Freethought & Rationalism Archive

lpetrich · 02-05-2002, 10:34 AM

Some living animals with more tyrannosaur-like dentition would be the Komodo Dragon and the crocodilians -- which are all carnivorous. Here is a <a href="http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~wjh101/hedbone/Gatorcroc/gatorcroc.htm" target="_blank">URL with pictures of some crocodilian skulls</a>. I found it very quickly with an Internet search.

The tiger example shows an interesting bit of convergence on the lizard/crocodilian/dinosaur pointed teeth: its molars have points on them, becoming carnassials.

Valentine Pontifex · 02-05-2002, 11:35 AM

John Solum wrote:

Quote:

Thanks for the comments, the email message from Horner is great. Have you put it online somewhere? If not, I really think you should, it'd be a great contribution to an FAQ on "fresh dinosaur bones."

Yes, yes. An FAQ on dino blood is something The Talk.Origins Archive really could use.

outtawork, you have done some work on this
with the email to Horner and thus have a good start on making an FAQ on this already.

The PNAS article, like all PNAS articles after they get [forget the number] months old are availiable online for free with no registration!

<a href="http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/94/12/6291" target="_blank">http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/94/12/6291</a>

It is also on PubMed:
<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=917721 0&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">here.</a>

Notice that Horner is listed as one an author of the paper, but judging from the comments in his email, it was the first listed author that did the work. This might be a good person to get comment from as well.

There was a recent thread on the newsgroup on a related matter:

<a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=tk368.17668%24vc.2943569%40ne ws1.rdc1.az.home.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26selm%3Dtk368.17668%2524vc.29435 69%2540news1.rdc1.az.home.com" target="_blank">here.[ /URL]</a>

To propose a new FAQ what you need to do is to
write one and then post to talk.origins proposing
the FAQ.

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-submit.html" target="_blank">Faq-submit</a>

{edited by theyeti to fix urls}

[ February 05, 2002: Message edited by: LordValentine ]

[ February 06, 2002: Message edited by: theyeti ]

lpetrich · 02-05-2002, 11:36 AM

First off, answering creationist arguments sometimes reminds me of German rocket engineer and science writer Willy Ley's comments on Hanns Hoerbiger's Cosmic Ice Theory: finding errors in it was as easy -- and as pleasant -- as picking Japanese beetles off of an infested flowerbed.

I'll be quoting John Solum here, and I'll add comments as I go.

He said that Genesis is the foundation of Christianity, and that there are two views of the past; evolution (no observer, based on extrapolation of present processes operating at present rates) and creation (based on direct observations revealed by God). ...

That favorite creationist posture: false dichotomy. There are numerous possible views, many of which have actually been stated.

He defined evolution as "man apart from God can decide what truth is" ...

A totally stupid viewpoint. What does that have to do with descent with modification?

He then moved on to dinosaurs stating that dinosaurs are the #1 most used tool to undermine faith in God.

I'm sure that he offered this amount of evidence: {}

Belief in millions of years of death leads to murder and killing today(he made a joke about Gary, Indiana here).

However, the Biblical God is depicted as being extremely murderous and supportive of mass murder committed by his followers.

At this point he also said that people need to take a stand against Hugh Ross.

I wonder what sins HR was supposed to be guilty of.

He said people need to use God's word to explain dinosaurs.

Which does not describe a single one of them.

He also said that Christian bookstores won't carry AiG's material.

I wonder if he speculated on why that might be the case.

He started by showing photos of fossil fish, saying they were evidence of a worldwide flood.

He was grasping at straws; fish can be buried by local floods.

He said that the horse transistional series was thrown out years ago yet it's still in museums.

But if those equine-like beasts were the result of special creation, they were the result of lots and lots of special creations over the last 50 million years, with each one looking much like some earlier one. The hypothesis of creations across geological time was a common one in the early 19th cy., with such notable advocates as Cuvier. But as research proceeded, the special creation of each species started looking more and more like Philip Gosse's Omphalos hypothesis of a young earth created with an old appearance, and that hypothesis went the way of Omphalos.

... He then showed a phylogenetic chart for whales (and said that it's hard to believe that a cow evolved intoa blue whale).

Actually, they evolved from some ancestral artiodactyl that lived in the late Cretaceous; whales are closest to the semi-aquatic hippopotamuses, which has a certain logic to it.

He then said that a half-wing or a half-tail is useless, and a creature with one can't survive.

However, low-quality features are better than nothing, and many high-quality adaptations can reasonably be traced back through low-qualify versions. The Walking Catfish may seem like a poor excuse for a land animal, but these fish can nevertheless walk. And if some population of walking catfish had no land competition, one can imagine the emergence of a population of more land-adapted descendants. They may have to go back into the water to spawn, but frogs and salamanders have to do that also.

He then talked about "kinds" of animals, mentioning rabbit kind, chicken kind, cow kind, sheep kind, and dog kind.

Did he ever try to work out what the boundaries of "kinds" are? Does the "dog kind" include wolves? Jackals? Foxes? Does the sheep kind include bighorn sheep? Goats? Does the cow kind include bison? Water buffalo? Antelopes?

He said the variation of wolfs to form dogs is due to a loss of genetic information, and that evolution requires an increase in the amount of genetic information, and that's not observed anywhere in the world (to support this he quoted Werner Gitt and Lee Spetner - not one mutation has been observed that adds information to the genome). He said that all mutations reduce information.

Totally absurd -- mutations that changes bases do not change the genome size, and gene duplications increase genome size.

He then said that dragons were likely dinosaurs, and dragons are mentioned in the bible. He talked about behemoth and how that had to be a sauropod.

More likely a hippopotamus. And judging from a lot of artwork, dragons were fantasy beasts.

... He said that there are only around 50 dinosaur kinds. ...

How did he work out that number?

He said that fossils are found on top of the highest mountains, providing evidence of the Flood,

Total geological illiteracy. Fossils get there because the rocks that contain them were lifted as a result of continental collisions; these collisions turn former sediment beds into high mountains.

and that scientists (conventional scientists) now say that the Grand Canyon was formed in a matter of days. He said that Lake Bonneville drained catactrophically and carved the Grand Canyon.

News to every serious geologist. However, he may have mixed up the Grand Canyon with the Grand Coulees of the US Pacific Northwest. These are formations caused by the breaking of some glacier ice that had held a lake in place; when that dam broke, a great flood resulted.

Mt. St. Helens formed layered rock in a matter of hours,

Layered VOLCANIC rock.

polystrate trees indicate that rocks weren't deposited over millions of years,

However, a tree stump in a swamp may stay undecayed because the other decaying material there had caused the decay-causing microbes to consume all the oxygen. I remember from my childhood finding some undecayed leaves at the bottom of a lake that my father would take me to swim in.

and that the Greenland ice cap could have formed quickly, indicated by the fact that the "Lost Squadron" was buried under 268 feet of ice in 50 years.

If they had really been found that deep, they either fell into a crevasse or they sank into the ice.

He said that the geologic column exists only in textbooks.

Pure horse manure. The complete column is assembled from partial columns found in many places.

He says that when you radiometrically date a rock, you have to tell the lab how old you think the rock is, and then that's the date they return to you (he quoted Steve Austin and Richard Milton).

So they don't try to measure isotope abundances? That's news to me.

[ February 05, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]

outtawork · 02-05-2002, 02:13 PM

Between John's and LordValentine's comments, sounds like I've got some homework to do.... yee haa!!

Thanks for the motivation, I'll post it when I get something together.

Outtawork

tgamble · 02-05-2002, 03:12 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by outtawork:
I wonder what sins HR was supposed to be guilty of.

Not being a YEC. The most horrible crime of them all!

Kosh · 02-05-2002, 05:23 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by John Solum:

He then said that T-rex wasn't a meat-eater since an animanl doesn't need sharp teeth to eat meat, it needs them to eat plants. He showed a sketch of the skull of a camel and said it looked carnivorous, but it wasn't. He also talked about "Little Tike" the lion, a lion that never ate meat, which he said indicates that carnivores don't have to eat meat.

I fail to what this argument, even if it were
true, would have to do with denying evolution,
or the age of the earth.

Maybe it's a pivotal argument. If the audience
buysit , they know they can move to the really
stupid stuff....

Kosh · 02-05-2002, 05:31 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by lpetrich:

If they had really been found that deep, they either fell into a crevasse or they sank into the ice.

The latter, I think. Don't remember the details
of the process, but it has been an eye opener
for geologists and their knowledge of how
glaciers work:

<a href="http://thelostsquadron.com/" target="_blank">http://thelostsquadron.com/</a>

[ February 05, 2002: Message edited by: Kosh ]

Kevin Dorner · 02-05-2002, 05:39 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kosh:
I fail to what this argument, even if it were
true, would have to do with denying evolution,
or the age of the earth.

Maybe it's a pivotal argument. If the audience
buysit , they know they can move to the really
stupid stuff....

It's the "Fall" thing again, whereby before an arbitrary command of a brutal middle-eastern tribal god was violated and an apple was eaten, all species (oh... kinds) of animals lived together in peace and harmony and nothing died blah blah blah...

So this leads one to the conundrum that either T. Rex with a mouthful of knives and no grinding molars was a vegetarian or... >gasp!< T. Rex's clearly carnivorous dentistry eee-volved since "The Fall" from its formerly vegetarian self. Few creationist lecturers would admit the latter so T. Rex must have been a vegetarian, evidence notwithstanding.

In a way, this is a test of the "Genesis Compatibility" of the audience.

[ February 05, 2002: Message edited by: Kevin Dorner ]

ps418 · 02-05-2002, 06:28 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Kosh:


The latter, I think. Don't remember the details
of the process, but it has been an eye opener
for geologists and their knowledge of how
glaciers work:

<a href="http://thelostsquadron.com/" target="_blank">http://thelostsquadron.com/</a>

[ February 05, 2002: Message edited by: Kosh ]

Its really pretty simple. The annual layers become thinnner with depth in the ice, because of the greater and greater weight of overburden (and because the ice flows outward under the weight - like a rubber band becoming thinner as you stretch it). Last year's snow might be several feet thick, whereas layers from, say, the last glacial maximum might be an inch thick or somewhere in that neighborhood. The ice at the firn/ice boundary may be a century or more old. As an examples of how the layers thin with age, Cronin (Principles of Paleoclimatology, p. 433) shows several ice core sections with well-defined annual layers from 82, 105, 120, and 135 meters below surface in a glacier in south america. Over that thickness of 53m, average annual layer thickness shrinks from 16.9, to 5.0, to 3.0, and 1.7 cm, respectively.

Patrick

[ February 05, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]

wehappyfew · 02-05-2002, 07:27 PM

Aha!
I've been waiting and lurking, hoping to catch Patrick make a mistake... and after several months, he finally did.

The P-38's did NOT sink into the ice (the density of an airplane is far less than that of ice, or they wouldn't fly) as Kosh suggested... crevasses won't work... and thinning ice under the weight of thousands of years of accumulation is totally irrelevant to artifacts buried a few dozen years ago (Patrick's idea).

The answer really is simple, though. The area where the planes landed is very near the coast, at low altitude, on a moving glacier, where the annual snowfall is far higher than at the center.

At the center of the ice sheet, at an altitude of several thousand feet, snowfall amounts to a few millimeters per year - a high, dry plateau. All the moisture has been wrung out before it gets to the center.

Near the coast, the climate is more like the Cascade Range... meters per year. Add in the fact that the location is on a moving glacier, with refreezing summer meltwater...

Simple, really.

02-05-2002, 11:36 AM	#13
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	First off, answering creationist arguments sometimes reminds me of German rocket engineer and science writer Willy Ley's comments on Hanns Hoerbiger's Cosmic Ice Theory: finding errors in it was as easy -- and as pleasant -- as picking Japanese beetles off of an infested flowerbed. I'll be quoting John Solum here, and I'll add comments as I go. He said that Genesis is the foundation of Christianity, and that there are two views of the past; evolution (no observer, based on extrapolation of present processes operating at present rates) and creation (based on direct observations revealed by God). ... That favorite creationist posture: false dichotomy. There are numerous possible views, many of which have actually been stated. He defined evolution as "man apart from God can decide what truth is" ... A totally stupid viewpoint. What does that have to do with descent with modification? He then moved on to dinosaurs stating that dinosaurs are the #1 most used tool to undermine faith in God. I'm sure that he offered this amount of evidence: {} Belief in millions of years of death leads to murder and killing today(he made a joke about Gary, Indiana here). However, the Biblical God is depicted as being extremely murderous and supportive of mass murder committed by his followers. At this point he also said that people need to take a stand against Hugh Ross. I wonder what sins HR was supposed to be guilty of. He said people need to use God's word to explain dinosaurs. Which does not describe a single one of them. He also said that Christian bookstores won't carry AiG's material. I wonder if he speculated on why that might be the case. He started by showing photos of fossil fish, saying they were evidence of a worldwide flood. He was grasping at straws; fish can be buried by local floods. He said that the horse transistional series was thrown out years ago yet it's still in museums. But if those equine-like beasts were the result of special creation, they were the result of lots and lots of special creations over the last 50 million years, with each one looking much like some earlier one. The hypothesis of creations across geological time was a common one in the early 19th cy., with such notable advocates as Cuvier. But as research proceeded, the special creation of each species started looking more and more like Philip Gosse's Omphalos hypothesis of a young earth created with an old appearance, and that hypothesis went the way of Omphalos. ... He then showed a phylogenetic chart for whales (and said that it's hard to believe that a cow evolved intoa blue whale). Actually, they evolved from some ancestral artiodactyl that lived in the late Cretaceous; whales are closest to the semi-aquatic hippopotamuses, which has a certain logic to it. He then said that a half-wing or a half-tail is useless, and a creature with one can't survive. However, low-quality features are better than nothing, and many high-quality adaptations can reasonably be traced back through low-qualify versions. The Walking Catfish may seem like a poor excuse for a land animal, but these fish can nevertheless walk. And if some population of walking catfish had no land competition, one can imagine the emergence of a population of more land-adapted descendants. They may have to go back into the water to spawn, but frogs and salamanders have to do that also. He then talked about "kinds" of animals, mentioning rabbit kind, chicken kind, cow kind, sheep kind, and dog kind. Did he ever try to work out what the boundaries of "kinds" are? Does the "dog kind" include wolves? Jackals? Foxes? Does the sheep kind include bighorn sheep? Goats? Does the cow kind include bison? Water buffalo? Antelopes? He said the variation of wolfs to form dogs is due to a loss of genetic information, and that evolution requires an increase in the amount of genetic information, and that's not observed anywhere in the world (to support this he quoted Werner Gitt and Lee Spetner - not one mutation has been observed that adds information to the genome). He said that all mutations reduce information. Totally absurd -- mutations that changes bases do not change the genome size, and gene duplications increase genome size. He then said that dragons were likely dinosaurs, and dragons are mentioned in the bible. He talked about behemoth and how that had to be a sauropod. More likely a hippopotamus. And judging from a lot of artwork, dragons were fantasy beasts. ... He said that there are only around 50 dinosaur kinds. ... How did he work out that number? He said that fossils are found on top of the highest mountains, providing evidence of the Flood, Total geological illiteracy. Fossils get there because the rocks that contain them were lifted as a result of continental collisions; these collisions turn former sediment beds into high mountains. and that scientists (conventional scientists) now say that the Grand Canyon was formed in a matter of days. He said that Lake Bonneville drained catactrophically and carved the Grand Canyon. News to every serious geologist. However, he may have mixed up the Grand Canyon with the Grand Coulees of the US Pacific Northwest. These are formations caused by the breaking of some glacier ice that had held a lake in place; when that dam broke, a great flood resulted. Mt. St. Helens formed layered rock in a matter of hours, Layered VOLCANIC rock. polystrate trees indicate that rocks weren't deposited over millions of years, However, a tree stump in a swamp may stay undecayed because the other decaying material there had caused the decay-causing microbes to consume all the oxygen. I remember from my childhood finding some undecayed leaves at the bottom of a lake that my father would take me to swim in. and that the Greenland ice cap could have formed quickly, indicated by the fact that the "Lost Squadron" was buried under 268 feet of ice in 50 years. If they had really been found that deep, they either fell into a crevasse or they sank into the ice. He said that the geologic column exists only in textbooks. Pure horse manure. The complete column is assembled from partial columns found in many places. He says that when you radiometrically date a rock, you have to tell the lab how old you think the rock is, and then that's the date they return to you (he quoted Steve Austin and Richard Milton). So they don't try to measure isotope abundances? That's news to me. [ February 05, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

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02-05-2002, 10:34 AM	#11
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	Some living animals with more tyrannosaur-like dentition would be the Komodo Dragon and the crocodilians -- which are all carnivorous. Here is a <a href="http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~wjh101/hedbone/Gatorcroc/gatorcroc.htm" target="_blank">URL with pictures of some crocodilian skulls</a>. I found it very quickly with an Internet search. The tiger example shows an interesting bit of convergence on the lizard/crocodilian/dinosaur pointed teeth: its molars have points on them, becoming carnassials.

02-05-2002, 02:13 PM	#14
outtawork Junior Member Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: San Diego, Ca Posts: 97	Between John's and LordValentine's comments, sounds like I've got some homework to do.... yee haa!! Thanks for the motivation, I'll post it when I get something together. Outtawork

02-05-2002, 07:27 PM	#20
wehappyfew Junior Member Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Virginia Posts: 43	Aha! I've been waiting and lurking, hoping to catch Patrick make a mistake... and after several months, he finally did. The P-38's did NOT sink into the ice (the density of an airplane is far less than that of ice, or they wouldn't fly) as Kosh suggested... crevasses won't work... and thinning ice under the weight of thousands of years of accumulation is totally irrelevant to artifacts buried a few dozen years ago (Patrick's idea). The answer really is simple, though. The area where the planes landed is very near the coast, at low altitude, on a moving glacier, where the annual snowfall is far higher than at the center. At the center of the ice sheet, at an altitude of several thousand feet, snowfall amounts to a few millimeters per year - a high, dry plateau. All the moisture has been wrung out before it gets to the center. Near the coast, the climate is more like the Cascade Range... meters per year. Add in the fact that the location is on a moving glacier, with refreezing summer meltwater... Simple, really.

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