On a post about dinosaur and human footprints occuring together, someone named Ray stopped by and left what may be the first true creationist comment I’ve seen on my blog. It’s worth reading what he wrote and reflecting on it.

Interesting discussion. The photographic evidence published on the web of various sites around the world of dino and human prints apparently together are of varying quality, though some are pretty startling. If that’s all they had it would not be so much, but I’ve seen a lot on ancient dino paintings on cave and rock walls - some in North America, ancient dino ceramic and terra cotta sculptures from Aztec and Mayan age cultures, and ancient Peruvian textiles with dinos embroidered on them. Plus the point that the word ‘dinosaur’ was not coined until 1841 when they started digging them up as fossils - before then they were usually called dragons. On the historical face of it, it is true that there are dragons in the histories of every culture, so it is hard to say they were merely mythical, though sometimes they exaggerate, like saying they could talk. Most of the accounts are presented as soberly recorded events. Chinese dragons, your English knight rides out on his horse to fight the dragon, Spanish dragons, the Vikings fought dragons, they are in the Greek and Roman histories. So, purportedly, commonly known until modern times. They say the body style of a dragon is the long neck, long tail, big bulbous body - it’s a stylized dinosaur. One site, genesispark.org has a lot of photos of dinos on ancient art, pottery, engravings and textiles.

Now I don’t want to be mean here to Ray. After all, he civilly left his comment, and I appreciate that. But he’s walking out on a limb that can’t support his weight. The idea that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, and that evidence of this exists in the form of human/dinosaur footprints, is a completely unsubstantiated claim. One can read all about it from people who’ve poured in time to carefully examine these claims. It’s easy enough to read material on both sides of the “debate” and see where the consensus lies, if one is truly interested. There’s no conspiracy, no scientists trying to surpress evidence. The consensus among mainstream scientists (and by all means, one can be liberal with the term mainstream) is universal. There isn’t a shred of evidence that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.

As for the idea that all cultures having dragons provides solid evidence for the existance of dragons, by that line of reasoning ghosts must exist too. All cultures report them after all.

Mermaids are also a near certainty with their near universal origins amoung many different cultures.

Chupacabras become a very interesting case. While the whole story can be traced back to Puerto Rica circa 1992, as some have noted gargoyles of medeval Europe also look like Chupacabras, so they must have been around much earlier.

We might even have to rethink Leprechaun’s.

Ray’s standard of proving that dinosaurs and humans coexisted — namely drawing weak inferences from the mythology of past cultures — is simply not the way science works.

As for the site Ray pointed to, I don’t know whether to laugh at the claims it makes or feel sorry if one truly hinges their faith on this kind of material. I would encourage Ray to simply strive for the truth. Read everything he can find, look into people’s credentials, and weigh the support on both sides when something is in dispute.

This goes not only for dinosaur / human footprints, but more importantly and more broadly for science in general. When people claim that evolution is a theory with weak support in the scientific community, go see what scientists think. When someone claims alternative theories for the time and way that people first entered North America, go see what the debate is all about. (Here you’ll find a that there is not universal agreement and that new theories and new evidence are being evaluated. It’s a perfect example of science in action).

If we recognize all truth as God’s truth, we don’t need to jump through endless hoops on fire to try and claim with a straight face that the dinosaurs and humans walked the earth together. Rather we can appreciate the efforts that anyone makes, theist or not, to contribute to our knowledge of the world around us.

My I’ve been busy. I finally got around to putting up pictures. They’re not much, but I haven’t been carrying my camera with me yet.

For now, I’m staying in the McIvor Center. It’s a spacious building that’s got nice facilities including a kitchen and an adequate bedroom. It’s also got a wireless internet network via a satellite connection. It’s also a got a nice view. From the center, one can see Mount Livermore in the distance.

And last but not least, I traded cars with my professor to get a vehicle with a little more ground clearance (an absolute necessity on the back roads). The car comes with a colorful bumper sticker.

The thing that’s keeping me so busy is trying to setup my transects. Each point has to be 250 meters apart, and I’m finding that very difficult at times when trying to deal with the terrain. Once those transects are setup, I’ll try to run 20 points each morning in four hours. After that I’m done for the day and will get to enjoy myself a little more. Go birding, take pictures, do all that reading I have planned for this summer, etc. I’m sure blogging will be a little more frequent then too.

You never know what kind of friends you’ll make when you visit the urinal early in the morning. He’s still in the building somewhere…

This evening, while checking my email, the Common Poorwills were singing so loud I could hear them inside the lodge. Just a little reminder that I’m in the right place.

Sorry for the lack of blogging. I’m keeping real busy as I try to set up my transects out here in the Davis Mountains. I should have some stuff up soon though, including pictures.

I am excited to announce something I’ve known about for a while but have yet to announce as I worked out the particulars. I’m leaving tomorrow to begin my thesis on avian community ecology in the Davis Mountains. I will spend two field seasons of approximately six to eight weeks focusing on quantitatively describing the bird communities and how they are defined in major habitat types. Also, this type of work has previously been done in many of the other southwest mountain ranges, so I should be able to make comparisons with the Davis Mountains to see if any differences show up.

Most exciting is the place I get to work. I’ll be doing this study on The Nature Conservancy’s Davis Mountains Preserve. This location is an amazing place. It includes Mount Livermore, the fifth highest peak in Texas at 8,378 feet. It also contains habitats (and species associated with them) that are either Rocky Mountain species which barely make it this far south or Mexican species which barely make it this far north. The state’s first record of Buff-breasted Flycatcher was found here, sitting on a nest. The Mexican subspecies of Spotted Owl occurs here. Ten species of hummingbird have been recorded, like Magnificent Hummingbird. It’s also a great place for rare Mexican warblers like Slate-throated Redstart, Red-faced Warbler, and Olive Warbler. It is a place that any biologist would love to work in.

At first, I’ll be extremely busy working on the details of the study and marking my transects. But after things settle down and my surveys begin, I may have time to blog. You can also bet that I’ll be taking pictures, as time allows. We’ll just have to see how things work out. I’m also excited by all the time I’ll have this summer to read. I’m bringing a bunch of books.

One of my biggest goals in my time off however is to make a date with a Flammulated Owl. Of the birds that regularly occur in Texas, I can count the ones I’ve not seen on one hand. Somehow I’ve missed these tiny owls in all my prior birding trips, probably because I’ve not looked for them specifically.

It’s going to be a great summer, but one with its own challenges being away from my wife. I’ve got to give a big shout out for her support and willingness to take care of the homefront while I’m gone.

A story is breaking in the popluar press today about dragonflies migrating in similar ways to birds. This story is really just a good excuse for me to put up one my favorite pictures I took in South Carolina a few years back.

Small animals have been migrating since ancient times, but scientists still don’t know very much about where most of the wandering critters come from or where they’re going.

[…]

Although dragonflies are 140 million years older than birds, according to fossil records, they abide by the same temperature and wind rules. Both groups stay put on blustery days and travel only after two days of cooling temperatures. They even use the same markers on the landscape, and rest on the same beaches.

For more information, you can read the blurb from Science or if you’re really adventerous, go digging around the author’s website to learn more about the tracking technology they use.

And when someone publishes a study with a comparison to damselfly sex, I’ve got just the picture for that too.

I came across a picture of an Ovenbird the other day that I love. I’d love to include the picture here, but the photographer might not appreciate that. Anybody who’s birded much knows these little forest walkers can be devilishly difficult to see. The guy’s got more pictures of neotropical migrants, which illustrates why this spectacle of nature just has to be witnessed and appreciated.

And, his prints are reasonably priced, with 15% of the sale going to a local Houston Audubon Sanctuary (High Island) where these birds pass through on migration.

(For the record, I’ve never met the photographer and have nothing to gain by pointing to his pictures, though if my links provide a windfall — hah — I want a nice picture of that Ovenbird…)

Had I been reading the various blogs I usually skim over, I would have known in advance that the Simpsons last night was on evolution. As it turned out, my wife and I walked in the door from a long weekend (she graduated!) and turned on the TV and just happened to notice what the Simpsons was about. I was immediately interested.

The show was funny. It wasn’t epic, but good nonetheless. A brief synopsis: Flanders creates a stink over teaching evolution in schools. Principle Skinner is going to ignore it as first, but is then reminded that his car lease with an amazing interest rate comes from Christian Brother’s Auto Service. As the lease is about to be set on fire, he caves in to teaching creationism. Lisa forms a secret after school club to read the Origin of Species and is arrested when the cops kick down the doors. The ensuing trial is a parody of the Scopes Trial. I could describe the whole thing in greater detail, but Jason Rosenhouse has already provided a thorough recap.

For me, the funniest part was Principal Skinner’s announcing to the class they would learn about creationism. Ralphie asks if it’s true that the ocean’s are God’s tears. Skinner nervously looks over at the people holding his auto lease, they nod their heads in approval, and Skinner looks back at the class and says, “yes, the ocean’s are God’s tears”.

When the video starts playing, it’s the classic dichotomy. The video’s titled Are you calling God a liar? and promises to take a unbiased look at the scientific record. It then immediately depicts Charles Darwin and The Origin as being in league with the devil. It captures the truthfulness of creationists who claim to present fair and unbiased discussions on the subject.

All in all, it was good satire.

With most of the criticism of evolution and support for intelligent design coming from conservatives circle, the Wall Street Journal has an op-ed on the subject worth reading titled Misplaced Sympathies. The article’s a nice read, but here’s an excerpt.

It was a preoccupation with defeating materialism that inspired many of Darwin’s contemporary detractors. Richard Owen, a 19th-century English anatomist, privately conceded that “The Origin of Species” was the best explanation “ever published of the manner of formation of species”–but because he thought that natural selection denied the possibility of human uniqueness, he savaged the book in public. Ms. Himmelfarb made a related argument in a recent review of two new editions of Darwin’s works, decrying the “mechanistic and reductivist interpretation of all human life, including its emotional and intellectual dimensions, in the name of Darwinism.”

But there is a problem here. At a time when the life sciences are advancing at an astonishing pace, it is simply too late to be taking up Owen’s mantle. There is no longer any serious dispute about the evidence for natural selection; it seems that every gap in our current explanatory model has a Tiktaalik waiting to fill it, whether it comes from the Canadian tundra or a DNA microarray. The logic of Darwin’s theory has also undeniably shed light on some of the puzzles of human psychology. Of course this doesn’t mean that natural selection explains everything about the human condition, or that we shouldn’t be wary of attempts to use it as a cudgel against religion.

(via Dispatches)

I don’t know what it is, but family members and weird people that stop by (is that redundant?) seem to love my cat. It’s the ears. Except for other Scottish Fold owners, aint nobody’s cat got cooler ears than The Bruce. Okay, whoever ended up with this cat does, but that’s just a freak of nature.

For those that don’t know, my cat The Bruce is half Scottish Fold and half Siamese. As my wife likes to put it, someone’s show cat was defiled.

It’s also been a while since The Bruce has graced the blog, so I thought I would provide a nice little writeup.

Anybody that has a cat knows they’re creatures of habit, and The Bruce is no exception. Every morning at around 6am, he meets my wife at the bedroom door (he gets locked out at night) eager for company. Coffee and breakfast in hand, my wife and The Bruce catch up on world affairs, watching the news from the couch.

With enthusiam that makes any father’s heart swell with pride (and makes any mother jealous), The Bruce has a strong affinity for me over my wife. When The Bruce hears my alarm at 6:45am, he jumps off my wife’s lap, runs to the bedroom door, and starts yowling. (It’s a cross between a meow and howl — the Siamese in him coming through). My wife bitterly protests playing second fiddle.

Mornings are the time when The Bruce seems demon possessed. He attacks imaginary demons and displays the latest gymnastic routines he’s practicing for the 2008 olympics.

The day is the typical schedule for any cat. Approximately 11.5 hours of sleep.

Before bed, The Bruce likes to unwind just like the rest of us. He’s become an exceptional practitioner of yoga, contorting himself into unnatural positions, as the following series of pictures illustrates.

He usually demands as much attention as he can possibly get before we head to bed. In fact, his latest trick is one my wife loves to encourage. The Bruce sits on the back of large chair in the living room, and when my wife stops petting him and trys to walk off, he reaches out and taps her on the back several times with his paw. She pets him just to watch his reaction when she tries to walk off.

Just how loved is this cat? A few weeks ago my wife, covered with hair with The Bruce in her lap, looked at me and said, “I never thought I’d say this. I’ve become a cat a person.”

We’ve become so fond of The Bruce that when he finally kicks the bucket (don’t worry, he has many years left), we just might have to get a purebred Scottish Fold. They don’t come cheap though, starting at $500 and most breeders have a waiting list.