If you want to hear 20 people all complain in unison for hours on end ask a room of 20 scientists what they think of secondary science articles written by journalists.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad science articles written for the general public. Some is due to the authors not understanding the science. Some is due to the authors twisting the science to meet their own agenda. There are some great science journalists out there (e.g. Carl Zimmer), but they are too few and far between.
Knowing this, I try to be patient with non-scientists because they are misinformed by science articles written for them. I say a try, but hey, I’m human and sometimes I fail at the task.
I was reminded of this by a science fiction story the other day; in an alien planet explorers encountered a creature with feather-like covering that both served to shed rain and to enable low-level gliding, i.e. it would start running, spread its limbs, and proceed to keep running except only having to take one step with a foot where a dozen were needed without the feathers/limbs, a sort of hop-and-glide. What made it interesting was that one of the characters wondered out loud if that was as far as wings had developed yet.
Discover magazine when I had a subscription was darned good at getting things straight; it wasn’t uncommon to see an article that had a note at the end showing which scientist(s) in the relevant field were asked to review the articles. I think Disney bought the magazine, so I’m no longer confident of the quality control.
Having had time to ponder and evaluate, I realise I allowed myself to get sucked in. Wishbones may be considered unique to birds but they are by no means definitive. The enlarged sternum is the base for flight muscles not to mention the honeycomb bone structure.
You appear to have ignored the phenomina of parallel Evolution, whereby a feature can occur in disparate creatures.
Feather as insulation are a two edged sword. They basically reduce any heat exchange, be it into or out of the creature. The Ostrich has very long and exposed legs to facilitate the heat loss during motion. Your feathered dinosaur would collapse within minutes of running. .During flight a bird sucks in and expells air by the beat of it’s wings. If the wings are motionless or not exerting pressure on the air sac that motion will not occur. IOW there are functions that cannot be achieved by gliding, or static wings.
We are back to irriducebility.
An incomplete bird will not pass the test of survival of the fittest.
I am sorry.to pour cold water onto your hot coals,.and I still appreciate the effort involved.
I don’t know if this has been answered, but what are the criteria by which a fossil might be deemed “transitional”?
Until those criteria are laid out, then any would-be “transitional fossil” would be (and is) dismissed out of hand. So what should we be looking for that would qualify?
In layman’s terms a creature that has partial attributes of supposedly successive types. So a reptile with feathers is deemed transitional but only partial. A fish with lungs is often considered transitional.
The point is that the basic types have more than one unique and defining characteristics so there needs to be more than one transitional state to develop from one to the other. The complication is whether the attribute is ongoing or just a sideways parallel trait.
That would depend on the situation. Birds can fluff out their feathers either to retain more warmth or to allow more air flow and thus remain cooler.
[Now I’m wondering if there are any mammals that can do the same with hair/fur!]
Only if you ignore all the fossil evidence; it shows that at each little step along the way between primitive feathers and flight there were organisms that functioned just fine – at least until they evolved into something with better feathers that out-competed them.
A transitional fossil is any fossilized remains of a life form that exhibits traits common to both an ancestral group and its derived descendant group.
Over the last twenty years most new fossil species have fit this definition, and a number of them have been predicted before they were found. That predictive capacity strongly supports evolution (just as predictive capacity strongly supports geology, physics, etc. – if your theory is good enough to predict things that are found to be true, it;s a darned good theory).
For YECers, nothing qualifies, even the ones that were predicted – they just demand more fossil species that will fill in the new gaps. For a rational person, using a theory to predict something and then having that prediction happen is convincing support for the theory.
A good example of a transitional fossil that wasn’t predicted is Darwinopterus:
A good example of one that was predicted is Tiktaalik:
There is an inherent fallacy in looking for specifics (like feathers). It is the equivellent of optical illusions. The eye see something and try to make sense of it whereas in reality the structure cannot exist
Fossils are jigsaw puzzles without a guiding picture and less defined edges to fit together.
I am reminded of a Star Trek Voyager episode called Living Witness where the same basic imperial evidence is re-interpreted again and again changing the narrative.
What always amazes me is the way scientists can deduce ,not only the internal organs, but behaviour patterns based purely on skeletal structure.
Even though it’s only available to holy post subscribers, there is a very interesting Skyepod episode about certainty and stupidity (and the direct relationship between the two) that Skye Jethani just released.
In it, among the many examples he discussed are how lightning rod technology was received (or not!) by 18th century Christians, and the heavy price they paid for clinging to their certainty that they already knew what causes lightening (God). And it was fascinating to hear how they handled the cognitive dissonance of seeing that it was almost always churches being struck and burnt down, and almost never taverns or brothels or any other establishments in town.
You are going to get me to subscribe it seems. I tend to be cheap and just listen to the free episodes, but need to support them in a good cause. I noticed the Babylon Bee mentioned them in the post they had describing “woke “ churches (along with David French and other good folk). So that pushes me to subscribe as well.
Good marketing strategy on their part! The free access does get a whole lot of their good stuff, but I like them enough that I don’t mind supporting them and enjoy gleaning the last bits they reserve for the Holy Post plus subcribers. (And I’m pretty cheap - so you know it doesn’t cost much).
The Lightning rods observation was (to me) the most interesting and historical connection he made in that episode, and I could easily fill you in on the details of that if you wanted. But if you log in and listen for yourself, I think you’d enjoy it too.
So in what ways does the entire fossil record not show transitional fossils all along?
Because, in the past, the expectation was that between “this fossil” (A) and “that fossil” (E) there should be something that looks kinda like both with exactly those “partial attributes” (let’s say, C). Then something that looks an awful lot like C is discovered. But then that “in between fossil” (C) is not deemed “transitional” because it’s just a separate species, and now we’re looking for more “in betweens” (B and D).
The existence of a case of fraud does not discount other cases any more than a counterfeit one hundred dollar bill makes all one hundred dollar bills illegitimate.
Depends who you are talking to .Dedicated supported will claim that we already have enough proof, not in every line that would be ridiculous but they see enough similarities and transitions to make the assumption that they exist.
People like me are more cynical. But, then again, as you will no doubt hear, ,my core knowledge is about 50 years out of date. In tthe list @T_aquaticus gave me I only knew Arachaeopterix and the last pigeon.
Suffice it to say that modern scientist are convinced that Evolution can do what ToE claims. Then again, if the list I was shown is an example then I am still not convinced.
Both wishbones and bones with honeycomb structure are found in dinosaurs.
It seems that you have completely changed gears. You started out by saying that these species couldn’t even exist because they aren’t viable. Now you are trying to say that it is caused by convergent evolution.
Then how do birds not collapse after exerting themselves for a short time in hot climates?
Umm, no. If birds could only breath by beating their wings then they would die.
Their are muscles in the chest that move air through their lungs. It has nothing to do with their wings.
Also, dinosaurs had the same air sac system of breathing that birds have.
It would seem that we have the opposite problem here. You are invested in these fossils not existing, so no matter what features fossils have you will refuse to accept them as transitional.
The concept is pretty simple. You compare two divergent taxa and find the features that are unique to each. A transitional would be an organism that has a mixture of those two feature sets. For example, Australopithecines have a mixture of more basal ape features and modern human features. Tiktaalik has a mixture of features from fish and amphibians. Bird transitional fossils have dinosaur features not found in any living bird and bird features not found in other dinosaurs.
Ahh, yes. The whole evolution denial math. Each and every transitional fossil creates two new gaps, so the more transitional fossils we find the less supported evolution becomes.
Methinks we are both polarising here. I did not mention maths
That is not what I said. The wings supplement air intake during flight. Tey are not the main source. The whole point is that flight takes a great deal of energy, much more than running
Yawn.
Flying has its own dynamics including heat exchange.
Look, we can argue physiology all ways, it is less than definitive. Fossils, by their definition are bone structures and not even actual bones. To discern the internal structure of the bone you would need a cross-section (I would hope you had them). The presence of specific soft organs can only be deduced from modern equivellents which sort of is assuming that they are the same, which is part of Evolutionary theory.
The mantra about faith applies
For those who believe no proof is needed
For those who do not believe no proof is enough.
In the case of Evolution I sit on one side and you sit on the other. ( I suspect the reverse is the case when talking about God)
“During flight a bird sucks in and expells air by the beat of it’s wings. If the wings are motionless or not exerting pressure on the air sac that motion will not occur. IOW there are functions that cannot be achieved by gliding, or static wings.
We are back to irriducebility.”
You tried to imply that bird transitional species would have to be flapping their forelimbs in order to breath. That simply isn’t the case. T. rex had the same type of lungs that birds have, and its arms weren’t going to fuel any breathing. Also, gliding doesn’t take much energy, so you can have a wing without needing lots of energy.
No irreducibility.
You don’t understand the dynamics.
I have always been fascinated by the use of “faith” in trying to argue against evolution. It’s as if people are trying to drag science down to their level in order to disqualify it. Strangely, you never hear scientists trying to argue against ID/creationism by calling it science.
We have the evidence. We have the transitional fossils. We have DNA evidence in piles and piles. No faith is needed.
