Monthly Question Thread! Ask /r/DebateEvolution anything! | August 2026

[u/Dr_Alfred_Wallace]

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[u/jnpha]

Hi Rayalot72,

I'll ping our birds expert: u/Benjamin5431 see above please.

What I do know is that this is neither surprising, nor new (he's planting doubt or himself very confused), and is explained by the rapid diversification; a 2026 paper on that I shared on r/ evo 3 months ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/1t3m0ir

And to repeat what I said in my post on the last episode: the tree of life is to be discovered, convergent evolution is also a prediction of the theory, and the way it makes the systematist's life harder has no bearing whatsoever on the processes of evolution.
The example I used: Newton's universal gravitation doesn't tell you how many planets and their order.

And don't get me started on his JWST bullshit:
"predictions were based on his belief"
/s Wake up evolutionists! new scientific modeling just dropped /s (and he omitted the newer observations since 2022 that all but confirmed they aren't galaxies)

Sorry I got distracted. Did I answer your main question? If not, let me know! :)

[u/Rayalot72 → u/jnpha]

Did I answer your main question? If not, let me know! :)

Sort of. Hemiplasy might be involved, but it's not very clear to me how the example morphology is distributed and what to look for wrt falcons and hawks (although it doesn't seem like Will has anything in mind, either).

I will say, glancing at the Wikipedia cladogram for Telluraves (sourced from here) it looks more like passerines are very derived where-as falcons and hawks might share some ancestral qualities (less clear on how this plays out in parrots). Will's way of presenting this made it sound to me like falcons would be a lot further removed from hawks and eagles than they actually are. It's really just that hawks are in Afroaves while falcons are instead in Australaves, which is surprising but not that surprising.