The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Historical insights & thoughts about the world we live in - and the social conditioning exerted upon us by past and current propaganda.
simonshack
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by simonshack »

smj wrote: ... there are whispers that he [Barnum Brown] was even an "intelligence asset"; and yes he was named after that Barnum we're told.
Well, dear smj - it looks like those "whispers" about him being an "intelligence ass-et" are even mentioned on Wickedpedia :
During World War I and II, he [Barnum Brown] worked as an "intelligence asset." During his many trips abroad he wasn't above picking up spare cash acting as a corporate spy for oil companies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_Brown
Uhmm... So I guess there's nothing odd with paleontologists picking up spare cash acting as intelligence ass-ets - or as spies for oil companies? All part of your average paleontologist's livelihood, I suppose?

Here's a screenshot of Barnum Brown's Wiki page - which has me wondering: did this Mr Brown ("named after the circus showman P.T. Barnum" ) ever have a REAL name of his own? Does anyone know the full / real birth name of "Mr Bones"? :blink:
Image

Oh well, I guess that the discoverer of the fearsome "Tyrannosaurus Rex" needed to 'hide' behind a circus name for a reason. :rolleyes:
smj
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by smj »

Not only was Barnum an "intelligence asset" for the narrative...

"In 1941 the American government contacted museums to find out where their curators had done fieldwork in order to harvest information about remote and strategically vital areas. Although Brown was about to retire, he happily obliged, citing his travels to Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Patagonia, France, England, Turkey, Greece, Ethiopia, Egypt, Somalia, Arabia, India, and Burma. He also volunteered for service and was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of today’s CIA, where he used his knowledge of Samos and the Aegean Islands to help plan one of the potential invasion routes into Europe. From 1943 to 1945 he was transferred to the Bureau of Economic Warfare, where his duties included “interpreting aerial photographs to detect camouflage in areas of Africa, India, Burma, and the Mediterranean Islands” as well as conducting an aerial reconnaissance of oil fields in Alberta, where he had earlier prospected for petroleum on the Duke of Windsor’s large ranch."
https://web.archive.org/web/20150110055 ... -collector

... he is also an inspiration for the youth...

Image
http://www.nonfictiondetectives.com/201 ... bones.html

... and like his namesake; he liked to joke around on the sucker's dime...


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpkaRQfUGTw
smj
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by smj »

Roy Chapman Andrews would tell you himself that he was a bad-ass adventurer:

“In [my first] fifteen years [of field work] I can remember just ten times when I had really narrow escapes from death. Two were from drowning in typhoons, one was when our boat was charged by a wounded whale, once my wife and I were nearly eaten by wild dogs, once we were in great danger from fanatical lama priests, two were close calls when I fell over cliffs, once was nearly caught by a huge python, and twice I might have been killed by bandits.”
http://mentalfloss.com/article/49186/ro ... iana-jones

... but the bandits were no match for Roy, as this good christian confirms...


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtNk9iuuikc
http://www.bibleandscience.com/murray.htm

... And all the real bad-ass adventurers get to join the Explorers Club and hang out with other bad-asses, other bad-asses like Peter Freuchen...

Image
http://ultrafactsblog.com/post/11660289 ... ife-dagmar

... you can find "Indiana Jones' whip" next to Peter's portrait in the Explorers Club at the 18:13 mark of this behind-the-scenes tour of the Explorers Club...


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6YrFs1DKNA
https://mobile.twitter.com/laurenfarmer ... 16/photo/1

Apparently, there was an off-broadway play based on The Explorers Club...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLVEQe ... ode=NORMAL

Andrews, the intrepid adventurer, even did some Ψence. He found these very important dinosaur egg fossils we're told...

Image

... that he said were laid by these figments of his imagination, the Protoceratops andrewsi...

Image

... but alas some jerk at the Smithsonian said those eggs were laid by some other mythical creature...

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-n ... 126252413/

... but whatever; there was adventure to be had in Mongolia, and Andrews had some sweet rides:

“ The Dodge Bros. cars climbed like mountain goats, and later, in our enthusiasm, Colgate and I agreed that we should be willing to attempt the ascent of Mount Everest with them if the snow could be eliminated.”
http://whalescampsandtrails.blogspot.co ... art-1.html

Those five sturdy Dodges did get our intrepid hero through the "wildest corner of the Earth"...

Image
http://www.gunnarnordstrom.com/dynamic/ ... workID=473

When he wasn't adventurin' Roy was writing. Here's a book that inspired a generation of other hustlers we're told...

Image
http://roychapmanandrewssociety.org/roy ... n-andrews/

... and here's a couple of the hustlers he inspired...

http://research.amnh.org/paleontology/f ... cKenna.pdf
http://roychapmanandrewssociety.org/mic ... acek-2003/

... McKenna is a cousin of Carnegie and a Berkeley man; Novacek was the recipient of the first Distinguished Explorer Award by the Roy Chapman Andrews Society.

This guy wrote a book about Roy; I wonder of he believes Roy's bullshit...

http://www.c-span.org/video/?165063-1/b ... an-andrews

Roy wrote a book about Roy of course...

Image
https://en.de1lib.org/book/651345/61049f

Adventure and paleontology seem to go hand-in-hand down the bull-Ψ-ence trail. We are told a wise museum guard once said:

"... the secret of the fascination of dinosaurs, especially for the young, is that “they are half real and half not-real.” The resulting tension gives them a particularly exotic nature. In the mind of a child, they are half dangerous and half safe, half scary monster and half special pal. They are powerfully strong but cannot reach us. They are in many ways familiar and near, and yet also very far away in time and totally foreign to our experience. Other extinct creatures, whether ammonites, trilobites, flying reptiles or mammoths, similarly fascinate us with their strangeness and antiquity, but they lack the same emotional connection."
http://www.americanscientist.org/librar ... 66_306.pdf

I bet Roy, the bad-ass explorer, had an emotional connection with his Andrewsaurchus, even though it wasn't a scary lizard. The narrative says the Andrewsaurchus is some kind of pig-like rhino/tiger that's related to whales; which is cool because Andrews was also an expert on whales too we're told...

Image
http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/b ... sequence=1
Flabbergasted
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Flabbergasted »

I realize that few (if any) CF members need convincing that the NDT (Neo-Darwinian Theory) is little more than ideology (or poor philosophy) dressed up as science. However, the topic is vast and it can be difficult to know where to start and itʼs easy to get lost in endless discussions on details that donʼt really touch on the central argument. Below is a handy summary of six essential objections to the theory of biological evolution which cannot be refuted. It was extracted from a compilation of writings by William Stoddart (Remembering in a World of Forgetting), but I have edited it rather heavily (my apologies to the editors).

Six fundamental flaws in the evolutionist hypothesis

Logical: The greater cannot come from the lesser
A seed may appear to be “lesser” than a fully grown organism, but all the information needed at the different developmental stages is already contained in the seed. It may seem unnecessary to remind anyone of this, but many people are actually deluded by the appearance of simplicity and smallness and think of “primeval one-celled organisms” as seeds capable of evolving into highly complex multicellular species.

Physical: Entropy (the second law of thermodynamics)
Complexity tends towards degradation. Systems naturally move to a greater degree of randomness. Things run down, not up. They proceed from a state of order to a state of disorder. Order does not emerge from disorder. Order is conferred on disorder by the input of information (thus, intelligence) and cannot arise by chance. Intelligence is not the product of disorder. Nothing has ever been known to contravene this law, but the evolutionary hypothesis contradicts it.

Biological: The stability of species
There is no conclusive evidence that one species ever changed into another. If there were, evolutionists would trumpet it from the house-tops! There is evidence only for intraspecific variation, not for the formation of new and self-reproducing species. This is because of the fundamental stability of species. A species is a Platonic archetype. Evolutionists try to blur this as much as possible. Some even deny the reality of species.

Statistical: Not enough time
Evolution requires that there should have been a spontaneous generation of life, but the simplest of living cells is so complex that the probabilities of its coming into existence by chance cannot be expressed in meaningful figures. No matter how much one extends, on a realistic basis, the time-scale envisaged, it is statistically impossible for the generation of life, and for evolution, to have taken place by chance in the time available. This question is discussed extensively by Lee Spetner in his book “Not by Chance”, in which he applies the figures provided by evolutionary biologists to game and lottery scenarios to show that the amount of “luck” required by the NDT would be interpreted by any normal person as indisputable proof of gambling fraud. The silly hypothesis that life could have come from outer space merely sets the problem one stage further back; it does not solve it.

Teleological: The argument from design
It is impossible that blind, deaf, and dumb evolution could have given rise to eye, ear, and voice. The miracle of consciousness did not arise from a heap of pebbles.

Philosophical: The relativist pitfall
The evolutionist hypothesis is fatally impaired by the well-known contradiction of relativism, often demonstrated by means of absolute statements like “all men are liars” or “everything is relative”. If man is relative in the sense that he is a shifting, evolving species, he cannot all of a sudden step out of the evolutionary process, take up a stationary position, and make absolute statements about the continuing process.

Source: http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/viewp ... oddart.pdf
DrTim
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by DrTim »

Boring, Flabbergasted, I'm afraid, boring. For all your apparent impressiveness as a thinker, you're merely repeating same old same old. As you tackle one falsehood, you impale yourself on another. Namely by your second point, demonstrating a common misunderstanding of intelligence. Intelligence, or rather the mind (so that we may account for its most primitive, not-very-intelligent forms), arises spontaneously from communications in chance occurences of order. It is the emergent mind that sustains that order and the object survives. Take it from there and all your other points are answered too.

If you want a citation, try this:

http://sungod.likesyou.org/index1.html
Flabbergasted
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Flabbergasted »

DrTim wrote:[...] you're merely repeating same old same old.
Exactly.
DrTim wrote:Intelligence, or rather the mind (so that we may account for its most primitive, not-very-intelligent forms), arises spontaneously from communications in chance occurences of order.
A gratuitous claim. Nothing but wishful thinking.

Chance occurences of order? That´s cute.

Explain this process of "chance occurences of order" and "spontaneous emergence of intelligence" in your own words and support it with solid real-life examples and scenarios. And, please, none of that messy reasoning, the unintelligibility of which you blame on other people´s "lack of shared knowledge".
DrTim
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by DrTim »

It can't be done, Flabbergasted. You and I might sit in a cafe and see an alien cross the street, we can't prove whether we're seeing an intelligent, living being or an AI machine. We can pose the creature questions, but still not be able to prove anything (Never mind the nonsense known as the Turing test, beloved of AI pushers). The question of intelligence and the mind ultimately boils down to the question of Free Will, and you cannot prove that you have it or that you don't.

The true test is in the predictive quality of the insight. Your insight leads to a vision of mind as external to the material world. Mine leads to an abstract mind arising from the material. Mine requires less of a leap of faith, it remains rooted in the material world we can directly observe. Yours requires faith in a separate domain of "consciousness".

Mine is also more fine grained, to the extent that yours would struggle due to the required banality. Let me explain. We're in a desert and see a distant spot moving on the sand dunes on the far horizon. What is that, we ask. We continue to observe and note that the object seems to "have a mind of its own". It doesn't move in a straight line, it moves around obstacles, stops and starts, it even appears to shape-shift a little from time to time. Then a friend of ours pops by and hands us a pair of binoculars: we've been observing a man on a camel.

Now we're perplexed and arguing. Did we see an object with its own mind or not? It seemed like it, but closer examination revealed the component processes, man and camel. My point is that the negotiation between man and camel, their communication and resultant coming together as one object gave rise to the human-camel mind, which controlled the object, and was underpinned by the conflicting processes, man and camel. Left to their own devices, the man and the camel would go separate ways, neither would take the route eventually taken as a single object.

You of course disagree with this because you sense the danger to your own position. It's a little too banal for universal consciousness to descend to a man and a camel forming a new mind. But if you let go of this faith, and accept the possibility of what I'm pointing out, then a great deal becomes easier to explain. Namely, evolution. The role of mind, intelligence, at all levels. Not the all-powerful mind of Creationists, but the spontaneously emerging minds in coincidental order. The coincidence is one of successful communication, not that difficult to accept.
Selene
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Selene »

Flabbergasted wrote:I realize that few (if any) CF members need convincing that the NDT (Neo-Darwinian Theory) is little more than ideology (or poor philosophy) dressed up as science.
Dear Flabbergasted, I may be one of the "few (if any)" CFmembers. First of all I am curious to hear what you define as "Neo-Darwinian Theory"(NDT). What is it in your own words and why do you regard it as a philosophy or ideology?
However, the topic is vast and it can be difficult to know where to start and itʼs easy to get lost in endless discussions on details that donʼt really touch on the central argument. Below is a handy summary of six essential objections to the theory of biological evolution which cannot be refuted. It was extracted from a compilation of writings by William Stoddart (Remembering in a World of Forgetting), but I have edited it rather heavily (my apologies to the editors).
As far as I understood, the topic is about if dinosaurs (and only them or other fossil groups as well?) are a hoax. I am not convinced by that, what the topic has shown is dubious links to Disney, NASA, Freemasons and other suspicious entities and listed some examples of fake fossils. Showing that some fossils can be faked. For a short while; they get discovered and scrutinized. Faked fossils do not contradict the existence of dinosaurs, just like fake NASA pictures of galaxies do not contradict the Magellan Cloud and Andromeda which were observed long before NASA was created.
Six fundamental flaws in the evolutionist hypothesis
I consider the naming and framing of someone as an "evolutionist" a bit similar to the MSM loving people calling us "conspiracy theorists" or "hoax believers" or so. It hints to individual people being a group which is not the case.

If you give a title like this I'd call it "what I see as six fundamental flaws in the theory of evolution".
Logical: The greater cannot come from the lesser
A seed may appear to be “lesser” than a fully grown organism, but all the information needed at the different developmental stages is already contained in the seed. It may seem unnecessary to remind anyone of this, but many people are actually deluded by the appearance of simplicity and smallness and think of “primeval one-celled organisms” as seeds capable of evolving into highly complex multicellular species.
This listed "flaw" is by itself flawed.

A common misunderstanding about evolution is that it is an intended process, a predefined path. It is not, it is reactive. Reacting to the environmental factors, things evolve. We see that everywhere around us. Evolution is so founded in our DNA that we behave and socialize according to these evolutionary principles.

The free market (unfortunately spoiled by state powers) is in essence a biological ecosystem where creative profitable ideas emerge and evolve based on this ecosystem and the factors within.

The "greater cannot come from the lesser" is a statement which is meaningless without defining "greater" and "lesser". Is it in size, volume, intelligence, complexity, etc.? Is it in the way we perceive things? Is something bigger or more complex in some aspects "greater" than a strain of oceanic plankton which developed phosphorizing capabilities or simple life that developed the first "eye"?

If it is in the first category then children could not be taller, bigger, more intelligent or slightly more evolved to solve complex problems than their parents, which is a ridiculous standpoint.

Evolution behaves incremental; in steps. And if Gaia has 1 thing (and we humans do not), it is time. To imagine the millions of years I grant is for the average person very difficult. But millions of years and billions of generations for the simpler species in a timeframe of ~4.2 Ga (first sediments) to ~3.8 Ga (first life) should be enough to do the job.

I agree with people who criticise a view within the "evolutionist" thinkers who say it can only be natural selection. I see environmental factors and triggers as the main driver for evolution. Like adapting ourselves to emergency situations and evolve new ideas under healthy pressure in the present.
Physical: Entropy (the second law of thermodynamics)
Complexity tends towards degradation. Systems naturally move to a greater degree of randomness. Things run down, not up. They proceed from a state of order to a state of disorder. Order does not emerge from disorder. Order is conferred on disorder by the input of information (thus, intelligence) and cannot arise by chance. Intelligence is not the product of disorder. Nothing has ever been known to contravene this law, but the evolutionary hypothesis contradicts it.
I do not really understand how 1 physical-chemical law of thermodynamics is relevant to a biological science as the study of evolution? :wacko:

The (many in such a short paragraph) statements:
1 - "Complexity tends towards degradation"
2 - "Systems naturally move to a greater degree of randomness"
3 - "Things run down, not up"
4 - "They proceed from a state of order to a state of disorder"
5 - "Order does not emerge from disorder"
6 - "Order is conferred on disorder by the input of information (thus, intelligence) and cannot arise by chance"
7 - "Intelligence is not the product of disorder"
8 - "Nothing has ever been known to contravene this law, but the evolutionary hypothesis contradicts it"

1 - What is meant by this? I don't understand the wording. Complexity tends towards something? Has "complexity" free will, or how does "complexity" do this?
What is meant by degradation exactly?

2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 basically restate the first claim in different words, and are all flawed as there are (too) numerous examples to show that this statement is incorrect, some basic examples:
  • crystallography - see the marvellous growths of complex crystals, not degrading at all
  • carbonate reef buildups - either fossil or modern (diving shows you a whole new -unspoilt by the Elites!- world)
  • sedimentary rocks - the organisation of the grains based on gravity-driven compaction, the sorting by sediment transport systems as wind, ice and water, layered structures, etc. etc., not degraded
  • cooling of lava below the Curie point - "suddenly" the "chaos"/"disorder" of unaligned magnetics is "orderly" frozen in time by becoming cooler than the point where the Earth magnetic field is "felt" and taken over
7 - Intelligence. How does this come into the story? First you need to define it again. What is intelligent? Is only Homo sapiens intelligent or do we take dolphins and apes in the same category? Then intelligence becomes a recent phenomenon with apes/hominids around for some 10 million years and the first dolphinoids a bit older if I recall well.

8 - see first question.

Or do you consider higher order species, more complex life, evolved from unicellular life preceding the Cambrian Explosion?

As you can see around intelligence evolves gradually as well. Take Cluesforum for example. There were a couple of people in the pre-internet times who devoted their time and effort to this cause of exposing fakery and lies to the people and an evironmental factor (the distribution of the internet) resulted in 11 million non-unique views. That's evolution of intelligence, I'd say. Fast, within 1 generation.
Biological: The stability of species
There is no conclusive evidence that one species ever changed into another. If there were, evolutionists would trumpet it from the house-tops!
This is an unfair question due to the inherent incompleteness and biasing of the fossil record. Imagine that these remains not only had to have the 'luck' to be fossilised and thus preserved in the first place (how many modern human remains do we have compared to the real number of people died?) but also and foremost the slow but destructively violent past of Gaia herself?

Coming back to dinos: we do see a lot of Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks outcropping which biases our understanding of the history of Earth towards those periods. Trilobites should have been as if not more numerous than dinosaurs, they only had the "disadvantage" of having lived much longer ago so the specimens that survived are absolutely abundant but relatively very few.

Asking for the complete line of generations which shows the evolution is impossible. Even within humans.

The environmental factors of better health and food has made the Dutch people the tallest in the world (nowadays). Evolved from medieval midgets, like everywhere in Europe (the indigenous tribes of the Americas were even shorter). Nothing against short people, it's not "better"/"greater" versus "lesser", just like acknowledging biological, physical differences between races doesn't make you a racist. That's MSM-framing, not a sensible debate based on facts.

To respond to this demand by "anti-evolutionists" (you see what a stupid term it becomes) would mean that you preserve the human remains of a tall person and analyse all the skeletons from his/her ancestors. With modern bones that is already an impossible demand, so how ridiculous does that become when we talk millions of years with absolutely spoken very few fossilisation (due to climate)?
There is evidence only for intraspecific variation, not for the formation of new and self-reproducing species. This is because of the fundamental stability of species. A species is a Platonic archetype. Evolutionists try to blur this as much as possible. Some even deny the reality of species.
Again hard to follow what you're saying but the formation of new species is not (well) understood? What about the polar bears? Evolved and adapted to the harsh environment from brown bears? How do you explain these very similar yet different species then?
Statistical: Not enough time
Evolution requires that there should have been a spontaneous generation of life,
No, abiogenesis is the spontaneous generation of life. Not "spontaneous" in the sense of "by chance". But by environmental factors. That is like in evolution, but evolution does not include abiogenesis.
but the simplest of living cells is so complex that the probabilities of its coming into existence by chance cannot be expressed in meaningful figures.
The simplest of living cells is a cell which developed ~3.8 Ga (that is 3,800,000,000 years!) after the analysed first living cell. How can you compare the two?

And not by chance. That is a misunderstanding of the process. By environmental factors, triggers. In this "soup" of the Precambrian period any trigger may have spawned the process of abiogenesis. Lightning? Meteorites containing alien life? Magnetism? Chemical processes in the strange volcanic worlds of the time? A combination of all these and unknown factors? We will never know and can only speculate.
No matter how much one extends, on a realistic basis, the time-scale envisaged, it is statistically impossible for the generation of life, and for evolution, to have taken place by chance in the time available.
Sorry to say, but this statement is useless without any calculations.

Let's say first sediments 4.2 Ga, first life 3.8 Ga, first complex life (just before the Cambrian Explosion) some 600 Ma, first terrestrial life in the Devonian @ 400 Ma, first intelligent life (hominids and dolphins) some 15-10 Ma.

Abiogenesis "took" some 400 million years
Simple to complex life some 3200 million years
Complex marine to first terrestrial life some 200 millon years
First intelligent life in marine (dolphins?) and terrestrial (hominids) environments took since the "beginning" of complex life some 590 million years

That's an awful lot of time...
This question is discussed extensively by Lee Spetner in his book “Not by Chance”, in which he applies the figures provided by evolutionary biologists to game and lottery scenarios to show that the amount of “luck” required by the NDT would be interpreted by any normal person as indisputable proof of gambling fraud.
I obviously haven't read that book and you have, but do you really consider this an honest scientific comparison?

There are people who are struck by lightning and live to tell it, even repetitively. These stories may or may not be true and even an interesting own topic in the "musings category" (where dino hoax and questioning evolution belong as well in my opinion), but the chance of that happening is also extremely low and you would be a very lucky winner of the lotteries around if you apply it there.

The point is; the comparison is nonsense as a scientific argument against evolution (as a whole).
The silly hypothesis that life could have come from outer space merely sets the problem one stage further back; it does not solve it.
I don't know if it's silly. I don't know if it makes sense or is needed. But is it relevant to evolution? Even if the spawning of life would be alien, all the evolutionary processes took place on Gaia, not in outer space.

My main objection to the "alien believers" (in the sense of visiting extraterrestrial life forms) is that there are no fossils. Or no real ones at least....
Teleological: The argument from design
It is impossible that blind, deaf, and dumb evolution could have given rise to eye, ear, and voice. The miracle of consciousness did not arise from a heap of pebbles.
The "argument" of design is where it all boils down to and thanks for bringing it up. It is not an argument as the "design" is an interpretation by us, humans. To us, product from its design, it looks like design.

Imagine you take a person from Ancient Egypt and place him or her in the present with all the commodities of modern life. He would stand in front of the mirror amazed by all that has been "designed" to "fit him in his new life".

It was not designed to be that way (although the materialistic contents have been designed, but that's not different from Egyptian pottery and architecture); it grew, it developed, it evolved that way.

The title of the topic is "(non-religious)". If your idea of a designer, of Intelligent Design, is of a nature other than religion (a Creator, a deity), then I am all ears, because I am even suprised that evolution theory is questioned on a non-religious basis, I haven't found that anywhere else.

Even in religious communities evolution theory is widely accepted. Abiogenesis may be another theme, but as said it is essentially irrelevant for the question of evolution.
Philosophical: The relativist pitfall
The evolutionist hypothesis is fatally impaired by the well-known contradiction of relativism, often demonstrated by means of absolute statements like “all men are liars” or “everything is relative”. If man is relative in the sense that he is a shifting, evolving species, he cannot all of a sudden step out of the evolutionary process, take up a stationary position, and make absolute statements about the continuing process.

Source: http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/viewp ... oddart.pdf
The well known contradiction of relativism was not known to me, so thanks for bringing it up, but again I fear an apple-pear comparison.

Absolutism I think is a dangerous ground (and one of the main points against the claimed hoax in this topic; "some fossils are faked, so all (dinosaur) fossils, even in the remotest of locations in the sedimentary rocks they come from are faked"

"All men are liars" and "everything is relative" [but not everything at the same degree of relativity!] are human perception statements. Evolution is a process which is humanly perceived too, but so is everything around us, so what's the point regarding evolution theory? Is the relativity claimed an argument against a biological process driven by environmental factors?

I really look forward to your answers as I think it is an important discussion to have.

Selene

PS: later on I will provide links to the points mentioned, have to go now.
Flabbergasted
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Flabbergasted »

Selene wrote:I see environmental factors and triggers as the main driver for evolution.
No, Selene, this is not what scientific evolutionism posits.

You will find answers to some of your questions in my exchange with nonhocapito on this page: http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?f= ... &start=150

I would very much like to address all your points, but your post is very long, so I ask you for a little patience while I put together a reply.
Flabbergasted
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Flabbergasted »

Thank you for your feedback, Selene.
Selene wrote:I am curious to hear what you define as "Neo-Darwinian Theory"(NDT). What is it in your own words?
I summarized the basic tenets of the NDT here: http://cluesforum.info/viewtopic.php?f= ... 0#p2380378
The NDT is the mainstream doctrine of evolution that students are taught in schools and universities (unless their teachers decide otherwise). When I speak of flaws in the evolutionist hypothesis, I am referring to the NDT.
There are of course also non-mainstream biological evolutionist doctrines or hypotheses, but to my knowledge they all share the belief that irreducibly complex systems emerge spontaneously from chance combinations of utterly simple elements (if such exist in the real world). In any case, I donʼt think it is inappropriate to group advocates of such hypotheses under the heading of “evolutionists”.
Selene wrote:Why do you regard it as a philosophy or ideology?
If I may, I would like to answer this in another post.
For now I will just add that scientific theories must by definition be falsifiable. The NDT is impervious to falsification because its repeatedly negative experimental results and absence of proof are prepensely justified as problems with lab conditions, study design, insufficient time frames, missing fossils and so forth. Darwinists have for 150 years asked the public to accept a theory based on the promise of proof.
Selene wrote:Faked fossils do not contradict the existence of dinosaurs, just like fake NASA pictures of galaxies do not contradict the Magellan Cloud and Andromeda which were observed long before NASA was created.
Nobody ever said otherwise.
Selene wrote:[...] it is reactive. Reacting to the environmental factors, things evolve.
As I said in an earlier post, environmental factors play a role in natural selection, but according to the NDT they are not the driving force of evolution. Random mutation is.
Though relevant, environmental factors are not as powerful a factor in natural selection as it might seem (if you are interested, I can explain why in another post).
Selene wrote:The free market (unfortunately spoiled by state powers) is in essence a biological ecosystem where creative profitable ideas emerge and evolve based on this ecosystem and the factors within.
This has nothing to do with our subject. Talk about comparing apples with pears!
Selene wrote:The "greater cannot come from the lesser" is a statement which is meaningless without defining "greater" and "lesser". Is it in size, volume, intelligence, complexity, etc.?
You are right that these and other terms need to be defined. The list I posted was meant as a handy summary so I did not discuss definitions. “Greater” refers to biological systems of greater anatomical and/or physiological complexity, as a consequence of qualitative differences in the genome. In the same sense that a sonnet by Shakespeare is qualitatively “greater” than a phone number scribbled on a slip of paper.
Selene wrote:But millions of years and billions of generations for the simpler species in a timeframe of ~4.2 Ga (first sediments) to ~3.8 Ga (first life) should be enough to do the job.
It may seem that way to you, but you have not done the math (even if we grant the figures you provided). Most people grossly underestimate the staggering complexity of life all the way down to the molecular level.
Selene wrote:I do not really understand how 1 physical-chemical law of thermodynamics is relevant to a biological science as the study of evolution?
I am little surprised you don´t understand this point. I can get back to it in a later post, but for now let me just say that by “degradation” I mean loss of differentiation at a number of levels. To give you an example (though an imperfect analogy), imagine keeping 100 couples of dogs of distinct “pure” breeds together in captivity and allowing them to interbreed freely for, say, 50 generations. The breeds in the pool will become increasingly undifferentiated over time. Eventually, there will be no chihuahuas or boxers or terriers left -- only mongrels. It takes intelligently directed selective pressure to maintain differentiation, as any breeder will tell you.
Selene wrote:crystallography - see the marvellous growths of complex crystals, not degrading at all.. [etc]
I don´t think we are talking about the same thing.
Selene wrote:As you can see around intelligence evolves gradually as well. Take Cluesforum for example. There were a couple of people in the pre-internet times who devoted their time and effort to this cause of exposing fakery and lies to the people and an evironmental factor (the distribution of the internet) resulted in 11 million non-unique views. That's evolution of intelligence, I'd say. Fast, within 1 generation.
This is completely irrelevant to the topic of biological evolution (unless you are claiming that CF is a biological species with DNA or that membership adds information to membersʼ genomes). We are not discussing the dynamics of ecosystems and societies.
Selene wrote:This is an unfair question due to the inherent incompleteness and biasing of the fossil record.
Claiming the fossil record is incomplete is a common argument among evolutionists, but it is not true. We have an impressive array of fossils, though not a single clear-cut transitional form. Entire phyla and classes make their appearance in the fossil record all of sudden, not gradually. The greatest problem with the fossil record is that it contradicts evolutionism.
Selene wrote:The environmental factors of better health and food has made the Dutch people the tallest in the world (nowadays). Evolved from medieval midgets, like everywhere in Europe (the indigenous tribes of the Americas were even shorter).
As I pointed out in the post linked to at the beginning, what you are observing is the effect of gene switches which can be turned on and off, according to environmental cues. You see reversible adaptation and cry “look, evolution!”
Selene wrote:Again hard to follow what you're saying but the formation of new species is not (well) understood? What about the polar bears? Evolved and adapted to the harsh environment from brown bears? How do you explain these very similar yet different species then?
The formation of new species could not possibly be “well understood”! There is no evidence to support the claim that polar bears evolved from brown bears, or vice-versa. It is merely an evolutionist preconception. Why do lawn mowers and motorcycles have so many parts in common? Is it because once a motorcycle courageously self-mutated over thousands of generations, covering a spectrum of unthinkable but perfectly fit intermediary forms, and restyled itself as a lawn mower? Or could it be because the two machines were built by the same engineer, using similar nuts and bolts?
Selene wrote:The simplest of living cells is a cell which developed ~3.8 Ga (that is 3,800,000,000 years!) after the analysed first living cell. How can you compare the two?
Where on earth do those figures come from? You canʼt seriously think scientists can make valid statements about cells living 3,800,000,000 years ago! Also, there is no such thing as a simple cell. It is wishful thinking, not reality.
Selene wrote:In this "soup" of the Precambrian period any trigger may have spawned the process of abiogenesis. Lightning? Meteorites containing alien life? Magnetism? Chemical processes in the strange volcanic worlds of the time? A combination of all these and unknown factors? We will never know and can only speculate.
A good example of an untestable and unfalsifiable theory.
Selene wrote:Sorry to say, but this statement is useless without any calculations.
As I said, my post was a summary. The calculations you are asking for (and rightly so) are in the books I referenced (Lee Spetner and Michael Behe). I try to avoid posting lengthy book excerpts on the forum.
Selene wrote:I obviously haven't read that book and you have, but do you really consider this an honest scientific comparison?
I consider Spetner´s book a valid statistical evaluation of the impossibly long odds involved in the NDT.
Selene wrote:It is not an argument as the "design" is an interpretation by us, humans. To us, product from its design, it looks like design.
“Design” needs to be clearly defined before we can proceed with this point.
Selene wrote:Absolutism I think is a dangerous ground [...]
I wasn´t speaking about absolutism, or of anything “absolute” in the sense you seem to imply.
Selene
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Selene »

Thanks Flabbergasted,

On the NDT and link to the discussion you had with nonhocapito (I fully agree with and admire his eloquence in saying exactly that); you find in me a partner if you want to fight specifically the idea that “random mutations” are the driving force of evolution, as I think environmental factors, so well explained by nonho, do contribute much more to the selection of genes to pass on., see for more below.

As promised links to the info in the last post, I cannot edit it anymore:
Evolution behaves incremental; in steps. And if Gaia has 1 thing (and we humans do not), it is time. To imagine the millions of years I grant is for the average person very difficult. But millions of years and billions of generations for the simpler species in a timeframe of ~4.4 Ga (even!) to ~3.5/3.7 Ga (first life) should be enough to do the job.
Wankerpedia
Possibly the progenitor of cellular life

The similarities between DNA sequences of thermoacidophiles, and other Archaea, and complex eukaryotes provides support to Archaea being the progenitor Domain for the first cellular life on Earth. They were able to thrive on the early, warmer Earth with an atmosphere that lacked oxygen.
Archaea
Scientific evidence suggests that life began on Earth at least 3.5 billion years ago. The earliest evidences for life on Earth are graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in Western Greenland and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.
Oldest terrestrial material
The oldest material of terrestrial origin that has been dated is a zircon mineral of 4.404 ± 0.008 Ga enclosed in a metamorphosed sandstone conglomerate in the Jack Hills of the Narryer Gneiss Terrane of Western Australia. The 4.404 ± 0.008 Ga zircon is a slight outlier, with the oldest consistently-dated zircon falling closer to 4.35 Ga.
I agree with people who criticise a view within the "evolutionist" thinkers who say it can only be natural selection. I see environmental factors and triggers as the main driver for evolution. Like adapting ourselves to emergency situations and evolve new ideas under healthy pressure in the present.
but the simplest of living cells is so complex that the probabilities of its coming into existence by chance cannot be expressed in meaningful figures.
The simplest of living cells is a cell which developed ~3.5 Ga (that is 3,500,000,000 years!) after the analysed first living cell. How can you compare the two?

And not by chance. That is a misunderstanding of the process. By environmental factors, triggers. In this "soup" of the Precambrian period any trigger may have spawned the process of abiogenesis. Lightning? Meteorites containing alien life? Magnetism? Chemical processes in the strange volcanic worlds of the time? A combination of all these and unknown factors? We will never know and can only speculate.
Let me react to your post. Not point by point, but in general. One interesting analogue I'd like to react to:
Flabbergasted wrote:You are right that these and other terms need to be defined. The list I posted was meant as a handy summary so I did not discuss definitions. “Greater” refers to biological systems of greater anatomical and/or physiological complexity, as a consequence of qualitative differences in the genome. In the same sense that a sonnet by Shakespeare is qualitatively “greater” than a phone number scribbled on a slip of paper.
What is "greater" in this sense? Let's say you are starving to death and you have the choice between a rabbit (a highly developed mammal) or some bacteria which you need to get your digestive system back on track. You instinctively might choose the rabbit and may die because you cannot digest it. Or you may choose the "lesser" (by far) bacteria which has a specialised (evolved) characteristic...

To stay within your analogue: if I'm in a fire or any other emergency situation, I'd rather have the phone number of someone for help scribbled on that damaged poor piece of paper than that "greater" sonnet of Shakespeare... :unsure:

And exactly that I think drives evolution; triggers, stress factors, specialisation and during after mass extinctions. We see that change happens from that in our everyday lives from drastic measures and/or environmental factors. Why would that be different on a molecular/gene level, I don't see that, but am not a molecular biologist.

Your position is in general: “Darwinism/evolutionism is not the answer to the observations, yet an Intelligent Designer is”.

With the acceptance of an Intelligent Designer the discussion becomes very difficult. Your position is of an irrational nature. You can postulate an Intelligent Designer, you can describe him/her/it to me and others, and that’s it. There are no rational points possible, as your Designer cannot be proven or disproven. It’s your personal philosophical view of “where do we come from” but not empirically or otherwise reproducible.

And what you do, is making your own position difficult to hold, because of the point in Earth’s history where you place your Designer.

In principle, there’s no scientific argument possible against the existence of an Intelligent Designer at the beginning (“Big Bang”, the start of what we call universe, the big question of life) nor putting it instead of abiogenesis. We couldn’t ever disprove that something has spawned life in the Precambrian and it was not nature of the time, but this Designer. The clues to the question are so old and worn down by time, that any analysis is already a challenge, so no way that can be disproven. It cannot be proven either, however.

If you position your Intelligent Designer at the point where “he/she/it” takes over from evolution, then this designer is constantly working to redesign? Then fossil species are not related through evolution, yet are all designed? Every time again, after mass extinctions?
In the Cretaceous this Designer designed dinosaurs (oh no, not) and in the Eocene terror birds (did they exist, you think?)?
If you hold that position, I wonder how you see the everyday examples of “evolution”?

I gave the thought experiment example of the Egyptian.

Take another example: everybody’s houses.

If you take a look around in your house today, do you reckon it is designed to be this way, or is it rather the product of a dynamic growth and development based on internal and external (environmental) factors? That vase that Aunt Annie gave as a birthday present, is that designed to be there? Is every position of the furniture and cutlery designed to be like this? Even in the most autistic case where the owner would be superfocused on keeping everything the same, even there the house would (slowly) develop, change, evolve.

If you think about it, the list of examples is endless. Even in human cases. Take cities for example. Although the content of a city (buildings, infrastructure, parks, etc.) is planned, designed, the city itself, as it is today is not designed as such. It evolved. Ok, Madhatten Ground Zero is maybe not the best of examples….:P

But look at Rome. Did the Romans plan to have only those buildings of them left over in 2015? The Renaissance Roman people? The architects from the late 19th century maybe?

It looks designed today, yet there’s no designer but time…

Another argument for the in my opinion human perception error that proponents of “Intelligent” Design fail to see is that this “Intelligence” of Design, the fit for purposeness, is only because we recognize the functionalities.

If you’d present a helicopter to a medieval peasant (not some Leonardo da Vinci-type scientist, but the average Joe of the time) he’d look at you and ask about the "stupid" design, as he cannot reconcile what to do with it. He doesn’t know it. It is not in his system. It didn't evolve yet, so you will. To modern humans a helicopter looks intelligently designed, as we know the purpose of the design.

You say that “the incompleteness of the fossil record is an excuse”. That would be the same as you would take photos of your house development as in the example but not of every step in the process. Then, when you present the clues (for this example photos, for the Earth’s history fossils), one immediately discards your photos because not all of the evolutionary steps in the photos of your home are shown.

Or for a bankrobbery that the prosecutor presents photos of the robber entering the bank at the moment of bank robbery, exits the bank and races off after the robbery and the judge discards the evidence because the presence of the man in the bank is unproven by photos.

Laws of court rooms do not apply to Earth sciences, and rightly so.

Geology, archeology, paleontology, are detective sciences. CSI, but then for real. And with a lot longer, more uncertain and speculative past.

The photos of your house have been altered, your house itself has burnt down, experienced floods and earthquakes and all, through millions of years and still you ask us to present every photo of every evolutionary step, otherwise you call it an “excuse”? Isn’t that demand in itself an excuse?

It’s not an excuse, it’s a fact of life we have to live with as crime scene investigating detectives have to live with their scattered and biased clues. Or the prosecutor with his crucial linking lack of photos, yet rational reasoning can help him.

Imagine a vast mass extinction happens now and all things but some would get destroyed and an archeologist later will find one of the first computers from 1972 and then a modern 2015 microprocessor.

Would he/she say that it was designed this way or postulate that the 2015 under the influence of time and environmental factors (R&D, chip techology, access to ores, freedom of market, etc.) evolved from the old cranky living room sized box with 256 kb memory...?

The discussion in the topic now becomes also very broad, which of the following points is the real item?
1 – dinosaurs are fake/a hoax
2 – all fossils are fake(??)
3 – evolution is a hoax/wrong theory
4 – all the Earth sciences are corrupt, the age of the Earth is incorrect, etc.

The title in strict sense refers only to point 1; the question is asked if dinosaurs are a hoax. To argument this position, examples of fossil fakery have been shown and presented by the various members. Other posts focus more on the suspicious links with(in) the nutwork (Disney, Hollywood, Spielberg, NASA, etc.).

Great work to expose fossil fakery and keep going on!, but that does not make all fossils fake. Just like exposing a media hoax, does not make all media reports faked (the local news; fires, accidents, etc. usually is not fake). Or taking NASA pictures of galaxies which are PhotoHubbleShopped as proof that stars and galaxies would be fake (do not exist, just like dinosaurs (?)).
Question Selene: My main question remains, if only the first point is the point of discussion: if only dinosaurs are fake, and all other fossils are real; which animals occupied the ecological niches of the dinosaurs in the lush Jurassic and Cretaceous (who ate all that food?) and where are their fossils then??
2 – all fossils are faked. This position is a bit silly, knowing that everywhere in the world one can find fossils for themselves, even dinosaurs. Amateurs and professionals go fossil hunting in the remotest of places or close to civilisation.

Examples: Fossil sites in Britain, Germany, worldwide.

To propose all fossils are faked, it would mean man would have total control over all parts of the Earth, especially the remote Patagonian and Mongolian deserts, and fabricate complete geological layers over thousands of square kms?

Looking at the ridiculous rock props they use in some movies, I am not convinced any human would be capable of falsifying all fossil sites (known and unknown!) and fooling all geologists in the world…

Dinosaurs are just a part of paleontology, a very serious science, but there are so many other fossils, of animals that obviously do not exist today. All ammonites, trilobites, microfossils, terror birds, fossil megasnakes, fossil other megafauna, everything from small to big is fake?

Image

One can see fossils as well in “ordinary” sedimentary rocks, when looking through a microscope. Like these examples from personal archive of benthonic, planktonic and mixed foraminifera in rocks, present day at some 300 meters altitude in Southern Spain and Italy….

Foraminifera (/fəˌræməˈnɪfərə/, Latin meaning hole bearers, informally called "forams") are members of a phylum or class of amoeboid protists characterized by streaming granular ectoplasm that among other things is used for catching food, and commonly by an external shell or "test" made of various materials and constructed in diverse forms. All but perhaps a very few are aquatic and most are marine, the majority of which live on or within the seafloor sediment (i.e., are benthic) while a smaller variety are floaters in the water column at various depths (i.e., are planktonic). A few are known from freshwater or brackish conditions and some soil species have been identified through molecular analysis of small subunit ribosomal DNA.

Foraminifera typically produce a test, or shell, which can have either one or multiple chambers, some becoming quite elaborate in structure. These shells are commonly made of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) or agglutinated sediment particles. Over 10,000 species are recognized, both living (8,708) and fossil (1,837). They are usually less than 1 mm in size, but some are much larger, the largest species reaching up to 20 cm.


Image

Left: Benthonic, snail-shaped foram in Miocene sandy limestone, Southern Spain
Right: Benthonic forams (nummulites) in Eocene limestone, Central Apennines, Italy


Image

Benthonic (B) and planktonic (bulbous space ship looking fossils where the red arrows point at) deposited in a narrow deep pre-Mediterranean basin, compare present day Red Sea on a smaller scale - field of view 6 mm
Question Selene: If fossils are fake, (evolution not real, etc.), and these are not benthonic (1, 2) and (mixed)planktonic (3) life forms of some 5 million (1, 3) or 40 million (2) years old, but for every fossil this same question can be asked; what is it then?
3 – Evolution is a hoax/a wrong theory.
To hold such a position requires some back-up, just like Simon is working on for his Tycho-superseding-Longomontanus-Capella-Simon Shack-Solar System. If you can propose a similar rational* theory which confirms present and past observations and can be predictive for future ones, then you have something to talk about.

*if you propose an Intelligent Designer you are in the realm of irrationality. There’s nothing wrong with that, it is just non-compatible with a scientific theory, because you do not speak the same language. Religious, mystical, transcendent, metaphysical and other irrational ways of looking at the world around us may or may not point to truth, they just fall outside of natural science as it is. You can hold science responsible for it, but I think to have these different areas of research is not wrong at all. It is not one is better or worse than the other, it’s just different ways of looking at the physical world.
Selene: So, the only answer to the question “Is Evolution Theory a wrong theory/hoax/fake/politics, not science/whatever” would be a schematic point-by-point scientific approach, where you defend an alternative rational mechanism for the diversity and similarity of species around us, see for an example the topic about the SSSS.
Image
Image
Quick overview of different explanations for the diversity and similarity of species found on Earth, strongholds for "more environmentally driven" ar faster evolution to explain relative "sudden" changes in the fossil record. Religious views can be summarised by an Intelligent Designer, some entity that has super power. I do not know of any other rational theories regarding this subject?

I always wonder how someone who does not think evolution is the answer to the biodiversity on Earth sees an ape. A (baby) chimp, gorilla and orang utan do not look human to you? You do not spot the similarities in reactions, behaviour, facial expressions, playfulness with human children??
“Designed” on two drawing tables next to each other, but by slightly different authors?

Image
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WrBnmaNP-UA/U ... ies_03.jpg

...and of course you all spotted the ridiculous photo manipulation here (not my photo!)... ;)

4 – All natural sciences, biology, paleontology, geology, paleo-antropology are all fake/in on the scam/a global fraud/proposing some kind of religion/are “Darwinists” or “evolutionists”/can be grouped into 1 common denominator.

Again, this stand point would be as ridiculous as to think all photographers in the world (amateur or professional) are fakers like the media do, just because it’s photos and there are so many faked photos as shown here on Cluesforum.

Within the Earth sciences very unfortunately there is a strong tsunami wave of politicised “science”. The Antropogenic Global Warmongering (thanks ICFreely, I so much enjoyed reading your post)-hoax is spoiling serious climate science and is poking into the related sciences of geophysics, hydrology and geology. That does not make these sciences as a whole a fraud. It is just this circle of AGW-proponents who get the publications.

The system of peer review as an infallible wall against bullshit is of course a laughter in general and the claim on that aspect for an individual publication (like Monstrosanto and Notorious Big Pharma propagandisers do) ridiculous.

But paleontology is not BigPharma research. The hundreds of millions of years old lush forests of the Carboniferous are not infected by Roundup (if they find proof of that, let me know please); it is not a spoiled science.

A clown like Jack Horner is just as representative for many tens of thousands of serious paleontological researchers as Justin Bieber or Miley Cirus are for all the motivated singers in the world…

The data is tangible, so different from AGW (paleoclimatology and climatological predictions are compared to many other sciences pretty much a mystery), Apollo etc. (we depend on NASA c.s.), the media hoaxes (no access to all the data), the question of our solar system (NASA has poisoned the wells of information for a great deal), gravity (mysterious force), etc. Everyone can look for fossils. There are no restrictions to that.

The practicality of the hoax also remains a mystery. For the media and space hoaxes the mechanisms of fakery, technical challenges, logistics, vicsims, crisis actors, mass manipulations, frauds, deceptions, image manipulation, shills, trolls, thrills and shoals; links to dubious entities, etc. etc. etc. all have been exposed. This topic cannot stand that same test on all the factors to the theme.

How do you fake all these fossil sites? How big and expensive does the operation need to be to accomplish this? What’s the gain? A prank? Setting up a whole industry on pure 100% fakery? And no smart-ass whistleblows that something is fishy about the Eocene Messel Fische? No buyer of a dinosaur bone of 50 grand would check what he/she bought? Just got fooled by some plaster faked specimen, but what's 50 grand nowadays... :blink:

And if all fossil findings are faked -the absolutism I very much argue against as it spoils good and decent research-, do you think a serious geologist or paleontologist who sees a formation or fossil is completely fooled by the fakery? For all his or her research? You just replace 1 heavy fossilised bone (2.6+) or other fragment by plaster of 2.32 kg/m3 and no paleontologist would ever notice?

To me, that’s the beauty of geology; it’s not (in the physical sense) affected by these media hoaxer crazies… It’s tangible, touchable, you can see the clues right in front of your eyes. Not depending on NASA claims…

Selene

The materials of wealth are in the [E]arth, in the seas, and in their natural and unaided productions
Daniel Webster (1838)
Last edited by Selene on Thu Jun 25, 2015 7:05 pm, edited 3 times in total.
ShaneG
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by ShaneG »

Selene,

I skimmed the above post, trying to decipher the crux of your argument while not having to spend all day reading what seemed to be a very long-winded post that included geology charts and other pieces of info that are irrelevant to me.

From what I gather, your main points are:

1) You support Darwin's theory of Evolution, as you state that humans resemble various types of primate.

2) You support Paleontology, as you state that Dinosaur bones can be found all over the world.

I appreciate that Darwin is well revered in the science community; however, I have my doubts that we are related to these primates which you speak of. Humans have evolved over time, so in that sense there has been an evolution; but when you talk about 'Evolution', people associate it with the Darwin narrative. I refuse to be tied down to this indoctrinated belief system, because there is many holes in the story which makes the evidence look flimsy.

The Dinosaur hoax question is a work in progress. After reading this thread, and looking at other evidence online -- it would seem the evidence in favor of a 'Big Dino' hoax is damning!

That's all I have to say on the subject, for now.

I do have an off-topic question though, if you don't mind me asking: are you male or female?

I keep seeing you sign-off your posts with your forum name 'Selene', which makes me think you have adopted this female name as your own?
Selene
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Selene »

ShaneG wrote:Selene,

I skimmed the above post, trying to decipher the crux of your argument while not having to spend all day reading what seemed to be a very long-winded post that included geology charts and other pieces of info that are irrelevant to me.
Calling geology irrelevant to paleontology (or you, interested in the subject) is like calling physics irrelevant to astronomy.

Take your time, my posts may not be for easy swallowing, but I think there's already too much of this non-sensical easy-junk-food-information-or-reasoning online or broadcasted via media.
From what I gather, your main points are:

1) You support Darwin's theory of Evolution, as you state that humans resemble various types of primate.

2) You support Paleontology, as you state that Dinosaur bones can be found all over the world.
I don't understand the narrative "support"? As explained and updated in the post above, I see evolution driven mainly by environmental factors and triggers the most logical explanation for all the observations, yes.

How can I "support" paleontology? Paleontology is a science, performed at many universities and institutes, it's a fact of life. I support good research on the Earth and her history and that is done by tens of thousands of decent, normal, moral, a bit nerdy researchers.

And some clowns come on tv, but that's with every branch of science, engineering or other profession.
I appreciate that Darwin is well revered in the science community; however, I have my doubts that we are related to these primates which you speak of.
Then even more important the question I asked. You do not see the similarities in behaviour, diet, reproduction, intelligence, etc. etc. to apes? I cannot do that for you, you only can do that for yourself. Just like nobody can be forced to see the Sandy Hook lying on screen, but I'd say it would be rather strange to not see it.

But ok, your position is that apes are not related to humans and that Darwins theory of evolution is wrong. Other than Flabbergasted you haven't proposed an Intelligent Designer, then I am curious to know how you fill in the boxes; like Simon with his SSSS: you'd have to show on which points Evolution Theory (either NDT/Slow evolution or environmentally-driven Fast evolution) fails to explain the observations but not only that, also convincingly prove that your explanations, in your model, better fit and thus are more thrustworthy (compare: SSSS-model not only beats Kepler-Copernican heliocentrism but also beats Tychos and Indian geo-heliocentrism based on the following arguments) than any other explanation.

Just skipping on and not looking at a decent scientific comparison to me does not seem very constructive.
Humans have evolved over time, so in that sense there has been an evolution; but when you talk about 'Evolution', people associate it with the Darwin narrative.
My point is that there's no difference. Evolution is so prevalent in all of us that it manifests itself in everything we do.
I refuse to be tied down to this indoctrinated belief system, because there is many holes in the story which makes the evidence look flimsy.
This is a non sequitur. The "indoctrination" or "belief" (I wonder how you can call a rational scientific theory a belief) does not follow from the holes.

And if you see holes in Evolution Theory, then present them. Fill in the red boxes, come up with a good name for your hypothesis and scrutinize it with past, present at possibly (gaining real strength) future observations.
The Dinosaur hoax question is a work in progress. After reading this thread, and looking at other evidence online -- it would seem the evidence in favor of a 'Big Dino' hoax is damning!
The evidence is in favour of the possibility of faking some fossils throughout history. You cannot post 50 examples of faked fossils and just neglect the 10s of billions of fossils found everywhere in the world. If you talk only dinosaurs, you reach some million findings all together as well.

Evidence for fakery of theme A is not evidence for the fakeness of theme A.

That's why the comparison:

- based on a handful (relatively) of faked examples state absolutely that all other fossil samples are also faked without ever seen or touched them would be the same as:
- stating that all stars & galaxies are fake, because NASA fakes star & galaxy pictures
- stating that all climate science is false/wrong/bad, because IPCC and the other spider claws of the AGW-hoax have poisoned parts of the serious scientific communities
- stating that all news is fabricated like the hoaxes so widely exposed here, because of September Clues and the exposure of the so many other media hoaxes perpetrated
- stating that all engineering sciences are fraudulent because some "engineer" came up with some cartoon physics fantasy to "explain" "crashing" "airplanes" on 9/11
- stating that all seafaring or airline captains are scammers because of Costa Concordia, MH370, RMS Titanic, AirAsia, SS Ironic, MH17, Germanwings, etc.
- ...

Exposing fakery = a great job
Going from fakery examples to absolutist statements that all fossils (dinosaurs or not?) (therefore) are/must be faked, that is not a great job.
That's all I have to say on the subject, for now.

I do have an off-topic question though, if you don't mind me asking: are you male or female?

I keep seeing you sign-off your posts with your forum name 'Selene', which makes me think you have adopted this female name as your own?
I don't mind you asking, I like the way of signing with a quote and my forum name but depends on my mood. I have not adopted this name or so and neither did I adopt feminine characteristics. B)
smj
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by smj »

Selene,

I'm not sure what you mean by Gaia. Do you mean the thing I'm standing on or Lovelock's silly metaphor?

A metaphor that he dreamed up on Nasa's dime:

"He first conceived the Gaia hypothesis while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the mid-1960s, where he was designing life detection instruments for NASA's Mars Viking probes.

How, Lovelock asked himself, if he were on Mars, could he tell there was life on Earth? By the Earth's atmosphere, which defies all natural expectations. Free oxygen accounts for 20 percent of the atmosphere, when the laws of chemistry say that this highly reactive gas should combine and settle down. How fortunate for life, most of which depends on oxygen for survival.

Lovelock concluded that life -- microbes, plants and animals constantly metabolizing matter into energy, converting sunlight into nutrients, emitting and absorbing gas -- is what causes the Earth's atmosphere to be so, well, lively. By contrast, the Martian atmosphere is essentially dead, settled into a low-energy equilibrium with little or no chemical reactions. So he recommended that NASA save its money and scrub the Viking mission. Carl Sagan, his officemate, did not agree but Sagan's then wife, microbiologist Lynn Margulis, took Gaia to heart."
http://environment-ecology.com/gaia/72- ... -gaia.html

Yep. We are told that Lovelock was hanging with Carl Sagan in his office at Jack Parson's Lab when he had his Gaia eureka moment.

Lovelock also happened to have a buddy named William Golding, yep that William Golding, who told him to name his new theory Gaia.

Then with a little help from Carl's ole lady Lovelock got all systems theory/cybernetic on us.

"The idea that life, the biosphere, regulated the Earth’s surface environment to sustain habitability came to me at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1965. It arose from a life detection experiment that sought the presence of life on a planetary scale instead of looking at the details visible on the surface. In particular, NASA’s quest to find life on Mars provided me with the opportunity to ask the question Can the existence of life be recognized from knowledge of the chemical composition of a planet’s atmosphere? The answer was a resounding yes. This way of thinking pre- dicted in 1965 that Mars and Venus were lifeless long before the Viking landers failed to find life on Mars in the 1970s, but it also drew attention to the extraordinary degree of chemical disequilibrium in the Earth’s atmosphere, which led me to think that some means for its regulation was needed. Although they disliked my conclusions about life on Mars, JPL actively supported the early development of Earth system science. In 1968 they invited me to present a paper that included for the first time the notion of the Earth as a self-regulating system at a meeting of the American Astro- nautical Society. NASA now recognizes the validity of atmospheric analysis as a life detection experiment. Without realizing it, they have taken the science that led to Gaia and made it their new science, astrobiology. By doing this they have brought together under one theoretical view life on Earth and life on other planets.
The next important step was in 1971, when Lynn Margulis and I began our col- laboration. Lynn brought her deep understanding of microbiology to what until then had been mainly a system science theory that saw a self-regulating Earth through the eyes of a physical chemist. By stressing the importance of the Earth’s bacterial eco- system and its being the fundamental infrastructure of the planet, Lynn put flesh on the skeleton of Gaia. Selling a new theory is a lonely business, and it was wonderful to have Lynn as a friend who stood by me in the fierce arguments with the neo- Darwinists who were so sure that they were right and we were wrong. And they were right to say that there was no way for organisms to evolve global scale self-regulation by natural selection, because the unit of selection is the individual organism, not the planet. It was not until I made the model Daisyworld that I recognized that what evolved was not the organisms or even the biosphere, but the whole system, organ- isms and their material environment coupled together. The unit of evolution is the Earth system, and self-regulation is an emergent property of that system."
https://en.de1lib.org/book/3705056/392566

Here's Lovelock's Daisyworld by Nasa...

full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCxIqgZA7ag

Here's Gregor(y) Bateson's daughter; no, not Nora but Mary Catherine, explaining the Gaia metaphor's relation to cybernetics. She's speaking at Lynn Margulis' memorial because they were dear friends of course...


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMT4QMmvC4E

Here's Mary Catherine again talking about her dear friend and her contribution to "the future of cybernetics"- at the 26:30 mark...


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXQraugWbjQ

Besides dreaming up sweet metaphors, Lovelock was able to build super duper sensitive pollution detectors. His detector proved Rachel Carson's theory with its 1 part in trillion accuracy and whatnot...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro ... e_detector

James tells us that not only was his ECD super duper sensitive, like 'Wild' Bill Libby's super sensitive geiger counters I reckon; but it was "uniquely sensitive to nasty things"...

http://www.webofstories.com/play/james. ... 6EDE25D434

We are also told Lovelock, the adventurer and environmental steward, even sailed to Antarctica to discover the CFCs that were pokin' Gaia's o-zone.

Here's a picture of Lovelock working at Nasa back in the day when he was working on detectors...
Image

Now it seems he's worried about "accelerated evolution" and "endosymbiosis with the mechanical world", I reckon Sagan's ole lady would be proud...

"He cites Moore's law, which states that a computer's processing power doubles every two years, and says we, too, will have to adapt to this speeded-up world. Man likes to assume he is the end of the evolutionary cycle, but dinosaurs, who held sway for almost 150m years, probably laboured under the same misconception. In the book, Lovelock posits the idea that one consequence of accelerated evolution could be that at some point we ourselves incorporate inorganic elements in our bodies. "Instead of robots going to war with us and taking over the world, which is the way it's always portrayed in science fiction," he says, "I thought, what happens if we join with them?""
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... over-world
Flabbergasted
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Re: The (non-religious) dinosaur hoax question

Unread post by Flabbergasted »

Selene,

Thank you again for your efforts. However, this exchange is leading nowhere and I suspect other forum members are getting rather bored with it.

I have a question for you but I would like a truly scientific response so let´s leave all the could-be-this-could-be-that wishful thinking aside for a moment.

Background:
There are several species of toad fishes. Some have dorsal fins with solid spines we will classify as "simple and conventional" to save time. Other species have a poison gland and a poison pump at the base of the dorsal spine and the spine is hollow (like an injection needle). I presume you know that the poison gland and the poison pump are highly complex biological systems, the formation of which requires a multitude of very specific "instructions" in the DNA (comparable to adding a 30-page section to a builder´s manual explaining how to assemble and install a burglar alarm).

Question:
Where did all this novel and highly specific information come from and how was it introduced into the DNA?
If you are claiming that environmental factors are responsible for the emergence of such highly specific instructions in the DNA, then please describe by what mechanism.

Tip: if you can answer this question scientifically you will win the Nobel Prize.

If you are going to carry on with the wishful thinking, then let´s just save each other´s time.
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