Re: KT boundry event

uraniumcommittee@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

John Harshman wrote:
(snip)

It's clear that we don't know a whole lot about this creature, which
adorns my computer desktop right now. Is it too old to be an amphibian?
When is it believed that amphibians arose?

Age has nothing to do with it. When we believe amphibians arose has
nothing to do with it. Because age is not the criterion used to define
any group.


I am interested in knowing if this guy lived before the accepted rise
of amphibians.

And I am interested in knowing why this is relevant, one way or the other.

Well, isn't that obvious? If amphibians did not arise until much later,
he could not be an amphibian, or if he is, we have to revise our
understanding of amphibian origins.

Precisely. And since we don't define taxa based on time, we would adopt
the latter course. If Tiktaalik were to turn out to be a member of the
clade we call Amphibia (which it won't, but never mind), then that would
only mean that ampibians were older than we had previously thought. The
age, like I said, is irrelevant.

[snip]

Amphibians have gills, then lungs. One at a time.

Some do, some don't. There are frogs that never have gills because there
is no tadpole stage. Likewise there is a whole family of salamanders
that have no lungs. And of course many fish have both gills and lungs at
the same time, though most of them have had their lungs changed into
swim bladders. It's very likely that Tiktaalik had both gills and lungs,
just as did most extinct sarcopterygians. Why is this important?

I find amphibians to be fascinating creatures.

Then you should learn something about them. I would recommend a book if
one came to mind, but it didn't.

[snip]

It should change only when necessary. Slow or fast is irrelevant. It
should not be changed because of the inability of scientists to get
things straight. the knowledge of Latin is dying, and many scientists
are simply lazy or foreigners using English as a second or tertiary
language.

What does that observation, true or false, have to do with anything? How
is Latin relevant to anything we're discussing here? Unless you think
that etymology rules meaning, that is, and this is even less true in
scientific terminology than in vernacular speech.

It's a polite way of saying that scientists (and academics in general)
in the 'old days' were linguitically much more capable. Today, they're
almost unreadable.

Because they don't speak Latin? I'm not sure you have any idea what
you're saying from moment to moment. I think you just write down the
first thing that comes into your head. What is this supposed "inability
of scientists to get things straight"? What's all that nonsense about
"lazy foreigners"?

We're making progress. I think it should change at whatever
rate is convenient. And that it will change at whatever rate it changes
at, regardless of whether or not you take out your sword and slash at
the tide.


HALT thou foul demons of linguistic night! Cast not thine impertinent
words upon me!

How's that working for ya?

Let's refer now to Scene 24.


So you claim. I don't think that has anything to do with the poor
reception of evolution among the public.

You cannot be serious.

I can. You've been wrong about everything else so far, why not this?

What? Have you ever actually TALKED with a Creationist-supporting
religious person?

Yes, frequently.

I have, many, many times. They have their own
language: 'kinds', etc. Then there are those who are not so strict, but
who nonetheless dismiss Darwinism. THOSE are the people whom we need to
reach, and you folks are doing a TERRIBLE job of it.

And this has something to do with saying that humans are fish? Present
some evidence.

You
haven't supported your claim with any arguments or evidence yet.

Oh, so the fact that 60% of the American public rejects evolutiuon
means you are doing a good job? Face it, friends, you stink. You have
to SELL evolution just like Coca-Cola or iPods or McDonald's
hamburgers. The trouble is you haven't the first clew on how to do
that.

I have some clues. Generally, scientists don't try. That's the biggest
problem -- few resources devoted to evolution education except at the
college level, and then mostly to biology majors

Permit me to doubt that you have the first clue on how to do it. It's
certainly not by having long arguments about what a bird is, or what a
dinosaur is.

I also don't think scientists
are at fault at all, except to the extent that they don't stop to
explain things to the public. The biggest problem is with our
educational system. And the creationists, of course. And, unfortunately,
the Republican Party, currently acting as the secular arm of creationism.

How ironic. many of them are just transplanted southern Democrats.

Yes, there's been a rearrangement. This has much to do with the
transformation of the party. Do you disagree?

Of BOTH parties.

I don't think so. The fundamentalists were never a big enough part of
the Democratic party to affect policy. Partly this has to do with the
great job the Republicans did of recruiting fundamentalists from the
ranks of non-voters. It used to be a semi-official doctrine not to get
involved in the affairs of Caesar.

You don't understand how politics works, given that an overwhelming
majority of the US population does not accept evolution.

I'm a Republican and an atheist and a Darwinist. My regard for
academics is very low. The soft scientces are the worst, but even the
hard sciences are filled with inept, illiterate individuals who could
not argue their way out of a paper bag.

I doubt you would be able to tell. Tell me, aren't you a bit dismayed at
the present state of the party, hostage to the fundamentalists? By some
accounts, your favorite president is one of them, or if he isn't, he's
merely a shameless panderer. Which would you prefer to be true?

He's a bit too much of a politician for my taste, but it's not a fatal
flaw. Lyndon Johnson was much worse.

So that would be a "no" for the first question, and a preference for the
"shameless panderer" option, right?

Are you familiar with the Sokal hoax paper?

http://www.sablesys.com/sokal.html

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/weinberg.html

He's a liberal (old-school) and even HE is disgusted with academe. He
wrote this garbage paper and got it published as a test.

Yes, I'm quite familiar. How is this relevant to anything you have said,
except for the claim that the social sciences have problems?

ALL the sciences have problems, including but not limited to the
inability to communicate.

How do you derive that information from the Sokal hoax? It involved one
journal in one discipline of the very soft sciences. I'd like to see him
try it in a physics or biology journal. Words in those journals actually
mean things, and reviewers (let alone readers) know what they are.

I suggest that you know nothing about the abilities of scientists to
communicate to other scientists. We write for the intended audience. If
that audience is other scientists, the language might be hard for you to
understand. But you're not the intended audience. And of course you
could understand it if you took the trouble to learn the meanings of the
words.

[snip]

I read a lot of material written over the last 200 years. Writing today
has never been so bad. I read a book by a leading philosopher, and felt
compelled to write to him and chastise him for his atrocious style.

Bet he was properly chastened, too.

It is horribly written.

Could be, but at this point I'm not prepared to credit anything just
because you say so.

Apparently you think language should be frozen at the point you learned
to speak it.

Nope, I never said that, and do not believe that.

Sure you do. You don't want "dinosaur" to change meaning, but you are
happy for "coelacanth" to have changed before you were born.

It did not change in meaning. The species discovered alive are
different, and are NOT 'living fossils'.

Wouldn't it be better for your position if they were living fossils?


No.

OK. You really have to break this habit of making unsupported
pronouncements. It doesn't get you points with anyone.

Perhaps I don't see how it could be?

Then say that. "No" means that you understand the point but disagree.

[snip]

OK. Big Wodehouse fan too?

Never read her/him.

P. G. Wodehouse. (And "him".) Try a book store.

[snip]

No, it's not. Mammals as a GROUP are identified by being unable to
breathe water, for one thing, which is something that all fish can do
or else they're not considered fish.

Notice that's a different charateristic from the ones you listed before.
There are fish (some lungfish) that will die if they are not allowed
access to the air. They can't get all the oxygen they need from their
gills alone. Are they still fish?

Maybe not.

How would you tell? More importantly, why should anyone care whether
you, personally, can tell?

I did not say that I personally could tell, I said "Maybe not."

How would one go about telling? How can we resolve the ambiguity?

If mammals were fish, then all those
characters would indeed occur in fish.

Do you know what a differentiating character is?

Yes. But in biology, they delimit groups within groups. A new character
can create a new group, but it doesn't end an old one.



The only reason you can say they
don't is that you exclude mammals from being fish. By the way, there are
traditional fish that breathe air, and some that are endothermic.

But none that cannot breathe water.

So why mention the others. Anyway, you're not quite right. There are a
few that can't survive without air.

OK, but there are always a few bordeline cases in any field.

But they aren't borderline cases. Nobody except you is saying that,
because they can't breathe water, they aren't fish. Everyone agrees that
lungfish are indeed fish.

I didn't say they were not. I said they were bordeline cases.

Nobody else says they're borderline cases. Everyone else says they're
fish, period.

No
"milk", exactly, but there are equivalent forms of parentally-produced
nutrition, I'm sure.

Not good enough. All mammals, even monotremes, produce milk of some
kind.

Define "milk".

You don't have a dictionary?

Since you have a personal definition, contrary to the dictionary one,
for a great many words, I have no reason to believe that the dictionary
is adequate for determining what *you* mean by milk.

The stuff that caomes from mammay glands.

I bet you define mammay glands (mommy glands? mammary?) as glands that
make milk.

And evolutionary innovations don't remove group membership either. If
making milk required that a species be removed from its old group,
pigeons would not be birds.

Not the same sort of thing. Close, but no cigar.

Why not? How is pigeon milk less defining of a new group than is mammal
milk?

The way it is produced and the nature of the 'milk'.

Surely the relevant question is not whether it's identical to mammal
milk but whether it's as big an innovation as mammal milk.


??? Flight is a bigger one, to be sure.

Irrelevant. You separate mammals from "mammal-like" reptiles by their
making milk. So why don't you separate pigeons from birds because of
their nearly identical evolutionary innovation?

If we call
mammals something different because they make milk, why don't we call
pigeons something different because they make pigeon's milk? What
determines the size of an innovation, and whether it warrants starting a
new group and making the species no longer part of its old group?


It's all somewhat arbitrary. I tend to follow convention, as it makes
communication much more practical and accurate.

But you don't follow convention. When the world disagrees with you, on
the meaning of "bird" for example, you just say that the world is wrong.

[snip]

'Ape', 'man', 'simian', 'monkey', etc. are vernacular terms that apply
to living creatures. They should not be used to characterize ancient
animals, which have evolved considerably to become the modern forms.

If we believed that, then there would be no fossils under those names.

Under what names?

"Ape", "man", "simian", "monkey", etc. The term "fossil ape" or "fossil
man", etc., would not be found. But you try it and tell me what you get.

I don't understand what you are driving at.

You claimed that "primate" was used only for living species.


I claimed that the VERNACULAR term applies properly only to living
species.

"Primate" is always a vernacular term. What exactly does "properly" mean
here? Certainly it doesn't refer to common usage, because everyone
except you calls extinct primate-like animals "primates". Your claim is
simply false.

You cited
Wikipedia for this, not noticing that the very article you cite
discusses extinct primates. Same thing with "ape", etc. I'm telling you
that they don't apply (aren't applied) only to living animals.

That's not best usage.

Show me an example of anyone other than yourself saying it's not best
usage. Show me someone who says extinct species shouldn't be called
primates.

Perhaps you know that they are applied that way, but just think they
shouldn't be. But what's your argument? You have previously appealed to
common usage. But I've shown that common usage agrees with me, not you.
What else do you have?

Best usage.

If "best" is not determined by common usage, how is it determined?

[snip]

They are not 'horses'.

Why? Because you say so? Can we agree, at least, that everyone except
you calls them horses?

I have no idea. People do all kinds of crazy things. Some people like
Wayne newton and Barry Manilow.

Since your sole appeal is to common usage, how can you have no idea how
the word is used? Find me a case where anyone says that a fossil equid
is not a horse.

No answer?

Likewise, there are modern genera of
birds that have no English common names, just the names of their genera
(Parotia, for example). But they are still birds.


Are you saying you cannot read the book and make up your own mind?

I have no great interest in reading the book right now, and perhaps
ever. At any rate, you're just hiding behind it.

No. I am tring to get you to understand the relationship between
language and the formation of concepts.

Oddly, "read the book" doesn't help me understnd anything.

It's too sophisticated, perhaps, for paleontologists.

I'm not a paleontologist. I'm an ornithologist or, if you like, a
dinosaur neontologist. But "read the book" isn't sophisticated at all,
though the book itself might be.

It certainly is.

Apparently it's too sophisticated for you to understand the arguments,
since you can't summarize them in your own words.

They defy brief description.

I'm suspicious. I think you have no clear idea what the arguments are.

Plesiosaurs had to come onto land to lay eggs, right?

Nobody knows that I am aware. But what does that have to do with
dinosaurs anyway? Surely you're not under the impression that
plesiosuars were dinosaurs.

Close enough for our purposes here.

If our purpose were to remove all meanings from words, perhaps. Even
your dictionary is no help to you here. What exactly is a dinosaur, if
plesiosaurs are dinosaurs?

I said "close enough for our purposes here" which means that they are
no longer fish and cannot breed in water.

We were supposedly talking about dinosaurs. Are you claiming that
anything that's not a fish and can't breed in water is a dinosaur for
our purposes?

No, I was claiming that they are not fish.

Now you're being disingenuous. Either that, or you forget from one post
to another what you're saying.

Perhaps. I thought we were talking about men being fish.

We were talking about several things. The immediate subject that
occasioned your descent into plesiosaurs was my statement that there
were no aquatic non-avian dinosaurs. Is it all coming back to you now?

What point are you trying to make here? (And as far as I
know, it's unknown whether plesiosaurs could breed in water.)

I really doubt it.

Why?

Because they were not fish.

Yet whales breed in water, and they're not fish (according to you), and
ichthyosaurs bred in water, and I bet you think they weren't fish
either. So "they were not fish" turns out not to be good evidence that
they didn't breed in the water.

Do you, by the way, remember at all what point you were trying to make?

[snip]

If so, they're just avians.

Only because you, just last week, redefined the words to be so. Nobody
else uses them that way. I thought you claimed to be going by
established usage. But everyone except you calls them birds. Where's
your established usage now?

I'm talking about what establishes vernacular usage.

As far as I can tell, what establishes vernacular usage is vernacular
usage itself. It's an empirically investigatable phenomenon. If everyone
calls something a bird, that's vernacular usage. It just so happens that
everyone (except you and a few creationists) calls Archaeopteryx a bird.

No, only scientists do. There is no vernacular term for such animals.
Scientists ahve adopted the vernacular usage without justification.

Find me anyone, anywhere, who says Archaeopteryx is not a bird, and I'll
give your claim some credence.


I'll look around.

I'll wait here.

(But it has to be someone who accepts the
idea of evolution -- there are creationists who say that, but what they
think is that the feathers are faked.)

Poor deluded souls.

Let's not be too mean to the only folks on your side in this.

[snip]

.

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