Dawkins on Noah's Ark

[cronus]

I want to bring your attention to the shoes waiting to be filled since there is no evidence that niches left by dinosaurs got filled by little furries in a just so manner, indeed there is evidence for multi-millennia dead patches following each mass extinction event...as shoes decayed.

[mistermack]

Dawkins is right, as he should be. He lives and breathes the topic, so he should be on top of it.

The biblical creationists should be fought with the most glaring examples of idiocy first. And Noah's Ark is the biggest open goal for them.

Bearing in mind the low level of understanding displayed by the forty percent of the US population, who believe all that crap, you have to keep it simple.
And the Ark is the easiest of all to understand. How all marsupials apparently headed in one direction, as if they KNEW that Australia was there, is the silliest part of creationism, and the easiest to point out.
Maybe they were HOMING kangaroos, and wallabies...

[cronus]

Yeah, maybe, but he's introducing some kind of niche filling noahs ark myth of his own with things filling the dead dinosaurs shoes - which is debunked by the hard evidence that the aftermath of each mass extinction is a near dead planet - for many thousands of years...

It took millions of years for ecosystems to recover after the death of the dinosaurs

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/ ... dinosaurs/

Diversification happened but not right after the dinosaurs left the scene like Dawkins the wise is spouting...and how close Earth come to losing all its complex life and returning to some primal fungal state after each mass extinction is hard to tell with only one planet for observation.

[Svartalf]

Dawkins is right, as he should be. He lives and breathes the topic, so he should be on top of it.

The biblical creationists should be fought with the most glaring examples of idiocy first. And Noah's Ark is the biggest open goal for them.

Bearing in mind the low level of understanding displayed by the forty percent of the US population, who believe all that crap, you have to keep it simple.
And the Ark is the easiest of all to understand. How all marsupials apparently headed in one direction, as if they KNEW that Australia was there, is the silliest part of creationism, and the easiest to point out.
Maybe they were HOMING kangaroos, and wallabies...

Those that claim that Dog is omniscient an perfect can be faced with other instances... like its bargaining with Abraham about how many honest men to find in Sodom before it's worthy of destruction, or its mistaken choice of Saul to be King.

[mistermack]

Well, yeh, nobody would expect niches to be filled overnight. Millions of years isn't much, in evolutionary terms.
We humans went from Chimpanzee-like to modern humans in about six million years.
Most mammals were tiny, at the time of the extinction, so it was bound to take millions of years for huge mammals to evolve.

I think he's taking it for granted that when he describes shoes being filled, that people don't think that that means overnight.

[cronus]

Two wrongs don't make a right. Dawkins should not have said what he did whilst knowing what he knows. Trying to win over the undecided middle with another 'alternative' manifest destiny myth is dishonest and reckless. How many times was Eugenics abused because it appeared scientific?

Whatever caused the mammalian diversification explosion, probably molecules, may have happened anyway, there is no guarantee the dinasuars would have made a difference.

[mistermack]

Those that claim that Dog is omniscient an perfect can be faced with other instances... like its bargaining with Abraham about how many honest men to find in Sodom before it's worthy of destruction, or its mistaken choice of Saul to be King.

I don't really understand the creationists at all.
If a god can create a universe at will, he can do anything. So why they try to invent these various cause-and-effect explanations for various things is beyond me.
I would just say that that's how god wanted it, so he magicked it that way. To everything.

Once you have postulated magic, why stop there? You might as well make full use of it.
If people will swallow a god miracle like creating a universe, they should swallow anything.

I suppose that what they are actually doing though, is trying to get their hooks into science education. They don't want kids learning proper science, so they are trying to invent pseudo-science, to undermine the real stuff.
It's not that they actually believe the pseudo stuff. It's just a weapon to use against proper education.

[mistermack]

Two wrongs don't make a right. Dawkins should not have said what he did whilst knowing what he knows. Trying to win over the undecided middle with another 'alternative' manifest destiny myth is dishonest and reckless. How many times was Eugenics abused because it appeared scientific?

Whatever caused the mammalian diversification explosion, probably molecules, may have happened anyway, there is no guarantee the dinosaurs would have made a difference.

I'm not with you there. What exactly did he say that was wrong? It's pretty clear that the dinosaurs dominated the planet, so their disappearance was surely an opportunity.

A lot of the food that the plant-eating dinosaurs had been eating was left available to the creatures that remained.
That opened the door for all sorts of creatures. If insects ate the newly available leafy food, the insect-eating mammals would have a lot of potential prey. And grazers and browsers would have some foods to themselves. And predators would increase, along side them.

[cronus]

No evidence what killed the dinosaurs didn't kill the plants they fed on at the time. What ever changed in the mammals leading to diversification could have happened even with the dinosaurs about, leading to a evolutionary arms race and maybe intelligent life arriving even sooner? Not saying it could be like that only saying...it ain't necessarily so, because you've seen a following b, that a then follows b or are even on the same level.

[mistermack]

No evidence what killed the dinosaurs didn't kill the plants they fed on at the time. What ever changed in the mammals leading to diversification could have happened even with the dinosaurs about, leading to a evolutionary arms race and maybe intelligent life arriving even sooner? Not saying it could be like that only saying...it ain't necessarily so, because you've seen a following b, that a then follows b or are even on the same level.

Well, there would be fossil evidence. But it's unlikely that plants would suffer as much as large animals.
Plant seeds can lie dormant for a long time, in the right circumstances, whereas big animals have to keep eating and reproducing, so I would say that plants could out-survive animals by an order of magnitude.
But even if some plants went extinct, others would fill the space left. Plant food is basically soil, water and sunlight. So wherever those exist, something is likely to grow.

It would be interesting to know how the insects came off, after a meteor strike.
I would think that the sheer numbers of small animals would be in their favour. They could survive in tiny niches that huge animals simply couldn't exploit.
A tiger needs a territory of several square miles. Imagine what kind of territory a T Rex would need.
And the same would apply to the huge plant eaters. Whereas insects and mice could hang on in a cave, or inside a log, etc.

[cronus]

If it was volcanic gasses/fallout then plants can easily suffer as much as big animals. Recovery of some plant species would be quick, amazing how quickly plant life recovers after a volcanic eruption. Not sure there'd be much direct competition between dinosaurs and mammals for foliage if the two had co-existed though, what they gonna do? out chase one another for that fast moving leaf?

[mistermack]

Nobody knows for sure. The evidence isn't clear, whether dinosaurs died out in weeks, after a meteor strike, or over a few million years, for an unknown reason.

I always fancied my own idea, that some kind of animal evolved that specialised in feeding on ground-laid eggs. For it to drive the dinosaurs to extinction, it would have had to have other sources of food, but if it was really successful at finding and eating eggs, that could cause a wide range of species to go extinct.
Not sure how the crocodiles would survive that, but they are extremely protective of their eggs, so maybe that was it.
And the dinosaurs that became birds might have been nesting in trees, back then, so didn't suffer egg loss in the same way.
That's just my speculation though. I don't know if anyone else has proposed anything like that.

[cronus]

The survivors of the dinosaurs became birds. Most likely a stable climate gave way to a more up and down one and they needed to downsize and put on feathers to keep warm or cool in a more turbulent epoch? or the survivors did anyway? Could be that continental drift was stoking up the climate change, along with volcanic activity?

[mistermack]

The survivors of the dinosaurs became birds. Most likely a stable climate gave way to a more up and down one and they needed to downsize and put on feathers to keep warm or cool in a more turbulent epoch? or the survivors did anyway? Could be that continental drift was stoking up the climate change, along with volcanic activity?

I wonder why the ocean-living dinosaurs went extinct, but crocodiles didn't.

I wonder how those ocean-dwelling dinosaurs reproduced, anyway? You would think that it would have to be by giving birth to live young. Which would rule out the egg thief hypothesis.

I think if climate excesses were to blame, there would be a clear record of it in the rocks from that period.

As far as the extinction goes, the picture is a bit confused. Read some accounts, and it happened over a very short time. But others put it as happening over a few million years.

[cronus]

The survivors of the dinosaurs became birds. Most likely a stable climate gave way to a more up and down one and they needed to downsize and put on feathers to keep warm or cool in a more turbulent epoch? or the survivors did anyway? Could be that continental drift was stoking up the climate change, along with volcanic activity?

I wonder why the ocean-living dinosaurs went extinct, but crocodiles didn't.

I wonder how those ocean-dwelling dinosaurs reproduced, anyway? You would think that it would have to be by giving birth to live young. Which would rule out the egg thief hypothesis.

I think if climate excesses were to blame, there would be a clear record of it in the rocks from that period.

As far as the extinction goes, the picture is a bit confused. Read some accounts, and it happened over a very short time. But others put it as happening over a few million years.

Oceans turned bad. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event Could be crocs lived in rivers, as now, or shallow lake/sea with enough winter meltwater or whatknot to survive what happened elsewhere? They don't swim deep.....looking for prey.