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Scientists Find Missing Link in Bird Evolution
BlueCup writes "Dozens of fossils of an ancient loon-like creature that some say is the missing link in bird evolution have been discovered in northwest China. The remains of 40 of the nearly modern amphibious birds, so well-preserved that some even have their feathers, were found in Gansu province, researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Previously only a single leg of the creature, known as Gansus yumenensis, had been found."
They were planted there by the Flying Spaghetti Monster to test the convictions of the faithful!
Join Tor today!
Wonderful. They may have "found the missing link" but now there are two missing links to take its place!
No you fools, now there are two missing links (previously we wanted to find C between A and B, now we want to find D between A and C, and E between C and B) Of course this all really goes to show that you can never completely verify evolution no matter how much evidence you collect (just like any scientific theory), which is fine since you can be certain of the truth of something even if there is a remote possibility of later disproof. The public's obsession with "missing links" just goes to show that they don't understand knowledge very well.
Philosophy.
KFC's stock soared 100 points with the news that the protoduck would be served boneless and with hot sauce. When asked to comment on the decision to serve 100 million year old extinct bird, a kfc representative was quoted as saying "It has to taste better that the cluck we serve now"
Regardless, it is pretty cool that China, given their track record for openness and freedom of speech, is open to scientific progress.
~ C.
What if this bird, that was flying around, fell out of the sky and landed in this pond?
..god put it there to confuse the silly evolutionists..just like George Bush was elected to confuse the rest of the World.
It's the chicken and egg thing all over again.
"During Gansus's time, a group of birds called the Enantiornitheans--known as opposite birds because their wing joints are reversed compared to their modern relatives--dominated the skies. But the opposite birds perished along with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago."
Did these birds fly upside down, or in reverse gear?
Oh well, what the hell...
I think deviled eggs, only because "Buffalo" (word or city) is much more recent than "eggs" or "devil".
I would finish this post, but I find myself a bit peckish (adj. def 2), no pun intended...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
"...Previously only a single leg of the creature, known as Gansus yumenensis, had been found." ...But did it taste like CHICKEN???
Now just to find where humans fit into that line. I think they might be 6th or 7th, I'm not sure.
Do not mark in this space. For official office use only.
Huh ?
Is "Can you say OOOOLD news" department at it again ?
Read radical news here
That's no ancient loon-like creature, that's my wife!!
Chinese culinary historians were also very excited by the discovery, noting that this pushes back the date of the earliest known example of Peking duck 110 million years.
I'm suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,199695,00.html
Those of us with room-temperature IQs are perpetually assured that there is overwhelming evidence for Darwinian gradualism in the fossil record. So, after reading the news release linked above, I asked myself, "Self, why is this big news?"
I guess I just don't get it. Why has the missing link in bird evolution just been found, when I have been assured for years that there is overwhelming evidence in the fossil record that the enigma of bird evolution was already solved?
Sigh. I'm apparently too stupid to understand Darwinian logic.
Filed under: Intelligent Design -- GilDodgen @ 10:23 pm
Karma? Sorry, i don't believe in superstition. http://talk.thinkingmatters.org.nz
Following the naming convention of the "Peking Man", is this one going to be "Peking Duck"?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Are there any real experts out there who can explain how they know this creature was amphibious? I looked at the image, and I see no indication that this creature spent most of its time in the water. It seems no different than a duck - adapted to the water, but certainly not spending most of its time there. How can you tell?
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Where does the article mention carbon dating? What is the relevance of your statement? Can you provide a scientific reference to your statement regarding potassium-argon dating?
I'm not that knowledgable about evolution but I do know that many keep saying that there really is no such thing as the "missing link" and people that keep refering to such an elusive idea do not fully understand. Why then, does slashdot, supposedly with a fairly intelligent readership, seem to keep posting articles with headlines containing "missing link" so often? Why keep talking about it like it has been found (again and again) if it really doesn't even need to exist in the first place? Sorry, I'm confused.
Meh.
"Not again?"
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
Often proponents of creationism and intelligent design tend to choose the dating technique that fits the picture they have in their minds. For example, the poster above me stated a single, unrefined example of a dating technique being off in order to set a mindset that this technique is unreliable, and, unjustifiably, useless in all situations. He or she also states the half life of carbon-14, and a continued presence of it in fossils to understate the possible age of the fossil, conviently fitting into creationary mold set by the bible. How old is the world again? 6,000 years?
As you probably don't know, given the woeful understanding of science shown by creationist, no real scienctist uses carbon-14 for objects that old. So please shut the fuck up instead of displaying your ignorance to the world.
Is it just me or does anyone else find that there's an unusually large number of unique fossils coming from China? Maybe it's because, like products manufactured for Walmart, they're mostly cheap crap http://www.paleodirect.com/fakechinesefossils1.htm
NT
Carbon dating is only reliable to ~60k years because it is a naturally occuring isotope. It can be found anywhere at any time. However, living things tend to have higher levels of radioative C-14 than non living things, because of hte way carbon is recycled through living organisms.
After ~60k years, the level of C-14 in a sample can not be reliably seperated from the "background noise" of the C-14 that might just happen to be lingering around.
Potassium-argon dating can not be used on once-living things because radioactive Potassium-40 decays into Argon, a gas, which tends to escape into the environment -- unless it's in solid rock. Thus is is useful for dating lava flows. Also, the half-life of radioactive Potassium-40 is very long, about 1.3 million years (compare to C-14 at a mere 5730 years). Therefore K-Ar dating is only useful for dating "really old non-organic things" like... ancient lava flows.
It's simply a matter of using the right tool for the job.
=Smidge=
This isn't the missing link, it's a missing link. The fossil record is imperfect, and that makes every new fossil discovery a previously 'missing link' that connects a pair of things together in an evolutionary chain. This doesn't indicate a problem with Darwin's theory, just the tendency for journalists to sensationalize things in hopes that people will actually pay attention to less-than-earth-shattering discoveries. Unfortunately, scientists play the same game, as it helps give their work higher profile at the expense of distorting its actual value.
If anyone has told you that the "enigma of bird evolution" is already "solved" they would be wrong. The biggest problem with that statement is that there is no single enigma that needs solving. We know a lot about bird evolution, and this new discovery gives us a bit more information. But there is no single fact that awaits discovery that will allow us to say 'there, that's solved it, time to move on to cold fusion'. Most of the debate over evolution arises from this reduction of complex ideas to overly simple terms.
yp.
Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring:
Mandatory linkage for reading up on this (quoted from this site: http://creationsafaris.com/crev200606.htm#20060616 b
The news media are abuzz with the phrase "Missing Link" again. This time, it's about a fossilized duck or loon found in Early Cretaceous strata in China, announced in Science.1 The article calls it a "nearly modern" bird with soft-tissue preservation, including webbed feet, wing feathers and downy feathers. They said it "possesses advanced anatomical features previously known only in Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic ornithuran birds." Being found in Early Cretaceous strata (assumed 110 million years old) makes it "the oldest known member of the clade," but the paper does not call it a missing link. Neither does the summary page "This week in Science" earlier in the issue; in fact, the summary states "this Early Cretaceous bird has many derived features," and "It was also well adapted for an aquatic-amphibian lifestyle--the fossils even show what appears to be webbing in the feet." This particular species has been known previously from fragmentary fossils, it says.
Why, then, are the news media all calling this a missing link? See Fox News, for instance, and Associated Press on MSNBC News which states, "Waterfowl fossils fill in a big missing link." It was not missing, and it is not a link; it is a better-preserved specimen of a known species appearing much earlier than previously thought. Live Science did not use the phrase, but said that it "might be one of the oldest ancestors of modern birds," even when the original paper noted that the wing feathers "are asymmetrical and virtually identical to those of volant [i.e., flying] modern birds." National Geographic News avoided the buzzphrase "missing link" also, but claimed "The discovery supports the view that key characteristics of modern birds evolved quickly and early, long before the demise of the dinosaurs." Quoting Jerald Harris (Dixie State College), a co-author of the paper, "It was unexpected to find a bird this advanced in rocks this old. It tells us that the anatomical features we use to characterize modern birds evolved [sic] very quickly [sic]."
In fact, the specimen "shares many skeletal features with modern birds, including the knobby knees characteristic of underwater swimmers like loons and grebes." Even the "preserved skin of the webbed feet shows the same microscopic structure seen in aquatic birds today." There doesn't seem to be anything un-modern about this fossil other than its presumed place in the evolutionary tree. At the end of the NG article, Julia Clarke (North Carolina State U) makes the startling claim that "there was a wide range of bird types during the period that preceded the emergence [sic] of truly [sic] modern birds." That would seem to be the opposite of evolutionary expectations.
At the end of their paper, the discoverers noted one other puzzle: "Consequently, contrary to recent hypotheses, adaptation to an aquatic ecology appears to have played little part in the survival of birds across the K/P boundary."2
1Hai-lu You et al., "A Nearly Modern Amphibious Bird from the Early Cretaceous of Northwestern China, Science, 16 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5780, pp. 1640 - 1643, DOI: 10.1126/science.1126377.
2I.e., the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, assumed 65 million years ago when some catastrophic event killed off all the dinosaurs (but apparently not the sparrows and ducks).
This is scandalous. The news media should be ashamed of themselves. What should have been interpreted as the falsification of common notions about bird evolution has been twisted into support for evolution. In an act of contortion astounding in scope, the media expect us to believe three more impossible things before breakfast: (1) that the anatomical features of mode
Go hide behind your ghost stories, superstitious fool.
Ah, Now there are two missing links, you know how it all goes, at least until they find another, then there will be three, ad infinum.
What is an evolutionist? You mean a scientist?
Scientists tend to report everything. If multiple dating techniques are used, they would report them all. Of course, ambition, expetation, and other problems with human nature lead to flaws. That's why the scientific method has peer review.
So, feel free to review the published findings.
I've found that people who hold convictions but are presented with contrary evidence will often try to write-off the person presenting the evidence. What you did with your post is a very weak attempt at an "ad hominem" argument.
I see from your previous posts that you are very in to religion. This is a science article, so make sure you know how the scientific method works before you make more posts as silly as this one.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
...which is actually very easy to solve thanks to evolution. The ancestors of birds laid eggs too; this means the last representative of reptiles in the chain laid an egg from which the first bird hatched. Ergo the egg was first.
The dilemma that paleontologists face is to define which species was actually the first bird, but that doesn't affect the answer to this question.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Hey buddy, would you like a brain for your strawman? Although you may believe the logical fallacies that you espouse, you cannot be taken seriously when your logic fails under scrutiny.
The article throws out a date of 110 million years. It should be noted that carbon-14 has a half-life of 5730 years and should be fully decayed in ancient fossils. However small quantities of C-14 that has not fully decayed are still found in ancient fossils.
Where is it stated that Carbon-14 dating was used to derive the age of the fossil? The article makes no mention of it; presumably a different dating technique was used that does not have the same limitations as Carbon-14 dating. It would appear that your commentary is a non-sequitur.
Often evolutionists choose the dating technique that fits the picture they have in their minds. For example, 200 year old lava flows have been dated to be 3 billion years old by the potassium-argon dating method.
This is another example of creationists distorting facts
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Follow the dating methods chain link and see if these are all distortions:
9 9
http://creationsafaris.com/crev200606.htm#dating1
There is no such thing as evolution. Flying Spaghetti Monster is the sole being responsible for making the earth and the universe as it is. It is He who put the fossils there so evolutionists would be fooled and the public's faith would be tested. If you believe, then, upon the day of Reckoning, when fiery meatballs fall from the sky and water tastes like marinara sauce, you will be saved.
Scientists agree! Join the Church of the http://www.venganza.org/Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Um ... they found an old duck ... and we still have ducks today ... and ... um ... can somebody please help me out figure out why the story title says "Scientists Find Missing Link in Bird Evolution". Thanks.
There is nothing wrong with fossils coming out of China, in fact some of the fossil data coming out of China via legitimate digs by reputable scientists is very interesting. The problems start when foreign museums go buying fossils on the black market that have no history and that have been taken totally out of context by the looters who dug them up which in turn reduced their scientific value considerably and makes them valuable mostly to amateur collectors who buy them for bragging rights. Using black market fossils for scientific work can be a dangerous business and many scientists consequently shun fossils obtained on the black market. If you want to buy fossils off of dodgy characters expect to get burned even if you are an expert. The most famous recent example of the perils of doing this is probably the National Geographic 'Archaeoraptor' debacle which fooled some leading experts and was incidentally partly exposed by a Chinese scientist who found the counterslab of one of the fossils used to make up the faked composit. The ironic thing is that in the end the scientific significance of the two halves of the National Geographic composit fake turned out to be almost as great as that of the composit would have been had it been genuine. Furthermore, had the specimens that were carved up to produce this fake been sold, complete and undamaged along with some sort of contextual data they would probably have been more valuable than the fake turned out to be.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
The article throws out a date of 110 million years. It should be noted that carbon-14 has a half-life of 5730 years and should be fully decayed in ancient fossils. However small quantities of C-14 that has not fully decayed are still found in ancient fossils.
Straw-man, irrelevant, sophistry.
Often evolutionists choose the dating technique that fits the picture they have in their minds.
Ad Hominem, hasty generalization, straw-man, cognitive-bias, anecdotal.
For example, 200 year old lava flows have been dated to be 3 billion years old by the potassium-argon dating method.
Cognitive-bias, anecdotal, sophistry.
Skirting the Godwin rule a bit, but Nazi Germany was one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world at the time (Engineering mostly, biology... not so much.) Scientific progress is a neccessary but not sufficient condition for a free and happy state.
Uncommon Descent, even after their failure in basic statistics this morning, kind of outdid themselves with that post.
The entire complaint there is that the find was called "the missing link". Except... who called it "the missing link"? Well... Fox News.
Fox News manages to disprove evolution sheerly by how they chose to word their headline? Wow. Who would have seen it coming?
This is really the most fascinating thing about the "Intelligent Design" movement. The most extreme and fundamental flaw with "Intelligent Design" creationists is that they simply don't produce anything; year after year while evolutionary biology moves ahead and makes interesting new discoveries, intelligent design creationists keep repeating the exact same mantras over and over, year in and year out, barely stopping even to revise them in the face of refutations. While science goes out and does research, intelligent design creationists sit around and do nothing, because they either already know all the answers or don't care what the answers are.
You'd think intelligent design creationists would be kind of embarrassed of this, and try not to call attention to this. But no. In fact, they take it as a point of pride. Every time evolutionary biologists learn something new, intelligent design creationists-- in particular those at Dembski's uncommon descent blog-- jump on it and claim victory. "Ah ha!" they said. "Evolutionary theory now knows something it didn't before! Why didn't it know that before? This shows how flawed evolution is, that they keep discovering new things!". IDCers see evolution's willingness to learn and constant progress as a sign of weakness, flipfloppery and intellectual bankruptcy. The IDCers themselves, meanwhile, are safe from any such allegations, as each year they remain exactly as ignorant as they were before.
erm, if you're upset with something posted at the Panda's Thumb, perhaps that would be the most appropriate forum for your complaints. There's obviously some animosity between you and the PT people that is completely lost on those of us who haven't been to their site or your CEH.
Regarding the more substantive points in your post:
You need to understand that for evolutionary biologists, evidence suggesting that webbed feet may have developed in a few million years rather than 10s of millions of years (or whatever, I don't know the timeline for bird evolution) is not the sort of thing that shakes the whole evolutionary theory. Similarly, while we don't understand the nature of fossilization and tissue preservation, or what exactly happened to kill off the dinosaurs, that doesn't mean evolution as a whole should be rejected. It seems entirely reasonable to me that these sorts of results lead to further investigation of bird evolution, the nature of tissue preservation etc. It does not seem reasonable to infer from evidence that bird evolution was faster than we thought that we need to invoke divine intervention as the only possible explanation.
yp
I sure hope this is not some kind of rooster. I am not looking forward to spam like:
Enl4r9e y0ur missing link now
Free \/ia9ra and C14L!S for your Gansu cock
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Evolutionary links are inferred from biological data. With living species this is done primarily with DNA, but for fossils you have to use morphological information. So the taxonomists would line up all the specimens they have and figure out morphological connections among them. You might find that one group of fossils all have a certain bone structure, so they get grouped together while another group with different bone structure is interpreted as being a different lineage. You might be lucky enough to find a specimen with an intermediate structure, linking the two groups. This is a very basic explanation - there are all kinds of variations for deciding which features to use to make your classification, what to do with features that produce conflicting results and how to interpret the differences, but you get the idea...
yp.
Under an atheist's worldview, all our thoughts are constrained by the laws of physics. An atheist cannot say that he believes something because it is true. You wouldn't believe anything because it is true. You would believe something because the atoms in your brain are bouncing around in a certain way. An atheist couldn't trust their own rational capabilities, if they are to be consistent in their atheism.
So if you are a strict materialist, you would have to say that not only do religious people have pre-determined conclusions, but that is the case for everyone.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Penguins were created in Newark, New Jersey, in 1912.
".... and the earth isn't round, either. Nope, it's shaped like a burrito!"
- Director of the Institute of Scientific Penguinism
I aint a biologist, but it doesn't take a frigin biologist to RTFA!
They were rewarded, however, with five exquisitely preserved skeletons of the ancient bird. The *fossils* even reveal *impressions* of feathers, webbed feet and other rare details
Thats fosils, not tissue..
And don't get your religious panties in a wad over the word quickly. A creationist's idea of quickly (6000 years for obvious reasons) doesn't mean squat compared to an evolutionist's idea of quickly(millions of years?). Till you know what time period he meant, you just assuming.
To this the Duck replied, "What kind of bird are you, if you can't swim?"' - Sergei Prokofiev
How old is the world again? 6,000 years? ,4004 BC at 9 am
Because God liked to get to work early while he was feeling fresh
Come now it's a well known fact that the world was created on Sunday 21st October
I had a pet once
Previously only a single leg of the creature, known as Gansus yumenensis, had been found.
Perhaps someone with more background in this subject can clear this up for me. If they only had a leg, how the hell did they know what it was? Educated guess? Or did the researchers realize their unidentified legbone matched these new fossils and reclassified the original leg fossil?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
So why are scientists so certain abou certain dates of events that happened long ago like the killer astroid that wiped the dinosaurs 65 million bc?
I am not a fundie but there has to be a reliable way to date something. Otherwise scientists would not claim things like the age of the ducks in the article or any scientific paper.
http://saveie6.com/
Having viewed your posting history, I now recognize you as a frequent poster to Evolution discussions. You have made a habit of posting demonstratably false information, and then refusing to respond when your claims are exposed as ill-informed or total fabrications. This does not speak well of your credibility.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Since they are aquatic, and we know waterfowl have penises, albeit ones with lymphatic engorgement rather than bloodvessels, this would be interesting to know, since 97% of birds don't have one. Other types of birds that do are ratites - Emu, Ostrich, etc.
That's great, my comment was modded down to -1 (just like any comment that dares question the validity of Evolution). Maybe we should add a new category (-5000, "not compatible with my worldview ?"). I have yet to find ONE comment in favor of ID or Creationism that was modded "Insightful".
In the case of the asteriod, there is a thin layer of iridium that can be found just about anywhere on the planet. The thickness (thin) and age of the layer (about same as purported asteroid hit) is pretty consistent. One reasonable explanation for the iridium layer is that material from a large vaporized asteroid was deposited over the entire planet.
There is also the area of the Yucatan hit. It isn't too hard to show that something really big hit the Earth there and altered the geology of the place. The size and age of the hit make it a good candidate for the killer asteriod.
...these fossils are at least an order of magnitude too old to have such "modern" features.
GSM should take a little more care with its duckies.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I am not a fundie but there has to be a reliable way to date something. Otherwise scientists would not claim things like the age of the ducks in the article or any scientific paper.
Uh, no; there doesn't have to be a reliable way to date something. There are a great many ways of dating old things. Usually, scientists consider a date determined by a single method to be preliminary and requiring verification. The verification usually happens by using several different methods. If they all come up with a similar date, that is considered good support for the date.
Most of the methods used by paleontlogists are based on various sorts of decay processes, mostly the decay of radioactive isotopes. Taken singly, each of these has ways that that the samples can be contaminated, giving a bad date. But different chemical elements or compounds have different kinds of contamination that produce different kinds of dating errors. If you use N different dating methods, it's unlikely that all would be contaminated in such a way as to produce the same error. So if all N (or N-1) give the same date, that implies that there's little or no contamination, and the date is reliable.
The first scientific papers dealing with a new discovery often have tentative dates due to the use of a single dating method. But with new fossil beds, once good fossils have been excavated, it's routine to apply several different dating methods to pin down the fossils' ages more precisely.
This whole topic is a serious scientific field in it own right. Explaining how it all works would take several years of intensive study.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Wow, and here I was thinking that Superman is the missing link in bird evolution...
It should be noted that carbon-14 has a half-life of 5730 years and should be fully decayed in ancient fossils.
No, C-14 should be decayed to 1/2 in fossils 5730 years old, 1/4 in fossils 11,460 years old, 1/8 in fossils 17,190 years old, etc.
In case you didn't notice, that sequence works to infinity, and C-14 never is "fully decayed".
That said, it is only reliable up to about 60,000 years (10 times the age of the "Christian" universe) due to our ability to measure it.
Maybe if we were all blessed with a bias for the written word over empirical evidence we wouldn't need additional dating methods.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages; all alike.
C'mon people, get it right. There is no such thing as a 'missing link'. What we have here are previously unknown Transitional Fossils (you know - the kind that the Creationists keep insisting don't exist). Let's try to use the correct terminology. Furthermore, the subject line indicates that there is only one missing link, and we've found it (yay!). Truth is that there are countless missing Transitional Fossils, and no - it's has nothing to do with the loud yammering of Ignorant Bible-Bashers. The truth is the the conditions for fossilization are pretty strict. As a result, the fossil record is a lot more sparse than we would like.
For example, 200 year old lava flows have been dated to be 3 billion years old by the potassium-argon dating method.
;-)
Yes; this is an example of why scientists usually treat single-method dates as preliminary. Most dating methods can be contaminated in one or more ways, giving an erroneous date. But different methods have different kinds of possible contaminations, and the errors are usually wildly different. So you use several different methods. If some of them give the same date, that's evidence that those methods didn't suffer from contamination and are probably reliable. Even then, applying yet another independent dating method is always in order. When you get enough of them, you find that several indicate about the same date, while no two of the rest agree. The subset that agree are probably the correct date. (And all the dates should have error bars.
Lava is one of the more difficult things to date accurately. The high temperatures during flow often melts the substrate, adding contaminants from below and adding random errors to the apparent dates. Also, gases like argon tend to bubble out of hot lava, decreasing the end product of decay and increasing the apparent age given by the K-Ar test.
Lava is a clear case where several dating methods are needed, due to the high probability of contamination during the lava flow. A single test is only useful in cases like this, where the writer is looking for a bogus date as a way of discrediting the science to lay readers. Scientists just read it and laugh.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
not a reference to given statement, but:a ting.asp
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i1/d
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: Intelligent Design is dying
.003% of the worlds population. This is consistent with the population of the southern United States.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Intelligent Design community when IDC confirmed that Intelligent Design market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all people. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Intelligent Design has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Intelligent Design is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Really Cool Test for Plausibility.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Intelligent Design's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Intelligent Design faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Intelligent Design because Intelligent Design is dying. Things are looking very bad for Intelligent Design. As many of us are already aware, Intelligent Design continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Intelligent Design leader Pope Benedict XVI states that there about are 2 billion believers of Christianity. How many believers of Intelligent Design are there? Let's see. The number of Christians who believe in Intelligent Design versus Evolution posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 1 to 10000. Therefore there are about 2 billion/ 10000 = 200000 believers. The approximate population of the world is 6 Billion. 200000 / 6 Billion * 100 =
All major surveys show that Intelligent Design has steadily declined in Believers. Intelligent Design is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Intelligent Design is to survive at all it will be among the ignorant and cultists. Intelligent Design continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save Intelligent Design at this point in time. For all practical purposes, GOD is dead. Where is your God now
Fact: *Intelligent Design is dying Where is your God now?
Note: satire
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Potassium-argon dating is not a good method for dating recent things. It's just not. All that your article proves is what science already knows: potassium-argon dating can't be used for dating extremely recent events. Resolution on potassium-argon dating is rarely under a million years; and is often more then that. Of course, there are other methods that are used for dating things that are newer that have more resolution in the short term, but can't be used for dating very old things.
It is called geology. There are nice layers of stuff in the ground and you can see the Iridium layer right at that 65 million years ago level. Sure, no one can tell you 65.0000001 million years ago, but they can tell you 65 +- 1 or 2 million years. Hint: Iridium is very rare on Earth (probably some 3000km down, but not in the Earth's crust). Meteorites and asteroids have lots of that stuff.
:)
Geology is one thing I'll trust. Back over a century ago, the biologists of the time said that earth is much older than 6k years, but probably only a few million is needed to get all the life. Physicists of the time knew nothing about fusion, so they estimated the Earth cannot by older than a few million years, because a piece of coal or wood the size of the sun would burn out in that time. Only the geologists said that the Earth is just over 4 billion years old because the oldest rocks are that old. Guess which ones were right?
So, when when geologists date something, they probably have it quite correct (+- few percent
PS. You don't need to say 65 million BC because a few hundred thousand years are in the error for that measurement. Anything over 100k years ago, BC is meaningless.
You're using a strawman fallacy... trying to troll perhaps?
It always strikes me as peculiar when people refer to "atheism" as though it were a unified philosophy. Dividing people into "theists" and "atheists" in itself is silly, since it is obvious that opinions vary greatly in the "theists" camp, even within the same sub-groups. What kind of uniformity or cohesiveness do you expect when you group people by entities they do not believe in?
What I find more disturbing in general is that in spite of all the scientific progress humanity has made, the view that humans are practically irrelevant in the scope of the universe is challenged infinitely more than the view that we should all follow a martyred faith healer.
see a Text Widget
"Gansus is the oldest example of the nearly modern birds that branched off of the trunk of the family tree that began with the famous proto-bird Archaeopteryx," said Peter Dodson of the University of Pennsylvania, a co-author of the paper along with Lamanna, You and others. the problem here is that Archaeopteryx may not be their ancestor... http://research.unc.edu/endeavors/spr97/bird.html of course, any EVIDENCE that contradicts their view is shuffled off to the side and never discussed in public. sicence at its best, no?
What I find more disturbing in general is that in spite of all the scientific progress humanity has made, the view that humans are practically irrelevant in the scope of the universe is challenged infinitely more than the view that we should all follow a martyred faith healer.
the power of anyone, be they man or god, is in the power of their ideas.
calling jesus a martyred faith healer doesn't really address his ideas.
how about calling him the one that loved others equal to himself. would the world be a better place if people loved others equal to themselves?
ultimately, that is the question and the martyred faith healer drew a line in the sand - humanity can never achieve long standing peace and harmony precisely because they break the law of relationships... if people value themselves more than others, all h*ll will break loose.
being a matyr and being a faith healer are *only* important once one realizes the relational equation that said person laid down.
do unto others as you would have them do unto you - OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR OWN MISGUIDED ACTIONS.
that equation is absolute. a donkey riding, faith healing, matyr taught that law 2,000 years ago and everyone since his time has proved him right.
the only reason to follow him is b/c he's right.
they found aunt martha! we've been looking for the old bird for years!
Top-notch post sir. Someone give this guy a Funny rating right away.
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Science's website tells us that it's "an early ornithuran bird". Okay, so it's still a bird, just different from the birds we have today.
The whole point is that it's a "bird" that is different from the birds we have today. It's also much more closely-related to older birds and bird-like creatures. That's why we call it a transitional fossil. You provide us with no source or explanation of why this isn't another feather in the cap of evolution.
Then you attack the media and slashdot for reporting it, once again without pointing out exactly what you think is wrong.
You can't simply spout off ID talking points here. We're pretty logical-minded people, and will demand claims that can be researched so we can see the evidence for ourselves.
When I see an ID proponent who does that - and then admits to any falsehoods in his claims - I'll mod him insightful. "This is just a bird" is not insightful, and sort of misses the whole point. The thing is, I have yet to meet an ID proponent who actually understands evolutionary theory.
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It's not a strawman. I'm not saying that atheists believe such and such. It's just I described the logical conclusions if you are consistent with an atheistic worldview.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
"The fossils even reveal impressions of feathers, webbed feet and other rare details, though none of the remains include a skull."
These were ducks ready to be butchered, but ran and hid after getting their heads chopped off.
Well, I "believe" in evolution but i think the talk about is silly. For one are seriously handycapped because there is only limited fossil evidence.
/masses, charges etc. of a gas. And macroscopically "most" variables are irrelevant, the "remaining" variables are things like temperature, (energy, particle, impulse)densities, -flows. :D) In kinetic gas theory and the like, the macroscopic relations can be derived from the microscopic relations using methods of eliminating irrelevant variables and approximation.
More importantly: We don't have a definition of a species. We don't even know whether a reasonable definition is possible. When people are talking about evolution they think about how the species evolve, while in reality there are only a whole lot of interacting organisms. The model people form in their head is far from reality, and we have no idea how to even specify how relevant it is to reality.(but, hey, let em dream)
Well, the model is relevant to the point that mice and flies can't breed to form a hybrid naturally, but i think the model is totally says nothing about how the mice themselves are evolving. I think people that find fossils are deluding themselves that they have a useable model. It's a kind of hindsight hey i can explain that model.
So basically i don't believe in all that "transitional fossil" shit. Mathematics using DNA probably have a much better chance of saying usefull things.
It may just be possible to try model some properties of "organism-design-dynamics" using less variables then exist in the actual process of evolution, but the task of finding it sounds more then dounting.
I should try illustrate what i mean. With variables of a system i mean every thing that describes a system at a given time.
For example, in a case of a gas/liquid the variables are all the speeds and position
(btw impulseflow == pressuretensor
Now theory of gasses/liquids can be complicated, imagine "theory of organism-design-dynamics"! If your "pro-evolution" you should not get yourself pushed into the actual mechanisms of evolution discussion. What else? There is little else to argue for evolution, so maybe you shouldn't.
So where i stand is that i will not say i believe in evolution, i believe in the current state of the universe is a result of the natural way the universe behaves, and our understanding of it is limited. Let them prove god suddenly appeared and created everything, that is the silly-est explanation possible anyway. Maybe i effectively say nothing, but i am pretty sure i am not saying nonsense either, as i would in getting in the evolution-discussion mess.
Another thing: computer simulations may be able to model organisms. Maybe a simulation with imaginairy physics may be able to create evolution. Ofcourse it will have to be very visual to convince people.
What sort of research have you seen? I remember from catholic religion classes, 70 years was considered about right. A survey of the scholarship at wikipedia claims ranges of:
- Mark: c. 68-73
- Matthew: c. 70-100
- Luke: c. 80-100
- John: c. 90-110
(years A.D.). Jesus is thought to have died ~30 A.D.Given that the average life expectancy at that time was ~40 years, it would have taken ancient men of the time for the accounts to have been first-hand witnessings. Peter is said to have lived until 64 AD - I don't think we know when he was born but he probably lived at least into his fifties, so not everybody died at 40.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Scientists are doing the best they can with the evidence they have.
Sorry, MOST scientists are doing the best they can with what they have. Some seem to be saying that they have Arrived at some point where they Really Understand the Truth, when what they have done is understand the evidence they have, pending new discoveries. I suppose you might be able to say that a scientist who makes unwarranted claims is not much of a scientist.
Likewise, the IDers are often presenting as Truth what their pastor has told them the Bible means. Now if their pastor is an actual prophet, that would be one thing. Very few people really believe their pastor is a prophet. Slightly more believe in the existence of modern prophets at all. Of those who claim to be prophets, they don't seem to come out and tell the whole world about evolution or How God Did It.
To summarize: there is very little reason to argue about this.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Evolution is not a hypothesis. It's a scientific theory, lending it huge validity and overwhelming acceptance in the scientific community. Questioning it as an untrained layman makes you come across as a perpetual motion/zero point energy type of crackpot. Also, religious viewpoints in general tend to be openly mocked here, which is nice.
Oh, yeah . . . we forgot that anwersingenesis.org is the leading authority on all things scientific. Sorry 'bout that. Our mistake. ID all the way, baby!!
There is no such thing as an "atheist" worldview, except in an abstract sense. There is only a theist worldview, and then some people who do not share it, all of whom have their own worldviews which need not necessarily have any relation to each other.
"Sigh. I'm apparently too stupid to understand Darwinian logic. -- GilDodgen"
(Replying to GilDodgen, not the poster)... Or common values like honesty, or decency, or all the other things that the merry band over at uncommon descent routinely break. DaveScot has been caught self-contrdicting, lying, and trolling so many times that it's impossible to keep track of anymore (and he almost never corrects himself), and yet Dembski still keeps the guy around. Deeply embarrasing, but the company kept is telling.
Back on point, the basic failure of Gil's understanding in this case is confusing learning more about the particulars of a specific lineage with learning about the overall picture of evolutionary change. The two are not the same, and we can learn lots and lots of totally new things about one thing without it necessarily doing much more than being yet another in an already overwhelming landslide of reinforcements of the basic idea.