Early history of birds much more diverse than once thought

Interesting...

Roadrunner-like birds skittered around under the feet of dinosaurs 125 million years ago, according to ancient tracks found in fossilized Chinese mud two years ago.


Denver paleontologist Martin Lockley has now officially described the tracks, and experts say the discovery means there were many more types of birds flitting around dinosaurs than once thought. ...

...A decade or so ago, scientists had only a few fossils of marine birds that soared around during the age of the dinosaurs, said paleontologist Luis Chiappe of the Los Angeles County Museum.

"Most of us thought that birds just weren't very diverse in the Mesozoic, the age of the dinosaurs," Chiappe said.

In recent years, paleontologists have found new bird fossils from millions of years ago, some with short beaks, others long, some that ate seed and had insects in their stomachs when they died, Chiappe said.

"This is very interesting," he said of Lockley's new paper. "It adds to a realization that the early history of birds was extremely diverse."

Being a female tick would suck...

Um...thank God I’m not a tick. Evidently, sex fattens one species of female tick to 100 times it’s normal size. That would certainly reek havoc on the diet!! SHEESH!

Weigh-In Week 16, April 30

We've completed week 16, with our total weight loss at 107 lbs..


Dieters, please use the comment section to post how much you lost (or gained) this week, and your ~total~ weight loss since day 1 of dieting. When everyone has done so, I’ll post the results.

UPDATE

Davescot -1 this week, -38 total
Starving -0, -19
Ftk -0, -12
Sparky -0, -10
Gigi -0, -9

“Mom” and “Dad” not politically correct

Now I’ve heard it all. California is launching a plan that could ban the reference to “Mom” and “Dad” in the schools so that it does not “reflect adversely” on homosexuality.

Good freaking grief...

Here are some of the changes that could take place:

"Mom" and "dad" and "husband" and "wife" would have to be edited from all texts.

Cheerleading and sports teams would have to be gender-neutral.

Prom kings and queens would be banned, or if featured, would have to be gender neutral so that the king could be female and the queen male.

Gender-neutral bathrooms could be required for those confused about their gender identity.

A male who believes he really is female would be allowed into the women's restroom, and a woman believing herself a male would be allowed into a men's room.

Even scientific information, such has statistics showing AIDS rates in the homosexual community, could be banned.

Sheer craziness, IMHO.

[via this link]

Predictions of Theism & Materialism

Via "bornagain77", a commenter at Uncommon Descent:

The whole materialistic philosophy is in a state of denial about the truth.

1. Materialism did not predict the big bang, Yet Theism always said the universe was created.

2. Materialism did not predict a sub-atomic (quantum) world that blatantly defies our concepts of time and space, Yet Theism always said the universe is the craftsmanship of God who is not limited by time or space.

3. Materialism did not predict the fact that time, as we understand it, comes to a complete stop at the speed of light, as revealed by Einstein’s theory of relativity, Yet Theism always said that God exists in a timeless eternity.

4. Materialism did not predict the stunning precision for the underlying universal constants, for the universe, found in the Anthropic Principle, Yet Theism always said God laid the foundation of the universe, so the stunning clockwork precision found for the various universal constants is not at all unexpected for Theism.

5. Materialism did not predict the fact that the DNA code is, according to Bill Gates, far, far more advanced than any computer code ever written by man, Yet Theism would have naturally expected this level of complexity in the DNA code.

6. Materialism presumed a extremely beneficial and flexible mutation rate for DNA, which is not the case at all. Yet Theism would have naturally presumed such a high if not, what very well may be, complete negative mutation rate to an organism’s DNA.

7. Materialism presumed a very simple first life form. Yet the simplest life ever found on Earth is, according to Geneticist Michael Denton PhD., far more complex than any machine man has made through concerted effort. Theism would have naturally expected this.

More on Fossilized Rainforest

Here’s an update on the fossilized rainforest I posted about earlier this week:

One article mentioned that a member of the research team seemed puzzled at finding “mangrove-like plants”.

Also surprising is the presence of remains from mangrove-like plants. "It was always assumed that mangrove plants had evolved fairly recently," says Falcon-Lang.

This source offers the following:

Is this a “mangrove-like” plant or a true mangrove? If the latter, it sounds like a big out-of-order problem for evolution, because mangroves were not supposed to appear till the late Cretaceous (source) and these forests are Carboniferous, over 200 million years earlier. That would be a bigger problem than finding a living dinosaur. A quick check of the original paper in Geology (May 2007) does not reveal any mention of family Rhizophoraceae or any of the other mangroves, but that doesn’t mean they were not found. We’ll have to see if more of the details come to light. In any case, gymnosperms were not thought to live in “mangrove-like” habitats.

This story also illustrates, as seen so often before, that wherever evolutionists look, they find more complexity farther back in time than they expect.

Hmmm...there might be all kinds of interesting finds in that rainforest.

'Junk' DNA Now Looks Like Powerful Regulator

From here.

Powerful regulators that play a crucial role – this is how non-coding sections of DNA are now being described. A story in Science Daily says that these regions of “junk DNA” once dismissed as “gene deserts” actually orchestrate the expression of genes during development.

For decades, Darwinian preconceptions have held back a promising field of genetic research with their falsified notion that most of the genome is composed of evolutionary leftovers. Now that we see the design that was there all along, can we get on with what science should have been doing? Away with this new plot line that junk DNA is a source of “evolutionary novelty.” Darwinians, you have been exposed as usurpers. Get out of the way. The field is not evolving. Intelligent design is taking back its rights.

The Darwinian Priesthood

Anika Smith highlights a satirical short story written by James Hoskins.

Here’s a teaser...

Adam looked away in frustration. “Son, you are a bold and intrepid young man. You are a born leader. Your mother even named you after the father of us all: Adam; that first cell from which we all evolved, the first to have life breathed into it by Chance itself. And I think you are sincere in your search, but this is a very exigent matter. This is bordering on heresy. Your salvation is at stake!”

“But Father, you always told me to question authority and be a free thinker.” “Not when it comes to this Adam. Do you realize that if you continue down this path you could lose your salvation and be banished to the fiery plains of Kansas! That place reserved for obdurate and evil persons! A place where people do not believe in Chance! A realm of absolute misanthropes, where there is screaming and gnashing of teeth!”

“Father, how can you say people are evil just because they believe differently than you?”

“Adam, need I remind you of the words of the apostle Dawkins: ‘It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).’¹”

“Isn’t that a bit harsh?”

“Adam, these people want to have Intelligent Design taught alongside Evolution in their schools!”

“Why is that wrong?”

“They want to have both arguments presented in the classroom and leave it up to the students to decide which is true! What could be more wicked! It opens our doctrine up to heretical criticism and, worst of all, it endangers the authority of the Church and the Priesthood to say what is science and what is not.”

Kansas -- the land of Darwinless blasphemers...LOL.

Read Confessions in it’s entirety here.

"Lucy" loses status

The famous "Lucy" fossil "bites the dust".

[Via DaveScot at Uncommon Descent.]

Science owes its existence to God

From here.

Christian believers employed their faith and biblical understanding to spark modern science.

Schaefer and Townes are only two examples of Christians who are seeking the truth about nature and God. Their approach is that modern science is founded on biblical thinking -- that there is an order in creation.

Schaefer says that the logical outcome of biblical thinking is modern science. That is, the seeds planted by the Christain scholars of the Middle Ages blossomed into the robust flowers of the scientific revolution.

Unlike the gods of mythology, random evolution or some "Big Bang," the God of the Bible created a stable, orderly world that can be described with mathematical precision.

Christian believers made up a Who's Who of the scientific revolution.

And in conjunction with the testimony of current scientists about their faith, there appears to be a movement to reclaim that historical connection.

Old Mike, New Christine

An LA Times Sports writer is undergoing a sex change operation.

Though it is extremely difficult to understand transsexualism, I have no doubt that it is devastating for a person to feel that they are in the wrong skin. But, I have to wonder if changing gender is going to make the situation better. It seems that there would be a whole new set of problems one would have to deal with after a gender change.

The writer of the article asserts that there is scientific evidence that points to physiological reasons for his condition:

Recent studies have shown that such physiological factors as genetics and hormonal fluctuations during pregnancy can significantly affect how our brains are "wired" at birth.

Hmmm...I hadn’t realized that scientists had found conclusive evidence that there are physiological factors responsible for transexuality. I wouldn’t doubt that there may be, but I’m not sure if that would be the reason for every case.

My husband was shopping in a lighting store last year and ran across a gal who looked just like a guy he knew in high school. He’s was struck speechless, and wondered if his assumption was correct. He didn’t think it was kosher to ask the gal due to the fact that he hadn’t seen the guy for years, and he might have been hallucinating or something. He certainly didn't want to get slapped!

He asked a few of his old friends about it, and sure enough, it was him (whoops...I mean her).

Carbon Offset Fraud

Why am I not the least bit surprised?

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

The Dawkins Mind Set applied to Cho Seung-Hui

Lawrence Seldon offers an interesting take on Dawkins, evolution, good & evil, free will, and Cho Seung-Hui (VA Tech).

Potentially Habitable Planet Found

From here.

For the first time astronomers have discovered a planet outside our solar system that is potentially habitable, with Earth-like temperatures, a find researchers described Tuesday as a big step in the search for "life in the universe."

Sounds very interesting...hope we hear more soon.

Religious kids are better behaved

Yup, science says so...

From here.

Kids with religious parents are better behaved and adjusted than other children, according to a new study that is the first to look at the effects of religion on young child development.

Spring is in the air

I love this time of year, when we can finally get out and enjoy the nice weather again.

But, every year around this same time, my kids get serious spring fever. They can’t wait for school to end, and they seem to lose all interest in their school work. Spring sports become the focus, and we end up running them all over town all week long.

The utter chaos always brings me back to “the plan”. A long time friend/former roommate and I had an elaborate plan to just throw caution to the wind, quit our jobs, pack up a VW microbus, and tour the US. We’d work odd jobs to pay for gas and food and live the hippy lifestyle for a year.

Of course, being the ultra conservative that I am, "the plan” never transpired. But, whenever things get crazy around here, I think back to the idea of just dumping all responsibility and heading for the hills.

As I dropped off my kids at soccer practice the other day, the urge to get back in the van and keep driving was a tad overwhelming. That’s gotta be a ~sure sign~ of Mommy overload.

I’m thinking my friend of over 25 years would probably still be game to hit the road. But, the problem would be to find the perfect set of wheels...

Weigh-In Week 16, April 23

We've completed week 16, with our total weight loss at 105 lbs..


Wow, we've lost 100 lbs! Good job people. Dave's still on a role, but the rest of us are losing motivation. As long as we don't gain anything, I think we're still doing well. Maintaining is the hardest part, so stick with it.

Dieters, please use the comment section to post how much you lost (or gained) this week, and your ~total~ weight loss since day 1 of dieting. When everyone has done so, I’ll post the results.

UPDATE

Davescot -2 this week, -37 total
Starving -0, -19
Ftk +2, -12
Sparky -0, -10
Gigi -0, -9

Fossilized Rainforest Unearthed

Pretty cool...

Dr Howard Falcon-Lang said: ‘It was an amazing experience. We drove down the mine in an armoured vehicle, until we were a hundred metres below the surface. The fossil forest was rooted on top of the coal seam, so where the coal had been mined away the fossilised forest was visible in the ceiling of the mine. We walked for miles and miles along pitch-black passages with the fossil forest just above our heads. We were able to make a map of the forest by the light of our miner’s lamps.’

More from the Darwin vs. Design Conference

From an article in the Southern Baptist Press in regard to the Darwin vs. Design Conference at SMU.

...Not everyone, however, welcomed the scientists proposing Intelligent Design. At least three SMU professors lodged protests against the conference, which they claimed would promote a "mystical world view" lacking scientific credibility.

Seven students also protested inside the conference, holding up signs with questions related to Darwinian evolution. SMU police escorted two students out of the conference after the students attempted to move closer to the stage where Strobel, Meyer, Richards and Behe were speaking to an audience of more than 1,500.

An editorial in the daily campus newspaper also lambasted the proponents of Intelligent Design for "preaching a religious message masked in a capsule of pseudoscience."

The editorial, written by SMU anthropology student Ben Wells, said the Discovery Institute is a political action group that "fights to create a theistic worldview that corrupts science to fit the doctrines of evangelical and literal Christians who are unable to reconcile their religious beliefs with the material world."

But Meyer, director of the Center for Science & Culture and editor of "Darwinism, Design and Public Education," said neither he nor his colleagues are part of any political group. He also said the theory of Intelligent Design is not faith-based.

"The theory of Intelligent Design is an evidence-based theory. It is not faith-based, as TIME magazine said, but it does have larger implications and I think that's where most people get confused. The key is a distinction between the evidence and the implications," Meyer said.

Behe, known for his groundbreaking work, "Darwin's Black Box," said he and the other scientists are doing what they were trained to do -- that is, ruling nothing out of bounds in the quest for the truth. But much of the scientific establishment, he said, has nonetheless ruled the ideas of Intelligent Design deficient "as a matter of principle" because they work against the status quo. Many in the scientific community remain loyal to the teachings of Charles Darwin.

"I was told that we were supposed to follow the evidence wherever it leads," said Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. "Intelligent Design seems to point strongly beyond nature and seems to have philosophical, maybe even theological implications. That makes a lot of people nervous, and they think that science should avoid any theory that seems to have such strong extra-scientific implications."

Darwin's Black Box, regarded by WORLD magazine as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century, dealt a heavy blow to neo-Darwinism when Behe argued for the idea of "irreducible complexity." According to Behe, life is run by thousands of complex "machines" in cells. These machines are designed in such a way that the cell cannot function without any one of its multiple parts.

Design, Behe contends, is not mystical; it is quantitative. The purposeful arrangement of parts in a cell implies design, and even neo-Darwinians -- scientists who still hold to evolutionary theory despite modern advances in science that purport to prove the theory false -- agree that cells at least "appear to be designed." In the end, however, these scientists claim that the structure of the cell was achieved either by chance or by a combination of chance and necessity, Behe said.

Meyer said cells prove design because they do what even supercomputers cannot do -- they produce and transmit trillions of specific bits of information in a "digital" genetic code. Darwin, he said, had no concept of this code -- known today as DNA.

In 1869, T.H. Huxley, then called "Darwin's Bulldog" for his strident defense of evolutionary theory, regarded the cell as "a single homogenous globule of plasm." In other words, Meyer said, Darwin and Huxley believed life was made up in its simplest form of a kind of "chemical Jell-O." Today, however, life is regarded as an information phenomenon, with specific and complex messages being communicated from cells, Meyer said.

"Blind chance is not a significant explanation for the origin of the information in the DNA molecule," Meyer said, claiming that there apparently is no limit to the information DNA can contain. "We don't have anything in nature that can suggest information can arise from undirected processes."

Just as the view of the cell changed in the last century, so did the view of the cosmos, said Richards, a research fellow and director of media with the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Mich. He is the coauthor of "The Privileged Planet," recently adapted into a documentary that aired on PBS stations around the country.

Richards quoted Carl Sagan, the famed 20th-century scientist and science fiction author, who said the "cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be." Sagan believed in a materialistic explanation for the universe, one in which the universe and matter are infinite, and was offering a "doctrinal statement" in defense of his ideas.

But then there was Hubble, the powerful space telescope that revealed an expanding universe. If the universe was expanding, Richards said, scientists could calculate when it began at a point of "zero volume and infinite density."

That means that all of the matter in the universe would need to fit into a space less than the size of a pinhead -- and that could not have occurred, Richards said. Matter had to spring into existence from someplace, making it and the universe finite.

"There's no more dramatic change than from the materialistic view of the 19th century, which claimed that the material universe had always existed, to the view now in the 20th and 21st centuries that the universe had a beginning," Richards said.

"Matter is a crummy candidate for the ultimate explanation of existing reality," Richards said. "We all know that if something comes into existence, if it begins to exist, it had to have a cause."

Richards also said that the factors that make Earth habitable for human beings are not mere accidents of the cosmos. He said that for life to flourish on Earth, as many as 30 variables had to be met, among them a planet with an iron core that produces a magnetic field, a stabilizing moon that keeps the Earth tilted on its axis, the right atmosphere, the right planetary neighbors, the right single star around which planets orbit and the right galaxy in the "galactic habitable zone."

That these conditions were met "suggests conspiracy rather than coincidence," Richards said.

Nice turnout - more than 1,500. Man, I wish a group from Kansas City would fund one of these conferences. Hmmm...how could I make that happen?

Dawkins/O'Reilly

Atheist extrodinaire, Richard Dawkins, will be interviewed by Bill O'Reilly tomorrow night. Yikes! That should be quite the interview. I wonder if I'd be considered a really horrific mother if I skipped my son's baseball game to watch the fireworks instead.