Hacker News Reader

Yes.

I know nothing about the evolutionary origin/path of the chicken except that it's a "flightless dinosaur". It certainly has "reduced flight capacity", but given evolutionary time and pressure, it certainly doesn't seem like a controversial idea that chickens -- given the right selective pressure -- could evolve in a direction towards being fully flighted dinos again...?

View on HN

Chickens can perform short flights, but from my limited observations it seems like the stamina is the main limiting factor for them. They've however clearly evolved from fully flight-capable birds, but the now-extinct Moa however might have been a different story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moa

Oh, yes, there are evolutionary dead ends, but e.g. the Moa (or even the Dodo[1]) basically evolved for really long without any evolutionary pressure towards avoiding "enemies" and thus was stuck in a local optimum with no way out.

Still ~25 seconds of sustained flight, just about the record for a chicken, I think seems like not-evolutionary-dead-end-enough to my untrained eye. :). YMMV.

[1] AFAIUI, it was humans that ultimately drove it to extiction, but it could have been any invasive species that would kill bird-like thigs. Maybe I'm wrong on that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com