| Evolution in the News - May 2005 |
| by Do-While Jones |
Here is the latest baseless claim for evolution.
|
Newfound dinosaur a transitional creature Caught in the act of evolution, the odd-looking, feathered dinosaur was becoming more vegetarian, moving away from its meat-eating ancestors. 1 All plant-eating dinosaurs were ultimately descended from a meat-eater, and switchovers to plant-eating occurred several times. The newly discovered species, which lived 125 million years ago, could help scientists understand details of how the changeovers took place. It's "our first really good case of a dinosaur in the midst of shifting from the meat-eating body to a plant-eating one," said an expert not involved in the discovery, Thomas R. Holtz Jr. of the University of Maryland. 2 |
It was not “caught in the act of evolution.” There is no factual way of knowing what its ancestors were, nor what its descendents were. It is assumed, without any proof whatsoever, that its ancestors were meat-eaters, and that its descendents eventually evolved into vegetarians. The only reason for assuming this is an a priori belief in evolution.
It is true that the shape of teeth is generally correlated with diet. That is, animals with sharp teeth tend to eat meat, and animals with peg-like teeth tend to be vegetarians. This tendency is not an infallible diagnostic trait, however. Gorillas, with their fierce teeth, would be presumed to be carnivorous, but they aren’t.
Ironically, one of the alleged key turning points in human evolution is that our subhuman ancestors supposedly started eating meat, which stimulated brain growth. 3 This is nonsense, of course, but it is what some evolutionists say. If this were true, why would meat-eating dinosaurs evolve into vegetarians several times?
Which do they think is the cause and which is the effect? Did eating vegetables cause the dinosaurs’ teeth to become duller? Or, did duller teeth force meat-eaters to become vegetarians because they could not chew tough meat? That runs counter to the theory of natural selection. One would expect that in times of famine the dinosaurs with sharp teeth, which could eat meat or vegetables, would have a survival advantage over dinosaurs that could eat only vegetables.
How do they know these dinosaurs weren’t evolving from vegetarians to carnivores?
The truth is that they discovered some dinosaurs with teeth that aren’t as sharp as the meat-eating dinosaurs and not as dull as those that eat vegetables. One can speculate that these teeth evolved to be optimized for the food source, or one could speculate that an intelligent designer gave these creatures teeth optimized for the food source, but it is just worthless speculation in either case.
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Footnotes:
1
Malcolm Ritter, Associated Press, May 4, 2005, “Newfound dinosaur a transitional creature”
(Ev)
2
ibid.
3Stringer and McKie (1996) African Exodus, page 35, quoting Leslie Aiello
(Ev)