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Author Topic:   Theropods and Birds showing a change in kinds
New Cat's Eye
Inactive Member


Message 31 of 150 (544838)
01-28-2010 4:51 PM
Reply to: Message 30 by Godismyjudge
01-28-2010 4:44 PM


Thanks for the reply, Godismyjudge. Welcom to EvC. Its great here, I hope you like it.
I notice you use the term evidence, there is no evidence for or against creation.
Not really in general, no. But for specific creation ideas, yes. Like man being created 6000 years ago, we know that's not true.
But this thread isn't about that.
We all have the same evidence: the same fossils, the same rocks, the same Earth. What is different is how we interpret this evidence.
This thread is about how some of the evidence we have, particularly that of the OP (opening post, Message 1), shows that birds evolved from theropods but they are two different kinds so we can see that one kind has evolved into another.
I don't think either side is trying to find some sort of "magic bullet".
What do you mean?

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MiguelG
Member (Idle past 1976 days)
Posts: 63
From: Australia
Joined: 12-08-2004


Message 32 of 150 (544845)
01-28-2010 5:26 PM
Reply to: Message 22 by RAZD
01-25-2010 10:06 PM


Re: posting tip
Hi all,
Pardon my intrusion (and pickyness) but I just had to correct the spelling for some of the skeletal structures in that picture of a Campsognathus(?).
The term is not furcular but furcula, and not hullus but hallux.
The furcula is what you would call a wishbone in a bird. it serves as a means of strengthening the thoracic skeleton - especially in flight.
The hallux is directly equivalent to the human big toe. In most birds it has reversed and acts as an opposable 'thumb'.
Among theropods one can see species that have partially reversed and even fully reversed (bird-like) halluxes.

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New Cat's Eye
Inactive Member


Message 33 of 150 (544849)
01-28-2010 5:40 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by MiguelG
01-28-2010 5:26 PM


Re: posting tip
Pardon my intrusion (and pickyness) but I just had to correct the spelling for some of the skeletal structures in that picture of a Campsognathus(?).
If you click "Peek" you can see the path to the image file and we find the name of it at the end:
Arhaeopteryxskeleton.gif
The term is not furcular but furcula, and not hullus but hallux.
I'll take your word for it
Among theropods one can see species that have partially reversed and even fully reversed (bird-like) halluxes.
Neat. Got some pix or a link or something?

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menes777
Member (Idle past 4318 days)
Posts: 36
From: Wichita, KS, USA
Joined: 01-25-2010


Message 34 of 150 (544850)
01-28-2010 5:45 PM


Why do you keep comparing like kinds?
quote:
A baby lobster and a scorpion look pretty similar, CS. Don't be fooled...
First someone compared a human to a chimpanzee. Yet they are related.
Then someone compares Lobsters and Scorpions, but they are related too! They are both Arthropods.
Arthropod - Wikipedia

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Meldinoor
Member (Idle past 4808 days)
Posts: 400
From: Colorado, USA
Joined: 02-16-2009


Message 35 of 150 (544871)
01-28-2010 11:57 PM
Reply to: Message 34 by menes777
01-28-2010 5:45 PM


Re: Why do you keep comparing like kinds?
Well, Kaichos Man is right about Lobsters and Scorpions being superficially similar. But they're pretty distantly related. Certainly far more distantly than ostriches and archaeopteryx.
I suspect that under the hood (DNA, etc) they're quite dissimilar.
Welcome to EvC by the way. Always a pleasure to have fresh meat... uhm... new blood in the forums.
Respectfully,
-Meldinoor
HINT: When replying to someone, be sure to hit the "reply" button at the bottom of the post you're responding to, and not the Gen Reply button. That way they'll know you replied.
Edited by Meldinoor, : No reason given.

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slevesque
Member (Idle past 4640 days)
Posts: 1456
Joined: 05-14-2009


Message 36 of 150 (544873)
01-29-2010 1:09 AM


Ok, I totally forgot I had started discussing in this thread so sorry about that. I'll just answer the couple of comments made about what I had said at the time to try and clarify things a bit.
menes77 said:
First someone compared a human to a chimpanzee. Yet they are related.
My first post with the two images wasn't very clear unfortunately. I was simply answering CS question about if I found his OP convincing of relationship between an emu and therapods.
The idea was simply that if phenotypical similarities between human and chimp didn't convince me nor prove anything, it was no different between birds and therapods. I clarified this shortly afterwards, but I guess you posted before reading the whole thread.
The reason I say it proves nothing is because it is an argument of the type ''affirming the consequent'' which is a logical fallacy. Similarities are a necessary condition for relationship, but they are not a sufficient condition to support it as a conclusion. Which brings me to the comment I made that made some waves:
Bluejay wrote:
slevesque writes:
If all of scientific knowledge is based on affirming the consequent, then we're in deep shizzles.
And yet, strangely, millions of scientists have been able to apply this method to real-world applications, with great success. If you call that "shizzles," then I suppose you're right.
CS wrote:
I find it hilarious when people claim science has problems over an internet discussion board. I mean, here we are, communicating instantly over great distances because of science.
The simple answer is that scientific knowledge is not based on affirming the consequent. That is why we are not currently in ''deep shizzles'' as I called it. When logical deduction is required to extrapolate a hypothesis from the data, non-fallacious forms of argumentation are rightfully used.
Now, I'm not saying that affirming the consequent isn't used in scientific investigation. And I would say it is frequently used in archaeology,history, etc. There is no problem in doing so as long as it is presented as showing a necessary condition for the hypothesis and not as an acceptable proof of the given hypothesis. I raised this issue because CS didn't make the difference between the two and affirmed that, as far as he was concerned, this was sufficient proof of relationship between emu and therapod. Which it is not unfortunately.
_____________________________--------------------------------------------------
On a final note, I will add some meat to the discussion while I'm here. CS's case can be resumed in the following manner:
If you look at an Emu and a Therapod, at first glance they don't look alike at all. In fact you would easily say that they are not of the same kind. But if you pay closer attention, you will start noticing similarities. The feet, the skeleton, even up to the sound, etc. And of course, you figure that you can go from one similarity, the foot for example, to the other through small microevolutionnary changes. Step by step. It's becomes pretty obvious to me that the two are, contrary to first glance, related.
I hope I represented it as clearly and accurately as possible. Unfortunately, I think this is the wrong way to look at things. If you want to provide evidence for the possibility of relationship, you have to look at the biggest differences possible between the two, not the smallest. If these biggest differences can be had with step-by-step fashion, then it is much stronger evidence of relationship than if you do the same exercise but on the aspects that are similar as CS did.
And on a final note, to really put fuel in the discussion:
xongsmith said:
Hey guys! Just in from China:
"A team of scientists from China and the UK has now revealed that the bristles of this 125 million-year-old dinosaur were in fact ginger-coloured feathers."
BBC News - Dinosaur had ginger feathers
Check it out.
This gives more weight to a very well-supported theory that modern birds evolved from theropods, the group of small carnivorous dinosaurs to which Sinosauropteryx belonged."
"The findings also help to resolve a long-standing debate about the evolution and original function of feathers.
"We now know that feathers did not originate as flight structures," said Professor Benton. "This suggests that they evolved, initially, for insulation and perhaps for display. " "
Kinda timely, I'd say.
The following will be only my personal opinion: I am very skeptical of any fossils that come out of china, and I advice myself and any other willing to listen to always wait a couple of years before being sure of a fossil that come from there. The reason for my position on the issue is this:
Interview between Alan Feduccia and Discover:
quote:
Discover: What about all the other evidence for feathered dinosaurs?
Feduccia: When we see actual feathers preserved on specimens, we need to carefully determine if we are looking at secondarily flightless birds that have retained feathers and only superficially resemble dinosaurs, or if the specimens are in fact related to dinosaurs. That’s a difficult issue to deal with right now, given the existence of fake fossils.
Discover: So far, only one feathered dinosaur, Archaeoraptor, has been publicly acknowledged as a forgery. You think there are others?
Feduccia: Archaeoraptor is just the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of fake fossils out there, and they have cast a dark shadow over the whole field. When you go to these fossil shows, it’s difficult to tell which ones are faked and which ones are not. I have heard that there is a fake-fossil factory in northeastern China, in Liaoning Province, near the deposits where many of these recent alleged feathered dinosaurs were found.
Journals like Nature don’t require specimens to be authenticated, and the specimens immediately end up back in China, so nobody can examine them. They may be miraculous discoveries, they may be missing links as they are claimed, but there is no way to authenticate any of this stuff.
Discover: Why would anyone fake a fossil?
Feduccia: Money. The Chinese fossil trade has become a big business. These fossil forgeries have been sold on the black market for years now, for huge sums of money. Anyone who can produce a good fake stands to profit.

Replies to this message:
 Message 37 by Iblis, posted 01-29-2010 1:34 AM slevesque has replied
 Message 40 by cavediver, posted 01-29-2010 4:09 AM slevesque has replied
 Message 47 by menes777, posted 01-29-2010 11:35 AM slevesque has replied
 Message 48 by New Cat's Eye, posted 01-29-2010 12:20 PM slevesque has replied

  
Iblis
Member (Idle past 3895 days)
Posts: 663
Joined: 11-17-2005


Message 37 of 150 (544875)
01-29-2010 1:34 AM
Reply to: Message 36 by slevesque
01-29-2010 1:09 AM


appearances
If you look at an Emu and a Therapod, at first glance they don't look alike at all. In fact you would easily say that they are not of the same kind.
I'm not sure if I understand what you are saying here.
If we look at a long-dead emu fossil and a long-dead theropod fossil of about the same size, in other words at skeletons, then as CS has pointed out, they look remarkably similar. If some of the bones were missing, there's a good chance one could be misidentified as the other.
If, on the other hand, we look at a picture of an emu and a "thunder lizard" brand artist's rendition of what people on That 70's Show thought a theropod might have looked like, sure, they look totally different. One looks like an evil version of Big Bird and the other looks like Godzilla. But I feel pretty certain that those artist renditions were all wrong and still mostly aren't right.
My position is that if you met a small theropod in a murky bit of jungle right now, you might well think that it was an emu or ostrich or something similar, perhaps extending its wings for balance as it ran at you, and your first clue that it wasn't would be when it slashed you with its foreclaws or ripped a serrated chunk out of you with its wicked teeth. But I do think that they had feathers, and you apparently don't. Time will tell.
Theropoda - Wikipedia

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slevesque
Member (Idle past 4640 days)
Posts: 1456
Joined: 05-14-2009


Message 38 of 150 (544877)
01-29-2010 2:33 AM
Reply to: Message 37 by Iblis
01-29-2010 1:34 AM


Re: appearances
I intended the phrase you quote (and the entire paragraph where it is is my previous post) as being a resume of what CS was saying. The following phrases during this thread gave me that impression of what he was saying.
Example:
OP:
At first glance it should be obvious that these animals are two different kinds, but let's look closer.
message 16:
But its not just a cursory glance at their external morphologies. From that, it seems that the theropod and bird are different kinds. But when you look at them closely, or into them, and especially those feet!, you can see that a bunch of small changes, microevolutionary changes, to the theropod could easily get us to the point of being a bird.
It was an attempt by myself to show as accurately as possible what CS was saying in the most compact way possible.
-------
I'll add even more fuel to the discussion. I'll say that I do not believe it impossible that some dinosaur species had feathers. By this I mean real, complete feathers. I'm not saying this is the case; I never really researched a whole lot on this issue and the evidence for or against it. I'm saying that this is a possibility.
The issue, for my part at least, I can't speak for every creationists out there, is if there is any evidence of the transitional phases between scales and feathers. Both are very different both on the surface and at the microcospic level I believe, and this type of evidence would be much more compelling for me then a dinosaur with complete feathers.

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Replies to this message:
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slevesque
Member (Idle past 4640 days)
Posts: 1456
Joined: 05-14-2009


Message 39 of 150 (544878)
01-29-2010 2:43 AM
Reply to: Message 17 by Larni
01-07-2010 4:23 PM


I'll just answer this small question very quickly so Larni won,t think I skipped over him:
What would make you think that a human and a chimp are not closely related (please don't forget endogenous retroviral markers)?
I'm afraid that in this situation, the burden of proof is on you. I personnally believe that the fossil evidence is inconclusive. ''Bones of contention'' by Lubenow is a good read on this issue to know the creationist perspective on many of the finer details and it isn't filled with a lot of biblical stuff, he pretty much sticks to the fossils at hand. He also keeps the dates assigned to the fossils and shows that even keeping the evolutionnary timeline there are many things that do not click.
On the genetic level I think the 98% similarity figure is a bit outdated and it probably hovers around 95% now. Even recently their was a study published about the study of the Y chromosome of chimps and humans and the differences were much, much bigger than anticipated.
Is this all still in the subject ?

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cavediver
Member (Idle past 3643 days)
Posts: 4129
From: UK
Joined: 06-16-2005


Message 40 of 150 (544882)
01-29-2010 4:09 AM
Reply to: Message 36 by slevesque
01-29-2010 1:09 AM


That's all well and good, Slevesque, that you are unconvinced by the hypothetical inter-relatedness. But that does leave us with the question - just how many pairs of animals were on the Ark in your estimation?

This message is a reply to:
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Kaichos Man
Member (Idle past 4487 days)
Posts: 250
From: Tasmania, Australia
Joined: 10-03-2009


Message 41 of 150 (544883)
01-29-2010 4:13 AM
Reply to: Message 35 by Meldinoor
01-28-2010 11:57 PM


Re: Why do you keep comparing like kinds?
I suspect that under the hood (DNA, etc) they're quite dissimilar.
Actually, Meldinor, probably not.
Did you know that if you compare human, cow and kangaroo DNA, humans and kangaroos are most similar? This is despite the fact that humans and cows are fellow mammals, and the kangaroo is a marsupial.
It seems that similarities in DNA have more to do with morphological similarity than (supposed) evolutionary relatedness.

"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

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Kaichos Man
Member (Idle past 4487 days)
Posts: 250
From: Tasmania, Australia
Joined: 10-03-2009


Message 42 of 150 (544885)
01-29-2010 4:28 AM
Reply to: Message 21 by New Cat's Eye
01-25-2010 1:47 PM


That, and it put a freakin' man on the moon... yeah, deep shizzles science is in
CS, we didn't put man on the moon through a sequence of unsound logical silogisms. (Though having recently watched a documentary entitled "The true story of Apollo 11", maybe you could be forgiven for believing that!)

"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy." Charles Darwin

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Huntard
Member (Idle past 2294 days)
Posts: 2870
From: Limburg, The Netherlands
Joined: 09-02-2008


Message 43 of 150 (544887)
01-29-2010 5:18 AM
Reply to: Message 41 by Kaichos Man
01-29-2010 4:13 AM


Re: Why do you keep comparing like kinds?
Kaichos Man writes:
Did you know that if you compare human, cow and kangaroo DNA, humans and kangaroos are most similar?
Source please?
This is despite the fact that humans and cows are fellow mammals, and the kangaroo is a marsupial.
Marsupials are also mammals.

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Huntard
Member (Idle past 2294 days)
Posts: 2870
From: Limburg, The Netherlands
Joined: 09-02-2008


Message 44 of 150 (544888)
01-29-2010 5:22 AM
Reply to: Message 39 by slevesque
01-29-2010 2:43 AM


slevesque writes:
On the genetic level I think the 98% similarity figure is a bit outdated and it probably hovers around 95% now. Even recently their was a study published about the study of the Y chromosome of chimps and humans and the differences were much, much bigger than anticipated.
What about the ERV's? or the fact that human chromosome two is a fusion of two chimp chromosomes?

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Iblis
Member (Idle past 3895 days)
Posts: 663
Joined: 11-17-2005


Message 45 of 150 (544889)
01-29-2010 5:39 AM
Reply to: Message 41 by Kaichos Man
01-29-2010 4:13 AM


Skippy on the details
Did you know that if you compare human, cow and kangaroo DNA, humans and kangaroos are most similar?
Here's a nice chart.
It's wrong, of course. Instead of doing an overview comparison of many genes, or using even more current methods that give even better comparisons, it's based entirely on a single molecule, mitochondrial cytochrome-c. The webpage linked is a discussion on how this works and how to get better results.
As we saw in the comparison of human and kangaroo cytochrome c, a single molecule provides only a narrow window for glimpsing evolutionary relationships.
The technique of DNA-DNA hybridization provides a way of comparing the total genome of two species. Let us examine the procedure as it might be used to assess the evolutionary relationship of species B to species A:
http://users.rcn.com/...ltranet/BiologyPages/T/Taxonomy.html
The creationist websites have jumped on this intentional bad example, however, to start making claims in the usual vile way.
When the protein strands of various living things are analysed in a laboratory, results emerge which are totally unexpected from the evolutionists' point of view, and some of which are utterly astounding. For example, the cytochrome-C protein in man differs by 14 amino acids from that in a horse, but by only eight from that in a kangaroo. When the same strand is examined, turtles appear closer to man than to a reptile such as the rattlesnake.
http://www.darwinismrefuted.com/myht_of_homology_04.html
This is the sort of thing that keeps ID from ever getting anywhere near the science class ever again.
The Centre’s Director, Jenny Graves, said, ‘There is great chunks of the human genome which is sitting right there in the kangaroo genome.’ In fact, according to a report in Australia’s national newspaper, the 20,000—25,000 genes in the kangaroo (roughly the same number as in humans) are ‘largely the same’ as in people.1 Graves said elsewhere that ‘a lot of them are in the same order’.
Skippy surprises scientists - creation.com
Does anyone here believe that Jennifer Graves actually used the wording attributed to her in those quotation marks?
Another interesting point is that we are obviously seeing the results of a game of telephone. Note what animal does not occur anywhere in the chart being misrepresented.

This message is a reply to:
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