Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Why, in god's name do these goddamned birds bob their head ever so often

The question thats been troubling me for years, and more so after the release of Jurassic Park.

Lets face facts - its strange enough that a lot of these avain things don't fly. Science at school does little to explain why or why not- like it doesn't explain the ground-up theory and the tree theory of avian evolution, the evolution of down feathers, and a whole bunch of related stuff. Atleast, we weren't taught Creation unlike those kentucky kids who are taught

Though indirect evidence suggests that evolution is at work, an intelligent mind will be able to figure out that this world is too complicated to have evolved, and that it should be the work of a higher power

Religious people all over the world are uniformly funny.. lol...

Anyways, the answer is this

For an animal with side-mounted eyes, forward movements result in parallax shifts (apparent motion of near objects relative to distant objects). Now, vertebrate eyes--and retinas--work much better with completely stationary images. So what happens is that the bird's body walks on while the head is temporarily left behind to stabilize the image. The head is then jerked forward at the start of the next step.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Life, as seen from the eyes of a hopeless narcissist. A true story of one man's journey through life's little pleasures and pointless struggles; a man whose last friends died 65 million years ago; a man who believes evolution has taken a step back after Velociraptors... This is the inspirational story of his life, his experiences, joys, sorrows, women and dinosaurs; his sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic escapades and his one true love: himself.

:)))))
Heavvy da Don...Noticed it just now and it's really funny.

-Kuzh

Sriram said...

Hmm.. wasn't/isn't it a case of the classic stereo problem? U have no depth information because there is no triangulation and hence, no depth perception.. but I'm sure u already knew this too ;)