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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Re: Challenge to creationists and evolutionists
Message-ID: <717@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 18-Feb-84 13:37:06 EST
Article-I.D.: dciem.717
Posted: Sat Feb 18 13:37:06 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Feb-84 18:22:27 EST
References: <114@utastro.UUCP>
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
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There is one little problem with asserting that finding contemporaneous
human and dinosaur bones would invalidate evolutionary theory.  This is
in the definition of "dinosaur".  Some "dinosaurs" are well known to be
contemporaneous with humans.  If I remember rightly, alligators qualify.
What you really mean is some species of dinosaurs certifiably extinct
long before primates evolved.  By now, we have explored enough of the
world to be pretty sure of the extinction of important species, but had
the question been asked 50 or 100 years ago, people were still unsure
whether perhaps large dinos might live in isolated parts of the world.
Even now, with sea creatures, surprises happen, as witness the coelacanth
which emerged from millions of years of extinction in some fisherman's
net a few years ago.

I would modify the test simply to require that there be human bones
discovered having a certifiable (by stratigraphy, radiocarbon dating, etc)
age greater than several million years.  At the least, such a discovery
would require considerable revisions to our ideas about evolution or
physics (they could be accounted for by time-travellers from our future,
for example).

Another possible test would be the discovery of some life-form, whether
current or fossil, that did not use the "standard" forms of genetic
replication, and had no relatives in the fossil record.
-- 

Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt