Our best scientists still can’t figure it out how it works: Bird navigation

April 28 2012, Cornelius Hunter — Evolution may be unguided but its creations certainly are not. From ants and bees to fish and birds, nature’s creatures have remarkable built-in guidance and navigation capabilities. Birds, for instance, can fly thousands of miles and return to the same location.

How organisms are able to  perform these feats, let alone how evolution could have created such capabilities, has puzzled scientists for years. Such capabilities can be divided into several functions such as sensing information from the environment, storing the sensed information, comparing the stored information with reference information, deciding how to act given the comparisons, and so forth. New research is now helping to explain a bit more about the storing function in pigeons.

The new research suggests that there must be, as yet undiscovered, magnetic field sensors in the bird’s inner ear which report compass readings to the brainstem. The story is further complicated, however, by activity in other regions of the brain as well. The researchers were able to detect signals in specific neurons, and how different neurons were sensitive to particular compass readings.

The researchers suspect that the reference information is stored in the hippocampus. As one writer explains:

In some birds that hide seeds and return later to their caches with astonishing accuracy, the hippocampus grows and shrinks seasonally, presumably as they map their hiding spots.

It has been an on-going and difficult area of research and this latest study is being called “stunning.” But it is only a small part of the story and there is much more to learn.

What is being slowly revealed is an astonishingly complex guidance and navigation system. As its profound complexity is increasingly understood the belief that it arose by chance biological variation becomes increasingly exposed for what it is: a non scientific and outdated view of origins.

In this case, we would have to believe that sensors arose by chance, with multiple neurons that by chance reported their data to parts of the brain that by chance stored the information, and that other parts of the brain by chance evolved capabilities to store reference information, and that other parts of the brain evolved capabilities to compare the sensed information with the reference information and to make decisions.

All of this had to be constructed in the embryonic stages and operate robustly in the mature bird. And all of this is so complex our best scientists still can’t figure it out how it works, let alone how it could have evolved. And yet evolutionists are certain that it did evolve. That is a conviction, not a scientific conclusion.
source: Darwin’s God