Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/11/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 09:36 PM 11/19/03 -0700, Kit McChesney wrote: > >Good lord, I had no idea! How did you get to be so danged smart? ;-) > >But you know what I mean, or meant, though, don't you, metaphorically >speaking? (Maybe not!) > >What happened to that reptilian brain I keep hearing about that we have? ==================== Blame Carl Linnaeus for this one: he was the original sorter of lifeforms and was the fellow who developed the use of a generic name coupled with a species name, as in Lacerta Lacerta or Salamandra Salamandra or Homo Sapiens and the like. Linnaeus dumped all of the cold-blooded land animals into a single class and divided the warm-blooded land critters into two classes. Through sheer bloody-minded stubborness, we tend to think of fish producing amphibians, and amphibians producing reptiles, and reptiles producing bids and mammals. But such is not the case. A better method of classification is "cladistics" which rigidly adheres to the evolution of traits from older species to newer ones. This shows that the proper division should be: amapsida today, turtles amphiia . synapsida today, mammals diapsida today, lizards and snakes, crocodiles, the sphenodon, and birds Cladistics shows us that birds ARE dinosaurs (as that great paleontologist, Bakker, has noted: "the next time you hear a flock of Canadian geese honking overhead, announce to all in your abode that the dinosaurs are migrating again"). And when you are watching a robin bobbing about looking for worms, think of the predatory dinosaurs from which it is descended. Warm blood was developed early-on by the diapsida and synapsida, roughly 200m years ago. The anapsida are a bit slower in this regard, as the Leatherback Turtle is developing warm-blooded circulation as I write these words. So much for those who scream for evolutionists to produce the intermediate forms evolution develops! Scientists tell us that we are perhaps 50 years from a chronograph (time travel in view only) and pehaps a century away from true time travel. This makes me want to make at least 155 years of age, so that I can take my Leica IIIc back and get some proper pictures of Tyrannosaurus arguing with a Triceratops. I may not be functioning all that well at 155 years of age, but I KNOW that my IIIc, being a year or two older than me,. will be doing just fine. Now, if I can still find FILM in 2103, well, we will have to wait and see! The best single source on this stuff is Stephen Jay Gould's THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY. It is tightly written and is overly technical in parts, but it is a magnificent book. A rainy afternoon, a pot of tea, and you can flip through Gould as you might through Gibbon or Lawrence or Churchill. Marc msmall@infionline.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bąs fir gun ghrąs fir! - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html