> While I provisionally accept some form of common ancestry between
> major groups like reptiles and birds, I would not be surprised if it
> does not support a Neo-Darwinian "blind watchmaker" pattern. My
> expectation is that the gulfs between major groups will turn out to
> be consistently further back in time than first thought (and
> hence deeper and wider) and will be better explained by a
> Pre-Darwinian "archetypal" (or structuralist) model:
At some point, Neo-Darwinians will have to get tired of seeing
their proposed branching points continually pushed further back
in time. Their striving to find ancestors among known species
shows their own microevolution from simplistic 'chain-of-being'
evolutionary theory.
But as to the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs, could they be
anything else? Could creatures of that volume bring themselves
up to working temperature with an hour of sunning?
-- Cliff Lundberg ~ San Francisco ~ cliff@noevalley.com