- Dec 9, 2004
- 3,573
- 184
- 54
- Faith
- Pantheist
- Marital Status
- Private
- Politics
- US-Others
Hi, Dr. Bakker (paleontologist)asked me to post this for him.
Enjoy.
Lily
Papal veloc
Bones Bibles & Creation:
The Popes Velociraptor and the KKK
..
Who owns the sneaky-smart feathered dinosaur Velociraptor, who starred in the Jurassic Park movies? Swivel-eyed atheistic Scripture-Bashers? No, emphatically no. Velociraptor belongs to 1 billion Roman Catholics. So does Neanderthal Man. So do the Paleolithic cave paintings. So do Hox genes. They all belong to ..
The Pope and his congregation. No kidding.
Most early fossil hunters were Protestants. The outstanding exception was the brilliant Geoffroy St. Hilaire of Paris, Egyptian explorer, embryologist, genetic theorist and Roman Catholic. In the 1830s and 40s, Geoffroy dug beautiful Jurassic sea-crocodiles, armor-backed beasts with long snouts studded with curved teeth that interlocked when the jaws slammed shut.
Geoffs crocs were part of the marvelous menagerie that haunted the warm Jurassic oceans covering much of Europe. Not a single modern-day species was found among the thousands of Jurassic bones. Geoff scrutinized his croc heads and bodies and made an outrageous suggestion: My Jurassic species evolved .they changed into modern crocodile species.
Protestant buddies cringed. Doctrine taught that each fossil species was created by itself and went extinct without descendants.
But Geoff had powerful facts.
1) Jurassic crocs had primitive backbones. Modern crocs have ball-in-socket joints that let them perform the death roll, turning over and over in the water to rip apart prey carcasses. (See any episode of The Crocodile Hunter on cable TV.) Jurassic crocs didnt have ball-in-socket joints, so they couldnt roll.
2) Jurassic crocs had primitive muzzles. A modern croc has nifty bone tubes running from nostril to throat, to protect the air passage, so the beast can open its mouth and not flood its windpipe. Jurassic crocs had shorter, less developed air tubes, so underwater activity was limited.
After the Jurassic, in the Late Cretaceous Period, crocs did acquire the modern-style joints and full air tube and kept them to this day.
Then Geoff made another anatomical observation that rocked Europe: Jurassic crocs evolved into other species too they became possums and monkeys and .
Us humans!!!!!!!
Geoffs fellow croc digger, Rev. William Buckland, giggled. Hey I love crocs as much as anyone but Im not going to greet one with Hello Uncle, hows it going?
But Geoff had intriguing clues. Jurassic croc air tubes did look like what possum-style mammals had. And the way the brain-case bones were attached to the roof of the mouth had a mammal character too.
Geoff suspected that any animal Phylum could be transformed into another. Maybe a vertebrate could be made into a crustacean - by changing how the embryo grew. He mapped embryonic anatomy to see if simple shifts would transform a lobster into a poodle.
His colleagues didnt get it. They fell over laughing ..a lobpoodle a poodobster ha ha!
However, Geoff was 150 years ahead of his time. In the 1980s we learned about Hox genes, genetic commands that tell the body how to grow front-to-back and top-to-bottom. By gum, Geoff was right! A poodle IS an upside down lobster in the way spinal cord, gut and main artery were designed. A simple fish-like vertebrate could be made from a crustacean.
Was Geoff anti-Church? No way. During anti-clerical riots, he risked his life to rescue his old profs from Catholic college buildings.
In the 1850s, Protestant Sir Richard Owen (fellow who coined Dinosauria) followed up the croc-to-man connection. Owen got skulls from the Permian, long before the dinosaurs. The heads had the beginnings of air tubes and lots of other mammal hints too. They werent crocs but a group we now call Mammal-Like Reptiles. Texas fossils dug in the 1870s were even older and more primitive and showed the beginning of mammal-like features.
By 1910, a long sequence of fossils validated Geoffs reptile-to-mammal vision (check out the fossil museum at Austin or Chicago or Harvard).
Meanwhile, Roman Catholics pursued Darwinism big-time. St. George Mivart, English anatomist, investigated all primates, from apes to little bug-eyed tarsiers. Mivart irritated loud agnostic T. H. Huxley by insisting that evolution fulfilled Gods Plan.
Pope Leo XIII was impressed and told his theologians to look into Darwin.
In the early 1900s, French and Spanish Catholics, including monks and priests, explored caves with Neanderthal bones and stone tools. And cave paintings by modern human species. Other Catholic priests dug dinosaurs including kin of Velociraptor.
By the 1950s Pope Pius XII said that evolution of some sort probably did happen. Our late John Paul II fully accepted Natural Selection as the agent that formed the human body (not the soul).
A few anti-Darwinists insist that Evolution=Atheism. Hey the Pope John Paul II was NOT an atheist!
And thats why we should be careful about creationism in public schools. Catholic-Protestant tensions color the creation-evolution debate. Our country did go through a sad period of anti-Catholic bias. When the KKK marched in Indiana in the Depression, they were against integration, Jews, Darwin and ..Catholics. Some of todays anti-Darwin feeling began when Protestants linked evolution to those Pointy-headed Modernists, Papal heretics and the harlot of Babylon. I heard that growing up in the 1950s.
A simple proposal: discuss various brands of creationism in philosophy classes and in the history of religion. All kids should learn about our diverse religious heritage.
Put Darwinism when it belongs. In science classes.
Velociraptor belongs to everyone Catholics, Unitarians, Southern Baptists, Holy Rollers. And threatens no ones real theology.
..
Enjoy.
Lily
Papal veloc
Bones Bibles & Creation:
The Popes Velociraptor and the KKK
..
Who owns the sneaky-smart feathered dinosaur Velociraptor, who starred in the Jurassic Park movies? Swivel-eyed atheistic Scripture-Bashers? No, emphatically no. Velociraptor belongs to 1 billion Roman Catholics. So does Neanderthal Man. So do the Paleolithic cave paintings. So do Hox genes. They all belong to ..
The Pope and his congregation. No kidding.
Most early fossil hunters were Protestants. The outstanding exception was the brilliant Geoffroy St. Hilaire of Paris, Egyptian explorer, embryologist, genetic theorist and Roman Catholic. In the 1830s and 40s, Geoffroy dug beautiful Jurassic sea-crocodiles, armor-backed beasts with long snouts studded with curved teeth that interlocked when the jaws slammed shut.
Geoffs crocs were part of the marvelous menagerie that haunted the warm Jurassic oceans covering much of Europe. Not a single modern-day species was found among the thousands of Jurassic bones. Geoff scrutinized his croc heads and bodies and made an outrageous suggestion: My Jurassic species evolved .they changed into modern crocodile species.
Protestant buddies cringed. Doctrine taught that each fossil species was created by itself and went extinct without descendants.
But Geoff had powerful facts.
1) Jurassic crocs had primitive backbones. Modern crocs have ball-in-socket joints that let them perform the death roll, turning over and over in the water to rip apart prey carcasses. (See any episode of The Crocodile Hunter on cable TV.) Jurassic crocs didnt have ball-in-socket joints, so they couldnt roll.
2) Jurassic crocs had primitive muzzles. A modern croc has nifty bone tubes running from nostril to throat, to protect the air passage, so the beast can open its mouth and not flood its windpipe. Jurassic crocs had shorter, less developed air tubes, so underwater activity was limited.
After the Jurassic, in the Late Cretaceous Period, crocs did acquire the modern-style joints and full air tube and kept them to this day.
Then Geoff made another anatomical observation that rocked Europe: Jurassic crocs evolved into other species too they became possums and monkeys and .
Us humans!!!!!!!
Geoffs fellow croc digger, Rev. William Buckland, giggled. Hey I love crocs as much as anyone but Im not going to greet one with Hello Uncle, hows it going?
But Geoff had intriguing clues. Jurassic croc air tubes did look like what possum-style mammals had. And the way the brain-case bones were attached to the roof of the mouth had a mammal character too.
Geoff suspected that any animal Phylum could be transformed into another. Maybe a vertebrate could be made into a crustacean - by changing how the embryo grew. He mapped embryonic anatomy to see if simple shifts would transform a lobster into a poodle.
His colleagues didnt get it. They fell over laughing ..a lobpoodle a poodobster ha ha!
However, Geoff was 150 years ahead of his time. In the 1980s we learned about Hox genes, genetic commands that tell the body how to grow front-to-back and top-to-bottom. By gum, Geoff was right! A poodle IS an upside down lobster in the way spinal cord, gut and main artery were designed. A simple fish-like vertebrate could be made from a crustacean.
Was Geoff anti-Church? No way. During anti-clerical riots, he risked his life to rescue his old profs from Catholic college buildings.
In the 1850s, Protestant Sir Richard Owen (fellow who coined Dinosauria) followed up the croc-to-man connection. Owen got skulls from the Permian, long before the dinosaurs. The heads had the beginnings of air tubes and lots of other mammal hints too. They werent crocs but a group we now call Mammal-Like Reptiles. Texas fossils dug in the 1870s were even older and more primitive and showed the beginning of mammal-like features.
By 1910, a long sequence of fossils validated Geoffs reptile-to-mammal vision (check out the fossil museum at Austin or Chicago or Harvard).
Meanwhile, Roman Catholics pursued Darwinism big-time. St. George Mivart, English anatomist, investigated all primates, from apes to little bug-eyed tarsiers. Mivart irritated loud agnostic T. H. Huxley by insisting that evolution fulfilled Gods Plan.
Pope Leo XIII was impressed and told his theologians to look into Darwin.
In the early 1900s, French and Spanish Catholics, including monks and priests, explored caves with Neanderthal bones and stone tools. And cave paintings by modern human species. Other Catholic priests dug dinosaurs including kin of Velociraptor.
By the 1950s Pope Pius XII said that evolution of some sort probably did happen. Our late John Paul II fully accepted Natural Selection as the agent that formed the human body (not the soul).
A few anti-Darwinists insist that Evolution=Atheism. Hey the Pope John Paul II was NOT an atheist!
And thats why we should be careful about creationism in public schools. Catholic-Protestant tensions color the creation-evolution debate. Our country did go through a sad period of anti-Catholic bias. When the KKK marched in Indiana in the Depression, they were against integration, Jews, Darwin and ..Catholics. Some of todays anti-Darwin feeling began when Protestants linked evolution to those Pointy-headed Modernists, Papal heretics and the harlot of Babylon. I heard that growing up in the 1950s.
A simple proposal: discuss various brands of creationism in philosophy classes and in the history of religion. All kids should learn about our diverse religious heritage.
Put Darwinism when it belongs. In science classes.
Velociraptor belongs to everyone Catholics, Unitarians, Southern Baptists, Holy Rollers. And threatens no ones real theology.
..
