Bird breathing anatomy breaks dino-to-bird dogma

There is no doubt that the birds evolved from dinosaurs. What this stupid attempt at "national Lampoon SCience" has done is to show how really dumb the Creationists are. Alan Feduccia is one of the deniers of Theropds to birds evolution. HE DOES NOT DENY THAT BIRDS AROSE FROM DINOS. Actually what Feduccia and others argue is that Birds didnt arise ferom THEROPODS as the common ancestor, but from ARCHOSAURS which were the break off point of the earliest dinosaurs that first appeared on the early Triassic. This entire argument casts NO DOUBT on anything, it merely shows that the debate among paleontologists is a very geeky and arcane one, in which one must be aware of the subtle points of the debate ,LEST, like Gunky and his friednds, YOU DONT WIND UP LOOKING LIKE A COMPLETE MOWRON.


Im much closer t5o the subject than gunky, however, I really dont give a **** about the academic argument as to whether birds came from Theropods or Archosaurs. Just tell me hen youve worked it out .

Also, relying on Free Republics version of Johny Sarfatis work is doubly hilarious. Sarafti, in case weve forgottten, is a physical chemist (Actually his PhD is in the spectroscopy of Chalcedony). Sarfati has been a vocal, (yet unschooled) critic of the entire science underlying evolution. He used to do the peddling for Answers in Genesis till he was asked to leave. Now hes with CReation Ministries. Hes most famous for his AIG minipub about the evidence for a Global Flood.Hes got A pHD in physical chem and hes a denier of isotopic dating. Hes had to put one side of his brain (at least) to sleep.

Gunga thinks birds evolved from *poof* the magic dragon.

Feduccia has been going on with this argument for about 30 years now. Hes getting more and more supporters to his side as the decades move on.
Vertebrate fossils, for the most part , dont have any real applied use except to isolate specific oil producing formations in te Mesozoic.

I was watching a NOVA special last night about these guys who, practicing Paleontology in AUstralia for years, they finally wre notified by e-mail of a cave deposit in the karst of western australia and it was the highlights of their careers to find a carnivorous marsupial in these cave deposit. I felt doubly blessed to not have had to sit upon my ass waiting for news of a significant fossil deposit to "make my career". Sad really.

There are two gigantic problems for evolutionites such as our Farmerman here involving birds, which you never see in print.

The first such problem arises from probability theory and combinatorics. Suppose for a moment that you aren't a flying bird, but that you wish to become one: You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, the complex system for turning flight feathers open on upstrokes and closed on downstrokes, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through lungs and super efficient heart, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be anti-functional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitesimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitesimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidirectional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

A velociraptor could of course simply hatch as a bird with all of the new features required at a stroke, but that would still just be a probabilistic miracle and the same miracle would have to occur twice on the same day, one male, the other female...

The other giant problem arises from a study of chickens. You have noticed that chickens have some sort of very limited flight capability but could not generally be called flying birds. That is because they originated as some sort of a little 1 pound or 1.5 pound jungle fowl and then were bred into a six or eight pound domestic animal, but still have the one pound bird's wings. Geese are as large and heavy as chickens and fly perfectly well because they were created with the wings needed by a bird of their size.

Again, a flying bird needs a dozen or so highly specialized biological systems, the lack of any one of which will cause the whole idea not to work. He needs wings, flight feathers, highly specialized and efficient hearts and lungs which are unlike those of anything else, a highly specialized kind of tail and general balance parameters, etc.

Now, a velociraptor has none of those things, yet the evolution crowd claims that a type of velociraptor, given enough time, basically turned into today's flying birds. Is that possible? The velociraptor-bird wannabe would be working from a miniscule numeric base, and would require numerous probabilistic miracles, along with some government agency like AFDC to feed him during the thousands of generations while he was carrying the incomplete wings and flight feathers and what not around as liabilities rather than assets. Again, they only BECOME assets on the day that the whole deal works.

Consider the kiwi, the auk, the ostrich, the emu, the penguin, and the whole host of flightless birds on the earth not only now, but during the last 50,000 years or so. At least some of these guys have some vestige of the things which the velociraptor would need to become a bird; if the velociraptor's trip to flying-birdhood is viewed as 1000 miles, the kiwi and what not need travel less than a mile.

According to evolutionist doctrine, somewhere within recorded history, some kiwi or emu or other such should have started to fly again, and we should occasionally look overhead and see them. At the very least, the fossil record should show such a thing. It doesn't.

The question: If the kiwi can't make it the last mile, given some sort of a start on all of the necessary organs and biological systems needed to become a flying bird, then how is the velociraptor going to make his 1000-mile journey?

Better yet, man has raised chickens all over the world throughout recorded history, and only for the last 50 years or so in cages. Chickens even have some minimalistic ability to fly, and the numeric base they've had to work from is immense. The numbers of escaped chickens over the last 5000 years or so must be in the billions. If the kiwi has less than a mile to travel to become a flying bird, then the feral chicken has less than a foot. According to all logic, given evolutionist dogma, some group of escaped chickens should have fully regained flight over the last 5000 years, and we should see them up overhead.

The reality is that once you lose any part of a complex trait, it's gone forever, and neither the Easter rabbit nor the Evolution fairy has any power to get it back for you. If you lack some complex trait altogether, such as the case of the velociraptor wishing to become a bird, your only hope will be God, Dr. Moreau, or somebody else with a fairly good idea of what he is about, and a bit of intelligent genetic re-engineering. Mutations and "natural selection" don't cut it in the real world.

These probability arguments are all predicated on the [false] assumption that flight was the original goal from the start, and it wasn't (evolution doesn't work that way, which you *should* know, but you obviously don't). So the presumption above is simply false, as we've demonstrated many times in the past.

The rest of your post is just a cut/paste which is a derivation of the original false assumption, so it's a waste of time.

Have a nice snakey day

Probability has nothing to do with anything. Adaptation and drift are non probabalistic responses to internal structures and external morphology. The HOX gene is present in ALL organisms. What the evolutionary response has been from archosaurs (or theropods) to birds is a simple turn off and on of HOS=X structures by DNA that now resides within the "junk" sections of the organisms genome. None of the effective DNA ever disappears, it merely gets hung in the "genomic closet" as a fossil of an organisms makeup. I understand how the Creationists SO DERLY WANT to make it sound like theres an infinetessimal chance of any ocurences , but, once an organism had HOX, the multiplication of its format is simple and inevitable(dependent uypon the environmental stresses and opportunities)

Thats just total eyewash. The celebrated Archeopteryx fossils (of which we have over 200 in the worlds collections now), show the intermediate structures that sre "caught" between reptile and bird. Most ALl of these intermediary structures have been experimentally jiggered with in genetic experiments. For example, a beak with teeth has been shown to be simply derived by just turning on the respective "transposable element" in the area of the genome that accrues to the cephalon of an organism. Once the controlling DNA, as it exists in the very earliets common ancestor is first manifest, IT NEVER GOES AWAY, so your entire point is garbage.

You are insane. Your logic doesnt even pass a basic laugh test. "Evolutionist doctrine" (whatever the hell that is ) says noting about birds doing anything but adapting to their environment or becoming extinct. The ratites clan is highly adapted to a land locked life . The ancestors of these birds seemed to be all over the drifting continental landmasses so that the ratites of today now look like theyve diverged from at least two rootstocks. ALL OF WHICH IS IN THE FOSSIL RECORD AND IN THEIR GENES. The process of evolution is pretty much unidirectional with some diversions in specific manifestations. For example, both marsupials and placentals have evolved "sabertoothed" species.
PS , your examples of domestic geese and chickens are about as robust and argument as a sugar cube in a cup of coffee. Domestic geese dont fly. THeyve been domesticated , like chickens, by artificial selection to be big reatsed and meatiwer. Thus the Long Island, Pekin Runners, and SCobies dont fly ata all. Several groups of chickens (like bantams) CAN fly . They are all of the same family as pheasants who, as we know, are powerful short distance flyers that rely upon gliding after a radical power styroke.

Chickens are best adated for land feeding and they only fly to perch or get away from danger. Even big fat Wyandotte hens (like I own) can fly quite well. Your analogies just done even hold water. A bird thats adapted for one way of life doesnt "REadapt to another by just leaving it alone" Thats ridiculous and you know it.
However, whats even more ridiculous is the existence of all these species , so adapted to specific tight niches in the planet, you would have these "Created Separately"? Now whos sounding idiotic.


Archeopteryx has been challenged by Creationists as a "bird" or as a "lizard" somehow you Creationists should make up your mind and stick with it because you are sounding like youre beginning to become an "evolutionist"

Youve abandoned your original thread assumption that several of the major researchers in evolution of birds actually seem to deny that evolution has occured. Youve trapped yourself by cutting and pasting what you dont understand. Several researchers DO deny that the evolution of birds arose out of a specific line of reptiles. They present their own evidence that birds have arisen from a differnt line of reptiles.

The lung **** means nothing, THATS WHAT EVOLUTION CAN ACCOMPLISH. There are many species, consider Boas . They have only one huge functioning lung. Yet they bear the remnants of another and the remnants of hips and legs.

Finally, the unglossed truth. Gunga is insane.

(but that doesn't mean he's gonna put you on his ignore list. Nice try though.)

That's because the snake fucked up and fucked with the woman and by inference with the Lord, who basically said something like "**** you, ASSHOLE, upon they BELLY shalt thou go (and all of thy descendants to the end of time), and reduced him to his present estate.

That was great! Do another one, do another one, please....

Next one is gonna be about HOW THE LEOPARD GOT HIS SPOTS.

Kipling nailed that one, didn't he?

Does he really believe this crap, or is he just trolling from the comfort of his autistics asylum?

I think that snakey is just a bit frustrated with his "belief system". There appears to be lots of story line but no characters or stage props in his version.

Jesus, Guys. This is an idiot child. I suspect he's a teenager, or until recently was, but even if he is simply an adult with wilfully defective understanding, some things about him are so obvious as to be embarrassing (except that he hasn't the honesty nor the self-assessment to be embarrassed).

The only reason he started this thread is so he could post that spoof magazine cover, and he thinks he's clever by association for having done so.

I think Gunga is actually a pre-teen schoolgirl (in a pink dress with ruffles) from a hoity-toity little neighborhood in Pasadena, pretending to be redneck bow-hunting dip from the Ozarks.

The snake actually is one of those creatuers for which the bible version makes sense and the evoloser version doesn't come close.

How the hell could any creature with legs evolve into a snake. Doesn't evoloserism have to proceed from advantage to advantage with every change along the way to being some new kind of animal? I mean, the first step towards any land creature become a fricking snake would be losing all four of his legs.

You gonna tell me that's an advantage? Ever actually see any sort of a creature or human which loses both arms and legs in some sort of an accident?? Is there some sport which quadraplegics excel at??

By the same token, if you were gonna PUNISH somebody, say possibly for believing in something really ungodly stupid like evolution, then turning them into a snake would be as good as anything I could think of.

Ive gotta savor this guy. Snakes evolved from burrowing lizards there are a few classes of fossils from the mid Cretaceous and a few from earlier times. These show the free quadrate bones in both lizards and snakes that share their ancestry from the ancient Squamata that include the Prolacertans and the mosasaurs of the class Tylosauria. (The problem isnt so much fossils anymore, its the presentation and availability of fossils in the stratigraphy of pre-drifted Pangean subcontinents).

Also, snakes present a special case when viewing their groups genetic makeup with their shared living groups oftuateras, snakes , and lizards. In these groupsThe HoX genes have expressed themselves in the thoracic section . The "fossil" genes associated with limbed pre-snakey lizards are still inthe genetic makeup of most snakes (There are actually several "legl;ess" lizards which have lizardy cephalons and neck vertebrae.The lizards and tuatera keep the expression of Hox extant.

"How" isnt really a problem at all, weve got the fossils and weve got the genetics (we win!).
The problem is WHEN. If we carry the evolution all the way back to their common ancestors ,these groups all evloved not much later than the mid Triassic. However, since the "Home" continents were busy splitting apart at that time, we havent found any snake fossils yet. Im betting that , like Tiiktalik, some enterprising museum paleo dept will mount expeditions into the middle Triassic continental deposits and try to map lake margin deposits so that snake/lizard fossils could be located in "fossil friendly" stratigraphy. That would be how Id approach it. Its merely a problem of space time, not "worldview".