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Study Provides Compelling Evidence of Single Impact Extinction Theory
ectotherm writes to tell us that a new study at the University of Missouri-Columbia claims to provide compelling evidence that a single meteor impact was the cause of animal extinction 65 million years ago. From the article: "MacLeod and his co-investigators studied sediment recovered from the Demerara Rise in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of South America, about 4,500 km (approximately 2,800 miles) from the impact site on the Yucatan Peninsula. Sites closer to and farther from the impact site have been studied, but few intermediary sites such as this have been explored."
Since this helps to support a widely-held theory of the mass extinction 65 million years ago, why is this really news?
Help me out here.
Didn't they just fill in another data point?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
If you want to laugh read through the comments. Laugh or be concerned, that is.
Read through the comments at the bottom. Seriously. These people really believe this stuff, and I've personally met people who, if you try to talk to them about almost anything scientific (like, oh say, 80,000-year-old human remains) will absolutely tell you "No, way! The Earth is only 6,000 years ago. It says so in the Bible!"
I'm not at all suggesting that people give up their religious convictions, but I am saying that some people need to stop confusing religion with science. They are separate disciplines and need to be separate. If you absolutely must believe that the choice is eaither A) God loves me and the Earth is only 6,000 years or B) there was a mass extinction event on the Earth 65 million years ago, so there can't be a God, then you are either seriously depraved or downright stupid.
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So you have no problem granting me equal logical standing when I say the following: that I have, as of this moment, created your entire reality. Isn't it possible that if I was the creator, and created the universe, then I could also have created that universe with a false history? You believe me don't you? I have a post that says it's true! All other posts were planted here by me to tempt the faithless.
The problem with the statement is that there is no way to challenge it. You can't prove it, I can't disprove it, at best it's uninteresting, and at worst it's meaningless.
An analogy would be a computer simulation. You have a gigantic computer simulating a universe. You don't want to run the simulation from the big bang, so you load a precomputed state which includes 14 billion years already simulated. Now, this is important to know for discussions of the reality in which the giant computer exists. But it is meaningless for any discussion or investigation of the simulation rules for the universe being simulated.
BTW, your simulation has a "cheat" function called "miracle" used for, ah, errr, "debugging". The AI units in your simulation can't reliably tell which events are miracles, and which are normal operation of the simulation. This is because they cannot know the full state of the simulation, and likely won't even know the full rule set - due to being part of the simulation themselves.
>> equal amount of evidence for other possibilities regarding the origin of life
The theory of evolution is not a theory regarding the origin of life.
>> The Monkeyists might like to know
I presume you're trying to imply that people are thought to be descended from monkeys. This is not what evolution states.
>> there hase to be NO CHANGE in the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12
This is true. In fact, the ratio has not been constant. A quick look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dating shows that scientists are aware of this. (who would have thunk it?)
So, is the ratio constant historically? No. Does that make carbon dating useless? No.
>> I do expect at least 5 posts arguing against what I say
That'd be because what you say is factually incorrect and misleading.
Old argument. Could He create a stone He couldn't lift?
I heard answers like: sure He could, after that He could improve His might so He could lift it (or eat the burrito).
Funny as hell.
Thruth is: if there is a God, He is definitely not omnipotent. Most people talk about a Almighty God, which, in strict sense, means "One with all might". That doesn't mean He "can do everything", it means He can do anything every other being can, and perhaps a lot more (like creating a universe with an embedded existance, which I personally believe to be bogus).
Back to the "creation" thing: I'm christian. I believe God created the Universe, the earth and all living and non-living beings. That doesn't mean he created the world in six literal days, nor does it mean that "it just happened" as he wished. He could have initiated everything and guided it since then.
Bottomline is: when you mix up science and religion, you degrade the value of both. The question of the scientific origin of "us" shouldn't be hampered with religious prejudice, nor should the question of religious origin be hampered with scientific prejudice. In the end, it's up to the individual to combine both beliefs into one.
What both ends always should realize: everything you say which you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt is a theory. At this point in time, macro-evolution seems the more likely theory. For others, Intelligent Design could seem the most likely. But these questions should always be regarded as a theory, not as facts, and should be considered from a scientific point of view, instead of a religious one. It's apparent that most creationists forget that rule, but to me it's also apparent that a bunch of evolutionists forget it: it almost is a sport to degrade monotheists with scientific theories.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Do I believe that natural selection should be taught in school? YES I DO!!! It is a proven fact
Bzzzt. Wrong. Evolution is a theory, just like Einstein's theories of relativity, Pythagoras' Theorem, and Maxwell's Theory of Electromagnetism. There are no "scientific facts", just theories. A Theory attempts to explain a natural phenomenon. A theory becomes more accepted through repeated experimentation and observation. But if an experiment yields a result other than what the theory predicts (and the experiment was done properly), then the theory must be discarded in favor of the new evidence.
A Theory can never really be proven because the next experiment may yield a result other than what the theory predicts. A lot of people, especially Creationists, get hung up on "theory" and "fact". Creationists will assert that Evolution is just a theory- it is, and thank you for reiterating that. They also insist that their belief is Fact, which is where science and religion begin to diverge.
Maybe if you read TFA, you'd recognize that the reason there's such a hubbub on Slashdot regarding this article is that a large percentage of the comments on the article were left by ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christians who all pretty much say the same thing (e.g., it was the biblical flood that extinguished the dinosaurs, and much more recently than the scientifically-agreed-upon period of the asteroid impact that TFA refers to).
Maybe if evangelicals stopped trying to cram their religion down our throats, we wouldn't react so vehemently. Though I must say, if I had to pick between being shouted down by partisans of a scientific theory and being murdered by an angry mob of religious extremists, I'll take the shouting match any day. The thing is, few people have been murdered in the pursuit of Science (the Tuskeegee experiments and various Nazi experiments being the prime counter-examples), while many have been murdered in the name of religion.
Do I need to invoke the murder of Hypatia, the last great Libarian of Alexandria, at the hands of a mob incited by a man who later became a Christian saint, to make my point any clearer? (Carl Sagan goes on at length about this atrocity in the book and television series Cosmos.)
I guess my point is, practice what you preach, and encourage your evangelical fundamentalist comrades to follow your example. If you want non-believers to cut you some slack, then kindly get the believers to stop behaving badly by vandalizing the comment sections on science-oriented web sites, for a start. And while you're at it, stop being so self-centered: this isn't a reaction against you, but against the fundie loonies who effectively vandalized the web page of TFA.
Oh, and incidentally, since you toss off a list of supposed "evidence" against evolution and modern cosmology and in favor of creationism, I should point out that each one of those points has been debunked endlessly. Repeating these time-worn non-arguments doesn't make them any more true or correct. As someone trained in the physical sciences, I get tired of trying to explain to people why evolution doesn't violate thermodynamics, or why extreme energy densities (e.g., those found in the Universe of the Big Bang, as well as those found in the singularities of black holes) cause most physical laws as we commonly understand them to break down. For that matter, it gets tiresome trying to explain why scientific "laws" are descriptive, not proscriptive like the laws that men write. So when you complain about believers having their intelligence assailed or mocked, perhaps you should step back and realize that part of the reason for the mockery is the repetition of the same old retread non-arguments that we scientists have to endure from the extremist believers out there.