Are Birds Learning to Fly?

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When we see the birds flying around in ways that seem like fun, to what extent is it training them to be better fliers? To what extent can we say they're just having fun and it's not necessarily improving their reproductive fitness in any way? As an orthodox darwinian, i would have to say something like this. If it were only fun, and they were actually wasting time and wasting energy, then a rival bird that conserved its energy and conserved its time wouldt reproduce it. And so i think there's got to be some kind of added benefit o it, to the fun, such as practice. I don't see why one shouldn't argue about whether

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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