Scientism

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I think I might actually be of the Scientific Worldview. I love Evolution, and, it seems to make the most sense to me. I am even reading through Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man. A lot of it is quite boring though. Besides, I wonder how many of you were into dinosaurs when you were young?

This is part of how I was weird actually. Dinosaurs are pretty normal. I was into that plus astronomy and space, math, chemistry, and I chased my parents around to both take me to natural science museums (we lived near Ann Arbor MI at the time so the options weren't bad) as well as go to some of the stores that were selling raw gem stones - I still have a box of citrines, amethysts, quartz, etc. from almost thirty-five years ago sitting around here somewhere.

I used to hear psychologists, in describing Asperger's, use an analogy of a little boy who had all kinds of star maps and was fascinated with them and asked a parent or therapist with a straight face how we discovered their names. I'm half afraid I literally could have been that kid.

Science is amazing and powerful but also fundamentally limited.
Putting it in place traditionally held by religions - ultimate truths and meanings of things - is usually full of logical fallacies.
Science works because of constant questioning of its particular claims. It never provides ultimate answers - just answers more or less useful for itself or technologies. Science provides more or less useful models of the reality, not its ultimate sense.

It's a fallacy to either put religion in place of science or to put science in place of religion.

I liked to tear the tails off of plastic dinosaurs and pretend that the tails were slithering snakes.

Or pretend that the dinosaurs themselves were dragons. Anyone ever notice that mythical dragons closely resemble dinosaurs?

Oh yes. As an adult I worked for a company that did merchandising (ie stocked the shelves) of retail stores. We did that for KB Toys (seems to have gone under since then) for the Xmas season. And I would pause from hauling and opening crates from the truck to watch little kids on the floor pushing around the one foot high plastic T-rexes, and having them fight the one foot tall dragon figurines, and I would marvel at the similarities and subtle differences between the two types of creatures.

Strictly speaking its really just one subset of dragon- the Wyvern (the two legged upright kind) that outwardly strongly resembles the upright dinosaurs of the Mesozoic (like the plant eating hadrosaurs, and the meat eating T-rexes).

The more horizontal four-plus legged dragons of both Europe, and East Asia, are much more serpent like in appearance.