Category Archives: science

T-Rex may have come before both the chicken and the egg

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What modern animals are dinosaurs most related to? Since the 90’s I have been convinced that modern birds are related to (and therefore at least partially the descendants of) dinosaurs. I got the idea from Michael Crichton’s books Jurassic Park and The Lost World – both good reads even today. I found his arguments pretty compelling, but there wasn’t much evidence back then.

Now a world renowned paleantologist and his collegues have done an analysis on collagen proteins extracted from a T-Rex leg bone. They can’t get actual DNA (à la Jurassic Park) as it is too fragile to survive the millions of years. However, proteins are created from the plans encoded in DNA, so they are also very useful for species analysis. The team had already used this analysis to show that mastadons (very similar to woolly mammoths) are related to modern mammals (obvious!).

The new analysis found that the T-Rex had most proteins in common with the modern chicken! There were also less significant matches with frogs and newts. The guys didn’t have much of the T-Rex protein to analyse so this is only a partial test – but they are back out there looking for more!

Protein extracted from this femur was used in the analysis

48% of Americans are either ignorant, stupid, or insane

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Newsweek just published a survey about Americans and faith. Among their results were the following:

  • 48% of Americans do not believe that “evolution [is] well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community”.
  • 34% of college graduates accept the Biblical story of creation as fact.

Richard Dawkins once said: “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)”.

A typically controversial statement from Dawkins. I think that most people who deny evolution are indeed ignorant, but there are other important motivations too.

Gravity is ‘just’ a theory

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If you drop something – say an apple – it will fall right? But how do you know that it will fall? In fact, you don’t actually know that it will fall – but every other time you dropped something it fell, so you are pretty sure that this time the apple will fall too.

This is a (very) simplistic example of how humans have been gaining knowledge for thousands of years. Basically we follow a simple process:

  1. We observe things in the world around us. Every time I drop something, it falls to the ground.
  2. We propose a hypothesis explaining what we see. I propose that every time I drop something it will fall. (As an aside this is not the theory of gravity*)
  3. We make predictions according to the hypothesis. I predict that every time I drop something… down it will go.
  4. We use the predictions to create and repeat experiments. Drop a bunch of things to check that our prediction holds.

One day we could disprove the theory by dropping something that doesn’t fall. But, no matter how many experiments we conduct, we can never prove our theory. We just amass a lot of evidence that we are right, but the point is our idea remains a theory. It could be proven wrong at any time.

Evolution is also ‘just a theory’ – but so is gravity, and our theory about dropping things. And like gravity, evolution has a HUGE amount of evidence behind it. Don’t dump it because it’s just a theory – otherwise you should be dumping everything that humans have learned over the last 13,000 years!

* The theory of gravity, at a very simple level, states:

  • Any two objects will attract each other. For example the earth exerts a force of attraction on you – and you exert a force of attraction on the earth.
  • The force of that attractions is proportional to the mass (size) of the objects. The earth is really massive so the force between you is enough to hold you down!