AARGH! THE COPPERS GOT ME.

Last month, I bought me a brand new little Kia Rio, 2005. It's a cheap car and gets so-so gas mileage, and there's shimmy in the wheel from about 55 to 70 mph. This weekend I drove over to visit my son in Tahuya and on my drive back, I decided I wanted to take the Kia up to 100 mph and see how she handled. I almost always drive my new cars up to that speed at least once, just to see how they handle. But high speeds make me nervous so I don't drive at high speeds normally nor for very long.

Anyhow, I come to a long clear patch in the road, just west of Ritzville, without much traffic, sunny day, dry pavement, I can see for miles, and figure this is the place to do it, so I take the car up to 100 and immediately let off the gas, get into the right hand lane, and coast back down to 70 mph. I guess I'm breaking the law all of 20 seconds up and back the speedometer. But sure enough, way back behind me, I see him coming, and soon I've got a $228.00 dollar ticket for giving my car a test drive. He got me going one hundred. I must have hit a hundred at the exact moment he tags me with the radar because I was only there a second. Now ain't that something?


GIVING CREATIONISTS THE BIRD

Creationists are fond of saying that evolution can’t come up with any “missing links”, i.e. any fossils which show the moment of transition between one species and another. Well, how about the links we can find between dinosaurs and birds? Would that be a change in species? Well, of course, it would. And those fossil links are coming up in spades in China.

But first, let’s debunk the idea that “missing links” exist. Let’s go back to my trusty series of photographs analogy. Remember, we take a photograph every day of a human being’s life from the moment it’s born until the day it dies, then we ask an independent observer of those photos to identify the days of significant change in that person’s life. On what day did the infant become a toddler? What photo shows the day that the child became an adolescent. What photo shows the first day of the teenage years? When was the last day of middle age? Our independent observer, of course, could not tell which single photograph marks these moments of transition. But he could group together a lot of pictures and guess the change probably happened right about in “here” or “there”, during this “series” of photos. In short, there is no missing link in our person’s slow steady rate of change. There’s just constant infinitesimal change.

Same with species. The changes in species are so gradual that no one would be able to tell at just what moment of species change a dinosaur with wings and feathers became a bird. We’d also have to make other decisions. Is gliding flying or not? How many gliding species would it take before truly flying being became a bird? How many flaps of a dinosaur’s feathered limbs does it take before the dinosaur can be said to be a flying being, well on it’s way to being a bird? Ten, fifteen?

So, there’s this great deception in the creationist attacks on evolutionary fact which needs to be ignored once and for all. Creationists make their naive readers think there is some being which somehow lies exactly between a bird and a dinosaur, a missing link, but there is no such animal. That’s not how evolution works. Certainly, there were hundreds of animals existing simultaneously which were feathered and which glided or flew or flapped or floated down lightly from trees with feathered limbs taking the wind. And no telling which of them became the bird line of evolution.

And, what would a missing link between a fish and a land animal look like, anyway? It would be a being which could live some of its time in water and some in air, but, wait, we have some of animals which already do that. But what of an animal who lived 55% of it’s time in water and 45% of it’s time on land compared with an animal that lived 55% of time on land and only 45% of it’s time in water? Which would we judge to be the land animal and which a fish?

What I’m getting at in this piece is that we will never find a “missing link”, a single creature exactly between bird and dinosaur, because the concept of a missing link is nonfunctional and absurd. What we should expect to find, instead, is a group of fossil “snapshots” of all kinds of dinosaurs with feathers and protean birds, any one of which or several of which might lie in the line between birds and dinosaurs. And that’s what all the recent finds in China are yielding. Lots of dinosaurs with protean wings and feathers and capabilities to glide. Who knows which one of them flapped its wings one, two or three times on its way to being a branch toward a bird? But what scientists are discovering in China is the stuff that evolution is proven with—many feathered bird-like dinosaurs.

Now to return to some specific Chinese fossils which show the pattern I am speaking of. Recently,six four-winged dinosaur fossils were found which “flew” much like a flying squirrel does, “gliding short distances from place to place, and... probably not capable of actual flight.... The study’s authors say their new finds are further confirmation that birds evolved from dinosaurs....” The theory that dinosaurs became birds grew stronger in the past century when “dozens of anatomical structures” were found to be “shared by birds and and the type of dinosaurs called theropods.

Another recent finding of a dinosaur fossil called,“Mei long”, shows a dinosaur fossil curled in a sleeping pose which looks very much like the sleeping posture of a bird with its nose tucked under its wing.
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"To enter life by way of the vagina is as good a way as any." —Henry Miller (I like Henry Miller. I read a lot of his books in the 60s.))