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Posted on 08/13/2003 9:02:05 PM PDT by nwrep
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2 hours, 55 minutes ago
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By RAMOLA TALWAR BADAM, Associated Press Writer
BOMBAY, India - U.S. and Indian scientists said Wednesday they have discovered a new carnivorous dinosaur species in India after finding bones in the western part of the country.
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The new dinosaur species was named Rajasaurus narmadensis, or "Regal reptile from the Narmada," after the Narmada River region where the bones were found.
The dinosaurs were between 25-30 feet long, had a horn above their skulls, were relatively heavy and walked on two legs, scientists said. They preyed on long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs on the Indian subcontinent during the Cretaceous Period at the end of the dinosaur age, 65 million years ago.
"It's fabulous to be able to see this dinosaur which lived as the age of dinosaurs came to a close," said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. "It was a significant predator that was related to species on continental Africa, Madagascar and South America."
Working with Indian scientists, Sereno and paleontologist Jeff Wilson of the University of Michigan reconstructed the dinosaur skull in a project funded partly by the National Geographic (news - web sites) Society.
A model of the assembled skull was presented Wednesday by the American scientists to their counterparts from Punjab University in northern India and the Geological Survey of India during a Bombay news conference.
Scientists said they hope the discovery will help explain the extinction of the dinosaurs and the shifting of the continents — how India separated from Africa, Madagascar, Australia and Antarctica and collided with Asia.
The dinosaur bones were discovered during the past 18 years by Indian scientists Suresh Srivastava of the Geological Survey of India and Ashok Sahni, a paleontologist at Punjab University.
When the bones were examined, "we realized we had a partial skeleton of an undiscovered species," Sereno said.
The scientists said they believe the Rajasaurus roamed the Southern Hemisphere land masses of present-day Madagascar, Africa and South America.
"People don't realize dinosaurs are the only large-bodied animal that lived, evolved and died at a time when all continents were united," Sereno said.
The cause of the dinosaurs' extinction is still debated by scientists. The Rajasaurus discovery may provide crucial clues, Sereno said.
India has seen quite a few paleontological discoveries recently.
In 1997, villagers discovered about 300 fossilized dinosaur eggs in Pisdura, 440 miles northeast of Bombay, that Indian scientists said were laid by four-legged, long-necked vegetarian creatures.
Indian scientists said the dinosaur embryos in the eggs may have suffocated during volcanic eruptions.
That would take many examples of 2000 year old dinosaur bones (not fossils), the name of Cain's wife, a newly discovered Dead Sea scroll with an explanation of how all the sauropods fit into an ark that was way too small, wake up in the morning and find all our technology was just a dream, and receive lots of ice cream (my wife bribes me with ice cream, too). ;)
But seriously, you'd have destroy an awful lot of data to make it work. I don't see how it's possible.
Lotsa entities are claimed to have lotsa answers in lotsa books. it's nothing against your particular entity; I'm inclined to disbelieve any creation account by any primitive people which had neither the knowledge nor the intellectual framework to understand a scientific approach to origins.
But, you've answered my question as to whether or not I could post a single thing that would sway your opinion.
Not a single thing, no. The foundation of evolution is not a single thing; it's a large body of evidence. You would need a similarly weighty set of evidence to convince me otherwise; and you would need to come up with an alternative theory that is consistent with scientific evidence, not directly in conflict with a large part of it.
I'll take a shot at this. There would be no problem getting me to abandon evolution. All it would take is evidence -- solid, verifiable evidence -- that the proliferation of species on earth did not appear in the sequence predicted by, and in a manner consistent with the theory. So far there is no such evidence. But I remain open-minded.
As for the literal, word-for-word accuracy of the creation account in Genesis, that's a far more difficult issue. I would have to be persuaded that most of what we know about astronomy, geology, and physics is wrong. I don't know what it would take to persuade me of that. I'm always open-minded to genuine evidence, but the task of overthrowing so many self-consistent, mutually consistent, and well-supported sciences seems very difficult.
To start, you look like a Handsome fellow on your website, not quite quasimoto.;-) 
The ape genomes suffer from the same 'design flaws' the human genome has.
I would expect them to suffer similar mutations, being that much of their design is so similar. They are exposed to the curse (Degeneration) that includes the earth, not just man.
Isa 51:6
6 Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath: for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment,
And why would a loving God make poor Pongo's time on earth short, and his days full of sorrow, because some human female chomped on a bit of fruit?
Gen 3:17
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Poor Pongo faces the cursed ground because of Adam, not Eve.
The Careationist Web-page
All naturally occurring families of radioactive elements generate helium as they decay. If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, much helium should have found its way into the Earth's atmosphere. The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small. Taking that loss into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in five billion years.(19) This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged evolutionary age.
What scientists actually say.
Helium escape from the terrestrial atmosphere: the ion outflow mechanism. Lie-Svendsen, Oe.; Rees, M. H. Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, Kjeller, Norway. Journal of Geophysical Research, [Space Physics] (1996), 101(A2), 2435-43.
Abstract: Global He+ escape fluxes have been computed for a range and a variety of diurnal, seasonal, universal time, and solar activity geophys. conditions. The short-term variables are averaged and the globally averaged escape flux is computed for a range of cutoff latitudes, which sep. regions of open and closed field lines, during one solar cycle. The global escape flux averaged over a solar cycle was computed, and shows that a cutoff latitude of approx. 60° or lower is sufficient to balance the outgassing from the Earth's crust.
I finally saw The Matrix this past weekend (rented it from NetFlix). Great movie. It really lived up to the hype.
They suffered not similar but identical mutations; and not just mutations, but inclusion of identical extraneous genetic material. Why would 'degeneration' cause insertion of an identical element of an identical virus in an identical part of the genome of humans and the great apes?
Poor Pongo faces the cursed ground because of Adam, not Eve.
If Adam inserted identical retroviruses in his own genome and into the genomes of the higher primates, he is indeed a fiend, and I'm ashamed to have him as an ancestor.
That's a good start, but I'd have to have a few days to be convinced that I wasn't delirious. If you've ever had a close relative or friend become delirious due to fever, infection, or drug reaction, you come away with an altered sense of what kinds of imaginary worlds the human mind can create when it's on the fritz.
Any story that replaces evolution will have to explain all the data that points to evolution in a consistent and coherent way. Nothing on this thread so far is even consistent with the data.
There are three tasks that the evidence would have to perform.
The hard task is that it would have to provide much of the (hitherto undiscovered) evidence we would expect easily to have found, were the Biblical account factually true.
The much harder task is that it would have to discredit several enormous bodies of evidence that objective scientists have painstakingly compiled over the last five hundred years, evidence from which our currently accepted models have been derived.
The very hardest task is that it would have to explain why the accepted models have hitherto worked so startlingly well, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and coming both from the direction of observation and from the direction of theory. Furthermore, the new evidence would also have to explain why the Biblical claims have hitherto been in such miserable disagreement with the old evidence.
I am from the Creation/Intelligent Design camp and thus the challenge was not addressed to me --- however I believe there are a few things which would get the attention of the science community. For instance:
1. If the sound waves in the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation which were captured when light formed and went its way actually said something from Genesis in an ancient Hebrew dialect, e.g. “In the beginning, God created” or “Let there be light” etc. --- then I believe the rabbis and Christian theologians would be asked to the table to help figure it all out.
2. If the research into biogenesis/abiogenesis or the big bang concluded that there was a substantial algorithm necessary to initiate life or the universe, e.g. process, conditionals, recursives, autonomy, symbolizations – then I believe the intelligent design scientists would be asked to the table as well.
3. If the scientists were faced with an undeniable miraculous event which specifically tied back to the Bible – something stronger than the Bible Code or the Shroud of Turin -- then they would question materialist epistemology altogether.
Personally, I do not believe God will allow any of this to happen – or reveal Himself so directly before the time comes. I say this because it would work against faith and would be inconsistent with the Word in 1 Cor 1:21-29 and Matt 13:10-11.
Therein lies some kind of argument that God expects, or at least allows, the enterprise of science to persevere without encountering any contradictions.
Taking a look at for a reasonable list of data that could be convincing.
To present a scientific argument for a literal interpretation of Genesis and YEC you would have to provide an explanation for all the theories of physics that have accumulated over the last 200 years -- something consistent with the data, yet demonstrates that current understanding is out-of-date.
You would have to prove that radioactive dating is wrong, without violating all the physical laws that require it to be correct. Once you substitute your new improved physicl laws, you could re-date the geological strata. Once you have done that and demonstrated that all the extinct species could have lived together at one time, you need to do something about biomass. You need to explain how all the animals and plants that contributed to such phenomena as coal and pead could have lived together without enveloping the earth in a 300 thick carpet.
that would be a start.
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