Flighty Evolutionary Speculations Taint Hummingbird Taste Study

As many people know, hummingbirds live off sweet things like nectar and special feeders with sugar water. (Be sure to clean the feeders often so that mold doesn't form and poison them — and you should avoid cleaning with bleach.) Research was conducted about the sense of taste in hummingbirds and other critters, especially about how these birds can sense sweetness.

Humans can generally taste a variety of flavors, sweet, sour, salty, umami, and bitter. Cats and other animals do not seem to have the ability to taste sweetness, but crocodiles have it. Some animals show no ability to taste anything at all. The "sense of taste" (taste receptors) are actually quite complex, and there is a great deal yet to learn about them.

Pixabay / luxlioness

The evidence plainly shows that the special taste apparatus of the hummingbird is the product of the Creator's design. Naturally, evolutionists were operating from their worldview and did some unwarranted philosophical wrangling. "This bird tastes sweet stuff? It's evolution what done it. Now let me offer opinion as fact about how dinosaur-to-bird evolution, and the sense of taste in dinosaurs". Not hardly.

Most birds are blind to sweets. They lack the taste receptor to detect sweet-tasting molecules. Yet hummingbirds—dependent on nectar to fuel their fast wings—are experts at telling what is sweet and even at fending off fakes1—non-nutritive artificial sweeteners. The unusual genetic basis for their ability, according to Harvard Medical School biologist Stephen Liberles and his coauthors publishing in Science, has pinpointed hummingbirds’ place in evolutionary history and suggests theropod dinosaurs had no taste for sweets.

After that sample, you can chew on the rest of the article by clicking on "Our Creator’s Sweet Design for Hummingbird Taste".