From ScienceDaily:
A study that has ‘weighed’ hundreds of dinosaurs suggests that shrinking their bodies may have helped the group that became birds to continue exploiting new ecological niches throughout their evolution, and become hugely successful today.
…
Dinosaurs aren’t extinct; there are about 10,000 species alive today in the form of birds. We wanted to understand the evolutionary links between this exceptional living group, and their Mesozoic relatives, including well-known extinct species like T. rex, Triceratops, and Stegosaurus,’ said Dr Roger Benson of Oxford University’s Department of Earth Sciences, who led the study. ‘We found exceptional body mass variation in the dinosaur line leading to birds, especially in the feathered dinosaurs called maniraptorans. These include Jurassic Park’s Velociraptor, birds, and a huge range of other forms, weighing anything from 15 grams to 3 tonnes, and eating meat, plants, and more omnivorous diets.’
The team believes that small body size might have been key to maintaining evolutionary potential in birds, which broke the lower body size limit of around 1 kilogram seen in other dinosaurs.
Well, a brick can’t fly; that’s uncontroversial. But there is, of course, way more to becoming a bird.
This sort of analysis is interesting. It is a reasonable interpretation of the past. That’s conventionally called history. Why, in the absence of an ability to predict anything in the present, should it be called science?
Follow UD News at Twitter!
Well, the best reason I can think of is because it isn’t history.
Seeing the extensive use that cladistics played in this supposed study for seeing if dinosaurs can or did evolve into birds, this study is about useless for seeing what really happened.
Whereas the actual evidence, as opposed to imaginary lines drawn on a sheet of paper, reveals a very different story than the one Darwinists tell the public:
Moreover, birds have shown Darwin to be wrong in one of his fundamental predictions:
Even the famed Darwin finches fail to give support to Darwinian evolution. The Grants (who extensively studied Darwin’s finches) made a long presentation at Stanford in 2009 on their work. In it they give the game away. All the so called Darwin finches can inner breed. Doesn’t happen much but it does happen and they have viable offspring that reproduce. Here is the link:
To save you some time. Start at about 109:00 and follow Rosemary for a few minutes till at least 112:00. Then go to 146:30 and listen to Peter. Before this is the inane prattle by two of Stanford’s finest who do not understand that the Grants are saying that the whole evolution thing is a crock.
Supplemental note, this following video clip comes recommended by none other than Mr. Grand Inquisitor Jerry Coyne himself:
—-
Mung,
Macro-evolution is more of a forensic science than empirical.
We only have evidence of events that have occurred in the past. We have to interpret and make sense of the evidence we find. Like the modern day CSI, we must determine what evidence is pertinent and which is not. This evidence originated, supposedly, millions of years in the past, and not just the night before or two weeks ago. It is indeed history.
It’s dogma so call it dogma. Or perhaps it’s just a fairy tale for grown ups…
Actually, neo-Darwinism should be considered a full fledged pseudo-science rather than a science, a history, or even forensic science:
What the vast majority of Darwinists fail to realize (or ever honestly admit to) is that Darwinian evolution is not even a ‘real’ physical science in any proper sense but that Darwinian evolution is more realistically thought of as a pseudo-science. Even Jerry Coyne himself, the self-appointed Grand Inquisitor of Darwinian evolution, admits that Darwinian evolution lacks the rigor of a proper physical science:
The main reason why Darwinian evolution is more properly thought of as a pseudo-science instead of a proper science is because Darwinian evolution has no rigid mathematical basis, like other overarching physical theories of science do. A rigid mathematical basis in order to potentially falsify it (in fact math, in so far as math can be applied to Darwinian claims, constantly shows us the Darwinian evolution is astronomically unlikely),,
Another primary reason why Darwinian evolution is more realistically thought of as a pseudo-science rather than a proper physical science is that Darwinian evolution does not have a demonstrated empirical basis to support its claims (in fact empirical evidence also consistently shows us that Darwinian evolution is astronomically unlikely),,
Another reason why Darwinian evolution is more realistically thought of as a pseudo-science rather than a proper physical science is that the two foundational pillars of Darwinian evolution, Random Mutation/Variation and Natural Selection, are both now shown to be severely compromised as to having the causal adequacy that Darwinists have ascribed to them. For instance, although Darwinian evolution appeals to unguided ‘random mutations/variations’ to DNA as the main creative source for all evolutionary novelty, there are now known to be extensive layers of error correction in the cell to protect against any unguided “random” changes happening to DNA in the first place:
Moreover, for the vast majority of times that changes do happen to DNA, they are now known to be ‘directed mutations’ by sophisticated molecular machines, not unguided ‘random mutations’ from a cosmic ray, chemical imbalance, or some such entropy driven event as that:
What should be needless to say, having ‘cell-mediated processes’ direct changes to DNA is in direct contradiction to the ‘unguided randomness’ which is held to be foundational to neo-Darwinian thought.
Moreover, Natural Selection, that other great pillar upon which Darwinian evolution rests, has also been undermined as having the causal adequacy that neo-Darwinists have attributed to it. First off, to the extent that Natural Selection does do anything, Natural Selection is found to be a eliminative force not a generative force:
As well, Natural Selection is grossly inadequate to do the work required of it because of what is termed ‘the princess and the pea’ paradox. The devastating ‘princess and the pea’ paradox is clearly elucidated by Dr. John Sanford, at the 8:14 minute mark, of this following video,,,
Dr. Sanford points out, in the preceding video, that Natural Selection acts at the coarse level of the entire organism (phenotype) and yet the vast majority of mutations have effects that are only ‘slightly detrimental’, and have no noticeable effect on phenotypes, and are thus far below the power of Natural Selection to remove from genomes before they spread throughout the population.
Here are a few more notes on this insurmountable ‘princess and the pea’ problem for natural selection:
Moreover, as if that were not devastating enough as to undermining any credibility Natural Selection might have had as to having the causal adequacy to explain the highly integrated levels of overlapping functional information found in organisms, dimensionally speaking, Natural Selection is now known to not even be on the right playing field in the first place:
Here is, what a Darwinist termed, a ‘horrendously complex’ metabolic pathway (which operates as if it were ’4-Dimensional):
And remember, Darwinian evolution has yet to explain a single gene of those ‘horrendously complex’ metabolic pathways.
The reason why a ‘higher dimensional’ 4-Dimensional structure, such as a ‘horrendously complex metabolic pathway, would be, for all intents and purposes, completely invisible to a 3-Dimensional process, such as Natural Selection, is best illustrated by ‘flatland’:
I personally hold that the reason why internal physiology and anatomy operate as if they were four-dimensional instead of three dimensional is because of exactly what Darwinian evolution has consistently failed to explain the origination of. i.e. functional information. ‘Higher dimensional’ information, which is bursting at the seams in life, simply cannot be reduced to any 3-dimensional energy-matter basis:
Moreover, matter and energy are now both shown to reduce to ‘quantum information/entanglement’. In fact an entire human can now, theoretically, be reduced to quantum information and teleported to another location in the universe:
Thus not only is Information not reducible to a 3-Dimensional energy-matter basis, as is presupposed in Darwinism, but in actuality energy and matter both reduce to a information theoretic basis as is presupposed in Christian Theism:
Verse and Music:
DaRook:
Why should forensic science be called science rather than history?
Forensic science is not empirical?
History is not empirical?
How ironic.
The Greek Septuagint, unlike the modern Masoretic Tanakh/Old Testament, is very close to the Dead Sea Scroll translations and is the version used by Greek-speaking Jews during the time of Jesus and his talmidim and a couple hundred years before and after.
Here’s a literal reading (only changing the word order used in Greek) of how the first part of Genesis describes the first animal life on Earth without transliteration:
Reptiles … flying winged creatures … great sea monsters … feathered winged creatures. 😮
-Q
AMEN to this thread. Bulls eye.
Its not science in these speculations. its not doing the scientific method before drawing or suggesting conclusions.
Its doing the methodology of history.
Its weighing the scant information and then speculating.
This is why evolution slipped through.
It never was a scientific study. it was a historical study wearing white lab coats.
They are just guessing.
Birds are not dinos. Its stupid. iN fact dinos are not dinos. tHey are kist kinds with some trivial like traits.
its asll flaws in classification.
On the question of history, one thing has puzzled me — many of the pterosaurs had unbelievably huge wingspans. My understanding is that they had wingspans of, like, 30 feet. My puzzle is how these creatures, at the dawn of vertebrate flight could have pulled off this task which is unfathomable for modern birds.
The large pterasaurs are mostly azhdarchids, which where not at the dawn of reptile flight but some 100 million years older than the first pterosaurs.
Some birds got pretty big (Argentavis was ~70kg) but seem to be limited from getting super-huge by the way they take-off. Some of the mechanics are described here
@Moose Dr
“On the question of history, one thing has puzzled me — many of the pterosaurs had unbelievably huge wingspans. My understanding is that they had wingspans of, like, 30 feet. My puzzle is how these creatures, at the dawn of vertebrate flight could have pulled off this task which is unfathomable for modern birds.”
I don’t know. I once heard that the oxygen levels at that time were greater and thus allowed for large creatures requiring large lung capacity to live, I think.
wd400, this might interest you if you are ever ready to admit you were mistaken in swallowing Darwinian evolution hook, line, and sinker:
The Unknown Origin of Pterosaurs – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP6htc371fM
@Querius
Speaking on the subject, where can I find the closest dead sea scroll hebrew and greek to English translation?
VunderGuy,
Here’s a link that discusses the comparisons done by scholars:
http://www.doxa.ws/Messiah/Lxx_mt.html
Here’s a link to a modern translation of the Septuagint into English (you can download the first edition for free):
http://septuagint-interlinear-greek-bible.com/
Here’s a link for a translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Comp.....0141197315
The academic scandal about how their publication was suppressed for 40 years (60 years after their discovery) is described here:
http://www.biblicalarchaeology.....a-scrolls/
-Q
Mung,
Dr. Max M. Houck is an internationally-recognized forensic expert with research interests in forensic science, education, and the forensic enterprise and its industries.
He wrote a book entitled,”Forensic Science is History”,which contained the following passage:
“Forensic science is a historical science: The events in question have already occurred and are in the past. Forensic scientists do not view the crime as it occurs (unless they’re witnesses); they assist the investigation through the analysis of the physical remains of the criminal activity. Many sciences, such as geology, astronomy, archaeology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, work in the same way: No data are seen as they are created, but only the remnants, or proxy data, of those events are left behind. Archaeologists, for example, analyze cultural artifacts of past civilizations to interpret their activities and practices.”
There may be aspects of all these disciplines that may be empirical. Take, for instance, paleontology. A fossil can be weighed and measured and maybe even articulated into a skeletal structure, but to say that it is ancestral to another fossil is purely conjectural.
My bad.
“Forensic Science is History” is a chapter in the book “Fundamentals of Forensic Science”. It is not a book in and of itself.
So what? That does not make them history and not science.
Is ID also history rather than science?
And the physical remains are present, not past.
The DNA, for example, is actually there. One doesn’t have to study the past to find it.
Mung,
It’s historical because “the events in question have already occurred and are in the past”. Empirical sciences deal with the five senses; sight, touch, hearing feeling and smell. No one observed these evolutionary changes in the past (in fact, they are not observed in the present either), so we have only the evidence those events left behind and those need to be interpreted somehow. Evolutionist tries to interpret the evidence using only known natural processes, ID thinks that some Intelligent Designer(s) best explains the evidence. Creationism also believes in an Intelligent Designer, but that Designer is the God of the Bible.
They all deal with past events, therefore, they are all forensic sciences. With no observation and indirect testing, they all try to interpret the evidence that best conforms to the best explanation. The one that explains the preponderance of evidence will be favored, but, without a time machine, we will never know if they are correct.
DaRook,
And now you’re equivocating between historical and history.
Because a science deals with historical events that doesn’t make it history and not science.
Is intelligent design theory history and not science?
And forensics doesn’t involve any of this so forensics is not empirical science. Is that your argument?
Taking into consideration what can be observed of current facts and processes and using these to make inferences, including making inferences about past events does not turn a science history.
The whole argument is just absurd. It does nothing to further intelligent design theory. And that’s my last post in this thread.
cheers