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Vorpal Rabbit-o-Saurus
guacamolefoo writes "CNN reports that a rabbit-o-saurus fossil was discovered in China. Apparently it lived about 128 million years ago and was related to the T-rex. It had feathers and large, buck teeth.
Paleontologists are finding more and more bizarre things. Some seem so strange that they must appear to some to be made up. When the science skeptics get ahold of the rabbit-o-saurus, they'll put it right next to their moon landing hoax books and their creationism propaganda."
When the science skeptics get ahold of the rabbit-o-saurus, they'll put it right next to their moon landing hoax books and their creationism propaganda
According to the article, the technical name for this dinosaur is Incisivosaurus. Calling it a "rabbit-o-saurus" instead will only encourage the skeptics. The picture in the article depicts something that, aside from the buck teeth, is very different from a rabbit--it looks much more like an emu or an ostrich. This is, to my understanding, consistent with recent research that suggests that dinosaurs were the antecedents of birds. And buck teeth would, no doubt, be useful in digging up plant roots or whatever, suggesting that it was a herbivore.
Granted, it's one funny looking mother.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
One of my biggest gripes with fundamental christianity (which I was raised in btw) is the hypocritical idolatry of the Bible. The Bible is just a book assembled by man. A great book but it has no magical powers and cannot fight vampires.
I think part of the root of this hypocrisy is various references in the Bible to the "word of god". Now, at the time those particular verses were written; there was no Bible. Yet people assume these were forward looking statements covering the Bible. If you really believe in a God that transcends the physical world, why put so much faith in a stack of paper that you are probably interpreting out of its own historical context and doing so poorly?
To each his own though....... I could be wrong.
Never overestimate the end user. -jeramy b. smith
Maybe it's because the creationists can just play the "God is all-powerful, so anything is possible" card at any time. Hard to poke holes in a Biblical theory which has no limitations, isn't it? You don't know how many times I've gotten the "That's one of the mysteries of God" answers. Sorry, but for some people who don't want to think that answer may be enough, but it's not enough for some of us thinking peoples.
I think I would prefer having a world that changes with new information that I have to think about rather than one where I'm told what to think by a 2000 to 4000-year old book. Maybe I like thinking about life, the universe, and everything more than living a blissful, yet ignorant, life where I can "know everything" by reading a book that hasn't changed in the last 1500 years, at least.
Maybe it's this rigidity of the typical Creationist that many people find unsatisfying. To them, the world is already figured out, why bother studying it? Why can't you just live your life according to what this book says? I consider this a pure stagnation of all thought and progress. Science is based off of experimentation and observation... new ways of observing things give new ideas and new theories. Science is not stagnant, and that is one of its strengths. The conservative minds that Creationists tend to have don't like things changing... a continuum is something that Bible-thumpers and Creationists can't handle. Everything has to be discrete and in nice, easy to understand pieces. Things don't happen gradually; they just happen. This flies in the face of so many things that people experience in the world... coffee doesn't spontaneously change to room temperature, clouds and weather just don't spontaneously appear, new lives aren't just brought into creation in adult sizes. That's why creationism seems like the odd man out. Yeah, you can play the "everything" card in God; that's fine. But that's a weak logical argument. Hard to have an intelligent argument with a person who "knows everything", isn't it?
-Jellisky
The reason for the comment is that although its rude, its funny and true.
Aren't we the ones who prefer Linux to Windows because it doesn't break as often? As rational and intelligent people, many of us professionals and experts in industry and academia, we pride ourselves on choosing the tool that gives us the best results.
A much better analogy would be Linux is like science because anyone can develop a bugfix, and so is more likely to fix bugs faster.
Surely, while the discovery of a species of rabbit that no longer walks this Earth may surprise the evolutionists and Science-worshippers, it's plain to see that it fits right in to the Creationist worldview. Extinct species don't have to be our "ancestors." They were just creations that didn't make it through the flood.
First of all, it is *NOT* a species of rabbit!! It is a species of dinosaur that happens to look like a rabbit in one small way. It has buck teeth. Secondly, there are plenty of extinct species of rabbit, but they are all ancestors or relatives in some way. Thirdly, the idea of a global flood is ludicrous for several reasons. One, where did all the water go? Enough water to raise sea level to the summit of Mt. Ararat doesn't just disappear. Two, why is there still sea life? A flood of that magnitude would have stired up enough silt and sediment to kill every living creature in the sea. Three, why do we see layers of sediment in things like the grand canyon? If there was a flood like that, we should see one single huge layer of sediment. There are tons more flaws with a great flood hypothesis, I'm sure you can find them online.
So once again, we see Scientists scurrying about, trying to revise their fragile theories so that new information doesn't destroy them. Remember the great Scientist Aristotle? How about Newton? Those guys were the best Science had to offer, and now we know how wrong they were.
Yes, that is how science works. Everytime that an inconsistency is pointed out, the ideas are revised so they are more correct. We know that not every single one of our ideas are completely correct, but we are pretty close and getting closer all the time.
Religion on the other hand just ignores all the new evidence and just says its not true, unless you're Catholic, in which case it only says its not true until 300 years after its been accepted by the general populous of scientists.
Meanwhile, the Bible has been through, count 'em, one revision in the same time period. New discoveries poke holes in Scientific theories, while supporting Biblical ones, almost without fail.
Without fail?! LOLOL, that is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. You seem to have conviently forgotten about the geocentric theory, the global flood (see my reasons above for discounting it), evolution (we *have* observed evolution many many times, the only question is how it happens), and the myriad armageddon predictions. The only reason you think no evidence contrary to the bible exists is because you stick your fingers in your ears and say "la la la" whenever it pops up.
If you really want to find some good evidence for creationism or any other biblical hypothesis, find something those hypotheses actually predict, and then do an experiment to test the prediction. Fitting the data to your theory after the fact is dishonest research.
When the science skeptics get ahold of the rabbit-o-saurus....
Is anybody else enjoying the irony here? Although they derive from different roots, "skeptic" and "science" are startlingly close in meaning. "Skeptic" comes from the Greek skeptesthai ("to look carefully"). "Science" came from the Latin "scire" ("to know").
Sounds to me like skepticism and science go hand in hand. They're not opposites like you seem to want to imply they are. Maybe you should choose your words more carefully next time, guacamolefoo.
> Oh my, how I'd like that to be true! Unfortunately, ``peer review'' (which is neither) only guarantees that revolutionary findings are suppressed for 30 years or so, and by then those who actually thougth of it, the true scientists, are retired or even dead, and the looters of science `rediscover' those findings and become the new high priests of the departed genious. Then, this new generation of looters and fakers block the new ideas for another 30 years... and so it goes on and on generation of looters following generation of looters that feed on the work of real scientists.
You seem to portray this as the norm for the field. How many examples can you cite?
> The so-called ``peer-review'' also means that skeptics in science never get published. Only those that `get along with the program' are not silenced.
This, along with your earlier assertion that revolutionary findings are suppressed for 30 years, is a sure indication that you've never read much peer-reviewed literature.
Peer review isn't about ensuring orthodoxy; it's about ensuring that you support your claims. We get revolutionary and/or contrarian views expressed in peer-reviewed literature all the time; what we don't get (when the system works) is grandiose claims based on sloppy work and/or handwaving arguments. There's a reason cold nuclear fusion was announced in the news press rather than in a peer-reviewed publication, and it ain't because CNF would have rocked the boat.
> And answer this: why is the review done on things we never get to see.
Actually, almost all of it is plainly visible if you care enough about it to study up in the field and go to conferences where you can talk to people about what they're doing.
> We have had the Inet for a couple of decades now... why is science not published first and reviewed later?
To a certain extent that is in fact happening. Many prominent researchers have non-peer-reviewed articles available at their Web or FTP sites, or at some other centralized repository. The entire "tech report" mechanism uses only lightweight review, i.e. is usually only a grad student's work reviewed by that student's advisor, which is not generally considered a detached enough reviewer or a broad enough review for this to count as peer review proper. Yet huge masses of this stuff is available over the internet. (Hint: google for "university of <state>" and "tech report", and spend the next few years reading the papers you find.)
Unfortunately, this arrangement is not altogether satisfactory. There's just too darn much material out there to allow reading everything written even for a sub-sub-sub-field of some major discipline. Peer review is nice because it filters out most of the stuff that is just text without a point, or without any tangible contribution to the field, or that "discovers" something the experts already knew, or that doesn't follow good experimental procedures, or that makes claims that aren't actually supported, etc. Peer review is ultimately a spam filter; the internet makes peer review more important rather than less important.
> To do it that way costs less than 10%
Yes, several major disciplines are trying to move away from the traditional print journals, partly due to cost issues and partly because the internet will give wider access and thus make science more open.
> and science would be transparent to us all.
Other than weapons research and the direct applications research going on in big companies, science is remarkably transparent. For peer reviewed science all you really need is a library card.
> Yes, fakes---read non-officially santioned fakes---are found out. But others, like Darwinism, are not. Go and ask for any evidence that supports Darwinism... you get called ``Creationist''.
That's because with six nines' accuracy only creationists are asking for evidence that supports the theory of evolution. Scientists realize that in the big picture a theory isn't something you dream up and then try to dredge up evidence to prove. In fact it's almost the reverse of that process: faced with a big pile of evidence, you generate a theory as a model that explains it.
If you have a better model for biology than the theory of evolution, you should write it up and submit it to Nature for publication. But sitting around and asking "where's the evidence" merely makes you look ignorant, not only of the evidence but of what science is all about.
> Be a skeptic, be a scientist, and get labeled as ``Creationist''.
Sorry, but your post indicates that you don't even know what science is. Spend a few years of intense study learning what observations the theory of evolution was created to explain, then come back and post your alternative model and explain why it is better - then, and only then, will I acknowledge you as a scientist. Meanwhile you differ from creationists only in the details, not in the important dimension, cluelessness.
Sorry to sound so harsh, but you need to think things out a bit. Try going to a construction site and convincing everyone that there aren't enough anchor bolts in the steel columns, or go to an operating room and try convincing everyone that the incisions should be made elsewhere, or go to a racetrack and convince the drivers to swing wider on the curves, or any of a million other examples. You can't just sit in your armchair and proclaim "I don't believe the experts, let them prove me wrong!", and expect to be labeled a scientist for your trouble. Science isn't in the business of convincing recalcitrant deniers; science is in the business of understanding nature. For that we observe nature and construct models; the rhetoric of denial is irrelevant.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade