Q For Darwinists: Are Fish Birds or Dinosaurs?

[LifeToTheFullest!]

-- Have I ever?

No, I guess not.

 

[Febble]

Yup -- you're a scientist --

So when do I get my hike?

 

[Targ]

I'm not quite sure whether you were assuming I was disagreeing. I agree entirely. I was just pointing out that reproduction doesn't have to be sexual for evolution to work.

I was agreeing, don't worry.

Well, you can tell quite a lot, of course. And from several teeth in a jaw, considerably more.

I'm reading Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, for the first time. It's a lovely book.

Heh, I just ordered that book last night on Amazon.

 

[DarkProphet]

Darwinists make the claim that birds are theropod dinosaurs i.e. terrible lizards.

Should read, "Scientists have reason to believe that birds descended from certain dinosaurs."

So my question is are fish birds, dinosaurs, or both?

Flying fish glide as well as birds, researchers find

Short answer is neither. There is a type of squirrel that can glide as well but that doesn't make it a bird.

Even a creationist would not ask a question this badly thought out so I question your sincerity. Although if it is sincere then I truly feel sorry for you.

 

[Febble]

One problem, I think, is loose terminology, which causes confusion between longitudinal differences in populations (which will tend to be gradual along one lineage) and "lateral" differences - differences between co-existing populations/species, which, on the whole, are fairly categorical.

So modern birds are, in one sense, dinosaurs, in that they are dinosauriae i.e. descended from the same family as dinosaurs. But it would not be true to say that dinosaurs are birds, just as it is true to say that all cars are vehicles but not true to say all vehicles are cars. But the same problem would arise if someone designed a car and called it a Vehicle. Then it would be true to say that all Vehicles are cars, but still untrue to say all vehicles are cars.

So we should be more careful. If Fish=modern fish, we are not Fish. However if fish=the family of animals of which a fish-like animal was the common ancestor, then we are fish. But better to say we are all sarcopterygii, in that modern fish, modern birds, and modern humans, as well as extinct dinosaurs, descended from the ancient animals we have named sarcopterygii, and which looked a lot more like a modern fish than birds, humans or dinosaurs.

But birds, humans and dinosaurs did not, clearly, descend from modern fish.

 

[[serious]]

You must have missed the part where I explained "as an account of human origins".

Well, still missing it as there is nothing in that post that even suggests that, but if you want to address that as a follow up, I'd have to ask if the lack of any alternative to the germ theory of disease is similarly evidence of an intellectual conspiracy to suppress dissenting views. Certainly, many alternative medicine/homeopaths disagree. Should we teach demon possession, imbalance of humors, and unaligned chakras as disease concepts?

How about the theory of gravity? Should we allow intelligent falling in?

Models of the atom?

relativity?

Now, this actually goes to a deeper issue of whether creationism/ID can even be called a theory. A scientific theory must be disprovable, a bar that ID has yet to meet. Certain branches of creationism at one point argued that species could not split into two separate species, but since then we've had multiple examples of exactly that happening.