How the hell did my mention of some cutting edge cosmology hypothesis lead to a creationism debate ... is there nothing in this world the creationists WON'T latch onto ?
So I'm rather going to discuss the dragon posts - ignoring the bible stuff - because THOSE are at least slightly interesting.
>Flying lizard-like creature? I give you the Pterosaur [wikipedia.org].
Yes, erm - no mammals ever saw one, the earliest mammals were the Morganocodontids, who did live before the K/T event, but not THAT long before. Pterosaur is as far in the past of the earliest mammal as Tyranosaurus is in ours.Seems rather unlikely that racial memory from a time our ancestors were smaller than your pinky would remember the big lizards that were around at the time -and which we outlived.
>Fire breathing creature? Not quite, but the bombardier beetles [wikipedia.org] is somewhat there. It's not real fire, but getting hit by a liquid close to 100 C is going to feel like being burned. And if that compound is also acidic or caustic, it gets even worse, and anyone hit by a decent amount of it would certainly feel like they're on fire.
The fire breathing bit was never the hard part. There are numerous creatures on the planet that mix chemicals that create something very close to fire. There are many plausible evolutionary paths to that. The fact that none of them are big suggest however that either it is simply not a good trait for survival - or there just never was mutation to do that in any vertebrate. It's not that, that can't happen - it's that it just never did.
Even the flying lizard bit is easy - probably not on the scale the legends drew them, but hey legends are prone to exaggeration - especially on size (what slashdotter does NOT exaggerate the size of their legendarily unused physical features ?).
>These two aren't exactly along the same evolutionary branches, but a combination of the two aren't beyond the realms of realism.
I said above that fire breathing wasn't hard - so lets see what IS hard. The hard part is this: every culture, every dragon story get the same basic body shape. A creature that has four legs AND wings. A vertebrate with six limbs. Nothing like that has EVER existed. Not in the fossil record, nor anywhere on the planet now. Birds have only TWO legs to get wings. The first vertebrate on the planet had 4 limbs, and every descendant got that basic body pattern - and the DNA evidence concurs.
Again, a mutation in DNA could produce a six-limbed vertebrate - but not a flying lizard in one jump. So you'd need a BRANCH of vertebrates with six limbs, before natural selection could refine those extra limbs into working wings. While a single species living and going extinct without leaving a fossil is statistically MORE probably than a species leaving one at all - an entire BRANCH - that level of natural selection means at least 500 thousand generations - multiple species, and never once did even ONE of them leave ANYTHING ? Unlikely. Now further - this creature is supposed to be a big reptile, so that's a fairly LATE branch-off from other vertebrates, and if humans ever saw one (and could draw it) then it must have been around until no less than 5000 years ago.
The odds of THAT not leaving any fossils shrink to nearly nothing.
The dragon myth is still interesting because it's so pervasive. It occurs in every culture everywhere on earth. Even if we are generous and say it dates back more than 70-thousand years to when we were all one "race" in Africa - and this is how it got in them all (so how come NO other myth made it all the way through ? If there is something psychologically attractive to the myth - then that would be just as good evidence for it arising independently over and over - a hell of a lot of other ideas did) - that's still statistically unlikely to leave no fossil evidence but nevermind.
The point is - in those cultures there are marked differences between their dragons (and a lot of what WE know as dragon stories aren't, they are other mythical beasts like the Great Orm that got confused in post-medieval times [Saint George NEVER killed a dragon in the original story, he hunted Orms), so lets stick to dragons, not giant earthworms). Some breath fire, many make no mention of that. Some are wise, some are vicious beasts. Some are stocky and short (particularly in South American drawings) while some are slender. What all the recognizeable dragons in mythology have in common is that special body-plan, six limbs.
What makes the dragon myth scientifically interesting is it's pervasiveness, and the pervasiveness of this particular attribute especially - but it would be stupid to assume that this pervasiveness proves there "some truth to it", it's evidence - but it could be evidence for many other explanations. We still lack a convincing explanation with strong additional evidence - we have speculative hypothesis, a few with interesting supporting evidence, but nothing that really answers the question: Why do all human cultures tell the same story ?
I don't think Dragons ever existed (cool as it would be too be wrong) - but I still find the story beguiling, because of what it tells us about OURSELVES. The problem is - we don't (yet) KNOW what it tells us about ourselves, we just have some interesting suggestive ideas, we lack a strong theory with genuine evidence (let alone experimental evidence). If/When we find one, perhaps we'll understand something about our brains way beyond our current understanding - THAT possibility is intriguing.
