[TeMPOraL]

I understood them to mean that evolution evolves things on an ongoing basis, and doesn't start from abiogenesis each time. So the current form of a bird species is very much constrained by the form of what it evolved from.

I'd also add that it seems evolution isn't even turning bicycles to cars bolt by bolt, but is adding whole subsystems at a time. It's as if each bike was made of a set of standard ACME parts, and came with a set of blueprints for many other kinds of ACME parts - and evolution, at the large animal level, is just replacing one standardized part for another, or adding new ones where they didn't exist, or altering the manufacturing timings, etc.

I'm of course referring to the findings of evolutionary developmental biology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_developmental_bio....