Academia, Science, Society

Happy Birthday Charles: A New Discovery Confirms Asteroid Theory For Dinosaur Extinction

170px-Charles_Darwin220px-Pasta-BrontosaurusToday is the birthday of Charles Darwin. Despite those intellectuals like Sarah Palin who believe that Earth is only a few thousand years old and deny evolution as a “theory,” Darwin continue to rack up proof of his work. With perfect timing for the great man’s 205th, American and European researchers have confirmed the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction during which roughly 75% of the planet’s species were killed, including almost every dinosaur, by an asteroid impact. The result was the evolution of species best suited to deal with the aftermath of the explosion 66 million years ago. Of course, for creationists, the dating of material from 66 million years ago may be rejected as simply biblically inaccurate (if not immoral), but for the rest of us it is an important new development. While Darwin did not know of the asteroid theory or the demise of the dinosaurs, he knew a lot about adaptation and survival of the fittest. Dinosaurs went from being the dominant creatures to the least competitive in the new environment.


The asteroid that hit Chicxulub, Mexico released 420 zettajoules of energy — 100 teratonnes of TNT. The resulting dust cloud blocked out the Sun and triggered the die out — further accelerated by massive global fires. The problem is that previous attempts to date material showed that the asteroid impact occurred up to 300,000 years before the extinction of the dinosaurs. However, scientists decided to return to the site and use more modern equipment. The difference was considerable. The modern equipment reduced the gap to a period of 11,000 years or between 66.03 and 66.04 million years ago. The would make it almost simultaneous with the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.

Those that could adapt then survived. Those who could not died off. Then 205 years ago, a man named Charles Darwin came along and explained it to the rest of us.

Source: Extremetech

103 thoughts on “Happy Birthday Charles: A New Discovery Confirms Asteroid Theory For Dinosaur Extinction”

  1. “…intellectuals like Sarah Palin who believe that Earth is only a few thousand years old and deny evolution as a “theory,” Darwin continue to rack up proof of his work.”

    So let me understand, the intellectuals that think a pineapple and a porcupine share a common ancestor THINK they are racking up evidence for evolution. You know, there are a lot of people that would like to see this elusive “mountain of evidence” that is racked up for evolution. Where is it? Heck, I’d like to see ONE solid piece of evidence for evolution. But we have all evidence for the contrary, such as mathematicians that say the human body, for example, is a “statistical monstrosity” for evolution to have occurred. Still others say there simply hasn’t been enough time – even the x-billion year number that’s always thrown about isn’t enough time. Never mind the explanation of where DNA came from. Did it “evolve” too? DNA is basically a program – or information. Last I checked, information and programs don’t just collect themselves into existence over x-billion years. We’ve never seen something like that happen, nor is there any evidence for such a thing happening.

    Bottom line – let’s see some of that “evidence” that is supposedly so abundant.

    “The result was the evolution of species best suited to deal with the aftermath of the explosion 66 million years ago. Of course, for creationists, the dating of material from 66 million years ago may be rejected as simply biblically [sic] inaccurate (if not immoral)”

    The rejection of the x-million or x-billion year ago number can be rejected purely on science. To date, even our most accurate dating methods are not reliable. Volcanic rocks formed only days ago date to be millions of years old. Living mollusk shells date to be thousands of years old. Scientists even had a lava flow dated to be anywhere from hundreds of thousands of years old to millions of years old in the Grand Canyon but there was an ancient Indian village found on the lava flow that reliably dated it to only a couple thousand years ago. The list goes on and on. So Sarah Palin is a convenient scapegoat, you can reject these ridiculously astronomical millions and millions and billions of years with science. Without even cracking open a Bible. That should satisfy all the idiot-head Bible haters but of course, it doesn’t. They’ll clink to Darwin’s rotting corpse forever. Poor old Darwin’s corpse is propped up with sticks and on life support, while the evolutionists are tirelessly TRYING to find SOMETHING to back up his stupid theory.

    Now there was a global event that did happen several thousand years ago. Instead of thinking it was some big asteroid, why don’t we look at the evidence. Everywhere we look, high, and low – literally, we find evidence of a global flood. Even other religions have flood legends. So something happened and it wasn’t a big rock hitting the earth – sorry to burst the evolutionists bubble. (Not really sorry)

    I challenge all the evolutionists that are so confident in their belief, to study all the flood legends. Look at all the evidence for a global flood. It can’t be ignored, unless you’re unwilling to look at it. Hmm, that sounds familiar – there are none so blind as those who will not see. 2Peter Chapter 3 talks about those that will choose to be “willfully ignorant” of Creation. Evidence of Creation is the elephant in the living room. It takes up a lot of space, knocks over furniture, eats tons of hay, but so many swear it isn’t there.

  2. One interesting aspect of the recent asteroid impact science, which JT focuses on in this post, is that Darwin was unaware of it.

    He did not know that most of life existing 65 million years ago did not become extinct by failing to adapt via natural selection.

    An abiotic cosmic catastrophe of non-biological proportions rendered those millions of species extinct, even though they were dominating and successful in their environment.

    Something just as interesting, with just as much surprise, is that Darwin was not aware of genes either.

    Yet genes became a central focus of evolutionary thought all done in the name of Darwin, and done for Darwinism itself evidently:

    What is at issue is not the fact of evolution, but its mechanisms. As Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb are at pains to remind us in this important book, Darwin himself, a naturalist and consummate observer of living organisms, was a pluralist about such mechanisms, even embracing a version of Lamarckism – the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Conventional historiography ascribes this to his being unaware of Mendel’s discoveries and so of genes. If he had known, he would have been as monolithic as have become his ultra-Darwinist followers. For them, evolution is about one thing only – genes, aka DNA.

    The tendency to such reductionism set in as far back as the 1930s, when evolution ceased to be defined in term of changes in organisms (phenotypes, such as the shape of the beaks amongst the Galapagos finches that Darwin studied) and instead was seen as “the rate of change of gene frequencies in a population”. Francis Crick formulated what he called “the central dogma” of molecular biology as the one-way flow of information from gene (DNA) to organism.

    But it was Richard Dawkins above all who captured the sense of ultra-Darwinism when he divided the living world between replicators – structures which can be accurately copied, like DNA molecules – and vehicles, the “lumbering robots” whose function is to enable that copying.

    Despite the attractions of its doctrinal simplicity, important strands of biological thinking have never accepted this genocentric view of the world, and many doubt that Darwin would have either. The late Stephen Jay Gould, for example, insisted that selection acted at multiple levels, not just on individual genes, but on populations of organisms and indeed on species and ecosystems as a whole. In this perspective, Dawkins’ lumbering robots become players in their own destiny.

    An even more fundamental attack has come from researchers interested in how organisms develop. To appreciate the importance of this, think about the fact that humans are just under 99% genetically identical to chimpanzees, yet no one would confuse the two. The origin of the differences between the two phenotypes lies in their development, which in turn depends on which genes are switched on or off at any time – a process regulated by the cellular environment in which the genes are embedded. Genes do not exist in isolation, but as part of a web of interactions extending in time as well as space.

    Indeed, as more and more is learned about the complexities of these processes, the concept of “the gene” as a reified DNA sequence tends to dissolve. What exists, as one molecular biologist put it, is not a set of discrete genes, but an entire genome. And what evolves is neither a set of genes nor a given static phenotype, but a developmental system, embedded as that system is in an even broader web of interactions with its fluctuating environment – the famous “tangled bank” of hedgerow species that Darwin invokes in the closing paragraph of The Origin. Jablonka and Lamb’s book makes the case for this much richer view of evolution by going both back to Darwin and forward to the latest findings of molecular and behavioural biology. What matters, they insist, is not genes per se but heritable variation – variations that are transmitted, by whatever means, from one generation to the next.

    There are, they suggest, four levels at which such variation can occur. The first is unexceptional: the shuffling of DNA in sexual reproduction, which mixes variants from both parents, coupled with mutations – random changes in the DNA sequence. A second major source is not genetic but epigenetic – it depends on changes that occur in the “meaning” of given strands of DNA. Molecular biologists are discovering an increasing number of esoteric ways that DNA, or the proteins that surround it and ensure its orderly translation, are chemically modified during development. Such modifications, which profoundly alter how an organism develops, can, just like copies of DNA, be transmitted during reproduction, and in due course can feed back to modify the sequence of DNA itself.

    A third dimension of evolution is one whose study Jablonka has made particularly her own – the inheritance of behavioural traditions. Rabbit mothers who feed on juniper berries transmit to their offspring a preference for such food, an inheritance stable across generations. In the days when milk was delivered in bottles to our doorsteps, blue tits learned to peck open the foil tops to drink the cream, a tradition acquired and passed on, by social learning, from generation to generation but now presumably lost because, in an environment of Tetra Paks, it is no longer an adaptive form of behaviour.

    The authors’ final dimension, a uniquely human one, is symbolic inheritance, the traditions we learn and pass on not by subtle odour-based cues in our mother’s milk or faeces, or by direct imitation of our elders or peers, but through our capacity for language, and culture, our representations of how to behave, communicated by speech and writing.

    The treatment of these higher levels is important, as the authors carefully distinguish their approach from the banalities of evolutionary psychology, of “memes”, and even from Chomskyian ideas of universal grammar.

    The slowest of all these forms of evolutionary change is that based on DNA, and there is a tendency to dismiss the others as all dependent “in the last analysis” on genes. Jablonka and Lamb vigorously rebut this. Rather, they insist, there are constant interactions between the levels – epigenetic, behavioural and even symbolic inheritance mechanisms also produce selection pressures on DNA-based inheritance and can, in some cases, even help direct DNA changes themselves – so “evolving evolution”.

    (What Darwin Really Thought, emphasis added). So Darwin did not consider cosmic impacts, genetics, nor epigenetic impacts in terms of fitness to survive or the lack of fitness to survive (how does a species become fit to survive cosmic catastrophe or Anthropogenic induced catastrophe?).

    These have now become major considerations of the current scientific world within current civilization, in terms of extinctions of species.

    There have been five mass extinctions, and we are well into the sixth mass extinction, the Anthropogenic Mass Extinction.

  3. HBD, Darwin, but maybe the Alvarezes, father and son, deserve mention for what is their asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extintion…

  4. “We are still learning all the ways that genes and gene expression are altered.”
    ========================Blind Faithiness

    No doubt true, but is it genes, a very late comer timewise in the expression of life, we should be staring at. Epigenetics, which unfortunately I am not following, seems to work in some non-genetic way. What came before the gene, a highly complex protein structure?

  5. “So, I guess the “Darwin is Infallible” phrase is a straw man to their work, but not to those who fervently believe “Darwin was Infallible” to be true.”
    ==============Dredd

    So I guess the bible is infallible to, or is it correct. Seers they may have been, but scientists never.

  6. Dredd,

    What did the virus pool feed on? Modern ones like to take over cells and use the factory there. But if virus preceded cells, then tell me how they fed.

  7. Thus Constantine’s wife, a devout politician and incidentally an opportunist Christian like her husband, destroyed all secular study, ie the net of academies in the old Greek style. The monastery system succeeded, and we know how little it has produced (some exceptions) over the centuries

  8. Creationists point at the pattern of the seeds in the middle of a sunflower and say God did this.

    The obvious answer is that it is part of nature, our universe as we can perceive from here.

    The expansion of tree growth by the Fibonacci series is not due to God, but to the connection to the ultimate form of nature, powers, etc. Strings aside!

    They wish, the ones who know, to retain power by people bowing at their altars, instead of letting us go to school which instead considers what we can “see” and then contemplate it

  9. “…..There is evidence that oxygen levels also rose 1.3 billion years ago and again before the Cambrian Explosion, a rapid proliferation of animal life that began 540 million years ago. Some researchers believe increasing levels of atmospheric oxygen helped trigger the Cambrian Explosion.”
    ==================

    Expansion of species is necessary to expansion of life’s need to use any unoccupied niche. And species expansion occurs, increasing at a greater pace the more species which provide the DNA to mutate. Not competent to say when the expansion of species and individuals can have passed a threshold or other barrier to becoming an Explosion.

  10. “…..“There were huge ice ages just before the Cambrian Explosion, but also associated with the Great Oxidation Event,” Holland says. “It is important to have a much better understanding of those events and the history of life.”

    Kasting, Catling, Des Marais, Hoehler and Holland are members of the NASA Astrobiology Institute so those issues have special relevance for them……”
    =====================

    Have no explanation of the Great Oxidation Event (blue algae=bacteria), but there are interesting processes which follow it. One would be the drop of dissolved iron in the oceans. What this means for Cambrian Explosion is not for me to say.
    But I speculate from using current studies of the Baltic Sea.
    Cod fish who lay there eggs there flee waters where the oxygen levels drop by as little as one percent. A case of eggs when laid there are starved for oxygen and rot in the sour blend. Proximate cause to oxygen fall: fertilizer run off, unprocessed sewage, and paper mills. Remote cause: you know who—-this effing system.

  11. Then 205 years ago, a man named Charles Darwin came along and explained it to the rest of us.
    ~+~
    Good thing he explained it before the Vogons came along…

    “Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, and so the idea was lost, seemingly for ever.”

  12. You are not going to find this in the Sears Roebuck version of the King James Bible, but here it goes: On The Eighth Day, God Created Dog.

    Ok, there I said it. Now, this does not reflect on just when Day One was. It could have been back in Dinosaur days. I know that I was reincarnated as a dog and that my last life was as one of you humans. If you are good in this life then you might get a chance as The Second Go-Round. If you do go up for that interview at the Pearly Gates and you are given a chance, go to the seminar which they give at that Ellis Island like place on Coming Back As A Dog. I took the seminar and I made the choice. It is a choice, not an echo. The Dogalogue Machine is acting up and the other dogs are not gonna get to chimne in here on this topic. We may be off page for a few days. The DolphineLogue Machine is broken as well. We think it is some computer virus caused by some fish and dog hater.
    Over and out.

  13. RWL.
    How convenient for that story to surface. I do not believe it for a second.
    ..Now on to snark.

    I believe your link left out the last line in this Darwin religious fairy tale
    As in all religious fairy tales …..

    “And Darwin died happily ever after” . :o)

  14. I don’t know about you, Frank, but as a non-Catholic I’ve sworn to give up abstinence for Lent after Mardi Gras this year. 😉

  15. In addition to Darwin, today is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln and it’s Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras: Laissez les bons temps rouler/ Let the good times roll. Our host spent some time in Nawlins, LA, good times.

  17. There can be many things in a gene pool that one can call a god if they want. Not all things are capable of quantifying. Life has many abstracts that just aren’t rationally explained. If one has all of the answers, they aren’t necessarily correct. But it does not make them incorrect either. It is a truth that they live with.

    Darwin would be proud….. Some are capable of claiming correctness and they haven’t evolved….

  18. BF,

    Bingo. Natural selection has many inputs but it is the explanation for adaptive evolution.

    ********************

    No, Dredd. I’m saying you don’t understand natural selection, your “viruses as God” theory is ridiculous, and that your perpetual anti-Darwinism is rooted in both your lack of understanding of biology in general and your harebrained desire to find direction where there is none.

  19. Will Broun decide that evolution is a good idea after all as he sits on the house science committee?

    “God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” said Broun, who is an MD. “It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”

    He continued:

    “You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/06/paul-broun-evolution-big-bang_n_1944808.html

  20. Dredd, speciation is evolution and adaptation. His masterwork is titled “On the Origin of Species,” meaning speaking about speciation via adaptation. No one that is scientifically literate thinks any science or scientist is “infallible.”

    RWL, he never said that. Its an old creationist tale.

    Bron is on the right path. DNA is proven to change by a myriad of methods. This includes things like lateral gene transfer(gene swapping between different types of organisms[eg e coli. taking on human genes]), fusion, mutation during replication, reproduction, natural selection stresses, and results from outside actors like environmental chemicals to name a few. We are still learning all the ways that genes and gene expression are altered.

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