Posted on 08/13/2003 9:02:05 PM PDT by nwrep
Not really. I know you find little rays of hope even where there aren't any, but I'd say the door is about slammed shut on any non-feather interpretation.
And, as I said, feathered dinosaurs don't equal transitional species any more than hairy long tailed dogs equal cats.
Think about this. The thing is not a bird and it has some feathers, although no way are they enough to fly.
You're saying Archaeopteryx is a bird, but Archaeopteryx has almost the same underlying skeleton as the thing which may be a young Sinornithosaurus and which may have some feathers but is a dinosaur.
What modern bird has the skeleton of what modern reptile?
Then, there are the claws.
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| Fig. 1: Archaeopteryx | Fig. 2: Deinonychus |
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| Fig. 3: Hoatzin chick | Fig. 4: Hoatzin adult |
Why do birds have foreclaws that look like dinosaur foreclaws, at least before the bones fuse? Why do fossil birds have unfused dinosaurian foreclaws? (Sort of like, why do fossil whales have legs, if you get my drift.)
Science is about understanding the world. It adjusts to new evidence as needed. That it does so makes it different from religion.
Science hasn't gone back to ascribing real-world phenomena to the actions of magical beings. Ascribing things to magical beings will be wrong forever.
Fallacy of argument from semantics. You have a scoop on Archy's lungs. Such soft tissue has not been preserved anywhere among the seven or so specimens. You also have a scoop on his embryonic development. At least, I've encountered no commentary on any such. You seem tired, cranky, and need to go to bed.
Yes, Archy is mostly classified as a bird. It nevertheless has far, far more reptilian features than any modern bird, including the hoatzin, ostrich, and penguin combined.
It's meaningless to try to make this go away by screaming "It was classified as a BIRD!"
That's mainly a historical accident. At the time it was found, feathers were considered diagnostic of birds. That has since proved indefensible and has been abandoned, another instance of science "changing its story."
Again and again, you see things not-so-related now looking more and more related as you go back in time (down in the sediments). Birds and dinos are just one example.
This web page gives more such and explains the fallacy of arguing from arbitrary classification schemes back to reality.
Here, for instance:
Thus, the different perissodactyl groups can be traced back to a group of very similar small generalized ungulates (Radinsky, 1979; Prothero, et al., 1989; Prothero & Schoch, 1989) (Fig. 8). But this is not all; the most primitive ungulates (hoofed mammals) are the condylarths, which are assemblages of forms transitional in character between the insectivores and true ungulates (Fig. 9). Some genera and families of the condylarths had been previously assigned to the Insectivora, Carnivora, and even Primates (Romer, 1966). Thus, the farther you go back in the fossil record, the more difficult it is to place species in their "correct" higher taxonomic group. The boundaries of taxa become blurred.And here:
Moving further up the taxonomic hierarchy, the condylarths and primitive carnivores (creodonts, miacids) are very similar to each other in morphology (Fig. 9, 10), and some taxa have had their assignments to these orders changed. The Miacids in turn are very similar to the earliest representatives of the Families Canidae (dogs) and Mustelidae (weasels), both of Superfamily Arctoidea, and the Family Viverridae (civets) of the Superfamily Aeluroidea. As Romer (1966) states in Vertebrate Paleontology (p. 232), "Were we living at the beginning of the Oligocene, we should probably consider all these small carnivores as members of a single family." This statement also illustrates the point that the erection of a higher taxon is done in retrospect, after sufficient divergence has occurred to give particular traits significance.The kind of thing you're wishing away here is all over the place. All over!
Creation Science is the science of "You can't make me see!" It's the science of "Maybe we can get the evidence thrown out!"
Just the latest seminar cutter-paster. We'll have the entire AiG site linked in before much longer.
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