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Originally Posted by David To use inclination - which gives you l attitude - you also need longitude. OK, in theory if the bird could keep exact track of time (even while anaesthetised), it could get that from the sun's position in the sky, but we may only be talking about a few tens or hundreds of miles, so the change would be very small. Do we really believe all that - after all, the US had to install a fleet of navigation satellites to make its cruise missiles work properly. |
No, birds use the inclination of the Earth's magnetic field lines, not their own inclination. They are somehow comparing the angle of the lines to the horizon. There is evidence for additional migration mechanisms having to do with light, I think.
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To me, this is an example of the "any explanation is OK just so long as it is conventional" school of thought.
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You're not paying attention, David. There are actual experiments being conducted to find evidence for these ideas. It's as if you believe that a couple of grad students toss this out at some conference and everyone says "Okay, that's good enough for me. Problem solved. No work required."
On the other hand, Sheldrake says he thinks that birds are navigating by some morphic field and everyone says "Ooh, yeah, that 'splains it!" What happens next? How about this: Sheldrake proposes a storage mechanism for the morphic field, a mechanism by which the bird senses the field, figures out how to suppress that sense, and then sees what happens to the birds. Or the rats running a maze. Or anything. No one else can do it, because no one else has a clue what in hell Sheldrake is thinking. You might as well ask scientists to consider whether aliens living on the Moon are bird whisperers.
There is no hundredth monkey. Part of the problem here is that you can only refer to a proposal as "conventional" if it's been around for awhile. But it's precisely the proposals with staying power that you scoff at. There was once a time when navigation by electromagnetic field was not conventional. For some reason, scientists were willing to consider it anyway.
~~ Paul