Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

I don't think it possible to do that but from what anti-IDers have said about it it must be their obvious aim.

There's no chance of ever fixing society's problems. You are focussed on trivia. Science has no room for democracy or freedom.

I defined "scientist" way back for you and its the opposite of that. "Goals" don't come into it. Darwin would never have got a grant out of that committee.

I see... So you were lying when you said you actually thought I was a girl. You insult everyone by assigning the wrong gender to them.

Your"definition" of scientist needs quite a bit of refinement and some more hands on.

Butchers discover an ancient animal
They possibly found an American mastodon's skull.
By LYDIA GENSHEIMER
The Kansas City Star

Mark and Garry Bichelmeyer have been butchers and meat cutters their entire working lives. But they've never come across a bone like this one before.

On Aug. 16, when the brothers were on a kayak trip with their cousin Mike Billups, and Garry Bichelmeyer's grandson, Kyler Mogusar, they came across something sticking out of the Wakarusa River.

"It was so gigantic as compared to cattle or buffalo, things that we've worked with, so we knew it had to be an elephant or a pre-historic animal," said Garry Bichelmeyer of Tonganoxie.

What the men found, according to Larry Martin, curator of vertebrae paleontology at the University of Kansas, is a fragmented, but nearly complete skull of an American mastodon. It is a relative of the elephant and is thought to have been extinct for about 10,000 years.

Garry Bichelmeyer had spotted part of the skull in the river. He had initially thought it was a rock or a log, but quickly realized it was part of an ancient skull. The men fished the mastodon jaw ?- the length of a man's arm ?- out of the mud and a foot of water.

"Mark was just as muddy as a cat out of a hole," Garry Bichelmeyer said. "He was excited and of course the excitement spread. We just went crazy when we saw the teeth."

He said the enamel is still on the teeth and that each tooth is the size of two of his fists. The size of the teeth confirmed the men's suspicions that the skull was very old, said Billups, of Wyandotte County.

"I'm 51 years old and I've seen a lot of animals," he said, "and I've never seen anything with teeth this big, so we knew it was prehistoric."

After making the discovery, Garry Bichelmeyer called Martin, who said that the skull, which he estimates at 10,000 to 20,000 years old, is quite a find.

"For instance, we don't have one in the museum here and we've been around for nearly 120 years," he said. "If in 120 years we haven't found one, then it's pretty rare."

After the men pulled the jaw out of the water, they spent an hour collecting all of the skull's pieces, and then loaded the parts into the kayaks.

"We weren't going to leave it there, because we didn't even know where we were," said Mark Bichelmeyer, of De Soto. "The jaw and everything weighed about 80 pounds and the rest of the pieces weighed nearly the same."

On Tuesday, the men brought the skull to Lawrence for Martin to examine.

"The big deal is that a find of this sort of a mastodon is not something that we've made before in Kansas," Martin said. Because of Missouri's many spruce forests, mastodons lived in greater numbers in Missouri than in Kansas, Martin said. But he added that there probably have been only 20 to 30 mastodon skulls found in the entire country.

"If you were collecting a stamp, it would be a good one," Martin said.

The men think the skull was only visible due to the unusually low water level of the river. Mark Bichelmeyer said if they had found the skull a few years ago, he thinks it may have been in one piece.

But Martin said the men were lucky to have found the skull at all, since it had recently been subjected to the wear and tear of the river.

"The thing to remember is that if they hadn't collected it, it wouldn't have lasted longer than a year," Martin said.

The men said their find has generated a lot of interest, with good reason.

"If I was a dentist, I sure would want to have one of these teeth because it's a coffee-table piece extraordinaire," Garry Bichelmeyer said.

The men are hoping to enlist the assistance of KU graduate students to help put the skull back together. After that, they aren't sure what they'll do with the skull, but currently have plans to display it at the Tonganoxie steakhouse owned by Garry and Mark Bichelmeyer's brother.

"My brother is already trying to figure out woolly mammoth burgers or something," Garry Bichelmeyer said.

The men aren't the first to discover mastodon bones in the Wakarusa. In the late 1800s, KU Chancellor Francis Huntington Snow was fishing on the Wakarusa and standing on what he thought was a rock when he realized it was the lower jaw of a mastodon.

"It is one of the oldest catalog specimens in our collection," Martin said.

He said the discovery means that a little more knowledge has been gained about the past.

"The only criteria we have to predict the future is based on our ability to understand the past," Martin said. "Every little bit, every mastodon skull, helps us get a little further down that pathway."

Statement from Chief of Staff David Dunn on Eligible AC/SMART Grant Majors
(U.S. Department of Education, August 24, 2006)

David Dunn, Chief of Staff for U.S. Department of Education, today issued the following statement on eligible majors under the Academic Competitiveness/SMART grant program:

"Recent news reports have suggested that Evolutionary Biology is not an eligible major under the new SMART grant program. This is incorrect and in fact the opposite is true. Evolutionary biology is a major eligible to receive SMART grants under the 'Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology' category of majors.

"The misunderstanding occurred as the result of a draft document that omitted evolutionary biology from a list of majors put forth for use by colleges. As soon as the omission came to our attention, we took steps to correct it. However, regardless of its omission on that one document, evolutionary biology was and continues to be SMART grant eligible.

"The Department is making the necessary correction which will be in place before final guidance on AC/SMART grants is issued."

(If, according to Dr. Martin, 'it wouldn't have lasted more than a year', it is rather hard to believe that it has lasted 10,000-20,000 years.)

real life wrote:

(If, according to Dr. Martin, 'it wouldn't have lasted more than a year', it is rather hard to believe that it has lasted 10,000-20,000 years.)

He probably means "wouldn't have laster more than a year in its presently exposed condition". I thought that was pretty obvious.

Otherwise he would be implying that it's less than a year old. Do you think that's what Dr. Martin was implying, RL?

I might have to drive to Tongy to look at the thing.

RL wrote-

Quote:

I might have to drive to Tongy to look at the thing.

That's the general idea mate. If you're thinking that there's millions of others doing the same and if a few thousand a month actually do it they are in business. Well- you will want muckin' and fodderin' when you get there. And ice-creams for the kids. A fashion shop or two for the wives who find mastodon's jawbones, moulded in a butcher's shop or not, boring after about 2 microseconds.

Do the bones contain any chemicals that might help to lower cholesterol levels. Most things do and I can't see why an extinct mastadon's jawbone would be any exception.

You could get a health farm and spin offs.

How much is a walk-up (is that a 2-up and 2-down in our money) in Tongy, which has a very nice name of which much could be made by a skilled ad. man starting with the jawbone of a mastadon.