quote:

Originally posted by CancerDusk:
adding more info on how dinosaurs relate evolutionarily to other animals.

Thats the coolest aspec, the warm versus cold blooded debate still rages, at least they have settled that birds are the decendants of dinosaurs, and the little feathered dino's are just so cute!

The Creationists are seizing upon this dinosaur news as proof against evolution:

article

I think Scientific American did it best; sarcasm is the only way to respond to these morons, since scientific rationality is beyond their understanding.

If you're bored check out their arguments we think Creationists should not use.

quote:

Originally posted by Paperboy:
I think Scientific American did it best; sarcasm is the only way to respond to these morons, since scientific rationality is beyond their understanding.

I dunno. The creationists I've chatted with online have been nice people and were amenable to decent counter-aguments (which surprised me).

In those cases, what seemed to have happened was that nobody sciencey had properly played "devil's advocate" with them and pointed out why their arguments didn't seem to make much sense from a religious viewpoint.
For instance, the whole creating the universe in seven days thing: It's easy to point out that it seems a bit silly for an all-powerful creator to be basing his schedule so rigidly on the rotation rate of the Earth, before He's even created it. And what time zone would He be working to? GMT? PST? Would he say, Okay, my sundial says that it's now sunrise over Manhattan, so I'll have to throw down my tools and stop making creepy crawlies and start the next stage?

An all-powerful deity shouldn;t be compelled to work to such an arbitrary timetable, and assuming that G isn't obsessive-compulsive, doing it for kicks woudl be wierd, so perhaps the more interpretation of the Bible that would have more credibility would be to suggest that perhaps "day" refers to some arbitrary division of time, and once you'ce accepted that, you can say, well, perhaps "day one" lasted so many billion years, and so on.

Another argument is that since we know that the Bible had to be written in a contemporary human language understandable to both the writers and listeners, its going to be necessarily flawed even before it got translated and rewritten, so perhaps the "First Book", uncorrupted by human hand, is the fossil record.
If someone is a creationist who believes that the Earth is ony a few thousand years old, and that the fossil record is an intricate fake created by G to make it look as if the Earth is billions of years old, then presumably the f.r. is an elaborate 3-D "story" written directly into the rock in the rock by the hand of G, and presumably that gives the stories and parables and lessons built into the f.r. the status of being more "true" than the hand-me down strings of charcters that make up the Bible.
So then you say, well, if the f.r. represents the true untranslated uncorrupted Word of G and His message to us, then surely the most important thing we can do is study that f.r., ad make sure that none of the competing religious groups with their human social preconceptions and agendas are allowed to contaminate the purity of The Word as revealed by the f.r..

So I think one can argue that if one truly believes in creationism, perhaps the truly "religious" thing to do is to campaign for proper objective scientists to be given more funding to study this stuff and publish, and for all the religious groups to get the heck out of their way and let them do it.

quote:

It's easy to point out that it seems a bit silly for an all-powerful creator to be basing his schedule so rigidly on the rotation rate of the Earth, before He's even created it.

This was pretty much the critical argument in Inherit the Wind, the fictional play based on the Scopes "Monkey Trial". The attorney who's defending the teacher who was arrested for teaching evolution makes the point that because there were no sun and moon to use as time-keeping devices, the first day could have lasted billions of years by current standards.

- Cho (who played the small but crucial role of Mrs. Krebs in a 6th grade production of this play)

quote:

Originally posted by Chomiji:

quote:

It's easy to point out that it seems a bit silly for an all-powerful creator to be basing his schedule so rigidly on the rotation rate of the Earth, before He's even created it.

This was pretty much the critical argument in Inherit the Wind, the fictional play based on the Scopes "Monkey Trial". The attorney who's defending the teacher who was arrested for teaching evolution makes the point that because there were no sun and moon to use as time-keeping devices, the first day could have lasted billions of years by current standards.

- Cho (who played the small but crucial role of Mrs. Krebs in a 6th grade production of this play)

Interesting and true!

It's easy to lump all "Creation" thought into one basket to try to attack, easy but misguided.

Along those lines ...

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Fundamentalists often make it a test of Christian orthodoxy to believe that the world was created in six 24-hour days and that no other interpretations of Genesis 1 are possible.

They claim that until recently this view of Genesis was the only acceptable one"”indeed, the only one there was.

The writings of the Fathers, who were much closer than we are in time and culture to the original audience of Genesis, show that this was not the case.

There was wide variation of opinion on how long creation took. Some said only a few days; others argued for a much longer, indefinite period. Those who took the latter view appealed to the fact "that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day" (2 Pet. 3:8; cf. Ps. 90:4), that light was created on the first day, but the sun was not created till the fourth day (Gen. 1:3, 16), and that Adam was told he would die the same "day" as he ate of the tree, yet he lived to be 930 years old (Gen. 2:17, 5:5).

Catholics are at liberty to believe that creation took a few days or a much longer period, according to how they see the evidence, and subject to any future judgment of the Church (Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani Generis 36–37).

They need not be hostile to modern cosmology.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, "[M]any scientific studies . . . have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life forms, and the appearance of man. These studies invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator" (CCC 283). Still, science has its limits (CCC 284, 2293–4). The following quotations from the Fathers show how widely divergent early Christian views were ...

Six Days of Creation?

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˜Evolution is just a theory.' What people usually mean when they say this is ˜Evolution is not proven fact, so it should not be promoted dogmatically.' Therefore people should say that. The problem with using the word ˜theory' in this case is that scientists use it to mean a well-substantiated explanation of data. This includes well-known ones such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Newton's Theory of Gravity, and lesser-known ones such as the Debye–Hückel Theory of electrolyte solutions and the Deryagin–Landau/Verwey–Overbeek (DLVO) theory of the stability of lyophobic sols, etc. It would be better to say that particles-to-people evolution is an unsubstantiated hypothesis or conjecture.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/faq/dont_use.asp

just to cross over a bit from the earlier evolution threads...

Well, Einstein had a few different theories of relativity ... but you really don't want to start me on that subject (trust me).

I think the appropriate response to someone saying "evolution is just a theory" is to point out that, no, evolution is [u]not[/u] a theory, it's actually an observation.
There are certainly "theories of evolution" that attempt to explain why things appear to be like this, but the observations of apparently "evolving" characteristics came first.

Watch populations and they and their characteristics often appear to evolve over long time periods. Animals and plants that people have selected for certain properties have been changed by unnatural selection, and a naturally changing environment would seem likely to apply similar similar evolutionary forces.

Look at the fossil record and you see an apparent evolving sequence of species characteristics whether you have a theory for it or not.


What Darwin's book said was that natural selection and population drift could perhaps go so far as to generate diverging strains from a single population that were distinct enough to be classed as whole new species - perhaps natural selection offered a mechanism for the ultimate speciation of diverging populations. That was the controversial bit, because people had grown up thinking that although the characteristics of cat populations and dog populations might evolve, a cat was always a cat and a dog was always a dog and this had always been true since creation.

"Speciation" is still a very interesting subject, IMO. Although there are species barriers that at first sight seem to be insurmountable by gradual processes (eg how the heck do you smoothly change the number of chromosomes in a population) people don't always appreciate the degree of genetic mutation that occurs just below the observation threshold. Lots of people I grew up with had non-standard biology one way or another, but you'd never know from just casually looking at them.
Quite a few people are born with six fingers, or a "wrong" number of vertebrae, and so on, and we are now beginning to appreciate just how many people out there also have chromosomal "anomalies" that give them extra duplicated chromosomes so tha their chromosome count doesn't agree with the textbook "human" numbers. If some natural disaster made some of those individuals more likely to survive than the rest of us, you'd get clustered communities where people with the same previously-rare mutation now started meeting up and having kids together who'd then have the same mutation, and suddenly you'd get families and villages who were predominantly six-finger (or whatever).
An alien studying the human fossil record in the far future woul be liable to conclude that, using physiological classification, this disaster seemed to mark the birth of a new species of six-fingered human, apparently from nowhere (because the earlier people carrying two copies of the six-finger gene etc probably wouldn't have been numerous enough to show up in samples before that).

Our bodies are teeming with individual mutated cells. Sometimes they die, sometimes they don't. If those mutations lead to runaway multiplication and cancer, we notice, otherwise we usually don't. If the cells are sperm or egg cells, the mutation becomes heritable.

Some couples can't have kids together because of a freak genetic incompatibility between them.
If the two factors leading to that incompatibility accumulated in two separate populations so that one population became almost exclusively "A" and the other "B", and "AB" couples couldn't have kids, then the two populations would lose the ability to mix genetically, and might meet the genetic criteria for being distinct species (who happened to look the same), and the two separated populations might then diverge naturally in different directions and accumulate more random phyical population differences that they couldn't exchange, until the two groups looked markedly different too.

If they came into contact with external populations without those "A" and "B" mutations they could interact genetically again indirectly though that external unmutated genetic pool, and the definition of a species barrier between the two populations would dissolve (speciation is sometimes context-dependent), but in a natural disaster where everyone is wiped out apart from those two isolated groups, the speciation of the two populations might eventually become irreversible, except between freak combinations of individuals. The beginnings of this sort of reproductive divergence seems to have happened in the past with some some isolated human populations, although the exact history is fuzzy.

Finally there's a gene that was only investigated properly a few years ago that continuously repairs natural heat damage to DNA (DNA is quite fragile stuff). They found that when an organism is subjected to environmental stress, this gene can stop working properly, so in times of environmental disaster where a population is suffering from disease of starvation, the natural mutation rate might be expected to increase, which might throw off some of the more pessimistic calculations about how long it should take these divergences to happen.

The hike in mutation rate might be an adaptive trait. If the stressful agent is persistent, higher instances of mutation may lead to a greater likelihood of hitting on one that would confer greater resistance, adaptiveness to the stressful environment. Hal posted interesting links to studies in bacteria that showed stress actually upregulating error-prone DNA polymerases.

Speaking of mutations, I found this story very interesting: Mendel's Law May Be Flawed

That stuff is weird, kinda cool, but really weird. It makes me go, "Gah! WTF?!?!"

This is pretty damn cool.

First extra solar planet photographed

quote:

Originally posted by Paperboy:
Speaking of mutations, I found this story very interesting: Mendel's Law May Be Flawed

Hmmm, interesting.
I think with all this talk of cloning, people have gotten the idea that nuclear DNA dictates everything, and people aren't told so much about all the other cell junk that gets inherited down the female line, the mitochondrial stuff, and the miscellanous stuff floating around in the cell, and chemical states that affect whether certain chunks of DNA are switched on or off.
It may not just be all the chemical sequences, that are inherited, but perhaps also some of the the folding states of particular odd bits and pieces inside the egg cell.

I read somewhere that if you are female and your mum was a "small" adult because of childhood malutrition, you are likely to be smaller than average (because you developed in her womb), and perhaps your own kids might be slightly smaller than average, too. Apparently it takes a few generations to shake that off. Inherited, adaptive, and (probably) not encoded in DNA sequences.
And as well as womb environment, you also have immune system primer stuff passed down through breast milk.

So maybe if someone is a great natural runner and athlete, and you clone them using a "random" egg cell, the resulting person, with different mitochondria, might turn out as a big fat unathletic slob! Heh

Just cause i'm going to be heading down to Wellington soon to visit some mates, including the lovely Phoenix6!

And everytime i go down there i just can't seem to keep away from Te Papa which is the national museum, i'm such a geek! But they have my fav fossil (well appart from hallucigenia) ok so maybe my fav fossil specimen, which is *tadah*



Silly Bloody website doesn't have a scale on there though, it's about 2 metres across (~6 feet) and i think it is one of the larger specimen's of it's kind in the world.

What is it?
Matt should know, but for the rest of you, it's an....

Ammonite - which is an extinct branch of the mollusc family, got killed same extinction event as the dinosaurs. Closest living relative is the nautilus. Basically a squid that lived in a spiral shell, sorta.



If anyone want's to know more here is a site

your mission is to bring us a pic of you next to the giant evil sea thing. and/or tell phoenix6 i says hi.
have fun in wellington!

Well mission 2 is already completed, chatting to her now, she says Hi!

Hehehe

I've found a few ammonites before. Nothing nearly that big though. Most were half an inch to 2 inches. The big ones are really impressive. I'm jealous.

Say hi to Phoenix6 for me too!

quote:

Originally posted by erkDemon:

I think the appropriate response to someone saying "evolution is just a theory" is to point out that, no, evolution is [u]not[/u] a theory, it's actually an observation.

Sometimes, however, several observers might observe the same data ... yet arrive at differing theories about what conclusions (or theories) should be made from their observations ... or differing explanations about what caused the observed events/evidences to occur.

Observations too often might be "in the eye (or mind; or preconception) of the beholder."

quote:

Originally posted by halucinagenia:
Just cause i'm going to be heading down to Wellington soon to visit some mates, including the lovely Phoenix6!

And everytime i go down there i just can't seem to keep away from Te Papa which is the national museum, i'm such a geek! But they have my fav fossil (well appart from hallucigenia) ok so maybe my fav fossil specimen, which is *tadah*

Whee! She's coming to visit me! She's coming to visit me *gleeful*

On the Te Papa note, I absolutely hate the place. Not the stuff in it, just the horrible exterior of it. I swear when we have our earthquake, all our national treasures will be dumped into the sea. Then they will be sorry!

(Have strong kinds of affection for old museum now Massey University Design School)

quote:

Originally posted by Indrid Cold:
Sometimes, however, several observers might observe the same data ... yet arrive at differing theories about what conclusions (or theories) should be made from their observations ... or differing explanations about what caused the observed events/evidences to occur.

True, but I think "evolution" is more an observation of how sequences of related dead beasties appear to be grouped time-wise in the ground. The sequence appears to "evolve" - I suppose that whether this "evolution" is explained by mainstream theories of evolution or by a whim of some Creator who just decided to create things like that is open to argument, but if those apparent sequences were created "artistically" by a deity on purpose, then perhaps that makes the patterns a sort of godly poetry, which religious people then ought to study.
So either way, I think that the apparent evolutionary patterns in the rocks are important. If someone's a creationist, IMO they should be asking: what message is G trying to pass on to us here? What is the "lesson" of the story written into the rock about, say, mass extinctions?

quote:

Observations too often might be "in the eye (or mind; or preconception) of the beholder."

Yep, agreed again.
And our preconceptions about the patterns that we think ought to be there sometimes colour or change the data that we collect. We sometimes tend to keep and record the "good" data that agrees beautifully with a theory that we think is right, and throw away the stuff that doesn't fit, as faulty.

I don't think that many people would disagree with the periodic table - the elements can be arranged usefully like that regardless of whether or not one agrees with particular theories about atomic structure - but sometimes when we impose patterns onto other data, it's admittedly a bit more open to interpretation whether those patterns are really there, or are being read into the data inappropriately.

Sometimes it's the people working in the the most "objective", "hard" sciences that fall into this trap the most easily, because those people are sometimes so sure that what they are doing is objective, they don't always do the sanity checks that people in less "certain" sciences would want to carry out.

I think the most extreme accepted example was probably N-rays, that effect really was in the eyes of the beholders, quite literally!
(The researchers sat in a darkened room looking for particle-flashes that happened a the same moment as a sound from their equipment. They saw the flashes. Some malicious visiting researcher disabled their equipment. They still saw and reported the flashes. It may actually have been honest reporting, a lot of vision processing is carried out in the retina, which kinda counts as an extension of the brain, bussedin by the optic nerve, so when they were primed to expect to see dim flashes when a sound happened, its possible that their brains obediently set up such a sharply selective amplifying filter that the sound may have triggered genuine neurological impulses through their visual cortexes, so the "flashes" that they saw may have been genuine, but literally only existing in the eyes of the beholders! )