There are laws relating weight versus surface area and things like that. As you increase the ilinear dimension a, the size of anything, doesn't matter whet it's an animal or a block of wood. So the smaller you are, the easier it is to fly. If you're the size of a horse, say, then flying becomes essentially impossible. There's one terrasor quetze coatalus, which is it may be as heavy as a horse. Andd that man to presumably glideo from high places.
Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. But it hasn’t invented jet engines. What are the different ways that heavier-than-air objects might be made to fly, and why does natural selection produce some of them but not others? Richard Dawkins has a new book on the subject, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. We take the opportunity to talk about other central issues in evolution: levels of selection, the extended phenotype, the role of adaptation, and how genes relate to organisms.
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Richard Dawkins received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, where he was previously the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He is an internationally best-selling author, whose books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.
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