At 08:07 PM 4/4/98 -0600, Ron Chitwood wrote:
Of the discovery of half-evolved feathers,
>
>Why do you assume they are right and Morris and Parker are wrong. Couldn't
>their observations be erroneous and based on their predisposition to
>macroevolution?
One could of course turn that argument around and ask why should Morris and
Parker be right when they have a predisposition to disbelieve evoluton. But
I will simply say that I have never found Morris to be correct when I have
gone to personal observation of geology or paleontology and this was done
when I was a YEC and I also had a disposition to disbelieve evolution.
Why can't you simply admit that they are wrong about something. Surely you
don't give Morris the ex-cathedra speech that the Pope has, do you? They
state that there are no half evolved feathers that none have been found, I
provided an example. It is a simple as that.
>As an example, observations concluded that Neanderthal
>man was brutish , sub-human and walked with a stoop until it was
>discovered that the speciman they had been examining merely suffered from
>rickets. After that the dioramas of museums all over the world had to be
>modified to fit the findings. One time it was a geocentric earth that was
>considered sacrosanct based on Ptolemaic observations. Galileo had to
>recant of his findings or find himself excommunicated.
Lets see.... I think it was the Christians who were after Galileo for
violating the "clear meaning of the Biblical texts" If only Galileo could
see that he was calling God a liar...
Now back to feathers, in 1995 in Laoning, China a farmer found a fossil
dinosaur with feathered legs (Oct. 19, 1995, New York Times, "Very Early
Bird Had a Way to Catch Worms: In a Beak"By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD)
"The specimens from Liaoning show evidence that
Confuciusornis had feathers along its leg, making this the
earliest record of contour feathers, as distinct from flight
feathers. Scienctists do not know whether Archaeopteryx had such
feathers along its body, but it clearly had flight feathers along
its wings and tail.
"The presence of contour feathers is important because it
bears on whether early birds were warm-blooded. Some researchers
have speculated that contour feathers arose first among warm-
blooded dinosaurs as a form of insulation. Birds would have
inherited feathers from their dinosaurian ancestors and later
used them for flight."~R. Monastersky, "The bird calls that
filled Jurassic Park," Science News, 148, Oct. 28, 1995, p. 277
There is also the case of Sinosauropteryx which seems to also have partially
evolved feathers although it is still under discussion.
"Both Sinosauropteryx specimens are surrounded by apparently
hollow fibers up to 40 millimeters long, report Pei-ji Chen of
the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology and his
colleagues. The filaments resemble extremely simple feathers,
called plumules, found on some modern birds. The fibers could
represent protofeathers that helped trap body heat or served as a
colorful display for attracting mates, suggest the scientists."Richard
Montastersky, "'Feathered' Dinosaur Makes Debut," Science News, 153(1998), p. 95
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm