Small joke.

This was from Ed.

Don't lots of guys have anal sex with women?

And I don't think this rant is a really appropriate response to a statement about research.

What are you talking about, did you just see Zaras latest post? This is blockbuster stuff!

So...any homosexual interaction that doesn't culminate in ejaculation is natural, normal and not deviant! But, unfortunately, masturbation is deviant, unnatural and abnormal, since the precious seed isn't being put to its purpose as designed by Invisible Sky Man. We should start having funerals for nocturnal emissions, I say! A tragedy!

We're finally getting somewhere!

So those agreeing with Eddie are medieval compared to those not?

GOOD point, dude!

But not temperatures.

As a general remark, you probably want 'kind' to be some sort of cladistic group. For instance, dinosauria is any decendent of the most recent common ancestor of Iguanodon and Megalosaurus. But your problem would be determing preciesly where that line is. To continue using dinosaur examples (since that's the group I know most about the taxonomy of).

Two Broadest groups: Saurichia and Ornithicia.

Saurichia groups: Therapoda, Sauropoda
Ornithicthicia groups: Thyreophora, Marginocephalia, Ornithopoda.

General overview of groups:

Sauropoda - long necks, big bodies. The Brachiosaurs are in here.
Therapoda - the carnivores and some omnivors, including modern birds.
Thyreophora - both Stegosaurs and Ankylorsaurs.
Marginocephalia - Pacycelphalosaurs ("butt heads") and Ceratopsians.
Ornithipoda - The 'ostritch' dinosaurs if I remeber correctly.

If kind is the smallest unit needed to get the diversity of dinosauria, you might need only three specimins. You might not - a basal Ornithician and a basal Saurischian could do it. Of course, so could a basal Dinosaur.

To use kind in this way, you'll need to figure out things such as how rapidily species diversify and how much time they have to diversify. Using dinosauria as a hypothetical, you could need one pair, two pairs, or even five pairs (one for each major grouping).

That's how 'kind' can be usefull to your case. But in order to use it, you will need to make a case for the right 'level' of species diversity.

Maybe because you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about and you refuse to define just what the fuck it is we're debating.

Calm down.

His argument/question is simple. Given (1), (2) and (3), can you disprove the possibility that the Ark existed?

I know the (provisional) answer, as I'm sure you do.
I also know the nuance that that answer should get, as I'm sure you do.

Now go get 'im, tiger!

Only if his command of English is as bad as his command of the Bible.

He said:

That means these are the things we're discussing, not the things we're *assuming*.

How he can be "convinced" by things he doesn't even understand eludes me.

Then it is up to you to prove what you are claiming.

The Bible does not say Noah was a giant. It only says that there were giants on the earth in those days (Gen. 6:4). Further, please keep in mind the square-cube law of muscle/bone proportion. Muscle and bone strength are "square" interactions that are based on surface area, but mass is a "cube" interaction that is based on volume. In short, your muscle strength cannot keep up with your mass when upward scaling occurrs - had Noah been a "giant", he'd've collapsed under his own weight and never built the ark in the first place.(1)

(1) http://www.palaeos.com/Vertebrates/Lists/G...GlossarySq.html
http://home.swiftdsl.com.au/~dferstat/news...ws_2003_01.html
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/tennis/ne.../12/03/mailbag/ (near the bottom of the page, do a 'find' for "square-cube law")

Please not that dinosaurs had their own morphological adaptations to account for extreme size. They were not merely some smaller animal that got "scaled up" like giants are.

Muscle development in juvenile reptile species has nothing to do with muscle scaling.

I reiterate: a T-Rex is not a "bigger" version of anything. There is no "L-Rex" that was fed a magic potion and grew to twice its normal size. The species predating T-Rex that were smaller (Allosaurus, for instance) had to develop new morphological capabilities during the evolutionary process. There are enough differences in the skeletal structure that scientists know the difference between an Allosaurus and a juvenile T-Rex. You simply cannot take the current muscle and skeletal structure of an animal and scale the size upwards without a distinct loss of motor function. The internal structures MUST change to cope with the scale factor.