I have been enjoying an engaging dialog over on PeacefulScience.org with Avian Phylogeneticist John Harshman about the development of birds following the K-Pg mass extinction event.
According to John Harshman, "all modern birds are post-K/T species".
(K-T and K-Pg are the older and newer names for the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.)
I mentioned two boundary dates: K-Pg which is 66 million years ago and the Eocene-Oligocene which is 34 million years ago.
When asked if most genera of modern flying birds evolved between the K-Pg and the E-O, he said no. Most genera (a grouping just above species) are Miocene or later (making them relatively recent).
According to Harshman, the minimum number of bird species to survive the K-Pg was around 7. From these 7 all the thousand of modern bird species are derived, including flightless birds.
The impact of the E-O extinction on birds probably cannot be easily determined at this point due to a shortage of quality fossils.
We discussed whether the Biblical term "kind" had much to correlate to in the phylogenetic structure. We agreed that phylogeny is just based on convenience with no "true" nodes.
At one point, I suggested that:
"God created every winged bird according to its kind" simply means God instigated every speciation event of birds.
To which he replied:
You can certainly believe so, in the sense that God could have caused every apple to fall from its tree, every rainbow to form, and every sand grain to reach the beach.
Ultimately, John Harshman's opinion of trying to align science and the Bible is summed up as follows:
Any attempts to match Genesis 1 to reality is doomed to ignominious failure.
Although he is very skeptical of the concordant approach to creationism and labels himself a secularist, it was none-the-less interesting to hear his objections. This has spawned ideas in my head for improving my model.
He also pointed me to timetree.org a web site that is useful for exploring the phylogenetic relationship between species. To use the website effectively, you also need to know official Taxon names. For birds, some of those can be found here: https://www.worldbirdnames.org/new/updates/taxonomy/
My Take Away
I think it is fascinating that all birds alive today descended from as few as 7 species surviving the K-Pg extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs and 75% of all species. This reminds of the recovery after the Flood of Noah. It makes me think of the K-Pg as a harvest or reaping of all that was good.
As I am also reading John Walton's Lost World of Adam and Eve, I am reminded that in Ancient Near Eastern culture, the night and darkness are associated with chaos and non-order. I wonder if the "Evening and Morning" phrase in Genesis 1 refers to the night, a time of darkness, between each Day of creation. This would make the night a Chaos Event, a time when God eliminates all that He has made that He is basically through with.
Can we think of the K-Pg Extinction Event precipitated by an astroid strike as a Chaos Event separating Day 4 from Day 5 of the creation week?
In this sense God kept the land and seas and seed plants and fruit trees of the Third Day because they were good, but He eliminated the dinosaurs because He was done with them - they were not good for what He had in mind to create next.
I will take this question, in some form, back to the PeacefulScience.org discussion forums for a group think.
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