Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed
npr.org
npr.org
Had this been a religious idea, I'm afraid the new evidence would have been buried and we'd still have the old, wrong idea.
We've refined our view of other dinos over the years, but we don't say that T-Rex never existed just because we know he stood differently than we first imagined.
So while many of us would agree that the comparison ideally shouldn't be relevant, certain cultural realities mean that it is. Though it's definitely still tangential in this case.
(on a side note: Do you make something the dogma? I never really used the word in that sense before)
Historically, religions have been found to be very adapting, incorporating new and existing ideas, and even elements from other religions. Christianity, for one, has incorporated many foreign elements and have changed over the years adapting to every era.
Sure, people have also been burned as a consequence of religion. Then again, people have been killed as a consequence of science too. 240.000 men, women, children and elderly died in Hiroshima and Nagashaki from the direct results of several years of work by the top physicists of the time. Or the people had followed psychiatric treatments such as lobotomy we now consider BS. Or the tens of thousands sterilised (in Western Europe) by eugenics programs that run until the '70s. Those are consequences of science too -- one cannot separate it from politics arbitrarily, else we can say the same about religion "oh, but a TRUE believer would never harm anyone", etc. Well, many very true scientists are working on biological weapons and other scary things, and a lot of true scientists amongst them hate other people or nations with a passion.
You're talking about syncretism. As new religions are generated, they draw from previous ritual and myth. This is not the sort of adaptation to eliminate falsehoods referenced here. The bible includes elements cribbed from other religions, it is not rewritten to be factual.
Both things happen.
Religions also take things out of their "canon" as the society evolves, precisely to take out old mistakes.
The way the Catholic church does not endorse slavery or the "Spanish Inquisition" as it once did, for example.
This story is also more consistent with saying the Brontosaurus "never existed", since it was the Brontosaurus that got given the wrong head. (Though one could well argue that Brontosaurus was just another name for Apatosaurus with the whole head thing just being an error in the visual representation of the dinosaur referred to by Brontosaurus.)
Since the first Apatosaurus featured the skull of another dinosaur, meaning Marsh named a non-existent animal, couldn't you argue that the Brontosaurus was the right name since it was applied to a more accurate reconstruction?
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/b7bcd9b6-9ab1-11df-87e6-00144...
That chimera certainly never existed.
So with the usual headline sensationalism, it is fair to say "it never existed". More accurately, one could say something like "the dinosaur popularly known as brontosaurus, is actually a aptosaurus with a different head..." But as a headline, it lacks punch.
I was pretty ticked off when I learned it was the 70's, and yet I still was taught about the brontosaurus in school a decade later. Makes me wonder if kids today still get taught about the ninth planet Pluto.
Increased the amount, but has the quality really improved that much? We've still got the latest free-energy, supplement/alt-med, cancer cure, and diet quacks making the rounds under the guise of "science" reporting.
http://www.newser.com/story/97112/triceratops-never-existed....