Question for a knowledgeable evolutionist

[psychoslice]

There may have been some organisms that simply had a rudiment part of their body that looked like a wing, and after many years this rudiment part simply became what we call a wing, simple, well to me it is.

 

[ADigitalArtist]

Until fairly recently it was widely believed that birds morphed from dinosaurs

It still is. Or rather, that birds are the only extant dinosaurs left.

flight requires a lot of specialized engineering, a bird only needs a slight injury or clipping of the wing to render them useless- at which point they are a cumbersome disadvantage.

Actually part of the reason birds outlasted pterosaurian flyers is because their wings a ton better at taking damage. They can (and do) lose a significant number of feathers before they can no longer fly. The feathers can be split when flying through brush and mended through grooming, and they're not attached to the legs like with pterosaur wings. And while their bones are hollow, they're still strong relative to size. But even without flight, wings provided a huge advantage to avian dinosaurs who didn't have powered flight. From gliding/lift assisted jumping/drag assisted maneuvering, egg brooding, signaling and communication, sexual selection, creating shadow lures for fishing, insulation from both cold and warm weather, and so on and so on. We see clear demonstrations of these behaviors and these steps in feather and wing development within the fossil record. We now even have amber preserved feathers from an avian dinosaur.

As with any aircraft, the more specialized the design, the more sensitive to alteration / damage of any kind. And so the more improbable it is, that a random mutation would ever significantly improve on that design, rather than significantly damage it.

This is of course assuming the only thing to evolution is random mutation, which is only a part of it. Non-random selective forces towards more specialized or more generalized wing configuration, and sexual selection doing the same, provides the improvement. Not the mutation itself.

 

[Tiberius]

I'm an evolutionist. Out of the many unfortunate holes in the theory, there is one that stands out prominently to me:

The development of wings. What benefits can a primitive wing provide before it evolved enough to actually allow the organism to hover, glide, or fly?

The birds evolved from dinosaurs. So let's imagine a small dinosaur that would climb trees looking for food. Grubs, insects, spiders, etc. It would find jumping from tree to tree a good way to move around and avoid predators. There are lots of tree-dwelling animals that can't fly or even glide, like monkeys.

But we do know that dinosaurs had feathers. They may have used them for insulation, or display. But a dinosaur that had slightly longer feathers might have found that as it was jumping from tree to tree, the longer feathers meant it could go a little further. Not much, but enough to give it a reproductive advantage. It could reach a tree that was further away, giving it access to food sources that others would have found it difficult to reach. And so the genes for longer feathers would have spread throughout the population.

Remember, even a small change can have a large effect. There are flying squirrels that have just a flap of skin between the front and back legs. Even frogs with long toes with webs. Even the smallest primitive wing will provide benefits over no wing at all.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

I'm an evolutionist. Out of the many unfortunate holes in the theory, there is one that stands out prominently to me:

The development of wings. What benefits can a primitive wing provide before it evolved enough to actually allow the organism to hover, glide, or fly?

There is a whole video series on these kind of things I wish I could link to you but don't want to because I'm on a phone.
Firstly there are currently zero "holes" in the theory but lets talk about yours currently. The development of wings seems to be a more common development as there have been at least 4 times. I believe it has been done more than that but at least twice in insects independetly, birds obviously and in mammals.

There are two primary places from which wings evolved. Either animals that did great leaping and jumping while running and those that lived high in trees or other elvated living conditions. Lets talk about the second one first since the first one is generally a little more complicated. The ones that lived in high elevations that developed bodily mechanisms that allowed them to slow their fall or "glide" even in the slightest degree had a better chance of surviving than those that simply did not. From there the effect is cumulative. The more resistance to falling an animal obtains the better chances it has of surviving while living in an area where falling is a constant hazard.

Lets talk about flight in our warm blooded creatures. Its the most recent flying creature on the planet. Bats. Bats have wings that are structurally different than insects or birds. We even have a mid way point right now of an animal that in a few million years may be just as agile in the air as modern day bats, the flying squirrel. We can clearly see the development of stretched skin being used in the latter example only as a gliding mechanism while in the former we see more advanced development out of the same basic principles. There are a number of "gliders" that are at different levels of airborn manuverability. We even have fish whose fins have developed in such a way that it can glide temporarily out of the water.

 

[Etritonakin]

I'm not very knowledgeable, but I saw a documentary on flying fish recently.
Their fins also provide lift when out of the water.
They can taxi and glide, but do not flap their fins to remain airborne -so they do not technically "fly" -but perhaps that is just a matter of time. They do more than swim, jump and splash down again, anyway. It is believed they leave the water primarily to escape predators.

Flying squirrels and snakes also don't really fly -but they do more than fall.

If I were a betting man, my money would be on the fish flying first.
Flap, little buddy!!!

More info........ (From The Evolution of Flight )

A comparative study of the functional morphology of the wings of the earliest known flying members of the lineage with the "pre-wing" structures of likely ancestors and close relatives provides the best evidence for how wings evolved. Why wings (and hence flight) evolved from this point is a matter of contention among scientists; various hypotheses proposed include:

1. Wings evolved from arms used to capture small prey. (This seems rational, so we can ask whether the ancestral forms were actually doing this.)
2. Wings evolved because bipedal animals were leaping into the air; large wings assisted leaping. (This is possible; any amount of wing could assist leaping. Remember that we first need phylogenetic evidence for a bipedal running or leaping origin.)
   
   
3. Wings were used as sexual display structures; bigger wings were preferred by potential mates. (This is a non-falsifiable evolutionary hypothesis — we cannot test it.)
   
   
4. Wings evolved from gliding ancestors who began to flap their gliding structures in order to produce thrust. (This is reasonable and possible, but only with phylogenetic evidence for an arboreal gliding origin.)
   

It seems that #1, #2, and #4 are the best hypotheses to use for the origin of wings because they can be tested by bringing in other lines of evidence. Move on to consider these origins, but remember: the issues of the evolution of flight and the origins of flight are inextricably linked