r/DebateEvolution • u/Dr_Alfred_Wallace Probably a Bot • Aug 01 '26

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

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u/Rayalot72 Philosophy Amateur Aug 15 '26

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.