Chasing The Raptor: Patience please!

Some Useful Terms

Fate: 1. Power predetermining events unalterable from eternity. 2. That which is destined to happen.

Existential: Of or relating to existence.

Existentialism: Philosophical theory emphasizing existence of the individual person as free and responsible agent determining his or her own development.

Killer: A predator which takes the life of another living organism. In our own time the term also has acquired a new inflexion of meaning, implying something which is especially stylish or exceptional in some way: "a killer jacket". Its use in this blog's subtitle could mean either. Raptorial dinosaurs were certainly predators, and surely to anyone passionate about the subject, all dinosaurs, whether great or small, predators or prey, were both stylish and exceptional animals.

About My Featured Book

Bones: The Unity of Form and Function, by R. McNeill Alexander
Photography by Brian Kosoff

Packed as it is with lavish and detailed photography, this title might easily have become just another nice-to-look-at coffee table book. But the photographs virtually invite a closer scrutiny of this material, and the author's text offers much more than just an appraisal of what the photographs show. Bones as functional engineering structures, bones as moving mechanisms, bones as growing material, and bones as aesthetic objects in their own right, are all covered in the text. We come to understand such factors as the trade-offs between strength and lightness that are made in bone formation, and even the different evolved forms which teeth have undergone to cope with specialized diets.

The book includes both fossil and contemporary material, from the teeth of an Amazon piranha to the huge chambered fossil skull of the hadrosaur Lambeosaurus, and from the delicate fossil skeleton of a pterosaur no larger than a sparrow to the bone-crunching jaws of a spotted hyena.

In a word: irresistible.

Some More Useful Terms

(The experience which prompted me to write these has been garnered over the years of my debating these issues with creationists on assorted Internet forums.)

Creationist: Young Earth Creationists believe that everything was created 6,000 years ago (or even as long as *gasp* 10,000 years ago), and that evolutionary theory is a scientific conspiracy. There are some who might consider this world view medieval. Sane people, for instance.

Evidence: To a creationist, this means anything that the Bible says. To anyone remotely sane, however, evidence means something that can be observed by repeatable experiment, is subject to rigorous peer review, and often has a material reality.

God: A supreme being who gets regularly insulted by creationists who trivialize his grand scheme of creation, which it took him squillions of years to complete, and yet which they insist he threw together in just six extremely busy days, including overtime. If this were true, he would of course have had the unions on his tail.

Satan: The Lord of Darkness himself, who really grooves to what creationists believe because it trivializes God's true achievement (see above).

Charles Darwin: A genius whom God created to prove creationists wrong.

Kenneth Ham: Founder and director of the Creationist Museum in Kentucky. Is on the record as saying that a T. rex (which, with a staggering *2,900 pounds of force per side of the jaw, had the most powerful bite ever known), ate coconuts and was on board Noah’s Ark (you think I’m making this up? I wish that I was).

Museum: Originally, this was the temple of the Muses in Ancient Greece (hence the name). So in an apparent attempt to lend a spurious legitimacy to their own museum, the very Christian creationists unintentionally named their building after a pagan temple. Megafacepalm.

God did it: This is the creationist equivalent of pleading the 5th Amendment. A catch-all response to anything too hard to answer (i.e.: anything put to them in the form of a direct question), such as: ‘why can mitochondrial DNA (inherited through the mother) be traced back to a possible 140,000 years ago?’ Or: ‘why is the human genome 95% identical to the chimpanzee genome?’

God is testing us: This is another useful catch-all response trotted out by creationists when asked such questions as: ‘why are the fossils of marine animals found in the middle of Kansas?’

Wrong: This is a very useful creationist term used to describe virtually anyone or anything other than themselves, such as the sciences, other religious beliefs, you name it. The phrase 'siege mentality' comes to mind.

Non sequitur: a conclusion doomed to be false because the starting point is itself a false or unverifiable assumption: "God created the Earth in six days because the Book of Genesis says so" is a non-sequitur because it does not qualify the source of the statement. How could it, when such a statement is a matter of personal belief, and therefore unproveable.

*See Scientific American, vol. 281, #3

I'm exempting these 'useful terms' from my Creative Commons license and studio copyright. Feel free to re-post them to the discomfort of creationists. :) A link back to this blog is not required, although always appreciated.

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Friday, November 20, 2009

Patience please!

The raptors are currently being fed. As soon as they are through with their meal, they will appear on this weblog, and those patient readers with a stout heart and a steady nerve are welcome to check back later to meet them.

Welcome