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BrandonIke
September 11th 2003, 11:19 PM
Rossum, in his above post, is wrong about the missing link.

Dr Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, was asked why he had included no transitional forms in his book on evolution. '… I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them … Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils … I will lay it on the line there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.'

Dr Colin Patterson, letter to Luther D. Sunderland, 10 April, 1979, as published in Darwin's Enigma, Master Books, 1984, p.89.

JS: Of course Archaeopteryx was 'bird-sized' — it was a true bird! This is probably the evolutionists' favourite claim of a transitional form, supposedly half-way between a reptile and a bird. But Alan Feduccia, an ornithologist of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, claims:

'Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of 'paleobabble' is going to change that.'

Cited in Virginia Morell, Archaeopteryx: Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms, Science 259:764–65.

Archaeopteryx had fully-formed flying feathers (including asymmetric vanes and ventral, reinforcing furrows as in modern flying birds), the classical elliptical wings of modern woodland birds, and a wishbone for attachment of muscles responsible for the downstroke of the wings. Its brain was essentially that of a flying bird, with a large cerebellum and visual cortex. The fact that it had teeth is irrelevant to its alleged transitional status — a number of extinct birds had teeth, while many reptiles do not. Furthermore, like other birds, both its maxilla (upper jaw) and mandible (lower jaw) moved. In most vertebrates, including reptiles, only the mandible moves.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/2403.asp

By the way, modern birds were found fossilized in layers UNDERNEATH archaeopteryx.

yeah sorry for the long post too.

DivineOb
September 12th 2003, 01:02 AM
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/2437/misquote.htm

*yawn*

Why do Christians lie so much?

geochron
September 12th 2003, 01:50 AM
Today @ 06:02 AM post located here (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=209824#post209824)
DivineOb:

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Hangar/2437/misquote.htm

*yawn*

Why do Christians lie so much?

It's in the bible.

"Thou shalt [...] bear false witness"

Passant
September 12th 2003, 08:56 AM
"What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the
good and for the Christian church...a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a
helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them."

rossum
September 12th 2003, 05:06 PM
BrandonIke,

Welcome to Theology Web. I suspect that you pressed the "New Thread" button rather than the "Post a Reply" button, a mistake I have sometimes made myself. I assume that you are responding to one of my posts in the Ron Wyatt thread (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=5004&highlight=wyatt).

Having searched that thread I cannot find any reference I have made to the "missing link" though I do refer to transitional fossils, and in particular Archaeopteryx. Judging by your quote from Alan Feduccia it is this that you are referring to.

Do you have any problems with any of the facts about dinosaurs, Archaeopteryx or birds that I gave in that thread?

The preamble to the Patterson quote, and a whole section of your post from "JS:" on are both taken from AiG. You correctly give the reference, but it would be better if you clearly indicated where the quoted sections begin and end.

AiG quote Colin Patterson. As DivineOb implies, this is not the first time this quote has been seen. Background details, including a clarification from Colin Patterson himself, are available on this webpage (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html). These old creationist quotes have been around for so long, 1979 for the Patterson quote, that they no longer have much impact. Argumentum ad quotemine is not a very successful tactic. Geochron's tongue in cheek example is a good example of why such quotes do not work. If the sense of a specific quote is against the whole tenor of a scientist's work then the quote is almost always ignorable. Quoting Stephen Jay Gould to show that evolution is wrong is like quoting Jesus to show that God does not exist - it will not change anyone's mind.

AiG quote Alan Feduccia. I too can quote Alan Feduccia from Discover magazine:
Question:
Creationists have used the bird-dinosaur dispute to cast doubt on evolution entirely. How do you feel about that?

Feduccia's answer:
Creationists are going to distort whatever arguments come up, and they've put me in company with luminaries like Stephen Jay Gould, so it doesn't bother me a bit. Archaeopteryx is half reptile and half bird any way you cut the deck, and so it is a Rosetta stone for evolution, whether it is related to dinosaurs or not. These creationists are confusing an argument about minor details of evolution with the indisputable fact of evolution: Animals and plants have been changing. The corn in Mexico, originally the size of the head of a wheat plant, has no resemblance to modern-day corn. If that's not evolution in action, I do not know what is.

http://www.discover.com/feb_03/breakdialogue.html (at the bottom of the page)

Alan Feduccia thinks that birds evolved from reptiles, but not specifically from dinosaurs. There are certainly arguments within science, but the fact that scientists disagree does not prove science wrong. Sometimes Christians disagree, does that prove Christianity wrong?

I think you need to be aware that while theological arguments may be resolved by quoting from authority, scientific arguments are resolved by the preponderance of data. The only quotes that really matter in science are references to the scientific papers where the data is found.

By the way, modern birds were found fossilized in layers UNDERNEATH archaeopteryx.
This is wrong. No modern bird has ever been found in any strata earlier than Archaeopteryx. I suspect that you may be referring to the Triassic Protoavis. This is certainly not a modern bird, IIRC it has teeth which no modern bird does. There are doubts about whether it is even a bird at all, the skeleton is badly crushed and it might just be a small dinosaur. See this webpage (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/archaeopteryx/info.html#protoavis) for more details and references. Even if Protoavis is a bird then that does not impact the status of Archaeopteryx as a transitional. Did your parents die just because you were born? Archaeopteryx could have survived alongside its descendants for a long time. If you are not talking about Protoavis then could you please supply a reference to your source.

I will be on holiday from tomorrow, so I will not be looking in again for a week.


rossum