Most Bird Wings Aren’t Optimized for Flight (Jake Currie, May 7, 2026, Nautilus)
To investigate the optimization of bird wings, researchers from the University of Bristol essentially decided to design some from scratch. They created a “theoretical morphospace” of all wing shapes that could appear in nature, regardless of whether they’re actually found there or not (and they really covered their bases—some of the imagined wings were almost round while others were spindly wisps). They then tested each wing to discover which shapes performed the best in different flight modes (soaring, hovering, diving, and so on).
After identifying the ideal theoretical wings, they mapped real bird wings on top to see how they measured up. Most birds don’t have the “best” wing shapes, they discovered. In fact, the majority of birds were in the middle to low end of the optimization space. “It turns out for many birds, including most of the ones you see every day, that good enough is good enough when it comes to flight,” study author Benton Walters said in a statement.
It’s ideology, not science.