Business Insider (founded in 2009) is an up-and-coming website that seems to be a must-read for financial folks, rivalling the online Wall Street Journal. It’s like HuffPo, having some original content but also many links to other pieces. And the articles are short and easily-digested, just right for the harried capitalist who has to make a lot of trades before noon.
Sadly, one of the original content pieces, published on April 3, is a straight piece of creationism, “Creationist explains how humans and dinosaurs could have hunted the Tyrannosaurus rex.” The short piece is about the ludicrous ideas of Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo (Ph.D. in kineseology, of course), a California creationist who has launched the famous $10,000 challenge, offering anyone that sum if they can disprove the literal truth of Genesis before a judge. (Note to readers: please stop asking ask me to participate in this: these offers constitute a mug’s game that nobody can win.)
So here’s what curious business folks are reading:
. . . given that he believes that the universe is about 7,000 years old, [Mastropaolo] posits that dinosaurs became extinct relatively recently.
“If we go back a thousand years, we probably had these so-called dragons roaming the earth,” Mastropaolo told BI. “But they couldn’t be called ‘dinosaurs’ because that word hadn’t been invented yet.”
Radiometric dating indicates that some dinosaur fossils are about 65 million years old, but Mastropaolo believes that the technique is “grossly biased, not valid, unreliable, and uncalibrated.”
But here’s the best part:
As for how human beings were able to survive in the same neighborhood as a Tyrannosaurus rex, Mastropaolo said that humans beings would have been able to trick them.
“Human beings were smarter the further back we go in time because they have been less degenerated by the pollutants that we’ve been putting into the air, water, and soil,” he said. “T. rex … could be herded into a blind canyon and have rocks dropped on their heads from above. And they’d soon be done in.”
Furthermore, Mastropaolo believes that they could even have been domesticated the “way we have domesticated cattle and elephants.”
“I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t be able to do it with [a dinosaur],” he said. “We know that animal husbandry goes back thousands of years. Why not? If people found out that there was a dinosaur that they were able to feed and domesticate, why not expect that they used that knowledge to better their standard of living?”
How much lunacy is packed into those quotes! We’re no longer smart enough to outwit T. rex? We could herd them all into blind canyons? Or we could domesticate them?
It’s amazing that anyone, much less Business Insider, takes this clown seriously.
But the worst part is this: there is no criticism of his views and no inquiry among experts on dinosaurs or radiometric dating to rebut Mastropaolo’s claim. His arguments are unrebutted.
h/t: Gattina
(Note to readers: please stop asking ask me to participate in this: these offers constitute a mug’s game that nobody can win.)
I spread the original article around on Facebook and when people suggested I do the same, I pointed out that there are legal loopholes stated right in the article. Words like “nonbinding” in the court’s decision.
Also the time it would take to do this is worth more to me than the $10,000.
Herded?! Forgive my ignorance, but can you herd an animal that hasn’t even been proven to congregate in herds to begin with?
Cats?
If you put T. rex into smaller and smaller stick cages (steel not yet having been invented), within a few generations you get chicken nuggets.
I despair.
Evolution by artificial selection! Mastropaolo unwittingly argues for evolution.
More Lamarckian, I think. And if we were so smart back then, I wonder why all our T. rex farms failed? (And did they get a tax break?)
Obviously, the failures were caused by the interferences of Big Gubbermint.
I’ve often thought that the question is not so much ‘How could humans have survived living with T-Rex?’ but more like ‘How long would it have taken humans to drive T-Rex extinct?’
Mike.
We’d try to kill them off instantly. I mean after The Fall. Before The Fall, we would have just nestled with them at night.
Can you imagine your pet T-Rex named Dino, that you adored so much before The Fall, suddenly turn into this ferocious, flesh eating monster?!
Now, as far as BI goes, they like to throw silly stories into the mix sometimes to spark discussion.
Kind of a fun site. I read it often.
It seems he gets his ideas from duplo set 5597!
It seems that Mastropaolo has been unusually severely degenerated by the pollutants that we’ve been putting into the air, water, and soil…
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“T. rex … could be herded into a blind canyon and have rocks dropped on their heads from above. And they’d soon be done in.”
So that’s how dinosaurs became extinct!
More or less. Given the popular scientific explanation that a dirty great rock dropped on the earth and then dinosaurs became extinct, he’s almost right.
If we had domesticated dinosaurs, wouldn’t that have ensured their survival rather than aided their extinction?
Just as there are more horses today than in the old west, wouldn’t there be more dinosaurs now due to domestication and human guided selective breeding?
And that, children, is why we have chickens today…
Tasty, tasty, deep fried chickens. :o)
This thing itself is just plain humorous.
But the quote “…Mastropaolo believes that they could even have been domesticated..” reminds me of sections of “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond, where he talks about the extreme difficulties of domestication, the very low percentage of wild animals and plants for which this is even remotely possible. This is all in aid of his thesis about the historical differences in human ‘progress’ between different parts of the world being so closely connected to geography, as opposed to the oftentimes racist ‘explanations’. I found his brief discussion of zebras versus horses, despite superficial resemblance, especially entertaining. I know little about biology, but assume Diamond was largely accurate here.
I cannot possibly be the first to point out that Dr. Mastropaolo’s speculation on how humans killed T. Rex bears a strong similarity to how a group of juvenile, anthropomorphic dinosaurs accomplished the same feat in The Land Before Time…
Well, it does stand to reason that if humans were smarter back then, that dinosaurs must have been too.
After all T-Rex was smart enough to figure out how to eat coconuts.
Watching cartoons is so research!
“T. rex … could be herded into a blind canyon and have rocks dropped on their heads from above.” So that’s what happened to Marc Bolan ….
I like the idea of T. rex rodeos, team roping, and the Mesozoic Bareback Rigging Festival.
Oh my gosh, what’s next? Nazis riding dinosaurs?
Here is an artist’s reenactment of how it went down in 33 C.E.: http://tinyurl.com/c7fvj3x
I doubt the lack of overt criticism implies that the article’s author means for us to take Joseph Mastropaolo’s claims seriously. I suspect that, rather, he’s just giving the man enough rope — or column inches — so that he can hang himself.
Yes, it sounds that way to me, based on these excerpts. Some fun for the readers. At least, I hope that is the explanation!
If pollution was less at that time shouldn’t the dinosaurs have been smarter, too?
They didn’t have much brain to degenerate by pollutants to begin with.
Remember, these people think that dinosaurs were belly-dragging swamp dwellers with brains the size of walnuts.
Any ‘rag’ associated with Wall Street should well know by now that Gresham’s Law applies to many things other than money.
The author is one Michael Kelley. If you click on his name, you’ll see he has a BA in philosophy from Northwestern (just down the road from Jerry). You’ll also see that he recently responded to a Bible-thumper criticizing him for referring to evolution as a ‘fact’. His response is that his next article (the creationist one) shows how balanced he is. That’s all we need: more balance with lunatics.
So dinosaurs lived a thousand years ago? Is anyone else picturing Christian knights and Muslim warriors riding various large theropods into battle for control of Jerusalem, while pterosaurs drop rocks and firebombs from above? I’d pay to see that movie.
You mean like this?
Different era, though
Yes.
I was imagining William of Normandy mounted on a Triceratops, but yeah.
You forgot to add one more stand-alone word at the end of your assessment: “moron.”
To be fair to the author of this article, it seems it’s part of a series over the last week showcasing this nutcase, and the other articles have more snarky asides like:
or
I think what we’re seeing here is a young journalist showcasing an idiot for his readers to laugh at (see the comments section).
Author Bio: http://www.businessinsider.com/author/michael-kelley
Love this post. Can I offer a recent example of unwarranted scepticism about evolution from a supposedly reliable source here in Britain, the BBC?
http://brandonrobshaw.wordpress.com/2012/12/30/evolutionary-theory-maintains/
Excellent piece.
Gratci’
It looked to me like BI was making fun of the creationists by reporting their ideas straight, because the comedy value is inherent. Their commenters certainly don’t seem the least bit fooled.
I have long been a fan of Business Insider They had some of the most sympathetic coverage of the Occupy movement. They are also generally anti-austerity and understand that the widening wealth gap will destroy America as we know it.
I’m gonna give BI a pass on this.
This is how people document false claims that becomes reality after thousand of years .. lol ..
Even Richard Dawkins doesn’t bother arguing with Creationists.
“Human beings were smarter the further back we go in time because they have been less degenerated by the pollutants that we’ve been putting into the air, water, and soil”
Well, that settles it – if this is true, Adam and Eve must have been evolutionists.
And atheists.
Heh. Behold the Creationists’ nightmare… the CAR!
Cars > gasoline > fossil fuels > fossils > millions of years.
Huh. Now why does Mastropaulo’s Biblical Truth of Dinosaurs differ from Ken Ham’s? About Mastropaolo we can safely assume that he’s “grossly biased, not valid, unreliable, and unhinged.”
I hope that one day scientists actually clone a few T.Rex (as in Jurassic park), and then I would like to see all those creationists who claim that humans killed off the dinosaurs with spears and arrows, get together in a Heyerdahl-like experiment and use those same spears and arrows to try hunting a T.Rex to show us how it was done.
Hang on, you’d let a billion-dollar and totally unique (in this epoch) scientific specimen be attacked by a bunch of loonies with weapons?
What’s a T-Rex ever done to you? ; )
If scientists only clone one T-Rex, I probably wouldn’t do that to him, but if they make a spare T-Rex, I think it’s worth conducting this experiment. We already have plenty of spare creationists.
I suspect this Business Insider story was written by a C- journalism graduate struggling to get by on $19,000/yr.
He’s doing what it takes to get by.
No one is buying newspapers anymore, let alone online content. It’s all linked to for free, as here.
If people want real coverage, then pay for it. Otherwise we will all get whatever coverage pays their bills.
It scares me a lot when high rank business people (CEO’s) use biology concepts to justify their decisions… I’ve seen this in motivational speaks. Frightening!
People like Mastropaolo belong either in prison (as the conmen they really are) or in a mental health facility if they genuinely believe such bullshit. I can’t come up with another option.
He is just wildly speculating flying in the face of the evidence. He has not even biblical assertion to back him up.
He might as well throw in a team of leprechaun dinosaur wranglers while he is at it.
Why not a team of rainbow-clad fairies to cheerlead the event?