How a biblical Creationist interprets a paleontological theory

A few days ago, I mentioned the new groundbreaking and controversial theory that postulates that up to a full third of dinosaurs species may never even have existed due to a mislabeling in the fossil record. Anyone with a scientific and rational mind will understand such theories and possible mistakes to actually be one of science’s strengths: when scientists screw up, rather than cover it up or try and twist existing evidence into conforming to their preexisting theories (sound familiar, Creationists?), they simply try and fix the mistake via reevaluating the evidence to try and see anything they may have missed, and (of course) performing ever more research to try and get as much information and evidence as they can. This self-correcting mechanism is what ultimately makes science so trustworthy and accurate.

But, that’s not the point of this post. What I wanna do is showcase just how egregiously strange Creationists’ understanding of evidence and theories can be and how they can so easily twist logic into fitting in with their delusional take on reality. For starters, below is some of the actual text taken from the source National Geographic article:

That's because young dinosaurs didn't look like Mini-Me versions of their parents, according to new analyses by paleontologists Mark Goodwin, University of California, Berkeley, and Jack Horner, of Montana State University.

Instead, like birds and some other living animals, the juveniles went through dramatic physical changes during adulthood.

This means many fossils of young dinosaurs, including T. rex relatives, have been misidentified as unique species, the researchers argue.

How T. Rex Became a Terror

The lean and graceful Nanotyrannus is one strong example. Thought to be a smaller relative of T. rex, the supposed species is now considered by many experts to be based on a misidentified fossil of a juvenile T. rex.

Makes sense to me (from a non-expert’s standpoint). Which, of course, brings us to one Creationist’s conclusion:

This report shows how terribly fallible the evolutionist fossil investigators are. It also lessens the number of animals that would have been on Noah's Ark. Noah did not have to carry every sub-species, such as every kind of dog, into the Ark. He only had to carry a representative of each kind. The average size of the dinosaurs, based on the fossil record, was the size of a sheep or small pony (M. Crichton, The Lost World, p. 122). Struthiomimus, for example, was the size of an ostrich, and Compsognathus was the size of a chicken. Thus, only some so-called dinosaurs were overly large, and of these, Noah could have taken the eggs or juveniles. Since reptiles can grow as long as they live, the large dinosaurs were probably very old ones (The New Answers Book). Even the largest dinosaurs were small when first hatched. "There were probably fewer than 50 distinct groups or kinds of dinosaurs that had to be on the Ark" (Ken Ham, The New Answers Book, p. 168).

Sweet holy Hell! That’s about as insane(ly skewed) an understanding of a scientific article as I’ve ever seen. No comment on his reference to Michael Crichton books (I’m not aware of how accurate, or otherwise, they may or may not be), but this wild, almost heroic attempt (in its foolhardiness) to try and reconcile a scientific theory with religion is the result of some serious mental acrobatics that I, for one, cannot hope to replicate.

(via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)
Technorati tags: paleontology · dinosaurs · fossil record · Noah’s Ark · National Geographic · theories