Social The Blue Moon Cantina XVIII ~Off to Never Never Land~

Why not?

 

Because I don't think heavy metal and rap go together?

 

Actually it can work if done right.

 

That's really good!

 

you killed the thread bro

morning all

 

There you go again. Breaking my heart. Why are you not here when I am?





p.s. Threadkiller!

 

All the latest posts in here seem to kill the thread.

 

Thread-icide

 

Hello ^_^

 

Hi Kitty. How have you been?

 

KITTY!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh, btw, I send you a request on Skype!


Just a flyby post people...still on my vacation.

 

Sorry to necro this, but I was aimlessly browsing this and, being a palaeontologist, I had to comment!

Essentially this is a result of cladistics being preferred over Linnaean taxonomy. In other words, things like 'families' or 'kingdoms' are recognised as essentially arbritary distinctions, and reworked within the framework of cladistics to be one of three: a monophyletic taxon, which is defined as a group including all descendants of a common ancestor based on that first member possessing certain characteristics which are inherited by all descendants and are not present outside that taxon, a paraphyletic taxon, which is one defined by excluding smaller clades, or a polyphyletic taxon, which is based on shared characteristics not inherited from a common ancestor.

So birds - 'Aves' - remains a class as it always was, but it's also recognised that living birds exist within the clade Carinatae (which is defined as all descendants of the last common ancestor of modern birds and the extinct, toothed Ichthyornis), and Carinatae is a clade nested inside the larger clade Averaptor, which is a clade of dinosaurs defined as all theropods more closely related to sparrows than to Velociraptor-type dinosaurs (and thus modern birds exist as their only living representatives), and so on. So with cladistics, it's not that scientists 'decided' to put them within a greater dinosaur family or such, it's simply the inevitable result of classifying things in ways that are actually taxonomically meaningful, i.e. classifying things according to the evolutionary family tree. An analogy would be this: with cladistics, you're creating meaningful groups like "Anyone more closely related to Richard Dodds than to Robert Dodds," or "The last common ancestor of Josephine Dodds and Laura Jones, and all descendants of that person (whoever it was)." And when you apply that to Dinosauria, you necessarily end up with a cladogram, or cladistic tree, that simply doesn't allow you to call those feathered flying things that live alongside us anything other than dinosaurs, any more than a family tree of the Doddses would allow you to call Robert anything other than a Dodds. (Okay, the analogy breaks down when you add marriage to the mix, so don't! )

But yeah, it's always pretty cool to go out and casually point to a pigeon and say "Look at that dinosaur," brace for the laugther or confused looks, and then explain that "Birds didn't evolve from dinosaurs, birds are dinosaurs which evolved from different, older and sadly extinct dinosaurs."

That isn't really a meaningful statement though, is it? You can say "I don't understand biological evolution," or, "I reject the theories of Lamarckian evolution or Darwinian evolution as accurate accounting for the diversity of modern-day organisms" (and you'd be right to, for no scientist supports Lamarckian or Darwinian evolution!), or "I am insufficiently educated on abiogenesis (the processes involved in the origin of life) to harbour an opinion on it," but these are all very different satements from one another, about very different things (despite the unfortunate conflation of both terminology and different concepts e.g. evolution with the origin of life).

What precisely do you not believe, or do not understand? Mendelian heredity? The molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, and the chemical processes involved in replication, including errors in the copying process (that are fancifully called 'mutation')? The logically necessary extrapolation of the existence of mutations when applied to an environment of limited resources, in which organisms with mutations coincidentally beneficial to their survival are more likely to reproduce, and the seemingly radical phenotypic effects of this process over millions of years?

 

Hmmm, this place looks supicious. Whats different here from the CCC besides for the owner?

 

People are more crazy here.

 

Well, i think i will like this place more

 

Whether someone else considers another's statement 'meaningful' is utterly subjective. I meant what I said, Dreadwar. I don't believe in evolution at all.

 

First, thank you Dreadwar. It is strange as I had an in-depth discussion earlier today with a colleague along the paleontological lines... more that we live in a point of time closer to the Tyrannosaur than it did with the Stegosaur and then the discussion diverged to the bookends of the Mesozoic era and how the 'tree' diverged and branched off from similar ancestors to birds. It was fun and rare to have conversations like that and seeing your post made me smile.

Regarding the lineage... (I'll skip the proper terminology [sub order, family, genus, et al] as it is going on midnight where I am and been a long day) I will give it time as what is considered part of a family keeps evolving and shifting... nothing is truly locked down as we gain a better understanding of that era and so does the reordering of things as more evidence and such comes to light… Torosaurus is now considered a phase of a Triceratops life cycle, some species within the Pachycephalosauridae family could be considered juvenile stages of the Pachycephalosaur and I won't go into the recent Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus thing.

I still think of birds as dinosaurs in a way. Not far fetch to believe certain species surviving the K-T event since a lot of fossil evidence show that certain lineages have protofeathers and that there were a lot of giant birds amongst the mega fauna that adapted after the event. Birds still retain the 'saurian' side and as the embryo has the tail and other elements and the genes switches them off as it develops.

That was fun talking about that just adds to my excitement for this:



Now don't get me started on X-Wings!

I hope everyone is going well and their day is too

 

I know! I just love the designs of the new, I hope they will bring out models of them.

That reminds me, they got the X-Wing video game series available on Steam now.

 

Excellent! With all these classics coming out, they better release Shadows of the Empire, Episode 1 Racer, Bounty Hunter and the Rogue Squadron series. Would love to play them again on the Wii U.