What Is a Bird? (Science of Living Things (Hardcover))

Rating:
Summary: Flawed exposition of evolution
Review: This is such a good book with thorough, well illustrated and clearly written coverage of so many important concepts of bird biology, adaptation and natural history. It's well laid out and well illustrated with a mix of drawings and photos. I liked that it covered feathers and flying mechanics. But it has a fatal flaw in the paragraph on bird evolution. Commendable that they even mentioned evolution I guess, but they did so in such a way as to promote the confusion and misunderstanding of this important biology concept. Here's the paragraph: "Scientists believe that birds were reptiles millions of years ago. Some reptiles evolved, or changed, in order to survive. They grew flaps of skin between their front and hind legs and used these flaps to glide from tree to tree. In time, these flaps became feather-covered wings. It took millins of years, but these ancient reptiles learned to fly. They became birds." This is followed by a picture of a reptile climbing up a branch, gradually morphing into a bird that takes off to fly. There are several problems with this explanation--birds weren't reptiles millions of years ago--modern reptiles and birds have common ancient ancestors. Evolution happens at the level of a population, not an individual, so evolution is not change within an individual, it is change within the genetic makeup of a population. And the reptiles didn't "grow" flaps of skin between their front and hind legs, again, this happened over time through changes in the genetic makeup of the population when those individuals who had the flaps because they were born with them had a survival advantage and passed this trait on to their offspring. Lastly, the photo of the reptile morphing into a bird all taking place on the same branch give the impression that evolution is quick rather than taking thousands of years and thousands of generations. I don't know how I would describe this to an eight year old, but I wouldn't do it the way it was done in this book.