[Birdtalk] Get ready for new Field Guides - Scientists rewrite history of avian evolution

[J. Harry Krueger]

I read the original artical a few days ago and was going to comment but a
very busy schedule this past week didn't allow.

A few things:

I wouldn't throw away any of my old field guides yet... or stop calling
falcons raptors... or start counting Black-chinned Hummingbirds on nightjar
surveys. Although the referenced summary piece calls the findings
"unexpected new avian facts," at this point they are almost anything but
facts.  It is my understanding that assumed evolutionary relationships are
based on certain commonalities by these researchers.  For instance the
relationship between parrots and falcons is grounded in the similarity of
their bills... and the assumption of a commonality of evolutionary
relationship is made (for me at least, the key word here being
"assumption").

Many theories are regularly proposed by reputable researchers that never
receive acceptance by even a majority of their peers.  Some of this research
is picked up by the popular, non-scientific media intended for general
readership simply because of its "eye-catching" properties. To put it
another way, don't expect the AOU to be drastically reordering and renaming
the list of our North American birds anytime soon.

A good example of this kind of thing is a very recent, and quite massive,
study on the Canada Goose and Cackling Goose complex which concluded that
there are over 200 distinctly separate subspecies, not just the eleven
currently recognized by the AOU. Interesting reading, but assumption
changing fact... not yet at least.

There is even still some legitimate question about whether DNA commonalities
demonstrate evolutionary commonality of ancestry. Obviously, much of our
present "family tree" relationships of birds is based in a very old system
that is based on morphological similarities... something which this present
study both dismisses and yet again affirms under a new and reformulated
guise.

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 8:40 PM, <salemid at aol.com> wrote:

> Scientists rewrite history of avian evolution
>
>   Thu Jun 26, 5:05 PM ET
>
>  A five-year project has revolutionized scientific thought on the
> evolution of birds and the results are so surprising that now even the
> textbooks will have to be rewritten, a study said Thursday.
>
> "With this study, we learned two major things," said Sushma Reddy, lead
> author and a fellow at The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. "First,
> appearances can be deceiving. Birds that look or act similar are not
> necessarily related. Second, much of bird classification and conventional
> wisdom on the evolutionary relationships of birds is wrong."
> The results of the largest ever study of bird genetics are so widespread
> that the names of dozens of birds will now have to be changed, says the
> study to be published in Science magazine. The Early Bird Assembling the
> Tree-of-Life Research Project has been researching the evolution of all
> major living groups of birds and has already examined 32 kilobases of DNA
> data in 19 places of some 169 bird species. A kilobase in molecular biology
> is a unit of length for DNA fragments representing 1,000 base pairs of DNA.
> Among new discoveries the team found that birds repeatedly adapted to new
> environments. For example, flamingos and grebes did not evolve from other
> waterbirds, while birds that now
> live on land such as cuckoos did not evolve from other landbirds.  Other
> findings were that, contrary to current thought, daytime hummingbirds
> evolved from nocturnal nightjars, falcons are not related to hawks and
> eagles and fast flying ocean birds are not related to pelicans and other
> waterbirds.
> "We now have a robust evolutionary tree from which to study the evolution
> of birds and all their interesting features that have fascinated so many
> scientists and amateurs for centuries," Reddy said.  "Birds exhibit
> substantial diversity and using this 'family tree' we can begin to
> understand how this diversity originated as well as how different bird
> groups are interrelated."
>
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