On the Piltdown Hoax and human exceptionalism

What the Piltdown Hoax Tells Us, 104 Years Later

Michael Flannery 

A curious anniversary falls this weekend. On December 18, 1912, the infamous Piltdown hoax was unveiled to an astonished audience of the Geological Society of London by lawyer and amateur archeologist Charles Dawson (1864-1916) and Arthur Smith Woodward (1864-1944) of the British Museum. What they showed was nothing short of amazing: the apparent remains of a human-like skull attached to an ape-like jaw. Allegedly unearthed at the Piltdown gravel pit in East Sussex, England, it was hailed as the missing link -- a truly history-making discovery!

It would take nearly 41 years to expose the artifact as a fraud. On November 21, 1953, officials of the British Natural History Museum revealed the shocking truth: Piltdown man was a hoax, the combination of three species, a medieval human cranium, the jaw of a centuries-old young orangutan, and some fossilized chimpanzee teeth. Various culprits have been proposed, including famed Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and physician/novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). But most recent investigation suggests that the imposture was likely perpetrated by Dawson alone in an effort to gain recognition and election as a Fellow into the Royal Society (see "Piltdown hoax solved," Forbes, August 10, 2016).

Writing for Harper's on the second anniversary of the Piltdown exposure, paleontologist Loren Eiseley (1907-1977), not one to look at an event or a phenomenon superficially, asked, "Was Charles Darwin Wrong About the Human Brain?" Eiseley noted that Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, was unimpressed with the Piltdown "find" from the beginning. Writing to a friend in August 1913 (just three months before his death), Wallace exclaimed, "The Piltdown skull does not prove much, if anything!" Why, asked Eiseley, had Wallace, almost alone among the scientific community, so summarily dismissed this apparently stunning missing link? The answer was simple: "he did not believe in a skull which had a modern brain box attached to an apparently primitive face and given, in the original estimates, an antiquity of something over a million years." The archeological "discovery" would have confirmed Darwin's Descent of Man in dramatic fashion. Indeed Piltdown man was, from a Darwinian perspective, even something that would have been predicted.

But Wallace's "voice of lonely protest," observed Eiseley, underscored "the abyss which yawned between man and ape" that Darwinians at the time blissfully ignored. Having observed primitive cultures in South America and the Malay Archipelago for more than twelve years, Wallace concluded (quoting Eiseley) that humans' "mental powers were far in excess of what they really needed to carry on the simple food-gathering techniques by which they survived." Certainly no process of natural selection was adequate to produce such superior powers of art, reason, and morals. For Wallace, the human brain freed mankind from the tyranny of natural selection:

Here, then, we see the true grandeur and dignity of man. On this view of his special attributes, we may admit, that even those who claim for him a position as an order, or a sub-kingdom by himself, have some show of reason on their side. He is, indeed, a being apart, since he is not influenced by the great laws which irrestistibly modify all other organic beings (Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection

, 1870).

How, then, do we account for this impressive array of human attributes? Wallace thought that mankind might well have emerged comparatively recently, and that the rapid evolution of the modern human brain would confirm that "distinct and higher agencies" have been responsible for these mental attributes and attainments.

Eiseley confessed, "Since the exposure of the Piltdown hoax all of the evidence at our command -- and it is considerable -- points to man, in his present form, as being one of the youngest and newest of all earth's swarming inhabitants. . . . Today, with the solution of the Piltdown enigma, we must settle the question of the time involved in favor of Wallace, not Darwin." Although Eiseley thought some other wholly naturalistic explanation might account for the late and virtually saltationist expansion of the human intellect, he confessed that "science . . . has yet to explain how we have come so far so fast, nor has it any completely satisfactory answer to the question asked by Wallace long ago."

Today we still wait for an explanation, and it must be admitted that various speculations along the lines of blind chance and necessity or natural selection remain as unsatisfactory as when Eiseley was writing more than sixty years ago. A century after Wallace's dismissal of Piltdown man, science still confirms Eiseley's assessment and Wallace's vindication. The chart below shows the timeline for ascending brain size/body weight estimates for Sahelanthropus, Australopithecus afarensis, early Homo, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, H. heidelbergensis, Neanderthals, and H. sapiens.

This chart shows relative brain size as cm3 per 50 kg of body weight. Adapted with modifications from Robert Jurmain, Lynn Kilgore, et al.,

 Introduction to Physical Anthropology

 , 2013-2014 ed. (Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2014), p. 357, and "Homo habilis," 

 Encyclopedia Britannica

, updated August 15, 2015.

Clearly brain size and capacity has not only increased, but increased at a very late and remarkably accelerated pace. Of course brain size is not the only measure of intellectual capacity, other factors may be involved. Some, for example, emphasize that Neanderthals, the closest historically to humans, possessed brains that were larger in absolute size to us. But as recent analysis has uncovered, the Neanderthal brain was quite different from its human counterpart. Being much more elongated than globular, the indications are that Neanderthals "reached large brain sizes along different evolutionary pathways." Their speculation that unique patterns of brain development in H. sapiens would have become "a target for positive selection" merely begs Wallace's original question (see Gunz et al., "Brain development after birth differs between Neanderthals and modern humans," Current Biology, Nov. 2010).

So the question remains: How did humans acquire such vast intellectual capacities so comparatively recently and so rapidly? Wallace called upon an "Overruling Intelligence" to explain human intelligence and many other features of complexity in biology and the cosmos. While Darwinians continue to search for some naturalistic cause, others, like British physician James Le Fanu, point out that the disappointments in high-tech solutions to the nature of the intellect and the human mind so touted by the human genome project and promised in the "Decade of the Brain" in the 1990s should force a reassessment of our species as truly unique (Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, 2009).

Eiseley's long forgotten but intriguing article is fortunately now available as "The Real Secret of Piltdown" in a new 2-volume set of his collected essays. As we reflect on the 104th anniversary of arguably science's greatest fraud, Eiseley's conclusion rings is as pertinent today as when it was first written:

The true secret of Piltdown, though thought by the public to be merely the revelation of an unscrupulous forgery, lies in the fact that it has forced science to reexamine carefully the history of the most remarkable creation in the world -- the human brain.

If the Cambrian period of 530 million years ago poses serious challenges to Darwin's insistence upon slow, incremental change in the amazingly rapid proliferation of animals over a mere 5 to 6 million-year timespan (see Darwin's Doubt), then how much more should the transformational changes in the human brain over the past 100 to 200,000 years cause as serious reevaluation of the nature of human beings and the means by which they came to be. If the Cambrian "explosion" is just too much change over too little time to be explained by Darwinian processes, the human brain is way too much change over way too little time. Perhaps Wallace's view of the Piltdown hoax still holds an important lesson for us today. Maybe the most dramatic "explosion" of all is the one that rests within our crania.

Humpback Whales v. Darwin.

For the Love of Humpback Whales
Evolution News & Views

In the intelligent-design documentary  Living Waters, Illustra Media offers beautiful footage of humpback whales from above and below the ocean surface, heaving their massive bulk into the air, coming down with a mighty splash. Even more wondrous, though, is the design of these mammals that are perfectly adapted to full-time aquatic life, though they breathe air, lactate and give birth to live young like other mammals.

The film only had time to treat a couple of specific design aspects of whales, such as their complex vocal communications and the internal testes of the males -- traits that defy explanations based on gradual Darwinian evolution. There's much more to tell.

Humpbacks have been a lot in the news since August  and  November of last year. Before going further, take a minute to watch a new drone video posted by  National Geographic showing "The Rare Beauty of Dozens of Migrating Humpback Whales." Then look at 21 art-quality photos of the whales in a gallery on the same page. They are truly amazing creatures, larger than any dinosaur that ever lived.

Flipper Phone and Breaches of Etiquette

You may remember the film's discussion about humpback whale singing, but New Scientist shares a new twist in their communication.

It's something all whale-watchers yearn to see. The sight of whales breaking the surface and slapping their fins on the water is a true spectacle -- but the animals don't do it just for show.
Instead, it appears that all that splashing is about messaging other whales, and the big splashes are for long-distance calls. [Emphasis added.]

Researchers from the University of Queensland followed 94 different groups of humpbacks during their annual migration. They found that breaching was more frequent when another pod was more than four kilometers away, but fin-slapping was more common when other whales were coming or leaving the pod. They also seemed to be doing it more often in windy conditions, perhaps because the conditions made vocalizations less audible. It may be that the whales aren't just engaging in these energy-intensive behaviors for fun or to dislodge parasites; they could be texting messages over the waves.

Mugging for the Camera

Live Science posts a short article showing humpbacks "mugging" for tour boats, seeking attention, indicating their social intelligence and curiosity. Sometimes a whale will lift one eye out of the water as if to get a better look. The article lists some of the superlatives of humpback whales:

They can grow as long as 60 feet (18 meters) in length.

They migrate farther than any other mammal.

Than can eat up to 3,000 pounds of food a day.

These don't sound quite like traits that could be inherited from a wolf- or cow-like ancestor.

Again, watch the short video clip in the article taken from a drone. The whales dwarf the tour boat. Undoubtedly the tourists were glad they were not surrounded by great white sharks.

Conservation Success

Whale sightings have increased off the coast of New York and New Jersey in recent years. Last month, a humpback was spotted miles up the Hudson River. In the past, marine biologists took this as a sign of distress, since they are usually not found there. This time,  Phys.org  says, they think the cleaner water due to conservation efforts is allowing more fish to thrive, enticing the beasts to swim in closer to New York City. In addition to humpbacks, New Yorkers have seen endangered right whales making rare appearances.

Population Boom

Before whaling was banned in 1965, humpbacks in the North Pacific dropped from an estimated 15,000 individuals to less than a thousand,  Science Daily says. After they were further protected by the Endangered Species Act in 1973, their numbers began to climb. Now, there are about 21,000 individuals frolicking in the area. "The recovery has been slow, in part because humpback whales can live to be 70 years of age and their recovery is driven primarily by local fidelity and recruitment."

What do they mean by "local fidelity and recruitment"? A paper in  Endangered Species Research explains. Oregon State marine biologists have determined that most individuals they observed in Glacier Bay are either the same individuals that were present decades ago, or their descendants. This implies that individuals remember their favorite feeding grounds. Outsiders do not often stumble in to an area. Instead, the knowledge of where to go is primarily inherited. This has important implications for conservation efforts.

How can scientists identify specific whales? Science Daily says that the markings on humpbacks are unique to each individual. "Each individual whale has a tail, or fluke, as unique as a fingerprint," National Geographic adds. "No two flukes are alike, which makes the whales easy to track."

Conservation Challenges

Despite these successes, all is not well. BBC News  posted a worrying video clip of a humpback whale calf caught in shark nets off the coast of Australia. Its mother kept pushing it up so it could breathe. Fortunately, a rescue team saw the predicament and moved in to cut away the nets; mother and calf swam away calmly.

Entanglement in fishing gear has been a longtime concern of Captain Dave Anderson, who appears in Living Waters. "Nearly 1,000 dolphins and whales die every day due to fishing gear entanglement," his  Whale Rescue page says. The page includes a video clip of his team going to great efforts day and night to approach entangled animals and cut away the ropes and nets that endanger their lives. Sometimes a freed whale will come near the boats afterward as if to say "Thank you."

Solving the problem of entanglement will require cooperation between marine biologists, governments and fishing companies. Science Daily reports on the magnitude of the problem:

Left-behind fishing gear that continues to catch -- sometimes called ghost fishing -- entraps sea life from the world's largest animal, the blue whale, to the critically endangered small tooth sawfish, according to a new study.
"Entanglement is the likely cause of death for many marine organisms, particularly whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, sharks, turtles and rays," lead author Martin Stelfox told Seeker. Stelfox is the founder and director of the Oliver Ridley Project, which is working to combat derelict nets and other equipment that continue to fish in the Indian Ocean. The problem occurs worldwide, however.

After compiling a list of losses, the researchers found that "Humpback whales were the most commonly caught animals, followed closely by the North Atlantic right whale." One promising trend is to make fishing gear out of biodegradable material, but fishermen need to be educated on the risk to these magnificent animals and learn to retrieve their nets and deposit them in designated collection points. We can each help by reducing plastic pollution that reaches the ocean, and by keeping mylar helium balloons from floating out to sea, where they are mistaken for food by whales, dolphins, and sea turtles.

Enjoy Humpbacks Up Close


If you are ever in Southern California, be sure to book a trip with Captain Dave Anderson's Whale and Dolphin Safari. He runs trips all year off Dana Point, which he calls the "Serengeti" of marine mammals. His trips have sighted humpbacks for most of the last few days.

Walt Disney and the future that was.

Fifty Years Later, Recalling Walt Disney and Scientism

John G. West 

Editor's note: December 15 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of filmmaker Walt Disney. Discovery Institute Senior Fellow John West is author of the new book  Walt Disney and Live-Action, which explores the meaning and making of Walt Disney's live-action features. In this article, he explores the role of scientism in Disney's work.

Someone once quipped that Walt Disney harbored "19th-century emotions in conflict with a 21st-century brain." The characterization was apt.

Disney, who died fifty years ago on December 15, was known for championing traditional morality and promoting nostalgia for a simpler past epitomized by small-town America. At the same time, he was widely recognized as a visionary futurist who enthusiastically embraced the new horizons offered by science and technology.

Disney's idiosyncratic mixture of moral traditionalism and techno-optimism didn't always seem to cohere, and it led people to admire him for vastly different reasons. Conservatives embraced Disney for his defense of Judeo-Christian morality, his unrepentant support for American republicanism, his love of free enterprise and entrepreneurship, and his distrust of big government and the welfare state. By contrast, fellow futurists were attracted to Disney's modernist ideas about urban planning, his exalted view of science and technology, and his utopian visions of human progress.

Although I have a keen appreciation for Disney and his achievements, I admit I'm not one of those who are especially enamored with his techno-optimism. During the last century, we've seen far too much destruction arising from the abuse of science and technology for me to believe that science can fundamentally reform the human heart or usher in a utopia. For me, scientific and technological progress is bittersweet. I think Disney was correct to see that science and technology can produce wondrous benefits for humanity. But they also make it easier for humans to accomplish their own destruction -- and that darker side of scientific and technological progress was rarely on display in Disney's projects as a futurist.

Consider his "Carousel of Progress," a stage show first developed for the 1964 World's Fair in New York City and later relocated to Disneyland and then Walt Disney World (where it still operates). Featuring "audio-animatronic" robots rather than live actors, the Carousel of Progress depicts the benefits to American society of the rapid technological advances during the first half of the 20th century. The audience meets an iconic middle-class American family at home circa 1900, the 1920s, the 1940s, and the 1960s.

In the 1900s, the family marvels over laborsaving inventions such as cast-iron stoves, gas lamps, ice boxes, and telephones. In the 1920s, the home has been wired for electricity, leading to electric lights, electric sewing machines, refrigerators, toasters, and coffee percolators. In the 1940s, the home adds even bigger and more efficient electric appliances, and by the 1960s, electric appliances have made preparations for previously exhausting holidays like Christmas a breeze.

Each act of this unfolding march of progress is linked together by the song "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow," a secular hymn to man's creativity and his mastery of his environment penned by Richard and Robert Sherman of Mary Poppins fame. The infectious tune boasts that human knowhow can make dreams a reality and usher in "a great, big, beautiful tomorrow":

So there's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow

Shining at the end of every day

There's a great, big, beautiful tomorrow

Just a dream away

Disney's techno-optimism was also on display in the "Tomorrowland" area in Disneyland, and his planned but never-built "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" (EPCOT) in Florida. There is something alluring about the cheerful optimism of these efforts. But there is also something more than a little disturbing. The Carousel of Progress celebrated -- apparently without irony -- the use of television as parents' new "electronic babysitter," and the relocation of grandparents from their children's homes into segregated communities of seniors. The "House of the Future" at Disneyland featured modernist, plastic interiors and "irradiated food." Disney's vision for his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was even more hideous, exhibiting many of the worst features of modernist urban planning: top-down micro-management of every part of life; the artificial separation of where people live and work and play; bleak Bauhaus-style architecture; and the attempt to herd everyone into mass transit.

The visual center of EPCOT was a modernist 30-story hotel that was designed to be seen from miles around, although more traditional architectural forms weren't completely forgotten. The city's 50-acre business and shopping district was supposed to include faux buildings and streets patterned after architecture from other parts of the world, all located within a giant, temperature-controlled enclosure -- in essence, one great big shopping mall. The narrator of an early promotional film for EPCOT promised: "In this climate-controlled environment, shoppers, theatergoers, and people just out for a stroll will enjoy ideal weather conditions, protected day and night from rain, heat and cold, and humidity." Disney, who loved nature, who grew up amidst real small towns and farms, and who loved to travel to other parts of the world, planned to dispense with the natural environment in his city of the future. In his new artificial downtown, no one need ever experience the discomfort of the elements. Of course, neither would they experience its joys, including sunsets or summer breezes or raindrops or the songs of birds.

What rescued Walt Disney from being a completely uncritical champion of scientific and technological progress was not his ventures into theme parks or urban planning. It was some of his films. To be sure, his educational productions often promoted the same lop-sided techno-optimism, whether championing nuclear power in Our Friend the Atom (originally prepared for his weekly television show in 1957) or extolling the virtues of mass bombing in Victory Thru Air Power (1943). Fortunately, Disney's fictional productions displayed more ambiguity.The film in the Disney canon that offers arguably the most explicit warning about the abuse of science and technology is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), still the definitive cinematic adaptation of the Jules Verne novel of the same name. 20,000 Leagues depicts a supposedly civilized world where international powers employ science and technology for enslavement and death. The film's Captain Nemo is a twisted genius who ostensibly opposes the misuse of science, but who himself willingly employs science to kill others, even those not directly implicated in the crimes he opposes. At the end of the film, Nemo blows up his discoveries in an iconic mushroom cloud. To audiences in the 1950s, where fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills were a fact of life, the film's ending was likely even more powerful than it is today.

Softening the film's otherwise bleak ending, Disney included a hopeful voiceover before the final credits, repeating the words of Captain Nemo himself from earlier in the film: "There is hope for the future. And when the world is ready for a new and better life, all this will someday come to pass, in God's good time." But what ultimately makes 20,000 Leagues so powerful is not those hopeful words, but the film's unflinching portrait of the human capacity to misuse science, a depiction that even its final words cannot completely obliterate.The dangers of science and technology can also be seen in Disney's comic fantasies, especially The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and Son of Flubber (1963), two phenomenally popular films starring Disney's everyman, Fred MacMurray, as Professor Ned Brainard of mythical Medfield College. Brainard invents flying rubber, aka "flubber," a gooey substance that makes things defy gravity. Brainard is portrayed as a scientific genius, but also as a complete blunderer as a human being. With his single-minded devotion to science, he neglects his human relationships, leading him to miss his own wedding. Brainard is also oblivious to the societal consequences of his research. In Son of Flubber, he runs an experiment that inflicts widespread damage on the rest of his community even while he remains utterly clueless about what he has just done.

Both films highlight how non-scientists try to manipulate scientific discoveries for their own ends, satirizing in particular the behavior of politicians, the military, the IRS, and big business. Professor Brainard himself is shown to be corruptible, misusing his discoveries to take revenge on his romantic rival. For all of their celebration of the creativity of science, these comedies also warned against the pervasive dangers scientific progress can pose. As beneficial as science may be for society, it cannot be left free from social norms, and scientists themselves may not be the best judges of the cultural consequences of their discoveries.

But perhaps Disney's most scathing indictment of the dark side of technological progress came in a 1952 animated short based on the award-winning children's book, The Little House, which tells how a beloved house in the country is eventually swallowed up by the encroaching city. Disney's version of the tale was considerably darker than the original book, with the forces of technological development portrayed by Disney as nothing less than demonic.

The film explicitly attacks the modern slogan of "progress." While the screen reveals the depressing tenements now towering over the little house, the narrator ironically comments: "Everything was bigger and better, for this was the age of Progress." Each new wave of "progress" in the film produces ever more nightmarish results, finally resulting in an Inferno of crime and noise and traffic and tawdry 24-hour-a-day neon lights.

Here was a hellish vision of technological progress that seemed to represent the very antithesis of the techno-optimism of EPCOT. Disney may well have viewed EPCOT as an answer to the problems posed by technological progress in the past, showing how science and technology in the future could be harnessed to build better urban environments through all-pervasive master planning. How Disney squared his proposed micromanagement of civic life in EPCOT with his own faith in human freedom, free enterprise, and limited government is anybody's guess. For myself, I don't think Disney ever completely reconciled the tensions between his techno-optimism and the rest of his worldview.

But it's those unresolved tensions that made him all the more intriguing as a shaper of pop culture, and his films all the more worth watching.

A brave new world is closer than you think.

Experimenting with live patients / Some experts think it's OK to use vegetative human subjects
Wesley J. Smith

In the new novel "Hunters of Dune," biotechnologists of the future create "ghoulas" -- clones made from the dead -- in breeding contraptions known as "axlotl tanks." About 100 pages into the novel, the reader is shocked to learn that axlotl tanks are really unconscious women whose bodies have been expropriated to serve the greater good as so many gestating vats.

Happily, "Hunters of Dune" is science fiction. In the real world, we have a higher sense of morality and ethics. We would never use catastrophically disabled human beings so crassly. We understand that treating people as mere things violates the intrinsic dignity of the individual and the equal moral worth of all human life.

Well, most of us do.

Unfortunately, many bioethicists would feel right at home in a world in which unconscious people are converted into mere biological machines. Indeed, some of our most prominent bioethical and philosophical thinkers have published articles in the world's most respected medical and bioethical journals proposing that unconscious patients (those diagnosed as in a persistent vegetative state) be used both as vital organ donors and the subjects of human medical experimentation.

Those we would exploit, we must first dehumanize. A favored proposal for stripping these vulnerable patients of their humanity is to redefine a diagnosis of persistent vegetative state into the legal equivalent of death -- even if the "dead" patient breathes without assistance.

"The essence of human existence," the influential Georgetown University bioethicist Robert Veatch wrote several years ago in the Journal of Clinical Ethics, "is the presence of integrated mind and body. ... For the human to exist in any legal, moral or socially significant sense, these two features must be present." And, since those diagnosed as vegetative are thought to be unaware, according to Veatch and many of his colleagues, they are merely "respiring cadavers" who could even be buried except that it "is simply unaesthetic to bury someone while still breathing."

The proposed redefinition of these living patients into dead, albeit breathing, bodies is intended to pave the way for using them as so many organ farms.

A 1996 article in the British medical journal Lancet put it this way: "If the legal definition of death were to be changed to include comprehensive irreversible loss of higher brain function, it would be possible to take the life of a patient (or more accurately to stop the heart, since the patient would be defined as dead) by a 'lethal' injection and then remove the organs needed for transplantation, subject to the usual criteria for consent."

  More recently, the notion that the bodies of persistent vegetative patients should be exploitable has been extended to the realm of cutting-edge medical research -- perhaps for the purpose of using these profoundly disabled people in place of primates or other animals.

Illustrating how respectable these radical views have become among the medical intelligentsia, articles and letters published during the past two years in the Journal of Medical Ethics have gone so far as urging that vegetative patients be used to test the safety of "xenotransplantation," that is, of transplanting animal (usually pig) organs into humans.

The usual ethical approach in medical research is to complete animal testing and then cautiously move into human trials with patients who could conceivably benefit from the experimental drug or procedure. But some bioethicists worry about the social, personal and sexual contacts of early pig organ recipients allowing a porcine virus to cross the species boundary and setting off a pandemic.

But quarantining pig organ recipients is seen as violating their personal autonomy. The proposed "ethical" remedy for this conundrum is to use persistent vegetative bodies in place of patients who actually need new organs in early xenotransplantation experiments.

"If it can be agreed upon that PVS bodies can be regarded as dead," Belgian professor An Ravelingien and several co-authors wrote in 2004, "then experimenting on them is legitimate under the same conditions as experiments on cadavers," so long as they consented to be used in this fashion prior to their impairment. To illustrate the extent to which these bioethicists dehumanize people diagnosed as , Ravelingien asserts that "living cadavers" in persistent vegetative state should not be called "patients" because that wrongly humanizes them and "impedes the discussion."

This year, Heather Draper, a bioethicist from Birmingham, England, took Ravelingien's argument one step further: "My own view is that people in a PVS are still alive," she wrote. But this seemingly obvious observation should not, in Draper's view, preclude these helpless patients from being used in animal organ transplant experiments. "I see no objection in principle to the proposal that competent people can decide, in advance, to participate in research when they become incompetent."

Nor, apparently, would Draper limit such human experimentation to those believed to be unconscious. "Helping others by taking part in clinical research is undoubtedly a good way to live out what may be years in a PVS or other less-compromised states," she writes.

Consider the kind of scenario this advocacy contemplates: Alice, a woman in her late 20s, nearly drowns. Aggressive CPR restarts her heart but she remains unresponsive for six months. Doctors tell her husband Jack she is in a persistent vegetative state -- and although the diagnosis is difficult to make with certainty and is often wrong -- they conclude she will never awaken.

Since the law now considers a persistent vegetative state the same as being dead, the state issues a death certificate. Jack assures doctors that Alice wanted her body used for science if she ever died or became profoundly incapacitated. Accordingly, her "breathing cadaver" is transferred from a nursing home to a major organ transplant center. Soon, her kidneys are removed for transplantation into renal patients. Doctors then implant pig kidneys. Alice survives the surgery and continues to breathe on her own. She lives for years in isolation as researchers continually test for dangerous porcine viral infections. When the experiment concludes, Alice is lethally injected -- which is not considered euthanasia because she is already legally dead -- and her remains are cremated.

It's an ugly picture, and it is important to emphasize that transplant surgeons do not currently harvest the organs of vegetative patients, nor do medical researchers use these most vulnerable people in unethical medical experiments. But if we want to keep it that way, we will have to make it unequivocally clear to the bioethicists and our lawmakers that patients diagnosed with persistent vegetative state are people, too. It's wrong to reduce them into the nonfictional equivalents of axlotl tanks.

C.S.I Unhyped?

Darwinists' Just so stories are beyond parody.

The 12 Points of Evolution: Evolutionists Outdo The Office

And Air Travel.
Cornelius Hunter

When The Office manager Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell) gives a guest lecture at the local business school, he reveals not only the depths of his ignorance but his lack of self-awareness. At one point he hilariously makes an attempt at profundity, informing the students with all assuredness that “There are four kinds of business: Tourism, food service, railroads, and sales.” Realizing his categories have left something out he quickly adds “And hospitals-slash-manufacturing. And air travel.” Scott hasn’t had a deep thought in his life, yet is certain his knowledge and intellect tower over those around him.

I was reminded of Carell’s hilarious portrayal of Scott this week when evolutionist Dan Graur made an attempt to describe “All of evolutionary biology” in 12 points. One can picture Graur, like Carell, starting with the four main points of evolution, and quickly realizing there is another point or two that he left out. But Graur’s first point is beyond anything fiction writers could have dreamed up:

1. Evolutionary biology is ruled by handful of logical principles, each of which has repeatedly withstood rigorous empirical and observational testing.

Logical principles? Rigorous empirical testing? You’ve got to be kidding. The entire biological world arising by chance comes from logical principles? A theory that contradicts science at every turn has repeatedly withstood rigorous testing? The sheer pompous absurdity leaves Carell in the dust.

But it gets better.

5. All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point.

Here Graur has spoken the unspeakable. In his ramblings Graur has laid bare the uncomfortable truth: evolutionary thought holds that the world arose spontaneously. Those Epicurean chance events, whether swerving atoms or mutating molecules, conspired to create everything we see. The idea is prima facie ridiculous and evolutionists do everything to dress it up with more palatable notions of natural selection, fitness landscapes, and all manner of Aristotelian euphemisms (“Dinosaurs were experimenting with flight”).

Not surprisingly evolutionists rushed in to cover over the embarrassment. Outdoing Steve Carell, Matthew Cobb hilariously added predation:

I think the main thing that’s not quite right about this is 5, “All novelty in evolution starts as a single mutation arising in a single individual at a single time point”. While this is essentially true, it misses out two of the most significant novelties in the history of life, which were not created by mutation, but instead by instances of predation that went wrong and instead produced symbiosis, with one kind of cell living inside another. The first such event took place around 2 billion years ago, somewhere in the ocean. Prior to that moment, all life had consisted of small organisms called prokaryotes which had no cell nucleus or mitochondria (these are the tiny cellular structures that help provide you and me and giraffes and mushrooms with energy). Everything changed when one unicellular life-form, known as an achaebacterium, tried to eat another, called a eubacterium. On this one occasion the eubacterium survived inside its would-be predator and became trapped, losing many of its genes to its host and eventually turning into a molecular powerhouse – the mitochondrion – that produced energy from chemical reactions and was used by the new eukaryotic cell. These new eukaryotic life-forms were a weird hybrid, composed of two different organisms. They were our ancestors. A second, similar, event occurred around a billion years ago, when a eukaryotic cell, complete with mitochondria, engulfed a eubacterium that had long ago evolved the trick of acquiring energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis. Predation went wrong again, and another form of symbiosis eventually appeared. This gave rise to algae and eventually plants, in which small organelles called chloroplasts, the descendants of the intended eubacterial victim, turn light into energy for the benefit of the eukaryotic host.

Of course one could also add any number of other evolutionary just-so stories, from Woese’s network of horizontal gene transfer creating a coordinated lateral evolution to retroviruses controlling embryonic development, evolutionary story-telling has no shortage of mechanisms that, as luck would have it, not only were created by evolution but, in turn, have produced more evolutionary change of their own.

The serendipity is staggering. Cobb’s fortuitous predators, as well as all the other imagined evolutionary mechanisms must have been, ultimately, created by those random mutations.

Graur put his finger on it.

All the evolutionary just-so stories, no matter how ridiculous, nonetheless owe their existence to those chance mutations. The rest is serendipity, just ask Michael Scott.

Is Darwinism falsifiable?

Thank Darwin for Dysteleology! Evolution Can't Lose
Casey Luskin 

A short article in Science, "The Burdens of Being a Biped," argues for evolution based on considerations of dysteleology. It claims that "A brief tour of the body reveals a number of design flaws." The problem, the article says, is that humans are built upon a quadrupedal body plan that wasn't "designed" to walk upright. This supposedly explains why we commonly suffer from back and other problems related to our bipedal locomotion.

Science quotes evolutionary anthropologist Bruce Latimer who asserts,

We've taken a body that was adapted to being horizontal to the ground and made it erect ... We've had to change nearly every bone in the body, and as a consequence, there are many things that humans suffer from that no other animal does.
So when natural selection fine-tunes a structure, that's evidence for evolution. But when "imperfect evolution" has "left us with vertebrae that break more easily, weaker bones, and feet prone to heel spurs and sprained ankles," that's also evidence of evolution. Dysteleology is great: evolution can't lose!
There's no question that we all face the prospect of bodily ailments we wish we could avoid. But Science has succumbed to the fallacy of arguing for evolution by citing undesirable design. In fact, undesirable features of our anatomy and physiology are no more a proof of evolution than they are a disproof of intelligent design.

Of course it's possible too that humans suffer from unique ailments having nothing to do with evolution. Maybe our unique problems stem from the fact that we're one of the only fully bipedal mammals -- by far the largest one, at that. In other words, we're a unique species, so it's not surprising we suffer ailments "that no other animal does."

There may be an additional explanation for why humans have so many back problems -- and it too has nothing to do with evolution. It may, however, have something to do with error or incompetence -- that is, on the part of the design's user, rather than the designer. As the article states:

Apes lose bone mass as they age as well, but they don't suffer fractures because their bones are so much denser to begin with. Humans could have more apelike bones if they got more exercise as youths, as early humans did, Ward says. "If we treated our skeletons the way they were designed to be treated, they would serve us better later in life."

So, our bodies work best when they get lots of exercise -- but that's exactly what we lazy folks in the Western world aren't getting enough of. If our bodies were "designed" to get more exercise, maybe the cause of many ailments isn't "design flaw," but user-error. Seems like when used properly, our bodies aren't so poorly designed after all.

Paradise:The watchtower society's commentary.

PARADISE

A beautiful park, or a parklike garden. The Greek word pa·raʹdei·sos occurs three times in the Christian Greek Scriptures. (Lu 23:43; 2Co 12:4; Re 2:7) Greek writers as far back as Xenophon (c. 431-352 B.C.E.) used the word , and Pollux attributed it to a Persian origin (pairidaeza). (Cyropaedia, I, iii, 14; Anabasis, I, ii, 7; Onomasticon, IX, 13) Some lexicographers would derive the Hebrew word par·desʹ (meaning, basically, a park) from the same source. But since Solomon (of the 11th century B.C.E.) used par·desʹ in his writings, whereas existing Persian writings go back only to about the sixth century B.C.E., such derivation of the Hebrew term is only conjectural. (Ec 2:5; Ca 4:13) The remaining use of par·desʹ is at Nehemiah 2:8, where reference is made to a royal wooded park of Persian King Artaxerxes Longimanus, in the fifth century B.C.E.—See PARK.

The three terms (Hebrew par·desʹ, Persian pairidaeza, and Greek pa·raʹdei·sos), however, all convey the basic idea of a beautiful park or parklike garden. The first such park was that made by man’s Creator, Jehovah God, in Eden. (Ge 2:8, 9, 15) It is called a gan, or “garden,” in Hebrew but was obviously parklike in size and nature. The Greek Septuagint appropriately uses the term pa·raʹdei·sos with reference to that garden. (See EDEN No. 1; GARDEN [Garden of Eden].) Because of sin, Adam lost his right to live in that paradise and his opportunity to gain the right to everlasting life, which right was represented in the fruit of a divinely designated tree in the center of the garden. The garden of Eden may have been enclosed in some way, since it was necessary to place angelic guards only at the east side thereof to prevent human entrance.—Ge 3:22-24.

What is the Paradise that Jesus promised to the evildoer who died alongside him?

Luke’s account shows that an evildoer, being executed alongside Jesus Christ, spoke words in Jesus’ defense and requested that Jesus remember him when he ‘got into his kingdom.’ Jesus’ reply was: “Truly I tell you today, You will be with me in Paradise.” (Lu 23:39-43) The punctuation shown in the rendering of these words must, of course, depend on the translator’s understanding of the sense of Jesus’ words, since no punctuation was used in the original Greek text. Punctuation in the modern style did not become common until about the ninth century C.E. Whereas many translations place a comma before the word “today” and thereby give the impression that the evildoer entered Paradise that same day, there is nothing in the rest of the Scriptures to support this. Jesus himself was dead and in the tomb until the third day and was then resurrected as “the firstfruits” of the resurrection. (Ac 10:40; 1Co 15:20; Col 1:18) He ascended to heaven 40 days later.—Joh 20:17; Ac 1:1-3, 9.

The evidence is, therefore, that Jesus’ use of the word “today” was not to give the time of the evildoer’s being in Paradise but, rather, to call attention to the time in which the promise was being made and during which the evildoer had shown a measure of faith in Jesus. It was a day when Jesus had been rejected and condemned by the highest-ranking religious leaders of his own people and was thereafter sentenced to die by Roman authority. He had become an object of scorn and ridicule. So the wrongdoer alongside him had shown a notable quality and commendable heart attitude in not going along with the crowd but, rather, speaking out in Jesus’ behalf and expressing belief in his coming Kingship. Recognizing that the emphasis is correctly placed on the time of the promise’s being made rather than on the time of its fulfillment, other translations, such as those in English by Rotherham and Lamsa, those in German by Reinhardt and W. Michaelis, as well as the Curetonian Syriac of the fifth century C.E., rendered the text in a form similar to the reading of the New World Translation, quoted herein.

As to the identification of the Paradise of which Jesus spoke, it is clearly not synonymous with the heavenly Kingdom of Christ. Earlier that day entry into that heavenly Kingdom had been held out as a prospect for Jesus’ faithful disciples but on the basis of their having ‘stuck with him in his trials,’ something the evildoer had never done, his dying on a stake alongside Jesus being purely for his own criminal acts. (Lu 22:28-30; 23:40, 41) The evildoer obviously had not been “born again,” of water and spirit, which Jesus showed was a prerequisite to entry into the Kingdom of the heavens. (Joh 3:3-6) Nor was the evildoer one of the ‘conquerors’ that the glorified Christ Jesus stated would be with him on his heavenly throne and that have a share in “the first resurrection.”—Re 3:11, 12, 21; 12:10, 11; 14:1-4; 20:4-6.

Some reference works present the view that Jesus was referring to a paradise location in Hades or Sheol, supposedly a compartment or division thereof for those approved by God. The claim is made that the Jewish rabbis of that time taught the existence of such a paradise for those who had died and were awaiting a resurrection. Regarding the teachings of the rabbis, Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible states: “The Rabbinical theology as it has come down to us exhibits an extraordinary medley of ideas on these questions, and in the case of many of them it is difficult to determine the dates to which they should be assigned. . . . Taking the literature as it is, it might appear that Paradise was regarded by some as on earth itself, by others as forming part of Sheol, by others still as neither on earth nor under earth, but in heaven . . . But there is some doubt as respects, at least, part of this. These various conceptions are found indeed in later Judaism. They appear most precisely and most in detail in the mediaeval Cabbalistic Judaism . . . But it is uncertain how far back these things can be carried. The older Jewish theology at least . . . seems to give little or no place to the idea of an intermediate Paradise. It speaks of a Gehinnom for the wicked, and a Gan Eden, or garden of Eden, for the just. It is questionable whether it goes beyond these conceptions and affirms a Paradise in Sheol.”—1905, Vol. III, pp. 669, 670.

Even if they did teach such a thing, it would be most unreasonable to believe that Jesus would propagate such a concept, in view of his condemnation of the non-Biblical religious traditions of the Jewish religious leaders. (Mt 15:3-9) Likely the paradise truly familiar to the Jewish malefactor to whom Jesus spoke was the earthly Paradise described in the first book of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Paradise of Eden. That being so, Jesus’ promise would reasonably point to a restoration of such earthly paradisaic condition. His promise to the wrongdoer would therefore give assured hope of a resurrection of such an unrighteous one to an opportunity to life in that restored Paradise.—Compare Ac 24:15; Re 20:12, 13; 21:1-5; Mt 6:10.

A Spiritual Paradise. Throughout many of the prophetic books of the Bible, divine promises are found regarding the restoration of Israel from the lands of its exile to its desolated homeland. God would cause that abandoned land to be tilled and sown, to produce richly, and to abound with humankind and animalkind; the cities would be rebuilt and inhabited, and people would say: “That land yonder which was laid desolate has become like the garden of Eden.” (Eze 36:6-11, 29, 30, 33-35; compare Isa 51:3; Jer 31:10-12; Eze 34:25-27.) However, these prophecies also show that paradise conditions related to the people themselves, who, by faithfulness to God, could now “sprout” and flourish as “trees of righteousness,” enjoying beautiful spiritual prosperity like a “well-watered garden,” showered by bounteous blessings from God because of having his favor. (Isa 58:11; 61:3, 11; Jer 31:12; 32:41; compare Ps 1:3; 72:3, 6-8, 16; 85:10-13; Isa 44:3, 4.) The people of Israel had been God’s vineyard, his planting, but their badness and apostasy from true worship had caused a figurative ‘withering away’ of their spiritual field, even before the literal desolation of their land took place.—Compare Ex 15:17; Isa 5:1-8; Jer 2:21.

It is evident, however, that the restoration prophecies recorded by the Hebrew prophets include elements that will also find a physical fulfillment in the restored earthly Paradise. There are features, for example, in Isaiah 35:1-7, such as the healing of the blind and the lame, that did not have a literal fulfillment following the restoration from ancient Babylon, nor are they fulfilled in such a manner in the Christian spiritual paradise. It would be inconsistent for God to inspire such prophecies as those of Isaiah 11:6-9, Ezekiel 34:25, and Hosea 2:18, with the intention that they have only a figurative or spiritual meaning, without having a literal fulfillment of these things in the physical experiences of God’s servants. The paradise that Paul mentioned at 2 Corinthians 12:4 could also refer to the future paradise, both physical and spiritual, of these Hebrew prophecies, as well as possibly being a vision of “the paradise of God,” the blessed condition in heaven.—Re 2:7.


Eating in “the Paradise of God.” Revelation 2:7 mentions a “tree of life” in “the paradise of God” and that eating from it would be the privilege of the one “that conquers.” Since other promises given in this section of Revelation to such conquering ones clearly relate to their gaining a heavenly inheritance (Re 2:26-28; 3:12, 21), it seems evident that “the paradise of God” in this case is a heavenly one. The word “tree” here translates the Greek word xyʹlon, which literally means “wood,” and in the plural could refer to an orchard of trees. In the earthly Paradise of Eden, eating of the tree of life would have meant living forever for man. (Ge 3:22-24) Even the fruit of the other trees of the garden would have been life sustaining for man as long as he continued obedient. So, the partaking of “the tree [or trees] of life” in “the paradise of God” evidently relates to the divine provision for sustained life granted the Christian conquerors, other texts showing that they receive the prize of immortality and incorruptibility along with their heavenly Head and Lord, Christ Jesus.—1Co 15:50-54; 1Pe 1:3, 4.

Are green jobs the economic future?

Big government = small citizen?:Pros and cons.

Russia's war on religious liberty IV

Is there such a thing as scientifically detecting design?

Back to the Drawing board re:planet formation?

Weirdly tilted exoplanet knocks formation theory out of line
November 27, 2015 Posted by News under Exoplanets, Intelligent Design


From New Scientist: Recent theory:

The idea is that smaller, colder stars have thicker atmospheres. “That provides handles with which the star can grab onto the planet and vice versa,” Winn says. Over time, those gravitational handles exert a tidal force on the planet, pulling it and its star into alignment.

But then:

But one Jupiter-mass planet discovered earlier this year, HATS-14b, seems to threaten that idea. Because it tightly circles a small star, its orbit should have flattened out quickly – but the orbit is instead tilted a whopping 76 degrees from the plane in which its star spins.

“It should have aligned with the spin of the host star, and what we’re finding is that it has not,” says study leader George Zhou, who conducted the research at the Australian National University in Canberra. “It was quite obvious from some of the very first measurements that it was an outlier.” … Understanding why, or finding other planets like HATS-14b, could knock down the tidal theory – which even Winn is starting to doubt.

In another new paper, Winn and Gongjie Li of Harvard University address another flaw in the traditional idea… More.

Hmmmm. The first exoplanets began to be discovered in the early 1990s. It’s probably too early for strong theories.

Here’s the abstract:

The obliquities of planet-hosting stars are clues about the formation of planetary systems. Previous observations led to the hypothesis that for close-in giant planets, spin-orbit alignment is enforced by tidal interactions. Here, we examine two problems with this hypothesis. First, Mazeh and coworkers recently used a new technique — based on the amplitude of starspot-induced photometric variability — to conclude that spin-orbit alignment is common even for relatively long-period planets, which would not be expected if tides were responsible. We re-examine the data and find a statistically significant correlation between photometric variability and planetary orbital period that is qualitatively consistent with tidal interactions. However it is still difficult to explain quantitatively, as it would require tides to be effective for periods as long as tens of days. Second, Rogers and Lin argued against a particular theory for tidal re-alignment by showing that initially retrograde systems would fail to be re-aligned, in contradiction with the observed prevalence of prograde systems. We investigate a simple model that overcomes this problem by taking into account the dissipation of inertial waves and the equilibrium tide, as well as magnetic braking. We identify a region of parameter space where re-alignment can be achieved, but it only works for close-in giant planets, and requires some fine tuning. Thus, while we find both problems to be more nuanced than they first appeared, the tidal model still has serious shortcomings. Open access – Gongjie Li, Joshua N. Winn

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A clash of Titans XL

A clash of Titans XXXIX

Playing with fire?

On Darwinism's zombie stories.

Daddy and Baby: Evolutionary Legends Die Hard

David Klinghoffer 

A colleague shares this gem from a get-together with friends:

I was hanging out with some friends last night and one of them is pregnant. Another gal in the group told her that her baby will look like the dad at first because this is a product of evolution -- a way to confirm paternity. Of course I knew it was a just-so story and here's an article in Scientific American actually admitting that. I just think it's interesting because they rarely admit stuff like that. This article is old, but obviously people still talk about the issue.

The referenced article is from 2011:

Fact or Fiction: Do Babies Resemble Their Fathers More Than Their Mothers?

Recent studies do not support the claim of an enhanced resemblance between fathers and their young offspring

Does junior really have his father's nose?

A common bit of parenting folklore holds that babies tend to look more like their fathers than their mothers, a claim with a reasonable evolutionary explanation. Fathers, after all, do not share a mother's certainty that a baby is theirs, and are more likely to invest whatever resources they have in their own offspring. Human evolution, then, could have favored children that resemble their fathers, at least early on, as a way of confirming paternity.

The paternal-resemblance hypothesis got some scientific backing in 1995, when a study in Nature by Nicholas Christenfeld and Emily Hill of the University of California, San Diego, showed that people were much better at matching photos of one-year-old children with pictures of their fathers than with photos of their mothers....

Case closed? Hardly. "It's a very sexy result, it's seductive, it's what evolutionary psychology would predict -- and I think it's wrong," says psychologist Robert French of the National Center for Scientific Research in France. A subsequent body of research, building over the years in the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, has delivered results in conflict with the 1995 paper, indicating that young children resemble both parents equally. Some studies have even found that newborns tend to resemble their mothers more than their fathers.

It goes on from there. Read the rest.

The other day Doug Axe referred to the "legend" of natural selection with its creative prowess in generating biological novelties. But of course the legend has many sub-legends and derivatives. They die hard.

How many years, how many decades from now do you think consumers of science media will be getting together and sharing this particular tall tale, after even professional evolutionists have ceased to believe in it?

When cheer leading supersedes fact-checking.

Feathers on a Bird or Dinosaur Tail? The Media Are Certain; the Scientific Evidence Less So
Evolution News & Views 

A section of a 99-million-year-old feathered tail discovered in a chunk of amber in Myanmar belongs to a juvenile dinosaur, a coelurosaur, not a bird. The media are certain of it. The actual evidence is more ambiguous. National Geographic pounds the pulpit for a feathered dino:

First Dinosaur Tail Found Preserved in Amber
The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur, including bones, soft tissue, and even feathers, has been found preserved in amber, according to a report published today in the journal Current Biology.

While individual dinosaur-era feathers have been found in amber, and evidence for feathered dinosaurs is captured in fossil impressions, this is the first time that scientists are able to clearly associate well-preserved feathers with a dinosaur, and in turn gain a better understanding of the evolution and structure of dinosaur feathers.

...

The semitranslucent mid-Cretaceous amber sample, roughly the size and shape of a dried apricot, captures one of the earliest moments of differentiation between the feathers of birds of flight and the feathers of dinosaurs.

...

The presence of articulated tail vertebrae in the sample enabled researchers to rule out the possibility that the feathers belonged to a prehistoric bird. Modern birds and their closest Cretaceous ancestors feature a set of fused tail vertebrae called a pygostyle that enables tail feathers to move as a single unit.

The reason that they claim it is a dinosaur and not a bird is because this is supposedly from a "long-tailed" individual. Most birds with bony tails are short-tailed, meaning they have fewer vertebrae in their tail compared to dinosaurs. Under ten vertebrae, perhaps only six or seven, would be the norm for a bony-tailed bird.

So what do they think about the number of vertebrae in this amber fossil? They say the living individual "likely" had more than 25 vertebrae.

But this is a matter of inference, because, as the paper admits, the soft tissue in the fossil is so undifferentiated from the bone that it is very difficult to tell what is tissue and what are vertebrae. As the paper puts it in technical language:

SR X-ray μCT scanning of DIP-V-15103 revealed that soft tissues have a density insufficiently different from the partially replaced skeletal elements to permit X-ray imaging and virtual dissection of osteology alone. Consequently, many diagnostic and comparative osteological details remain obscured.
At most, they can see clear evidence of only two vertebrae in this tail. From that they extrapolate that it had more than 25:

However, two vertebrae are clearly delineated ventrally (Figures 1F-1H). Extrapolating lengths of these vertebrae, the preserved tail section contains at least eight full vertebrae and part of a ninth.
So when they extrapolate from the two visible vertebrae, they get nine. That would certainly not preclude the creature from being a bird. In fact, some fossil birds had up to 20 to 23 vertebrae. As another paper states:

Archaeopteryx retained an ancestral caudal vertebral count of between 20 and 23. The next most basal bird, Jeholornis, from the Jiufotang Formation of China and dated at approximately 120 million years old, was also long-tailed, and had 22 caudal vertebrae that are nearly identical to those of Archaeopteryx.
If it did have up to 20 to 23 vertebrae, it could still be a bird. Yet again it's not clear exactly how many vertebrae this tail had because too much of it is missing.

The paper goes on:

Even with the skin adpressed to the bony surface, no features other than the grooved ventral sulci of two centra are clearly visible. This lack of topography suggests that the vertebrae lack prominent neural arches, transverse processes, or hemal arches. Therefore, the preserved segment is only a small mid to distal portion of what was likely a relatively long tail, with the total caudal vertebral count not reasonably less than 15, and likely greater than 25.
So they claim that the shape of the vertebrae suggests that what they are seeing is from the middle of the tail, and the actual tail was much longer. They admit that most features are not "clearly visible." Given that you can barely distinguish soft tissue from bone in this fossil, their inferences go too far.

Indeed while researcher Ryan McKellar tells Science Daily that "the feathers definitely are those of a dinosaur not a prehistoric bird," the paper itself is more circumspect, saying "it can likely be excluded from the long-tailed birds" (emphasis added). The Supplemental Information that goes with the paper includes the notable statement:

[T]here is a distinctive ventral groove on the caudal centra of the specimen, which is widely distributed among non-avialan theropods but which has yet to be reported in avialans (though the possibility of its presence in the two known long-tailed birds Archaeopteryx and Jeholornis cannot be excluded).
As a final note, one could argue that the age of the fossil (about 99 Ma) suggests that this individual lived long after known long-tailed bony-tailed birds. According to this paper, the most recent long-tailed bony-tailed bird lived about 122 million years ago.

That would be a very weak argument, however, since evolutionists regularly tolerate chronological gaps in the fossil record much greater than 20 million years. In fact they do this in their dinosaur-to-bird hypothesis.

After all, the dinosaurs that they claim supposedly gave rise to birds lived about 125 million years ago, but true birds like Archaeopteryx lived as far as about 150 million years ago. That's a major time gap. So if one were to propose that perhaps the long-tailed birds known from ~122 million years ago survived until ~99 million years ago, you would not be extrapolating fossil lineages any more than they already do.

In any case, all praise is due to the researchers for discovering and presenting this beautiful fossil with its unmistakable feathers. Probably no known feathers this old have ever been preserved in such gorgeous detail.


But unfortunately we have so little material, and the bone is so difficult to distinguish from the soft tissue, that any strong claims about this tail should be greeted with skepticism. This paper will not be the last word on the nature of the animal that sported this wonderful tail.