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  • #16
    Originally posted by daodejing
    Maybe this will help clear things up. Maybe not, who knows. Maybe RJW and Uwe will be the only ones who appreciate it..........

    Much appreciated, but I am sure it's not only the two of us.


    Uwe

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    • #17
      Everyone has their own agendas whether it is to find the "truth", or prove their theory first and get published, grab the glory, or get that research grant… There are as many reasons as there are people. Sometimes it's not personal at all, just the social mind-set that needs to be over come. As Zach said science usually gets around to reinvestigating things as they change & as new evidence comes to light, some new hotshot is always asking questions or sees things in a different way.

      In 1841 Richard Owen established what he called the order 'Dinosauria': from the Greek 'deinos' meaning monstrous, & 'sauros' meaning lizard. Owen speculated that dinosaurs were a version of reptiles that were active and perhaps even warm-blooded. Other scientists, however, believed that dinosaur behavior was very lizard-like, that is to say sluggish, that they dragged their tails because they couldn't lift them. There was even speculation that large sauropods, like the Apatosaurus were so weak they could only support their weight by half floating in lakes, or that they couldn't run or their legs would break. This came from the Victorian belief that all things must progress, therefore dinosaurs had to have been inferior in order to become extinct. The Victorian mind-set made the dinosaurs fat, lethargic, of low intelligence, & indifferent parents.

      It was not until 1964 that a dinosaur renaissance occurred. John Ostrom, a paleontologist at Yale University, discovered Deinonychus, an agile Cretaceous predator that slashed its prey with an oversized middle toe. The more Ostrom thought about Deinonychus' locomotion and habits, the less plausible it seemed that such a creature could have been cold-blooded. Ostrom, along with paleontologist Robert Bakker, and others began to argue that dinosaurs were much more active than had been thought, they maintained that dinosaurs were perhaps more closely related to birds than reptiles. Since birds are warm-blooded, why not the dinosaurs? Today the mind-set has changed and we no longer think of dinosaurs as slow and stupid, but fast, agile creatures of intelligence, many of which probably stayed with and looked after their young.

      In India it has long been the belief that a white skinned tribe of people from northern climates migrated down to the subcontinent of India, these people are known as the Aryans. This theory came from early British archeologists after they had colonized India. The original people of India lived in the Indus River Valley, eventually they developed writing (Sanskrit) and wrote the Vedas (the forerunner of Hinduism, a name the British gave the Indians in the 1800's to describe those not of the Muslim faith). It was not until the Aryans arrived that India became one of the ancient world's "supper powers" a highly civilized race. This theory has held true up to today, however it is now being contested. The British saw themselves as the only truly civilized empire on earth, it couldn't have been possible for these dark skinned people to have created such a civilization on their own so a white skinned race must have helped them. The current theory is that the British misinterpreted the Vedas & that the Aryans never lived in India. This is still being hotly debated among scholars, as it is so new.

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      • #18
        thought this might be an interesting addendum on the whole quantum mechanics angle: http://www.skepticreport.com/tools/quantum.htm

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