Then explain why there was yet another fraud when archaeologists faked a feathered flying lizard in China perhaps a decade ago. Why all these lies if evolution is so very factual?
At
Not Found:
quote:
In 1999, a supposed 'missing link' fossil of an apparently feathered dinosaur named "Archaeoraptor liaoningensis", found in Liaoning Province, northeastern China, turned out to be a forgery. Comparing the photograph of the specimen with another find, Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing came to the conclusion that it was composed of two portions of different fossil animals. His claim made National Geographic review their research and they too came to the same conclusion.[7] The bottom portion of the "Archaeoraptor" composite came from a legitimate feathered dromaeosaurid now known as Microraptor, and the upper portion from a previously-known primitive bird called Yanornis.
If you follow that footnote 7,
BBC - 404: Not Found
, you will find the transcript of a BBC report,
The Dinosaur that Fooled the World, first shown on BBC Two 9.00pm Thursday 21 February 2002. That report details the examination of the fossil and the publishing of the findings (in
National Geographic which had exclusive rights having funded the research), the research that led to discovery of the fake (by a Chinese paleontologist who was offered a similar "complete" fossil for sale by a local farmer, a fossil with an
identical tail, since it was the counter-slab to the fossil in question), and the scientific community's reaction and corrective actions. It was not paleontologists (
not archaeologists as you said -- shouldn't you bother to learn something about science before you start to make false statements about it?) who had created the fake, but rather a
Chinese farmer. From the BBC report (link provided above, so do please read it on your own):
quote:
NARRATOR: Xu Xing now began to search the area. . . .
One of the best sources of information is local farmers who are paid by China's geological institutions to spend up to six months of the year digging and sifting rock.
. . .
NARRATOR: Life in the region's villages is harsh and many farmers don't just dig for fossils, they've become amateur dealers. . . .
. . .
NARRATOR: . . . In the aftermath it became clear that the Liaoning region of China is not just famous for its fabulous fossils. It's also home to a highly developed faking industry. Dr Zhonge Zhou, a scientist at Beijing's Institute of Palaeontology, has been monitoring it.
DR ZHONGE ZHOU (Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Beijing): Farmers or dealers can make a much bigger profit if they've got the fossil of a complete animal. They take a damaged specimen and add the parts from other animals to make a new one which looks complete. In one place I saw them putting all the bits from a dinosaur's leg into a box, just like a box of machine spare parts so that they could add them to different fossils.
NARRATOR: A whole fossil, even one put together from different creatures, sells for far more than a genuine but damaged specimen.
ZHONGE ZHOU: A damaged fossil might sell for a few hundred yuan, but when broken bits are used to make a complete one it can sell for several thousand.
NARRATOR: It was from these murky origins that the Archaeoraptor had emerged. Somewhere an expert had put together a fake that had fooled the world.
And yet, towards the end of that BBC report:
quote:
NARRATOR: It was a complex and clever fraud, but in his urge to make a quick profit the faker, for all his skill, had completely missed the real value of what he had. In Beijing Xu Xing had begun to examine the counterslab of the National Geographic specimen's tail. He was curious to know what he'd got. It was incomplete and damaged, but he could clearly see the short, rigid tail of a dinosaur, but there was something very surprising. The remains of the pelvis suggested it was the smallest dinosaur ever found. Even more unusually, it showed signs of having the feathers of a bird and the light and spindly legs suggested a creature adapted to climbing and perching rather than running along the ground. To Xu Xing this looked like the first dinosaur ever found that could live in trees.
XU XING: This is the original artist's impression based on the initial research. You can see this was a dinosaur with a very small bird-like body, but there's also something else very important about the skeleton. The hind legs suggests that this may have been a dinosaur that lived in trees.
NARRATOR: This was a new and completely unknown creature and contained within it evolutionary data never found before. Here was an animal that had evolved into something more like a bird than any dinosaur previously known about.
. . .
NARRATOR: . . . In America, something equally astonishing was coming to light. The other half of the fake fossil was throwing up more fascinating and unexpected results. As Tim Rowe studied the head and body he could see that it was clearly the skeleton of a bird.
TIM ROWE: These bones all go together. This is a natural, verifiable new skeleton. It's a unique combination of characters with a big breast bone, a big wishbone, a flight capable wing and yet it retains claws and moving up to the skull up here we find that it still has teeth.
NARRATOR: This was an extraordinary combination of features. Birds don't have teeth or hands, yet this creature had the hands of a dinosaur and the wings of a bird. It also had the teeth of a dinosaur but the beak of a bird. It was another brand new animal scientists had never heard of or seen before.
. . .
NARRATOR: The fake fossil was a commercial fraud but a scientific goldmine. The upper portion was a bird with dinosaur features and the tail was a dinosaur with bird-like characteristics. It was not one, but two creatures showing all the evolutionary characteristics of a missing link.
You ask "Why all these lies if evolution is so very factual?" We find that the lies were not told by the scientific community as you claim, but rather by professional fakers. And just who exposed this lie? Was it creationists? No, it was by
scientists. In
all human enterprises, both scientific and non-, we cannot keep frauds and fakes from ever occurring. It's impossible since they all involve
people. But what we
can is to seek out fraud and fakery, expose it, and remove it and correct the damage done by it. That is what science does. And that is what creationism
refuses to do. That is why there are so many PRATTs, false creationist claims that have were exposed decades ago and which creationists unscrupulously continue to spread.
If creationists serve the God of Truth, then why all the persistent lies?
BTW, you should visit the
Genesis Panthesis site at
No webpage found at provided URL: http://genesispanthesis.tripod.com/main.html by D. Jon Scott. Select the
The Inspiration for Genesis Panthesis link. Scott was a young (pre-college) young-earth creationist who was so active in arguing for the cause that he set up a site and forum for it. Here is part of his story:
quote:
For a very long time I was content to explain away the mounds of evidence supporting evolutionary biology as well as mainstream geology and cosmology. Particularly the fossil record - which I feel I can safely say that I was much more well-versed in than the majority of prominent creationists (Gish et. al.), was rather easy for me to dispute in my deluded creationist mind.
After a while, I became very aware of the dishonest tactics used by creationists such as Gish and Morris, and developed a growing contempt for the majority of my fellow creationists/Christians. Though I was determined to help give creationism scientific respectability and aid in restoring the good name of the Christian religion.
I kept updating the archive and working on it straight through 1998, the year in which Caudipteryx zouii and Protarchaeopteryx robusta - two creatures which scientists described as obviously non-avian dinosaurs (which means they weren't birds), but which had feathers! I simply emphasized their avian qualities and either explained away or dismissed as unimportant their reptilian characteristics, and went on happily spreading the myth of creationism.
Yes - I had the evidence, the information, and the knowledge of how evolutionary biology works - yet I did not have the intellectual integrity to admit to the truthfulness of evolutionary theory and kept denying that this incredibly intricate law and set of 'trends' in nature could possibly have any validity.
Then, in september of 1999, the bomb dropped. I picked up my issue of the National Geographic and saw what else on a page advertising an upcoming issue; but Sinornithosaurus millenii! It had long steak-knife-shaped teeth like a T. rex, a long, muscular tail, hyper-extendable "switchblade" claws on the hind legs like Velociraptor mongoliensis, a narrow snout that looked almost like a bill, a bird-like pubic structure, and worst of all - feathers!
I simply stared at the page for a few moments, muttered "oh shit!" to myself a few times, and got up to check the N.G.News web site. This wasn't just some artistic depiction of what a reptile/bird might look like - and it was no hoax. It was a small dromaeosaurid ("raptor") with killing claws, razor-sharp teeth, and a pair of wing-like arms complete with plumage. My heart sank, and my gut churned. This was it - the one proof of evolution I had always asked for but never thought would come to light. In my mind, I was betting that even if evolution were true, the chances of finding such a beautiful example of transition would be slim enough to be dismissed as impossible. And yet here it was - proof.
I stepped outside to compose myself, and stood there looking at the world around me.
Weeks later, I began making plans to dismantle to the Talk.Science Archive, all the while researching the Christian religion. I soon came to the conclusion that since much of the first ten or twelve chapters of genesis had been plagiarized from Chaldean fairy tales and mythos, the truthfulness of the Bible must be strictly spiritual rather than spiritual and historical.
It wasn't very long before I began to realize that since the 'historical' sections of the Bible, particularly those stolen from Chaldean mythos, were intended to influence spiritual truth - that the early Israelites must have simply been making up their own "spiritual truths", trying to make the fairy tales of their Hebrew (Chaldean) ancestors match up. I was faced with the realization that the Bible could not even be taken as spiritually true...it was/is nothing more than a book of myths and fables from a time and place in which people had no scientific knowledge, and made up these stories to explain what was going on around them (though the people making up these fables probably thought that they were coming to revelations given by their God(s)).
Then that day in 1999 came back to me. I remembered standing outside on my porch, looking at the natural world of which I had always known myself to be an integral part - albeit created as such. On that day, however, I began to look at the world in a new light.
. . .
{long contemption of everything around him now being considered in that new light}
. . .
"This is it..." I spoke to myself softly, "Welcome to the real world."
That page is a decade old and has been abandoned, I'm sure, for as long. I had found it a few years after it had been written and via Google I found some more pages by and about D. Jon Scott. He had become very strongly anti-Christian. He had also become an atheist, but at some point in college had pedelled back to Wicca, becoming a Red Witch, centered on Odin as I seem to recall, with "Corvus" as part of his Wiccan name. Now 7 or 8 years later, I couldn't conclusively locate him via Google, so I don't know where he is at now.
Please note that what had deconverted him was
not evolution or fossils, but rather it was solely
creationism. It was creationism that had taught him to base his faith on false claims that are contrary-to-fact and to believe that if those contrary-to-fact claims are not true, then he must abandon his faith.
Creationism did its job of destroying faith and it did it well. And it would have destroyed his faith just as well if D. Jon Scott had seen Archaeoraptor liaoningensis instead of the actual fossil that he did see, Sinornithosaurus millenii.
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