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The Nastiest Feud in Science
The Atlantic ^ | Sept 2018 | BIANCA BOSKER

Posted on 08/12/2018 7:56:38 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT

...But Keller doesn’t buy any of it. “It’s like a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’ And it has all the aspects of a really nice story,” she said. “It’s just not true.”

...Keller’s resistance has put her at the core of one of the most rancorous and longest-running controversies in science. “It’s like the Thirty Years’ War,” says Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Impacters’ case-closed confidence belies decades of vicious infighting, with the two sides trading accusations of slander, sabotage, threats, discrimination, spurious data, and attempts to torpedo careers. “I’ve never come across anything that’s been so acrimonious,” Kerr says. “I’m almost speechless because of it.” Keller keeps a running list of insults that other scientists have hurled at her, either behind her back or to her face. She says she’s been called a “bitch” and “the most dangerous woman in the world,” who “should be stoned and burned at the stake.”

...Although Keller’s father enlisted his brood to tend the land—working them so hard that a neighbor once reported him—the family constantly teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. To put meat on the table, Keller’s mother once stewed up one of the cats the family kept on the farm. Another time, she gave an older daughter some fresh “mutton” as a gift—in actuality, Keller’s butchered pet dog.

(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...


TOPICS: Astronomy; Chit/Chat; History
KEYWORDS: biancabosker; breakhertenure; catastrophism; deccantraps; dinosaurs; feminism; gertakeller; godsgravesglyphs; incompetent; kirkjohnson; kt; lucyvanpelt; mediawingofthednc; paleontology; partisanmediashills; presstitutes; smearmachine; unfit; womeninscience
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To: DUMBGRUNT

Extinction theories about dinosaurs tend to claim that environmental changes wrecked the food supply and the big beasts starved to death.

One problem is that many dinosaurs were no bigger than chickens. So why would they die out while larger reptiles survived?

Also, the dinosaurs may have died out quickly on a geological scale, but it still took thousands of years at least. It was not overnight by any means.

Need new theories that fit the data. Not reliance on flawed theories that are simply attractive.


21 posted on 08/12/2018 8:58:09 PM PDT by Seruzawa (TANSTAAFL!)
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To: DUMBGRUNT

My grandson asked what happened to the dinosaurs...

Told him they were all killed by Henry Ford to make into seat-covers for Model T Fords.


22 posted on 08/12/2018 9:01:04 PM PDT by ASOC (Having humility really means one is rarely humiliated)
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To: DUMBGRUNT

“Some say the reason the Norwegians succeed in Polar exploration... An Englishman would NEVER eat his dog”

If you are ever in Antarctica stop by the R.F. Scott cabin and just outside is a blackened, desiccated curled up in a ball dog, in a small little dog house. Scott decided because he was English, not to eat his dog. And the dog succumbed to inclement weather.


23 posted on 08/12/2018 9:07:43 PM PDT by Clutch Martin (The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.)
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To: IYAS9YAS

A Chicxulub-sized event rings the planet like a bell, any fault that is near its critical strain is apt to let loose.

Doctors and coroners have a term, coup contercoup, that means damage to the opposite side of the brain from where the skull was struck.

Imagine you are standing on the spot exactly on the opposite side from the strike. The shock waves race around the globe and come together (focus, if you will) right under your feet!

On a lower gravity bodies such as the moon, big impacts have delivered sufficient coup countercoup force to jet material off into space.

I don’t doubt that nearby magma would be squirted up through the resulting shattered bedrock.

Add to that the fact that Chicxulub was a shallow water strike and the surrounding sea formed a wall around the white hot crater as it attempted to flood in. It was like a 120 mile wide rocket nozzle jetting vaporized seawater and any entrained atmosphere into space. As the crater was quenched, the force of the boiling reduced, and the remaining flood of sea water and air steam-cleaned half the planet.

It was a bad day.

On land nothing larger than a house cat survived. I suspect all the surviving animals were burrow dwellers, animals already used to breathing lower oxygen content than their larger peers. The thinned atmosphere was a final insult to the bigger surface dwellers.


24 posted on 08/12/2018 9:11:26 PM PDT by null and void (Equality is important, but quality is paramount.)
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To: IYAS9YAS

From the Berkeley News article:
Richards teamed up with experts in many areas to try to discover faults with his radical idea that the impact triggered the Deccan eruptions, but instead came up with supporting evidence. Paul Renne, a professor in residence in the UC Berkeley Department of Earth and Planetary Science and director of the Berkeley Geochronology Center, re-dated the asteroid impact and mass extinction two years ago and found them essentially simultaneous, but also within approximately 100,000 years of the largest Deccan eruptions, referred to as the Wai subgroup flows, which produced about 70 percent of the lavas that now stretch across the Indian subcontinent from Mumbai to Kolkata.

...Co-authors of the paper, in addition to Richards, Renne, Manga and Sprain, are Walter Alvarez, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of earth and planetary science and the co-originator of the dinosaur-killing asteroid theory...

From The Atlantic article
Over and over, Keller saw “no evidence of a sudden mass killing.” Instead, she found more proof that the Earth’s fauna grew progressively more distressed starting 300,000 years before the extinction. The forams, for example, gradually shrank, declined in number, and showed less diversity, until only a handful of species remained—results consistent with what many paleontologists have observed for animals on land during the same time.
...Alvarez had set the tone. His numerous scientific exploits—winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, flying alongside the crew that bombed Hiroshima, “X-raying” Egypt’s pyramids in search of secret chambers—had earned him renown far beyond academia

NB: Walter Alvarez is the son of Luis Walter Alvarez the Nobel Physicist, that has done it all, including early work on the K-T Boundry with his son.
Also, note the minor(?) difference of 200k years between the two camps?


25 posted on 08/12/2018 9:15:40 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT (This Space for Rent)
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To: ASOC

Told him they were all killed by Henry Ford to make into seat-covers for Model T Fords.

Only the Giant Naguas, for the Naugahyde.


26 posted on 08/12/2018 9:18:13 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT (This Space for Rent)
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To: null and void

To which I might add, ringing the planet like a bell and smacking the opposite side with converging shock waves would probably have much the same effect on a pocket of dissolved gas-filled magma that shaking and dropping a bottle of soda would have on the soda.


27 posted on 08/12/2018 9:21:52 PM PDT by null and void (Equality is important, but quality is paramount.)
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To: DUMBGRUNT

I know what killed off the dinosaurs. Saw it in an ad -
“Bad Eggs, Kid, Bad Eggs”. /sarc re bad ads


28 posted on 08/12/2018 10:03:20 PM PDT by MadMax, the Grinning Reaper
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To: DUMBGRUNT; Moonman62; IYAS9YAS; Seruzawa
from the article: "...'it has all the aspects of a really nice story,' she said. 'It’s just not true.' "

Seems to me Bob Bakker has been making similar arguments for many years:




29 posted on 08/12/2018 10:09:26 PM PDT by BroJoeK ((a little historical perspective...))
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To: 75thOVI; Abathar; agrace; aimhigh; Alice in Wonderland; AndrewC; aragorn; aristotleman; ...
She's dumb, and wrong, and unfit for tenure. Thanks DUMBGRUNT.



30 posted on 08/12/2018 10:22:38 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (www.tapatalk.com/groups/godsgravesglyphs/, forum.darwincentral.org, www.gopbriefingroom.com)
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To: StayAt HomeMother; Ernest_at_the_Beach; 1ofmanyfree; 21twelve; 24Karet; 2ndDivisionVet; 31R1O; ...
She's dumb, and wrong, and unfit for tenure. Thanks DUMBGRUNT.

31 posted on 08/12/2018 10:23:02 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (www.tapatalk.com/groups/godsgravesglyphs/, forum.darwincentral.org, www.gopbriefingroom.com)
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To: Moonman62
Hey, maybe they're related to Elizabeth Warren, or Chinese..

32 posted on 08/12/2018 10:24:43 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (www.tapatalk.com/groups/godsgravesglyphs/, forum.darwincentral.org, www.gopbriefingroom.com)
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To: DUMBGRUNT
The most interesting take for this article is how nonscientific "scientists" really are. The adhominem attacks and slander and mudslinging are laughable, except these aren't ghetto boys trash talking, they are supposed to be smart and educated. Ha!

The lady has an alternate explanation for the extinction of dinosaurs. It seems possible. But why do the establishment "scientists" have to destroy someone with another viewpoint?

It reminds me of all the phony "global warming scientists" who smear and malign anyone who doubts their hypothesis. There is a lesson in this story.
 

33 posted on 08/12/2018 10:35:06 PM PDT by Governor Dinwiddie ("Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.")
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To: null and void

+1 for coup and knowledge of reflection /focusing of vibrations in a round object.


34 posted on 08/12/2018 10:36:29 PM PDT by grey_whiskers (The opinions are solely those of the author and are subject to change without notice.)
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To: DUMBGRUNT

bttt


35 posted on 08/12/2018 10:47:49 PM PDT by CedarDave (DJT: "Rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than risk peace in the pursuit of politics.")
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To: null and void
It was a bad day. On land nothing larger than a house cat survived. I suspect all the surviving animals were burrow dwellers,

Larger than a house cat, not a burrow dweller

Was at the supposed ground Zero, apparently had an OK day.

36 posted on 08/12/2018 10:47:52 PM PDT by qam1 (There's been a huge party. All plates and the bottles are empty, all that's left is the bill to pay)
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To: DUMBGRUNT
There are no tigers in Belize nor anacondas in Madagascar.

And polar bears don't eat penguins.

37 posted on 08/13/2018 1:42:18 AM PDT by Eagles6
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To: DUMBGRUNT

Two things stand out from this long and interesting article. First, both sides are violating an important aspect of science which is to be unbiased when interpreting data. Both sides are so personally invested in their argument that they will not accept opposing data. They also are working to prove their own pet theory rather than looking for or considering data that might disprove it. Second, both sides have been working feverishly for decades to answer a question that essentially has NO VALUE. Other than satisfying idle curiosity what benefit is there to knowing what killed the dinosaurs a hundred million years ago? Does it make any difference whether it was an impact or volcanism? It is interesting but not important.


38 posted on 08/13/2018 6:11:59 AM PDT by Brooklyn Attitude (The first step in ending the war on white people is to recognize it exists.)
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To: DUMBGRUNT

I’m old enough that I was taught that we weren’t sure why the dinosaurs went extinct. The meteor was in the list of contributing possibilities, but changing weather (global cooling, through not anthropogenic), emergence of new species competing for food, other species eating vulnerable dinosaur eggs, etc.


39 posted on 08/13/2018 6:30:50 AM PDT by Dr. Sivana (There is no salvation in politics.)
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To: Governor Dinwiddie

“But why do the establishment “scientists” have to destroy someone with another viewpoint?”

After I left the Grunt life to be a wage slave...
I picked up a new ditty about my fellow ‘workers’.

That bunch can never starve to death, for they will eat each other first.

True then, true now.


40 posted on 08/13/2018 7:05:46 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT (This Space for Rent)
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