ICR uses a fifteen year old article against Jurassic World

ICR put out, What Would Need to Change for a Dinosaur to Evolve into a Bird?, in response to Jurassic World.  It was lacking.

"Feathers: Feathers are not at all similar to scales. Even if scales were frayed, they would not be interlocking and impervious to air as are feathers. Actually, feathers are more similar to hair follicles than scales. Could such precise design arise by mutation? In all the recent discoveries of dinosaur fossils with "feathers," the "feathers" are merely inferred. What is actually present is better described as thin filaments which originate under the skin."

Who is still advancing the idea of frayed scales evolving into feathers?

"Birds have delicate, hollow bones to lighten their weight while dinosaurs had solid bones."

Not all dinosaurs had solid bones.

"Lungs: Birds are unique among land-dwelling vertebrates in that they don't breathe in and out. The air flows continually in a one-directional loop supporting the bird's high metabolism. Reptilian respiration is entirely different, more like that in mammals."

Unidirectional breathing has been discovered in crocodiles.

"A recent "mummified" dinosaur, with soft tissue fossilized, proved to be quite like a crocodile, and not at all like a bird."

Which one? Without citing which dinosaur mummy this argument is meaningless, especially when crocodiles are proving more bird-like.

Citation at the bottom of the article

I noticed this article was written in 2000. We know in 2015 that some dinosaurs had hollow bones and another archosaur, ie crocodile, has unidirectional breathing. Especially since the discovery of unidirectional breathing in crocodiles, I have been extremely frustrated in the reluctance of creationists to update their media. Why knowingly share fifteen year old outdated incorrect info?

Are Crocodilians one thing? Part II

As a general rule, I try to present someone else's position as accurately as possible.  Therefore, I read a lot of creationist materials.  In January, Tom Hennigan posted two more papers on estimating "kinds": An Initial Estimate toward Identifying and Numbering the Ark Turtle and Crocodile Kinds and An Initial Estimate Toward Identifying and Numbering Amphibian Kinds within the Orders Caudata and Gymnophiona.

I have enjoyed reading these papers and they have actually helped me freshen up on my taxonomy.  I have written about these types of papers elsewhere and do not wish to rehash old posts.  You can read The Kind of argument we are having and Avian Kinds for more details.

I just wanted to call attention to two things. A couple of years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts about Carl Kerby in my view misrepresenting a phylogenetic chart. In Are Crocodilians one thing?, I dealt with Kerby's claim that Crocodilians, now called Crocodyliformes, are "one thing."  Below is all the diversity that Kerby allows in this kind.  (Image drawn by Darren Naish and can be found on his blog)

Hennigan chooses to deal only with Crocodylia and this is probably due to AiG's hesitance to speak to fossil kinds in these initial papers.  While Lightner tends to accept broad genetic relationships and create large kinds, Hennigan tends to be more narrow.  While he admits that all Crocodylia may have had a common ancestor, "the kind is delineated at the family level because of their strong cognita, interspecific hybridization reported within (but not across) some families, and the need for more understanding of what the molecular data mean."

In his paper on salamanders, he does the same thing.

Family Plethodontidae is the largest salamander group with 27 genera and 431 species having an average total length of 10 cm...The family is quite diverse, for example, some can ballistically project their tongue to catch prey while others have web feet. Until further research sheds light on why they are so diverse, I default the kind to genus. It is probable that many will eventually be lumped into larger taxa in the future.

 Remember, the diversity is a problem for the "biblical creationist", because they only have the 4000 years since Noah's Ark to account for the diversity.  While Lightner is more willing to appeal to supernatural mechanisms, Hennigan does not wish to go down that route, at least not initially.

The "Kind" of argument we are having

I just finished writing something and I wanted to write a little about the creationist concept of kind.  As I noted in my last blog post, Ray captioned a picture with this.

Prof Stanford: "There’s evidence of evolution in the Galapagos." Ray: "Could you give me one instance?" Prof Stanford: "Yes, we have an example from a group of birds called Darwin’s finches." Ray: "What have the finches become?" Prof Stanford: "They've become anatomically new and genetically new, recognizably different species." Ray: "So they’re still finches?" Prof Stanford: "Well, of course they’re still finches, yes."

In creationism, finches, the family Fringillidae with almost 20 genera and over a hundred species, have long been considered the same "kind".[1]  Ray seldom gives his criteria for a change of kind.  In the quote above, Ray says that still being a member of the family is not a change of kind. Just to give an idea of the kind of diversity that we are talking about, the family Mustelidae (wolverine, badgers, weasels, otters) is considered the same kind.[2]  So something could be as different as a wolverine from a sea otter and you could still say there has been no change in kind.   Sometimes there is more diversity than that.  The suborder Ceratopsia is almost uniformly considered considered a kind by creationists and it includes bipeds and quadrupeds.  So your parrot could become as big as a car, grow horns, and walk on all fours and still not be considered a change of kind (but dogs and seals are not part of the same kind?).

So what evidence would Ray accept?  Well, he has held out the crocoduck, a hybrid between two different classes of animals.  Sure toothed birds and feathered reptiles have been demonstrated to have existed, but there is no evidence to trace birds through crocodylia.  Which leads me to my next point, the evidence Ray wants doesn't exist, because that is not how nature works.  Creatures don't give birth to overtly different creatures.

Two things recently caught my eye.  One, the author of the Mammalian Ark Kinds had an interesting discussion when it came time to classify the family Bovidae.

There are 50 genera and 143 species in the family Bovidae (Wilson and Reeder 2005). Horns, which are characteristic of this family, consist of a bony core attached to the frontal bone and a hard keratinous sheath (Nowak 1999). There is considerable hybrid data within two subfamilies: Bovinae which includes cattle and Caprinae which includes sheep and goats. In fact, sheep and goats have been so commonly thought of together that the Bible has a single word that refers to a flock of sheep and/or goats: צאן (tsoan). While isolated reports of hybrids between the subfamilies Caprinae and Bovinae and between them and members of Cervidae exist, they are not well documented enough to be considered reliable (Lightner 2006c; Lightner 2007).

There is considerable diversity in this family. Most people would tend to think of sheep and goats as distinct from cattle. For these reasons it was decided to split the family and consider the subfamily the level of the kind. This probably over-estimates the number of kinds since antelope are found in more than one subfamily, but it is the simplest way to split until more information becomes available.

For fairly weak reasons, she can accept that sea otters and wolverines share a common ancestor, but not cows and goats.

Also, this was recently posted in an article on Answers in Genesis[3].

How many different created kinds of dinosaurs were there? If we define a “created kind” as animals that can successfully interbreed, we see that many different genera and species could descend from a “kind.” Speciation—the development of species—is not the same as evolution and only involves variation of genetic information already existing within each kind of animal.

However we have known for quite a while that as animals get genetically further apart, they lose the ability to interbreed.  Generally this phenomenon is known as "ring species".[4]  This occurs even within what creationists might call the same kind.[5] Ray responded to the evidence of ring species a few weeks ago noting that they are still the same kind.

A number of times she says that there’s "tons" and "mountains" of evidence, but all she offers as her best observable evidence for Darwinian evolution is birds changing into birds and salamanders changing in salamanders.

Are Crocodilians one thing?

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about someone misrepresenting phylogenetic charts.

It is difficult to see, but the red line to the far left represents what used to be referred to as "Crocodilians".  The third red line from the top left represents "birds".  Now, I mainly took issue with the following statement.  

According to the chart, everything changed incredibly fast for 30 million years, then many didn’t change for the next 150 million years! Truth be told, it’s actually much worse than that. The fossil record actually contains things that are dated back to 400 million years and they are exactly the same as what we see today! Call me skeptical, but I find it hard to believe that an animal can stay exactly the same for long long of a time period...

...What these charts actually show is that one thing, stayed one thing and never changed into anything else! What we see in the world today and what we read in the Bible is consistent and true.

The fossil record confirms that one thing, stayed one thing, and never changed from, or into, anything else. Consider these quotes from non-creationists that support our conclusion.

In my original post, I pointed out that this is not what the chart says at all.  These red lines represent large amounts of diversity.

If you were to zoom in on that infraorder you would find that evolutionists think they changed for the next 150 million years producing new genera and species. For example, lions are a species. Their genus includes tigers, leopards, and jaguars. Their family includes other cats like pumas and house cats. Their sub-order, Feliformia, includes also hyenas, mongooses, meerkats, etc... Their order, Carnivora, includes bears, seals, dogs, etc... It is misleading to say that the order of Crocodilians did not change when an order or infraorder contains a lot of diversity. Just look at "W" which represents the suborder Ceratopsians. They were both bipedal and quadrupeds.

Well, I found a blog post by palaeozoologist Darren Naish explaining the taxonomy of what used to be called "Crocodilians".

Firstly – a minor point on nomenclature. This sort of thing has to be discussed whenever crocodilians are. The group of archosaurs conventionally called crocodilians, and frequently termed Crocodilia in the textbooks (that is, living crocodiles, alligators, gharials and all their crocodile-like, alligator-like and gharial-like fossil relatives) is now most typically termed Crocodyliformes. That is, ‘crocodilians’ of tradition are now crocodyliforms (note that the last ‘e’ gets dropped when you convert a ‘-formes’ name to its vernacular version). Within Crocodyliformes, the crown-group (that is, the group that contains the living species and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor) is termed Crocodylia. So, Crocodylia is a clade within Crocodyliformes (Clark in Benton & Clark 1988, Norell et al. 1994, Salisbury & Willis 1996, Brochu 2003).

Crocodyliformes is part of a more inclusive group that also includes the crocodyliform-like sphenosuchians, and this larger clade is termed Crocodylomorpha. In turn, Crocodylomorpha is part of a major archosaur group informally termed the crocodile-branch or crocodile-group archosaurs, the best technical name for which is (unfortunately) Pseudosuchia (how I hate the fact that this name might win out over Crurotarsi, if certain phylogenetic definitions are followed).

Massively simplified cladogram of crocodilians and their relatives, with numerous lineages not shown. The affinities between "rauisuchians", aetosaurs and crocodylomorphs are shown here as being unresolved, but some studies find aetosaurs to be closer to crocodylomorphs than are other croc-group archosaurs. Other studies find at least some "rauisuchians" to be closer to crocodylomorphs than are other croc-group archosaurs. Within Crocodylomorpha, some studies find thalattosuchians to be further away from Crocodylia than is Notosuchia.

In view of the confusion that ensues whenever an attempt is made to explain the use and meaning of these names (I’ve had to do it several times), I believe that we should stick with what we have: the archosaurs that we imagine as ‘crocodilians’ are now crocodyliforms, and the crocodyliform crown-clade is Crocodylia. However, some workers aren’t happy with this and have argued that we should use Crocodylia in place of Crocodyliformes (Martin & Benton 2008). I can’t see that this does anything useful bar complicate an already confusing situation and I think that we should ignore this proposal. When talking to technical audiences, I tend to use crocodyliform, but I don’t see anything wrong with ‘crocodilian’ being used as a vernacular term for the clades Crocodyliformes or Crocodylomorpha. [1]

In my last post, I made a comment about therizinosaurs.

They belong to “m” on your chart, the clades “Carnosaurs and Coelurosaurs”. Therizionosaurs, are in the clade, Coelurosaurs, and all posses sloth like giant claws. How can “m” which represents two parallel clades teach that “one thing stayed one thing”? Also, how is anything becoming a Therizinosaur not becoming a new thing?

I would like to echo that comment here.  The red line marked "Crocodilians" includes thalattosuchians.  How can anyone consider a group that includes these aquatic reptiles and alligators as "one thing stayed one thing"?   Clearly this chart does not teach that "everything changed incredibly fast for 30 million years, then many didn't change for the next 150 million years".  Thalattosuchians are thought to have evolved in the early Jurrasic.  

Whatever you believe about the Theory of Evolution, it is unwise to misrepresent information.  

Croc with a sail

The family trees of birds and crocodiles meet somewhere in the early Triassic and archosauriforms are the closest cousin to those archosaurs, Nesbitt said. But the new research places X. sapingensis firmly within the archosaur family tree, providing evidence that the early members of the crocodile and bird family trees evolved earlier than previously thought.

"This animal is closer to a crocodile, but it's not a crocodile. If you saw it today you wouldn't think it was a crocodile, especially not with a sail on its back," he said. [1]