Why Have Birds Never Gotten as Big as T. Rex?

[River Jordan]

that's true. you are certainly obligated to work under that framework at work, but not outside of it.

For sure, otherwise only atheists could be scientists.

Okay, how many objects in nature do you believe were specially created and not the result of gradual natural processes? the stars? the earth? the oceans? life itself? humans? just curious

I'm going to pass, because the other times I did something like that didn't go well. I hope you understand.

yes, you believe evolutionary history is undeniable truth, i get that.

I don't know about "undeniable" since lots of people deny it (you for example), but I've never seen anything that would make me doubt it.

because the study was conducted by someone who works with medical journals.

the entire study described the scientific peer-review process generally. there was nothing that suggested those are only problems limited to medicine. such a suggestion doesn't even make sense. why would peer-review *only* be flawed in one single field of science?


have you conducted an actual critical study of the peer-review process?


i don't understand your position. i linked you to a study (from a prestigious journal) that meticulously describes how peer-review is a deeply flawed process with no evidence that it actually works.

your response is "that only happens in medicine" with no argument?



you're probably right about that

but it doesn't change the fact that the evidence shows peer-review doesn't work at all.

I have to apologize, since I thought the paper you linked to was a different one.

I just read through the full paper and yes, it is very much in the context of medical science. It was published in a medical journal by a former editor of a medical journal and all his specifics and citations are in that context. Plus, the process he describes for how peer review is done is very different (much looser and with significantly fewer steps) than my experiences in the process. Interestingly, that sort of inconsistency in processes is one of his main points and one I agree with. I also agree with his other points about how long it can take and the expense.

The main question I have after reading the paper though is, when he asks if the peer review process works, what does he mean by "work"? He never really says.

So all I can say is no one is arguing that the peer review process is perfect, always produces absolutely accurate results, and can't be improved. But that doesn't mean "it doesn't work at all". Lots of processes aren't perfect, but still work well enough to be useful.

Interestingly though, for those who do not trust anything that comes from the peer review process you have to wonder how much they've really thought it through. So much technology, medicines, etc. in our modern world were in one way or another the result of the process, do these people still use them? If so, that seems hypocritical.

 

[AaronClaricus]

Hmm... the first scientific evidence for the age of the Earth was by Kelvin, who used the heat flux from the Sun to conclude that if it was a cooling sphere, it could be perhaps tens of millions of years old. Then Rutherford showed that the heat came from radioactive heating, which showed billions of years of age for the Earth.

Rutherford, BTW, was as right about the Earth, but wrong about the sun; it does not get it's heat from nuclear fission, but from nuclear fusion.

But since the 1800s, the calculated age has varied only as we found older and older rocks.

Don't you mean 1900s? You don't really start getting radiometric dating until 1910 or so. And you are correct. The original dates for were for the age of the rocks and a "minimum" earth age. While it was technically possible to date meteorites(as we have known samples) it would have been a waste because the needed sample would destroy it. And they were quite rare in those days. Rutherford knew that dating meteors would yield the correct age. He also knew it would be a while before the technology caught up.

 

[lifepsyop]

Phylogenetics is obviously more technical than this. No sincere person would word it this way. We never find a rabbit in the Cambrian. Such a discovery would disprove evolution. Yet no such discovery that defies cladistics and phylogenetics, exists.

ah the good ol' rabbit in the Cambrian, swimming with the trilobites...

Okay, answer me this:

Hypothetically speaking, if early paleontologists had discovered a pattern of big mammal fossils appearing in rock layers below dinosaurs, what would be the conclusion?

 

[The Barbarian]

Don't you mean 1900s? You don't really start getting radiometric dating until 1910 or so.

(Barbarian checks) You're right. 1904, actually.

I came into the room, which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in for trouble at the last part of the speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief he fell fast asleep but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye and [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] a baleful glance at me! Then sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the earth, provided no new source of heat was discovered. That prophetic utterance refers to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold! The old boy beamed at me. -Ernest Rutherford, on the 1904 meeting.
(Rutherford had accurately dated a rock at 40 million years)

In 1907 Boltwood tested very ancient rock and came up with a date of about 2.2 billion years.

Nevertheless, ancient Archaean lead ores of galena have been used to date the formation of Earth as these represent the earliest formed lead-only minerals on the planet and record the earliest homogeneous lead–lead isotope systems on the planet. These have returned age dates of 4.54 billion years with a precision of as little as 1% margin for error.

Age of Earth - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[The Barbarian]

Hypothetically speaking, if early paleontologists had discovered a pattern of big mammal fossils appearing in rock layers below dinosaurs, what would be the conclusion?

Some might think that mammals appeared before dinosaurs. Mammals evolved in the Triassic, about the same time as dinosaurs. However, early investigators assumed that all strata were from a single Biblical flood, and so might have made some rationalizations as to why they were so segregated. Pretty much the same rationalizations we see from YECs today. Differential escape, hydrologic sorting, and that kind of thing. All of them have huge problems, given the data.

 

[lifepsyop]

Some might think that mammals appeared before dinosaurs.

mammals that we say evolved only since the Paleogene (60 mya)

could have instead appeared in fossils found below the Triassic (300 mya)

and the story would just be "well that's when they evolved, the fossils prove it"


so when someone says "the fossils only make sense in the light of evolution" (which was the comment i was responding to), they aren't really taking into account just how wiggly that light is with regards to explaining huge contrasts in data

when you realize how many hugely different evolutionary narratives could potentially be written, the current one does not seem so impressive

 

[AaronClaricus]

mammals that we say evolved only since the Paleogene (60 mya)

could have instead appeared in fossils found below the Triassic (300 mya)

and the story would just be "well that's when they evolved, the fossils prove it"


so when someone says "the fossils only make sense in the light of evolution" (which was the comment i was responding to), they aren't really taking into account just how wiggly that light is with regards to explaining huge contrasts in data

when you realize how many hugely different evolutionary narratives could potentially be written, the current one does not seem so impressive

Crown group Mammalia splits from Mammaliaformes about 220mya during the triassic. Platypuses are an example of a type of mammal that split from the crown group around this time. So we have a good idea of what kind of animals they were. We don't have as many fossils as we'd like because of the habitat choice of forests. This gradually changes although at the current rate of discovery still very slow due to the lack of scientists that specialize in it.

300mya(carboniferous) all mammal ancestors are still undifferentiated from Eupelycosauria.

 

[lifepsyop]

In fact, that phylogeny was first discovered by a man who had no idea of evolution. He couldn't explain why it looked like a tree, but once Darwin realized how it worked, the puzzle was solved.

Linnaeus. About a hundred years before Darwin. He first noted that living things fit nicely into a bush-shaped diagram. He just couldn't figure out why. Remember when I suggested that not knowing about a subject was a major impediment to understanding it? Here's another example. Darwin didn't discover the "tree of life" or even evolution. He merely showed why it happens.

he "solved" it by making up imaginary groups of creatures to connect the tips of the bushes. those "common ancestral" nodes he imagined probably never even existed.

in reality, it really doesn't seem like you can throw time at a fish to eventually turn it into a dog or a human.

 

[lifepsyop]

Crown group Mammalia splits from Mammaliaformes about 220mya during the triassic. Platypuses are an example of a type of mammal that split from the crown group around this time. So we have a good idea of what kind of animals they were. We don't have as many fossils as we'd like because of the habitat choice of forests. This gradually changes although at the current rate of discovery still very slow due to the lack of scientists that specialize in it.

300mya(carboniferous) all mammal ancestors are still undifferentiated from Eupelycosauria.

can you reread my comments on this topic....

you're just reciting the ad-hoc modeling of the theory today

i'm asking you to take a step back and really think about what the big idea of Evolution predicts....



hypothetically:

if early paleontologists had discovered both "mammaliaformes" and modern mammals all crammed together in the Permian or Triassic, the inevitable conclusion would have been that there was something akin to a Cambrian explosion with regards to selection pressures for those particular body-plans to evolve in such abundance and variety at that time. and as evolution theory progressed over the centuries, you would be reading matter of fact ad hoc models of mammal evolution about it today.

and the same thing would be said today "the fossils only make sense in the light of evolution"

 

[Job 33:6]

ah the good ol' rabbit in the Cambrian, swimming with the trilobites...

Okay, answer me this:

Hypothetically speaking, if early paleontologists had discovered a pattern of big mammal fossils appearing in rock layers below dinosaurs, what would be the conclusion?

Big mammals are found below dinosaurs. What do you mean? Like elephants?

And if elephants were discovered, then it would contradict phylogenetics and the theory of evolution wouldn't be supported by the fossil record.

 

[The Barbarian]

In fact, that phylogeny was first discovered by a man who had no idea of evolution. He couldn't explain why it looked like a tree, but once Darwin realized how it worked, the puzzle was solved.

Linnaeus. About a hundred years before Darwin. He first noted that living things fit nicely into a bush-shaped diagram. He just couldn't figure out why. Remember when I suggested that not knowing about a subject was a major impediment to understanding it? Here's another example. Darwin didn't discover the "tree of life" or even evolution. He merely showed why it happens.

he "solved" it by making up imaginary groups of creatures to connect the tips of the bushes.

For example, his collaborator Thomas Huxley, imagined creatures transitional between the known dinosaurs and birds. He based this on the structure of archosaur structures. Much later, the predicted creatures have been found in abundance, showing many stages of transition. Even more convincing we don't find transitional forms where they are not predicted. No mammals with feathers; no scorpions with bones.

There are many, many other examples. Would you like to learn about some of them?

in reality, it really doesn't seem like you can throw time at a fish to eventually turn it into a dog or a human.

However, natural selection can turn fish into tetrapods, from which humans and dogs evolved. What transitional form between a fish and a man do you think is impossible?

 

[The Barbarian]

if early paleontologists had discovered both "mammaliaformes" and modern mammals all crammed together in the Permian or Triassic, the inevitable conclusion would have been that there was something akin to a Cambrian explosion with regards to selection pressures for those particular body-plans to evolve in such abundance and variety at that time.

That's sort of what happened at the end of the Cretaceous. If it had happened earlier, we'd still have the same data. But the causes would be rather hard to explain.

and as evolution theory progressed over the centuries, you would be reading matter of fact ad hoc models of mammal evolution about it today.

and the same thing would be said today "the fossils only make sense in the light of evolution"

You don't seem to have a point here.

 

[The Barbarian]

mammals that we say evolved only since the Paleogene (60 mya)

could have instead appeared in fossils found below the Triassic (300 mya)

and the story would just be "well that's when they evolved, the fossils prove it

Facts matter. So if they evolved earlier, and for some reason we have no evidence of it, then finding the evidence would change our understanding. Doesn't seem very likely to me. For reasons that are obvious to anyone familiar with the evidence.

 

[Fervent]

mammals that we say evolved only since the Paleogene (60 mya)

could have instead appeared in fossils found below the Triassic (300 mya)

and the story would just be "well that's when they evolved, the fossils prove it"


so when someone says "the fossils only make sense in the light of evolution" (which was the comment i was responding to), they aren't really taking into account just how wiggly that light is with regards to explaining huge contrasts in data

when you realize how many hugely different evolutionary narratives could potentially be written, the current one does not seem so impressive

You seem to be articulating something like the Raven paradox induction problem. Is that along the lines of what you're getting at?

 

[lifepsyop]

That's sort of what happened at the end of the Cretaceous. If it had happened earlier, we'd still have the same data. But the causes would be rather hard to explain.

'hard to explain' and yet Evolution could still easily manage such a story, which you seem to reluctantly concede.

 

[The Barbarian]

That's sort of what happened at the end of the Cretaceous. If it had happened earlier, we'd still have the same data. But the causes would be rather hard to explain.

'hard to explain' and yet Evolution could still easily manage such a story, which you seem to reluctantly concede.

I said just the opposite. You're not paying attention. The key takeaway here, is, the theory had never had to explain something that difficult. The most difficult thing was in explaining how new traits can spread in a population. If inheritance is in the blood, a new trait would be erased like a drop of red paint in a barrel of white.

Then genetic was discovered and it was found to be more like sorting beads than like mixing paint. And evolutionary theory was once again confirmed.

You're just imagining a weaker case than a bunny in undisturbed Cambrian strata. Since neither has been observed, evolutionary theory remains confirmed.

 

[AaronClaricus]

(Barbarian checks) You're right. 1904, actually.

I came into the room, which was half dark, and presently spotted Lord Kelvin in the audience and realized that I was in for trouble at the last part of the speech dealing with the age of the earth, where my views conflicted with his. To my relief he fell fast asleep but as I came to the important point, I saw the old bird sit up, open an eye and [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] a baleful glance at me! Then sudden inspiration came, and I said Lord Kelvin had limited the age of the earth, provided no new source of heat was discovered. That prophetic utterance refers to what we are now considering tonight, radium! Behold! The old boy beamed at me. -Ernest Rutherford, on the 1904 meeting.
(Rutherford had accurately dated a rock at 40 million years)

In 1907 Boltwood tested very ancient rock and came up with a date of about 2.2 billion years.

Nevertheless, ancient Archaean lead ores of galena have been used to date the formation of Earth as these represent the earliest formed lead-only minerals on the planet and record the earliest homogeneous lead–lead isotope systems on the planet. These have returned age dates of 4.54 billion years with a precision of as little as 1% margin for error.

Age of Earth - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I like zircons better because they are closed systems. They form relatively rapidly under most cases. And contain two independent systems for measuring age. We don't just know the age of solar material with them, we know the age of many things with them. For example we know that Mars didn't have a late bombardment period(or any at all). And it formed crust very quickly. Dwaft planets are even older. Which tells a nice natural history story where the earth is lacking.

Once we get a chance to study mars zircons extensively. Space labs and permanent habitation by scientists or robots we will find even older spots on mars. Which will tell us a lot about water on mars/earth. Although, that may be beyond your time. Hopefully it will happen soon enough that we will still be on this site(I've been here 20 years).

 

[lifepsyop]

You seem to be articulating something like the Raven paradox induction problem. Is that along the lines of what you're getting at?

sort of

evolutionists look at the fossil record and say "see! it all fits!", but in a way it's like marveling over how well a fluid like water conforms to the shape of the container you used to hold it, not realizing that a totally different shaped container would hold the water just as well....

it's not exactly that simple, but that's the idea

since evolution theory's constraints are imaginary 'common ancestry' nodes, and there is a lot of liberty to shift these around in geologic time, in order to explain why this or that pattern of fossils appears in a certain layer.

the hard part of understanding this is breaking out of the 'ad-hoc' view of evolution as we know it today. of course, it would be very difficult to shift these ancestral nodes *now* in present day... however if we went back in time to 17th, 18th centuries when paleontology was first establishing itself, and hypothetically find that there is a significantly different arrangement of fossil patterns, then evolution theory would have developed a story working around that data instead. it has that level of malleability.

*edit: there's nothing wrong with modeling your theory around the data, that's expected, actually. it's just that evolutionists who say "the fossils match with the theory" haven't thought about just how malleable their theory actually in terms of conforming to the shape of fossil data. it's like someone with a universal key being surprised at how skilled he is at getting through different locked doors.

 

[lifepsyop]

Facts matter. So if they evolved earlier, and for some reason we have no evidence of it, then finding the evidence would change our understanding.

exactly. if fossils were in different places than they are today, you would simply have a different 'understanding' of how evolution occurred.

knowing this, it's rather awkward to point to their current locations as some kind of amazing vindication for the theory.

 

[River Jordan]

sort of

evolutionists look at the fossil record and say "see! it all fits!", but in a way it's like marveling over how well a fluid like water conforms to the shape of the container you used to hold it, not realizing that a totally different shaped container would hold the water just as well....

it's not exactly that simple, but that's the idea

since evolution theory's constraints are imaginary 'common ancestry' nodes, and there is a lot of liberty to shift these around in geologic time, in order to explain why this or that pattern of fossils appears in a certain layer.

the hard part of understanding this is breaking out of the 'ad-hoc' view of evolution as we know it today. of course, it would be very difficult to shift these ancestral nodes *now* in present day... however if we went back in time to 17th, 18th centuries when paleontology was first establishing itself, and hypothetically find that there is a significantly different arrangement of fossil patterns, then evolution theory would have developed a story working around that data instead. it has that level of malleability.

*edit: there's nothing wrong with modeling your theory around the data, that's expected, actually. it's just that evolutionists who say "the fossils match with the theory" haven't thought about just how malleable their theory actually in terms of conforming to the shape of fossil data. it's like someone with a universal key being surprised at how skilled he is at getting through different locked doors.

If it's okay, I have a few thoughts.

Scientists don't impose evolution onto the fossil record any more than geologists impose erosion and sedimentation on the geologic record. Evolution of new species is a process we see take place in real time, just like erosion and sedimentation, so when we see different species in the fossil record it's just as sensible to conclude they were produced by evolution as it is to conclude that certain geologic features were produced by erosion or sedimentation.

Also, scientists don't just "imagine common ancestry nodes". However, if you have a reference to where they do that I'll give it a look.

Lastly, it's often bugged me how creationist organizations, and some creationists, gripe and complain about how scientists interpret things like the fossil record, but don't make any meaningful efforts to show how their interpretations are better. If they think viewing the fossil record through a YEC lens is more accurate, then show it! I'm very confident that if they came up with a vastly superior model that got better results, someone somewhere would take it up and use it.