"Dinosaurs Swimming Between Continents" Is Their Latest Escalation of Commitment

There are many similarities between Old World monkeys and New World Monkeys.  Committed to the assumption that such similarities must be because of common descent, Darwinist professors maintain that the New World monkeys are descendants of the Old World monkeys, and that such an ancestry was able to occur because some Old World monkeys rafted across the Atlantic ocean something like 40 million years ago, arriving in the New World.  Such an idea is supremely unbelievable for several reasons: (1) the incredible improbability of a sea-worthy raft appearing accidentally from logs or vegetation; (2) the almost equally great improbability that any monkeys would ever swim out to sea and jump on such a raft; (3) the almost equally great improbability that such monkeys could ever survive a voyage across the Atlantic. 

You can make some rough estimates:

(1) Chance per year that a stable raft might accidentally form, one sea-worthy enough to take monkeys across the Atlantic: less than  in a trillion.

(2) Chance that monkeys would ever swim out and jump on such a raft, and stay on it as it floated out to sea: less than 1 in a billion.

(3) Chance that monkeys on such a raft would ever survive a voyage across the Atlantic: less than 1 in a thousand.

The overall likelihood of such a trans-Atlantic monkey voyage per year would be less than the product of all three of these independent probabilities multiplied together: 1 in a trillion times 1 in a billion times 1 in a thousand, which gives a probability of less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 per year.  The chance that such a thing would have occurred during a 10-million year window of opportunity is, according to such an estimation, less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000.

Now a new fossil discovery has caused Darwinist authorities to tell us another tall tale as silly as the story of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic ocean. We read in a CNN report, "The new dinosaur, Ajnabia odysseus, a member of the plant-eating duckbill dinosaur family, was discovered in rocks in a mine in Morocco, dating back some 66 million years to the end of the Cretaceous period."  The report tells us this: "Nicholas Longrich, a senior lecturer at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, who led the study, described the discovery of the fossil as 'about the last thing in the world you would expect.' " The report claims that duckbill dinosaurs originated in North America, and later spread to South America, Asia and Europe.  Another news account quotes a scientist as saying the discovery was "completely out of place, like finding a kangaroo in Scotland." 

At the time there existed a dinosaur corresponding to the fossil (about 66 million years ago), there was no land bridge between the Middle East and Africa, and Africa was completely isolated.  So how could one of these duckbill dinosaurs (called hadrosaurs) have got to an Africa surrounded by water? One of the scientists suggests an answer: that these dinosaurs swam or rafted between continents, raveling more than  250 miles.  In the Daily Mail we read, "Longrich told MailOnline that it would have had to swim about 250 miles or so, probably from somewhere in what is now Europe." 

Once again we have a Darwinist authority telling a very unbelievable  story to try to explain a fossil discovery that does not fit in naturally with a theory's predictions.  In the CNN story, we read the following:

" 'Sherlock Holmes said, once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,' said Longrich. 'It was impossible to walk to Africa. These dinosaurs evolved long after continental drift split the continents, and we have no evidence of land bridges. The geology tells us Africa was isolated by oceans. If so, the only way to get there is by water.' "

Be very suspicious whenever anyone quotes Sherlock Holmes saying once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. It is typically a strong indicator that you are about to be sold some incredibly implausible nonsense. Of course, the idea of dinosaurs swimming 250 miles across the open ocean is nonsense and bunk.  Large land animals have never been observed naturally swimming very many miles across very large bodies of water that did not have ice surfaces for resting.  

Reports of a polar bear that swam for hundreds of miles in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska typically fail to mention that almost certainly such an animal was able to rest on ice surfaces while making such a journey.  The post here clarifies the situation: 

"But check out this qualifier from the methods section of the newest study (Pilfold et al.2016: 3rd page):

'Following Pagano et al. (2012), we defined ‘long-distance’ as any swim > 50 km, and included instances when a polar bear may have rested briefly (≤ 16 h) on non-detectable ice floes during a swim as a single event.' my bold]

So, for all of these studies, a 16 hour rest was the same as no rest at all and it was known that there were likely ice floes large enough for a bear to rest on in the Beaufort Sea that could not be detected by satellites. Got it – stopping on ghost ice for half a day didn’t count as a rest. Those long swims were assumed to be ‘non-stop’ but there is no evidence that they actually were, since what was reported as open-water could have been filled with undetectable ice flows easily used by polar bears to rest between swims."

In a water area of 250 miles between Europe and Africa or the Middle East and Africa, there would not have been any such ice surfaces for a swimming animal to rest on, and there would have been no reason for an animal to make a very long swimming journey (unlike the global warming reasons why polar bears may make long swims).  So the idea of two duckbill dinosaurs making such a 250-mile swim to get to Africa is ridiculous.  No human has ever swum more than 139 miles in a single swim, and whoever did that had some "break a world record" motivation a dinosaur would never have. A dinosaur reference tells us this about the tail of the duck-billed dinosaur: "the stiff tail is not believed to have been used for swimming."  The body shape below looks like one best suited for running rather than swimming. 

Duckbill dinosaurs looked like this (not a great body for long-distance swimming)

Longrich claims that "ocean crossings are needed to explain how lemurs and hippos got to Madagascar, or how monkeys and rodents crossed from Africa to South America." This is not true, and such tall tales are needed only if you are wedded to Darwinist origin theories, and the claim that all animals have a common ancestor.  Thinking that lemurs swum to Madagascar (about 200 miles from Africa) is almost as silly as thinking dinosaurs swum 250 miles to Africa. 

The type of duckbill dinosaurs which Longrich would have us believe traveled across 250 miles of water are called hadrosaurs. An article written years ago explains reasons why such hadrosaurs could not have been very good swimmers.  The article is entitled "Why Hadrosaurs Could Not Swim Well." The article explains reasons such as "hadrosaurs could not paddle with their feet," and  "hadrosaurs' tails weren't strong enough to propel them through water," and concludes, "hadrosaurs were one of the worst swimmers among the dinosaurs."  Since the fossils found in Morocco correspond to an organism three meters long,  weighing much more more than a human, there is no credible rafting theory than can explain such a 250-mile sea journey to Africa by two such organisms (some "raft of vegetation" being insufficient to hold animals of such a weight). 

In the willingness of some to accept these very absurd tales such as trans-Atlantic rafting monkeys, and poorly-swimming dinosaurs swimming 250 miles to Africa, we see what seems to be an example of what is called escalation of commitment.  Escalation of commitment is when someone makes more and more of a commitment to some decision or investment or theory, despite mounting evidence that the original decision to support such a  decision or investment or theory was in error.  The people engaging in escalation of commitment rather seem to have a motto of "keep throwing dollars where you've thrown a dime," or "if you find yourself in a hole, keep digging" or "believe anything required to back up what you previously maintained." 

Escalation of commitment can occur when a person devotes more and more dollars or time to a failing project.  Escalation of commitment can occur when someone responds to a stock investment loss by investing more and more money in the stock with a dropping value. Escalation of commitment can occur in a company when some executive is unable to admit that he hired the wrong person when an employee performs poorly, and kind of "proves to himself" that he hired the right person by promoting the bungling employee.  

Escalation of commitment can occur to a theorist when he adds more and more belief requirements to try and salvage some theory that is failing observational tests, or seeming more and more implausible as time goes on.  A theory that seemed "clean and simple and beautiful" at the beginning may turn into something "dirty and byzantine and ugly," as more and more belief requirements are added to the theory to try to explain its failure to predict reality correctly. Below is a typical scenario, in which a theory becomes more and more implausible, as more and more "epicycles" are added to it to try to fix its observational failures, with E, F, G and H all being far-fetched claims:

Starting date	Version 1 of theory: requires belief in A and B.
Later date	Some observation seems to conflict with the theory.
Later date	Version 2 of theory: requires belief in A, B, and C.
Later date	Some observation seems to conflict with the theory.
Later date	Version 3 of theory: requires belief in A, B, C and D.
Later date	Some observation seems to conflict with the theory.
Later date	Version 4 of theory: requires belief in A, B, C, D and E.
Later date	Some observation seems to conflict with the theory.
Later date	Version 5 of theory: requires belief in A, B, C, D, E  and F.
Later date	Some observation seems to conflict with the theory.
Later date	Version 6 of theory: requires belief in A, B, C, D E, F and G.
Later date	Some observation seems to conflict with the theory.
Later date	Version 7 of theory: requires belief in A, B, C, D E, F, G and H.

For biology professors, the most dramatic escalations of commitment have occurred as ever-more-organized and ever-more-fine-tuned biological units have been discovered, and as the professors have kept saying each time, "Even these wonders of organization arose accidentally."  Gradually, over a long period, it was discovered that there are some 20,000 complex inventions inside each of us (the 20,000 different types of protein molecules in our bodies), and also 200 different types of cells in us (each gradually found to be as functionally complex as cities or factories).  When units so fine-tuned and organized were claimed to be explicable under the prevailing theory,  gigantic escalations of commitment were taking place. And when it was discovered that eukaryotic cells were just too complex to have arose through any gradual process, and there arose a weird legend of eukaryogenesis by endosymbiosis (cells suddenly becoming vastly more complex and organized by gulping up other cells), this very strange belief requirement also was a huge escalation of commitment. 

Having wedded themselves to the notion of a purposeless origin of biological organisms, certain people will seemingly accept many an absurdity that follows from such an idea, following partisan professors down any rabbit hole, no matter how deep.  At no point does it ever occur to such people to ask whether credulity has been strained too much. Innumerable weighty straw-bundles are heaped upon the camel's back, each a new belief requirement required by the original assumption; and such people will never ask whether the latest one has broken the camel's back, requiring one to finally look for alternatives to the original assumption. Faced with evidence of extremely precise fine-tuning in the universe's fundamental constants, which dramatically subverts their "purposeless nature" assumptions, such people will not hesitate to postulate a multiverse of innumerable universes, which is like piling a million additional straw bundles on the camel's back.  And when some fossils are found that seem to defy their beloved theory, such people will not hestitate to believe in  poorly-swimming dinosaurs swimming across 250 miles to Africa, and also monkeys rafting across the Atlantic, and also lemurs swimming across 200 miles to Madagascar.   If you told such people that to preserve their cherished worldview they must believe in a thousand land mammals swimming 10,000 miles across the Pacific, from Peru to China, very many would probably say something like, "Well, whatever it takes." 

In my US state there was an interesting example of escalation of commitment. Decades ago a corporation started to build a nuclear power plant, the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, originally planned to cost 70 million dollars. As time went on, the cost of the plant grew higher and higher and higher, eventually reaching 5 billion dollars. No one would have ever started the project if they had known it would cost that much. But having committed so many resources to the project, and having their prestige so tied to the success of the project, the corporation executives just couldn't bear to "pull the plug" and admit they had made a mistake.  The Shoreham plant was eventually sold for the price of $1, and never even went into operation. 

We can compare this result to the escalation of commitment during the Vietnam War. It started out as a fairly reasonable proposition: just send a few advisors to a tiny Asian country. But the commitments kept escalating, as more and more billions were spent, more and more bombs were dropped, and more and more American soldiers died. The final result was that the US ended up spending 168 billion dollars (about a trillion in today's dollars), and losing 58,000 soldiers in a war that ended in defeat for the United States. 

The lesson of all these cases is that intelligent men can bring about end products that are extremely absurd, through a very gradual process of escalation of commitment. Similarly, a man wishing to drive from St. Louis to New York may end up driving halfway to Los Angeles, if he starts down the wrong road and stubbornly keeps saying to himself, "I've driven too far down this road to turn back now." Such a person may imaginatively explain away all kinds of evidence that he is traveling in the wrong direction. So when he sees a setting sun in front of him in the evening (contrary to his belief that he is driving to the east), he may explain away this sight as some slowly falling glowing meteor or a defect in his vision or a hallucination, like those explaining away unexpected "out-of-place" fossils by telling tall tales of miracle-swimmer dinosaurs or trans-Atlantic rafting monkeys. 

Postscript: If you do a Google image search for "oceanic dispersal," you can find maps depicting claims that plants or animals somehow crossed oceans long before there were any boats. The page here has one of those maps, which appeared in a scientific paper.  The arrows in the map tell us a large set of vastly improbable tall tales of oceanic movements before the existence of boats, such as (1) the claim that eons ago monkeys and cotton plants traveled from Africa to South America; (2) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from South America to Africa; (3) the claim that eons ago gecko lizards traveled from Africa to Cuba; (4) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from North America and Africa to Australia; (5) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from Australia to Hawaii;  (6) the claim that eons ago chameleons and frogs traveled 200 miles between  Madagascar and Africa; (7) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from New Zealand to South America; (8) the claim that eons ago some plant traveled from India to New Zealand; and (9) the claim that eons ago some trees traveled between Africa and Australia.