Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site dciem.UUCP Path: utzoo!dciem!mmt 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 Lines: 27 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