Why donâ??t you wright a brief post on this site? Its a very fun tool, have a go with it.

Thanks, good luck!

That presumption is not very controversial when joined with your proviso that the particular actors need not be birds: bats, bees, moths, and hummingbirds are phylogenetically diverse known pollinators, for example. If an exploitable ecological niche exists, multiple species are likely to arise to exploit it.

The more compelling proposition is whether a substantially identical species would be likely to arise if you roll the evolutionary dice again: is a taxonomic type more or less likely, even inevitable? In general, I suspect, probably not.

For example, the early Homo sapiens population in east Africa appears (based on genetic diversity arguments) to have undergone a population bottleneck perhaps 70,000 years ago, not too long before some of their descendants migrated out of Africa to populate the rest of the planet. If this inference is correct, our species dwindled to within a few thousand ancestors from total extinction. One can easily envision a plausible sequence of events – a prolonged drought, a new disease epidemic – which might have exterminated such a small and localized population. The impetus for either science or blogs would then have passed to the next of kin, namely Homo neanderthalensis. They were big-brained and hardy survivors, but seem to have lacked the same creative impulse. Whether they would have evolved a comparable level of intellectual sophistication is an intriguing speculation, and the ongoing genome comparisons may even offer some insight as to how close they might have been to developing an innovative culture.

But consider how critically dependent on small historical incidents is the fate of evolution in our own time. For example, China under Mao had a billion people living under communism in extreme poverty. In the late 1970s, Mao died and was succeeded by Chao En-Lai, who instituted modest capitalist reforms. Over the next thirty years, the Chinese economy grew at double-digit annual rates. By 2010, 300 million Chinese had attained a middle-class or higher standard of living. Whereas their parent’s generation was lucky to have a full rice bowl, they could afford an occasional luxury like shark-fin soup. In response to this demand, the harvest of sharks for their fins has led to a world-wide decline in many shark species.

Had Chao died before Mao, would China have embraced capitalist reforms? Had they not, the Chinese would have remained dirt-poor, and the demand for shark fins would never have developed. Odd to think that the evolutionary survival of hammerheads in the Gulf of Mexico might be affected by which Chinese octogenarian autocrat outlived the other; yet it seems to be the case.