In a post on starling murmurations, Jerry Coyne promotes this excerpt from the Illustra Media intelligent design documentary Flight: The Genius of Birds. Of course he doesn’t identify it as such, and clearly didn’t realize what he was doing. Otherwise he would have censored it:
Well, good for him. It is among the many spectacular sequences in the film. Of the phenomenon of murmurations Coyne observes:
This is clearly an evolved behavior, but the details — largely physiological and neuronal rather than evolutionary — are still obscure.
So it’s an “evolved behavior” — which it would have to be if Darwinian evolution explains everything — that in its details is not, however, largely “evolutionary”?
Jerry, let me know if you’d like a free copy of Flight. I can set you up.
UPDATE: Lad Allen of Illustra Media, producer of Flight, emailed me to express appreciation for Coyne’s post: “What’s really beautiful is that the the clip ends with the title of the film, our company ID, and website.” Indeed it does.
I’m now on Twitter. Find me @d_klinghoffer.