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Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Living dinosaurs


HUMAN APE SAID:

I have no problem with people who disagree with me, but I have a big problem with people who are stupid enough to believe people lived at the same time as dinosaurs. They ARE insane.
 
Every educated person knows dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, and our ancestors didn't start looking like modern humans until between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago.
 
To be wrong by 65 million years, that's pure out-of-control stupidity and a serious mental illness.


On Saturday Jack Conrad will show that New York is filled with dinosaurs: they roam the streets, hover over your roof, swoop down from trees, nibble on your garbage. “You can go in Central Park and feed the dinosaurs,” Dr. Conrad said. “That is, if you want to.”
 
Dr. Conrad is neither a crackpot nor a star in a new release in the “Jurassic Park” franchise. A research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, he will present a program there that demonstrates what he and his fellow paleontologists have learned over the last 15 years: Birds are dinosaurs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/arts/04bkids.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

7 comments:

  1. This has been a proposal taking shape over the last decade or so. I remember first hearing about it and finding it amusing that what had been supposed to be reptiles for decades has now been revealed to be a warm-blooded creature. T. rex went from being a solitary repitlian hunter to a warm-blooded pack animal.

    But the most amusing consequence of all this was seeing Bill Watterson soak up these changing scientific proposals and integrating them into Calvin & Hobbes. Watterson went on record several places saying he drastically adjusted Calvin's fantasies about dinosaurs in light of the changing scientific consensus. Calvin & Hobbes is not exactly a low profile pop culture measurement of changing scientific consensus about dinosaurs that no one ever read or saw.

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  2. Actually birds are thought to be descended from dinosaurs.

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  3. Nice bait-n-switch, but that's not what Dr. Conrad said. He didn't say they were *descended* from dinosaurs. Rather, he said they *were* dinosaurs. But perhaps you know more about the subject than he does.

    Let's compare your credentials to his. Here are his:

    Kalbfleisch Post Doctoral Fellow, Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, Division of Paleontology, and Co-Curator, Lizards & Snakes: Alive!
    Jack Conrad studies the anatomy and evolutionary relationships of modern and fossil lizards, documenting their anatomy and morphology and applying this data to phylogenetic analyses in the hopes of understanding the interrelationships of the dizzying diversity of squamates. Much of his time is focused on the gigantic cache of Cretaceous fossil lizards from the Gobi Desert. Dr. Conrad has published five scientific papers and conducted fieldwork in Montana, Wyoming, the Sahara, and the North Pole, where he was part of the group that uncovered Tiktaalik (the recently described sarcopterygian "fishapod"). He received his B.A. in biology from Drury University in 1999, and a Ph.D. in vertebrate paleontology at the University of Chicago in 2005.

    http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/lizards/curators/

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  4. Steve said "Let's compare your credentials to his. Here are his:"

    Steve, though I agree with your point here, you've commit the fallacy of arguing from authority.

    If Dr. Conrad is correct, as you suggest, it is not because of his credentials, rather it is because his reasoning is sound.

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  5. Appealing to an expert witness is not a fallacy, especially when he's a spokesman for the opposing position. I'm quoting a Darwinian in response to Darwinians.

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  6. Keep in mind that he himself led with an appeal to authority: "Actually birds are *thought* to be descended from dinosaurs."

    I'm merely answering him on his own terms.

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  7. "Birds are dinosaurs . . ."

    And they think we're wingnuts.

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