t a bird.
Suppose someone wrote a program to determine how beautiful a woman is based on physical features of many women. The program tells you that a Julia Roberts is a pretty woman. But then, you add data about Marilyn Monroe, and it says that Julia Roberts is no longer pretty.
It isn’t the computer that decides if the woman is pretty or not—it’s the algorithm chosen by the programmer that determines the outcome. The fact that adding data about one individual changes the classification of another individual makes the algorithm questionable. Julia Roberts may not be as pretty (in someone’s opinion) as Marilyn Monroe was; but that does not make Julia Roberts ugly.
Witmer said, “This experiment affirmed how crucial Xiaotingia is to understanding the evolution of advanced theropods.” We would say, “This experiment affirmed how subjective the thinking about evolution is.”
Regardless of how similar Xiaotingia and Archaeopteryx are to modern birds or extinct dinosaurs, it doesn’t prove anything evolved from anything else. They could just as easily been created with similar characteristics.
Evolution isn’t science. It’s opinion. It’s speculation. It’s prejudice. This is evident from Witmer’s conclusion:
In truth, this chapter of the scientific story is just beginning. Just as Xiaotingia moved Archaeopteryx out of the birds, the next find could move it back in — or to somewhere else within this fuzzy tangled knot that makes up the origins of birds and bird-like dinosaurs. That said, during this sesquicentennial anniversary of Archaeopteryx, which is being honoured with exhibits and commemorative coins, the bitter irony may be that it may not have been the bird we've always thought it was. But Archaeopteryx will remain an icon of evolution, perhaps even more so now, providing compelling evidence that, as we should expect, evolutionary origins are rather messy affairs. 6
They are messy because they are wrong!
|Quick links to|
|Science Against Evolution
|Back issues of
of the Month
New Scientist, 30 July 2011, “It’s been fun, feathered friend”, page 3, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128233.000-we-shouldnt-mourn-the-demotion-of-archaeopteryx.html
2 Witmer, Nature, 28 July 2011, “An icon knocked off its perch”, pages 458-9, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7357/full/475458a.html
4 Xu et al., Nature, 28 July 2011, “An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of Avialae”, pages 465-470, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7357/full/nature10288.html
5 Witmer, Nature, 28 July 2011, “An icon knocked off its perch”, pages 458-9, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7357/full/475458a.html