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."

Comments

Wombats

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect Wombats were somehow involved.

Re:Wombats

[Woldry]

You could ask them.

Re:Wombats

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard that the wombats were all going to seminary school down at Lake Titicaca when a dump truck full of kumquats overturned on their clambake.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Re:Wombats

[Magic5Ball]

Yes, wombats have been suppressing "Evidence of Single Impact Extinction Theory" for years now, to the point that some doubt that he theory ever existed. Evidence _for_ the single impact extinction theory, however, appears plentyful.

Re:Wombats

[cyclomedia]

which, along with the next post down, leads into a newish theory of mine: maybe god DID create the human race, and in his own image to boot. but maybe it was a few million years ago and god is actually a small, furry mammal

65 million?

[grub]

65 million years is crazy-talk, that's 64,994,000 years before God made the Earth!

Re:65 million?

[sRev]

I read this yesterday and have been looking in occasionally to read the comments at the bottom. It looks like there must be some global creationist group that is directing traffic to the story, as every comment makes just that same arguement. I guess the creationist party line is that the "flood" wiped out the dinosaurs. That's a lot of water.

Re:65 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like there must be some global creationist group that is directing traffic to the story, as every comment makes just that same arguement. I guess the creationist party line is that the "flood" wiped out the dinosaurs.

Maybe they are just hoping that a crapflood will wipe out scientists?

Re:65 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Young Earth Creationists say that the Earth was created 6000 years ago, they're talking in God-years.

Re:65 million?

[Grishnakh]

Please use a dictionary and look up the word "sarcasm".

And if you don't think a huge number of people today don't believe the earth is 6000 years old, you're naive.

Re:65 million?

[morgan_greywolf]

65 million years is crazy-talk, that's 64,994,000 years before God made the Earth!

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.

Re:65 million?

[pilgrim23]

Ever wondered what god the dinosaurs fought wars and slaughtered each other in the name of?

oh and regards your sig: Watch out at zebra crossings.....

Re:65 million?

[saforrest]

I don't believe a huge number of people today believe Earth is 6000 years old, so I'm naivete.

Er, whether or not grub is an anti-religious troll, there are lots of believe who believe this. This was evident from the public reaction in American media to this court case.

Re:65 million?

[buswolley]

Personally, I don't believe that the Universe was made just thousands of years ago, but first consider the following:

It seems possible that if a creator was able to make a Universe, then He would also be able to create that Universe with a false history. To be more precise,

I mean the Creator could have created a Universe at state B, with Physical Law set Y, in such a way as to make it appear that state A had existed, by reconstructing state A by applying Y on states B..C...D...k...etc, where A In other words, if something is to come out of nothing, and can take on any form, it may well APPEAR that there was a prior history before that creation, but it isn't actually true. Light may take a million/billion years to reach us from that star, but those intermediating states may be reconstructed by an all knowing all powerful entity. By placing a photon with the appropriate properties and vectors in between the star and our planet, say 10,000 Light years out, may make it appear that the photon originated from that star millions/billions of years ago.

Re:65 million?

[ettlz]

And yet, you are here on Slashdot.

I do believe that grub is an anti-religious troll (read his sig, then read his posting history).

And yet, you are here posting anonymously, thereby preventing us from examining your proclivities.

Re:65 million?

[ettlz]

Ever wondered what god the dinosaurs fought wars and slaughtered each other in the name of?

Jehovasaurus.

Next!

Re:65 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's something that's always struck me. An omnipotent god could trivially create a zillion photons all the way up to every star in the iniverse. And in fact could create 15 billion years of fake history which would be completely indistinguishable from "real" history.

Which also means that we could also postulate that the universe came into existence 10 seconds ago, complete with this comment half written.

Re:65 million?

[flynt]

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.

Re:65 million?

[Hoi Polloi]

And the Bible doesn't even give the number 6000. It is extrapolated by Bible researchers based on counting named generations (sure they mentioned every one?) and making assumptions.

Re:65 million?

[pixelpusher220]

Go read "End of Faith" by Sam Harris. *Any* religious beliefs are entirely and wholly incompatible with science.

In the old days before science became it's own field, religion *was* the science and of course they got along famously together. Once Science grew up, Religion wasn't so thrilled since it's basic prinicples were being overturned one by one.

Religion has been nothing more than the explanation of that which can't be explained right now. It rained? must be the Rain god is upset. It didn't rain? guess what, he's still upset, just differently. Repeat adnauseum for anything you need to explain.

'God' today is just the summation of all the different 'gods' so called 'primitive' cultures generally had.

And if you look at most religions, they all have the same basic beliefs - be nice to others, be 'good'. Funny how all the different 'human' groups came up with the same conclusions...we all like to live next to people who aren't going to hurt or kill us.

So religion is also a human expression of the desire for 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' to re-use a phrase.

There is no God...there is however the basic goodness that comes with being human expressed over and over again throughout history. (obviously bad apples will exist, even outside of nurture forces...but the *vast* majority of people don't want to hurt others)

Re:65 million?

[mojodamm]

Tell you what; if I was omnipotent I sure wouldn't be playing this crappy version of 'The Sims', just to mess with all the insignificant life-forms I'd created earlier. Do people honestly think that if God created us in his image, he'd be content to just tool around in the heavens because he couldn't find anything better to do?

Re:65 million?

[ArcherB]

That's something that's always struck me. An omnipotent god could trivially create a zillion photons all the way up to every star in the iniverse. And in fact could create 15 billion years of fake history which would be completely indistinguishable from "real" history.

Uh, that is what omnipotent means. I'm not agreeing with it, but by definition, an omnipotent God could do literally anything.

Re:65 million?

[venicebeach]

I'm not at all suggesting that people give up their religious convictions

Why not? That's exactly what they should do. The fact that there are convictions immutable by evidence is the problem.

Re:65 million?

[bushki3]

Maybe man's perception of time is not the same as God's perception. Perhaps those millions of years worth of "proof of evolution" that we see only cover 6 days worth of creation for a God who exists in Eternity? Thus it's possible that a time difference is all that separates the creationist from the evolutionist.

Re:65 million?

[jakel2k]

In Genesis, it states that Heaven and Earth were created along with everything else in 7 days... from that you have Adam and Eve... from that you can trace appx. each generation, including how long certain people lived. That can be traced to the creation to the flood to the house of David to Jesus... and from there you have well documented 2000 years. Which adds up to about 6000 years.

Re:65 million?

[truckaxle]

This reminds me of an incident at the San Diego museum of Natural History. There was a display of Therizinosaurus. A group of kids were admiring the display when one of them asked out loud how old the fossils were. A member of the museum staff was walking by and overheard the question and quickly answer "72 million and 14 years".

That answer satisfied most, but after a few seconds another asked how could they ever identify the age so precisely. The staff member responded "Well when I started work here they told me that it was 72 million years old and I have worked here for 14 years so now it is 72 million and 14 years old."

Re:65 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh huh... but even the entire USA is hardly a representative sample. That said, the American media is hardly a representative sample of Americans.

Creationists == Atheists

Why? Because they both have the least confidence in their faith (yes, grub, Atheism is a faith, whether that makes it a religion...??) and are therefore the most vocal about it. That's why it is perceived that so many Americans are atheists, while the rest are seen as creationists.

HELLO, there are over 1,000,000,000 Catholics in the world alone. That's enough to populate 3 USA's; and the vast majority of Catholics aren't creationists. Then we'll talk about the other some billions of Christians, the Jews, etc. who aren't creationists either.

The thing that drives me nuts about the average Slashdotting atheist is, they like to paint the picture that anyone who believes in God accepts The Bible literally. That's not only stereotyping, it's wildly inaccurate.

Re:65 million?

[morgan_greywolf]

It might interest you to know that I don't belong to one of the major Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and that I'm also a (former) agnostic. The specifics of my religious/spiritual beliefs are outside the scope of this discussion.

But in any respect, your argument (and by extension, I'm assuming Harris' book) seems to be that religion only exists to explain the unexplained. Since there's nothing (or almost nothing) left unexplained, we don't need religion (or spirituality, I assume).

Except that there are things left unexplained, and there are events in people's lives that cannot be explained.

But that's even besides my main point. Religion exists not to explain the unexplained, but because it is human nature to ponder the mysteries of life. No matter how much science figures out, there are always mysteries, not all of which can be explained by science or that science would ever even try to understand. But that's even still besides my main point.

Also, religion != morality != ethics. Religion doesn't exist because we think we need to be nice to one another. And as much as religions are similar on some ethical and moral issues, they differ very greatly on others.

Ok, here's my main point (finally): Religion exists because people need to believe in something greather than themselves. That's it in a nutshell.

Re:65 million?

[malsdavis]

That THEORY might be mentioned with arguments for and against it, but there is equal amount of evidence for other possibilities regarding the origin of life on this planet

There are no serious arguments against "natural selection". "natural selection" has nothing to do with the "first spark of life" which is what you appear to be referring to.

Are you seriously trying to say you have proper evidence that contradicts the "primordial soup" theory? If you actually do (which I highly doubt), you would become world famous in academia if you could write a paper on it!

because most people here are biased towards evolution as being the source of all life.

They are only biased in the same way that a jury might be made biased upon seeing an overwhelming amount of evidence. They have reached their conclusions based on the large amount of compelling evidence, what have you reached your upon?

Re:65 million?

[wall0159]

>> 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.

Re:65 million?

[winomonkey]

Please, please, please allow me to say this - thank you from the very bottom of my little heart. I have been having a pain-in-the-ass of a day, and your joke has made it notably brighter.

Re:65 million?

[hxftw]

The Bible does not say that the Earth was created 6000 years ago. People who say that it was; either haven't actually read the Bible, lied, or didn't understand it. Genesis 1:1-2. "(1) In [the] beginning God created the heavens and the earth.(2) Now the earth proved to be formless and waste and there was darkness upon the surface of [the] watery deep; and God's active force was moving to and fro over the surface of the waters." This was BEFORE the 6 creative days. As for people saying that it was 6 24 hour long days, here is this. 2 Peter 3:8. "However, let this one fact not be escaping YOUR notice, beloved ones, that one day is with Jehovah as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day." If you actually took the time to do real research, science and the Bible actually agree on many scientific things. People simply don't want to see it. And for those who don't know who Jehovah is, Psalms 83:18. " That people may know that you, whose name is Jehovah, You alone are the Most High over all the earth." The "YOUR" you see above just indicates it is in plural, as in more than one person. Many translators took out God's name and replaced it with GOD or LORD. I'm sick of hearing people preaching that the Bible says something when it doesn't, and when people say science and the Bible contradict each other. DO THE RESEARCH.

Re:65 million?

[TheJorge]

I see a bigger problem with that statement.

If we are to assume God did in fact create the universe and all its laws in such a way to make it look as though it's been around a lot longer than it has, and then gave us the tools of analysis and reason to "discover" these laws and the universe's history, who are we to thumb our noses at him and see through his giant fabrication? I mean, if He went to all this effort to make it look like there were dinosaurs 65 million years ago, carefully placing each photon and atom and what-not, we're pretty big jerks to dismiss all his efforts and say, "Yeah, that was nice with the fossil record and the carbon dating and all, but we know the truth. Good try with all that 'evidence' you made us." Even if you really know the secret truth that the universe has only been around 6500 years, lets not go and put a damper on God's efforts. Just go along with the rest of us when we say things like "Evolution" and "Big Bang"-- it'll make God a lot happier. And you don't want to make God angry.

Re:65 million?

[jakel2k]

Some interesting combinations of the two I've heard:

1. Dinosaurs, (along with Unicorns, Winged Horses...) didn't get on the ark.
2. Each day of God is millions of years in human time.
3. Using carbon dating on scripture, scrolls...

Re:65 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not agreeing with it, but by definition, an omnipotent God could do literally anything.

Could he microwave a burrito so hot that even he couldn't eat it? Either way he's not omnipotent!

Re:65 million?

[ArcherB]

65 million years is crazy-talk, that's 64,994,000 years before God made the Earth!

So a lot of people believe in Creationism. What's really sad is that even MORE people believe that 9-11 was an inside job, even though there is actually more evidence of creationism! Some examples include: lack of lunar dust, the Big Bang theory breaks the first law of thermodynamics, life breaks the second law of thermodynamics, descriptions of dinosaurs living and walking around in The Bible and so on.

Personally, I do believe the universe was created some 13-20 billion years ago but neither me nor anyone else can prove by who or how. I just suggest that you and the rest of the slashdotters take a little time to actually read the arguments of Creationism before you immediately dismiss it and ridicule those that believe it as a matter of faith and/or science. I've met good Christians with multiple doctorates in scientific disciplines such as physics, nanotechnology and quantum mechanics. I think it is safe to assume that these people are smarter than the vast majority of slashdotters who frequently mock their intelligence because of their religion.

Finally, as a Christian myself, I humbly ask that slashdotters stop seeing every article that deals with dinosaurs, evolution/Darwin, stem cells or genetics as an excuse to slap me in the face with it. The only thing worse that pushing your religion on others is trying to take other's religion away.

Re:65 million?

[truckaxle]

In order for Carbin 14 dating system to be accurate, there hase to be NO CHANGE in the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in the atmosphere over the years for which the system is claimed to be accurate.

What is Carbin 14 is that sort of like the Mini-14?

Seriously, modern Carbon-14 dating does not assume there is NO CHANGE in the atmosphere. Carbon-14 dating is calibrated to known events such as ice cores, wood artifacts and growth rings, ocean sediment, cave deposits, etc. Uncalibrated Carbon-14 dates are referred to as radiocarbon years.

Additionally Carbon-14 dates only are reliable in the tens of thousands of years. A common mistake by YECers.

NO PLACE THAT STATES THAT THE EARTH IS ONLY 6000 YEARS OLD

Yes it does, run the math on the geologies.

In confirming that the earth is old, very old, there are many geological structures that confirm this and falsify a young earth. My favorite question to ask YECer's is which sedimentary layer in this picture of lava layers is the flood deposit.

I do expect at least 5 posts arguing against what I say because most people here are biased towards evolution as being the source of all life.

No just that you have the wrong information.

Re:65 million?

[pjbgravely]

In Genesis, it states that Heaven and Earth were created along with everything else in 7 days... from that you have Adam and Eve... from that you can trace appx. each generation, including how long certain people lived. That can be traced to the creation to the flood to the house of David to Jesus... and from there you have well documented 2000 years. Which adds up to about 6000 years.

This is wrong. No one knows how long each day of creation lasted.

No one knows how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden, it could have been 10 years, or even 10 Billion years for all we know.

The genealogies are known to be incomplete, they tend to only list the important people and leave out the others.

It seems a lot of scholars read the Bible without any kind of understanding. Just look at the pictures of Solomon's temple and then read how it was really built. The people that drew them had no understanding of engineering.

Re:65 million?

[grub]

Who cares? The bible is just a dusty old story book from the late Roman Iron Age. I don't own one, have never owned one and don't plan do. Green Eggs and Ham is better storytelling and less violent.

Re:65 million?

[rthille]

No. The variation of carbon 12 to 14 is already known and depends on the earth's magnetic field. That's not relevant given that the 1/2 life of carbon 14 is only ~6k years (5600 I think), so Carbon dating is only useful for living things and only upto about 40k years. Potassium -> Argon is just one of the radioactive decompositions used for longer time scales.

Bill Bryson's book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" has a good general overview of what we know about the age of the earth and the universe...

As for evolution not being the source of all life; praytell what other explanation do you have for it? That's the thing about science, it doesn't just throw up it's hands at the hard questions. It posits an explanation, comes up with tests that can be made to see if it works, and then refines the theory.

And as for this:
there is equal amount of evidence for other possibilities regarding the origin of life on this planet

What evidence and for what other possibilities?

Re:65 million?

[CFTM]

Shhh, don't tell the masses that; makes it tougher to push the drugs!

Re:65 million?

[geobeck]

...there are over 1,000,000,000 Catholics in the world alone.

You mean in addition to the Catholics on other worlds?

Yes, I know what you mean, but the placement of your modifier says something else.

Re:65 million?

[cyberscan]

"They are only biased in the same way that a jury might be made biased upon seeing an overwhelming amount of evidence. They have reached their conclusions based on the large amount of compelling evidence, what have you reached your upon?"

I base mine on a compelling amount of evidence. What is your evidence?

Re:65 million?

[FST777]

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.

Re:65 million?

[geobeck]

Do I believe that natural selection should be taught in school? YES I DO!!! It is a proven fact.

No, it's not. It's a theory that happens to fit the facts better than any other. If the Flying Spaghetti Monster lands tomorrow and starts handing out samples of the Primordial Pasta, current theories will be modified or discarded.

Re:65 million?

[Anthony]

The way that dating mechanisms work is based on unproven assumption. In order for Carbin 14 dating system to be accurate, there hase to be NO CHANGE in the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in the atmosphere over the years for which the system is claimed to be accurate.

Perhaps you should read up on Carbin[sic] 14 dating before you post. The Internet is a wonderful place where ignorance is indefensible. Here's a Chapter that may help: Radiogenic Isotope Geochemistry

Re:65 million?

[TheCabal]

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.

Re:65 million?

[LionMage]

Finally, as a Christian myself, I humbly ask that slashdotters stop seeing every article that deals with dinosaurs, evolution/Darwin, stem cells or genetics as an excuse to slap me in the face with it. The only thing worse that pushing your religion on others is trying to take other's religion away.

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.

Re:65 million?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's up to the individual to combine both beliefs into one.

You can't combine 1+1=2 and 1+1=3 into one belief. You can either reject science despite enjoying its effect each time you listen to an iPod, or accept science and consider religion to be a bunch of fairy tales.

Re:65 million?

[wall0159]

I don't know why I'm bothering, but...

>> What I say happens to be the TRUTH
yet
>> we do not have any CERTAIN way of telling
and
>> Scientists can make EDUCATED GUESSES, but that in no way makes these GUESSES correct

That's bollocks. There are lots of separate pieces of evidence that corroborate each other. Sure, it doesn't make it a certainty - any more than a person standing over a bloody corpse, and holding a smoking gun, is likely to have killed them. But we can't be certain! Let's not jump to any conclusions!

Do you, perhaps, have an agenda here? Is there another "truth" that you would really _like_ to believe and this science perhaps contradicts that? If so, why don't you just say it, and get it out in the open? Or alternatively, maybe you can just go on seeing the world through your rose-coloured glasses...

Re:65 million?

[Laser Lou]

I base mine on a compelling amount of evidence. What is your evidence?

If you have fact-based, non-sectarian evidence that Darwinian evolution is wrong, I would very much like to see it. Years ago, I was a creationist. However, on my own investigation, I concluded that none of the "facts" I read before (from ICR and others) that supported that were valid. None. Ironically, that helped me understand that Bible better and strengthened my faith.

Re:65 million?

[ArcherB]

If you believe that the universe was created 13-20 billion years ago, then that is not Creationism. Creationists believe that God created them in his image, literally, not as in "God created a universe in which mutation and natural selection resulted in us". I am a Christian myself and I think that Creationists are a disgrace to the faith. It is right to point out how and why they are wrong.

I've actually done some studies on Creationism, and Creationists are like all religions, they don't agree amongst themselves. I've heard theories like you described where in six 24-hr periods, God created the light, heavens and the earth, the seas parted to create land and so on. I've heard others that take a slightly more scientific approach and state that in the beginning, there was no universe, and therefore no time so a day != 24 hrs, or any other measure of literal time. I've even heard theories where God created several different classes of creatures at or around the genus level, like a bird, a man, a horse, a cow, and so on, that evolved over time (yes, through evolution) into the variety of creatures we see today. So while I will agree that the strict creationists are a bit whacked out (I see them screaming "nah-nah-nah-nah" with their hands over their ears with their eyes closed every time scientific evidence is presented), I'm not going to ridicule their intelligence because of their faith.

Re:65 million?

[Laser Lou]

By the way, I really do mean it when I asked you show me any real evidence you have that Darwin was wrong. I searched hard and have found nothing. NOTHING!!!!!!

Re:65 million?

[maraist]

...religion only exists to explain the unexplained. Since there's nothing (or almost nothing) left unexplained, we don't need religion (or spirituality, I assume).

How can you say all things are explained by science? Maxwell derived the complete electro magnetic equations 1xx years ago and Einstein General relativity 8x years ago, yet we have only begun to understand them practically.

There is a difference between the understanding of the general order of things and discerning pratical things.

Except that there are things left unexplained, and there are events in people's lives that cannot be explained.

From my above, unexplained things will always exist no matter how great the depth of general understanding. But I have little doubt that all things important to humans will ultimately be found to be imperical, testible, and thus Scientifically grounded. cience isn't about having the answers, but about reliably pursuing them.

First and foremost are the historical lies that have been told by the authorities in power that have empowered the feeble minded - those willing to kill for an idea never grounded in empirical evidence. Muslim, Chrisitians, and even Jews (with respect to the "holy land").

I have faith that the ability to research historical evidence will become the greatest achievement of mankind. Whether this comes through mathmatical deduction, or space mirrors that can see ancient earth light or some quirk over time travel - it doesn't matter.

Simple logical deduction disproves that 3 mutually exclusive religions can not all be completely correct. Yet people die or are terminally oppressed (even today) over the subtle interpolations of the infallible truths of their respective texts.

Religion exists not to explain the unexplained, but because it is human nature to ponder the mysteries of life. No matter how much science figures out, there are always mysteries, not all of which can be explained by science or that science would ever even try to understand

When studying religion, you do find that the thing most common among them is the use of giving personal order out of the knowlege of the greater order. A primitive way of saying this is in fact that Religions purpose is to explian the unknown. Read "The sacred Canpoy" an excellent though dated book.

From this it is still true to say charismatic leaders give hope to the lost or down trodden. That morality can still be found in the central philosophy and theology of a particular dogma.

But history is replete with arbitrary nomos's (general orders), so it is repugnant to me that the evolved state of the current three western religons can be considered uniquely sacred.

Also, religion != morality != ethics. Religion doesn't exist because we think we need to be nice to one another. And as much as religions are similar on some ethical and moral issues, they differ very greatly on others.

From my above, you can see where my analysis would lead to different conclusions. Religion, in an order centric view, necessitates defining morality. And those that crafted the doctrine (Mohammud, Jesus, Abraham, Moses, Pharoh, etc) all had similar needs to fullfil. Their followers would not have deemed them credible if there wasn't a natural feeling about rules regarding friendliness towards like neighbors. (Note that most religions were/are still hostile towards outsiders. Even Jesus gives creedence to the idea of the inferior non-Jews - the Samaritans - saying Jews should take pity on them)

Re:65 million?

[scoot80]

I reckon one of the Unicorns farted, and killed the dinosaurs...

Re:65 million?

[saforrest]

I think you're allowing your resentment of unsubstantiated generalizations make by idiotic atheists to colour your perceptions about public belief in a young Earth.

The fact is, there are lots of people alive today, many of whom are Americans, who beleive that the Earth is 6000 years old. I don't particularly care whether they do this because they are Biblical literalists, Quranic literalists, Talmudic literalists, or just plain nuts. The fact is they exist, and that's the only point I was interested in making.

That said, Catholicism is not a faith generally known by its adherents' rigid applications to doctrine -- no faith that stretches over the entire world and hundreds of languages and cultures could be otherwise -- so I am not particularly convinced by an argument that merely presents the Vatican's view on an issue with an estimate of the worldwide number of Catholics.

As for your statements about atheism being a faith, I'll agree to an extent. I think a belief in the non-intervention of a deity is a the only position with which to approach scientific questions, merely because of Occam's Razor. But I have yet not seen athiests whose atheism was inspired by science argue convincingly to me on the larger metaphysical questions on the existence of higher powers.

However, I am meaning to read more by Daniel Dennett, who apparently has argued something of this kind, and I have been generally impressed so far with his work.

Re:65 million?

[Gilmoure]

A microwave burrito is the hottest substance known to man. Even they can't eat it, much less dog!

Re:65 million?

[cyberscan]

"there is equal amount of evidence for other possibilities regarding the origin of life on this planet. What evidence and for what other possibilities?" Yes there is an equal amount of evidence demonstrating other possibilities. There is also little scientific evidence that points to evolution as the source off all life on this planet. Many cultures have reords of the great flood and other biblical events. There is physical evidence of other biblical events such as the sulfer balls from the site where Sodom and Gommorrah was beleived to have existed. As far as other possibilities are concerned, these possibilities include a supreme being creating life on this planet or life from beyond this planet bringing life here. I can go on and on with various forms of evidence, but most here have made up their minds about what they want to believe. I also have better things to do than spend my arguing back and forth with people who are stuck on one ideology. Yes, I was once an atheist, howeveronce I was open minded enough to look at evindence and records from many different sources and have changed my mind. By the way, I do have a college education in the sciences and many other scientists also believe in a Supreme being. One such Scientists is the father of modern calculus. His name is Isaac Newton. Does this mean that I agree with what the fundamentalist Christians believe? No It doesn't. In fact, my beliefs are in many ways very different from what most people call Christian. In fact, there is a huge difference between what the original biblical texts say and what most Christians THINK they say. Knowlege of ancient customs and idioms is essential in understanding what the Scriptures say. I do not approach any subject with blind faith. I base my belifs on what I have studied in the past.

Re:65 million?

[Chris Burke]

What I say happens to be the TRUTH

So scientists can only make educated guesses, but you know the all-capital TRUTH.

Uh-huh. The sad thing here is that you are impunging upon the capabilities of scientists who have studied and used these techniques, learning both the advantages and limitations, for years as being mere "educated guesses", while your "TRUTH" with regard to carbon dating is certainly less educated than any of the scientists you are slurring.

But apparently only scientists need an education to make their guesses. For others, the TRUTH just seems to appear out of a combination of learned dogma, sheer arrogance, and some cranial-rectal connection to the aether that I don't understand. It's like, just sitting there, they become Enlightened like a Buddhist monk and the TRUTH falls upon them fully formed.

Must be nice. Too bad the scientists are stuck with their limited learning and educated guesses and empirical evidence. Pulling stuff out of one's ass^W^W^W^W^W Enlightenment has no such limitations.

Re:65 million?

[cyberscan]

Note that I said natural selection is a fact - not natural selection as the origin of life. It is a proven fact that certain animals in each species have certain qualities that make it able to thrive or breed better in its envoronment. Combinations of certain genes as well as learned behaviours can be passed from parent to offspring.

Re:65 million?

[hxftw]

Don't come in here and say "who cares" to my comment when most of the other comments in here are basing their ridicule of religion and the Bible on false statements that they didn't bother checking, some science.

Re:65 million?

[cyberscan]

Note that I said natural selection (not evolution as the origin of species) is a fact. It is demonstrated many. many times that creatures that are well suited towards an environment tend to produce offspring that is better suited for the same environemnt. That is what I mean by natural selection.

Unfortunately, in most schools, evolution (even as the origin of species) is taught and treated as if it is a fact rather than a theory. Courts have even blocked a disclaimer label being put in textbooks that state that evolution is a theory. In fact evolution as the origin of life is being taught with religious zeal in our public schools.

Re:65 million?

[Maserati]

Congratulations, you win teh Internet.

Seriously, every DARPA grant, every CompSci thesis, every failed IPO, every mile of fibre, every microwave repeater, just to get me that one joke.

Worth it !

Re:65 million?

[Laser Lou]

descriptions of dinosaurs living and walking around in The Bible

That is totally absurd and untrue.

lack of lunar dust

That involves a false "fact" often quoted by creationists. A simple google search will show the facts behind this urban legend.

life breaks the second law of thermodynamics

This is a creationist / "intelligent design" fact, but is generally not well accepted, and is highly disputed.

the Big Bang theory breaks the first law of thermodynamics

That's not evidence for creationism. It just means that the "Big Bang" theory is not complete.

Re:65 million?

[Phleg]

Of course these points are not allowed to be brought up in any "science" program in the public schools.

Flamebait and a troll. Some teachers might not know about this, or bring it up, but nobody's prohibited from bringing it up. In any class I had where radiocarbon dating was discussed, they also clearly described its shortcomings, and exactly why we don't rely on a single method of dating and use several overlapping measures instead.

Re:65 million?

[Maxo-Texas]

And what kind of a sick liar of a god would do that?

Should you worship such a god?

Which is more plausible. that such a god exists... or that the evidence we can repeatably measure is correct.

Re:65 million?

[duguk]

Its completely lost me, I'm going to be up all night trying to figure this out. Yeah, I have read his post... over and over again but I just don't get it.

Atheism is the disbelief in the existence of God .
Creationism is the belief that humanity, life, the Earth, or the universe as a whole was specially created by a supreme being, God.

Help? I'm an atheist btw, does that make me a creationist?

DugUK

Re:65 million?

[abigor]

You are wasting your life with this crap, you know that? It's just a bunch of fairy tales invented by Semitic nomads. You only have one life to live - get out there and live and accomplish things rather than worrying about some irrelevant bunch of stories.

Re:65 million?

[Yunzil]

For example can you tell me what the ration of carbon 14 to carbon 12 ration was in the yeer 50000000 b.c.e?

It doesn't matter because you don't use carbon dating for things that old.

Now go out and play and later we might have ICE CREAM!

Re:65 million?

[buswolley]

I think the idea is that He can do anything he wants, but will not break his word.

Re:65 million?

[grub]

Where did I ever say my original post (which was meant to be tongue in cheek) was based on science?

Re:65 million?

[mikael]

But the problem is that some highly respected bible scholar decided to do this study. Because of his seniority and respect in the community (he went to university, they didn't), nobody could really prove otherwise. So this belief becomes common wisdom (and now a website.

Re:65 million?

[Artifakt]

Natural Selection has EVERYTHING to do with the First Spark of Life".

1. Standard evolutionary theory says that a lower mutation rate, (down to some minimum that is greater than zero) actually increases selection speed. That sounds counter-intuitive, but it is straight from Dawkins and similar sources. One reason here is that mutations are occuring in organisms that are already pretty close to perfectly adapted to their environments or they'd be dead. The few mutations that are improvements are generally small improvements, that take generations of testing to prosper. A high enough mutation rate, and a new mutation overwrites the last one before the first had time to be tested. To see this a little more clearly, just imagine a mutation that makes an annual type plant a little better able to resist drought. If droughts only happen in that area about every 20 years, the mutation only helps a carrier survive every twenty generations or so. There are several other arguements for this point, which can be found in the Dawkin's The Selfish Gene or The Blind Watchmaker, or in a typical college textbook on the subject.
(Anyone who doubts this is standard theory is welcome to write somebody such as Dr. Dawkins and ask, or for God's sakes read a little. Usually when I get this far, someone insists this isn't the standard theory of evolution at all, and proposes some kind of Lysenkoism as the standard instead. I am very sick and tired of proposing this and having people who think evolution means the X-men try to prove I'm wrong.).

2. Modern organisms use DNA, with both advanced error correction and mutation reduction. One form of correction is sexual reproduction, by using a second copy of most genes. One form of reduction is putting the DNA in a central nucleus where it is less exposed to chemical mutagens.

3. Fully modern DNA in sexual organisms has been around for at least 700 Million years (see Dr. Simon Conway Morris's estimates for the age of the earliest Ediacaran fauna. If he's not THE greatest still living expert on this, he's at least number 2.).

4. Less modern DNA, but still with error protection in the form of nucleated cells, has been inside the oldest fossil eukarotes since, at the absolute very least, 2.1 Billion years ago (again Morris's timetable). That's also about half the age of the Earth (4.2 Billion years).

5. Really primative DNA with no correction or protection, has been found, again at the very least, as far back as the first stromatolites (2.9 billion years). Most paleontologists (admittedly not all), point to earlier fossils, as early as 3.5 billion years old, for the first DNA based organisms.

6. DNA is believed to have developed from RNA. RNA is still used by most life as a messenger chemical, but is only found as a heredity chemical in some very primative viruses. The error rates for RNA are well known, and indicate evolution must have been proceeding very slowly, even compared to the most primative DNA based life. The living record agrees with this, as do extensive tests comparing generalized eukarotes with all surviving types of non-eukarotes. While it's not as universally agreed by biologists as the earlier points, it's still generally agreed that RNA did predate DNA. You can find a few recognized biologists who don't support this last point, but they are a distinct minority, under 5%.

7. This means, we have counted back to within about 700 million years of the time Earth formed, just for the three stages of DNA based life. That's about 84% of all the time we have to explain life. The RNA dominant period, when evolution was much slower, has to fit into that last 16%. Whatever came before RNA has to fit into what's left after RNA gets its share, and so on.

8. By the standard theory's best guess, there are at least a dozen stages, each with more primative molecules involved, going back to the beginnings of life. The earliest ones might have been non-living clay-like substances, where natural selection operated only

Re:65 million?

[pjbgravely]

I assume that Adam's age wasn't counted until he was thrown out of the garden and became mortal. While in the garden he was immortal so age didn't matter. If that assumption is wrong then so am I.

Re:65 million?

[andy_t_roo]

This is wrong. No one knows how long each day of creation lasted.i believe most biblical scholars lean on the side that the writer of genesis one intended for a meaning of a single revolution of the earth 'day' not an epoc 'day'; http://www.gotquestions.org/Genesis-days.html has a discussion concerning this

No one knows how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden, it could have been 10 years, or even 10 Billion years for all we know. i agree - the bible does not specify how long adam and eve were in the garden however Genesis 5 does specify how old Adam was when Seth was born, how old Seth was when his son Enosh was born and so on down to Abram (post flood, with years totaling about 1200) so while people argue over what actually happened, i believe that what the bible claims is quite clear. 3 When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. 4 After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. 5 Altogether, Adam lived 930 years, and then he died.

Re:65 million?

[Kohath]

Any argument that starts with "Go read [some book] ..." is a poor (or poorly communicated) argument.

I didn't read the rest of your post. I'll wait until the author of that book posts and them I might read his.

Re:65 million?

[Kohath]

I am saying that some people need to stop confusing religion with science

Maybe all the hateful bigotry that the "science" crowd directs at the "religion" crowd will help with that. Religious people will learn (correctly) that anyone involved in science is their enemy and wishes them harm.

And people who like science, but won't engage in hateful bigotry, will eventually choose professions that are separate from the sciences and their culture. That's either a loss or a gain, depending on how highly you value hatred.

Re:65 million?

[radtea]

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.

The fact/theory distinction is devoid of scientific interest. No scientist has ever had a debate over the status of a particular piece of knowlege, wondering if it is a fact or a theory. Opponents of science are the only people who bring up the distinction, but they never explain what it is.

Re:65 million?

[ArcherB]

My post was not to defend Creationism or try to debate it. I'm just tired of /.'ers calling Christians retards because of their beliefs. I find that extremely rude and not to mention politically incorrect. No one here would stand for someone saying that believing in Budha is rediculous, why should Christianity be any different? Besides, the article was about how a single even wiped out the dino's 65 million years ago. No one on slashdot mentioned Creationism except for those ridiculing it right out of the gate. That was not the point of the article nor any post before the attacks started. I'm just asking for a single dinosaur or darwin story to be posted here without someone calling my religion, or any other, retarded because it might be counter to their belief system.

BTW, I don't necessarily side with the most Creationists, but I do believe that God created the Universe. I see no reason why He could not have done it 14 billion years ago in a big bang and let life evolve throug evolution. That's a bigger miracle to me anyesy thsn just saying "LET IT BE!"

Finally, even in mentioning this, I have been modded down three times because my views were a bit different (as my sig states). The moderation guidelines state that "you are moderating to promote thoughtful discussion, not to make your opinions heard", but because I don't follow the /. group think, I'm modded down. You could say I'm literally modded down because of my religion, even though I did not force it on anyone. All I did was ask that it not be attacked when unprovoked. I think that alone proves my point.

Re:65 million?

[orkysoft]

But you can only get a maximum score of +5! It says so in the FAQ! How dare you mock the Slashcode authors?

Re:65 million?

[loxosceles]

...life breaks the second law of thermodynamics, ...

Finally, as a Christian myself, I humbly ask that slashdotters stop seeing every article that deals with dinosaurs, evolution/Darwin, stem cells or genetics as an excuse to slap me in the face with it. The only thing worse that pushing your religion on others is trying to take other's religion away.

You want to know why many people slap you in the face with your Christianity? Because you spout off about "life break[ing] the second law of thermodynamics," demonstrating that you either don't understand life or you don't understand thermodynamics... perhaps both. Yet you're obviously willing to insult scientific principles based on something you read on some crackpot website. I think it's written somewhere that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And you have the audacity to complain about people who believe crackpot 9/11 theories?! Maybe you should first cast the beam out of your own eye.

Oh, I'm an agnostic. I have no problem with the idea that there might be a God. We're not very far along in understanding the universe, so who's to say the universe wasn't created by something even more incomprehensible. I do not, however, see how the possible existence of God has any relevance to government, society, science, or morals

I get prickly when people use religion as filler for science or social policy. If your religion keeps you from examining the scientific and pragmatic realities of dinosaurs, evolution, stem cells, genetic engineering/cloning, abortion, women's rights, etc., then I think you deserve to have your religion stuffed down your throat.

The amazing thing about the Bible is that it illuminates so much hypocrisy among Christians. And, since I don't subscribe to the Bible wholesale, my glee in watching people like you get raked over the coals in scientific discussions does not make me a hypocrite. If I'm wrong about something, which happens, I accept it. I don't go on to whine about how I'm persecuted because I prefer science over faith.

Re:65 million?

[radtea]

Religion exists because people need to believe in something greather than themselves.

"That word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means."

Art can fulfil the purpose of giving something greater than themselves to believe in. So can science. There's so much to simply WONDER at in the universe, from the smallest bug to the farthest star. Religion, as it is commonly understood rather than according to your personal definition of it, has nothing to offer anyone who is aware of the world around them.

Re:65 million?

[zm]

Right on the money there, amigo. Similarly, if it was His will that the scientists do stem cell research and that the doctors perform abortions, who the heck are we to question Him? There are people around who claim to be bigger believers than us and tell us that His will is something else, but we know better - if it happens, it is the will of God. Praise the Lord.

Re:65 million?

[redneckHippe]

Yea, until he destroyed them in a huge ball of fire for their wicked ways.

Re:65 million?

[masdog]

Whew! It's a good thing Bartleby and Loki didn't make it into that church in New Jersey. Otherwise, we might really be in for some trouble.

Re:65 million?

[rthille]

I'll stop subjecting religion to scientific inquiry when religion stops saying things about the real world.

Re:65 million?

[Laser Lou]

No one on slashdot mentioned Creationism except for those ridiculing it right out of the gate.

Creationsim gets that sort of treatment here because it claims to be scientific while having no real scientific merit. It is like the king with no clothes.

I'm just asking for a single dinosaur or darwin story to be posted here without someone calling my religion, or any other, retarded because it might be counter to their belief system.

Yes, some people think that creationism is an essential part of a belief in God, so while they may reject creationism because of its lack of scientific merit, they may feel that they have to reject religion and God's existence as well. That would not happen if they had any sense of theology, and were able to accept God as the creator, while also seeking to understand astronomy and evolution.

Re:65 million?

[syousef]

>> The Monkeyists might like to know
I presume you're trying to imply that people are thought to be descended from monkeys.

Now be fair. I'm sure he was talking about Monkey Magic fans. I bet he thinks that's real too. After all if you believe the earth was made in 6 days by a guy shouting let there be light etc., it's not a stretch to think that blowing between your fingers as you move them up and down will summon a pink cloud that will take you where you want it.

Re:65 million?

[syousef]

Blasphemer! How dare you speak the name of the great one without including the suffix -Rex. You are evil and must be purged from this place!

Re:65 million?

[2short]

"I'm just tired of /.'ers calling Christians retards because of their beliefs"

Then don't make retarded posts. Buddhism and Christianity are both, in my opinion, silly mumbo-jumbo, but I don't care. Beleive whatever you want. However, some people think their beleifs, for which they have no evidence, deserve to be respected by others just because they beleive it, and they push these beleifs at others, and try to get them taken seriously in public schools, etc. These people deserve ridicule. It's not unprovoked. They put forth blatantly false ideas, and attack good science with nonsense that has already been debunked many times over. The mocking carries over into the next relevant story, because they are just so mock-worthy. If you're not one of them, then don't be offended; it's not Christianity as a whole we criticise, but idiocy, Christian or otherwise.

Re:65 million?

[rohan972]

I don't know much about his science being wrong, but his moral outlook certainly seems questionable:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18. 'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p.236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."
The Project Gutenberg Etext The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin

If he was to first propose his theory today, it would likely be rejected as people would distance themselves from such racist remarks. I note that this is not the real evidence that Darwin was wrong that you asked for, nor do I have an alternate scientific theory for the origin of species.

Re:65 million?

[quigonn]

Well, religion started the conflict. Religions like Christianity were there before science was. And when science started to emerge, it was fought extremely hard and brutal by Christian religions (especially the Roman-Catholic church). And in these days, the evangelical movement and their think-tanks try to take over the science with pseudo-scientic junk like ID and try to make it into the schools' curricula, so the "hateful bigotry" you mention is only the healthy self-defense from the science community.

Re:65 million?

[ArcherB]

hen don't make retarded posts. Buddhism and Christianity are both, in my opinion, silly mumbo-jumbo, but I don't care. Beleive whatever you want. However, some people think their beleifs, for which they have no evidence, deserve to be respected by others just because they beleive it, and they push these beleifs at others, and try to get them taken seriously in public schools, etc. These people deserve ridicule. It's not unprovoked. They put forth blatantly false ideas, and attack good science with nonsense that has already been debunked many times over. The mocking carries over into the next relevant story, because they are just so mock-worthy. If you're not one of them, then don't be offended; it's not Christianity as a whole we criticise, but idiocy, Christian or otherwise.

This is a fucking article about dinosaurs!!! It has nothing to do with religion being taught in public schools. No one posted anything about religion being taught in public schools or about pushing religion on you or anyone else. So yeah, it is unprovoked. Yes, some people believe things that you disagree with, but that doesn't mean you have to insult them and their core beliefs any time something they disagree with is brought up. There is an article about Apple Hardware on slashdot right now, why don't we go over there and bash religion for hating gays?

Finally, you say here:
However, some people think their beleifs, for which they have no evidence, deserve to be respected by others just because they beleive it, and they push these beleifs at others, and try to get them taken seriously in public schools, etc.
Isn't that kind of what is goes on here? Let's ridicule those that believe differently than we do.

Re:65 million?

[complete loony]

It looks like there must be some global creationist group ...

I don't think it requires that much organisation, just enough regular visitors with the same opinions.

That's a lot of water.

Yes and no. There's lots of water in the oceans, and it would take less total volume of water to erode the mountains than would be required to cover them over.

Re:65 million?

[Slip-Knot in space t]

Dude, dont post religious sh** in a scientific discussion forum, thats just not cool.

Re:65 million?

[2short]

"This is a fucking article about dinosaurs!!!"

In response to which some people made dumb jokes (it's slashdot, dumb jokes are always in context) at the expense of young-earth creationists. Which were funny, because YECs are ridiculous. Others defended the YECs because how dare we make fun of others beleifs. I is this idea I feel needs a righteous smack-down. The concept that we must respect others ideas no matter how crazy they are is downright dangerous.

"Isn't that kind of what is goes on here? Let's ridicule those that believe differently than we do."
No, let us ridicule those who insist on ridiculous things. If you are insulted because I say your "core beleifs" are ridiculous, oh well. I do not ask anyone to take my beleifs seriously just because I beleive them. In many cases I beleive them because there is good evidence for them, which may ocf course be a reason for a rational person to agree with me. But I ask no one to beleive, or even respect, anything at all just because I say so.

Re:65 million?

[ObiWanStevobi]

Yes, I was once an atheist

Atheist turned troll? Reading through your comments, I don't see any technical posts, just thinly disguised right wing politics.

I do have a college education in the sciences

Really, which ones? Was this degree over the internets? Certainly not any sciences that are applicable to this debate. Perhaps social, political, or economic?

You haven't produced one bit of 'evidence' that doesn't match this site.

I hate to be a flamer, and couldn't care less what anyone believes about how he universe got here. However, you have made the always typical comments telltale of someone not intersted the least bit in 'the sciences' or any fact, you're interested in framing the argument. First off, you start with the 'Public Schools' chestnut. Only in a geeks wildest dreams would a public school education get that in depth into science. Second, you confused evolution with origin. If you are a student of 'the sciences', you would not make such a mistake unless you intended to do so. Finally, using the term monkeyist religion? Perhaps you would feel more at home at a Rush Limbaugh blog rather than a tech site.

Re:65 million?

[cyxxon]

Damn, +5 already, and I have mod points. Just need to reply then, and link this from my blog (which nobody reads, but hey, that never stopped anyone from having one). Anyway, very interesting way to see this problem!

Re:65 million?

[SleepySheep]

Maybe man's perception of time is not the same as God's perception. Perhaps those millions of years worth of "proof of evolution" that we see only cover 6 days worth of creation for a God who exists in Eternity? Thus it's possible that a time difference is all that separates the creationist from the evolutionist.

That does not work. Consider the following verses from Genesis:

1:11 God said, "Let the land produce vegetation:31 plants yielding seeds according to their kinds,32 and33 trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds." It was so. 1:12 The land produced vegetation - plants yielding seeds according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. God saw that it was good. 1:13 There was evening, and there was morning, a third day.

1:14 God said, "Let there be lights34 in the expanse35 of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs36 to indicate seasons and days and years, 1:15 and let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." It was so. 1:16 God made two great lights37 - the greater light to rule over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night. He made the stars also.38 1:17 God placed the lights39 in the expanse of the sky to shine on the earth, 1:18 to preside over the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.40 God saw that it was good. 1:19 There was evening, and there was morning, a fourth day.

On the 3rd day, God created plant life and put into the place the process by which they reproduce. I've got to think that means by the end of the 3rd day, the plants were completed which also means the process known as photosynthesis has been created. As we all know, plants require sun light in order to live.

Sunlight was not created until the 4th day. If a day in these verses means a period of 24 hours (as I believe), then no problem. The sun sets every evening and when it rises in the morning the plants are OK. But, if a day stands for millions of years, then the plants will be dead before sunlight is created. Besides, the Scripture talks about evenings and mornings; so if "a day" is a million years then what is an "evening" and a "morning"?

But, yes, God's perception of time is very different from man's. Man is living inside of time and is thus limited by it. God is the Creator of the universe. Time is simply one of the universe's dimensions and God transcends the universe.

The only thing that seperates the creationist from the evolutionist is God. That is, creationists believe in design with a Creator. Evolutionists believe in design without a Creator.

Re:65 million?

[shutdown -p now]

There are other ways around that paradox. The one I tend to like most is that "a stone the God cannot lift" is not definable in a meaningful way. It simply doesn't mean anything, much the same as "result of division of 1 by 0" (the latter is not infitity BTW... it's nothing, as in, there's simply no such thing), or, even simpler, a "square circle".

Can God create a "square circle" or a "triangle with four sides"? The fallacy is that of assuming that the answer of canCreate(x) should be either true or false. For some values of x, you just get an ArgumentException, which is really neither ;)

P.S. And no, I'm not a Christian.

Re:65 million?

[Gotta ask yourself..]

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).

You have no way to prove it's bogus, just like they have no way to prove it's not. You both are on the same ground and think very much alike. The conclusions you might come to might be opposit, but the method you use to get there is exactly the same.

With the advancement of technology, we might one day be able to simulate one entire universe inside a computer. Doesn't even matter whether it would take one of our years to simulate one second of the so created universe, because the time of the universe we created would exist in a reference frame independent from ours. What would matter, is the question: since you created that universe, who are you, if not the God of that universe?

Therefore, why and how we're here, ultimately, is irrelevant. There will always be the question "who or what originated it all". Call it God, if you wish.

-- an agnostic.

Re:65 million?

[FST777]

I strongly disagree. For me both science and religion contains the Truth. In my personal opinion, one doesn't rule out the other. Science cannot rule out the existence of a God, simply because that is out of the scope of natural laws as we know it. Religion cannot rule out the existence of natural laws (like gravity, or quantummechanics, or genetics), simply that is beyond the scope of spirituality.

The fact that I believe God created everything does not mean that I oppose the findings like we discuss in this very topic. It simply means that I believe that there is more meaning in life than mere chemics. But the bottomline remains: science and religion simply don't mix up, so they shouldn't be mixed up.

Your allegory doesn't make sense. Science might say 1+1=2, but religion doesn't contradict that by saying 1+1=3. I really can combine [1+1=2] and [$God=true]. That is the allegory that is made when combining science with religion.

Re:65 million?

[master_p]

God is not a human being. Deception, angriness, purposefulness, there are all signs of a finite being.

Actually, your argument falls flat because of itself! if you say that 'who are we to judge how the universe was constructed by God', we can also say that 'who are we to assume how the universe was constructed'!

Re:65 million?

[gavri]

It seemed so plausible! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qmglGWMsdk

Re:65 million?

[ComaVN]

It's not so much [$God=true] that people have a problem with. It's [$SpecificGodAsDescribedInSpecificBook=true] that is demonstrably at odds with current scientific understanding.

Re:65 million?

[CmdrGravy]

Some of you find pretty much anything to be proof a God, the problem is that nothing we can see, nothing we have ever discovered and nothing that we know about has ever provided the slightest reason to believe that there is such a thing as a God let alone any evidence for it.

Instead religious types start out by assuming that there is a God and that he is in some way responsible for everything.

When they start trying to explain exactly how he was responsible for a particular thing they come unstuck because shortly afterwards science will come along and explain the thing much more accurately without any reference to God.

In some cases it appears that God has just got some things plain wrong, e.g. everything orbiting the world. Once it becomes obvious that science is better at describing something than God was religious types change their mind about what it was exactly God had done - "But God never said everything orbited the Earth, that was just our misinterpretation".

What religious types fail to understand has always been a misinterpretation, no one has ever seen God, no one has ever heard God, there has never been any evidence for God it has from the start been simply an fabrication which is constantly re-interpreted to attempt to fit in with current thinking.

Re:65 million?

[CmdrGravy]

i believe most biblical scholars lean on the side that the writer of genesis one intended for a meaning of a single revolution of the earth 'day' not an epoc 'day'I agree but I bet that wasn't the case 400 years ago when that was probably a hard fact you had to agree with.

The only reason religious types have now changed their mind about this is that Science has so convincingly proved that any such belief is pure nonsense.

Rather than simply admit that their religion is nonsense the religious types instead prefer to simply re-interpret their original hard and fast laws to something more likely to be accepted by the general population so that they can continue to exert their control over their own believers and other sympathetic members of the general population.

Re:65 million?

[caroboom]

I don't have time to argue about some points. But: "A high enough mutation rate, and a new mutation overwrites the last one before the first had time to be tested." Do you have any idea what kind of mutation rate this would require? Eating plutonium sausage for breakfast wouldn't give you enough mutations to have a decent change of having 2 mutations that would cancel eachoter out. It's bullshit. Second point is that if what you say is true, why do bacteria evolve faster than humans. Or are you arguing they do not?

Re:65 million?

[CmdrGravy]

What is the difference between your prejudices about me and any other bigot that assumes that Mexicans are lazy, black people steal and so on?Their is a big difference between harbouring predjuices about Mexicans or black people and people with religious convictions. Mexicans cannot alter the fact that they are Mexican or black and their personal beliefs, character, intelligence etc have nothing to do with the fact they are Mexican or black.

You on the other hand choose to harbour completely irrational beliefs that you will somehow live on after you are dead, that some kind of superman created the world and watches over you. These are beliefs you have chosen to subscribe to and if I, or anyone else, decides to judge you based on a choice you have made then there is nothing wrong with that at all.

Personally I think people who choose to subscribe to a religious belief are more ignorant, less intelligent, less open minded, less charitable, more concerned with money and more likely to be a drunk than people who do not have religious beliefs. This is however purely based on people I have met, I've never met you so there's a chance you might be different.

Re:65 million?

[FST777]

Care to elaborate? Remember that "Specific God That Created Everything Sixthousand Years Ago In Six Days" is a scientific interpretation of religious-based wishfull thinking. The Bible is written so that people from all ages could understand it, and it should be read as such.

That being said, I can't see a problem with [$SpecificGodAsDescribedInSpecificBook=true] and scientific understanding, as long as one keeps in mind that one cannot approach science from a religious PoV, and vice-versa.

Re:65 million?

[bhiestand]

What both ends always should realize: everything you say which you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt is a theory.

No. At that point all you have is something which can't be proven. You need a lot more to have a scientific 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.

Well, once again, you're being dishonest about scientists. You're acting as if the two are actually equal scientific theories, which they aren't. Gravity is a fact, and a law, but there are many theories which explain how it works. Likewise, evolution is a fact. It is observable. The modern versions of the theory predict things very accurately and it probably has more evidence for it than any other theory.

Let me say that again: The fact that evolution happens is an indisputable, irrefutable, observable FACT. And you wonder why scientists ridicule people who claim to have a "competing" theory? Intelligent Design isn't even a hypothesis, and even if it was supported by scientific evidence (which it's not), it would never be a scientific theory.

Bottomline is: when you mix up science and religion, you degrade the value of both.

Funny you mention that. I see it as strengthening science and weakening religion. It is proof that the religious know they cannot survive without resorting to impersonating science. When you attempt to make it a scientific debate you are going to lose every time. Science will survive because too many people already know there is a method for determining the truth about how the universe works.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the day when a person saying they believe in a god is as embarrassing as an adult saying that they believe in Santa Clause.

Re:65 million?

[abell]

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

I would definitely exclude mathematical theorems such as Pythagoras' from the realm of theories. Theorems strictly follow from axioms and are not dependent on such contingencies as the physical world. Their application to real-world problems depends on whether the axioms they derive from are themselves applicable to it.

Re:65 million?

[Dabido]

'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.'

A friend of mine from School went on to do a PhD in Theology. During that time he studied Hebrew & Kone Greek, along with all the books of the Bible in these languages. From what he told me the word in Genesis that gets translated as 'Day' doesn't mean that in Hebrew. It apparently just means a period of time. Thus, a literal interpretation of the term 'Day' is just literally interpreting the English Translation and NOT the original word or meaning behind it.

I think the old warning from the Bible of not leaning to ones own understanding gets missed by a lot of people. I get tired of arguing against people who interpret things from a Modern Western point of view, and won't even consider that the meaning of some passages might have been obvious to a culture two thousand years plus in the past but not to our current understanding.

A lot of people seem to forget that Religion and Science are answering two different questions.

btw, enjoyed your post.

Re:65 million?

[FST777]

Thanks, I appreciate that.

This discussion came at the right time for me. I'm just started reading "the language of God" by Francis L. Collins from the Human Genome project. Judging from the first three chapters, I can recommend it to anyone who is interested in this dillema. Those chapters and this topic forced me to think about it thoroughly and strenghtened my faith enormously (in both God and science).

Re:65 million?

[ComaVN]

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/science/long.htm l

What method do you employ to determine which parts of the bible are to be read literally, and which parts are not? More specifically, why do most moderate Christians like (I presume) yourself interpret Genesis as metaphore, but the miracles performed by Jesus as literal truth?

Re:65 million?

[FST777]

In my opinion, each part of the Bible can be interpretated as metaphoric or literal juding on two points:

1. Context
Oftentimes it is obvious if something is meant as a metaphore. For some pasages, the context and the wording should be judged in its original language. Sometimes it simply cannot be done.

2. Time
You have to remember the time in which the Bible was written. Science as we know it now was virtually nonexistant back then. When there is a mention that "the sun stood still" it is obvious with current knowledge that if anything stood still, it was the earth.

I totally agree that it always is a thin line. You can spent a lifetime with judging texts like these, but it helps a lot that we know more of the world nowadays (for instance that it's round) than folks did back then.

Re:65 million?

[bogado]

That's something that's always struck me. An omnipotent god could trivially create a zillion photons all the way up to every star in the iniverse. And in fact could create 15 billion years of fake history which would be completely indistinguishable from "real" history.
 
Which also means that we could also postulate that the universe came into existence 10 seconds ago, complete with this comment half written.If he created the world this way, I guess that he can't blame humans and condemn them to eternal pain and stuff in hell for believing it... ;-)

God, the meta-physical prankster, "hahaha, fooled you"...

Re:65 million?

[Johnny5000]

God is not a human being. Deception, angriness, purposefulness, there are all signs of a finite being.

I'm not sure what your point is, but if you're a religious kook just keep in mind that the bible is full of instances where god acts like a complete douchebag, including deception, anger, etc.

So that would indicate the bible (and god) were created by finite beings?

Re:65 million?

[ComaVN]

Point 1 directly contradicts your earlier statement: "The Bible is written so that people from all ages could understand it"

Re:65 million?

[Ginger Unicorn]

Then why not ignore it and mind your own business?

because the unchallenged propagation of poor reasoning like that is bad thing. the more ignorance there is, the more the world is a dangerous place.

I think not being able to prove something is better than thinking you proved something with evidence when you really didn't.

That's why he had to pull you up on the way you were implying that your meaningless thought exercise was any kind of evidence for the existence of God, which it isn't.

Also, a lot of the evidence that scientists use for evolution can be viewed another way as evidence for Creation.

That's a bold claim, the kind that needs to be backed up with some references or at least some examples. And again, it would be irresponsible for me to let you make potentially baseless assertions without challenging you to back up your claims. As an unrelated and more extreme example, i'm sure you wouldnt think that a holocaust denier should not be challenged when making claims like "a lot of evidence for the holocaust can be viewed another way as evidence against it", without presenting a single example for consideration.

By the way, what ever happened to the 3 rules of cell theory, namely the one about all cells can only come from another living cell?

They are rules governing a particular well bounded model. They arent a set of commandments etched into the fabric of the universe. They also dont contradict evolutionary theory whatsoever. What I assume you are thinking about is the origin of life, rather than speciation. The theory of evolution has little to say about the origin of life.

Tell your friends to get their story straight before preaching evolution.

I would encourage you to heed your own advice. Also, evolution isn't a gospel that is preached. It is a scientific fact that can be readily examined by anyone who is genuinely curious about the way the world actually works. Your problem is that your only understanding of evolution is the self-deluding and ignorant propaganda of the intelligent design "movement".

A very important fact of life that would do you well to appreciate, is that you simple CANNOT make a valid judgement of the truth of a proposition if you only listen to one side of the story. Do yourself a favour and open your eyes. Try reading some actual scientific material about evolution and make a genuinely balanced judgement. Don't spend the rest of your life as the mouthpiece of someone else's propaganda.

Re:65 million?

[FST777]

You had me thinking there...

With my earlier statement I meant the way things are told or explained. It's quite easy to imagine the sun standing still, for us as well as for 1000 BC jews. Point one touches two issues which are out of that scope: translation (indeed not everyone understands Hebrew) and "supernatural" things, like described in Revelations. The first is a matter of insight in an old language and old cultures. The latter has been a matter of debate for ages and will remain so until "the end of times", if you follow me.

I have a hard time translating my thoughts on this in Dutch, let alone English. Bear with me :)

Re:65 million?

[fimbulvetr]

...false statements that they didn't bother checking...

Funny, coming from a guy who defends the bible and all.

Re:65 million?

[Ginger Unicorn]

It was not my intention to debate the "evidence" of creationism, only to point out that it does exist.

But he just explained that those examples you gave are not valid. They arent evidence because they arent true. Every single piece of evidence presented to bolster the notion of creationism by attempting to discredit scientific facts is demonstrably wrong. It is also a false dilemma. Proving all of science to be wrong would not prove that god created the universe.

I never said I agreed with it, but most people here have not taken the time to even consider that there may be other view points with valid, logical and scientifically backed reasoning. I've heard both sides of the argument and you have to agree that both sides have valid points as well as theories that don't make sense.

The creationist side ONLY has theories that don't make sense. And "science" isnt some kind of gospel edict that scientists have faith in. Science consists of varied points of view with logical scientific backed reasoning. But at the end of the day, one of those points of view come out on top as having the most evidence behind it. Thus a consensus is reached. A consensus that can be revised should more evidence come up in favour of a different point of view. "Intelligent Design" has been and can be reviewed as a scientific theory and it has been found to be JUNK SCIENCE. It doesnt hold any water. The "evidence" presented by the IDers has been peer reviewed the world over and it's GARBAGE. This ploy of appealing to "fairness" and "balance" is a political ruse to sway people who are ignorant of the fact that the entire case has been evaluated fairly and in a balanced way, and was found to be INCORRECT.

While you and others have done a pretty good job of "debunking" most of the creationist view, I have yet to hear anyone debunk the first law of thermodynamics. If energy (and matter) is never created nor destroyed, nothing can exist without that law at any scale being broken at some point.

He just explained that to you, but you havent understood. Scientific "Laws" are not etched into the fabric of the universe. They are used to describe the behaviour of a particular well defined system. In the same way that Newton's Laws dont apply when you approach the speed of light, the laws of thermodynamics dont apply when you are talking about the beginning of the universe, because they weren't written to describe it. They describe the lower energy universe we occupy today. This is another example of creationists confusing the layman with intellectually dishonest misrepresentations of what science is and what it says.

I'm not saying I know who, how or why, but I am saying that not all Creationist theories have been "debunked endlessly".

Present one that hasnt been debunked then. And dont just reiterate the ones that have just been debunked in front of you.

And saying that these "laws" don't apply because they break down at extreme scales is as much as a cop out as saying God did it.

No it isnt at all. You fundamentally misunderstand science. The "laws" were written from experimentation and research made in the universe as it is now. They only apply to the universe as it is now. A Scientific "law" is not a universal. It only applies to the system it describes. Saying god did it is saying "i know for a fact this thing we cant explain or understand was definitely done by god.". Saying the laws of thermodynamics dont apply at the beginning of the universe is just admitting the reality that we dont know what happens.

Re:65 million?

[fimbulvetr]

I think you're confusing Budha with Buddha.

In any case, Buddha wasn't a son of a god. He was just a guy who wrote some guidelines. There are no buddist mantras about killing your enemies, killing nonbelievers, promising 72 virgins in heaven, forgiving suicide bombings, holy cities, etc.

You can believe in him or not, and still be buddhist.

Perhaps you should conjur up another religious avatar you can compare your bearded savior of man with?

Re:65 million?

[Ginger Unicorn]

could he create a being that could and would kill him? Does that being have omnipotence+1?

Re:65 million?

[mrpeebles]

There is strong physical evidence that natural selection provides a coherent and consistent picture of how the rise of the species. And it does have explanatory power- it tells us that we can consider whatever causes mutations, and the survival value of those mutations, separately. So it is a good scientific theory. Now I'm not a biologist, and don't know how well people understand the potential beginnings of life. I'm not particularly convinced by your argument, but I can't immediately come up with a counter argument either. But I'm no expert. I will say, thought, that I could make an analogous argument about electrodynamics in physics. I could claim that Maxwell's 4 equations are blatantly absurd because they can't explain how a simply hydrogen atom (or any other kind of atom) is held together- the prediction from 19th century physics is that in a the electron should fall into the proton. (I might even say that since we must test electrodynamics with things made of atoms, electrodynamics has no explanatory power because it simply pushes the wild unexplained things into the very small, though this might be taking the analogy too far.) But electrodynamics did not turn out to be wrong. It is pretty much exactly right for large things, and just required some modifications for small things. (The modifications were radical, but not in a way that jettisoned earlier knowledge, exactly.) This isn't surprising. Classical electrodynamics had to be more or less right for large things- there was strong physical evidence for it. Logical extrapolations into phenomena it wasn't developed to explain weren't going to change that. Natural selection is no different.

Re:65 million?

[Gibsnag]

Of course that is possible... a creator could have created the universe a day ago, a minute ago, a second ago or at any point in time approaching an infinitely small measurement of time. Therefore not only does this idea have no relevance to science (because science is either assuming that it didn't happen, or not caring that it happened and is interested in this fake history), it also doesn't help the Creationist's point of view either. If someone wanted to say that it was created at a specific point in our history, say 6k years ago then without *cough* evidence to show that that was the point in time at which God created the universe their point is moot. Seeing as there are conflicting religious accounts of this exact point (I think certain aboriginal tribes believe that this creator was a rainbow snake who vomited out the universe) I don't see why one unsupported book should be taken more highly than another unsupported book or any other unsupported creation legend.

Re:65 million?

[init100]

A lot of people, especially Creationists, get hung up on "theory" and "fact".

This is because the word theory in common use by laymen means something like hunch or hypothesis, i.e. an idea without any evidence for its validity.

Re:65 million?

[init100]

I find that extremely rude and not to mention politically incorrect.

Rudeness is bad, but I hope that you are not trying to enforce a political correctness policy. I don't have many good things (if any) to say about political correctness, as it usually restricts free speech, sometimes quite severely.

And by the way, even if this is an american website, the web is international. Should non-americans have to stay updated on what is considered politically incorrect in the US this week?

Re:65 million?

[init100]

Others defended the YECs because how dare we make fun of others beleifs.

I wonder what the YECs (or YEC defenders (should I say apologists?)) thought about the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons article slightly less than one year ago. Could I suppose they attacked those as vehemently as they attack those who make fun of YECs?

Re:65 million?

[Maxo-Texas]

Actually it's not a fact.

A measurement of gravity at a given location and time is a fact.

I've read that the word "Law" is really 1800's talk for "Theory".

The "Law" of gravity is really the "theory" of gravity.

We can observe that gravity exists today.
We can use astronomy to look into the past and see evidence that it existed in the past.

But gravity could stop, reverse or change tomorrow.

In that case, the theory of gravitation would have to be changed to fit that change.

And technically the "Law" of gravity was wrong and redefined to be correct as long as relativistic effects were not involved (i.e. for things moving slowly compared to the speed of light).

Re:65 million?

[Maxo-Texas]

The fundamental flaw with your dream is that on average,
irrational religious people outbreed rational people by 10 to 1.

Since we both agree that natural selection and evolution exists, I think we should both see the natural conclusion.
A population comprised 99%+ of irrational religious people.

In addition, I believe that some religious memes have "evolved" ways to be immune to logic and science. In part by just killing people who don't believe that way but more importantly by certain concepts that redefine rational thought while people are too young to think logically.

Re:65 million?

[albanac]

Religion, as it is commonly understood [...] has nothing to offer anyone who is aware of the world around them.

I hope you won't mind if I substitute 'spirtuality' for 'religion' here: I'm only doing so to be clear that I'm not talking about churches, or other human organisations that accrete around spiritual understandings, but am talking about the actual thing itself.

I've thought for many years that a very good description of spirituality (religion) is precisely "being aware of the world around [one]".

~cHris

Re:65 million?

[morgan_greywolf]

Again, you make the classic assumption that religions are all about dogma and are all similar to the dogmatic religions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.

Not all religions are about shared belief. There are some religions (like, say, Zen Buddhism, some other Eastern philosophies/religions, deism, pantheism, or neopaganism) that are really religions of shared practice; belief or dogma or theology isn't all that important and many of these religions and philosophies have no cannon (scripture) and little or no common laws and practically nothing in the way of theology.

Now where, exactly, does your description fit into that?

Re:65 million?

[buswolley]

Granted. Indeed I would not seek to argue against any of the points you've just made, and I did not in my original post. I merely showed that it may be possible for a creation to be made that disguises its true birthday from logic and science. I DID NOT advocate that this is the true state of our world, and nowhere did I make a case for a particular date of creation.

unfortunately, it is difficult to argue for the possibility of God and creation without others jumping in and erroneously believing that more was said than actually was stated. Given the history of bad reasoning from religious communities scared of science, it is natural for people to make this mistake, and just assume that I am just another zealot without reason since their experience with zealots gives them reason to convicts me a priori. However, it is a fallacy to conclude that because the reasoning skills of the proponents of a position are poor, then the position they are defending is also weak. It may be that those whom wish to defend their religion from agnostic philosophers and scientists are less trained in reasoning skills, and are blinded by the bad reasoning thats been drilled in their heads from childhood from their religious leaders and peers. However, I believe that with a fresh approach a proper defense of religion can be made if and only if, opponents are willing to let go of stereotypes, and use reason themselves in analyzing the arguments actually made.

Re:65 million?

[kchrist]

Crappy? Have you seen the resolution of Real Life(TM)? The Sims doesn't even compare!

Re:65 million?

[loxosceles]

Thank you for proving mine.

I accused you of not understanding life or thermodynamics because you stated that life violates the 2nd law of thermo. I did not accuse you of anything simply because you're a Christian. You saw fit to gripe about the limits of science, yet you don't understand that science. The 2nd law applies to closed systems, which Earth is not. When energy is dumped into a system, that system can become more organized without decreasing global entropy.

I understand that energy is never created or destroyed, yet it is here. (How can something exist if was never created?)

That's a damned good question. How can God exist if God was not created? If you propose a mechanism for God's existence, I can use that mechanism to explain the existence of a Godless universe -- the universe becomes God, in a sense.

If the best you can do to defend your position is to quote Einstein, you'd better give up. Einstein was not a Christian.

There's a continuum of types of God, and some scientists (but not Einstein) retain the label of "Christian" or "Jew" even when they've abandoned notions of a Christian or Jewish God. The few physicists who label themselves according to a major organized religion are either hypocrites, subscribing to religious beliefs where their scientific knowledge ends, or they are part of a fringe group within their religion where God and religious doctrine has been toned down to such an extent that it does not interfere with scientific thought. I don't know whether you belong to the second group or not. If you do, I would not call you a Christian.

You labeled yourself a Christian, and you don't know physics. You're so consumed with defending your faith that you evidently haven't bothered to read up on entropy and correct your mistaken beliefs. I suggest you obtain Fermi's wonderful treatise on Thermodynamics, cheaply available on Amazon and published by Dover. The big bang? Fine, ascribe /that/ to God if you want. You can even believe that God created life; science cannot prove otherwise. But don't suggest that natural occurrence of life, or the propagation of life, violates thermodynamic laws unless you have a thorough scientific argument or experiment to prove it. Otherwise, you come across as a religious scientific illiterate, whether you are one or not.

Re:65 million?

[CmdrGravy]

Yes, you're exactly right. Being the religious type, the first word I taught myself at age 1 was God. It was almost a reflex of the tongue. Ever since I was 3, I knew that everything I could see was manufactured by The Holy Spirit.

When I turned 5, I realized that no God could ever understand what it's like to be a toddler and to grow up in such a demented world, and heuristically determined that God must have incarnated a human Son so that He could realize what temptation drove us to, and sacrifice this Son for our sins (the things which I inherently knew separated us from The Lord).

Obviously this is not how it works, Religion isn't typically that people realise for themselves from the moment they're born. More typically someones peers, they're parents, teachers or powerful members of the community might have a particular religious view which they then pass on to you. Usually this is accomplished by teaching religion as though it was the truth and not just a convienent self perpetuating fairy tale. This is why you normally find a predominance of Muslims in Islamic communities where it would be very unusual to find someone deciding to grow up as a Christian and vice a versa.

We have these things, which we can see, which have been "discovered" since they were created, that most anyone (except you apparently) knows about, they're called BIBLES (aka scriptures, "holy books", testaments, etc.).

You mean you have books of stories which contain nothing in the way of verifiable scientific proofs but an awful lot of speculation. These things didn't suddenly spring into existence from the loins of God but were instead written and collated by groups of people who chose which stories to include and how they were written based on political decisions determined by what message would suit their goals.

Do you suppose that the Jews would have accepted scripture which told them that the world was round and that the center of the universe is something so incomprehensible that it will be thousands of years before we can even define exactly what that is? Bearing in mind that we only have the very faintest clue today.

What's that? You don't think they'd have bought it?

Then how could God's Word have proliferated if The Bible was simply a complete specification for the universe?

This is a nonsensical argument, if the Jews or whoever else is believe in the word of God then surely they would be perfectly happy to believe that the world was round etc etc. In fact what this proves is that the Bible and all other religious texts are simply convienent stories. As soon as science successfully disproves whatever commonly held opinions which have been derived from the Bible the churches first response is to deny it and once that doesn't work they change they're mind about what they actually believe in order to prevent their credibility being totally undermined.

We can see this happening ( not very successfully ) now with Intelligent Design, the people advocating this have been forced to accept that God was wrong when he told them the world was formed 6000 years ago but are now trying to say that thats not what God told them in the first place and they are attempting to use pseudo science to lend some credibility to their belief that even if God was wrong about that he may have been correct on some other things.

which CLEARLY is nothing more than an insistent, unsubstantiated, poorly thought out assertion, which happens to be 100% false.

Well then it should be very easy for you to prove that God does exist right now then shouldn't it ...

But you can't, that should tell you something.

Proving the existence of God is admittedly a tall order but you can't even explain why different people believe in different Gods and why other people believe rocks and trees are Gods or why some people believe their ancestors are gods.

Let's be honest - there are many religious people who are far more i

Re:65 million?

[maraist]

Now where, exactly, does your description fit into that?

Well, it's not my description, as I pointed out. It just makes the most sense of any description I've come across. And I have spent most of my life twiddling with Religion (as a hobby).

Again, you make the classic assumption that religions are all about dogma and are all similar to the dogmatic religions of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, etc.

You misrepresent what I said.. Religion is not about Dogma. Dogma is one vessel by which the general order can be emparted to the individual's personal order. More correctly, Dogma is a contextualized way for the collection of beliefs to be passed on to outsiders.

By definition:
"a system of principles or tenets, as of a church."

But this assumes that all of the principles are neatly organized, and internally consistent.. This requires a LOT of thinking, and usually by lots of people, before a regular dogma can emerge.

There are tons of informal religions.. Or more correctly, religions that aren't consistent from one village to another, yet have the same label (as used by outsiders), or are recognized as one-in-the-same by insiders.

The ability to categorize divergent religions into the same category is the same as how we group people into "white", "black", "asian" or "hispanic".. There are key characteristics which we identify and rough into one category or another. When an asian person sees another pseudo-asian person, they may identify that other person differently than say a white American (who might have a greater tendency to categorize both equally as asian). The second asian might instead be categorized as Taiwanese or Chinese or what-have-you.

The same is true with the categorization of religion.. It obviously has greater differentiation within a similar set of practioners than to outsiders.

But this doesn't preclude the concept of personal internal order being provided by participating in the community's external order.

Moreover, I made no mention of a "shared" belief between religions. Only that the general order (also referred to by me as the community's order) is consistent enough to provide internal order.

Your examples including Buddhism perfectly match my description. Buddhism provides a description of the universe and your place within it. It also designates a method that can relinquish the world of suffering (training your mind to consider nothingness as an escape of the viscuous life-cycle of reincarnation). This very specifically is a general order (description of the universe and personal best-practices) such that your internal psychi can be without strife - having internal meaning/order/consistency.

Even the pseudo-religions like confusionism is a philosphy about how you and your rulers should live your respective lives. Again, virtually any philosophy is a structure-providing order. Even Atheists rely on the trust of logic, rationalism, and the consistency of natural things as part of their inner peace.

Finally, even a barbaric anarchistic atheistic amoral person with low mental capacity has a sense of the world.. Their sense is pure survivability.. Be stronger than your neighbor so you can take what you need and defend what you have. The only difference here is that they may be a community of one. So their sense of order may not come from outsiders.. Possibly not even from their parents.

In this extreme case (and possibly excluding hermits for similar reasons), you could find those that would not meet this analytical view of religion.

As one final point.. The key discriminator is the making of internal 'order'. Natural order and community order that does not ultimately translate into personal order is not inherently religious. Learning the quick-sort isn't inherently religious. But recognizing that the divide-and-qonquer alogithm is found throughout nature, and trying to encorporate this natural process into your everyday approach to things, and finally preaching to others the personal benifits of applying divide-and-qonquer could be considered religious.

Re:65 million?

[DoninIN]

Easy. Snakes don't talk, therefore Genisis and by inference most of the Old Testament is either metaphorical or divine wisdom interpreted through the terribly flawed writings of mankind. "Love your neighbor as yourself" and the other commandments of Jesus are meant to be interpreted literally, and the "Roman Church" by which I mean the thing that Christianity has been for most of its existence under the influence of Rome, and human governments in general is to be treated exactly as Christ treated the money changers he found in the temple (he went after them with a whip) so, love your neighbor feed the hungry clothe the naked, be merciful and take care of one another. That's the literal part. The rest is unimportant.

Re:65 million?

[godless dave]

They're not trying to take your religion away, they are justifiably mocking the minority of Christians who are Young Earth Creationists.

Re:65 million?

[bhiestand]

A measurement of gravity at a given location and time is a fact.

Right. As is the observation of species evolving. Evolution is a fact.

I've read that the word "Law" is really 1800's talk for "Theory".

The "Law" of gravity is really the "theory" of gravity.

The word "Law" basically means observation. The law of gravity says "things go down". The theories of gravity explain how and why, and make predictions. The fact that there are actually competing gravitational theories does not eliminate the fact that there is also a law of gravity, and we all know gravity does exist and is a fact of life. Likewise, the theories explaining how and why evolution works, which make predictions which have been accurate enough to be a great boon to other biological sciences, do not force evolution to cease to exist. They're simply answering different questions.

Certainly there are some small holes in the current models. There are also still some rather large holes in our understanding of gravity. By the logic which has been used by the Intelligent Design/Creationism movement, the existence of gravity should also be in question because we don't entirely understand everything about how it works. Perhaps the Intelligent Falling people were right after all?

Re:65 million?

[bhiestand]

The fundamental flaw with your dream is that on average,
irrational religious people outbreed rational people by 10 to 1.
 
Since we both agree that natural selection and evolution exists, I think we should both see the natural conclusion.
A population comprised 99%+ of irrational religious people. You're right. Luckily this doesn't matter much. While many parents are required by their religions to indoctrinate their children at a young age, even leave them to die if they don't agree with the religion, a hypocritical religious upbringing nearly ensures the adolescent will begin to have doubts. Some of the world's most outspoken atheists have the attitudes they have because they were raised in religious environments.

In addition, I believe that some religious memes have "evolved" ways to be immune to logic and science. In part by just killing people who don't believe that way but more importantly by certain concepts that redefine rational thought while people are too young to think logically. You just hit the nail so firmly on the head that I'm tempted to add you as a friend. This is commonly referred to by Christians as "challenging your faith". They are encouraged to find things which shake their beliefs and then overcome them. This is essentially logic resistance training. It is the reason why religious people are able to believe that statements like "God loves you" and "God hates you for being sinful" are not contradictory. They have actually trained themselves to set logic aside.

A Christian friend of mine defined it as "testing the solidity of your beliefs against overwhelming evidence". He used the comparison to Job, if you're familiar with that story. Basically God and the devil make a little bet about whether Job, this really upstanding and successful guy, will crack and curse God. God destroys his life, takes all his property, kills his kids, and gives him leprosy. Job refuses to doubt or curse his god. So God tells a prophet to tell Job that he did this all to him and he hates him and yadda yadda yadda. But Job says "oh, no, that doesn't make sense, I still love God!" God wins his bet, so he cures Job's leprosy and give his stuff back to him. But his ten kids stay dead. The moral of the story? Even if there's a world of evidence against you saying that your god is an evil bastard, you're supposed to stick with him. He's just testing you. He'll pay you back for it later, we promise!

Of course when you do things like this to a child so young he can not tell that Santa Clause is bogus, he ends up having a warped sense of reality and logical thought.

Re:65 million?

[Artifakt]

Bullshit? - great intelligent rebuttal there. Sorry, but that's precisely the point. Genes don't spread through a population in a single generation. They spread diferentially over tens of thousands of years or more and through millions or billions of organisms. Humans for example, tend to have about 0.34 mutant genes per organism, and only about 30,000 total genes. So in a population of 30 million humans, there are about 340 who get a mutation on the same gene (not necessarily the same mutation) in the same generation. Now as I've already pointed out for the learning impaired an advantagious gene has only a small positive effect on reproductive success. There has never been a single mutation that made every creature that had it 100% successful at reproducing and every one that didn't a 100% failure. Do the math from just those two factors, and it proves there absolutely have to be some cancelations, and we're just arguing over what it affects, not whether it exists.

      While you're at it, I said that was just one reason, and referred you to Dawkins for others that are a little long to go into on slashdot. Did you read the assignment? Obviously not - to busy to pick up even a laymans idea of the subject before you opened your yap.

      If what I am saying is true then bacteria mutate faster than humans (some bacteria, particularly the ones without ennucleated cells and no sexual reproduction). This means by my arguement they respond less quickly to selection pressure and so prokerotes and archaeobacteria don't evolve new types as fast as eukerotes, which is in fact precisely what happens. Duh! While we are at it, the genes in your mitochondria are not passed on from both parents, and they evolve much less quickly than the genes in your cell nuclei, again exactly as predicted. You are simply wrong. Go talk to a real biologist on this point - you are simply and utterly wrong. You don't have time to argue this point because you don't know jack about evolution or biology and think that the more rapidly evolving bacteria are the types which don't have sexual reproduction. You're confusing a lot of things here. Are you arguing that bacteria do evolve faster than humans, that is they need fewer generations to change than advanced organisms do? Remember they don't take 20 years between generations, more like 20 minutes, and maybe you'll see where you went off track. You're looking at organisms that don't have nearly the same numbers of genes or the same lifespans as multicelled creatures, and saying those tremendous differences produces no effects what-so-ever, so the effect this guy is talking about doesn't exist. While you're at it, what about bacterial sex? You do know that for bacteria, Sex and Reproduction are not likely to be the same thing? Don't you think being able to steal genes from entirely different species has some effect on how fast bacteria adapt to antibiotics and such?

        In the end, you're argueing with me on the very point all reputable geneticists agree is true, not the point I derived from it that many disagree with. That makes you a crackpot with some weird non-standard model of evolution.

Re:65 million?

[Artifakt]

Well, you could make that analogy, but does it hold? Maxwell's set of equations did predict some things its predecessors didn't, which I'll freely grant you also fits natural selection. Natural selection has explanitory power.
But Maxwell's equations don't make anything else that we have observational data on less probable. They do predict that if the nucleus of an atom fits something like the 'electron is a little thing, rapidly orbiting a bigger thing' model, there's a problem, and it takes quantum mechanics to give us a model different enough to overcome that problem, but we never had photos of an electron as a small discrete object, orbiting a larger nucleus as a planet orbits its sun. Even when this first became a 'crisis' in physics, many people simply proposed alternate models. People such as Einstein suggested that light had some sort of wave/particle duality by about 1906, and everybody was pretty patient until the 20's when it all shook down into QM.
Here, we have observations that do seem to dictate some probabilities. (for just one example, counting backwards, the period between artificial selection and sex being 'invented' is about 700-800 million years. The period between the 'invention' of sex and cell nucleation is longer, about 1.2 billion years. The period between the 'invention' of cells and DNA itself is longer again, about 1.6 billion years. We're trying to deal with the fact that data, such as lead/uranium isotope ratios, doesn't seem to allow enough time for the next step in that that sequence, let alone the half dozen steps we seem to think we need at minimum. The problem is, doing something analogous to QM here might involve claiming that the funamental physical laws were pretty seriously different on a macroscopic level, only about 4 billion years ago, well after the universe had settled down to being fundamentally as it is today. Unlike non-existant photos of orbital model electron structure, we have Hubble photos of honkin big objects we think are quite a bit more than 4 billion years old to argue against that, plus lots of red-shift data, spectroscopic comparisons, etc, that all have to be rewritten unless the universe has been functioning on our scale level pretty much like it does now, for about 12 billion years.

If all we've done with natural selection is make some things that once seemed improbable look more likely, but at a cost of making other things necessarily less likely, then a lot of people are drawing some very bad conclusions. That doesn't make the theory wrong, but it does make a lot of the interpretation flawed to completely bogus. It means professionals in the field have been saying things that are about as well grounded as all those half assed physics metaphors that compare QM to ancient Hindu teachings and Yogic sayings are in real physics.

I really don't want to get into a religious arguement, but as just one point, many agnostics have criticized the way religion sometimes seems to be in constant retreat, assigning God as a buzzword to cover whatever we can't explain without 'him' yet. As knowledge grows, the gaps get smaller, and so the need for a supernatural explanation shrinks. This is usually called the God of the Gaps arguement. But if we have explained one thing only by making another less explainable, overall human knowledge hasn't grown - instead the gap has gotten smaller in one area, but only by becoming proportionately bigger in another, so there goes the idea that the supernatural explanation may have looked valid for primative people but we don't need it as much any more.
Perhaps more fundamentally, if we can't reduce the gaps in human knowledge beyond a certain point, then what are we doing by doing science?
This same problem applies to many other ideas besides religious ones, such as progress. If we just made scientific progress by inventing the theory of natural selection, but we just

Re:65 million?

[mrpeebles]

Well, first, I don't think you are accurately portraying the problem that classical EM had with the atom. We essentially did have pictures of the electron as a small object orbiting a much larger nucleus. Thomson showed us that the electron was negative. Millikan showed us that the electron was small. Rutherford showed us that the nucleus was dense and positively charged. And the atom had to be neutral. So we pretty much did have a picture of a small electron orbiting a larger nucleus.

I think, though, that I must not have done a good enough job at what the similarities between the two theories were. My point is that there is good evidence that natural selection adds a lot to our understanding of the history of the differentiation of the species. Logical arguments about whether this causes problems for understanding the origin of life (whatever life is, exactly) cannot change that anymore than the logical problems with extrapolating Maxwell to the very small could change the fact that over certain scales of size, there was very good evidence for classical EM. I should also point out that people such as Einstein proposed alternate models for for very small things such as atoms. Nobody disagreed that Maxwell was more or less right on the macroscopic scale.

We could imagine that, for example, the origin of life is a singular event, so unlikely that the most science can ever do to explain it is to say that it is a statistical anomaly. Scientists say this about strange events in experiments all the time. As I said, I'm not a biologist, so I don't know how likely this is to happen. Certainly it would be very disappointing if we couldn't say anything more interesting about the origin of life. But none of this affects the validity of using natural selection to explain the differentiation of the species.

Now some people think the concept of natural selection says something interesting about metaphysics. The claim seems to amount to something like if the miracle of life must be explained by the existence of God, and natural selection is in some sense responsible for life, the natural selection must be God. Natural selection seems to imply that the differentiation of the species is not simply contingent, but is also accidental, so we should take this as motivation that the entire universe is accidental. (Or something like that.)

Re:65 million?

[mrpeebles]

I clicked submit too early... I think your argument may be relevant to the question of how natural selection should motivate metaphysics and religion- we will have to see how the origin of life is explained. But it cannot change the fact that there is very good evidence that natural selection is a good model for understanding the origin of the species, and that while the sort of argument you are making can be good for asking new questions in science, it is very dangerous to actually draw conclusions from it.

Also, one last thing, this isn't terribly relevant, but the claim in physics right now is that the universe has more or less behaved fundamentally differently throughout its history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_ene rgy

Okay...

[Stanistani]

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?

Re:Okay...

[Profane MuthaFucka]

OK, fine. It's OLD news. It's still interesting.

Re:Okay...

[inKubus]

Some scientists believe that there were multiple events that caused the massive global change that caused the mass extinction. This theory is that there was only one.

It's amazing to imagine the world populated by giant birds and lizards. But what did these creatures breathe? Perhaps the world was covered in plant life, which provided a lot of Oxygen. Then the impact hit, killing the plants, lowering the oxygen enough that the larger animals just sort of suffocated. The smaller animals had smaller lungs, less air requirements, and thus did not perish.

Re:Okay...

[hobo sapiens]

thank you. Talk about much ado about nothing. Did nobody else even read the article? Did anyone else get the fact that this theory stands in constrat to others which state the dinosaurs were wiped out by a chain of events rather than one cataclysmic one?

Re:Okay...

[quakeroatz]

This sediment finding supports the idea of a single, massive impact. As opposed to multiple events or impacts.

Also they are pushing the idea that sediment layers near the impact point would be so affected by the ensuing earthquakes and tsunamis, it may explain why there is little sediment evidence located near the alleged Yucitan crash site.

In short: One huge frikken impact which in which secondary events blew the crap out of the originals imapct's nearby, "tell-tale" sediment layer.

Re:Okay...

[pingveno]

Yes. The specific theory - that a meteor so large that its trailing edge was still in the outer atmosphere when it hit near the Yucatan Peninsula - has been around for a while. Read A Short History of Just About Everything and search around in the science for amateurs magazines for more. Apparently this study provides more solid evidence.

Re:Okay...

[maraist]

As a lay person, most of what I know about the topic comes from he history channel. But that info tends to coincide with slash postings like this.

From what I've gathered, 65M years ago one one of the very few mass extinctions due exclusively to a meteorite. There aren't as good markers that scream big-rock in some of the other period transitions.

big news... but wrong

[zappepcs]

Dinosaurs were not killed off in a mass extinction 65 million years ago... many of them survived and are currently employed by the *AA and associated groups.

Re:big news... but wrong

[fittekuk]

Well, I think some birds and reptiles are left overs who survived the extinction.

Re:big news... but wrong

[From A Far Away Land]

I think you mean ??AA. *AA would include organizations like AAA, or Canadian Automobile Association along with the RIAA, MPAA. I'm no certain if it would include Alcoholics Anonymous, it might depend on the language.

Re:big news... but wrong

[CreatureComfort]

If you count vultures and snakes, the GP still applies.

Re:big news... but wrong

[ettlz]

...having been recently laid off from a Microsoft advertising campaign.

Re:big news... but wrong

[init100]

On Slashdot *AA only means RIAA and MPAA, regardless of other organizations with AA as their name or a postfix of their name. :)

*sigh*

[OverlordQ]

I was *not* a meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs, it was global warming. Let's examine the facts here, with nearly everybody driving around Bedrock in their souped up SUVs, you can imagine all the CO2 those things put out, not to mention the contributing factor of mass extinctions due to consumption of racks of ribs at drive-ins.

Re:*sigh*

[anzha]

You're confused. That was the synapsids in the Permian with their unchecked Volcano Maker Pro users.

The KT Event was a case of the dinos getting waaaaaaaaaaaay too excited over their Orbital Dynamics for Dummies books.

A tad bit more seriously. Take that Gerta Keller!

Re:*sigh*

[venicebeach]

Yes, clearly if the dinosaurs stopped driving Hummers sooner they would still be around.

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it people.

Re:*sigh*

[grozzie2]

There's 18 inches of fresh snow on the ground outside, and more of it falling as i type this. I'm fed up with all these promises of global warming. Would you folks kindly quit with the talk, and get on with it, you've been promising global warming for years now, and it's all just empty talk promises. I'm getting tired of waiting, so please, just hurry up and deliver on that promise, i'm tired of shovelling snow....

Re:*sigh*

[Woldry]

But I'm already driving as much as I can!

Re:*sigh*

[yoder]

"There's 18 inches of fresh snow on the ground outside, and more of it falling as i type this. I'm fed up with all these promises of global warming."

I wish I could say the same but our winter weather is starting about a month later than when I was a kid (late 60's early 70's). We haven't had a real winter (ground completely snowcovered for more than a month) in probably close to 7 years.

Re:*sigh*

[14erCleaner]

OverlordQ writes:

I was *not* a meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs, it was global warming.

Nice try, there, Q, but I still think you did it.

Re:*sigh*

[Chris Burke]

I'm getting tired of waiting, so please, just hurry up and deliver on that promise, i'm tired of shovelling snow....

Look, I'm sure you've heard this before, but global warming means more heat energy overall on the earth, not that any particular spot on earth is warmer or colder. Some will get hotter, others will get colder, it's just the average that goes up.

How does this affect you? Well, according to my models, it looks like the spot you're at is one slated to become much, much colder, windier too, and with more of that stingy icicle-snow that you hate so much. Sorry about that.

Oh, and don't bother trying to move to someplace that is going to get warmer instead of colder. According to my models when you move the cold spot follows, even when I model you moving to Ecuador or slowly crossing the Sahara. I don't know what's up with that. If it makes you feel any better, at least you can try making some money from hopeful but currently unlikely hosts of the Winter Olympics.

Re:*sigh*

[kryten_nl]

I wish I could say the same but our winter weather is starting about a month later than when I was a kid (late 60's early 70's). We haven't had a real winter (ground completely snowcovered for more than a month) in probably close to 7 years.

Thats because "winter" was a communist conspiracy!

Re:*sigh*

[LouisZepher]

Is "icicle snow" Snow Type 232, or 136?

Re:*sigh*

[Woldry]

Is that why it was called the "Cold" War?

I call BS

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Look at the film. You can see another meteor on the grassy knoll.

Re:I call BS

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that people on slashdot call this BS character alot, and he always has a great deal of information at his fingertips.

Can someone please give me his number? Thanks.

Re:I call BS

[Hogwash McFly]

Noone knows BS's number. Of course, getting hold of Noone is just as difficult.

Fl00d

[picob]

If you want to laugh read through the comments. Laugh or be concerned, that is.

But....

[spahn]

But the Creation Museum says the Earth is only 6,000 years old! :-D

Re:But....

[InsaneProcessor]

God has a sense of humor. When he created everything, he figured that there would be some idiots (we call them scientists but not all fall into the idiots class) that wouldn't believe the truth so He created a past that they could track down and say "see, there is no creation, just evolution" just to keep them busy.

--
Liberalisim is an absurd ideology that displays the lack of knowledge of history.

Re:But....

[suitepotato]

Old, very old.

Not every or even most practicing Christians or Jews believe the biblical creation story as literal truth. We're not all dim enough to raise the writings of ancient *human* (and thus fallible) ancestors to the level of G-d's word.

Can you get a new joke and stop beating on other people because you've still got unresolved juvenile issues from being made by mom and dad to get up early and to sit/stand/kneel on a Sunday morning?

Re:But....

[pixelpusher220]

Also a very old reply. "We don't take it literally" being an excuse that allows completely unfounded beliefs to continue to exist. The same moderation that allows you to say which parts of the Bible are 'right' and which aren't really the real words of God, allows extremists to say it's still ok to stone people to death, homosexuals are bad and to not associate with women on their period.

If you don't believe in certain parts of the Bible...by all means WRITE A NEW ONE. I just don't see that happening much these days, do you?

Religion was created by humans for humans...there is no 'God' except the one(s) we create for each of ourselves as needed.

Re:But....

[ray-auch]

Look, we know the mice paid for it to be built around 2 million years ago - it says so in The Book.

But, lets look at both theories anyway.

1. the mice, 2m years ago, pay for the planet to be built to look like it is billions of years old, with fake fossils etc. buried as part of the construction process

2. God makes the planet 6k years ago, with dinosaurs and everything, then floods it when Noah's got two of everything into the ark. Except Noah forgot about all the dinosaurs, because they were small and easy to miss, especially the sauropods (behemoth) which Noah thought were on board but were hiding behind some reeds. Oh, sorry that was Job:40. Oops, Job was after the flood. Guess the dinosaurs maybe made it onto the ark after all. Seems that even the ID guys can't agree on that one.

Anyhow, lets look at the supporting evidence, ie. the fossil record:

Could it be fakes buried by the (far more advanced than us) builders of the planet to look millions of years old ? Difficult to disprove that one.

Could it be the victims of the flood buried in the sediments from the flood ? Hmmm, yep could fit too.

Ah, teeny weeny problem with the second one. People - lack of. According to the biblical accounts, lots of people should have perished in the flood alongside the dinosaurs. So, people bones should be common in the fossil record alongside the dinosaurs. Nope.

Since that just about wraps it up for the flood, we're left with the super advanced Magratheans building it all 2million years ago for the mice. All cleverly faked to look millions of years older.

QED - it was the mice.

Now try to disprove the mice / Magratheans theory you crazy Darwinists.

MacLeod?

[rainer_d]

Hell, he's probably witnessed it himself.

Re:MacLeod?

[Gospodin]

He is Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. He was born in 65,000,000 BC in the village of the Cephalopods on the shores of Loch Shiel. And he is immortal.

Re:MacLeod?

[Genrou]

And he said, about the meteor: "There can be only one".

How it really happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

65 million years ago...

Dino 1: Wii is the best dino console.
Dino 2: No. The Wii graphics suck. Xbox 360 is awesome.
Dino 3: Wii and Xbox 360 both suck. Playstation 3 with Cell processor rules. Plus we have BluRay.
Dino 1: PS3 is too expensive and there aren't enough blue diodes. All dinosaurs can afford Wii though. It great!
Dino 2: Meh, PS3 is expensive and Wii doesn't do hidef. Xbox 360 sits right in the middle and saves the day. Go 360, go!

God: Ok, that does it. No more dinosaurs.

Re:back in college

[gravy.jones]

I have heard it said that when God cast out Satan from heaven that his impact on the earth is the same meteoric impact that scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs.

Re:back in college

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

But even I have standards.

Wasn't the "Jesus wants me to save my virginity for marriage" enough of a tipoff? Or was she one of those types who think virginity means anything goes apart from intercourse?

According to TV...

[jzarling]

Global cooling killed the dinosaurs, wikipedia says so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs_(TV_series)

Re:according to... ? (was:big news... but wrong)

[Who235]

What compelled Noah not to include a pair of every dinosaurs on the arc however, is beyond me...

Obviously he couldn't fit them in there.
Do you have any idea how big 300 cubits is?
Not long enough to fit a bunch of freakin' T-rexes and stuff on, that's for sure.
Oh well, at least he managed to bring the bees. I love a little honey in my tea.

Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation

[MROD]

The problem with all these sedimentological studies is that the statistical period between large meteorite impacts and the systematic error in the dating of the sediments (using isotopic geochemistry) in addition to the ambiguity in the fossil record (and the dating errors in those sediments) means that it's guaranteed that you will find a correlation between any mass extinction and a large meteorite impact event.

Around the K-T boundery there is not only the Chixalub impact but a large one in Germany and a couple of others which have been discovered, all within the dating error. Add to this that there's also the Decan Traps flood basalts being errupted, ocean currents changing as the north atlantic starts to open and the amount of flooded continental shelf decreasing hugely and you have several possible smoking guns.

The evidence just isn't there currently to say why most of the dinosaur lineages died out (along with many sea reptiles and other oceanic creatures). In fact there is still a doubt as to when it actually happened and over how long a period. Ammonites, it seems, saw the meteorite coming.. about a million years before it hit.

Re:Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation

[cdrguru]

Uhhh, no.

Crater impacts in millions of years:

Yucatan - 65,000,000

Nordlingen, Germany - 5,000,000

Barringer, Arizona - 0.05

Yeah, there are a bunch of others out there but the spread is a lot more than you seem to think.

Re:Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation

[tootlemonde]

The evidence just isn't there currently to say why most of the dinosaur lineages died out

The evidence will probably never be conclusive. It is not the sort of question that can ever be answered with the same certainty as laboratory science where the results can be replicated.

Because new evidence could emerge at any time to support some other hypothesis, there will always be doubt as to what really happened. Given that doubt, the question of what really happened isn't even a meaningful question since the answer is fundamentally unknowable.

If there was an impact on the Yucatan Peninsula of the size indicated by the evidence, then it is reasonable to say, as the article does, that the impact "likely caused massive earthquakes and tsunamis. Dust from the impact entered the atmosphere and blocked sunlight, causing plants to die and animals to lose important sources of food. Temperatures probably cooled significantly around the globe before warming in the following centuries, wildfires on an unprecedented scale may have burned and acid rain might have poured down." If the impact occurred with those consequences, mass extinctions are a plausible outcome and it correlates with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

One could postulate that some new virus coincidentally emerged that wiped out reptiles but spared mammals. The virus would probably leave no trace and so it will never be counted as explanation. The most one can ever say is the sort of conclusion that this study reached: "The samples we found strongly support the single impact hypothesis". It is remarkable that one can say anything about what happened 65 million years ago with any degree of certainty.

Re:Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation

[flyingsquid]

The problem with all these sedimentological studies is that the statistical period between large meteorite impacts and the systematic error in the dating of the sediments (using isotopic geochemistry) in addition to the ambiguity in the fossil record (and the dating errors in those sediments) means that it's guaranteed that you will find a correlation between any mass extinction and a large meteorite impact event.

This is really misleading- there may be other craters out there, but there is certainly nothing else out there like Chicxulub. The Chicxulub crater is one of the largest meteorite craters ever discovered; vastly larger than anything we've ever seen in human history or anything that's happened in the past 65 million years. The rock or comet responsible for it is thought to have been about 10km in diameter, travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour; in terms of energy released by that blast, we're talking about something that would have made a full-scale nuclear exchange between the US and USSR look like a couple of kids playing with fireworks. It is estimated that a Chicxulub-scale impact occurs on the order of once every 100 million years, if that often.

The end-Cretaceous mass extinction, meanwhile is one of the five largest mass extinctions to occur in the past half-billion years. In other words, a 1-in-100 million year event. What are the odds of two such large scale, exceptionally rare events occurring simultaneously? Pretty much nil. True, there may be a few scientists out there who debate whether the K-T extinction was caused by the Chicxulub, and they try to poke holes in the Alvarez extinction hypothesis. But they haven't been able to present a compelling alternative to it.

Finally, ammonites go right up to the K-T boundary. In a paper in PNAS, Pope et al. show stratigraphic ranges of ammonites; the majority of ammonites extend to within a few tens of thousands of years of the K-T boundary and many go extinct right at the boundary.

Re:Dating error + meteor frequency = = correlation

[init100]

there may be other craters out there, but there is certainly nothing else out there like Chicxulub.

Oh? What about the Shiva crater?

The Shiva crater, along with the Boltysh crater and the Silverpit crater, are all dated to about the same time as the Chicxulub crater, and this brought up the multiple impact theories.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

[pln2bz]

If you ask the wrong questions, you'll get the wrong answers.

People should be asking how it is possible that dinosaur birds of the past could have been as large as 747's. We don't have birds today on the entire planet that are larger than about 50 lbs. And this clearly pushes the limits of what's possible with bird mass because these 50-lb birds practically kill themselves when they land. The Mongolians have tried to breed bigger falcons for thousands of years with no luck. So, how is it possible that birds were once as big as 747's?

People should be asking exactly *which* animals survived, and why?

People should be asking if the land-walking dinosaurs were alive today, would they survive? Check out http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/sauropod s/biganims.html.

Ask those questions *WITH* the questions about the impact, and suddenly the bigger picture changes. Is the Big Bang Theory still just a theory, or are there alternative cosmologies that people will consider? What about the electrical force? In a theory of everything based upon electricity, gravity would be a function of electrical charge accumulation and the Theory of Relativity could be very easily explained using aether concepts that contrary to popular belief, have never actually been disproven. The aether explanation for Relativity is actually much simpler to understand than Relativity.

Do planets accumulate and transfer charge? According to astrophysicists and NASA, the answer is a vehement "NO!". But have you ever actually looked at the Aristarchus crater on the Moon? That "debris field" has *negative depth*. They are trenches! That looks a hell of a lot more like a lightning strike to me than a debris field: http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/image06/060 309hubble.jpg. Should we just assume that it is pure coincidence that the Aristarchus and Tycho craters occur on naturally high spots on the Moon's surface?

We know that metals can accumulate charge and we know that the Earth has a hell of a lot of metals. So, why can't the Earth accumulate and transfer charge with nearby planets or bodies? Because we've never seen it happen? But we can see large-scale electrical activity all over the universe with our telescopes. We've gathered enough data by now on comets to suspect that the tail and coma of a comet are in fact lightning bolts. Check it out: http://www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/ElectricComet.pdf . If we're seeing large magnetic fields and temperatures of 100 million Kelvin inside of nebulae, then that means that nebulae are almost certainly *not* forming by gravitational collapse and that electricity is the dominant force in creating stars. If we're seeing large-scale electrical forces elsewhere in the universe, why should our solar system be so special as to not have these?

Why are all craters round? Sure, astrophysicists will tell you that it's because an object going fast enough will create an explosion upon impact, but then why is the sedimentary layer at the bottom of Meteor Crater undisturbed? Would a comparable nuclear explosion leave no trace of itself in the ground beneath it?

How To Kill A Planet of Dinosaurs:

What motivated Einstein to say that space is modified by gravity? Imagine that a planet is orbiting around the sun. Then imagine that suddenly the Sun disappears, and the source of gravitational attraction is gone. What happens to the planet? Does it instantly go off the orbit? Or does the disappearance of gravity require some time to reach the orbiting planet's position? Einstein's answer is that it stays in the orbit for a time R/c before going off. It is as though gravitation continues to operate on the planet at its location even though the Sun is gone. Something wa

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[vertinox]

So, you can see how Einstein's relativity theory can be explained in fine detail using an alternate theory that involves an aether.

Don't you mean dark matter?

In the end, it is pretty much the same thing... Things that affect reality that you can't see or detect.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[ScentCone]

See, normally you'd have to visit three or four crackpot web sites to get a full sampling this sort of BS. Thanks for condensing it all into one spot so that we can be more clearly reminded of how poorly we're educating people about basic things like causality, critical thinking, and little details like basic physics.

If you can't really deal comfortably with things like the nice smooth sediment in a crater having accumulates in the millions of years AFTER an impact, then there's really no point taking any single utterance you make as anything other than Super Duper Troll Bait. Which it is, of course. 'Doh! You got me!

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[Jonas the Bold]

I don't know why I'm bothering.

1. There were never birds as big as 747s, Dinosaur or otherwise.
2. Uh.. electrical universe is so bunked it's hard to respond to it. It's like trying to prove bananas aren't 57 mph, or that the color yellow isn't the driving force behind cell phones. No real math, no good astronomy, no real science.. there's really nothing to it that works at all or explains anything. Electric force is very easy to see and measure in this day and age, and is very well understood, and we just haven't seen anything at all like you describe. An object on earth or the moon or mars' weight is determined by their mass and not their charge, so are their orbits, so gravity must be the force that keeps the solar system's structure.
3. The reason Einstein is liked so much is that his theory explains gravitation perfectly in all places we see it, effecting light, the orbit of mercury, frame dragging, his time dilation is put to use in technologies like GPS, which rely on extremely precise clocks. The speed of light being constant from all frames of reference makes no sense with an aether based theory, yet that's exactly what all experiments find. Just because Aether is easier to understand doesn't make it right- the universe has no obligation to be comprehensible to you.

I don't really get what it is about junk science that makes people want to believe it so much, maybe just being anti-establishment? I mean the real science is just as exciting most of the time.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[TheCabal]

I think I lost some IQ points reading this. I'm going to go off and install Win95 now.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[Chris Burke]

So, how is it possible that birds were once as big as 747's?

The 747s were smaller back then. Duh!

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[M. Baranczak]

You've got to admit: the Electric Universe crackpots are way more entertaining then the Creationist crackpots.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[Jonas the Bold]

I'm not going to write a complete rebuttal, but to start with, a 747 has a wingspan of ~55 meters. Not that a 12 meter wingspan isn't big, but it is not the size of a 747. Second, a Pterosaur is not a bird. It's a different evolutionary branch entirely. Just because birds can't achieve that sort of wingspan, doesn't mean no flying animal can. Imagine if birds had died out and there were no bats, you'd find a fossil of a seagull and say gravity must have been lower because you can't breed a flying insect that size. Third, look at the build of the larger birds, like vultures or eagles or albatrosses. The larger the birds get, the smaller thier bodies get in proportion to their wings. Now look at Pterosaur skeletons. The pattern holds. Now think, for a moment, about what would happen if gravity were lower. Air would be much thinner. The earth would orbit further from the sun. I assume we're talking about a major change in gravity here that would allow "birds the size of 747s". If gravity were that low earth probably wouldn't even have liquid water. Now here's the part I hope you won't take as me giving anything up, I'm not, but EVERYONE agrees the sun has electromagnetic phenomenon. It simply does. Science believes it's caused by the conductive plasma the sun is made of working as a dynamo caused by plasma convection from the sun's core, where energy is produced by fusion. What your electric universe theory suggests is that the sun is nothing but a big gas discharge light bulb, and there's a multiple exowatt current being run through it. As for the Big Bang theory not explaining the sun's corona, those are sort of different scales, aren't they? The big bang theory also doesn't explain how ants communicate. It's not supposed to. It explains the formation of the universe, not phenomenon in individual stars. Asteroids orbits are not all circular and not eliptical. Every orbit is eliptical, with the sun at one of its focci. Comets' orbits tend to be very eliptical. Asteroids less so, mostly. But they're all elipses, of varying degrees. The grand canyon was caused by lighting because it's shape looks like a bolt of lighting. Give me a break.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[ScentCone]

Might as well add unicorns in there.

Why? Because the recent observations of reactionless mass actually on display in front of you, in the form of colliding galaxies, are just too uncomfortably close to confirming what you don't like? Or because the Doppler effect is something you can demonstrate at any wavelength (try it with your car horn, sometime - and if you get good enough gear try it with some light), and that just annoys the hell out of you? Or because black holes and neutron stars are just too dense for your brain - which evolved without any context for grappling with things on that scale - just hates the fact that if you put enough matter in one spot with nothing fluffing it up... gravity kicks in, and that's just too annoying for you?

Also, I think I can demonstrate, if you have a moment, that the world is in fact not flat.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[ScentCone]

I've been taught that galaxies are really far apart from one another and the next logical step would be that collisions are rare. If you're seeing this as an explanation for anything commonplace, then your skeptic alarm should be going off.

I did I say or imply that it's common? It's not. The point is that, using the Hubble, we've been able to actually see such a collision - a real rarity - and the observed images behavior directly support the contention that there is a large component of 'dark' mass effecting things, gravitationally, while still not behaving like a normal component of the vast dust/gas clouds are part of every galaxy.

You can't pack neutrons into a space like that without having them rush away from one another.

You can't, until the incomprehensible effect of that much gravity comes into play. Neither neutrons, nor much of anything else, behave "normally" when the normal forces that govern their behavior outside of such an intense gravitational gradient are overcome by such density. Add a little more, and you've got a singularity. Nebulae are actually hot. In some cases 100 million Kelvin hot!

You say "nebulae" as if they all behaved the same way, were formed of the same material, by the same processes, and were exposed to the same sources of nearby radiation. They're not. Some are being continually cooked by unspeakably intense radiation, and were formed while being accelerated within a hair of lightspeed during a violent explosion. Some of the molecules in those nebulae are quite juiced up indeed.

We'd be better scientists if we were better at accepting uncertainty in our lives.

Happily, we can embrace the uncertainty of what we don't know (specific mechanisms that are cooking up one nebula vs. another that isn't so toasty, for example) while still realizing that (just as we did when we all settled on the earth's spherical shape) we are actually gaining an understanding of what we see around us because we have better tools and a less mythology-driven, cave-man grade sense of why things are (or are not!).

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[nra1871]

The aether explanation for Relativity is actually much simpler to understand than Relativity.
So if something is hard to understand, it must be wrong? I wish that excused worked in my math classes in high school.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[spun]

I just had to respond to one of the many errors in this post. The Kaibab upwarp did not exist when the Colorado river first started flowing over the area. The upwarp happened gradually and as the land rose, the river stayed at about the same height, gradually cutting a channel into the rising land.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[Jonas the Bold]

Pterosaurs were bigger than birds, and Sauropods were bigger than modern land animals. This is true. But it's a HUGE leap to go from that to gravity being lower back then, and from that to surmise that gravity is caused by electrical phenomenon. It's crazy. Earth was also hotter then, and had more oxygen, which for my money is a much better explaination. Or maybe it still is possible, it just hasn't happened. The blue whale is believed to be larger than any whale before it, does that mean our water has different proporties than it did back then? Evolution is a weird thing, it doesn't operate with the goal to produce the largest animals the environment it can, just to produce animals that can survive.

It could also be that Dinosauria were better suited for large sizes in basic design than mammals. They died out, now mammals dominate which perhaps can't get as big. Also a better theory than higher gravity.

Gravity, not electrical phenomenon, is responsible for the structure of our solar system. There is no question about this whatsoever. The orbit of the Moon around the Earth and the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, and every other body in orbit around another in the solar system can be calculated perfectly using gravitation towards mass, not charge. If it were electric charge and not gravity, you would expect things orbiting the sun (extreme electromagnetic activity) and objects orbiting planets (nearly electromagnetically inert) to behave with different rules. They don't, the same formula works perfectly. So perfectly that we can plot orbits of spacecraft that do gravitational slingshots and execute them perfectly. The math involved there doesn't even acknowledge electrical charge of the objects involved, only their mass, since charge in insignificant on these scales.

It's Gravity. Gravity gravity gravity. Mass attracting mass over long distances. Magnetism and electrical force die off much too quickly to matter.

Big bang cosmology does not have to address the Sun's corona, and this is not a cop out. The Corona is a peculiarity on a very small scale compared to the big bang, and doesn't effect much of how a star works. Scientists disagree how exactly it works. It's not really a problem for star formation or the inner workings of stars, the corona is essentially the atmosphere and a very small (un-massive) part of the star.

You can calculate the pressure at the Core of the Sun from its mass. Fusion can occur there, there is enough.

Geologists are not mystified by the grand canyon. I looked it up, they aren't. The reason it appears to flow uphill is because uplift raised parts of it after it had started forming.

Neutron stars are not like atoms. Atoms have neglibible gravity, in neutron stars as so massive that gravity is the dominant force. I'm sure the neutrons are trying to repel each other and are held in place by gravity. Just because you can't imagine the core of a star spinning 300 times a second doesn't mean it can't be the case. I'm sure you can't imagine the heat in a nuclear explosion either, doesn't mean it's not happening. If pulars were binary stars you'd find them with every pulsar- you don't. You find them in the middle of supernova remnants and in star forming nebulae.

Look, this science is quite junky. It's just throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. Dinosaurs! The grand canyon! Quasars! The Corona! If the Sun is being powered by an external electrical current, it should be huge enough that it's easy to find. Like - impossible to miss easy.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[init100]

The point is that any bird that has a 30+ foot wingspan is going to weigh much much more than 50 lbs.

But pterosaurs were not birds. Their wings were only a single membrane, with the only stiff structure being the arms and extremely long little finger. Almost all weight would be in the body and head, which would probably not be taller than a man, and a lot lighter. We have a lot of solid thick bones, but pterosaurs had many hollow bones, just like today's birds. They might have weighed more than 50 lbs, but probably not a lot more.

Re:Garbage In, Garbage Out

[spun]

Yes, well, the two competing theories presented in that piece are the one that I presented, and a slightly modified version in which several periods of uplift and erosion take place. In this scenario, several different rivers did the eroding and the current day Colorado simply flows through the older river channels. Your out-of-context quotes notwithstanding, the article presents no serious challenges to accepted theory, merely slight revisions.

Very different from "The Grand Canyon was blasted into the Earth's surface by giant space-lightning." Not to insult your beliefs, but I have investigated the whole Electric Universe thing and it makes no sense whatsoever. It's predictions have been shown to be incorrect time and time again. Like most crackpot theories, it simply dismisses all contrary evidence as being the work of some vast conspiracy designed to keep down the truth. It is not science and it is not interesting.

Re:engineers and religion

[ettlz]

Oh, so it's not

1. design it;
2. model it;
3. build it;
4. test it;
5. pray it stays up?

oblig Bill Hicks

[BitterAndDrunk]

'Sure.' Dinosaurs? ..... 'God put those there to test our faith.'
I think God put you here to test my faith, dude. You believe that?
'Uh huh.'
Does that trouble anyone here? The idea that God might be fuckin' with our heads? Anyone have trouble sleeping restfully with that thought in their heads?
God's running around, burying fossils: 'Hu hu ho. We'll see who believes in me now, ha HA. I'm a prankster god. I am killing me. Ho ho ho ho.'
You know, you die, you go to St. Peter, 'Did you you believe in dinosaurs?'
Well, you know, there was fossils everywhere. [Bill makes sound effects with his mic] KOOM Aaaahhhh. 'What are you, an idiot? God was FUCKING with you! Giant flying lizards, you moron! That's one of God's easiest jokes!'
'It seemed so plausibleeeee! Ahhhhhhhh!' Bound for the lake of fire. . . . "

We miss you Bill . . . please tell the flying saucers to drop you off for another show.

Re:according to... ? (was:big news... but wrong)

[yurigoul]

I believe that this was explained in detail in "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" by Julian Barnes:

The dinosaurs shared their boat with some aggressive woodworm no one ever heard from since ...

(But this could also have been another book ...)

Weird

[pagaboy]

40 responses and not a single noodly appendage in sight. Is everyone OK?

Re:Weird

[Anthony]

Didn't you hear? All Pastafarians were invited to this really big party in Ecuador. That was the last anyone heard of them.

Re:Weird

[marcosdumay]

FSM realy loves to play golf, so no one doubts the metheor thesis.

Metaphysics

[CustomDesigned]

A false history is a metaphysical concept. Any scientific investigation would see the "false" history. Indeed, the "false" history is the true physical history seen by honest scientists - except when viewed from outside the system. There is no sense even bringing it up in a scientific discussion.

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.

Re:Metaphysics

[orkysoft]

Well, the agents in the simulation should worship the person running the simulation, because His avatar promised they would be saved! After the current simulation ends, a new simulation will start, which will be populated by those agents that were saved earlier.

No wonder people from 2000+ years ago didn't understand it, it's all technobabble!

Re:Metaphysics

[piscine2000]

Isn't mathematics part of metaphysics? We live in an n-dimensional universe, but we're not even sure of the value of n.

Not disagreeing, but noting that (as misguided as the anti-scientists may be) science is not outside of metaphysics.

Re:Metaphysics

[tom17]

Given that scenario, it is entirely possible that "God" is some dude in a computer lab in his own (very advanced) world where they have some impending doom. To work out what they should do about it, they built a computer(or physical micro-scale) simulation (not Matrix style, no) with the state and history of their universe programmed in. They are merely watching our universe to see what the outcome is and work out what they can do about it.

"God" is the project leader guy. Other "gods" are just the lab techs reading slashdot, discussing the existence of a god in their reality.

And we thought DeepThought - err, no, Planet Earth was the biggest computer ever! Pah!

Re:back in college

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

Standards? Your crazy! I would have done the hot meat conversion!

Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

I want to know whether the meteor appeared from Earth to come from the direction of the Pleiades constellation that the Mayans would later prioritize in their studies with the world's most sophisticated pre-industrial astromomy.

It's already an interesting coincidence that the people whose empire was built on the site of the most influential astronomical event in "recent" Earth history would have such sophisticated astronomy. I wonder what they discovered about the part of the sky from which the meteor seemed (to the dinosaurs) to appear. The Mayan name for the Pleiades is "Tz'ab", "the rattlesnake's tail", which is pretty resonant with a meteorite that killed the lizards ruling the world.

I also wonder if our current complex space sciences can reconstruct the path of the meteor from its origin, by studying the trajectories of the remaining solar system objects, and projecting back 65My to a slightly larger population. A lot has happened, but astronomers' deductions have made much of very little for quite some time.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[2short]

Somehow I think a meteor impact 65,000,000 years ago had little effect on the Mayans thinking 2000 years ago.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[rucs_hack]

it's not very hard to get the aproximate location of earth in the solar system *provided* you can narrow the impact down to a single day, a simple inverted nbody model would acheive that, with a little extra work to predict and correct for model drift over the huge span of time. Time of day and Orientation of the earth is impossible, we just can't be that exact from the archeology.

Then you need mass and impact velocity, plus analysis of the exact angle of impact to determine the likely incoming trajectory of the asteroid (slightly do-able perhaps). I have software I've developed that could extrapolate the likely orbit of the asteroid *if* all the specified data were known (which is impossible, it's just too long ago).

You would be able to use an evolutionary algorithm to generate likely candidates for impact, if you had a sufficiently detailed terrain and impact modelling system, and enough data from the original site. That could give you a likely mass and impact speed/angle. Only aproximations mind.

That's a whole bunch of impossible things, with a tiny smattering of vaguely possible. Shame that, it sounds like a cool project.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

I think so, too. That's why the coincidences are interesting. The sensible reaction is to want to know more facts.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[2short]

What coincidences? A meteor hit the earth. 64.5 million years later, humans developed, and spread out around the earth. A comparative eyeblink ago, pretty much all of them developed astonomical systems; including those who happened to live in the area the meteor hit. None of them could possibly have been aware of the meteor.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

Does the condition of the buried crater, possibly indicating 3D angle of impact, help any? At least in narrowing down azimuth, perhaps?

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[ebers]

A skeptical reply:

> I want to know whether the meteor appeared from Earth to come from the direction of the Pleiades constellation that the Mayans
> would later prioritize in their studies with the world's most sophisticated pre-industrial astromomy.

Yes, but lots of civilizations have placed importance on the Pleiades. Perhaps because they look so cool.

> It's already an interesting coincidence that the people whose empire was built on the site of the most influential astronomical
> event in "recent" Earth history would have such sophisticated astronomy.

Yes, but several ancient civilizations developed advanced astronomy. I suspect ancient civilizations are more likely to develop astronomy if:

They have a way to record numbers and do arithmetic.
They have a written language that allows them to record observations.
They have substantial city-states sustained by intensive farming, and
That farming relies (possibly via irrigation) on rainfall that comes at specific times each year.

> also wonder if our current complex space sciences can reconstruct the path of the meteor from its origin, by studying the
> trajectories of the remaining solar system objects, and projecting back 65My to a slightly larger population.

Not going to happen. We would need accurate measures of the trajectory of the earth before and after the collision to determine the momentum, and thus direction, of the meteor. In principle, if we knew everything that happened in the solar system since that time to a very high accuracy, we could run Newton's equations backward and find the trajectory of the earth after the event.

Yup, I'm a doubting Thomas.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

I've looked at the night sky from the top of Chichen Itza, among other Mayan locations. There are lots of other more conspicuous sky features, but the Mayans seem (as far as we can tell from scant evidence) to have really prioritized that particular feature, not even a separate constellation in many other contemporary tropical cultures.

What part of "rattlesnake" and "extinct lizards" doesn't seem connected to you? And what specific interpreation am I "throwing on the ancient Mayans"? I haven't mentioned any symbolic meaning, but rather a literal connection between two possible

And where do you get off dissing "street freaks - high on the occult and supernatural" for "projecting their anxieties on the perceptions they have", when you're Anonymously asserting uncited denials that dinosaurs weren't lizards, because it's "just a theory"?

Anonymous denial Coward, you can cherrypick science all you want, in your own biased investigations. But don't spit your venom on me.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

The coincidence is that the people who 65My later peopled the site of the buried meteorite developed the most sophisticated astronomy of any preindustrial (preglobal) civilization.

There are other coincidences, but that's a pretty interesting one. The town of Chicxulub is in the middle of the crater. Chicxulub is Mayan for "devil's tail".

I'm not proposing how Mayans could have been aware of the meteor, which seems practically impossible. That doesn't mean the other coincidences aren't interesting. To the contrary, it makes the coincidences more interesting.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Hektor_Troy]

Even if they somehow knew, wouldn't a more apt name have been something like "devil's bellybutton"?

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[rucs_hack]

a bit, but not knowing where in it's rotation the earth was it doesn't narrow it down. You could calculate likely approach vector, but not relate it to an incoming orbit.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Take your coincidence meter in for servicing, it's badly in need of recalibration. Until you do so you'll be making all kinds of bizarre claims about coincidences that will make you seem pretty weird.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

I'm a skeptic, too, but I'm also a brainstormer. I'm not proposing anything that can be disproved. I'm just looking for connections, which can later have hypotheses formulated into a theory that could be disproved. This is Slashdot, not a serious scientific (or any other discipline) discussion site.

Mayans weren't just another civilization with astronomy. They had the most accurate astronomy of any preindustrial/preglobal culture, including Egypt (which aligned the Great Pyramid more accurately along the Earth's axis than did the British in setting the Greenwich Line a century ago). And they (apparently, according to our incomplete evidence) prioritized study of the Pleiades, unlike any other astronomer civilization of which we know. Despite the greater prominence of other star systems in the mutual sky. And the Mayans were the only ones of these astronomer civilizations of which we know to build on the unique (except perhaps the Shiva Cater in the Indian Ocean) impact site of the biggest astronomical event to affect the Earth.

Another possible coincidence is that the Pleiades are known in Mayan as "Tz'ab", or "rattlesnake's tail". Which resonates with "the end of the lizard age". The town now at the middle of the crater is called "Chicxulub", which means in Mayan "the devil's tail".

These are all connected coincidences only if the meteorite is connected with the Pleiades. Which is why I wondered if we could find the sky region from which the meterorite apparently came.

As in "wouldn't that be an interesting coincidence?" Those words are often the beginning of fruitful scientific investigations. After that, after the brainstorming we're currently in, the skepticism is most useful for separating coincidence from correlation and causality. But we're not there, yet. Not enough facts to even hypothesize, let alone disprove.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

I don't know. I don't know the connotations of tails, or devil tails, to Mayans. But I'm curious. Personally, I think of the devil's tail as a lashing weapon, bringing an eruption of painful flame. And I think of dinosaurs as kinda diabolical in imagery, against an often hellish landscape. A meteorite could be the "tail end" of an event like the biggest shooting star ever, or the tail end of the dinosaur era. But those are my connotations, not necessarily the Mayans'.

I find it interesting that Mayans believe that devils have tails, like Europeans think. Maybe the town was named by Mayan Christians after European conquest. Still a funny coincidence.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

Does the apparently similar Shiva Crater, at apparently approximately the same latitude, but (almost exactly 180') across the planet, offer any clues?

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[scoot80]

Not going to happen. We would need accurate measures of the trajectory of the earth before and after the collision to determine the momentum, and thus direction, of the meteor. In principle, if we knew everything that happened in the solar system since that time to a very high accuracy, we could run Newton's equations backward and find the trajectory of the earth after the event.


Time for someone to invent a huge "replay" button

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

And your coincidence analyzer is measuring what, in what units, against what reference, exactly? Anyone going by "exp(pi*sqrt(163))" certainly has a lot to tell me about seeming pretty weird.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[2short]

"the most sophisticated astronomy of any preindustrial (preglobal) civilization"

Would have to be that of Gallileo, Copernicus, Newton, et al.

"I'm not proposing how Mayans could have been aware of the meteor,"

Because they obviously could not possibly have been, any more than they could have been aware of dinosaurs, or any of the other events that occurred in the millions and millions of years between then and when some tree shrews first developed opposable thumbs, much less the millions and millions of years more before those shrews became something we'd call ape-like, let alone human.

The Mayans have no more connection to the meteor than a population of cows in China does.

Have you considered the coincidence that the modern state of Nepal looks kind of like a devils tail if you squint right? I think those Mayans were on to something!

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

Copernicus, Galileo and Newton had nothing on Mayan astronomy.

And the rest of your snide remark, the majority of your comment, merely reiterates what I've said myself, as if it were somehow a criticism.

You know, if I look at this post just right, it looks like the end of this conversation.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[2short]

"Copernicus, Galileo and Newton had nothing on Mayan astronomy"

Except, you know, correctness; a reasonably coherent model of the heavens; heliocentrism; universal gravitation... For pete's sake, the Maya thought the earth was flat. Aristotle knew it was round, and with no better tech than the mayans, calculated its circumference.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[rucs_hack]

without more study I couldn't say. That crater has drifted, so I'd need to see the work they did to work out the original shape. It could be used as a baseline to study though. More recent impacts would be easier to model, but the uplift in the centre of an old crater needs to be reversed, which I suspect is non trivial, and is not present in modern craters.

I've done asteroid path reconstruction, but not asteroid impact reconstruction (though I have just bought the books I need to help me learn the fluid dynamics required for impact modelling, all I need is the time..).

The Yukatan impact seems to have had a secondary explosion caused by the material under the crust in that area (can't remember what, it's early here). That would muddy the picture somewhat.

As I said, it's all very interesting. Whether the work would produce anything considered plausible is another matter.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

I hope that in my ignorant way I have helped walk with you further down that road. Until I started this discussion in this story I had never even heard of the Shiva Crater. The main "promoter" of the Shiva Crater seems to think there are several other similar craters that don't get the attention paid even the more obscure Shiva Crater. Maybe in the "meteorite forensics" community these artifacts are well known. But now I've doubled my knowledge of the evidence of the biggest, most recent celestial event to affect me.

Just fixing the coordinates of both craters would
If the Chucxulib and Shiva craters can be dated to simultaneity, they might indicate two pieces of the same space object. Matching the composition of the sediment laid down by impact, such as the iridium signature that connected Chicxulub to the global extinction, could confirm as well. Shoemaker-Levy showed how meteorites can be broken up by gravity, but the Earth's gravity is much smaller than Jupiter's. And the 12h difference in impact time indicated by their opposite global sites indicates they'd broken up long before, and become separated somehow by megameters.

If their exact coordinates can be reconstructed after 65My of sediment and tectonic drift, there's probably some fascinating ballistics. Like almost establishing the plane in which the objects travelled, if their latitudes are consistent. If they're parts of a single object, and their remote separation point can be determined, and their relative momentums, their latitudinal separation could indicate the tilt of the Earth's rotational axis. Which would indicate the season, which would indicate the orientation of the Earth around the Sun, which might rule out some entry angles, blocked by planetary bodies.

Their separation distance is a riddle, if even closer to 180' opposite than their current distance (something like 175'). Perhaps including an offset from the Earth's solar orbit in the interval. That's a bizarre calibration to the Earth's orbital period. Or an even more bizarre (nearly impossible) scenario of simultaneous impact from precisely opposite directions.

This seems like a fascinating field. I look forward to seeing lots more of the original story told. And eventually some images of the streaks across the sky the doomed lizards might have seen, right before yielding to our great grandmothers.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[rucs_hack]

I knew nothing about asteroid path modelling till I said something stupid to my tutor at Uni, that being I wanted to do asteroid interception strategies as my final year project. Then I had a month long panic trying to figure out how on earth I was going to acheive it. Now I have, after producing a double dissertation (which was painfully hard to write) what seems to be the only open source particle particle nbody model that runs on normal pc's, and I've supervised three projects in that field using the software.

And I knew bugger all before I started, not a thing.

Impact modelling is utterly fascinating. I need it to model deflection strategies, hence my book purchases. I hate just reading web pages, I prefer a good textbook.

Its easy to work out the position of tectonic plates at that time, they don't move fast. The question is where were those impact points back then. How to go from that to seasons I don't know.

The idea of a broken up asteroid is, as we know since Shoemaker-levy 9, not only plausible, but apparently common. Common because we saw one, and the chances of us seeing it if they were rare are too big to conceive.
if indeed a second fragment hit the traps, then this would add credence to the impact worsening the eruptions. They did worsen, but the argument that shockwaves did it was always a bit dodgy to my mind. A stonking great asteroid smacking into them is far more likely.

Seperation

It will be a long time before I can model impacts, not least because the software is hard to write. When I can it would be fun to try and reverse engineer a double impact of the same scale as the twin impacts you speculate

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[Doc Ruby]

Meteorite forensics (as I think of the broad field) seems a lot more interesting and healthy to me than the Star Wars missile defense industry that asteroid deflection research fronts for.

Which university? I look forward to seeing a lot more research in uncovering history of some of the most momentous (pun intended ;) events in Earth's lifetime.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[rucs_hack]

Exeter University, where we have one ongoing (where I am the sole staff researcher, no-one else is interested), but soon Herriot Watt University, when we get our act together.

Ok, when I finish writing the new code we need. The page for the code is here.

http://nmod.sourceforge.net/

However that is out of date, I haven't been able to finalize the new code that we've been using for the last year, or the funky new visualizer, which needs to be moved the QT from plain opengl. Also the manual will take weeks I don't have to write, and I need to complete the new compressed output format.

Other then that it all works. If you fancy the *proper* code to play with, send me a mail c.pridgeon@ex.ac.uk. I know the open source thing is 'release early, release often', but when you have to re-write a huge manual, that's not so easy to achieve. I am bothered that it's been so long since a public update though.

I'm not even slightly interested in star wars space defense stuff. My primary concern is that we not get fossilized by another asteroid impact, who gives a crap about theoretical space dominance wars when we know that sooner or later we are going to get freight-trained by an asteroid.. Understanding more about previous impacts is useful, but I am nowhere near done writing the code I need to model that.

Re:Look, Up in the Sky!

[2short]

I don't think you apreciate the time scales involved.

A true skeptic would have wonder about the fact that there is no possible way the Mayans, or any humans, or, heck, any mammals, could have been aware of the meteor.

The meteor hit the earth, and its crater filled in long before humans evolved. It is detectable today by extensive statistical analysys of large scale gravitometer and magnetometer surveys, coupled with detailed mapping of geological deposits. There is nothing unique about the impact site today.

"Mayans weren't just another civilization with astronomy. They had the most accurate astronomy of any preindustrial/preglobal culture, including Egypt (which aligned the Great Pyramid more accurately along the Earth's axis than did the British in setting the Greenwich Line a century ago)."

"Classical" Western astronomy is preindustrial, and had a substantially correct model of the solar system. The Greenwich meridian was selected considerably more than a century ago, and if someone made an error drawing a line, it's not because their understanding of astronomy was not as good as the Egyptians. I cannot accept describing the Mayans Astronomy as "accurate", as the world is not a flat plane, let alone supported by jaguars.

To calculate the region of the sky the meteor came from, we'd need to know the impact time to within something like an hour. We know it to within about 5 million years; maybe.

Nah!

[Belial6]

She just was extra careful not to die between Saturday night and Sunday morning....

YESSSSSSSSs

[Captain Splendid]

Step right up folks! It's another edition of Captain Splendid's "Who pissed in your cornflakes this morning!"

Today's contestant is Krell. So, Krell, tell us, who pissed in your cornflakes this morning? Enquiring minds want to know!

Seriously, cheer up you grumpy fucker, and thanks for playing!

Re:back in college

[Zonnald]

Heard on local radio station.
"You want to get rid of an annoying man (i.e. boyfriend)? - start talking about Jesus."

Re:back in college

[Captain Splendid]

I have heard it said that when God cast out Satan from heaven that his impact on the earth is the same meteoric impact that scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs.

So, what you're saying is that the dinos are the first ever "friendly fire" casualties?

Should explain why such a christian nation as the US is so good at it, then.

How Radiocarbon Dating works.

[fuego451]

The way that dating mechanisms work is based on unproven assumption. In order for Carbin 14 dating system to be accurate, there hase to be NO CHANGE in the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 in the atmosphere over the years for which the system is claimed to be accurate.

I believe this article on Radiocarbon Dating may help you understand this process better. You will also see that scientists do take variables into account to better calibrate their results.

Re:How Radiocarbon Dating works.

[Guido von Guido]

One additional thing you should point out is that carbon-14 dating is only used for relatively recent samples (i.e., the last 60,000 years or so).

For older samples, other types of radiometric dating are used. For example, take a look at isochron dating.

Re:How Radiocarbon Dating works.

[dch24]

carbon-14 dating is only used for relatively recent samples (i.e., the last 60,000 years or so). For older samples, other types of radiometric dating are used. For example, take a look at isochron dating

I try to date only up to double my own age, but if you need to check a Geiger counter when you get your date, maybe her age isn't the main problem here?

Re:according to... ? (was:big news... but wrong)

[IdleTime]

The biblical flood is impossible as it would require the whole planet to be under more than 29000 feet of water. That is a rainfall of approx 30 feet per hour. That is not rain, but hydraulic mining.

exactly

[circletimessquare]

evolution, or any scientific advance, doesn't disprove the existence of god

the raving fundamentalists and the raving atheists really need to reconsider that point

the tension between science and religion is contrived, false

the tension between science and religion exists only in the minds of demagogues, brain-dead partisans, from either the community of faith, or the community of atheists

they both got it wrong

nothing science does disproves religion. nothing religion does disproves science. they are two disciplines examining the nature of existence from completely unrelated approaches: the fact-based here and now, and the transcendent impressionistic meta-view

and never shall the two disciplines meet

that's the truth of the matter

Re:exactly

[Ansoni-San]

Of course science does not conflict with the theory of a creator/God...it's a pretty plausible theory (even though arguable uninteresting). But let's not mince our words, God/Creator!=Religion. Science absolutely does conflict with most of the literal religions of the world. I'm sick of it already and I don't think I am alone.

The argument on the merit of a creator/God theory is very much something to be resolved through science. But that's not the problem. It's all the other bs people try to attach to a perfectly credible (for now anyway) theory and still claim it credible.

The Christians (I use the term Christian in the loosest of senses i.e. they go to Christian churches) I respect most are the ones that see the bible for what it is, a book written by people. They place no significance in the bible and focus on believing in a creator/God rather than a book in which they're too smart to blindly believe. I'm not saying they don't pray and whatnot but at least the imaginary conversations and alleged miracles are back down to clinically treatable levels of misguidedness. At least you can tell they're on the same planet. The praying can be looked at as a symbolic gesture, or human nature (things like hopes and wishes) so I would say their position does not conflict with science...the miracles being their choice of interpretation of an event because they'd rather think of it like that.

Re:exactly

[shutdown -p now]

It all depends upon your definition of religion. If you define it so that it cannot involve making any verifiable statements, and only dealing with metaphysical, then sure, it will never "meet" science. Unfortunately, none of the modern widespread religions are like that.

Public School

[jcnnghm]

The problem is with the education system. I don't see what the big deal is, but then again I went to private Catholic elementary, middle, and high schools, where we learned about science in classes called Science and religion in classes called Religion.

Seems pretty logical to me. The catholics that actually teach it taught that the bible should be taken as a collection of stories that can assist you in making moral decisions. Not necessarily fact, for fact we have science class. We were taught about evolution, darwinism, and the big bang and it wasn't presented as a theory either, but fact.

Interestingly enough, at one point or another we went into great detail about pretty much every major religion and belief system. Would it really hurt to learn about religion as a whole as long as it isn't taught in a secular manner? We did, which is probably why I don't practice any religion.

Ahh... the Emerill Lagasse Theory

[jakel2k]

Emerill "Bang! Creatures everywhere... don't worry about getting some in the lakes and rivers, only enriches things later...okay folks now stay tuned, after the commercial we'll whip up Man in less that 24 hours."

Last Tuesday

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

That's something that's always struck me. An omnipotent god could trivially create a zillion photons all the way up to every star in the iniverse. And in fact could create 15 billion years of fake history which would be completely indistinguishable from "real" history.

This is often referred to as "Last Tuesdayism." The idea that the universe was created last Tuesday with the appearance of being 15 billion years old is logically impossible to falsify. Since it cannot be falsified, it is not science, but that doesn't stop the creationists from bringing up the idea. They never seem to understand that a corollary of it is that God is a liar.

There are also constant Usenet flamewars, religious jihads, and university campus riots between the Last Tuesdayists and the Last Mondayists. They're all heretics, of course. All right-thinking, intelligent people know that the universe was created by my cat Marvin three weeks ago Thursday.

Re:Last Tuesday

[Subsound90]

My 2 cents, crazy or not. I believe in dinsaurs and the age of the earth to be billions of years, and not a bunch of fossils planted by god in a 6,000 year old earth. I think that if I got to be a higher being able to watch life I create unfold, I would want to create a start and see what happens. Then to see what diversity comes out of compition/disasters and celibrate it. We can look at these creatures with wonder and say "Wow, things like this actually existed? That is so awsome, I wonder what it would have been like", instead of the imagionation crushing "think as we do" vocal religous minority. Also, I don't think the writers of the bible could really understand any number as high as billions or even millions. Better to be vauge, and not have some one think you're a loony. I think people screaming at each other about how old the earth is are missing the point. The central tennent is kindness and generosity, which seem to have been lost in the "I"M RIGHT and YOU'RE NOT". Let people think and do what they want if it doesn't hurt anyone else, I think people are more creative and happier that way. I say let me deal with my own soul and beliefs, and everyone else deal with thiers any way that doesn't harm anyone else. No, I am not christian but I do believe there is a higher power out there. Whether I'm right or wrong in where I go to, or when I pray, or if I follow kosher or no alchohol, I feel my actions are what matters. If it's your beliefs and not actions that matter, then there is something wrong.

Self-aligned dates

[2901]

The interest in the article is that they have found a single sediment with both the K-T boundary marked by loss of marine plankton species and debris from the impact at the same level. So they can look at date difference without needing absolute dates and without the errors possible in isotopic geochemistry.

Re:back in college

[flyingsquid]

I once dated

You know, you don't have to lie to try to impress us.

Re:engineers and religion

[M. Baranczak]

The engineers who built the Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay obviously weren't praying hard enough.

Re:back in college

[eclectro]

That was the last time I asked her out. Oh well. She was so hot!

What was her name? What town was she from? What school was this at?

I think Noah was an ok dude.

i know everyone hates religon here but

[Some_Llama]

In revelations it talks about a big "star" falling from the heavens that killed many people and a third of life on the planet.. could this be an accurate prediction of a future impact? Everytime this topic comes up I am reminded of this prophecy...

  The third angel sounded, and a great star fell from the sky, burning like a torch, and it fell on one third of the rivers, and on the springs of the waters.

11 The name of the star is called "Wormwood." One third of the waters became wormwood. Many people died from the waters, because they were made bitter.

Re:i know everyone hates religon here but

[HyTronix]

Actually, I think this predicts people dying from drinking cheap absynthe.

Re:Assume the flood is true

[Penguinoflight]

He'd hardly be God if He let everyone else make the rules.

Re:Assume the flood is true

[pedantic bore]

Go back and read it again. Afterward, God promised he'd never do it again. After nuking a few cities of the plain, and drowning almost everything else, he realized it was time to chill out and limit himself to a few massacres here and there.

p.s., yes, I'm probably going to hell for that.

Ted?

[Dimensio]

When did Ted Holden start posting to Slashdot?

Re:back in college

[wiredlogic]

She told me about the "proven scientific evidence" that recently demonstrated that the dinosaurs went extinct in "Noah's ... EJECT, EJECT, EJECT!

Re:back in college

[Lord Ender]

pretty much what happened. there was also the "we don't need NASA. god would protect us from a meteor strike" bit.

"MacLeod" and single meteor?

[kurzweilfreak]

When questioned about what solidified the single-impact theory for him, MacLeod stated, "It just occurred to me, it's so simple.... THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!"

Carbon Dating

[camperdave]

I am curious about carbon dating. Although most biochemical processes wouldn't care less which carbon atom was used, would there not be a bias towards one isotope rather than the other. C12 has less mass, therefore would have an ever so slightly different activation energy. Could this bias distort carbon dating ages?

Re:Carbon Dating

[RockDoctor]

Although most biochemical processes wouldn't care less which carbon atom was used, would there not be a bias towards one isotope rather than the other. C12 has less mass, therefore would have an ever so slightly different activation energy. Could this bias distort carbon dating ages?

Carbon has two stable isotopes (C12 and C13), and a number of unstable isotopes (several with half-lives less than a second, C10 (19s), C11 (20min), C14 (5703a), C15 (2.449s) and C16 (0.747s)) So, for anything more than around 50,000 years old (approximately one mid-length Milankovitch Cycle, just to tie it to geological observables and astronomy), the only isotopes that matter are C12 and C13.
Variations in the C12:C13 ratio are routinely used for correlation within and between geological sections, and have been used as evidence of variations in photosynthetic productivity across the rock record (since the core part of the carbon-fixing system is sensitive to the masses of the atoms involved, as you suspect). For example, evidence from the C12:C13 ratio has been cited in support of the thesis that North Sea Oil is partly sourced from Fammemian-Frasnian lacustrine laminites as contradiction to the common working model that it's sourced in Callovian-Oxfordian-Kimmeridgian-Tithonian of a more widespread and somewhat richer source rock (that's part of my area of competence, and (apart from Nigel Trewin) few care terribly deeply about the question. Certainly not me, certainly not since Nigel retired.).
The shifts in C12:C13 ratio that one sees on cycling inorganic carbon through photosynthetic organisms are a few parts per thousand ; the abundance of C14 ranges around one part per trillion. Therefore, the disappearence of C14 from a system would distort C12:C13 ratios by (approximately) one part per million of the value of the ratio. That's around a thousandth of the level of the variations introduced by the experimentally observed isotopic shifts due to photosynthetic activity.

Or, to put it another way - it's noise. Faint noise. At it's maximum.
[Damn, Slashdot isn't letting me get a preview through. Got to go to work, so I'll just have to post blind. Typos etc are brought to you by the letter Q and the number (googleplex++)]
4th try fixed it ... Typos etc are now mine!

Moo

[Chacham]

Religionists says there was great flood.
Scientists decry it saying that the idea of a flood is ridiculous. Because, it couldn't be anything less than a meteor.

IOW, they both agree on the fact that there was a catastrophic event, but argue religously about how it happened.

Single meteor?

[Slip-Knot in space t]

Wow really, a meteor wiped out the dinasours? and all this time I thought it was anthrax. 8P

sorry about the rude people

[misanthrope101]

I do see many posts literally calling Christians retards (some of which are modded down appropriately). As a Christian, I get offended by that

It's unfortunate that some people in the world are rude. Try being an atheist and having tens of millions of people assume that you have no morals or values. I have to be careful who I "admit" my lack of faith to, lest I be insulted openly by their assumption that I must live my life as if there is no morality. Yeah, like I rape, pillage, and plunder daily. Want to join me?

Unfortunately for you, the fundamentalists have tried to co-opt the word "Christian" for themselves. If you aren't a biblical literalist, they don't consider you a Christian. The problem is, most biblical literalists repudiate rational thought and pretty much all of science. When you guys get that sorted out amongst yourselves as to who is an isn't a Christian, let us know.

but anyone who believes in a higher being), I get offended,

Well, how much respect would you have for an adult who believed in Santa Claus or magic elves? Really? You might not pelt them with rocks, but you aren't really going to respect them, and you are fully aware of that. God is basically an invisible magic friend who loves you and who will punish people you don't like by sending them to hell forever. We can disagree on the fine points, but though I agree that you have faith and I would never openly mock you (sorry about those who do--I don't like rude people) but at a basic level what is there that I'm supposed to respect? Can I have more respect for you than you would have for someone who prayed to Dionysus or thought that a magic leprechaun orbits Neptune and sends him messages? How you can expect more respect than you would have yourself? I agree that you wouldn't be rude to them (kudos to you) but the best we can hope for here is the old saw, "if you don't have anything nice to say..."

I have yet to hear anyone debunk the first law of thermodynamics. If energy (and matter) is never created nor destroyed, nothing can exist without that law at any scale being broken at some point.

The laws of physics would only exist in a universe that existed. Meaning, that this first law only holds true once the universe exists. And if science is correct and space and time are linked, there was no before to existence--it isn't as if the universe existed for a while but was empty, and then later stuff came into being. The laws only came into being with the existence of stuff, because the stuff has properties that, once recognized, are stated as scientific laws.

Evolution is the basis of modern biology. It isn't a hack "theory" in the laymen sense of the word. It is a mental model that happens to not only explain the facts, but to have a predictive value, and so on. Talkorigins.org has good articles on what "theory" means in a scientific sense. A large part of the problem we face in the evolution-creationism "debate" is the (often deliberate) misuse of the word "theory." Just because the biblical literalists have an explanation doesn't make it a theory in the scientific sense, so their explanation isn't a competing theory. It's a competing explanation (just as magic elves, Odin, and so on are explanations) but not a competing theory. A theory is more than a conjectural explanation.

Dear slashdot....

[advocate_one]

how do I block entire threads from view??? That one comment at the beginning derailed the entire discussion... and off it went with crap about creationism...

Alone?

[remmelt]

Thanks for clearing that up! I thought he meant that they were alone, as in lonesome, no girlfriends. Which would have made sense, and would have provided some hope for an evolution-believer like me. Too bad!

Come on dude

[KKlaus]

I'm an atheist but even I know the answer to that one. It's called the bible. And because christians consider it to be the word of god, it pretty much trumps everything else. Rethink your post with an "and he gave us this blessed book that was his truth to us all and it said (implied) 6000 years" and add that to the crafted history and the only conclusion you can come to (assuming bible is treated as gosple - is that a pun? anyhow..) is that something is wrong with the evidence, unless of course you want to believe the bible is false, which like I said is off the table for christians. No one wants to worship a dishonest god, so there is no way anyone would behave as you suggest.

Keep fighting the good fight though.

The REAL dinosaur killer

[rfc1394]

Everyone knows that an asteroid wasn't what killed the dinosaurs. It was high insurance rates!

Time is Relative

[djtachyon]

You speak as if time actually exists. It seems more that time is an illusion and relative to us conceiving what we experiance. *shrug* .. Who cares, still means I have to go to work in half an hour.

Re:back in college

[meringuoid]

I have heard it said that when God cast out Satan from heaven that his impact on the earth is the same meteoric impact that scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs.

Now, I know most people didn't much like Adric, but really - he wasn't Satan!

Dual agents

[CustomDesigned]

That is a pretty good summary of Christian doctrine within the simulation analogy. However, it is just an analogy with weak points. For instance, in Christian doctrine, the AI units are not strictly in the simulation. They are actually intelligent beings in the outer reality, whose primary mode of interaction is through the simulation. Intelligence is not strictly natural, and human beings exist in two realms at once. Also, "simulations" imply a certain lack of instrinsic worth - they are discardable. The creator of our universe (through His avatar) claims to have a vested interest in our reality - and his enemies seem to find our universe surprisingly important also. Some theologians think this is only because our creator's interest makes our fate a good way to "get back" at the creator.

Re:World Comedians Called

[krell]

The joker is Jon Stewart. I can't figure out the other two, however.

Shotz.

Re:I once say a bumper sticker...

[meringuoid]

... that said "Big Bang Theory: God spoke and BANG it happened."

This is part of what really puzzles me about the six-day breed of creationist. I mean, seriously... They think the universe began when God said 'let there be light'. We now find that the story of creation is written all over the sky in the cosmic microwave background, the redshifted photons of the original glow of creation still visible today. What more do they want? 'Let there be light'? Light meters out the metric of space, it binds spacetime together, it's the whole damn secret of relativity itself. The universe was created in a blaze of light and the physics of its grand scale are all founded upon light. Surely these people should be downright ecstatic?

My dogma chased your Wombats

[zish]

Wombats were put here by pirates to test our faith.
Sheesh! Read between the lines people!

Pedantic point, but...

[UncleGizmo]

"everything you say which you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt is a theory."

Ummm, no, that's actually closer to a belief (or a basis for a proof). A theory is something that you CAN prove, with consistency, regardless of who is doing the proving (I'm paraphrasing, but you get the point).

I totally agree with you on keeping your science out of your religion and vice versa. But that's why I believe it's important to reinforce the definition of what a theory is. The inaccuracy as you state above is what ID'ers use to teach creationism (or more accurately, resist teaching evolution) in our public education systems ("...evolution is JUST a theory, so ...")

Re:Pedantic point, but...

[FST777]

OK, let me phrase a possible definition:

A scientific theory is, as opposed to laws of nature, a hypothesis backed up with facts, but likely subject to change in the future, as more facts and laws become apparent. Therefore, a theory contains the possible thruth on a matter, with regard for the possibilities that future knowledge renders the theory to null and void and replaces it with another theory or a new law of nature.

Man, I know

[rsilvergun]

it's just a pity that He had to take out all those PS3 owners just to get the Wii gamers. *ducks*.

Oh well, it'll only take 65 million years for Sony to get another 100,000 consoles out. **ducks again**

Re:Assume the flood is true

[Caspian]

Even if a God willing to commit acts of mass murder (even genocide) against his own, supposedly beloved creations actually existed, he would not be worth worshipping. The things God allegedly did, just vis-a-vis mass human extinction alone (i.e.: 'The Flood'), makes God a worse dictator than any human tyrant ever to live.

The 'Old Testament' makes it abundantly clear that YHVH is not a nice guy. At all. Hell, even I'm nicer than YHVH; I've never even killed a single person, much less nearly wiped out the human race in a fit of pique.

Everything but the danged cockroaches...

[enmane]

damn those things - damn them!

Hypocrites

[Z34107]

Do you assume anyone with Faith is a hypocrite?

Science and religion aren't exactly opposed to each other. It is true that science cannot prove the existence of God any more than the existance of the flying spaghetti monster, but it is also true that science cannot disprove the existence of God.

That's why it's called "Faith." For the same reasons, it's foolhardy to try to use the scientific vernacular to articulate matters of faith; if science is worthless to prove/disprove the existance of an Almighty, than it is irrational to assume there is any overlap or conflict between science and religion at all.

If for no other reason, look at Faith from the view of the pragmatist. Although any group has its asshats, the truly faithful have morals, try to be good people in any way they are called, and in my experience are happy. The "evangelical athiests" I know are angry, bitter, elitist, and destructive. Look past the individual: fascism, nazism, and communism are actually perfectly sensical and rational outside some external source of morals.

I can see various counterpoints involving the crusades to trickle up, but stay them a moment. Are kings seeking wealth and power, and a then-corrupt Roman bureacracy actually examples of Faith and religion, or of more secular, political motives?

The point: Believing in something higher than your own mortal self is not a rejection of science. Not everyone who listens to an iPod "enjoying its effect", the product of science, is rejecting Faith or religion. Science cannot disprove the existence of God; by the very definition of an Almighty, this is impossible. There is no reason outside politics of convenience (think secular liberals or witch burners) that the two cannot coexist.

I personally consider science to be God's gift to humanity, that we may better understand His creation. From this viewpoint especially is any conflict ridiculous.

Hypocrism

[Z34107]

Do you assume anyone with Faith is a hypocrite?

Science and religion aren't exactly opposed to each other. It is true that science cannot prove the existence of God any more than the existance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but it is also true that science cannot disprove the existence of God.

That's why it's called "Faith." For the same reasons, it's foolhardy to try to use the scientific vernacular to articulate matters of faith; science is a wholly inadequate tool for reasoning out the existence/nonexistence of a divine being.

If for no other reason, look at Faith from the view of the pragmatist. Although any group has its asshats, the truly faithful have morals, try to be good people in any way they are called, and in my experience are happy. The "evangelical athiests" I know are angry, bitter, elitist, and destructive. Look past the individual: fascism, nazism, and communism are actually perfectly sensical and rational outside some external source of morals.

I can see various counterpoints involving the crusades to trickle up, but stay them a moment. Are kings seeking wealth and power, and a then-corrupt Roman bureacracy actually examples of Faith and religion, or of more secular, political motives?

The point: Believing in something higher than your own mortal self is not a rejection of science. Not everyone who listens to an iPod "enjoying its effect", the product of science, is rejecting Faith or religion. Science cannot disprove the existence of God; by the very definition of an Almighty, this is impossible. There is no reason outside politics of convenience (think secular liberals or witch burners) that the two cannot coexist.