Wow, this makes me feel like king kong... and understand scaling

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

That's pretty cool. Just mess with the slider.

Ingersoll, The Gods, The Devil...

Fire department analogy, a response. Spork in the Eye.

I have a few actual readers and commentators and I check out some of their blogs (they have the good taste to check out mine, so do you for that matter). And well Spork In the Eye had an interesting blog post as to how socialized medicine would be nothing like a socialized fire department but rather more akin to socialized fire insurance (which by the way exists in many areas along with socialized flood insurance and others, but lets ignore that). Since burying a long reply on a distant forum for a post made about half a month ago is a bit off... let me repeat the point here. First it'll give you something to read. Second if Spork cares to reply and I don't happen to make it back to his board there's one here.

-------

Real Universal Health Care IS like the fire department.

Insurance shouldn't enter into the picture and is only there because of a lack of actual fortitude and actual political will to make the system into what the system should be, a real universal health care system. Where the government pays hospitals and doctors for services rendered and there's no payment without services.

Insurance is a business model whereby we mitigate risks (in theory) and pay for services as such. There are actual insurance plans which cover you in the case of illness to get you back to where you were. If you become ill they pay you for lost wages and make sure you don't get hurt. Much like fire insurance will pay for your lost stuff when your house burns down. -- The fire department in this situation really is like real universal health care.

The difference is largely like the fire department before socialization. It was previously the case that fire brigades would put out fires and charge the person helped or loot their property and such. Insurance companies would pay the brigade that put out the fire for those properties with insurance. The system was haphazard and lead to large losses in property rather than a centralized system where fire departments put out fires and it didn't really matter whose stuff was saved.

Further you argue disanalogy due to the idea that the fire departments are localized. This is certainly the case for hospitals and doctors as well. Further it holds true for medicare as such as much of the reimbursement rates and businesses are conducted regionally. Additionally fire departments have very regional operations as well where fire departments are used to fight fires across state boundaries on federal land and as part of a much larger and national effort and presidential and gubernatorial declarations of disaster.

Ultimately any real universal health care plan would require, local, regional, as well as national support.

You aren't reimbursed for your lost health. You aren't paid for getting sick, your doctors are paid for mitigating the situation. And the constitution is established to "promote the general welfare".

There are certain requirements that everybody has and that need to be conducted at above the individual level. We have need for water, housing, health, security, electricity, roads, and a number of other projects and needs that cannot be elsehow conducted on an individual basis. If we do not own these utilities as a people they will end up owning us.

Much of your analysis seems dependent on staying on the obviously failed system we currently endure. Rather than making a clean break towards Medicare for all. Insurance is a terrible way to cover healthcare. Just as it was a terrible way to conduct fire departments prior to the Civil War. Your objection seems to be largely that we shouldn't half-ass this socialism and nationally pay for insurance but rather nationally pay for health-care; I couldn't agree more.

------

Basically if we half-ass it and using insurance as our model, ofcourse everything will suck. If we somehow did away with the whole thing and paid for the required care of anybody in need of care all of the problems would melt away. There'd be no need to saddle small businesses with the burden of providing insurance, there'd be no need for insurance, the prices would drop, the overhead would drift away, and we'd be able to assemble some more efficient system of regional support. Not every hospital needs an MRI machine. You only need them every once in a while but while everybody is out on their own without any centralization there's going to be more and more lost costs and opportunities, we'll have terrible procedures and unneeded tests, and little help from various. We need a much better system and insurance is never going to build such a system, it's going to build a system of making money by hoping people die.

Tat's Trivia Bot v. 3.58

So Geocities shut down and my long dead drifting set of links to the files has likewise died out.

I have a semi-permanent site setup

http://tatarize.nfshost.com/

It should always have links to such my old scripts and various bits of information as to the on goings. It will presently link to MediaFire folder where I have the latest version of the trivia bot 3.58 as well as the question files and all of the old versions.

Again, if you find any bugs with the script I am still correcting those (though due to the lack of urgent reports I doubt there are many large ones). The bot is still free and open to edit and change in any way you see fit. Thanks to everybody who supported it over the years.

Intelligence Squared Debate: Catholics, tey evil?

I've at times ran into jokes about the way Anne Widdecombe talks and I didn't think much of it, but damned that's freaky. The debate was fantastic and pretty crushing all in all.

Damn you Joplin38 from Kansas from last year (almost to the day).

I was, earlier today, commenting on a Christians' claim about Romans 7:7 having Paul talk about how the commandments made him want to sin and I was scoffing:

"So you, like Paul in Romans, are drawn to sin because of the commandments. Since it says you shouldn't have sex with horses you start looking lustfully after horses? Since it says don't murder you look longingly at an icepickless neck?"

I thought the word play was clever with the word icepickless and it probably was but, I'm somewhat annoyed at having not coined such a shiny word. A google search turned up an example of such a word being previously used:

http://www.lowcarbfriends.com/bbs/golden-years/524549-menus-mon-tues-wed-nov-5-6-7-a.html

11-06-2007, 11:09 AM Joplin38:

Very funny, Jezzie. For those of you who are icepickless, a carving fork would work just as well to puncture the squash before microwaving to soften.

I'm verklempt at having not coined the word and made the clever wordplay. I've been outcoined (others have apparently used that to describe having more coin/money/price, but my meaning is novel)!

You're a monkey.

AronRa is a hero of mine. What Richard Carrier is to history of science Aron is to taxonomy and cladistics. Which is very high praise from me indeed.

Dios mio! Quasifame undeserved. Robgene's clever.

So ego searching today I found an interesting bit credited to me. Tatarize is unique enough that other than Tatarizing a region of some former soviet somethingorother, it's all me. So crazy people I pissed off who think the swastika was made to look like the S in Adolf Hitler's signature (there's no S there), or several year long slow motion debates on TANG on some distant board about some monkeys or something or some comments I made on the Raging Atheist's blog before he became the Raging Theist (he never was right in the head). Well I came across this little chestnut:

Dios y Superman

Querer demostrar que Dios existe con la Biblia es como querer demostrar que Superman existe con un cómic

— Tatarize (vía Microsiervos)

Wha? It says trying to show God exists with the Bible is like trying to show Superman exists with a comic. Which is close to a demotivator I posted on Flickr,



But the actual quote itself is by robgene on About's Atheism/Agnosticism forum (a forum I've frequented for years) and picked up as part of a large quote file compiled by Twsh.

Microsievos gives the following attributions:

Demostraciones

Querer demostrar que Dios existe con la Biblia es como querer demostrar que Supermán existe con un cómic.

– Proof
(vía Maikelnai)

The proof links to the original flickr image and the Maikelnai links to a twitter post.

Querer demostrar que Dios existe con la Biblia, es como querer demostrar que Supermán existe con un cómic http://tinyurl.com/m6yz4c

The URL of which links also to the flickr. Which was one of the images I added to the atheism pool on Flickr. And apparently lead to the latest comment on the flickr image:

JulissaMirabal says:

ignorantes! ninguno de ustedes tienen idea de como se escribió la bilbia

"Ignorant! None of you have any idea what was written in the Bible!"


The internet is weird, and to make it worse... now I'm blogging on this really odd chain of semi-interrelated events.

Ingersoll speaking contest.

Good selection. Good rendition.



http://www.thomaspaine.org/bio/ingersoll1870.html

"Mental phenomena are considered more complicated than those of matter, and consequently more mysterious. Being more mysterious, they are considered better evidence of the existence of a god. No one infers a god from the simple, from the known, from what is understood, but from the complex, from the unknown, and incomprehensible. Our ignorance is God; what we know is science. " - The Gods, Robert Ingersoll

Damn it Mal! Watch the gorram heartstrings!

* Nathan Fillion in Castle.

It's shiny to see 'em browncoating again, but even after half a decade... the wound's still a might fresh.

Ashes to Ashes, Air to Air

Most of the matter in our bodies comes directly and indirectly from plants and those organisms lower on the food chain. Most of the actually molecules from those plants come from the atmosphere rather than the ground. If this weren't the case, trees would grow themselves into giant holes in the ground and we'd have to truck new dirt constantly to the heartland to fill in the holes produced by cornfields. Most of your molecules weren't dirt, they were air.

Ashes to Ashes, Air to Air.

Felicia Day: NASA PSA, cute as button

If you don't know/love Felicia Day just crawl in a hole. That or find yourself a copy of Dr. Horrible Sing Along Blog and the last few seasons of The Guild.

Strategy, Epistemology, Argumentation, Dhorpatan and Ignorance.

Behold a terrible argument for the non-existence of God.



The argument is unsupported, circular, fraudulent, false, incorrect, fallacious, and utterly idiotic. On top of this it's part of a terrible strategy apparently in favor of atheism. To be fair, Dhorpatan is a dumbass. He can't even reason himself out of the paperbag called objectivism. And his purpose seems to be to use a bunch of big words and try to confuse the Jesus out of people.

Let's look at the argument in question:

P1) The Christian God is said [to] exist by definition, as an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Incorporeal mind.
P2) The Christian God cannot prevent Quantum Tunneling, as an immaterial mind lacks the means to instantiate violations of Schrodinger['s] equation and evanescent wave coupling.
P3) No mind can know the exact amount of information loss from a system into the environment through Quantum decoherence, nor instantiate as well as exemplify, the mediated attachment between state crossing relations of the microscopic, and macroscopic "worlds", to prevent thermodynamically irreversible actualization, from Quantum decoherence.
-- Supporting P3) An Incorporeal/Immaterial mind lacks kinetic actuality, as energy is of the material realm.
P4) Thus, the Christian God cannot exist as an Omnipotent entity. (From P2 and P3)
P5) Thus, the Christian God cannot exist as an Omniscient entity. (From P3)
Conclusion) Therefore, the Christian God does not exist. (From P1)

The first point that should be stressed is most of those buzzwords are just made up bullshit. Your first sign should be his inability to use grammar. He randomly capitalizes words like "omnipotent", leaves out other words and possessives etc. But, from a scientific sense, most of this is just gobbledygook. It's akin to post-modernism where the hope is that nobody really understands what was said so people just sit there nodding and not pointing out that the emperor isn't wearing any clothing. Lets confuse the Jesus out of them! To really understand how true this is, we must understand the underlying serious flaws in the argument.

Let's simplify and analyze:

* God is an all powerful, all knowing, incorporeal mind.
* God can't do "X" because God is immaterial.
* No mind can do "Y" BECAUSE immaterial minds lack property "A" BECAUSE "A" is associated with material.
* Therefore God isn't all-powerful.
* Therefore God isn't all-knowing.
* Therefore God doesn't exist.

Ultimately, then the real argument is entirely predicated on premise 2 and premise 3. Why can't immaterial minds do X? Why can't immaterial minds do Y? This are simply asserted without any good reason to accept them and since they pretty much guarantee the conclusion, we are left to ask how these are supported? And moreover how one rules out the other possibilities?

And how are you establishing that there isn't a non-energy of the non-material that doesn't do the same fundamental thing. How are you excluding all the other possibilities in order to make substantive claims about the non-material?

Dhorpatan was kind enough to clue me in:

Hahahaha! An immaterial mind itself is by inherent definition, contradictory, since nothing can exist, by what it's not. Nothing can exist, and not have a compositional identity, as that violates the Law of Identity.

This argument suggests the inability of immaterial minds to do things by arguing that they don't exist. So the support for the premise on which everything hinges is inability via non-existence. Immaterial minds are contradictory and thus don't exist and thus can't do X and thus aren't all powerful and thus don't exist.

The given support renders everything else moot. All that out of context QM crap is a moot point and irrelevant to the argument. One might as well suggest that because non-existent things can't play baseball they aren't all-powerful and thus do not exist and call it an argument from baseball.

When pressed on the lack of support for the argument further, I was given the delightful insight that:

The second and third premises don't require support.

They ARE the support for premises FOUR and
FIVE. Haahahahaha. This is what I've been saying.

That's right, any premise used for support do not themselves require support.

So even a causal scratch at the surface of the argument results in pretty serious flaws being uncovered, worse logic, and terrible reasoning.

Apparently being pressed for reasoning rather than being blindly accepted annoyed Dhorpatan some, "I'm growing fairly tired of your stick" he managed to offer between claiming I don't understand logic or was committing fallacies by asking questions. Rather than beat a deadhorse with a shtick, let's sum it up to say he's a terrible anti-apologist and not a logical person. Now, why should we care?

Because his entire strategy is flawed.


Don't get me wrong, I've read a lot of deconversion stories on Ex-Christian.net they are often heartwarming and give you an understanding of the freedom deconverts often feel. However, not once have I seen one where the one key element was having some postmodernist-wanna-be objectivist confuse the Jesus out of them, I've seen people lose their faith after being asked 'why their reasons for believing should suffice for any other purpose.' I've seen people lose their faith when explained what platypuses mean for mammalian evolution (Oh, it's not a refutation for evolution but actually really good evidence).

But, Dhorpatan's strategy? It's probably never going to work. So for the most part because confusing people with fallacious arguments is probably not effective (though it seems delightfully reinforcing amongst theists), we can venture that this strategy probably has no up side (as far as pragmatism is concerned).

I've seen more than a few good Christian responses to Dhorpatan's videos that often portray such arguments as somehow indicative of most atheistic arguments. They usually raise a good point or two and certainly do a lot to let Christians pat themselves on their back and reassure themselves that they are right. And I think even small examples of terrible arguments on the counter-apologetic side is an extremely bad thing.

Bad arguments muddy the water and make it a little hard to judge how overwhelmingly one-sided the actual argument. The arguments for God are always, without exception, tissue-paper thin and riddled with the most obvious and trivial errors. Any debates with regard to logical arguments for God are heavily weighted towards atheists.

Likewise arguments dealing with science are often heavily slanted towards atheism. It has been the case since Darwin that a functional epistemology terminates in atheism. It use to be that rational individuals in the time of Hume would be deists, or in the time of Galen theists. But, since Darwin atheism has been the logical endpoint of a functional epistemology. If you care whether your beliefs are true and you want the most true beliefs and the fewest false beliefs then you're probably going to review the facts and end up being an atheist.

So the logic, reason, and science is all in favor of atheism. However, on the flip side, it is for these reasons that I think a number of atheists are terrible debaters. They have never had to vigorously defend a losing proposition, or fight tooth and nail in favor of a falsehood. Most of the debates one witnesses online and in various forums are such that one poorly educated teenage atheist can seem ninja-like in dismantling the most time honored claims of large groups of religionists. It's not really a challenge and thus many of the arguments are completely terrible. I once witnessed an atheistic argument with ten premises, of which nine were factually false, with three obvious fallacies have a theist respond with a flawed understanding of the second law of thermodynamics (a criticism that wasn't even applicable to the argument). Such things are pathetic, but amazingly common. However, I think the staggering lopsidedness is a great argument in itself, and one of the more compelling ones for atheism. Though, it's screwed when one considers a few bad apples.


What about self policing?

With Dhorpatan's complete failure with regard to logic and rationality, shouldn't this expose some tender tissue to the evisceration of fellow logical atheists who don't want bad arguments in support of good positions. Let's see:

-.- Do you accually think you understand quantum machanics? I bet if einstein was alive, he would have no clue how to solve or explain quantum machanics properly if he studied it for years...
 The point is, we haven't even scratched the surface of this science, which is scary becuase it's already disproving god... This is all theory...
God might not be real after all, you might have to throw in the towel christans. Don't try to explain stuff that not even the best phisicst in the world can't.

First off Albert Einstein is one of the fathers of Quantum mechanics. Secondly we've scratched the surface. We've looked under the hood. We've thought about the implications, we've built hard drives and innumerable devices based on our understanding of quantum mechanics. It's simply rather alien. A lot of our natural intuitions about how the universe work, break down at the quantum level. We understand exactly what the answers will be, we just aren't exactly sure there's a reason why that's the answer. It's great if you want to build an insanely fast computer. It's not so great if you want to portray the entire universe as Newtonian or relativistic.

This commenter seems amazed for as little as we know about the theory it's already disproving God and Christians might want to give up now. This might be interesting if not for the fact that the entire argument is a complete crock of shit, and QM doesn't matter a jot to the argument.


On this point, I argued with a pretty reasonable Dhorpatan fan for a while concerning this argument and he finally arrived at the conclusion:

I think there must be some kind of point in it, but its structure is invalid.

Just because something is full of crap, doesn't mean it's pointless? If one accepts that then why not be religious?

---

I think that terrible arguments hurt the cause because terrible arguments on both sides allows for one to offer a tu quoque to suggest that there are bad arguments on both sides of the debate (Dhorpatan is also find taking on the burden of proof for no reason whatsoever). However, on top of that, muddying up the waters ruins the best argument for atheism which is largely a meta-argument: "all the arguments for theism are utter shit and atheists bring up a number of good points." There's something delightfully powerful about having theists always be wrong. Throwing them a bone with terrible arguments is just going to encourage them.

Interpretation and Jesus

Monkeys use tools, are mean to jaguars.

If evolution is true, why haven't mothers evolved extra arms?

Development works like a pattern triggered on and off by various genes. Certain parts of the program code for certain things so things like arms and legs are triggered by limb buds and follow very similar programs. The primary bone is a single bone be it the femur or humerus then a joint and then a lower limb of two primary bones (tibia and fibula or ulna and radius). The same pattern is followed with modifications.

For example the knee cap is actually an ossified tendon that evolved early within the placental mammals. You won't find them in marsupials or any more diverse tetrapods. Likewise other tetrapods like some of the hoofed ungulates have modified limb ends, or sloths have fewer digits, or pandas have heavily modified wrist bones to make a thumb (look at their hands they have 6 digits because their thumb is not a digit).

So biology and genetics is more like a toolkit and the various cells and different cell types follow a decentralized build scheme to invoke specific organs in specific places. So it only takes one mutation to make limbs into hooves or to make humans largely hairless (by changing the growth rest cycles) rather than coding for individual parts.

This evo-devo scheme of developmental biology combines the understanding of evolution, development, genetics, and embryology into a single coherent field. So we know interesting things like octopuses, like squid, have ten legs but, unlike squid, have two of their legs suppressed by other genes. So you'll encounter an occasional "mutant" octopus with nine or ten legs, but never eleven. Or that the gene used in mice and fruitflies to start the program to build an eye is the same, even though mice have a lensed eye and fruitflies have a compound eye. You can simply move the gene from one to the other and it works just as well. Or that snakes still have functional leg genes that don't get activated and are just invoked elsewhere for non-leg purposes.

To properly change a lot of the patterning you need to change a lot of the structure, you'd need to make another upper torso section or otherwise cause the patterning to start the arm creation program multiple times. But, as the program only really takes small tweaks it would be hard to cause such a duplication and have a viable resulting phenotype.

It's like asking if there's some step you could tweak in making a chocolate cake that would actually end up making cookie dough icecream instead. If you want to gradually make a larger cake or tweak the coloring or flavor, that's easy, but you can't make a small tweak to the recipe to make a cake into cookie dough. Even if cookie-dough icecream were a great thing to make, using slight modifications of a cake recipe you'd likely end up with a cake that mimics cookie-dough icecream rather than the real thing. You can't really change the plan you already have down in the books, that's the reason why animals have vestiges. It's why humans have an eye with a blind spot. It's why aquatic flightless penguins have wings. You can only tweak the previous recipes, rather than change them wholecloth. And the recipe for land animals with four limbs was set down during the evolution of fish prior to migration on to the land. Tweaking that bit is going to cause serious problems for every step that comes later, which is pretty much every step.

We can tweak the expression of genes a lot easier than the pattern. So longer arms or more hair or to change the degree of anything is easy. However to actually change the recipe itself is not so simple. Which is why things typically evolve gradually from very small nearly inconsequential traits to large robust developments. Rather than encountering freakish but awesome new organs like sharp spikes on one's knuckles or extra arms or whatnot.

Humans like all the tetrapods are really just a jerryrigged fish.

Sorry if I'm cryptic at times, but evo-devo is very impressive science and somewhat cutting edge biology. And is actually the correct answer to why if extra arms might be evolutionarily advantageous could humans never evolve them. A lot of organisms get locked into certain patterns. For example humans have seven neck vertebrae, want to venture a guess as to how many a giraffe has? How about a mouse? A cat? A dog? A cow? -- The answer to all of these is always seven. Giraffes and humans have the same number of neck vertebrae they just get longer and shorter rather than more common like one would find in long necked birds, because, for some reason, nearly all mammals are locked into this pattern and the recipe is really hard to change.

Ingersoll on the Temptation of Jesus.

The fact that Christ could withstand the temptations of the devil was considered as conclusive evidence that he was assisted by some god, or at least by some being superior to man. St. Matthew gives an account of an attempt made by the devil to tempt the supposed son of God; and it has always excited the wonder of Christians that the temptation was so nobly and heroically withstood. The account to which I refer is as follows:

"Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when the tempter came to him, he said: 'If thou be the son of God, command that these stones be made bread.' But he answered, and said: 'It is written: man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city and setteth him upon a pinnacle of the temple and saith unto him: "If thou be the son of God, cast thyself down; for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, lest at any time thou shalt dash thy foot against a stone.' Jesus said unto him: 'It is written again, thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.' Again the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and saith unto him: 'All these will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me."

The Christians now claim that Jesus was God. If he was God, of course the devil knew that fact, and yet, according to this account, the devil took the omnipotent God and placed him upon a pinnacle of the temple, and endeavored to induce him to dash himself against the earth. Failing in that, he took the creator, owner and governor of the universe up into an exceeding high mountain and offered him this world -- this grain of sand -- if he, the God of all the worlds, would fall down and worship him, a poor devil, without even a tax title to one foot of dirt! Is it possible the devil was such an idiot? Should any great credit be given to this deity fear not being caught with such chaff? Think of it! The devil -- the prince of sharpers -- the king of cunning -- the master of finesse, trying to bribe God with a grain of sand that belonged to God!

Is there in all the religious literature of the world anything more grossly absurd than this?

From The Gods...

What is this dismissive crock I see before me?

Would it happen naturally? Probably not.

What about in a lab? Maybe, but how will they get funding. Who will give them permission to conduct the experiments?

* Chimps not sexy.
* Sex is hard.
* Differing numbers of chromosomes, more likely to be infertile.
* It's the evolutionary difference that counts.

However horses and donkeys are 10.10 million years apart and have different chromosome numbers. And we're only 6 million years off from chimpanzees.

* Ivanhov tried it three times and failed.
* Oliver was just a chimp.

--

No evidence that it's happened and not likely to happen.

--

Somehow this seems overly dismissive to me. The evolutionary distance is pretty close far closer than mules. And there are no confirmed barriers to reproduction as such. There's no evidence that it's impossible and less related species have hybrids quite often.

Kinds, Taxonomy, Clades and Macroevolution.

>>"otherwise you're just witnessing the allowable variations and ADAPTATIONS within a specific "kind" of organism."

Your definition of microevolution, suffices to explain all life on this planet. You have arbitrarily defined macroevolution as something that evolution does not suggest will ever happen.

Evolution includes to a large part clades. Which is to say the common ancestor of a given organism and all of it's descendants. At no point will the common ancestor of two species in a specific group ever be something other than in that group. Humans and mice are both mammals and so our common ancestor will be a mammal. And though the ancestral mammals have given rise to sheep, whales, platypus, kangaroos, humans, lemurs, aye-ayes, elephant shrews, shrews, elephants, dogs, hyenas, bears and all the other mammals alive today. They will never become non-mammals. That's not the way evolution works. It is always about modification of previous forms. Not the change of one form into another.

Animals will never be non-animals. And mosquitoes and I share a common ancestor that was an animal. You are simply abusing a rather silly platonic idea and misunderstanding clades. The truth is "An X will never evolve into a non X" is true for all clades. It's actually a prediction and explanation of evolution. Any grouping that includes a group of closely related species must by definition include them all and they will never stop being that group. Even if the group is as narrow as the great apes which is only five main species (chimpanzee, bonobo, orangutan, human, and gorilla) or as wide as all of the animals. At no point will a human stop being an animal or stop being an ape.

The thing is the allowable variations within a specific kind are nearly infinite. So bats may always be bats, but if after a large extinction event they were a group to survive and have many millions of years of allowable variations they might troll the skies like birds of prey, graze the fields like cattle, some primates, and iguanadons of yesterage. Or fill the seas like penguins, whales, fish, or plesiosaurs. Even as these hypothetical bats burrow into other animals and live as parasites burrowed just under the skin they will still be bats. They would be bats if they returned to the seas, they would be bats if they burrowed in the ground, they would be bats no matter what kind of diversity they achieved. Oddly enough there are a lot of birds with this kind of diversity, some burrow, some in the oceans, some graze, some hunt at night with ears on their cheeks, some take to the skies with unrivaled vision and speed, and some scavenge for carrion or sing intricate songs. But, all birds are birds and they will never be anything different, just as all birds are the only surviving dinosaurs and will never be anything different, nor will they stop being tetrapods or animals.

Went to beach, got burned.

I look a little lobster-like right now. Sun screen is for cowards.