Earliest Bird Had Feet Like Dinosaur

aychamo writes "A 150-million-year-old fossil of Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, may put to rest any scientific doubt that theropods gave rise to modern birds. From the article: '[A new fossil] presents important new details of the skull morphology [shape and function] of the earliest known bird, showing also that the skull of Archaeopteryx is much more similar to that of nonavian theropod dinosaurs than previously thought.' In the new fossil, the foot looks more like that of the four-toed foot of Velociraptor and its other nonwinged theropod relatives. The specimen also clearly lacks a reversed toe. Because Archaeopteryx lacked this stabilizing toe, it almost certainly did not habitually perch in trees. This leads scientists to believe that it was a land based predator."

Comments

Re:ID

[b4k3d b34nz]

The problem with your argument is the scale of the statistics. Chances of being hit by lightning are not "astronomically low", it's about 1 in 600,000, or 1.66 x 10^-6.

Here's the breakdown for random chance of life of a prokaryotic bacterium:

1. The first bacterium would need 10,000 amino acid connections (conservative estimate).
2. Same goes for the nucleotides of DNA, we'll assume there are 100,000, which is also quite a conservative estimate--normally it would need at least 500,000
3. All these amino acid connections have to take place at the same time
4. All of these components of the DNA had to be at the same place
5. We'll use 15 billion years (generally accepted based on Hubble research, among others) as the amount of time available to create this bacterium. This is 10^17 seconds.
6. Common accepted amount of matter is something like 10^84 baryons (pieces of atoms)
7. There's a limit to how many interactions between these particles can occur within a given amount of time. We'll say 10^20 per second. This is pretty conservative

Estimated chances of a cell randomly assembling are something like 10 to the 100 billionth power (10^100,000,000,000). Assumptions 4, 5 and 6 above (statistics based on space, matter and time) together give us a probability of 10^121, or 10^17 * 10^84 * 10^20. So we have 10^121 chances within the realm of possibility (10^100,000,000,000) to randomly make a cell. Overall, this leaves us with a chance of 1 in 10^99,999,999,879. That's a lot smaller of a chance than getting struck by lightning. By the way, any chance smaller than 10-50 is considered 0 by pretty much any mathmetician.

Also, 50,000 * 10^8 should be written 5.0 × 10^12.

Re:ID

[MPolo]

I know that both sides like to just spew generalities at the other one. But you're distorting the case so much that I feel compelled to post...

"Intelligent Design" does not by definition mean "The creation account in Genesis is 100% literally true", in the same way that "Evolution" does not by definition mean "Belief that natural selection alone provided the diversity of species we see today". Both "camps" contain a wide variety of members, with different nuances.

A large fraction of Intelligent Design supporters are advocating "theistic evolution", that is, that the Creator had some role in directing the process of evolution. There are certainly others who posit direct creation of the existing types of animals by a creator. But don't lump them together, please.

A favorite argument on Slashdot is that "Intelligent Design is not falsifiable, therefore it is not scientific". On the other hand, an intelligent design supporter might ask how evolution is falsifiable. When a gap in the fossil record is pointed to, the evolutionist simply says with great faith, "We will yet find the missing link". Thus it is impossible to disprove evolution as well. Evolutionists mock supporters of Intelligent Design saying that the eyes of squids are much better than those of vertebrates, so why didn't this Intelligent Designer keep with what worked, at the same time failing to explain why natural selection failed to choose the "better" eye form.

Here's an interesting article by an electrical engineer (but published on a Christian site, so leaning towards Intelligent Design): Supernatural Selection

I think if both sides would just listen to each other a bit (perhaps excepting the completely creationist camp and the completely natural selection camp -- if they even exist today), there would be more understanding and possibly even learning from one another.

By the way, as far as official teaching, the Catholic Church has not confirmed or denied either theory, leaving it open to the scientists. Most Catholic scholars (including John Paul II, Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, and the last I read, Benedict XVI) lean toward theistic evolution, though the director of the Vatican Observatory recently made statements more on the lines of what the parent poster said. However, the mechanism of speciation has been explicity placed outside of the realm of faith -- each Catholic may believe as the evidence convinces him, as long as he accepts God as a transcendent creator and the direct creation of the human soul.

Re:Maybe He Is

[nagora]

There's nothing crazy, antisemetic or nihilistic about Nietzsche's work

No, but it is unreadable childish twaddle.

TWW