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Why Have Birds Never Gotten as Big as T. Rex?
- Thread starter Michie
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And Deer didn't evolve from "mammals".
The type we call "mammals" is a merely a conceptual grouping based on shared traits. The type itself is not a physical entity.
This is the most basic thing an evolutionist struggles with.
Another reason why evolution theory is stupid. You are lost in a sea of mutations and can't even arrive at a solid conclusion that people are more advanced than a slug.
you group birds within "dinosaurs" because of your philosophical/ontological need for birds to have originated from non-birds.
in the same way you need to place humans within a lineage of fish-like creatures.
Yep, mammal is a description of similar traits. It's not a mystical amorphous biological entity that a deer sprouted out of.
Again, your issue is that you've confused these conceptual ideas with actual ontological beings.
Yep, and some dinosaurs don't have feathers, and yet you keep calling birds dinosaurs.
Do you ever notice how you have to contradict your own arguments?
You can't even admit basic tenets of your theory?
It's one of "Darwin's Four points" that you keep referencing:
"Only the survivors of the competition for resources will reproduce."
translation: "that which survives, survives."
which is a tautology.
What's the point of you even arguing with me about this?
That is beside the point. The actual modern "scientific" tradition is to only look to "natural" process as a mechanism. This is common knowledge and silly to dispute. The whole basis of modern science is the examination of natural law.
Nope. Evolution is just another way of saying "nature did it". If you're trying to find answers to the origins of things within the confines of natural law, there is no other conclusion to come to but some form of evolution.
This is very basic logic that is completely obvious and yet you are totally unable to admit.
If I was an evolutionist it would be one of the first things I'd be upfront about: "Yea, I admit we're looking to natural laws for an explanation and therefore some type of evolution needs to be the answer."
But you can't do that.
Yea, He made Earth into an environment that can sustain the multiplication of life.
He also said that he created separate types of creatures, and countless other acts of creation and destruction that all run counter to the evolutionary view of earth history.
God does it all. He commands both slow "natural" processes and instantaneous miraculous interventions. He allows providence to play out slowly over generations, and also sometimes turns the world upside down in an instant.
I let him do it all. I don't feverishly limit him to one or the other.
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The Barbarian
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Even honest YE creationists admit that the evidence indicates that they did. Deer are mammals, in fact.
That's a common misconception among YECs, but it's false. Genetics, for example show common descent. This is the most basic thing YECs struggle with. Some of them have retreated a bit and allow that new species, genera, and even families evolve. But that does great damage to their beliefs, since the same genetic data showing those changes also support common descent of all living things on Earth. Rock and a hard place.
Vertebrates, which like at least some other animals have a notochord. But you slipped back into YEC with the "advanced" assumption. Not part of evolutionary theory.
Well let's test your belief. Is a mammal more advanced than a bird? Show your evidence.
Remember, you just learned "that which survives, survives" is not part of evolutionary theory. And here you are again making the same mistake.
Hard to believe you still don't understand something so easy to comprehend.
1. More are born than can survive to reproduce
2. Every organism is slightly different than its parents.
3. Some of those differences affect the likelihood of survival long enough to reproduce.
4. Those with useful differences tend to leave more offspring, and those with harmful differences tend to leave fewer or no offspring, and this is how species form.
I don't blame you; likely you got that off some YEC website where they lied to you.
Did you not realize that science doesn't deny the possibility of miracles?
Pretty much like plumbers only look for natural processes when repairing plumbing problems. Go figure. If demons of blockage were a problem, we'd probably see plumbers doing exorcisms. That's how it is with science.
No, that's wrong, too. For example, it would be a valid hypothesis to imagine that every lineage was independently originated. The reason that hypothesis no longer stands is that the evidence is overwhelmingly against it. But biologists like Owen thought was reasonable before Darwin and others showed that it was not supported by the evidence. Again, you don't seem to have any idea of the evidence or even what scientists opposed to evolution thought. The evidence repeatedly confirms evolutionary theory.
Wrong again. But God has told us nature did it. God telling us that the Earth brought forth life, was sort of a tip-off. He does most things by nature in this world.
More than that, He said the Earth brought forth life. Big difference.
Yes. You just don't approve of the way He did it.
Geology shows countless events of creation and destruction as well as gradual change. Why not just accept His creation as it is?
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Yea Deer are mammals in the same way humans are story-writers.
It's true that humans all share the trait of holding the capacity to write stories, yet it would be strange to say this is proof that humans descended from some mystical group of ontological non-human beings called "story-writers"
That's the logic of how you explain where Deer came from... "they descended from mammals"
Universal common ancestry is basically in your imagination.
Actually some of the most remarkable morphological variation we observe with animals is caused by the environment activating structures that were already present in the animal. Dormant genetic pathways are effectively "turned on" by environmental stimuli. Sometimes referred to as "phenotypic plasticity"
Quite a different thing than something "evolving", but that level of nuance may be off limits to you.
Now you're just being silly. You admitted it yourself with #4 below.
4. Those with useful differences tend to leave more offspring, and those with harmful differences tend to leave fewer or no offspring, and this is how species form.
i.e. things that survive will survive
You can use different words to try and make it sound more science-y, but that's basically all it's saying. I guess you're embarrassed because it's something that didn't really need to be said at all, and yet it is presented as a novel scientific revelation.
Yea, now ask the plumber where the oceans came from and you're about on the level of an evolutionist trying to figure out where different types of animals came from.
It's true that Evolution would allow for multiple incidents of abiogenesis, thus producing multiple independent lineages/common ancestors. But that would still be a form of Evolution. As an evolutionist, you could even accept saltation theory, that fish "evolved" into people relatively quickly. What you cannot accept is that a fully formed animal (or earth, or ocean, or anything really) simply comes into being because God said so. This would violate your ontological philosophy of the nature of reality.
Richard Owen was an evolutionist so not sure what you're trying to argue here. Certainly one story of Evolution is going to seem more plausible than others. That's not evidence for Evolution, it just means one type of evolution seems more plausible than other types of evolution. And all of this is typically framed ad hoc.
The Earth brings forth life every Spring. I wouldn't call it evolution.
I just don't put modern natural philosophy on the same level as say, what God revealed to Moses. I hold Revelation in higher esteem.
Never said geology didn't show that. I have no problem accepting it. It's hard to conceive of a greater testament to the types of catastrophe described in Genesis than what we find buried the rocks.
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The Barbarian
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But is is true that humans evolved from other primates. And of course, earlier species of humans made marks on stones and cave walls to convey stories.
Universal common ancestry is basically evidenced by fossil record, genetics, anatomy and a host of other sources. Would you like to learn about some of them?
I have a hard time believing that you honestly think those are the same. But if not, we've identified a major problem for you.
(unhappy that scientists look for natural explanations for natural phenomena)
Pretty much like plumbers only look for natural processes when repairing plumbing problems. Go figure. If demons of blockage were a problem, we'd probably see plumbers doing exorcisms. That's how it is with science.
Not part of plumbing. You might as well ask a metallurgist about evolutionary theory. No wonder you're confused. But geologists know. Would you like me to show you how they know?
Not if there were enough such cases. It's very close to what Answers in Genesis preaches. Would you like to learn about that?
Someone lied to you about that, also...
Unfortunately for Darwin, when Owen first commented in publication about Darwin's theory of descent he was openly hostile (Edinb. Rev. vol. 111, Article VIII, 1860, pp. 487-533
Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, and Natural Selection: A Question of Priority - PubMed
No single author presented Darwin with a more difficult question about his priority in discovering natural selection than the British comparative anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen. Owen was arguably the most influential biologist in Great Britain in Darwin's time. Darwin wanted his...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
He said the Earth brought forth life. Big difference.
No, living things bring forth new life. But the Earth brought forth living things as God intended.
God created living things. You just don't approve of the way He did it. You just put modern YEC philosophy on the same level as say, what God revealed to Moses. I hold Revelation in higher esteem.
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You're just repeating the same thing without examining it. You're not even making an argument.
"primates" is just another system category, like mammals, or vertebrates. It's not an actual biological/ontological entity that exists in creation.
yes, actual humans did that. not an amorphous imaginary group called "story-writers" that humans descended from.
Your problem is that you take these invented categories and insert them as actual ancestral nodes in a tree of life, as if they were real things that living species sprouted out of.
evolution theory relies entirely on these imaginary ancestral nodes
that is just the mantra of modern natural philosophy
the same blanket assertion is made about the entirety of the physical universe, with just as much false confidence - that humans, whales, trees, oceans, planets, can all be confidently traced back to the star stuff exploding out of the big-bang. "all the evidence supports it" - yawn...
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AaronClaricus
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I don't know. I've seen a lot of fossils. Nearly every species goes extinct every age but clades survive and repopulate as new species. We find new and interesting stuff all the time. It always fits the pattern of evolution/transmutation of species. Recently we've been finding out that some clades diversify earlier than expected. When I was growing up there were only 3 avian dinosaur fossils and 2 really sucked(one is super duper famous). Now we have 100s of specimens.
Same applies for mammals. When I was growing up we didn't have very many cretaceous mammals of large size or complexity. Now we know complex primates lived along side non avian dinosaurs in the cretaceous. Possibly also giant mammals.
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I tend to think this is more likely the effect of certain biomes being buried together at once.
this is probably a bad analogy but...
consider if a music store that sells instruments was suddenly buried in a great earthquake. when you dug up the remains you would find all sorts of variations of instruments and conclude these must represent long ages of transmutation of species of instruments. perhaps you might even find a pattern of all the electronic keyboard species being unearthed either above or below a layer of classical piano species, and conclude this layer must represent a great evolutionary transformation.
... when in reality, you were just discovering coexistent environments that had been buried in proximity to where they lived at the time (you found the piano section of the store had fallen over on top of the keyboard section which gave the illusion that one had "evolved" into the other)
as for "new and interesting stuff"
there is no doubt amazing amount of variation in different types of life, but we know from observation that these variations can happen very quickly, e.g. drop the same population of lizards or birds into multiple contrasting environmental settings and within a single generation you will find great variation in their visible morphology, which could easily lead a committed Darwinist to conclude that such variation represented millions of years of natural selection.
I think we've just found a new type of 'bird' . They are more similar to dinosaurs than they are to other animals (just as we are more similar to chimpanzees than to any other animals) by necessity there will always be something that one is more similar to than anything else...
but, like humans and chimps, the story of evolution is entirely imposed upon birds and dinosaurs.
i don't know, to me this is just a testament to how malleable the story of evolution is. When I was younger I remember hearing how strong evolution theory is because fossils are always found in a particular order. e.g. we only find terrestrial/tetrapodal footprints above the lobe-finned fish that came before them. Then decades later, when fossilized footprints are discovered in rock layers below those 'ancestor' fish, "ah well, the transition must have occurred long before the evidence of it was fossilized"
there is no doubt a clear pattern to fossils and rock layers, it's just that the closer you look at it, it doesn't really seem like Evolution. returning to my analogy above, it looks more like a big deparment store collapsed into rubble and some sense of its distinct store layout was preserved.
of course, to a committed Evolutionist, they will impose upon such data a great narrative of long eras of slowly transforming creatures.
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River Jordan
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Pardon my interrupting @lifepsyop but I have a quick question (it's a question I saw someone else regularly ask and it's stuck with me ever since).
How do you account for the fact that scientists from lots of different fields agree, and have agreed for a long time, on evolution, common ancestry, common ancestry of humans and primates, and (in general) universal common ancestry?
How do you account for the fact that scientists from lots of different fields agree, and have agreed for a long time, on evolution, common ancestry, common ancestry of humans and primates, and (in general) universal common ancestry?
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For that answer, I think you have to go back to the origin of the modern education system. You'll find that a general philosophy of evolution has essentially been baked into the founding of these institutions.
The early-modern mythos of man evolving out of darkened superstition and ignorance to embrace the light of reason and science, the idea of Divine Providence working through the increase of knowledge and understanding of natural law - of man coming closer to the mind of God, the more he studies nature. This veneration of natural law being imposed onto a rapidly growing field of earth history - and like man's progress from darkness to enlightenment, viewing all of history itself as a kind of progress from primitive chaotic elements into refined complex creatures we see today. This was the ascendant philosophy of the nature of reality going back to the establishment of modern academic institutions.
so that philosophy has always been the lens with which the modern fields of earth history have been approached. Evolution has always been the big-tent that they are all operating within.
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River Jordan
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Thanks for replying, and I'll try and keep my interruption to a minimum.
Your last sentence stands out to me because I immediately think "shouldn't it be?" If we see, document, and study evolution occurring, shouldn't we incorporate that into our work? We definitely shouldn't ignore it, right?
Also, my question was a bit more narrowly focused. For example, this morning I was in a meeting with a team of scientists and part of what we talked about was the evolutionary history of the species we're working with and how it's been evolving in response to human activities. Do you think we're just making it all up? I also spent time this week reading a science paper about the evolutionary history of a gene family. Do you think the scientists who worked on that just made it all up?
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you're welcome and don't worry about it, you're not interrupting anything
well you'd be hard pressed to find a more equivocal term than "evolution", but yes of course you should document something you observe to learn more about it
not at all, but I do think scientists have a habit of just calling everything that changes "evolution"...
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River Jordan
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Thanks!
I can think of several words that have more definitions than "evolution", like "run", but I agree that the word "evolution" can mean a lot of different things in different contexts.
In our work we not only document things we observe occurring, a lot of scientists also look for signs that they happened in the past, which scientists have done with evolution for a very long time. So on that basis it's not crazy or weird for us to conclude that evolution happened in the past, right?
Like what?
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yea, it's an especially useless word when it is the very subject being debated
I think if you have a philosophical commitment to an evolutionary worldview, then it's pretty natural and not crazy at all to see evolution in everything.
the first thing that comes to mind is plasticity. essentially, all creatures are "pre-programmed" with a certain potential for morphological change - rapid change, like within an individual's lifetime, change that is stimulated by pressures in their particular environment.
this kind of change leans much more towards the idea of bounded, cyclic variation - as opposed to some point along a potentially endless evolutionary trajectory towards a completely different organization of biological function.
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AaronClaricus
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That's not what the fossil record is like in any way.
There's places you can visit that have 60 layers of sediments bearing trees. One on top of the other. You can clearly see the volcanic cycle of the area. It's like a snapshot of a thin slice of time. My best estimate is a couple of million years from layer 1 to 60. I wanted to radiometric date the area as it hasn't been done extensively for each layer. Other scientists have used dentrochronology to determine the layers aren't overlapping in any way. Each layer grew in a unique time period. There's so many places you can directly see the strata. Each layer forms in a different environment/time. There's just too many ways the strata are unique to themselves and counterparts. In terms of what fossils they contain and their chemistry to say they were all assembled at one time.
Then there's tortured rocks that are so unique they contain multiple histories within them. Rocks that have been pulled underneath the earth, spit back out, ground up and redeposited only to be pulled under and spit out again. The minimum time to do this is several hundred million years. Oldest earth rock found in the 2020s is now only a 100 million years younger than the solar system. Which is 700 million years older than when I was in school. And quite possibly the oldest it can realistically get. I can guarantee all the zircons in the world weren't made within 6,000 years of each other.
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River Jordan
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Sometimes. But I'm not here to debate the science of evolution with people. I don't think this is the right place for that. I'm mostly here to stick up for my colleagues and myself, so hopefully people understand we're not evil scientist characters, always plotting and scheming to undermine faith in God or something.
Probably so, but I've never met anyone like that.
That's a really interesting concept. You should write it up and see how it goes from there.
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