooms of those corporations, and take all the credit for the work of thousands of employees whom they don't know. Okay, stop me before this turns into a rant about Neutron Jack Welch, but I hope my point is clear. Engineering design and human intelligence in general are not supernatural processes, and use the same basic algorithm which biological evolution does.

P.S. I signed on using Google and expected my Google ID (JimV) would be used but instead I was turned into "A Masked Panda (Ha74)" - sorry about that.

JimV - slightly-disgruntled ex-GE Design Engineer, B.S. Physics, M.M.E., ~12 patents (after GE decided we should start patenting everything in the 1990's)

W. H. Heydt said: Re: Chris Pollard... Consider the Supermarine Spitfire and its American derivative, the North American P-51 Mustang. The Spit had full elliptical wings. The P-51 went with straight taper and bolted on a more powerful engine.

What NO Bf 109 pilot EVER wanted to hear: "Achtung, Spitfeuer!"

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmKClPHRhWOQyCVGlIJhJOKy_uJujWHa74 said: I am downloading the PDF as I type - haven't read the paper - but at first blush I like the idea because it sounds similar to what I have been proposing at several websites over the years: that evolution is a general process consisting mainly of:

All the discussion about Spitfires reminds me of the story (real or apocryphal?) that in WWII, Allied bombers that returned from sorties were inspected for damage, and the places most commonly damaged were reinforced. After doing this for a while without much success, they realized that they should reinforce the places that were always undamaged in returning bombers: these were the spots that inevitably brought the bomber down when hit, so no bombers ever returned if they were damaged there.

(Good story, but I hope the military planners were smarter it than sounds. I might not be any smarter, but that it was their job to be smart about stuff like this.)

If they had really been applying something like evolution, they would have intentionally sent out bombers with small experimental mutations (granted there were humans on board, so it would be reprehensible even by wartime standards). I suspect that they did not do a lot of random experimentation but sent out what according to their best effort and maintenance time constraints seemed most likely to fulfill its mission and return. The results may have had some evolution-like properties, but the process was very different.

I grew up immediately after World War II. As a boy I could see DC-3s flying overhead, Mustangs were parked down at the Philadelphia Airport in the Air National Guard area, and my first plane ride was on a Lockheed Constellation. I thought that these planes were way cool, so I know their appeal.

I am also not innocent of making off-topic remarks here myself.

But I am going to rule that the further discussion of Spitfires, Mustangs and such is Off Topic and further discussion of that ilk will be moved to the Bathroom Wall. Discussion of the analogy, or lack thereof, of airplane "evolution" and biological evolution is of course very much on-topic.

callahanpb said: I don't see the advantage of over-generalizing an idea that is already general enough to study productively.

I'm very disappointed at all the parochial points of view here which insist that evolution can apply to biology only. No one (I think) is saying that biological evolution isn't a very rich field with its own special tricks and vast amounts of information, or that physicists and engineers are smarter than biologists. Nor did I (at least) neglect to mention the role of horizontal gene transfer (or lateral transfer) which is easier and therefore more important in the evolution of designs and thoughts, but also occurs in biological evolution.

The more important point, to me, is that this concept philosophically blows "Intelligent Design" out of the water. I could go (and have gone) on at great length about this, but it seems so obvious to me that I am greatly surprised that it has not been the triumphal focus of this comment section.

JimV

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmKClPHRhWOQyCVGlIJhJOKy_uJujWHa74 said: I'm very disappointed at all the parochial points of view here which insist that evolution can apply to biology only. No one (I think) is saying that biological evolution isn't a very rich field with its own special tricks and vast amounts of information, or that physicists and engineers are smarter than biologists. Nor did I (at least) neglect to mention the role of horizontal gene transfer (or lateral transfer) which is easier and therefore more important in the evolution of designs and thoughts, but also occurs in biological evolution. The more important point, to me, is that this concept philosophically blows "Intelligent Design" out of the water. I could go (and have gone) on at great length about this, but it seems so obvious to me that I am greatly surprised that it has not been the triumphal focus of this comment section. JimV

mattdance18 said:

callahanpb said: I don't see the advantage of over-generalizing an idea that is already general enough to study productively.

Hear, hear. It actually kinda drives me nuts when I see the way the term "evolution" is used in so many other contexts. I fully realize that language is polyvalent and continually transforming thing. But when I see astronomers talk about "stellar evolution," or geologists talk about "the evolution of the planet," or pretty much anyone talking about "the evolution of technology" -- let alone some bizarre engineering paper talking about "the evolution of airplanes" -- it does a tremendous disservice to biology. Because in these other contexts, "evolution" is used basically as a synonym for "development through stages over time" and nearly always includes ideas of progress, at least toward an end stage or even toward a goal. So using the term "evolution" in these contexts just reinforces misconceptions about biological evolution, too. I realize we can't play language police, but this really bugs me. I wish people would be more careful about it. (And don't get me started on scientific programming, and even scientists themselves at times, casually using the word "theory" when what they mean is "hypothesis.")

TomS said: ... Unfortunately, the prior meaning of "evolution" is "development over stages in time", including in biology. It is the current biological meaning that one should object to.

Further instances of the differences in the means with which the algorithm steps of evolution (which I proposed in my first comment) are applied between biological evolution and human design work don't invalidate the algorithm steps themselves, but make me wonder if they are inspired by closet-IDism.

The key presumption of ID, it seems to me, is that human thought, and hence human design work, are accomplished by some supernatural means, which could not possibly be mimicked by blind nature. I can easily imagine an IDer responding to me with, "The stuff of engineering is primarily rearranged by intelligently directed external forces that don’t exist within the constituents of the engineered products.", and ignoring my point that intelligence itself is just another application of the evolutionary algorithm. A meta-application perhaps, but nothing supernatural. In other words, it is not nature that mimics human design, but human design (and intelligence) which mimics nature.

Okay, "closet-IDism" may have gone too far, but I seriously expect IDers would be vociferously arguing that biological evolution and human design work are just incomparable different, with no similarity whatever, and will happily use quotes here to that effect.

Joe Felsenstein said:

TomS said: ... Unfortunately, the prior meaning of "evolution" is "development over stages in time", including in biology. It is the current biological meaning that one should object to.

It gets worse. The prior prior meaning of evolution is an "unrolling". Like unrolling a coil of hose. This implies that the course of events is predetermined. Since evolutionary biologists do not accept that, we are forced to allow meanings to be changed.

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmKClPHRhWOQyCVGlIJhJOKy_uJujWHa74 said: ... Okay, "closet-IDism" may have gone too far, but I seriously expect IDers would be vociferously arguing that biological evolution and human design work are just incomparable different, with no similarity whatever, and will happily use quotes here to that effect.

I understand that evolution had prior meanings before biologists started using it, and I can also accept that people will continue to use it to mean other things than biologists usually mean. This is true of a lot of scientific terminology. E.g., the definition of "power" as energy per unit of time is neither the original meaning nor the correct meaning in every context.

But I believe this paper is making a stronger claim that "evolution" in the sense used by biologists today (not "unrolling" or "change over time") needs to be broadened. I don't agree with that.

Actually, it's not about words. The word "evolution" could be so overloaded to be a poor choice for biologists. But there is a useful concept that biologists study, and one of the things it includes is common descent, which implies a particular model of how characteristics are propagated. Conflating this with other things makes it a less useful concept for biologists, because the specific concept provides a robust means of generating and testing hypotheses that apply to living things but do not apply to airplanes.

Of course, the conflated concept, encompassing many processes involving small changes and trial-and-error, could be useful for some purpose. I'm reluctant to call it "evolution" but I see the lexicographical question as secondary. I agree with the suggestion made above that the presence of trial-and-error and accident in human design is a potential argument against the claims of cdesign proponentsists.

A big part of why I find ID stillborn is my strong belief that "design" isn't really what humans do either, for the most part. But this is actually kind of an argument to hold in reserve. There is just so much clear evidence in favor of evolution as understood by biologists that there's not much need to go off in that direction for rhetorical purposes.

TomS said: Unfortunately, the prior meaning of "evolution" is "development over stages in time", including in biology. It is the current biological meaning that one should object to.

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmKClPHRhWOQyCVGlIJhJOKy_uJujWHa74 said: Further instances of the differences in the means with which the algorithm steps of evolution (which I proposed in my first comment) are applied between biological evolution and human design work don't invalidate the algorithm steps themselves, but make me wonder if they are inspired by closet-IDism. The key presumption of ID, it seems to me, is that human thought, and hence human design work, are accomplished by some supernatural means, which could not possibly be mimicked by blind nature. I can easily imagine an IDer responding to me with, "The stuff of engineering is primarily rearranged by intelligently directed external forces that don’t exist within the constituents of the engineered products.", and ignoring my point that intelligence itself is just another application of the evolutionary algorithm. A meta-application perhaps, but nothing supernatural. In other words, it is not nature that mimics human design, but human design (and intelligence) which mimics nature. Okay, "closet-IDism" may have gone too far, but I seriously expect IDers would be vociferously arguing that biological evolution and human design work are just incomparable different, with no similarity whatever, and will happily use quotes here to that effect.

Mike Elzinga said: The problem with that argument is that ID/creationists never tell us how “intelligence” pushes atoms and molecules around.

My theory provides a robust means of generating and testing hypotheses that apply to living things but do not apply to airplanes.

Some types of creationists deny science altogether, and those are the most likely to make ignorant comments on science forums. IDers present their claim as a scientific hypothesis, such as "only intelligence can produce new information". The evidence that human thinking and human designs evolve over time using the same basic mechanisms as biological evolution (although the mechanisms use different means) seems quite clear to me as a design engineer (and sometimes thinker, as when I spent most of a year finding my own proof of Fermat's Prime Theorem*, using the evolutionary process I outlined in my first comment**). This converts their premise to "only an evolutionary process can produce new information", and poofs their hypothesis into non-existence in the reverse of the magic by which they assume nature and human intelligence work. I am sure they will deny the evidence and/or revert to more primitive forms of creationism and/or offer endless non-sequitors about welding vs. chemical reactions or the 2Lot, none of which invalidate the evidence.

To summarize (so people can know whether they're arguing with me or someone else, then I'll shut up), my positions are:

A. An evolutionary process consists of these basic steps:

1. Variation involving chance/luck.
2. A selection process that filters the variations.
3. Memory which preserves (somewhat - not perfectly) the results of the selection.

B. Human intelligence and human design work are evolutionary processes (as is biological evolution).

C. If I am correct in the above propositions, this would nullify any scientific content of "Intelligent Design".

* Fermat's Prime Theorem (the hard part): every prime of the form 4N+1 is the sum of two squares (integers squared).

** I wrote notes about my trials and errors on paper rather than encoding them in base-pairs in genes (could have probably used a library or Google to speed up the process but I wanted to do it myself).

JimV

callahanpb said: I understand that evolution had prior meanings before biologists started using it, and I can also accept that people will continue to use it to mean other things than biologists usually mean.

https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmKClPHRhWOQyCVGlIJhJOKy_uJujWHa74 said: To summarize (so people can know whether they're arguing with me or someone else, then I'll shut up), my positions are: A. An evolutionary process consists of these basic steps: 1. Variation involving chance/luck. 2. A selection process that filters the variations. 3. Memory which preserves (somewhat - not perfectly) the results of the selection. B. Human intelligence and human design work are evolutionary processes (as is biological evolution). C. If I am correct in the above propositions, this would nullify any scientific content of "Intelligent Design". JimV

Mike Elzinga said: That clears the way for ID/creationists to argue that some form of intelligence is required to make biological organisms. So one argument says that biological organisms are so improbable that they couldn’t happen by random assemblies of atoms and molecules in the entire history of the universe; therefore intelligent intervention is required.

TomS said:

Mike Elzinga said: That clears the way for ID/creationists to argue that some form of intelligence is required to make biological organisms. So one argument says that biological organisms are so improbable that they couldn’t happen by random assemblies of atoms and molecules in the entire history of the universe; therefore intelligent intervention is required.

But we know that intelligence does not have an exemption from the laws of thermodynamics. Intelligent designers (those of which know what they can do, and we have not been told anything about any others) cannot design and produce a perpetual motion machine. (Isn't that one of reasons that the laws of thermodynamics were discovered?) (One might argue that we can design, but not produce, a perpetual motion machine: as well as a faster than light rocket or a rational square root of 2.)

According to Morris - and every ID/creationist ever since; you can hop on over to the Uncommon Descent website and see that argument going on even now – the second law says everything tends toward decay. Therefore evolution is forbidden by the second law.

Is it any wonder that ID/creationists want “fine tuning” designed by an intelligence that put “information” into the universe so that we can be “safe” even after we die?

As for how I'd analyze evolution (from the perspective of a software engineer), I'd list the processes that increase variety in the gene pool, the ones that decrease it, mention that in a stable species these would balance, and add something about positive feedback effects (yeah, that's an engineering term, but it fits here). Whether something evolves doesn't generally depend on individual mutations; rather, it's any variation that works better than the other varieties in that species.

IANAS, but I think that one ought to distinguish between evolution, a process, and natural selection a theoretical mechanism about the process. There are other mechanisms, some more productive than others, which attempt to account for the ways that evolution happens: sexual selection, neutral drift, symbiosis, inheritance of acquired traits, .... And then there is common descent (with variation).

I hope Joe will allow the observation that it was in fact a form of environmental selection that caused a mutation in the Spitfire's engine: the problem that was exploited by its opponents - namely, that its engine flooded and cut out in a minus-gravity dive - was solved by a new design, and from 1942, ME109 pilots found, to their consternation, that the Spit could stay with them in a power dive.

A further reflection on environmental niches for aircraft: Both the Spit and the Mustang were specialised predators - but the Mustang was even more specialised than the Spit, because the Mustang's main prey was other fighters. Thinking in environmental terms, then, one would expect further adaptations specialising to that niche - and that's what we see.

I'd really like to try the experiment using, perhaps, an accurate air-combat simulation, just using Darwinian evolution and computer players, with varying missions, selecting the most successful designs and reproducing with variation for large numbers of generations. Come to think of it, I wonder if the Air Force actually does that kind of research?

Dave Luckett said: I hope Joe will allow the observation that it was in fact a form of environmental selection that caused a mutation in the Spitfire's engine: the problem that was exploited by its opponents - namely, that its engine flooded and cut out in a minus-gravity dive - was solved by a new design, and from 1942, ME109 pilots found, to their consternation, that the Spit could stay with them in a power dive.

Manuscripts "evolve" over time as well; the analogy to biological evolution suffers from the same problems as airplane "evolution" in that textual "mutations" can be drawn from any source outside the line of direct parental descent. Yes, Bible translations take ideas and phrases from prior translations. But the phrase "population explosion" in Genesis 6 of the Living Bible (1971) came from analysis of the Baby Boom (1950 onward).

Carl Drews said: Manuscripts "evolve" over time as well; the analogy to biological evolution suffers from the same problems as airplane "evolution" in that textual "mutations" can be drawn from any source outside the line of direct parental descent. Yes, Bible translations take ideas and phrases from prior translations. But the phrase "population explosion" in Genesis 6 of the Living Bible (1971) came from analysis of the Baby Boom (1950 onward).

Languages and manuscripts I think are the closest "natural analogies" to biologic evolution that we have, because they don't change due to intelligence, at least not exactly so.

Machines "evolve" due to accidents and intelligence, but even the accidents are generally deliberately selected.

Glen Davidson

Dave Luckett said: I'd really like to try the experiment using, perhaps, an accurate air-combat simulation, just using Darwinian evolution and computer players, with varying missions, selecting the most successful designs and reproducing with variation for large numbers of generations. Come to think of it, I wonder if the Air Force actually does that kind of research?

There is ongoing work on "Manuscript Traditions", including work by Rev. Arthur Lee in the 1980s (he used to come to Numerical Taxonomy meetings), earlier suggestions by Norman Platnick, and the work on The Canterbury Tales by Robinson, Howe and O'Hara. It goes back to non-numerical work on "textual criticism" or "stemmatics" in the early 1800s by Lachmann.

For recent papers discussing and citing all this see this open-access review article and a popularization by Howe.

An even more active area is comparative linguistics, where evolutionary biologists such as Russell Gray and Mark Pagel have taken the lead.

There are analyses of other cultural artifacts such as computer viruses too.

In engineering, computer simulations of evolution ("evolutionary computation" or "genetic algorithms") are used. They are most useful when the function of the resulting system can itself be computer-simulated with high accuracy, to permit rapid testing. The suggestion that we do this with fighter aircraft might be limited by the lack of a good enough computer-implementable method to judge success.

François Jacob (Evolution and tinkering, published in Science in 1977) has emphasized the role of tinkering in engineering, and its analogy to biological evolution. I was introduced to him once back then, and the first thing he did was ask whether I thought the analogy was a good one (I said yes).

For all of that, engineering does also do top-down design, with a comprehensive picture of the workings of a machine leading to a much more focused and thoughtful design process that will not waste its time making random changes in the logo on the front of the machine. But engineers also tinker a lot, and probably don't like to admit how often they do that.

Joe Felsenstein said: But engineers also tinker a lot, and probably don't like to admit how often they do that.

Mike Elzinga said: I would bet that Dick Cheney’s pulseless artificial heart would not be passed on to any progeny.

Joe Felsenstein said: The Uninviable.

I quickly reviewed the paper and completely ignored all of the equations. What is the point? Are they trying to give the ID community a peer-reviewed paper to quote? As an engineer in the aviation industry, I am always embarrassed by the number of engineers who are YEC's (I personally know three).

Regardless, in my opinion the paper is completely wrong. Advances in the aviation industry in the last 50 years (or more) have nothing to do with aviation. The 707 from the late 1950's has the same general configuration as the 777. The advances are primarily from three major sources: materials (ex, engine reliability and lightweight structures), manufacturing, and computers. These advances have also caused nearly everything we touch on a daily basis to have "evolved" too (PC, cars, houses, HVAC, wireless technologies, etc). Other than an interesting bar room discussion, I don't see the point in drawing an analogy between the practical application of improvements in technology to achieve an engineering design goal and natural biological evolution.

alicejohn said: I quickly reviewed the paper and completely ignored all of the equations. What is the point? Are they trying to give the ID community a peer-reviewed paper to quote?

Dave Luckett said: ... I wonder if the Air Force actually does that kind of research?

prongs said: There are rumors of the US Military investigating prayer and mental telepathy, just to be certain nothing's been overlooked.

Just Bob said: Prayer, really? I wonder if they covered all the bases and tested prayer to all the different gods that have been prayed to over the centuries.

These are my tax dollars at 'work'. I'd rather they just sent them directly to The Onion and skipped the middlemen.

There is a lot of junk science that gets hidden in Pentagon budgets. Con artists with PhDs can usually find some Pentagon official paranoid enough to try any “high risk/high payoff” projects just because our enemies are rumored to be doing it. The characters trolling the Pentagon for money often place such officials in a Catch 22 mentality state; if we don’t do it and our enemies do it and succeed, we’re screwed.

Here is a classic example.

Sharon Weinberger’s book, Imaginary Weapons, is great, by the way.

If anyone is interested in some examples of these strange projects, look up the details of “Project Excalibur” or “Project Orion.”

Hey, Project Orion was nothing to sneeze at. Liftoff might have been a bit dicey, but nuclear pulse propulsion is awesome stuff.

Project Excalibur, on the other hand...

diogeneslamp0 said:

John Harshman said: This isn't as bad as the usual intrusion of physicists into biology, in which they tell us that we're doing it all wrong, and then proceed to reinvent some result of R. A. Fisher's from 1930.

This is the Journal of APPLIED Physics. Translation: Engineers. Don't blame theoretical or particle physicists for this turkey. Which reminds me: which airplane has the same design as the turkey?

Mike Elzinga said: There is a lot of junk science that gets hidden in Pentagon budgets. Con artists with PhDs can usually find some Pentagon official paranoid enough to try any “high risk/high payoff” projects just because our enemies are rumored to be doing it. The characters trolling the Pentagon for money often place such officials in a Catch 22 mentality state; if we don’t do it and our enemies do it and succeed, we’re screwed. Here is a classic example. Sharon Weinberger’s book, Imaginary Weapons, is great, by the way. If anyone is interested in some examples of these strange projects, look up the details of “Project Excalibur” or “Project Orion.”

david.starling.macmillan said: Hey, Project Orion was nothing to sneeze at. Liftoff might have been a bit dicey, but nuclear pulse propulsion is awesome stuff. Project Excalibur, on the other hand...

What a great band name: The Hafnium Gap.

Mike Elzinga said: Now think of the storage and shuttling of those thousands of massive bombs from inside the spaceship to the outside, and think of the timing and speed at which it would have to transport all those bombs from their storage locations to the port from which they are ejected every couple of seconds as explosions are going off outside.

Later versions of Orion were to be built in space.

For obvious reasons.

That would be quite a challenge even today, of course.

Glen Davidson

So in engineering practicality, Project Orion was a real Noah's Ark?

I think the appeal that Orion had for me when I first heard of it was it that was a rare attempt to answer the question "What can we do with all those nuclear bombs we're building other than kill everybody?" In a very naive way (and this is me as a teenager 30 years ago) I thought of nuclear bombs as "free" in the sense that it seemed inevitable that we were going to keep building them no matter what. So I guess even the most ludicrous plan of what to do with abundant nuclear bombs other than targeting populated cities sounded like a net positive. Am I the only one who did the mental accounting this way?

The engineering problems sound daunting to say the least, and I think if technology and funding were available to build an Orion drive, we would be more likely to come up with a better solution along the way than actually build one. It may be useful as a proof of concept, like Babbage's analytical engine. You are better off developing other technologies first than taking the original idea and running with it.

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said: Later versions of Orion were to be built in space. For obvious reasons. That would be quite a challenge even today, of course. Glen Davidson

callahanpb said: Am I the only one who did the mental accounting this way?

1. Enough with the technical discussion of Orion. Further on that will go to the BW.

2. Guess what? The Discovery Institute's Evolution News and Views has discovered the Bejan et al. paper. Their line is pretty much as we predicted.

3. The ever-astonishing Denyse O'Leary takes this up at Uncommon Descent.

Is the line they take exactly as expected?

Minds make matter do things it would not naturally do, like making tons of metal fly into the air. The authors' analogy is backward. We don't infer from birds that airplanes evolve; we infer from airplanes that birds were designed!

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said: The DI whines about the unwarranted reductionism involved in the paper (not that I disagree), then writes:

Minds make matter do things it would not naturally do, like making tons of metal fly into the air. The authors' analogy is backward. We don't infer from birds that airplanes evolve; we infer from airplanes that birds were designed!

Yeah, that's a legitimate, non-reductionist inference. Ha! What's remarkable about birds, at least from a design standpoint, is how derivative they are of their terrestrial ancestors, as if we were to contort a car into a jet fighter. Human engineers don't, evolution (so to speak) does. Glen Davidson

callahanpb said: I think the appeal that Orion had for me when I first heard of it was it that was a rare attempt to answer the question "What can we do with all those nuclear bombs we're building other than kill everybody?" In a very naive way (and this is me as a teenager 30 years ago) I thought of nuclear bombs as "free" in the sense that it seemed inevitable that we were going to keep building them no matter what.... Am I the only one who did the mental accounting this way?

Joe Felsenstein said: Guess what? The Discovery Institute's Evolution News and Views has discovered the Bejan et al. paper. Their line is pretty much as we predicted.

prongs said:

Dave Luckett said: ... I wonder if the Air Force actually does that kind of research?

No doubt they do. The Navy has (or had) a group researching cold fusion, abandoned by almost everyone as pathological science, just to make certain there wasn't something genuine there (potentially useful for submarine propulsion, no doubt). NSA has advanced mathematics, in secret, beyond the current state of open knowledge. There are rumors of the US Military investigating prayer and mental telepathy, just to be certain nothing's been overlooked. Prudent research all, so long as it doesn't get sidetracked (as some think the naval cold fusion research was).

The airplanes show allometry: did you know that a 20-foot-long airplane won’t have 100-foot-long wings? That you need more fuel to carry a bigger load?

Then there are also the ”flying wing” aircraft.

Mike Elzinga said:

The airplanes show allometry: did you know that a 20-foot-long airplane won’t have 100-foot-long wings? That you need more fuel to carry a bigger load?

Are prototypes, such as NASA’s Helios with its 247 ft wingspan, allowed in these examples of allometry?

Mike Elzinga said: ... I keep having this sense of déjà vu about Bejan’s “Constructal Law.” I know I looked at a couple of his papers or presentations some time ago and concluded they were “strange;” to put it mildly. I don’t recall the context of the discussion, but I thought that UD had already sneered at one of these papers over a year ago and was making the arguments for design in biology based on design as seen in engineering. I saved in my pseudoscience folder on 9/15/2012 a paper by Bejan entitled “Constructal theory of generation of configuration in nature and engineering” from the JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS 100, 041301 (2006). Was that discussion here on Panda’s Thumb? I haven’t been able to find it. I’ve been away a lot.

Joe Felsenstein said: Your déjà vu is sound.

I am telling from long time ago: Biologists needs to wake up and responding to a war against Physicians and Mathematicians, invading the field of Physicists for discovering the basic of life's properties, as I tried building the Matrix/DNA Theory. They are occupying everything due arrogance from technological success, now they invaded natural evolution. Biologists are the culprit because they had taken this illusioned success as a indicative how nature works, and the Physics/Math interpretations of the whole Universe as the unique and the right world view. When designing airplanes models they are mimicking some methods and processes applied by Nature, but then, like did the Bible's authors, they are thinking that they are great and the center of human intelligence, and they believe that there is a ( a non confessable) God, so they are projecting themselves as the personality of God. The jump for such believer invading natural evolution, taking the drive of this field from Biologists, because Biologists are not such elected by God, has no great divine intelligence as they have...have been the normal course of religious dictatorship dominance.

If airplanes and birds were designed by the same methods and processes , should not have a way for making an airplane flying from New York to Paris, because they would always taking the direction North/South Poles, following the Earth's magnetic field.

Physicists and Mathematicians built a wrong world view because their Cosmos have no the principles forces that evolved into life's properties. Their cosmological evolution has nothing to do with the Cosmos' final product - biological evolution. There is a method for Biologists to fix this big error. Making the reverse way of evolution: you have the son, now, calculates the parents based on what you know about the son. Here we will find a better interpretation of the real truth. I tried it under rough and very limited conditions but the results already are surprising. As this papers reveals, these engineers forgot that airplanes have no DNA.

Nobody needs a "war" between physicists and biologists. Physicists have valuable mathematical methods and physical insights, and these are welcome in evolutionary biology. It is just that sometimes engineers and physicists get arrogant and fail to inquire what evolutionary biologists have actually done. They then reinvent the wheel or make elementary mistakes.

I am not sure what your "Matrix/DNA Theory" is, I have not previously heard of it. As for "calculat[ing] the parents based on what you know about the son", this sounds like the main research program of work on phylogenies: reconstructing the relationships and the forces of change, as well as inferring the features of the ancestors, from data on multiple present-day species. We're doing all that already.

Maybe we should blame the physicists. This paper is all about that planes always got heavier (see fig. 1). Here is an ordered list of the 10 heaviest birds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_birds):
Ostrich, Southern cassowary, Northern cassowary, Emu, Emperor penguin, Greater rhea, Dwarf cassowary, Lesser rhea, King penguin and Great bustard.
The last one in this list is a little bit odd, so we ignore it. My take on this paper is that Boeing is going to change its business and moving away from planes - taking the design(!!!) principles of heavy birds - to flightless planes! These new generation planes can be of course much heavier than the planes Boeing produces now.
So it is mainly marketing paper. Isn't it much fancier to travel on a flightless plane instead of a train or bus and a flightless, aquatic plane instead of a ship?

klaus.schliep said: Isn't it much fancier to travel on a flightless plane instead of a train or bus and a flightless, aquatic plane instead of a ship?

Mike Elzinga said: Flightless airplanes; “interesting” concept.

stevaroni said:

Mike Elzinga said: Flightless airplanes; “interesting” concept.

Ladies & genetlmen, I give you the Bennie Monorail.

E = mc squared.

The rest is implementation detail.

klaus.schliep said: Maybe we should blame the physicists. This paper is all about that planes always got heavier (see fig. 1). Here is an ordered list of the 10 heaviest birds (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_birds): Ostrich, Southern cassowary, Northern cassowary, Emu, Emperor penguin, Greater rhea, Dwarf cassowary, Lesser rhea, King penguin and Great bustard. The last one in this list is a little bit odd, so we ignore it. My take on this paper is that Boeing is going to change its business and moving away from planes - taking the design(!!!) principles of heavy birds - to flightless planes! These new generation planes can be of course much heavier than the planes Boeing produces now. So it is mainly marketing paper. Isn't it much fancier to travel on a flightless plane instead of a train or bus and a flightless, aquatic plane instead of a ship?

Joe Felsenstein said: By the way, this list of heavy birds illustrates the problem of ignoring phylogeny. The whole list comes from three groups. One is the Great Bustard, one is the ratites, and one is the penguins. All the ratites, large and small, are flightless, and so are all penguins. So you can't conclude that flightlessness is enabled by heaviness (in fact probably heaviness is made easier to evolve if the bird is flightless).

John Harshman said:

Joe Felsenstein said: By the way, this list of heavy birds illustrates the problem of ignoring phylogeny. The whole list comes from three groups. One is the Great Bustard, one is the ratites, and one is the penguins. All the ratites, large and small, are flightless, and so are all penguins. So you can't conclude that flightlessness is enabled by heaviness (in fact probably heaviness is made easier to evolve if the bird is flightless).

Technically (phylogenetically) speaking, the ratites are two groups, not one. So yay, there are four data points.

Oops. Actually, and according to the most recent results incorporating moas and elephant birds, the extant ratites are at least three groups. And flying in the water is close enough to flying. So 5 data points!

John Harshman said: Oops. Actually, and according to the most recent results incorporating moas and elephant birds, the extant ratites are at least three groups. And flying in the water is close enough to flying. So 5 data points!

Ah, but how many independent contrasts can you get from the tree of airplanes? You do have a tree of airplanes, don't you?

John Harshman said: Ah, but how many independent contrasts can you get from the tree of airplanes? You do have a tree of airplanes, don't you?

My wife is always telling me I need more exercise, but I'm not sure that's what she means.

John Harshman said: Ah, but how many independent contrasts can you get from the tree of airplanes? You do have a tree of airplanes, don't you?

TomS said:

John Harshman said: Ah, but how many independent contrasts can you get from the tree of airplanes? You do have a tree of airplanes, don't you?

How often did flightlessness arise in airplanes?

Does a ground effect vehicle like the Lun Ekranoplan count as a flightless airplane?

Just Bob said: Does a ground effect vehicle like the Lun Ekranoplan count as a flightless airplane?