From: throopw@sheol.UUCP (Wayne Throop)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Holden, Kazmaier and the sauropod
Summary: review of Ted's summary
Date: 22 Dec 92 16:48:19 GMT

: From: news@fedfil.UUCP (news) (Ted Holden)
: Message-ID: <179@fedfil.UUCP>
: I've given more than relevent comment to this bullshit...  
: I've demolished it.

Ted has indeed responded in the past.  But his "demolition" is irrelevant.
Ted has made a good summary of his points here, so I'll show specifically
why each isn't related to the points Ted is trying to establish.

: Most of body weight on Kazmaier is muscle;  

Ted's own sources show that muscle mass is irrelevant to how much
force the muscles can apply.  Only cross section is.  Further, all the
muscle mass in Kazmaier's upper body is used in series instead of
in parallel with that in his lower body for the lift Ted uses as
a benchmark, and so is irrelevant to the issue.

: Structurally, any juxtaposed photo will show Kaz to have thicker limbs
: than the saur.  Any difference in leverage would favor him. 

I don't think so, as pictures I tried don't show this.  Reference a
picture of Kazmaier I'd likely to be able to find in a university
library, or email me a GIF of Kazmaier and I'll rethink.  But even so,
this is irrelevant as regards leverage, because leverage is roughly
proportional to BONE thickness (specifically proportional joint
thickness), not gross limb thickness. 

:  five-second deal for Kaz.  The brontosaur walked around with a
: 70,000 lb load all day long.  

This is irrelevant, because again Ted's own sources show that endurance
does not scale square-cube, but with volume.  Elephants and sauropods
are nowhere near an endurance limit, even if they were near a force
limit.  (This again reflects Ted's normal confusion between energy,
force, mass, weight, and so on.)

In this regard, the point about muscle mass proportion Ted makes above
might be relevant.  But unfortunately, when you work out the volumes
available, you find no problem with endurance.  Ted, of course, likes
to make his claims without doing specific calculations (with, to be
fair, the notable exception of his calculations of square-cube
scaling (though he applies it incorrectly)).

: For the ultrasaur, the load was more like
: 360,000 lbs, and that's a documented fact.

No, it's a documented guess, based on a vertebra or two and a shoulder
blade.  The best experts on the subject disagree with so large a mass
estimate, as I've shown by excerpts from the recent book
_Kings_of_Creation_.  And even if the 360,000 guess is accurate, the
calculations I posted based on actual measurements show sauropods
wouldn't run into strength-related problems until 5 or 6 hundred
thousand pounds mass.  So again, the 360,000 lbs is irrelevant.

: there is little if any difference between muscle tissue from
: any two vertibrates, and that it all looks nearly alike under microscopes.

True, but irrelevant, since I never claimed there was such a difference.

: I have shown that if scaled to 70,000 lbs, 
: He'd be pinned to the ground by our gravity.  

True, but irrelevant, since Kazmaier isn't the same shape as sauropods.

: There is no 350 lb creature which eats leaves and low value food which comes
: remotely close to being as strong or having anything like the lifting abilities
: which Kaz has.  Candidates would include hogs, and certain members of the
: goat and deer families, possibly.  Put a 1000 lb weight on top of any such
: creature and watch what happens.

Candidates for matching sauropod performance would NOT include goats, stoats,
dogs, hogs, horses, gnus, shrews, tapirs, nine-banded armadillos, or
even Tazmanian Devils.  The reason is simple: their bones and muscles
aren't configured to be a proportional-sized sauropod.

Ted's point here is simply irrelevant.  When you scale the performance
of animals to sauropod sizes, you run into no problems IF you account
for the changing cross section and leverage as observed across all four
footed animals.  For popular accounts of these sorts of effects, see
_The_Mechanics_of_Dinosaurs_and_other_Extinct_Giants_ by Alexander for
some details.  Also the inter-species vs intra-species scaling examples
in Gould's _Bully_for_Brontosaurus_. 

: What Throop is claiming requires the saur to be the stronger of the
: two, by more than a two-to-one ratio, at the same size.  I claim that is
: obviously and patently absurd, and I'm willing to rest my case this one. 
: Anybody wishing to believe Throop on this may feel free. 

"Look at my client, members of the jury.  Does he LOOK like the sort
of fellow who would rob a convenience store?"  Sorry, I'll go with
objective measurements and calculations any day over how something
looks in a picture.

So, basically, Ted is resting his case on facts irrelevant to the case.
--
Wayne Throop  ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw