Bird breathing anatomy breaks dino-to-bird dogma

CMI ^ | June 16, 2009 | Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D.

[GodGunsGuts]

Do we eat Kentucky Fried Dinosaur? According to the dogma of many evolutionary propagandists for the last decade or so, indeed we do—they believe that birds evolved from the carnivorous dinosaur group known as theropods. Yet there are many problems with this idea. And now, new research into the birds’ lung and leg anatomy provides more strong evidence against it...

[SatinDoll]

“I wonder what grilled Liberal tastes like???”

It tastes like chicken.

[April Lexington]

Wow! That is really hard to say. While I am usually a firm believer in creationism, I have come to conclude that Obama is truly decended from apes...

[Bean Counter]

“Now how did the machines know what Tasty Wheat tasted like, huh? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like, uh ... oatmeal or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken for example. Maybe they couldn’t tell what to make chicken taste like which is why chicken tastes like everything!”

Mouse
“The Matrix”

[count-your-change]

Keep your hand out of Tweety’s cage.

[HHFi]

Anyone who thinks birds didn’t evolve from dinosaurs should spend a little time with one of my two Jardines parrots. They are absolutely T-rexes with feathers. One of them chomped into my bare foot last week, and the ensuing scene put anything from “Jurassic Park” to shame.

[GoodDay]

There is nothing wrong with evolution. All species adapt to changing environment.

Except, of course, for the many species that did not adapt...the standard evolutionist line to explain extinction.

And except, of course, for those species that remained unchanged for millions of years since their first fossilized appearance, in spite of enormous changes in their environment. They persisted through their environment; their lack of change -- their stasis -- does not attest to their having "adapted" to their environment.

There is nothing wrong with creationism, because it all had to ‘begin’ somewhere, sometime.

That's true. Hardcore Darwinists, however, will invoke abiogenesis -- life having evolved from non-living matter -- as the only "scientifically acceptable" explanation.

I still don’t see why there is a big argument.

Darwinism was the official creation-myth of the 20th century. The big argument is over whose God is more powerful: God-the-supreme-intellect-and-intelligent-designer vs. Chance-plus-lots-of-time.

Unfortunately for the Darwinists (as has been pointed out to them many times), mere chance -- even when helped along by a mysterious "natural selection" -- cannot create even simple functional arrangements of amino acids to form proteins, let alone functional arrangementsof proteins to form higher-order biological structures -- in a mere 10^17 seconds. The 12 billion years since the putative Big Bang are not enough time for Darwinism ("random mutation + natural selection") to work its magic.

[Dajjal]

bump

[varmintman]

The Earth as a collection of rocks is clearly more than 6K years of age. The age of our present biosphere is far less clear and almost certainly closer to biblical estimates than to the estimates needed to support evoloserism. They're finding meat, blood, and soft tissue in dinosaur bones on a regular basis and those 65M year time frames you used to read about are gone with the wind other than in evolosers' minds. That's before you even get to the question of dinosaur images in Amerind petroglyphs of course.

[FormerRep]

So how does this shape up with the prebiotic Earth? On the early Earth it is likely that the ocean had a volume of 1 x 1024 litres. Given an amino acid concentration of 1 x 10-6 M (a moderately dilute soup, see Chyba and Sagan 1992 [23]), then there are roughly 1 x 1050 potential starting chains, so that a fair number of efficent peptide ligases (about 1 x 1031) could be produced in a under a year, let alone a million years. The synthesis of primitive self-replicators could happen relatively rapidly, even given a probability of 1 chance in 4.29 x 1040 (and remember, our replicator could be synthesized on the very first trial).

Assume that it takes a week to generate a sequence [14,16]. Then the Ghadiri ligase could be generated in one week, and any cytochrome C sequence could be generated in a bit over a million years (along with about half of all possible 101 peptide sequences, a large proportion of which will be functional proteins of some sort).

Although I have used the Ghadiri ligase as an example, as I mentioned above the same calculations can be performed for the SunY self replicator, or the Ekland RNA polymerase. I leave this as an exercise for the reader, but the general conclusion (you can make scads of the things in a short time) is the same for these oligonucleotides.

Search spaces, or how many needles in the haystack?
So I’ve shown that generating a given small enzyme is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as creationists (and Fred Hoyle) suggest. Another misunderstanding is that most people feel that the number of enzymes/ribozymes, let alone the ribozymal RNA polymerases or any form of self-replicator, represent a very unlikely configuration and that the chance of a single enzyme/ribozyme forming, let alone a number of them, from random addition of amino acids/nucleotides is very small.

However, an analysis by Ekland suggests that in the sequence space of 220 nucleotide long RNA sequences, a staggering 2.5 x 10112 sequences are efficent ligases [12]. Not bad for a compound previously thought to be only structural. Going back to our primitive ocean of 1 x 1024 litres and assuming a nucleotide concentration of 1 x 10-7 M [23], then there are roughly 1 x 1049 potential nucleotide chains, so that a fair number of efficent RNA ligases (about 1 x 1034) could be produced in a year, let alone a million years. The potential number of RNA polymerases is high also; about 1 in every 1020 sequences is an RNA polymerase [12]. Similar considerations apply for ribosomal acyl transferases (about 1 in every 1015 sequences), and ribozymal nucleotide synthesis [1, 6, 13].

Similarly, of the 1 x 10130 possible 100 unit proteins, 3.8 x 1061 represent cytochrome C alone! [29] There’s lots of functional enyzmes in the peptide/nucleotide search space, so it would seem likely that a functioning ensemble of enzymes could be brewed up in an early Earth’s prebiotic soup.

So, even with more realistic (if somewhat mind beggaring) figures, random assemblage of amino acids into “life-supporting” systems (whether you go for protein enzyme based hypercycles [10], RNA world systems [18], or RNA ribozyme-protein enzyme coevolution [11, 25]) would seem to be entirely feasible, even with pessimistic figures for the original monomer concentrations [23] and synthesis times.

[FormerRep]

Oops - apparently the superscripting didn’t transfer. In each mutiplicate “1 X” insert a 10 with the following number actually an exponent. “volume of 1 x 1024 litres” should read “volume of 1 x 10 (to the 1024th power) litres

[Boxen]

They're finding meat, blood, and soft tissue in dinosaur bones on a regular basis

Source, please?

[varmintman]

Look it up; if you don’t know how to use google yet, the exercise will improve your education.

[Boxen]

It is the responsibility of the claimant to back up his or her claims. If you can’t do that, maybe you shouldn’t have made the claim in the first place.

[varmintman]

This one has been in the news all over the place for the last three years now. Try google searches on ‘dinosaur’ and ‘soft tissue’.

[FormerRep]

You could try the same thing. It was determined that the original claims were premature and the organic matter was not original tissue but an algal residue aka slime.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/sciencefair/2008/07/study-t-rex-sof.html

[Boxen]

And yet, I would hardly call the occurrence of soft tissue in ancient fossils “regular” as per your original claim.

And as the poster above me has pointed out, it may not even be soft tissue that was found, but bacterial remnants.

[varmintman]

In the case of the latest ( hadrosaur) investigation, extraordinary care was taken to avoid any claims of contamination. Try doing a few google searches.

[FormerRep]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071203-dino-mummy.html

There was no tissue on this specimen. The confusion lies in the fact that there was mineralization of soft tissues leaving casts and impressions - not original organic material.

[varmintman]

Wrong hadrosaur...

[SunkenCiv]

This is not a "godsgravesglyphs" topic, and I did not put that into the keywords. As noted in the earlier topics related to this, here's the Oregon State press release about this:

Discovery raises new doubts about dinosaur-bird links
News and Communication Services
Oregon State University
6-9-09

It's been known for decades that the femur, or thigh bone in birds is largely fixed and makes birds into "knee runners," unlike virtually all other land animals, the OSU experts say. What was just discovered, however, is that it's this fixed position of bird bones and musculature that keeps their air-sac lung from collapsing when the bird inhales. Warm-blooded birds need about 20 times more oxygen than cold-blooded reptiles, and have evolved a unique lung structure that allows for a high rate of gas exchange and high activity level. Their unusual thigh complex is what helps support the lung and prevent its collapse... However, every other animal that has walked on land, the scientists said, has a moveable thigh bone that is involved in their motion -- including humans, elephants, dogs, lizards and -- in the ancient past -- dinosaurs... "For one thing, birds are found earlier in the fossil record than the dinosaurs..." Ruben said... "But one of the primary reasons many scientists kept pointing to birds as having descended from dinosaurs was similarities in their lungs," Ruben said... The newest findings, the researchers said, are more consistent with birds having evolved separately from dinosaurs and developing their own unique characteristics, including feathers, wings and a unique lung and locomotion system. There are some similarities between birds and dinosaurs, and it is possible, they said, that birds and dinosaurs may have shared a common ancestor, such as the small, reptilian "thecodonts," which may then have evolved on separate evolutionary paths into birds, crocodiles and dinosaurs. The lung structure and physiology of crocodiles, in fact, is much more similar to dinosaurs than it is to birds... old theories die hard, Ruben said...