And, yet, we are here and there’s plenty of evidence of the development of life from earlier forms to what we know today.

No one disputes earlier life, where the dispute comes in is whether they designed or not.

You were questioning time; now you are asserting design. 

I was a creationist in the 1980s. I grew up.

So explain why you changed your mind as you grew up! What was it that settled it for you the differences between the two narratives, between how a mindless process is a much more reasonable explanation than a mind at work?

I visited the Institute for Creation Research in 1980 as a young religious cultist. Over the next few years, I read everything Creationists wrote, subscribed to their newsletter, argued with my professors, wrote papers for my classes. But, I never closed myself off to acquiring knowledge.

My field was history. My fellow religious cultists were beginning to push an alt-history of the US that was thin on primary sources. Ronald Reagan was president. A friend of mine, knowing my support of him, made me defend his speeches day after day, month after month. As a historian, I was growing disillusioned with the growing gaps between the past as it existed and the fantasies about the past that Reagan was pushing (and that some religious cultists were pushing, too).

After college, I continued my habit of reading constantly. Mostly I read theology and history, but did not shy away from science.

A few years later, I returned to graduate school. History was still the focus, but my interest in anthropology was growing. I had taken a course as an undergraduate and worked in the school’s anthropology museum. My dad had earned his degree in anthropology after he retired from the military. We discussed a lot. Books of his that I read explained evolution more clearly and in enough details that the glosses on that science in the works of creationists were revealing their inaccuracies.

Nonetheless, I still found the creationist’s claims about the Second Law of Thermodynamics convincing.

A fellow historian with whom I was in graduate school and I often discussed science and religion. He had broken his habit of going to church and I was getting closer to doing so. The alt-history being preached in churches was unacceptable. Some things you can change; others you must flee.

The friend and I were cleaning up his apartment after his roommates party the previous night. We were discussing science and religion. He was earning his MA in history, but his undergraduate degree was in biology. I mentioned the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He explained as he was dumping a bottle of stale beer into the sink that the bubbles were pockets of order in a system of disorder.

Of all the anti-evolution arguments I’d been imbibing the previous ten years, there was nothing left.

In my Advances in Anthropology seminar, the section on evolution had been taught by Grover Krantz (you can look him up). I had to write a paper. My paper was called, “Confessions of an Ex-Creationist”.

From time-to-time, my brother, who became a creationist when I was on my way out, will bring up an argument that is new to me. In every case, it rests on a refuted claim. Last year, at deer camp, he told a terrific story about the Lunar Module, the size of its feet, and estimates of the depth of moon dust prior to our first landing. I immediately recognized it as bovine excrement, but had to wait until I was home to demonstrate the error on which it rests. It took less than five minutes on my computer to learn how they had completely misrepresented a 1960 science article.

The explanations of science continue to change and develop and I am far from understanding them fully. I’ve taught a bit of the history of science and have delved with some depth into epidemiology. But, I am a historian with a focus on north America. I’m semi-retired from college teaching and focus my work on developing chess players. The explanations of creationists never hold up to even superficial analysis.

Last night, my wife and I watched two movies. https://www.badfaithdocumentary.com is a good documentary that takes me back to my own role in convincing Christian friends in 1980 that Ronald Reagan was not a bad man and to the dissertation on civil religion that I had outlined in the early 1990s, but never wrote. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8235296/ is strange, amateurish, and reminds me of other poorly done religious films I’ve seen over the years. The last 30 minutes are almost wholly disconnected from the drama. The horror scenes are among the least convincing that I’ve ever seen on the screen.

Order is not the same thing as systematic functionally complex systems, you can get order by gravity, but what you do not get, will never get, something that becomes more specified functionally complex as an integrated system, disorder is the natural order of things, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy would be working against a non-directed process without a mind directing it.

Sorry. That explanation no longer holds any water. Even Creationists don’t push it much any more.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo/probability.html

I am giving you what I've learned from years of R&D of CPU reality doesn't change because of what Creationists are currently saying or did say, any more than evolutionists are saying or did say.

Reasoning from computer programming to the work of biology, physics, astronomy, etc. is more far-fetched that the confused ramblings of Henry Morris and Duane Gish.

Even so, with your background, you should not have difficulty with the math at the link I provided.

Incidentally, Gish has been in the news again. The Gish Gallop (a rhetorical technique of concocting nonsense too fast for fact-checkers to keep up) was on display as Biden seemed lost confronting Trump’s lies.

Reason has us looking at what we see so having fossils even dated in the past doesn’t automatically mean that they are there through the process of evolution, it only means they we’re dated with some being older.

In addition accepting changes in time means an in flux of new information directing changes in form and features, that requires more than chance changes considering syntactic nature of the code. Adding back in the rate of necessary changes required and time constraints you need more than chance and necessity to get everything required done.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gnatalie-only-green-boned-dinosaur-140148091.html

Origin of Asteroid That Wiped Out Dinosaurs Pinpointed (msn.com)

Astronomers have long debated the asteroid’s origins and whether it is an asteroid at all. In recent years, they have suspected that it formed in outer space, specifically beyond Jupiter’s orbit.

To settle the argument, German researchers analyzed sediment samples formed during the impact. The strike left a layer of debris across the planet, marking the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. The team took samples from this layer and then compared them to sediments at the sites of five other asteroid strikes that occurred between 36 million and 470 million years ago.

The sediment samples contain ruthenium, an element incredibly rare within the Earth’s crust but associated with asteroids. By comparing the abundance of five different ruthenium isotopes in the samples, researchers could determine what type of space rock caused each impact.

The isotopes of ruthenium within the Chicxulub asteroid’s debris are consistent across all samples, regardless of where they originated. They match those of carbonaceous asteroids, which contain a lot of carbon. This is pretty conclusive evidence that Chicxulub is an asteroid and not a comet, as some suspected.

“It’s the nail in the coffin. This ruthenium isotope signature…cannot be anything other than a carbonaceous asteroid,” Mario Fischer-Gödde, lead author of the study, told The New York Times.

Carbonaceous asteroids formed in the early solar system billions of years ago, beyond Jupiter. Of the six asteroid sites tested, this is the only impact created by a carbonaceous asteroid. All the other impacts were siliceous asteroids, which form much closer to the sun. Usually, they come from the asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The authors suggest that the Chicxulub came from just beyond the asteroid belt.

How it ended up colliding with Earth is still a mystery, but this is a huge leap forward.

'Dinosaur highway' tracks dating back 166 million years are discovered in England

LONDON (AP) — A worker digging up clay in a southern England limestone quarry noticed unusual bumps that led to the discovery of a “dinosaur highway” and nearly 200 tracks that date back 166 million years, researchers said Thursday.

The extraordinary find made after a team of more than 100 people excavated the Dewars Farm Quarry, in Oxfordshire, in June expands upon previous paleontology work in the area and offers greater insights into the Middle Jurassic period, researchers at the universities of Oxford and Birmingham said.

“These footprints offer an extraordinary window into the lives of dinosaurs, revealing details about their movements, interactions, and the tropical environment they inhabited,” said Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontology professor at the University of Birmingham.

Four of the sets of tracks that make up the so-called highway show paths taken by gigantic, long-necked, herbivores called sauropods, thought to be Cetiosaurus, a dinosaur that grew to nearly 60 feet (18 meters) in length. A fifth set belonged to the Megalosaurus, a ferocious 9-meter predator that left a distinctive triple-claw print and was the first dinosaur to be scientifically named two centuries ago.

An area where the tracks cross raises questions about possible interactions between the carnivores and herbivores.

“Scientists have known about and been studying Megalosaurus for longer than any other dinosaur on Earth, and yet these recent discoveries prove there is still new evidence of these animals out there, waiting to be found," said Emma Nicholls, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Nearly 30 years ago, 40 sets of footprints discovered in a limestone quarry in the area were considered one of the world's most scientifically important dinosaur track sites. But that area is mostly inaccessible now and there's limited photographic evidence because it predated the use of digital cameras and drones to record the findings.

The group that worked at the site this summer took more than 20,000 digital images and used drones to create 3-D models of the prints. The trove of documentation will aid future studies and could shed light on the size of the dinosaurs, how they walked and the speed at which they moved.

“The preservation is so detailed that we can see how the mud was deformed as the dinosaur’s feet squelched in and out," said Duncan Murdock, an earth scientist at the Oxford museum. "Along with other fossils like burrows, shells and plants we can bring to life the muddy lagoon environment the dinosaurs walked through.”

The findings will be shown at a new exhibit at the museum and also broadcast on the BBC's “Digging for Britain” program next week.

I saw the story on the news in Texas.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dinosaur-feathers-bird-fossils

Dinosaur feathers may have been more birdlike than previously thought

Feather proteins can change during fossilization, a study finds 

Many feathered dinosaurs couldn’t fly — at least, not like birds do today. But the reptiles’ feathers may have been more birdlike than scientists thought.

In 2019, fossil analyses found that feathers from a flightless dinosaur mostly contained a different, more flexible form of the keratin protein that makes up modern bird beaks, scales and feathers. Researchers suggested then that feathers had evolved molecularly over time to become stiffer as birds — the last living dinosaurs — took to the skies (SN: 7/31/14).

Yet fossilization can change feather proteins, making one keratin protein resemble another, researchers report in the October Nature Ecology & Evolution. The team also presented their findings on October 19 at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Cincinnati.

The study raises the possibility that dinosaur feathers may have mainly contained the beta-keratin proteins found in bird feathers. While such a finding would not imply all feathered dinosaurs flew, it does raise new questions about feather evolution.

The work also gives scientists valuable insight into one way the fossil record may transform over time, says Julia Clarke, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the new research. “There’s still a lot more to discover about the process of chemical alteration that all structures undergo during the process of rock formation, liquification and burial,” she says.

For the new study, paleontologist Tiffany Slater of University College Cork in Ireland and colleagues placed modern bird feathers under heat conditions that mimic what deeply buried dinosaur feathers may have endured during fossilization. Beta-keratins in the feathers unfolded and reformed in the shape of alpha-keratins, the more flexible form previously found to be dominant in dinosaur feathers, suggesting that a similar process had occurred in those feathers.

The researchers next examined a roughly 50-million-year-old bird feather and a 125-million-year-old feather from the nonavian dinosaur Sinornithosaurus. To their surprise, the bird feather seemed to consist mainly of alpha-keratins. Since it should have been rich in the beta variety, the team suspects that the proteins transformed during fossilization. The dinosaur feather, by contrast, contained mainly beta-keratins, suggesting it wasn’t exposed to enough heat to morph its proteins.

The simplest interpretation is that the distorting effects of fossilization led previous researchers astray in thinking dinosaur and bird feathers were so different molecularly, Slater says.

But the conditions the team tested in the new study may not accurately replicate what occurred during centuries of burial, says molecular paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, who was involved in the 2019 research.

In her own work, feathers exposed to even higher temperatures preserved their proteins well when kept in sediment, rather than removed from it as in the current study. The effect fossilization has on feather proteins may be more complex and as yet misunderstood, she believes.

Scientists increasingly think that feathers did not evolve for flight. Instead, they probably kept dinosaurs warm and helped them attract mates (SN: 2/4/10). But some nonavian dinosaurs did launch themselves into the air and glide from place to place (SN: 10/28/16). And some that couldn’t fly still flapped their wings as they ran (SN: 5/2/19).

If feathers are only one piece of the puzzle of how flight evolved, keratin composition may be an even smaller sliver, says Matthew Shawkey, a biologist at Ghent University in Belgium, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “Would a feather made of alpha-keratin really be so flimsy?” he asks. “I just don’t know.”

https://www.gizmodo.com/paleontologists-claim-to-have-discovered-terrifying-new-dinosaur-species-in-pre-wwii-photographs-2000551815?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Could have been Behemoth, but Job's dinosaur is vegetarian, not carniverous...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/where-did-dinosaurs-first-evolve-164423292.html

Motivation really, money, influence, prestige, or notoriety couldn’t play apart? Anointing someone a sinner or a saint shouldn’t play a part in any decusion where we are attempting to figure out the truth of a matter.