Gaggle of crows

A blustery day in Victoria on Sunday, and the trailer at my construction site was arockin and arollin. A two foot length of 2 by 4 fell out of the sky while I was looking out over the scene, and a large moth fluttered by. Surprising. Made me think of the scene in Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up in her house and sees the witch riding by. I gave my flock of crows a can of sardines to go with their cat food today. They know me by now and follow me when I patrol the catwalk, one or two walking behind me and another one alighting on the railing ahead of me. They don't get enough from me to grow too dependent, but maybe it will be enough to tide some of them through the winter. And maybe in the spring they'll bring their fledglings over. I've always wanted to have a wild crow friend. He's got his own life, I've got mine. And I want to teach him to say, "F... off." I think they leave little gifts for me on the railing in front of the office. An old chicken bone, or one of the colourful foam earplugs that get tossed all over the site when the guys are finished with them.
I don't know these crows well enough to distinguish one from the other. Some are bigger, others smaller, some are bullies, others are bullied. I think they might be members of a single family. Crows are often thought of as birds of ill omen, presumably because they are feeders on carrion. In The Iliad being left on the field of battle to feed the birds and dogs is a disgrace. Crows, and all corvines, are considered the brains of ornithology, and obviously much smarter than gulls. Gulls are much bigger than crows and prey on their nestlings and push them off their food. However, I've seen a crow tease a gull by sneaking behind and pulling his tail feathers. Over and over again. Clumsy and stupid, the enraged gull could do nothing to rid himself of the pest. It was hilarious and I had the feeling the crow thought so, too.
One of my lifelong interests is evolution, and looking at the crows' beaks make me wonder about beaks and birds. Not all birds fly. Ostriches and their kin run. Different birds fly differently, soaring on updrafts like eagles, flitting through underbrush like finches, hovering like hummingbirds. But all birds have beaks. A myriad of birds live all over the world, filling every conceivable niche, varying drastically in size. Many navigate thousands of miles when the seasons change. They eat seeds, insects, nectar, grass, rotten meat, fish. Yet they all have beaks.
My first criticism of standard Darwinian theory was over the complexity of the ear. How could there be any advantage to an incremental mutation that had nothing to do with hearing to eventually become an ear, including the complex mechanisms that transfer air vibrations to the neurons. This is something I recently discovered has a fancy name: irreducible complexity. Compared to an ear or an eye a beak seems fairly simple, but I don't think it is. Without knowing anything about the anatomy of a beak I can see it has nerve endings, a nasal passage and all sorts of complexities. So what happened in the great long ago of cretaceous or jurassic times? Did a clutch of birdlike lizards suddenly hatch out of their eggs with beaks while all others around them in the colony had jaws and teeth? Because obviously, unless you are an amoeba, it takes two to have descendants. The complex of adaptations must occur twice before it can be passed on, and at the same time. What are the odds of all this occuring? You'll have to ask the statisticians, but it looks like a very poor bet to me. And yet there is no denying the facts of evolution.
However it happened, did it happen just once, and have all subsequent birds descended from that one mutant? Pretty hard to know, and a real mystery that has yet to be solved deepens the more you think about it. But what is evolution, anyhow? The word itself is inadequate. Incremental change over time through genetic variation (mutation) and adaptation to different habitats and life strategies (natural selection) is what evolutionary theory attempts to explain. It seems on the surface fairly logical that it might work until you realize that genetics is about chemistry- the chemistry of proteins. DNA is a chemical factory able to precisely produce chemicals with an almost infinite range of variation. A whole organism, like a crow, or even Prince Charles, must be at least as complex as the entire physical universe.
This complexity preexists life itself. As Wickramasingh and Hoyle point out in their book, The Cosmic Life Force " Enzymes are polymers or chains of smaller units known as the amino acids. There are enzymes to assist almost every basic biochemical process and without such enzymes biology as we recognize it could not exist...The random chance [of enzymes forming spontaneously] is not a million to one against, or a billion to one or even a trillion to one against, but p to 1 against, with p minimally a superastronomical number equal to 10 to the 40000th power."
But although life is based on chemistry, complete organisms like crows and Prince Charles are not just a collection of chemicals, they have form: wings, black feathers, a beak, in the case of crows, and a potential monarch of an island in Prince Charles. The relation of form to chemistry is something evolutionary biologists don't like to talk about. There is no obvious connection.
I bring Hoyle and Wickramasingh into the discussion because of their theory of panspermia, which argues that life, far too complex to have begun in the short lifespan of the earth, must be a cosmic phenomenon and that comets may be the means of transplanting it to earth. Their book is especially strong on the chemical basis of life, from the standpoint of one of the great physicists of the 20th century. It's well worth a read and I hope to say more about it in the future.