Somebody want to explain to me how mammals evolved to fly? How the fuck does that work?

Actually, bats are evolved from pterodactyls.

>Veeky Forums is trying to tell me that a bunch of gerbils falling off cliffs a lot caused them to fly

Fuck you gaylords are retarded, there is no fucking way this could happen. If gerbils kept falling off cliffs, it wouldn't pressure them to fly, they would just get eaten or starve to death eventually.

You telling me some gerbil motherfuckers had to jump for food and the ones that couldn't jump high died off, until they could fly.

This is bullshit. Evolution debunked.

Squirrels don't quite fly yet, but the better their "wings", the more trees they can reach without having to go via the ground, where predators lurk.

i know you are kidding, but it's just for that reason i said a human would need very little alteration to have their hand look like a bat wing at least superficially

lmgtfy.com/?q=evolution of bats
now go away

I doubt humans will ever fly.
Evolution says they should though. What does that say about evolution?

>Evolution says they should though
It does not

No way dude, it's like a dog evolving to fly. I can't see this happening. So there was no insects on the ground for the gerbils to eat, so they started jumping around until they flew. Sounds retarded.

Google doesn't say anything about it, infact scientists don't even know how they evolved.

lmao

a human hand is formed thus
first your hand looks like a shovel, then some cells die in a pattern that looks like 5 fingers
if the gene responsible for initiating cell death is gone, you will not have fingers but a member good for swimming, potentially

i know animals look very different, but the genes involved are not that many - this is why convergent evolution is a thing and animals have similar form despite actually being different
form isn't that difficult to change

If flying is such an advantage, you're lying.

>I can't see this happening.
Now ask yourself whether that's a problem with the theory or a problem with your imagination.

The flying squirrel is a perfect example of how true flight might evolve. If all birds and bats die tomorrow, in twenty million years the descendants of flying squirrels will likely fill similar ecological roles and feature true flight.

flying would not be an advantage for a large tree-climbing omnivore who also happens to walk a lot across semi-open plains
it is an advantage for a small, tree-climbing carnivore that eats bugs that flit around in the upper branches of trees

Why not fly across open plains to eat more and eat faster?
Flying is always an advantage for every creature ever.

shit nigga, flight is too expensive for something as heavy and ugly as you

itt: convergent evolution

I can't see this happening. Let's say a gerbil mutated so that it had wings, how would it know how to fly instead of just dying off because it's a weird mutant that the other gerbils don't want to mate with. Anyways thank you for attempting to explain it. I will have to think about this.

What difference does it make for the evolution of flight to take place in mammals or birds? Bad questions warrant no good answers.

I don't think you actually get evolution, my dude

You do know that mutation (if it benefits the individual) causes evolution right?

it takes time and it doesn't have to happen at once
imagine it's a recessive mutation and some small % of the population have it so some of their offspring is indeed a useless mutant gerbil, but most of them are normal carriers so the mutation lives on
over time things change(for ex. climate) and it becomes less of a problem to have merged fingers or maybe even advantageous, especially if you are a swimmer (or want to fly?) like in example

this may seem contrived, but modern day humans have congenital disorders with merged fingers - syndactily, webbed toes etc. so the genes are there, just not very prevalent

another example is the tail, when you are a fetus the cells in your tail die based on genes and it's the same concept as with the cells between your fingers, yet there's people born with "tails" and significant variation in how the sacral backbone is between humans

point is once you kind of understand how humans and animals in general get their outward form when in the uterus you'll see that you can easily fiddle with concrete genes
and the fiddling is the selection

without understanding the genes part jerking off about selection and pressures is precisely nothing more than jerking off

It's a rat that ate the candle in church and stole the power of flight from the holy spirit.
It ate the body of Christ and became bloodthirsty.
Satan himself shows them path in the dark.
Good christians - beware.

Hands are to important to fuck them up with wings. You would need to start over from fish and retain additional pair of limbs. Can happen after humanity kills itself.

bats eat annoying biting swarming bugs
bats are good

>tips fedora

There would need to be intermediate steps that led to some advantage either in food or mating. Elongated flappy appendages that do nothing but slow an animal on the ground preflight wouldve had the opposite effect. Ever see a bat or bird on the ground? Clumsy. The hollow bone structure is not something that can be selected for either. In short OP, anyone saying convergent evolution is a lying brainlet. These animals could not have evolved.

>if I be a retard I don't have to process what other people are saying

>Ever see a bat or bird on the ground? Clumsy.

Has never seen a bird on the ground. In 50 years of paying attention, I saw a bird trip once. Not bad for a biped.

>Evolution says they should though.

You are wrong. I talked to evolution about this once, evolution said, "Nah, you guys should not fly, as far as I'm, concerned. But if you are set on it, maybe use those fucking huge brains God an I gave you and figure something out."

Then why cant we fly? It seems like a favorable trait.

>The flying squirrel is a perfect example of how true flight might evolve.

I would tend to disagree -- they are pretty well adapted as gliders, but the "wing" they have is not well-suited for any sort of obvious intermediate step where they gain much by flapping.

A gliding proto-bat, with increasingly-sized webbed fingers, gets advantages from flapping pretty quickly, in terms of launching if nothing else, and evolution to a flying form could be relatively quick.

youtube.com/watch?v=0uVpz0m-Y7A

But the question of how flight evolved in birds, bats and insects is worth considering, since it likely took different routes.

Pterodactyls and bats may have followed a similar route, with their finger-dependant webbing though obviously pterodactyls and bats have some differences in wing structure.

much weight.

You need to:
(a) be a fairly small creature to start with, so that small wing-like mutations can have reasonable effect
(b) live in a high place so those effect are more immediately advantageous

Flying lizards use the same method as flying squirrels too.

Even a slow human could catch a biped with 5cm legs. Their evolutionary vulnerability preflight compared to the time frame required for blind evolution to occur compared to the intermediary steps themselves offering no advatage or selection bias suggests strongly these animals were the greatest fluke ever or they were designed.

Neo-Lamarckianism.

they grew wings over time

>intermediary steps themselves offering no advantage or selection bias

I read this as you asserting the intermediary steps towards flight would create no advantage. Is this a correct reading of what you are saying?

If so, why would you assume that to be the case?

>(b) live in a high place so those effect are more immediately advantageous

The "leaping ground insectivore" hypothesis is out of favor, but I wouldn't count it completely out yet.

>Then why cant we fly?

We can; milli0ns of us fly every day. Evolution-wise, we followed a MUCH more unlikely path to flight than condors or beetles, but we got there.

>Even a slow human could catch a biped with 5cm legs.
You can say that after you've caught a ground bird as it's running through the underbrush. Many species only do short-distance flights in open areas and prefer to run otherwise. Theropods are very good at running in general, and even regular lizards will commonly switch to a bipedal(+tail) run

>The hollow bone structure is not something that can be selected for either.
"Pneumatization occurs in the skulls of mammals, crocodilians and birds among extant tetrapods. Pneumatization has been documented in extinct archosaurs including dinosaurs and pterosaurs."
"Postcranial pneumaticity is found largely in certain archosaur groups, namely dinosaurs,[1] pterosaurs, and birds. Vertebral pneumatization is widespread among saurischian dinosaurs, and some theropods have quite widespread pneumatization -- Aerosteon riocoloradensis has pneumatization of the ilium, furcula, and gastralia as well.[2]"
"The extent of pneumaticity depends on species. For example it is slight in diving birds, loons lack pneumatic bones at all."

"Skeletal pneumaticity allows animals to redistribute the skeletal mass within their body. The skeletal mass of a bird (pneumatized) and a mammal (not pneumatized) with similar body size is roughly the same, yet the bones of birds were found to be denser than the bones of mammals. This suggests that pneumatization of bird bones does not affect the overall mass but allows for a better balance of weight within the body to allow for greater balance, agility and ease of flight.["
"In theropods, the head and neck are greatly pneumatized, and the forearms are reduced. This would help reduce the mass further away from the center of balance. This adjustment to the center of mass would allow the animal to reduce its rotational inertia, thereby increasing its agility. The sacral pneumaticity would lower its center of mass to a more ventral position, allowing it more stabilization."

Not really, lizards use a skin flap over extendable ribs, squirrels a membranes stretched between for and hind limbs. "Flying" snakes and frogs use snakes use somethign closer to what lizards use, adding taking advantage of their ability to move in sine waves, and "flying" frogs uses something closer to what a proto-bat might haves used, taking advantage of webbed roes and fingers to turn a hop into a glide.

Forgot pic.

>extant tetrapods.

I'm old enough that there is still a thrill in saying that...

Shit, read it as "extant theropods," which is more thrilling than "extant tetrapods." Nevermind.

Err, that's "tetrapod" and not "theropod".
Although birds are "extant theropods" of course.

Yeah, I am also old enough to need to keep my readin'-specs handy with greater consistency.

Imagine a flightless bat, extinction.
Hollow bones still cant be selected for, there is no advantage, only disadvantages and vulnerability.
>biped
Your examples are of nonflight, the clumsy intermediary steps of bats with floppy nonflight appendages wouldve had to exist and thrive for eons. Whereas your theory say survival of the fittest. The nonflight bat wouldve gone extict.

>I doubt humans will ever fly.

Nigger it's called an airplane, people have been flying for years.

>Hollow bones still cant be selected for

Yet they have been, multiple times in separate species.

>Hollow bones still cant be selected for, there is no advantage
The post you're replying to clearly spelled out the advantages that skeletal pneumatization provides for balance and agility, and showed that the level of pneumatization can be adjusted.

>Your examples are of nonflight
>nonflight wouldve gone extict.
Pick one.

My guess is they jumped from trees to trees to avoid predators. first came the armpit "wings" like those squirrels and then they started flapping like crazy.

That's not how evolution works. You can't just pick a trait and evolve it when you need it.

Intermediary species. Only happens with small rodents, started with a squirrel, like animal, progressed to a flying squirrel or sugar-glider like animal, didn't take much to go full bat. Flying has evolved multiple different ways, in birds, insects, and mammals. Possibly fish too.

>You telling me some gerbil motherfuckers had to jump for food and the ones that couldn't jump high died off, until they could fly.
yep

>Flying has evolved multiple different ways, in birds, insects, and mammals.
Four that we know of -- birds, bats, insects and pterosaurs.

>Possibly fish too.

There is no evidence of any fish achieving flight -- "flying fish" are gliders, like them skwerls you mentioned.

then why don't flapping rat intermediary species exist?

checkmate BTFO atheist

>Imagine a flightless bat...

OK, I'm getting something a lot like a mouse or a shrew.

Somebody Google and see if mice or shrews are extinct, I'm too busy.

The hypothesis I like on that is that flight is so fucking useful than, once a species get's on the path to flight, it tends to get refined very, very fast.

But of course, several gliding species DO exist.

no, that wont ever happen. they glide and wont do anything past that, ever, they will become pretty perfect gliders, but true flying requires a whole new body. wont happen.

Really fat squirrels hit a famine and it stuck.

>mice have huge fucking membranes all over their body and tiny fucking feet so they cant even run from predators
user, dont play the retard, please, lets get a good discussion.

I mean look at this shit, how hard is it to imagine a species of flying squirrel under the right environmental pressures starts to be able to fly? I'm sure bats followed the same path.

> Reptiles have the ability to fly.
Which ones? Am I retarded? The closest I can think of is that lizard that glides.

Neither would a non-flying bat ancestor, though.

Do you count pterosaurs as reptiles?

Not what he meant, I think he was just trolling, but that would be the group of reptiles that flew if you can accept furry endothermic reptiles.

see