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Evolution of Mammals Re-evaluated
AaxelB writes "A study described in the New York Times rethinks mammalian evolution. Specifically, that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs had relatively little impact on mammals and that the steps in mammals' evolution happened well before and long after the dinosaurs' death."
Most sensible explanation
In other words, chicken tastes like dinosaur!
(In Creationist America and Lysenkoist Russia, dinosaurs taste like chicken!)
I had thought this point was actually a point of disagreement between Gould and Dawkins, with Dawkins pointing out that the cambrian explosion wasn't as sudden as Gould had pointed out. I think this particular point was discussed in Bryson's "A Brief History of Nearly Everything". I didn't think anyone still held this viewpoint about mammalian evolution anymore.
It's not so "cool" having to clean dinosaur droppings off my car, though.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
But can they shoehorn it into the framework of a 6000 year old Earth?
Trolling is a art,
Speaking of misleading titles! I got all excited about your post's title, anticipating a link to some Miss Universe-type website. Instead, all I got was a one-sentence comment.
I've known about this since Sunday.
Triv
From Conservapedia:
A CBS survey said there's no evolution! If 87% of people say there's no evolution then this article is a sham sir!
Back on-topic, what interests me is:
If it wasn't the dinosaurs stopping the evolution of mammals (i.e. dinosaurs dominating the habitat), then what did? Could it be that the available habitats were just better suited to dinosaurs vs. mammals? That's the first thing that springs to mind (although am no paleontologist). As ever with this sort of thing, the finding raises more questions than it answers!
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
I thought it was about six million years, could be wrong though.
The big thing was grass, it hadn't been around for most of the time the dinosours had existed. The domination of grasses after the CT event really helped the spread of species
Evolution is a theory of science, not a parlor talk theory. There is no faith in evolution, only vast reams of empirical data supporting it.
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If you read The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, you'll find that recent genetic evidence suggests that many of the distinct branches of modern mammals predate the K-T extinction.
In particular, by the time of the K-T extinction, I believe that the primate lineage had already separated from rodents, as well as the laurasiatheres (all hoofed mammals, lions, tigers, bears, etc.), xenarthrans (armadillos, sloths, etc.), and afrotheres (elephants, manatees, anteaters, etc.).
So, while most mammals in the Cretaceous may still have been tiny shrew-like creatures scurrying around in the underbrush, many of the modern lineages had already come into separate existence.
It is also interesting to read, in the book, that our nearest non-primate relatives aside from the tree shrews are rodents. I can sort of see it: give a mouse a little more finger dexterity and it wouldn't not that different from a lemur. It also might explain why rodents are such good laboratory specimens.
Sounds more like religion to me.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Specifically, that the mass extinction of the dinosaurs had relatively little impact on mammals and that the steps in mammals' evolution happened well before and long after the dinosaurs' death.
Do they think that those steps ever could have taken place if the dinosaurs were still around?
Technoli
And then there is the subject of this article: which is not the whys and wherefores, but the histories of evolution. They are not reevaluating the means of evolution, just the details of the timetables of when things happened. Much like a police officer looking at a crime scene and sorting out what happened when, discovering a new piece of evidence or talking to a new witness and adjusting the description to fit the facts.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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I should add that these fossil discoveries lead to various people taking a more serious look at the presumed facts of mammal evolution and were the catalyst for a "rethink", however there is even more "hard evidence" in the paper cited by the NYT article which was a far more detailed study looking at far more fossil (and apparently molecular) evidence.
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Nope. It's not satire. It was created by Andrew Schlafly, son of arch-conservative anti-femininst Phillys Schlafly, and is used by her Eagle Forum.
If the ideas presented on that site induce laughter, it is because neoconservative ideas are completely ridiculous. Really, Mark Twain couldn't produce satire so deep. I honestly hope that the GOP uses that site as their definitive reference. Within two generations, they'll be too stupid to breed.
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
Re-Thinking? Well, hell if you knew it wasn't right, why didn't you say so before?
Jeez.
See, this is why Creationism is right...No rethinking required. Ever.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
You're right, some might be from the Northeast (like Dover, PA for example). So us dumbass, inbred rednecks from Alabama do not have a lock on scientific ignorance and religious idiocy.
Damn, whatever will happen when the Deep South is no longer looked on as the primary source of bible beating, homophobic, racist, ignorant fundies? Unfortunately, when that day happens, it will be the entire US that is looked on as the primary source of bible beating, homophobic, racist, ignorant fundies.
"Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093779/quotes
A magic man done it! With "forcey forces" of coursey.
Conservapedia is self-parody, but it is produced and maintained by "Conservatives" as a repository of official "Conservative" dogma. Because they think Wikipedia is "liberal", as they clearly state in their About page. Typically Conservative, they're using the Wikipedia software for free, but don't even mutter a minimal thanks to Wikipedia - they just bash it.
Anonymous Conservative Coward is a typical Conservative: trying to have it both ways, all ways, whenever it's convenient. There is no "truth" for today's "Conservatives" (What are they "conserving"? They're wasters, reckless consumers and rampant destroyers.) So whenever they dart out from behind their favorite weasel words to make a clear statement, they're usually a joke, at least because they contradict whatever other statement they made before that was once convenient then.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert
--
make install -not war
My problem is understanding why the creationists are so obsessed with evolution being wrong. After all, Heliocentrism vs. Geocentrism has all the same merits (i.e. we can see the sun goes round the earth, proving the opposite to the layman is difficult, Heliocentrism is a theory, literal interpretation of the bible says the arth is the centre of the solar system), biut doesn't cause nearly as much debate.
There's faith in the idea that what we observe is representative of what happened before recorded history. There's faith that empiricism is generally valid (watch how many people leap to defend empiricism and tell me that that's not faith). There's faith that the vast majority of collected data hasn't been tampered with. There's faith that, on the whole, scientists are conscientious about their work, and do not seek to deceive. There is even faith that no one is holding a gun to the heads of everyone who has ever worked in the field to gather data, and telling them to lie.
I happen to share all of this faith, as I think it's a fair set of assumptions on which to base one's faith (as opposed to invisible men in the sky, to paraphrase George Carlin). That doesn't mean that it's anything other than faith, however. Fundamentally, all of this can be boiled down to a faith in Occam's Razor, a principle which was the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of convincing the budding, and as yet unnamed scientific movement that the Church wasn't necessarily wrong (they didn't go that far for another 50-100 years), but that they were not the only authority on which to base the evaluation of truth. Occam's Razor leads directly to the explosion of thought surrounding empiricism in the Renaissance, and ultimately to what we call science, today. That we rely on this grounding in pre-Renaissance thought to this day is an often-explored and frequently questioned element of faith in the process that we call the scientific method.
As for the vast reams of facts supporting evolution... there are vast reams of fact supporting a lot of crazy ideas. What's interesting about evolution is that those facts corroborate each other in intricate ways that would be very difficult to unravel as a whole. Certain facts may turn out to support conclusions which they did not originally seem to point to, but the whole has many more inter-related facts on which to stand.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I have recently examined the Marzeah Papyrus (7th century B.C.), fragments of the dead sea scrolls, septuagint leviticus , septuagint exodus and Gospel of John fragments all from the 3rd century A.D. Modern, nonparaphrased, versions of the Bible, corresponding to these fragments are accurately translated.
Many of the original writers and earliest translators could write and speak multiple languages. While you might consider them superstitious they weren't illiterate. William Tyndale, a 16th century scholar and translator was fluent in eight languages. His work influenced Shakespear and the King James version of the Bible.
Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake because a version of the Bible that could be read by all, transferred power from the King and the Pope to the church, which Tyndale translated as congregation or congress (people) rather than church (hierarchy). Many credit Tyndale and his translation for furthering the concepts of representative democracy, individual responsibility, and equality.
"Nobody has EVER made a fossil. NO fossils are being made anywhere today, especially by any slow, gradual process, sometimes imagined by evolutionists."
Two words: Snow Mummies.
"To prevent this, a dead body needs to be put in an environment that prevents all microorganisms from feeding on the remains and oxygen must be excluded."
Hm. Like drowning in tar?
"A sudden disastrous upheaval such as the Biblical flood could certainly account for fossils."
Yes. Because there are no waterborne microorganisms.
Read as "Naturally occuring semi-modern fossils"
"The unwarranted assumption (faith) is that such radioactive decay rates have never varied over the vast periods of time evolutionists need in order to make their assertions seem plausible."
In order for radioactive decay rates to change, there would need to be some fundamental changes in a number of unary (ie: they equal 1) quantum constants. These constants only exist to translate from conventional units of measurement into quantum units. I would submit that you need to show evidence to suggest that any QED constant has drifted by any small percent over the time we've known about them.
Seriously. Is it that you're trolling on purpose, or are you actually someone who is *just* educated enough to sound this stupid?
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Summary:
Evolution, the historical record of species evolution on earth is being rethought, as there is new evidence to refine our understanding of it, and is as yet theoretical.
Evolution, the process of speciation (the forking off of species) and adaptation through natural selection, is quite firmly proven.
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Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Can it be because there is more selection pressure due to the dinosaurs?
If there is more selection pressure, more the chance of diverging to new species.
And when dinosaurs died out, the mammals had a field day.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
Sure like:
Deuteronomy
"As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace. If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor. But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town. When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder. You may enjoy the spoils of your enemies that the LORD your God has given you."
In this neat little passage we have slavery, genocide and rape by command of the god of the OT.
Here is something to describes the character of the god of the OT...
Exodus
"The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name."
And here is some more OT god mercy and graciousness and long-suffering. Obviously the love and mercy did not apply to young virgin children girls.
Numbers
"They warred against Midian, as YAHWEH commanded Moses, and killed every male. They killed the kings of Midian with the rest of their slain
Now here we have clearly child rape. Keeping in mind that the Midians were pure evil (the standard apologetic response to the above passage) just how young do think these virgin children were? Does not your OT gods grace apply to them?
Is that why whenever the "spirit of the lord" moves within Sampson he goes out to kill people. Yup the love of people just is quite clear in the above passages.
In my experience biblical illiteracy is widespread among bible believers.
No it did not! The flood is a not only a myth but a borrowed myth. Check the story of Gilgamesh, of which sources predate any OT sources. Try to read something other than Christian Apologetics.
Further the proof the flood does not exists is clearly and abundantly obvious in Geology. Get out into the field take a book or surface geological map and look around and will encounter geological formations that deny the flood.