Thommo wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Thommo wrote:Technically speaking I'm sure those are both scale issues rather than dimension issues.

if the cladogram has a time axis in direction away from its stem then the pterosaurs are still with us.

If it has an orthogonal linear scale time axis it might (although you've written that quite badly and it's hard to even tell what you think you mean). Of course you're replying to a post which didn't mention orthogonality, linearity or indeed axes. Thing is, I don't recall even saying that it was a graph, now I come to think of it.

I think that's a sign you've smuggled in a few additional premises.

ETA: Actually, in truth I can't even see pterosaurs on the diagram, so I'm not quite sure that you haven't just made that up. It certainly looks like plenty of lines of dinosaurs go extinct in the triassic, jurassic and cretaceous any of which could be pterosaurs, invalidating your claim (assuming you mean that the time axis is the orthogonal y-axis depicted).

I didn't post any pic of a cladogram. Yesterday I gave a link to a Wikipedia entry that presented several cladograms of pterosaur relationships. In the post you are complaining about I was discussing mainly the basic qualities of the Tree of Life, which does have a time dimension. At least, the pictured one did.

Thommo wrote:

felltoearth wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:
So long as I was feeling negative about cladograms it struck me that as a graphic, they oddly miss the obvious dimension of Time.

IKR!!!??!! I mean, I have the same problem with my family tree! How do I know that my grandfather isn’t ALSO my son? Someone throw a timeline on that shit, please!

Technically speaking I'm sure those are both scale issues rather than dimension issues.

In the sense that scale (as in scale factor) is dimensionless and time is a dimension. Hence when understanding descendent and antecedent a timeline might be useful but not necessary.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Thommo wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Thommo wrote:Technically speaking I'm sure those are both scale issues rather than dimension issues.

if the cladogram has a time axis in direction away from its stem then the pterosaurs are still with us.

If it has an orthogonal linear scale time axis it might (although you've written that quite badly and it's hard to even tell what you think you mean). Of course you're replying to a post which didn't mention orthogonality, linearity or indeed axes. Thing is, I don't recall even saying that it was a graph, now I come to think of it.

I think that's a sign you've smuggled in a few additional premises.

ETA: Actually, in truth I can't even see pterosaurs on the diagram, so I'm not quite sure that you haven't just made that up. It certainly looks like plenty of lines of dinosaurs go extinct in the triassic, jurassic and cretaceous any of which could be pterosaurs, invalidating your claim (assuming you mean that the time axis is the orthogonal y-axis depicted).

I didn't post any pic of a cladogram.

That post doesn't appear to say you did.

Jayjay4547 wrote:In the post you are complaining about I was discussing mainly the basic qualities of the Tree of Life, which does have a time dimension.

I can't find anywhere I'm complaining about any post. I believe all I made was a tongue in cheek comment about the difference between lacking a dimension and lacking scale.

Fenrir wrote:I'm quessing you wouldn't know what a cladogram represents and couldn't generate one if your life depended on it.

Or how progression from sea to land to air is reflected in the age of fossils for that matter.

Well I'm predicting that paleontologists will find a fossil that contradicts your progressive origin narrative "from sea to land to air". That, for some critters like the prehistoric Gastornis, (and the kiwi) the ancestral sequence went from sea to land to air to land to air to land.


And I'm suggesting that the power of the progressive evolution narrative form has somewhat obscured this back-and-forth possibility from being looked at.

The Genesis narrative isn't so clearly progressive as the evolution sequence you list; Genesis is more about stage setting and stage filling, with Mankind as the final occupant, who is given the full creation to enjoy. So I'm also suggesting that in this particular aspect, Genesis is a more accurate picture of what has been going down, than is evolution.

To argue that that the power of the progressive evolution narrative form has somewhat obscured the possibility of dinosaurs being descended from flying critters, I need to persuade you that objectively, that isn't a crazy idea. I said I could start with sauropod neck vs giraffe neck so I will pony up on that. Here are two pics of their cervical vertebrae:



Both those structures look marvelous to me, but ON THE FACE OF IT the sauropod one looks more technically advanced. It has more features and sure as hang, they all relate to function. Also the sauropod bones are hollow so their bone material is all carrying stress.

I have to post that, 3 attachments are the limit.

To continue this line of argument, here is a pic of an early small dinosaur neck vertebrae;


That seems to have similar features to the huge and later sauropod vertebrae.
And here is a pic of a pterosaur vertebra:


So I'm trying to give colour to the notion that the last common ancestor of dinosaur and pterosaur might have been a flying creature, some time in the first half of the Triassic period and that the know-how embodied in that flying creature was what enabled giant dinosaurs to function, in the Jurassic. Mammals didn't go through that creative event and so the biggest land mammal is the elephant: whose skull looks like a boulder.

I'm not saying it definitely was like that, it's just a bet. Keeping in mind the alternative once put to me by an atheist, that gravity was just less in those days.

So much stupid in two little posts.

Sauroppds arose from theropods which also gave rise to birds. The first/earliest dinosaurs were theropods. You jibberish aside, JJ.

If you aren’t trolling I suggest you stidy this issue a LOT more, but from here on try not to use confirmational bias as your motivator.

Just what idiots do you think your contrived crap will convince? It sure as fuck will not be anyone that has any actual interest in the topic.

Basically you are attempting to tell people that you know more about the topic than professionals which have devoted their entire lives, AND the data from actual fossils is wrong because you ( an internet nobody) say so.

Welcome to the Robert Byers school of bullshit assertions. Move to the head of the class.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Fenrir wrote:I'm quessing you wouldn't know what a cladogram represents and couldn't generate one if your life depended on it.

Or how progression from sea to land to air is reflected in the age of fossils for that matter.

Well I'm predicting asserting that paleontologists will find a fossil that contradicts your progressive origin narrative "from sea to land to air". That, for some critters like the prehistoric Gastornis, (and the kiwi) the ancestral sequence went from sea to land to air to land to air to land.

FIFY. Stop lying Jayjay.

Jayjay4547 wrote:And I'm suggesting that the power of the progressive evolution narrative form has somewhat obscured this back-and-forth possibility from being looked at.

The Genesis narrative isn't so clearly progressive as the evolution sequence you list; Genesis is more about stage setting and stage filling, with Mankind as the final occupant, who is given the full creation to enjoy. So I'm also suggesting that in this particular aspect, Genesis is a more accurate picture of what has been going down, than is evolution.

We don't care what you believe Jayjay. You need to demonstrate.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I said I could start with sauropod neck vs giraffe neck so I will pony up on that. Here are two pics of their cervical vertebrae:

Sauropod Cervical Vertebrae.png

GiraffeNeck.jpg

Both those structures look marvelous to me, but ON THE FACE OF IT the sauropod one looks more technically advanced. It has more features and sure as hang, they all relate to function. Also the sauropod bones are hollow so their bone material is all carrying stress.

I have to post that, 3 attachments are the limit.

There is nothing reasonable, much less scientific about what you just said.

The Genesis narrative isn't so clearly progressive as the evolution sequence you list; Genesis is more about stage setting and stage filling, with Mankind as the final occupant, who is given the full creation to enjoy. So I'm also suggesting that in this particular aspect, Genesis is a more accurate picture of what has been going down, than is evolution.

I kinda stopped reading right here with this confused teleological nonsense.

theropod wrote:So much stupid in two little posts.

Sauroppds arose from theropods which also gave rise to birds. The first/earliest dinosaurs were theropods. You jibberish aside, JJ.

I was little anxious about how you might reply to those posts seeing that you seem to have a professional background with dinosaurs. It was a relief to find that you didn’t explain that palaeontologists had thoroughly looked over the possibility that dinosaurs were descended from flying creatures and found contrary evidence which you linked to in the kindergarten area of Wikipedia. Instead, like Thomas Eshuis and Fenrir you just relied on abuse.

What was distinctive in your reply though, was your persistent misunderstanding of what I was saying. I don’t have an issue with the first/earliest dinosaurs being theropods. I’m presenting suggestive evidence that the theropods might have descended from flying creatures. And confidence that if that is true, palaeontologists will find those earlier flying creatures, in the rocks from the first half of the Triassic period. The missing link if you like. (and mainly to be frank, if you don’t like).

theropod wrote:If you aren’t trolling I suggest you stidy this issue a LOT more, but from here on try not to use confirmational bias as your motivator.

My motivator is just the chance of being right. That would be like winning the Lotto. If by “trolling” you mean, being tongue-in-cheek provocation about something of little real interest to me then you are wrong. And I’m not confirming anything, I’m setting out the grounds for a rational prediction.

theropod wrote:Just what idiots do you think your contrived crap will convince? It sure as fuck will not be anyone that has any actual interest in the topic.

Well a prediction doesn’t convince anyone anyway except something like an astronomer’s prediction of an imminent collision with an asteroid. If I don’t win the Lotto at least I’ve already won second prize, by getting you to demonstrate through your arrogant animus, that some self-identifying rationalists are deeply involved in irrational bullying behaviour.

theropod wrote:Basically you are attempting to tell people that you know more about the topic than professionals which have devoted their entire lives, AND the data from actual fossils is wrong because you ( an internet nobody) say so.

Imagine the party that internet nobodies will have if some palaeontologist finds a flying ancestor of the dinosaurs. Anyway, you haven’t presented any data from actual fossils, whether contradictory or not. The set of pics below illustrate that my hunch involves just tweaking mainline thinking.



Starting with pic 0, which is just an extract from the cladogram citing Nesbitt in the Wikipedia entry “Archosaur”. In pic 1 the line of Ornithodira was just moved, to suggest that the dinosaurs were a branching from a line of flying creatures. Then in Pic 2 the figure was rotated to the left so it became a Tree of Life, with time increasing upwards. In Pic 3 some metadata was added to flesh out the implications of Pic2. A scale was put on the Time axis, to indicate that position along it is quantifiable. That’s relevant because of the contrast with the horizontal axis of phenotype space, which like I mentioned before, is highly abstract.

A green punctuation mark was put where the dinosauromorpha were modelled as branching off. Here, what had in Pic 0 just been a line indicating relatedness, now as a horizontal line indicates rapid (indeed instantaneous) speciation. I should have put a little bit of a slope on it, hey? But still, a good word for this speciation would be “Creative event”. And the fossils so far discovered along that branch could have been much more highly readapted into terrestrial life than today’s New Zealand and Madagascan ratites. But they retained traces of a flying ancestry in their knowing how to construct skeletons with much higher strength-to-weight ratios than did their doltish competitors.

theropod wrote:Welcome to the Robert Byers school of bullshit assertions. Move to the head of the class.

I’m not in Robert Byers’ school, not that I'm invested in anything against him.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I’m not in Robert Byers’ school...

Oh, I don't know. Scared polar bears and aquarium ornaments seem to me to be right out of the same school.

Can someone please link to where I cited Wiki in this thread?

Thanks.

RS

Well, thanks for demonstrating your cluelessness about cladograms and confirming my previous post, I guess.

Also, btw, your highly dishonest "extract" is from Benton, not Nesbitt. Can't even read the material you manufacture your distortions from.

Fenrir wrote:Well, thanks for demonstrating your cluelessness about cladograms and confirming my previous post, I guess.

Also, btw, your highly dishonest "extract" is from Benton, not Nesbitt. Can't even read the material you manufacture your distortions from.

The figure I extracted into my Pic 0 above from was introduced with the note "Below is a cladogram modified from Nesbitt (2011):"
Here is a copy of the full cladogram, with the part I extracted shown as a solid red rectangle below. I removed the following ply as shown by a dotted rectangle, because the time after the creative speciation of dinosauromorpha was irrelevant to my point. Please explain what was "highly dishonest" about that.


As to my being clueless about cladograms, actually that figure demonstrated what I had said earlier, that a cladogram can be transformed into the much less abstract "Tree of Life", in which the all-important elements of a time scale and creation of new forms, can be shown.

It was the cladogram above Nesbitt's that was attributed to Benton. It seems to be similar in the part I wanted to focus on, albeit with some different names used. By the way, what I picked up about Benton and Bristol university struck me as highly authoritative.

theropod wrote:Can someone please link to where I cited Wiki in this thread?

Thanks.

RS

You must know darn well that you didn't cite Wiki. That was my point. You didn't EVEN site Wiki; you offered nothing but contemptuous invective.

If you carry on like that, I won't invite you to the party of internet nobodies.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

theropod wrote:So much stupid in two little posts.

Sauroppds arose from theropods which also gave rise to birds. The first/earliest dinosaurs were theropods. You jibberish aside, JJ.

I was little anxious about how you might reply to those posts seeing that you seem to have a professional background with dinosaurs. It was a relief to find that you didn’t explain that palaeontologists had thoroughly looked over the possibility that dinosaurs were descended from flying creatures and found contrary evidence which you linked to in the kindergarten area of Wikipedia. Instead, like Thomas Eshuis and Fenrir you just relied on abuse.

Pointing out that you're lying, as you're doing again in this post, is not abuse.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

theropod wrote:Can someone please link to where I cited Wiki in this thread?

Thanks.

RS

You must know darn well that you didn't cite Wiki. That was my point. You didn't EVEN site Wiki; you offered nothing but contemptuous invective.

If you carry on like that, I won't invite you to the party of internet nobodies.

Well, that’s it. I’m going to go out and blow my brains out with my Beretta as soon as I tap “SUBMIT”.

That post I linked to a few days ago you refuse to address, wherein I cite dozens of peer reviewed publications that the best student would need a month to properly digest (at a minimum), with links to pictorial documentation of actual specimens, my own attempts to translate the technical language into the common tongue and the follow-on discussion more than covers your sophomoric bitching. Oh you dare not go there and attempt this shit because your ignorance and trolling will be laid even more bare.

What reason do you have to hold on to a position which is totally unsupported by a mass of evidence you are unable to understand, much less counter? How many actual fossil specimens have you collected, formerly described, prepared or even documented? Why do you think your empty assertion hold any weight at all? In short, what the fuck is your deal? It’s clear you haven’t looked at the evidence, but rather you cherry pick stupid shit that measures up with the Glen Rose, Texas trackway where non avian dinosaur tracks are allegedly found alongside human prints. Either you have no idea how utterly idiotic your posts are, in which case I pity you, or you are an uber troll. Which is it?

Wait, I don’t think I will be trolled into suicide after all. Maybe next time.

...

Fucking hell I need an emoji for disgusted amusement.

RS

theropod wrote:
What reason do you have to hold on to a position which is totally unsupported by a mass of evidence you are unable to understand, much less counter?

Probably the same reason as all those loonies on the internet believing they have a groundbreaking theory, but they won't publish it because "scientists" won't let them, because it shatters the predominant theory : self importance.

I have to admit though, it's a rather elaborated trolling technique you have here JayJay. More than what we witnessed here anyway. Pulling a stupid theory out of your arse, and call it a "prediction", so you don't have to present any evidence for it. You can defend it until you die, preserving this self-importance feeling I was talking about, because your "missing link" is well hidden somewhere, and no one can prove it's not.

Unfalsifiable troll. nice one.

theropod wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

theropod wrote:Can someone please link to where I cited Wiki in this thread?

You must know darn well that you didn't cite Wiki. That was my point. You didn't EVEN site Wiki; you offered nothing but contemptuous invective.

That post I linked to a few days ago you refuse to address, wherein I cite dozens of peer reviewed publications that the best student would need a month to properly digest (at a minimum), with links to pictorial documentation of actual specimens, my own attempts to translate the technical language into the common tongue and the follow-on discussion more than covers your sophomoric bitching. Oh you dare not go there and attempt this shit because your ignorance and trolling will be laid even more bare.

Early in this thread you told me you had a link concerning my prediction but couldn’t be bothered to fish it out. The link you later provided was in a post to Wortfish and about birds being descended from dinosaurs; a well-worn issue that I wasn’t engaged with. Here is the record:

Wortfish wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: ...

No. Birds are not descended from dinosaurs. They are descended from smaller tree-dwelling archosaurs.

theropod wrote:Wortfish,
Please cite something to support your assertion that maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs did not give rise to birds, and please use a source from actual studies of real specimens.
In the mean time take a look at the post I put together HERE. I would appreciate your input. Considering the years I spent in both deep study, and hands on application, I feel my cited sources tell a different story.

Later you lost your temper with Wortfish.

aban57 wrote:

theropod wrote:
What reason do you have to hold on to a position which is totally unsupported by a mass of evidence you are unable to understand, much less counter?

Probably the same reason as all those loonies on the internet believing they have a groundbreaking theory, but they won't publish it because "scientists" won't let them, because it shatters the predominant theory: self importance.
I have to admit though, it's a rather elaborated trolling technique you have here JayJay. More than what we witnessed here anyway. Pulling a stupid theory out of your arse, and call it a "prediction", so you don't have to present any evidence for it.
You can defend it until you die, preserving this self-importance feeling I was talking about, because your "missing link" is well hidden somewhere, and no one can prove it's not.
Unfalsifiable troll. nice one.

It may be a stupid theory and prediction but I didn’t pull it out of my arse. If indeed dinosaurs descended from flying creatures, if there are actually pretty obvious reasons for suspecting it and yet that possibility hasn’t been widely tossed about then that would point to a widespread persistent blindness among the public figures who owned the 20th century discourse on evolution; I’m thinking of Dawkins, Gould, Mayr and Julian Huxley. That blindness would be towards the role Creation played in the Tree of Life that is, the relatively abrupt appearance of new functionality in living thing arising from their circumstances. The reason for that blindness would be atheist ideology having made the common word “Creation” taboo. I am interested in tracing the effects of that ideology.

It certainly is cheeky to have and to air such thoughts about one’s betters but well, I think I’m basically right about the bigger picture.

The prediction that palaeontologists will find that the last common ancestor of pterosaurs and dinosaurs could fly, is falsifiable. By their not finding such a fossil. By their finding this LCA and finding it could not fly. A place palaeontologists are looking for such things include the sedimentary rocks of the Karoo Supergroup, which covers the relevant Permian and Triassic periods.

Earlier I offered evidence that dinosaurs knew how to make light weight strong skeletons. And they might plausibly have learned that trick from flying ancestors. A related line of evidence is that in terms of their skeletons, the contemporaries of early dinosaurs were relatively doltish. The cladogram I showed earlier demonstrates that. Check it out. All the others had doltish skeletons and so did their kids. The pic doesn’t show the ancestral mammals but their skeletons were just as doltish. That has long been an embarrassment to me.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

theropod wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

theropod wrote:Can someone please link to where I cited Wiki in this thread?

You must know darn well that you didn't cite Wiki. That was my point. You didn't EVEN site Wiki; you offered nothing but contemptuous invective.

That post I linked to a few days ago you refuse to address, wherein I cite dozens of peer reviewed publications that the best student would need a month to properly digest (at a minimum), with links to pictorial documentation of actual specimens, my own attempts to translate the technical language into the common tongue and the follow-on discussion more than covers your sophomoric bitching. Oh you dare not go there and attempt this shit because your ignorance and trolling will be laid even more bare.

Early in this thread you told me you had a link concerning my prediction but couldn’t be bothered to fish it out. The link you later provided was in a post to Wortfish and about birds being descended from dinosaurs; a well-worn issue that I wasn’t engaged with. Here is the record:

Wortfish wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote: ...

No. Birds are not descended from dinosaurs. They are descended from smaller tree-dwelling archosaurs.

theropod wrote:Wortfish,
Please cite something to support your assertion that maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs did not give rise to birds, and please use a source from actual studies of real specimens.
In the mean time take a look at the post I put together HERE. I would appreciate your input. Considering the years I spent in both deep study, and hands on application, I feel my cited sources tell a different story.

Later you lost your temper with Wortfish.

I did no such thing as you lie about in the sentence made bold above. That’s your overactive imagination exposing your intellectual dishonesty. If I had done as you claim you would link to said statement. You didn’t because you can’t because this never happened. That makes your statement a lie. To place a nice ripe cherry on top of that steaming pile of shit you are now claiming I lost my temper. Neither you nor he hold enough influence on my thinking to generate anger. In fact I find both of you laughably ignorant, and the weak trolling in which you both engage to be boringly tedious. As I stated earlier I post in opposition to such nonsense as you both generate so that lurkers at least have access to factual data. Sorry, but you drivel doesn’t rev me up in the slightest. In my opinion both of you should be banned from ever posting here again.

Note that instead of addressing the mass of evidence in “that” thread you come up with this. Deflect. Distract. Evade. Nice try, but epic fail. You and Wortfish are cut from the same cloth. Neither of you seem capable of rational discourse, and your presence here on RatSkep degrades the entire forum.

Yawn.

RS