Birds before dinosaurs, fish before birds?

I am not a biologist or zoologist in any active sense (amateur or professional)  but do take an interest in the major developments. One thing I have always been sceptical about is the notion that birds descended from dinosaurs. This theory has almost become a dogma but the evidence is very sparse and the conclusions don’t follow.

Feathers have been found on certain dinosaur fossils and, like birds, they give birth via eggs but :

• Fish also give birth via eggs

• The body plan of birds is nothing like that of dinosaurs

• Feathers could be evolutionary remnants from previously evolved birds

• No truly intermediary species between bird and dinosaur has been unearthed. (The archaeopteryx is not generally accepted as fulfilling this role.)




It  seems more feasible to me, as a non-expert, for a creature to have made the transition from sea to air rather than land to air. Swimming in the water could surely have developed into swimming in the air. Fins could have become wings.  Could not the first birds have evolved from fish? Flying fish have aerodynamic characteristics like a bird and are able to stay aloft for up to 45 seconds.

  

 Evolving wings and a very light, but in relative terms immensely powerful, streamlined body to propel land-based organisms through the air and against gravity seems like a very big step. Fish already know how to glide, dive and propel themselves in a fluid. Given the inventiveness and intelligence of the natural world I can’t see why this possibility is rarely discussed in the scientific press.

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Sinosaurotpery

I was encouraged to see that some qualified researchers who have previously been ignored are beginning to get taken seriously for proposing dinosaurs from birds rather than birds from dinosaurs. See, e.g., Alan Feduccia’s Is it a bird? Is it a dinosaur? In the New Scientist, 28 April 2012. This does not propose fish as the starting point but it claims there is mounting evidence for birds having preceded dinosaurs.

Feduccia claims that Sinosaurotpery (see photograph above) ,the small fossil recently found in China, an earlier discovery of which was first described in Nature in 1998, was erroneously jumped upon as evidence for dinosaurs from birds. To quote: ‘...no evidence then or now has emerged showing that these structures are anything other than collagen fibres supporting a typical reptilian frill. The fact that they were located within a clearly demarcated body outline ...was completely ignored.’ He also points out that 'current orthodoxy dictates that the entire suite of avian flight architecture, including aerodynamic wings and specialised brain structures, evolved in earthbound dinosaurs...’ To me as an outsider this does seem a stretch on credibility.

 It would all be a lot simpler if fossilised birds were found. Unfortunately, they are by necessity so finely constructed that they do not lend themselves to fossilisation, so we may have to wait for a clearer picture to emerge. It is a case of absence of evidence not being evidence of absence.  But this does seem to me another example of evolutionary biologists seeing what they expect to be there rather than what is in front of their eyes.

What gives me, with no training in biology or zoology or paleontology, the right to comment? Nothing. But sometimes people from outside the field can see things afresh or stimulate a professional scientist to think outside the box of the current dogma or say things which may risk prejudicing his career or credibility but which nevertheless need to be taken seriously.

 John

Reach me at cosmik.jo@gmail.com

See also http://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/hagfish.html

You are more than a human resource

Philip Hunter in Prospect (April 2012) states the slightly politically incorrect, but nevertheless quite probably true, message that ‘IQ turns out to be a consistent indicator of success for individuals, nations and companies.’  He cites two books: IQ and the wealth of nations (2002) and IQ and global inequality (2006) both by Richard Flynn and Tatu Vanhause which give extensive evidence and arguments for this.

If by ‘success’ we mean earning power there is no doubt that, all else being equal, higher IQ makes you more able to solve problems which require speed and complexity of reasoning, and this is bound to be of immense practical value in achieving goals in everyday life, science, business or care for others. There are many other factors that have a bearing on how much money you are able to earn and on your role in society. E.g. artistic talent, inventiveness, lateral thinking, social skill, communication skill, cunning, empathy, compassion, competitiveness, ruthlessness, perseverance, honesty, affability, physical strength, physique and attractiveness. However, intelligence is probably the single biggest factor and often a necessary condition for the others to be effective, rightly or wrongly.

In general people are much more likely to admit to a bad memory or laziness in acquiring knowledge or bad education or lack of talent or lack of imagination than to a having a low IQ. Why are people so touchy about their innate intelligence? And why is it taboo to admit different IQ levels in different racial or social groups? 

 Human beings have a strong tendency to gauge a person’s worth by how useful he or she is. In the west this tendency has increased with the secularisation of society and what was once called the Personnel department in an organisation is now Human Resources. Labour is sold on a free market basis where supply and demand dictates the wage level and people accumulate signs of wealth which come to be regarded as marks of status and prestige in a meritocracy. Hierarchies in western societies are becoming steeper again, returning to what they were before the social reforms of a century ago  instigated by a strange mixture of Marxism and Christianity; and the welfare of those at the bottom is becoming increasingly precarious. A large strata of society have to work longer hours to support a family than a generation ago and it is no longer possible for most people to bring up a family on the wages of one man or one woman.

It is bad enough to have a hard life, working long hours, with no job security, fear of being thrown into debt by illness, no time to enjoy life, little hope of giving our children a reasonable education and no period of retirement prosperity to look forward to. But if on top of this the lowest paid in society are to be regarded as trash because they are not so intelligent or as useful as those above them this is not only a tragic denial of a person’s spiritual value to our Creator but, as the victims at the bottom of the social order also lose faith in their divine worth, they will feel even more oppressed.

When that happens they will follow whoever presents themselves as a saviour. If God is removed from their worldview they will follow whoever sets himself or herself up as the one to offer security, prosperity and purpose. Adolf Hitler did it in a secular democracy, the Wiemar Republic, in the 1930s Germany, offering all these rewards to a deprived de-Christianised populace. It worked for a while but the end result was hell, mercifully superseded by a post-war administration which at least attempted to re-instate Christian values.

So it worries me when I see people basing their self worth and that of others on material success, status and money. History teaches us that they can be swept away without warning by economic collapse, war, plague, famine or natural disaster, and then, what...?

For a nation state to run effectively and fairly we have to recognise the reality that people are different and have, through accident or providence, different degrees of intelligence and other attributes. It is the only way that everyone can be matched to one of the multifarious tasks that need to be performed in any country. But in a spiritual sense we are equal and if we follow the commands of Jesus Christ we are on the way to making our earthly existence more like heaven than hell. Fortunately, in my own country (UK), despite aggressive atheism, the Christ-inspired values are still prevalent. But how long will they last without constant spiritual renewal to remind us that we are more than a human resource?

 See also Equal but not equal

John

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Jean Paul Sartre - not the way to Peace on Earth

This is an earlier posting republished because it seems to have vanished from the system.

The French existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) reached the conclusion that if God does not exist life is absurd. He did not believe in God and so proceeded to find a way of looking at reality which allows an individual to live meaningfully in an absurd reality.

 I have to admit that I have not seriously tried to read his classic opus Being and Nothingness because it seems flawed from the outset, assuming what philosophers have written about is correct (but wait, if there is no such thing as meaning or truth, how can one say anything is correct or incorrect?), and virtually incomprehensible from the first sentence. However, his conclusion that life is absurd without God is a conclusion I share and many have reached it independently.

If Sartre, and those who follow him, seriously think there is a way of living a Godless life that does not seem absurd to the one living it, then that life must be based wholly on illusion.

Thinking about this recently it occurred to me that one theme of the Holy Bible is that if we do not believe in God we go to something called hell. Metaphysically, ‘hell’ means to me and a growing number of Christians, a state of being beyond the physical world where those who do not believe they were created by God get the kind of existence they want.  At a practical earthly level it has a clear pragmatic meaning applicable to all humankind, regardless of faith or creed. Hell is indeed what happens in this life if we abandon belief in our Creator (the God who ‘so loved the world...’, not just Christians) and the absolute love and truth which emanate from God.

 Consider what happens when people abandon belief in the sacred source of being. Objective truth, love, loyalty, social institutions, the judicial system, laws, art, literature, music, religion, science, engineering and the universe itself are all totally arbitrary and meaningless. Any individual with the necessary charisma and self-belief (e.g. Hitler, Mao-Tse Tung or Stalin) can fool or force whole populations into his or her own illusory world-view, however atrocious. See also the posting 1984 and postmodernism.

 In a world that has abandoned God all doing good means is doing what makes you feel good or is expedient. A serial killer feels good doing what he does. In World War II  a concentration camp scientist starved a baby to death by forcing its mother to deny it milk, so he could see how long it could survive without milk. No doubt this made him feel good, either viscerally or in that he was gaining medical knowledge for the human race. Ancient pagans sacrificed humans to their numerous gods and this made them feel safe.

Others left old people to die in the wild when it was inconvenient to keep them alive.  Some do what modern society calls good because their society makes them feel good or because it gains the approval of others. Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and Mao Tse Tung’s (Mao Zedong’s) China made their people feel good in ways which would make us, the members of a western society, cringe. Bankers distort financial reality to get status and wealth. Criminals rob or murder more often and with increasing amounts of gratuitous violence.  Journalists invent or exaggerate to increase sales. Scientists distort reality because they want fame or fortune rather than to honour their Creator, or because they want to feel like God. Some medieval priests, departing from the command of Christ, tortured people to death for their heretical beliefs.

All through the Holy Bible there are warnings of what will happen when we abandon God. If in their pride and arrogance societies abandon their Creator and the divine origin of right and wrong, truth and falsity, then what follows is truly hell on earth. It is a guarantee of war, famine, disease, ignorance, mass insanity and a downward spiral to social chaos. Anything goes once the social strictures, unbacked by God, have faded away. I’ m not saying that God is a fiction designed to maintain order. There are sound philosophical arguments for the existence of God as well as a wealth of biblical text written and assembled hundreds of years before the Roman church. The fact that disorder arises when God is abandoned is one indication at least that our Creator is very much involved in our progress as a species and it is not surprising that disbelief is classed as a sin..

Abandoning God is not the way to Peace on Earth.