BARMY bio-boffins are growing DINOSAUR SNOUTS on CHICKENS Having learned nothing from the triple Academy Award winning “documentary” of 1993, scientists from Harvard, Yale and several other universities have been manipulating chicken embryos into growing dinosaur faces. Published in the journal Evolution, the paper, titled "A molecular mechanism for the origin of a key evolutionary …
Myself and a few mates have had a long running bit of speculation regarding geese that we've never really been brave enough to test, namely: If you run screaming at a flock of them, do they scatter like pigeons, or attack like small dinosaurs?
Looks like a new challenger has entered the ring...
"Our goal here was (snip) not to create a ‘dino-chicken’ simply for the sake of it," said (snip) Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar"
Bhart-Anjan. You say that like creating a dino-chicken just for the sake of it is a bad thing. Not so. There are nowhere near enough dino-hybrids around these days. Proceed, Bhart-Anjan. Please, take note of my icon and proceed.
So, if you modify the 'number of breasts' gene in humans to behave like those in cats, you're saying we could breed women with 6 breasts? I can just imagine a young man dieing of starvation while trying to unhook the clasps.
Hell, if we're going to modify genes, how long will it take the pornography industry to hire a man with elephant or blue whale genes?
Interesting angle on the molecular link to evolution. Seems to support the theory of evolution through natural selection. Except of course its a load of bunkum - the world and all of the earthly creatures were created in just five days about six thousand years ago.
"the world and all of the earthly creatures were created in just five days about six thousand years ago."
It was actually created five minutes ago with all the apparent history and your artificial memories in place. Prove it wasn't (metaphysics exam question.)
There is no need to prove it wasn't: A world in which it is true is indistinguishable from a world in which it is false, and so the question can have no defined answer. Not only can it not be proven or disproven by practical means, it cannot be answered by any means.
"A world in which it is true is indistinguishable from a world in which it is false"
Perhaps you thought I was being serious?
However, regardless of whether or not your answer is correct, it wouldn't gain you any exam marks. You would actually need to address the issue that your statement may be correct, but the premise is very improbable, and the kind of answer is different qualitatively from the solution of an equation.
The best way to put this, perhaps, is to explore the implications of Creationism being correct. One of them is that God deliberately misleads human beings (e.g. with fossils) so that Creationists simultaneously have to believe that God is perfect and incapable therefore of doing anything which is not true and good, and that God is a liar who goes to the bother of writing the truth in a book in an obscure language while deliberately designing the entire observed universe to mislead us into believing the book is wrong.
The "5 minutes ago creation" may not be disprovable but it can be demonstrated to be extremely implausible, and without the need to bring theology into it.
The "5 minutes ago creation" may not be disprovable but it can be demonstrated to be extremely implausible, and without the need to bring theology into it.
Depends on the class in which the question was set I reckon.
If it was a theology class... well, frankly they're wasting your time. If it was a Philosophy of Science class the obvious rebuttal is to claim the the question is unfalsifiable and in accordance with Karl Popper's epistemology of scientific knowledge, is not scientific. As such the answer to the question is probably irrelevant outside of people's individual belief systems.
If you wanted to go further than that you could invoke logical positivism to claim that the sentence is literally meaningless - although logical positivism isn't exactly popular and has plenty of issues of its own.
The correct answer to this is to throw the logical fallacy flag. I don't have to prove jack. As the one making the claim the burden of proof lies with you. This is the same for any claim of a god, ghost, invisible unicorns, or flying spaghetti monsters. Do not get suckered by demands of people who want you to prove they are wrong.
If they wanted to see what a dino-hybrid looks like then go no further than the seagull.
Not the weedy in-land seagulls but the super-angry, bite your head off as soon as look at you herring gull. If there ever was a barely evolved dinosaur roaming the planet then this is it. To see one grab a songbird that happend to be hopping past, and neck it down in one was like a real life man-on-the-toilet scene from Jurassic Park. Brutal!
I think this is rather the point of this research - demonstrating that birds could be back-evolved into their dinosaur ancestors is actually a sort of experimental evolutionary biology.
Herring gulls? Fulmars. When you've seen a full grown fulmar close to, riding the air current along a cliff edge and looking at you as if speculating if it could bite off a lump without having to touch down, you realise just how important an opposable thumb has been in establishing the pecking order.
Or a cassowary. Those things are basically dinosaurs by most definitions. They haven't evolved far off the ancestral type. The only reason they don't kill people is an inability to aim higher than knee-height - against an animal of their own size, they are quite capable of slicing a target open with a kick from their sharp-clawed feet.
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