Re: KT boundry event

uraniumcommittee@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

John Harshman wrote:

uraniumcommittee@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


John Harshman wrote:



All dinosaurs died out at th eend of the Cretaceous. It's really a very
simple concept.

Simple, but wrong. That depends on what a dinosaur is. Why are you
insisting so strongly that birds are not dinosaurs? What's in it for
you? "Because they aren't" won't be acceptable.


No, 'birds' are not 'dinosaurs'. 'Aves' are indeed 'Dinosauria'. The
word 'dinosaur' refers to extinct, often massive creatures, most of
which had arms or legs, not wings.

The word 'bird' refers to living or recent animals that are mostly
small and winged.

The problem is one of the use of the terms 'birds'and 'dinosaurs' as
synonyms of 'Aves' and 'Dinosauria'. They are NOT synonymous.

We're arguing about two words here, "bird" and "dinosaur". Let's
consider them separately.

According to your dictionary definition, the dictionary definition you
yourself presented in an attempt to advance your cause, "bird" is in
fact synonymous with Aves. You may not like that, but I don't see how
you can deny it.

Not perfectly synonymous. Otherwise, why create the new word 'Aves'?

There are several answers possible here. I'll try them all.

1. What do you mean "new word"? Aves is Latin for "birds", and as such
is much older than "bird".

2. The dictionary didn't create the word, it just used it in the
definition that equated the two. Which it did.

3. The Linnean term was decided (by Linneus, as it happens) because
Latin was at the time the international language of science.

4. We retain "Aves" because "bird" can indeed be ambiguous, and because
there is still an international language of biological nomenclature.

5. There are of course a number of perfect synonyms in English. Oldsquaw
and longtailed duck, mean exactly the same thing. More to the point,
there is an exact correspondence between many common names and linnean
terms. Clangula hyemalis means exactly the same as those first two.

Look at the definition:

----------------------
'Bird'
a member of the class Aves all differing from the ancestral reptiles in
possession of a covering of feathers instead of scales, a completely
four-chambered heart served by a single (the right) aortic arch, fully
separate systemic and pulmonary circulations, a warm-blooded
metabolism, and large eggs with hard calcareous shells, and all recent
forms having the forelimbs modified into wings, the jaws without teeth
and enclosed in horny sheaths, and usually the breastbone enlarged by a
ventral keel for the attachment of the pectoral muscles that control
the action of the wings
-----------------------

The first part is "a member of the class Aves". The rest is amplification.

Note, while we have the definition in front of us, that only "all recent
forms" are said to have the forelimbs modified, the toothless beak, and
the ventral keel. That means of course that there are some non-recent
forms without these features, or the definition makes no sense.

Note, also, that there is no mention of the K/T boundary. That's your
own addition having nothing to do with the dictionary.

It stems from the logic of the thing.

It stems from your imagination, and in fact contradicts the dictionary.
Note that according to the dictionary, only some birds are toothless.
But all post-K/T birds are toothless. Therefore, by the dictionary
definition, some birds must be pre-K/T.

I see that you have since "corrected" this definition into one that you
like better. And you still say it's not your personal definition!

According to your dictionary, "dinosaur" isn't synonymous with what we
now think of as Dinosauria, and it does say that dinosaurs are extinct
too. But let's think about that. When the definition was written, it
wasn't clearly understood that Aves was a part of Dinosauria. Suppose
you had a 1930 dictionary and looked up "coelacanth". It would tell you
that coelacanths are an extinct group of lobe-finned fish. Then in 1938
the first living coelacanth was found. Would you argue, based on the
dictionary, that it wasn't really a coelacanth, because coelacanths are
extinct? I suspect you wouldn't. But that's exactly the position you are
adopting here: birds aren't dinosaurs, because dinosaurs extinct. See?
The dictionary says so. Similarly, dinosaurs were supposed extinct when
that definition was written because nobody understood that Aves was part
of Dinosauria. Now that we know they are, we can clarify that definition
of "dinosaur" to drop the word "extinct", and everyone can be happy.

But the word 'coelacanth' was not made up to refer to extinct
creatures.

Yes it was. Whatever are you thinking? It was made up to refer to
creatures that were thought to be extinct at the time. That turns out to
be wrong. Same with dinosaurs. The difference is that we knew about the
living dinosaurs but for some time didn't recognize them for what they are.

'Dinosaur' was. Are you saying that the word 'whale' is
wholly synonymous with Sinonyx?

Uh-oh, there's your problem with nested groups again. Sinonyx does not
encompass Cetacea (whales = Cetacea). All your counterexamples are of
this type, non-nested groups used to talk about nested groups.

Ancestors of birds originated among early dinosaurs, but that is not
the same thing as saying 'birds are dinosaurs'. They are linguistically
distinct statements.

Actually, they are cladistically identical statements, and cladistic
thinking should be encouraged.

Not using colloquial language. If you want to be technical, be
technical. 'Birds' are not 'dinosaurs', even though Aves may be
Disosauria.

Why?

Because the word 'bird' is not synonymous with 'Aves',

Actually, according to your dictionary, it is.

No, it is not.

Look again. Are we now agreed, or is your reading incomprehension total?


and the word
'dinosaur' is not synonymous is not synonymous with 'Dinoauria'. The
difference is all-important.

Why is it important? And why shouldn't "dinosaur" be synonymous with
"Dinosauria"?

Because they ARE not. The meanings of the words ARE different, that's
why. You have to respect the meanings of words! Humpty-Dumpty was
WRONG!

I find it interesting that you appeal to the meanings of words, as given
in the dictionary, to defend your personal definition of "bird", which
contradicts the dictionary on multiple points.


I will agree that the popular definition of "dinosaur"
doesn't include birds.

NOW you understand.

Always did.


Is that all we're arguing about?

YES!!!!!


The point is
that it *should*.

But it DOESN'T. That is NOT the role of science!

"The role of science is not to clarify or modify words, but rather the
concepts to which they refer."

Who said this? The botanist Julius Sachs...

I don't actually know who Sachs is or why I should care what he said,
but he's right. You are just interpreting his words to mean exactly the
opposite of what he said. He said that we should use old words with new
meanings, and not worry about what the old meanings were.

No, we can continue to call 'whales' to refer to whales even though we
know they're related to and decended from Sinonyx.

Whales are not descended from Sinonyx. Where did you get that idea? At
any rate, your invincible incomprehension continues. We could continue
to call whales "whales" even if we also called them artiodactyls, which
in fact they are. Or Sinonyx actually was ancestral to whales, we could
call them Sinonyx as well as calling them whales. In that case all
whales would be Sinonyx, but not all Sinonyx would be whales.

Many evolutionary biologists (including me) are
campaigning to make it so. You ran into that. But what's the problem
with making the change? It's good for you.

No, it's pernicious, and I'm here to tell you so.

But apparently you're not here to tell me why.


Do you think it useful to say baseball is cricket? I don't! Baseball
came from cricket, or so it is believed, but it now is distinct and is
referred to by a different name.

I suggest you read Umberto Eco's book:

Kant and the Platypus

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/015601159X/sr=8-1/qid=1145547304/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1737020-1779102?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Why? What lesson would it teach me.

It explains what I'm trying to say.

I'm not going to buy and read an entire book to figure out what you're
trying to say. If you can't explain it, don't bother referring me. Given
your track record, I have my doubts that you actually understood what
Eco was saying anyway.

(Cladistics summed up in a sentence:
"Once a fish, always a fish.") I really don't understand why you're so
adamant on this point.

Still don't.

Still don't.

Still don't.

If I hear my friend say 'I heard some birds last night' I am fairly
certain he did not mean dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are extinct, so far as we
know.

Once again, you confuse the concept of nested groups.

No, I do not. The 'dinosaurs' are extinct. All of them.

Only because you choose to define them that way.

But I didn't 'choose' to define them that way; I inherited a language
with all its baggage.

Coelacanths.

But why would you want
to do that? Especially, why should you care so much about doing that?
And I really want to know what you, in 1938, would have used as a term
for living coelacanths, when the dictionary said they were extinct.

Being extinct was not an essential part of the concept of the
coelacanth.

What makes you think so? Perhaps it's because you grew up with the idea
of living coelacanths, and so that is comfortable to you. But be assured
that coelacanths being extinct was an essential part of the concept when
the word was coined, just as much as it was with dinosaurs. You may have
read what a shock it was to find a live one. So I can see what a shock
it may be to you to have to recognize live dinosaurs.

It was in the case of dinosaur. It was coiuned in 1841 to
refer to very ancient animals that were clearly extinct.

And "coelacanth" was coined also to refer to very ancient animals that
were clearly extinct. That supposition just turned out to be wrong, as
it has also turned out to be with regard to dinosaurs.

If he heard some
birds last night, he heard some birds. Tyrannosaurids aren't birds.
Birds aren't tyrannosaurids. Your problem is that you persist in
imagining that if we call birds "dinosaurs", that means that birds must
be giant, lumbering beasts.


What you say is true.

You mean you recognize your problem? Then why don't you see that it's a
problem?


In fact many (traditional) dinosaurs were
also small, and some had wings. And saying that birds are dinosaurs
doesn't change them in any way.

The word 'bird' refers to living or recent animals.

Only in your personal definition. Not in the dictionary or in common
usage. Are we now agreed that you made that part up?


The word 'dinosaur'
refers to a different group, all of which are extinct.

True in the dictionary, but what about that coelacanth?

Fifferent kind of thing. Are whales Sinonyx?

Nested group problem again.

Whales are not
their land-dwelling predecessors. They're whales. the term 'whale'
exists precisely to refer to whales.

Indeed it does. But whales are also mammals, which was the point. More
and less inclusive terms can be used to refer to nested groups. Whales
are still whales, even though they're mammals too. You don't seem to
understand that birds can still be birds, even if we say they're
dinosaurs too.

No, they cannot. More precisely, they're NO LONGER dinosaurs: they're
birds.

What prevents them from being both?

Dinosaurs are extinct except for one particular clade, the birds.

False. All dinosaurs are extinct.

This is true:

"Dinosauria are extinct except for one particular clade, Aves."

But according to the dictionary definition you quoted, birds are
synonymous with Aves.

No, the terms are not perfectly synonymous.

Not according to the dictionary definition you quoted. A bird is a "a
member of the class Aves".

And
your friend meant that he heard dinosaurs whether he knew it or not.


It's impossible to mean what you don't mean. See the Sachs quote,
again.

Again you fail to understand that if you hear a bird, that doesn't mean
it's not a dinosaur too.

Whales? Sinonyx?

Nested group problem.

We can use multiple words to describe the
members of nested sets, depending on which set we think interesting at
the time. Your friend may have heard an American robin. But he would
also have heard a thrush, whether he knew it or not, and a passerine,
and a bird, and a dinosaur. All the same robin, just different levels of
generality. Are you going to say that robins are robins, and he didn't
hear a vulture, so he couldn't have heard a bird? I bet you aren't.

Dinosaurs are extinct. They died 65 mya. Get over it. Jurassic Park is
fiction.

You really have to understand that repeated assertion is not argument.
(Yes it is. No it isn't.)

Anyway, we are agreed that "bird" and "dinosaur" are disjunct terms in
common, popular usage, though you are wildly mistaken about the common
dividing line.

The dividinng line is the one you find in the dictionary.

Which is not the same as the one you are claiming. Under the dictionary
definition, Archaeopteryx is a bird, and there are many Mesozoic birds.


No, it is not a bird. The word 'bird' does not refer to animals that
lived before the KT boundary event. Before that, the ancestors of birds
and dinosaurs were mixed together. Afterwards, they are distinct.

Again, your personal definition that nobody else, including the
dictionary, uses.


I'm trying to tell you that it's useful and salutary to refer to birds
as dinosaurs.

No, it isn't. You don't understand, at all, the role of language. It's
primarily about REFERENCE, not cladistics. The word 'bird' does not
describe historical relationships, it refers to a class, objects that
are grouped conceptually by reason of their similar overall
characteristics.

The main argument here isn't over "bird", but over "dinosaur".


'Dinosauria' and 'dinosaur' do not mean the same thing. One is a
technical term used in paleontology. The other is a common term used by
laymen.

True. But in scientific papers they generally do mean the same thing,
and words do change meaning. In this case the change is an obvious and
useful one, similar (I repeat) to the change from "coelacanth" referring
to an extinct group to referring to group with one, now two, living species.


The
common conception is that they are separate, because dinosaurs are
giant, extinct beasts, and birds are little, flying, feathery things.

That's right.

It's right that this is the common conception. But the common conception
is wrong. Many extinct dinosaurs were smaller than many living birds, etc.

True, and irrelevant. The problem is the word 'dinosaur' is so vague
that it is useless. Much more useful to refer to birds with the name
'bird'.

What makes you think "dinosaur" is vague? The dictionary definition you
gave is a bit vague, true, but that's not the whole meaning as
understood by paleontologists and educated people. The operative core of
it, for some reason not stated up front as with the bird definition, is
in fact contained in that phrase on "the two orders Ornithischia and
Saurischia". Would it surprise you to know that birds are members of
Saurischia?

This distinction becomes much harder if you look at the actual fossils,
where one grades imperceptibly into the other. The dividing line is
arbitrary, as witnessed by your disagreement with the dictionary. It's
really hard to tell where theropods ought to end and birds begin. The
problem becomes easier if we don't have to decide where theropods end,
and just worry about where birds begin. And this is the practice we
follow most everywhere else. We don't talk about "primates and mammals".


Read the Sachs quote again.

Every time I read it, it means the same thing: keep the word but change
the meaning.

No, change the understanding of the referent.

He says that a word is used in quite a different sense from its previous
use. How is that other than a change of meaning?

(We do, however, talk about humans and apes. Are you willing to agree
that you are an ape?)


No, I am a man. Seems simple enough.

In scientific terms, I am a member of the species Homo Sapiens Sapiens,
of the family Hominidae.

In scientific terms (at least recently), apes are also members of
Hominidae. Does it make you feel insecure to be referred to as an ape?


Not at all. Just inaccurate. Just like a whale is not a Sinonyx.

Nested group problem.

Perhaps you should become a creationist.


Fie! Thou speakest evil!

Why not? You have much in common. Creationists don't like to think that
they're apes either, and they hate to think that birds are dinosaurs
too. Because all these words are being used with evolutionary meanings.

You respond "but they aren't", as if this was some
elementary statement of fact rather than a strictly arbitrary
distinction. What exactly is your stake in this?

Why do we refer to things by different words? Because it's useful. When
I tell my friends I bought a Buick, my friends know what I am referring
to. Using this clever device saves me the trouble of explaining the
history of the internal combustion engine, the organization of general
motors, and the application of paint in assembly line production.

All irrelevant. When I say I birds are dinosaurs, what is confusing you?


It's very relevant. Is a Buick a chariot?

Again you confuse nested groups with disjunct groups.

No.

That's still not an argument.

You have not been able to defend your
idea that birds are current animals (which would seem to deny that there
can be such a thing as an extinct bird).

No, it does not exclude that.

Then what's all that about anachronism? You understand that whatever
defining characters you pick, the difference between "bird" and
"non-bird" is an arbitrary division of a continuum, right?

Of course! Now you are beginning to understand.

I'm worried that you don't.




Evolutionary
transformations are gradual. Your division seems more arbitrary than
most, especially since we can't actually tell what it is so far. Your
ideas of "toothless" and "post K/T" are mutually contradictory, for example.

Not so. That's just a rough guide to where we can begin to start using
the word 'bird'.

It's a useless guide since the two contradict each other. You don't
think that's a problem?

There is no contradiction at all.

Only because you are ignorant of the fossil record.


The fossil record has nothing to do with what the word 'bird' refers
to.

Of course it does.

What the word 'bird' refers to, as in the case of all words, is a
matter for lexicographers.

Are you a lexicographer? Just for my information.

There are fossil birds or non-birds, and it has to be
decided which they are.

That's why you need to read Eco's book. That's what it is about.

Fossil birds and non-birds? Actually, I'm becoming intrigued. But could
you summarize some relevant argument of Eco's?

All your criteria are ambiguous (actual
characters of the animal) or silly (this K/T thing).


Toothless birds long
predate the K/T boundary. So if "toothless" and "post K/T" are both
criteria, there are many birds that satisfy one and not the other. Are
they birds (because toothless) or non-birds (because pre-K/T)? That's
what we call contradictory.



As for your second sentence,
nobody is daying that dinosaurs are birds, just that birds are
dinosaurs.

But that's simply false, even though Aves are part of the Dinosauria.
'Birds' are not 'Aves' and 'dinosaurs' are not 'Dinosauria'. NOW do you
understand?

I understand the difference. But why is is simply false that birds are
dinosaurs?

Because the WORDS mean different things, as can be established by
looking in the DICTIONARY.

Yes, the dictionary says that. But why are we to be bound by the
dictionary?


So that we can understand each other. Seems simple enough.

I think we understand each other pretty well. As long as the shifts in
meaning are not too radical or unilateral, they work fine. It's now
commonly understood among educated people that birds are dinosaurs, so
there is no problem with understanding. You yourself understand what
that means; you just don't like it.

I don't accpt the distortion of language for asny reason whatsoever. We
can change our understanding of what we're talking about when we use
the words, but what the words mean cannot be arbitrarily changed.

Then you are fighting 50,000 years of language evolution. Good luck.

You certainly aren't, because you disagree with the
dictionary definition of "bird".


No, I don't.

Sure you do. You disagree that toothed birds are birds.

No, I disagree that the word 'bird' can be used to refer to such
entities. My complaint is about language, not classification.

OK, fine. You disagree that the word "bird" can be used to refer to such
entities. In this you disagree with everyone else in the world. Why,
otherwise, would the phrase "toothed bird" be so common?

If you recall,
according to the dictionary, only recent birds were said to be
toothless. And you disagree that birds are not defined by the K/T
boundary, which is nowhere in the dictionary definition you yourself
gave. And in fact you have recently "fixed" the dictionary definition.
If you didn't disagree, why fix it?

'Recent' was their way of saying the same thing I did about the KT
boundary.

Notice that "recent birds", in the dictionary definition, does not mean
"all birds". According to the definition, there are some birds that
aren't recent birds. That contradicts your definition.

By the way, the dictionary is unclear
too, because it says that dinosaurs are members of Ornithischia and
Saurischia. But birds are members of Saurischia, so by that token, they
are dinosaurs even according to the dictionary.


The definition should leave out the reference to 'Aves'. It's not
relevant.

Ah, so now you say the dictionary is wrong. Only you are right.


Because the words mean different things. Cows are not sheep because we
refer to two distinct groups when we use the words 'cow' and 'sheep'.
Hell, we evenhave a word for different stages of the same organism! A
tadpole is not a frog, even though it will become one. You simply
conflate the distinctions that language has made for good reasons.

Once again, you use disjunct groups to tell me what should be the
practice for nested groups. I think this is no accident, because if you
used nested groups it would sound ridiculous even to you.

Is baseball cricket? Or did baseball evolve from cricket? We have
different names for them because they are different, even if one came

from the other. Their historical relationship is irrelevant for

reference.

Once again, you use disjunct groups to discuss nested groups. Do you
even notice this?


HUH? Cricket still exists, right? Baseball came from cricket, but is
not evolved into something else, right? The parallel is exact.

Sorry, but no. Baseball didn't come from cricket, and "birds came from
dinosaurs" is a misunderstanding that was common before cladistics
(which you still haven't looked up), but is becoming rarer these days.


But yes, the common meaning of "bird" and "dinosaur" are disjunct.

Baseball. Cricket.

Baseball isn't descended from cricket, by the way.


OK, pretend that it is for the sake of argument. It's just an example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball.

You need to look a little closer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_baseball

Baseball, cricket, and rounders all emerged from the same set of early
English games. But baseball is not descended from cricket, any more than
whales are descended from cows.

Thos eearly English games are all obsolete (extinct). Is baseball
identical with them? NO!

Nested group problem again.

Did you get tired after this point? I'll just snip the rest, since you
ignored it.

[snip]

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: KT boundry event
    ... "Birds are dinousars." ... "Therefore, dinosaurs are not extinct." ... Dinosaurs and all other large similar animals became extinct. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: KT boundry event
    ... "Birds are dinousars." ... "Therefore, dinosaurs are not extinct." ... Dinosaurs and all other large similar animals became extinct. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: KT boundry event
    ... "Birds are dinousars." ... "Therefore, dinosaurs are not extinct." ... That's nothing like the reasoning I have used. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: KT boundry event
    ... "Birds are dinousars." ... "Therefore, dinosaurs are not extinct." ... Latin was used for philosophy and science until the late ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: KT boundry event
    ... The problem is one of the use of the terms 'birds'and 'dinosaurs' as ... and it does say that dinosaurs are extinct ... birds aren't dinosaurs, ... But the word 'coelacanth' was not made up to refer to extinct ...
    (talk.origins)