Posted on 03/06/2002 12:32:35 PM PST by CholeraJoe
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:32:43 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Paleontologists working in China say they have unearthed the first fossil of a dinosaur that appeared to have mature feathers identical to those of modern birds, including long, showy plumage on its tail and hind legs.
The U.S.-Chinese research team said the 3-foot fossil should settle once and for all the debate over whether birds and dinosaurs are related.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
The Man Left Africa Three Times article is also free.
My argument(s) boil down to this:
One, that natural selection could not select on the basis of future or hoped-for functionality, so that this unidirectional long march from an arm to a fully functional wing on a flying bird is not possible. All you'd ever get would be a random walk around the norm for an arm and, in fact, that pretty much parallell's the experience of the people doing the fruit fly experiments in the early 1900's. All they ever got was random walks around the norm for fruit flies. Despite every effort and years of mutating and then recombining mutations in an animal which produces new generations every few days, all they ever got was fruit flies. They never got the unidirectional march to some other kind of creature, as macroevolution demands.
Two, is that the various features required for any new kind of animal could not plausibly all evolve at the same time and that, while the second such was evolving, the first would be de-evolving. In real life, when you don't use something, you quickly lose it. Thus we observe what wings look like on penguins and ostriches, which do not use them for flight.
That reality would be totally sufficient to prevent a therapod dinosaur from ever becoming a flying bird by any combination of mutations and selection.
Could some intelligent process have re-engineered flying birds from therapods? The answer is clearly yes and some of the evidence appears to support the idea.
Why did Jesus cross the road?
Because he was nailed to a chicken!
No, wait, that's Kinky Friedman.
Be right back with the correct reference.
Remarkable.
oooh, those are some SEXY looking mature feathers on what is clearly a theropod dinosaur! There's a clear central shaft, and tiny lateral filaments jutting out from it, going all the way down the shaft to the end.
1) Schopf has already conceded that NONE of his ancient fossils are cyanobacteria
2) Even the experts are disagreed over the difference between chert artifacts and bacterial fossils.
Damn! Now there's two more gaps to fill!
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