This is why evolutionary assumptions will always have problems:
American researchers say they have uncovered a mathematical mistake made by the dinosaur boffinry community, meaning that the weight of live dinos has long been massively overestimated. In a development with devastating consequences for various much-fancied works of fiction, it now appears that in fact the dinosaurs were significantly slenderer than had been thought.
“Paleontologists have for 25 years used a published statistical model to estimate body weight of giant dinosaurs. By re-examining data in the original reference sample, we show that the statistical model is seriously flawed,” says Gary Packard of Colorado State University.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/22/dinosaur_weight_revisionism/
The “much-fancied works of fiction” unintentionally include the phony evolutionary stories. The problem isn’t that science destroys religious faith, as Dawkins et al. claim. The problem is that their knowledge is supposedly factual and empirical, but it isn’t. They need to just accept the fact that their beliefs about evolutionary history are faith-based and then move on to create their worldwide Gaia-worship church.
I saw this yesterday. I can’t find the source article. It doesn’t appear in the early online articles or the June edition of J Zoology
Here it is:
Allometric equations for predicting body mass of dinosaurs
Journal of Zoology
Early View, Date: June 2009
G. C. Packard, T. J. Boardman, G. F. Birchard
Search on “Packard” from this page:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118535410/home
I don’t know what their access restrictions are, since I wasn’t asked to log in and I was able to download the full text.
Yes, that is where I went. I looked in June and early view and couldn’t find it (spend about 15 minutes looking). I even searched the whole journal for packard but the search engine was down and failed to return any.
Can now.
The study is an in-depth critique of predictive statistical methods in general, based on a reanalysis of a 24-year-old, admittedly incomplete dataset taken from modern animals. They got the attention of paleontologists by showing the implications of their critique for estimating dinosaur size.
To me, it simply emphasizes the absurdity of claiming that evolutionary biology is empirical, evidential, materialistic, or naturalistic. Even someone who believes it to be true cannot honestly claim that evolutionary biology is purely objective positive knowledge. Therefore, those who claim that it is entirely empirical are either lying or ignorant. My experience is that most of them are ignorant of genuine scientific method, and the rest are lying in order to promote a political agenda.