Posted on 02/17/2005 3:10:32 PM PST by DannyTN
"The term automobile didn't exist until they actually had to name it."
Adam didn't name the auto? ;-)
microgood: So you were lying when you posted all those supposed transitional fossils.
Always, always you bludgeon with your ability to misunderstand. This doesn't make you a scientist. It simply forces people to ask themselves whether you're telling the truth about what you know. Did no one before me ever try to explain this stuff to you? You've said as much. That seems improbable, given that you've been on these threads a bit. And yet you really don't seem to know anything.
Will you be back again dumb as a stump on the next thread claiming no one ever explains evolution to you? Even if we believe that, again, how do you know it's wrong if no one has ever even explained it to you and you've never tried to Google it on your own or went to the library and checked out a non-cretinist book?
What's supposed to be a lie about the fossil evidence? How do petrified bones lie?
The fossils posted inline and/or linked are real. Those arranged in a series occur in the fossil record in the order shown. They indeed show a transformation in progress. Creationist strawman versions of evolution like yours and antihannity's say this progress should reveal a dinosaur changing into a bird or a mouse changing into a bat--one actual individual or mouse fossilized mid-transformation in one generation. And how would the fossil of one individual even show that? All a fossil can do is just lay there.
Evolution says whole populations change over time. The average genetic makeup of the average individual within the population changes. "A shift in allele frequences," is a common term. I prefer the classical Darwinian "variation and natural selection," which is still accurate anyway.
So now you're going to know this, right? Wrong! You're a back-again-dumb-as-a-stumper.
So now if I go along with gradual evolution than you have to see transitional fossils but you have just stated there aren't any so I have to buy into punctuated equilibrium, which is good for you evolutionists because then I would not see any fossils. I guess this means you are a punctuated equilibrium type like Gould.
Puctuated equilibrium is a Darwinian model. I suppose no one has ever tried to tell you about that, either. I post the following web sites so the lurkers can learn something. One thing they'll learn is that there's no excuse for you showing up on the next thread as ignorant as you are today, which you will do come Hell or high water.
Speciation by Punctuated Equilibrium, including lots of links to lots of examples.
All you need to know about Punctuated Equilibrium (almost). Nicely documents how little new there is to punk-eek.
I am not a creationist.
No, you're a lying a$$hole.
I just do not believe evolution is correct.
People generally don't twist themselves into pretzel shapes for no reason. Your behavior is absolutely classic militant Holy Warrior Syndrome. Think more about what your story is before the next thread where you show up knowing nothing nothing nothing but spewing away nevertheless.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of conservative ones.
Then you obviously didn't understand it. No, it does not.
The section on transitional species convinced me even more that there is no macroevolution
How on *earth* did it do that?
and I have read all 29 of the supposed evidences of macroevolution.
And yet you still don't get it?
But for me macroevolution goes all the way back.
Well, of course.
If it cannot show how we got from a single cell to a human being,
It can, so there you have it.
I will not believe it can go from an ape
Even though there is overwhelming evidence that it has?
or as of this week a platypus to a human.
What *are* you babbling about here?
To go from a single cell to a creature with arms and legs and a brain and even over 100 trillion years by random mutation is simply not believable.
Fortunately, reality is not limited to what you personally are able to find "believable".
And of course many evolutionists back away from that and just do the ape to human stuff,
Huh? Who exactly "backs away from that"?
but it still does not answer the basic question of why if we came from a single cell, and there are not creatures turning into different species with partially formed arms or legs (since such a complex thing cannot occur in one mutation).
Could you rephrase that into an actual sentence which makes sense?
Thus the latest inference is punctuated equilibrium and here we are.
Horse manure. Punctuated equilibrium was described by Darwin in 1859. It's a logical consequence of the dynamics of evolutionoary processes.
...which you'd know if you had actually bothered reading the talkorigins.org site for educational purposes.
[...]
and I have read all 29 of the supposed evidences of macroevolution.
The astute reader will note that microgood directly contradicts himself here. So which statement is a lie? Or are both?
I posted the picture and you think you wish it away by not understanding how it lived? The limb in question is on an early (Cretaceous) bird. Before someone brings it up, it wasn't the most "modern" (as we would now consider it) bird species in the world at the time, but I'd say that's a good answer to your attempted point. It had an adaptation. Its seeming "throwback" status (being less developed in one certain direction than some other bird) did not hurt it at the time. The wing has unfused "hand" bones which clearly show the creature's quite recent saurian descent, but the bird could fly. Maybe it still made some use of the forelimb as a grasping claw from time to time, or maybe that potential was a useless vestige by then.
Not every bird is a wonderful flyer now. Some of them can't fly at all now. There are or were in recent times flightless bird species on many of the islands of the world. It is always one species per island except in the case of swimmers like penguins and auks. That's either because each island evolved its own species that originally flew there but lost flight over time, or else The Designer never resuses designs for flightless birds unless they can swim.
Maybe I'm confused about the whole survival-of-the-fittest thing, but even if something is shown to have come about slowly, incrementally, it doesn't necessarily follow that it is the product of blind chance.
Yes, you are confused. (That's how Creation Science is done!)
Natural selection is not blind chance. Variation is more or less random, a distribution about a population average. Natural selection is a bias, a pruning.
I don't think I'm an idiot, too (although that's never a safe assumption). These are questions that should be easily answered, since they are pretty common-sense ones, really, and I'm sure have been asked many times before.
Ah, the wail of unsatisfied intellectual curiosity! I'll help you out. Here's the hurdle you're stumbling over. Most people in the middle of these debates suspect that those who really want to learn about evolution will go to the library and check out a book, or Google up a non-creationist website. Everyone is born innocently ignorant of everything. Past a certain age, they address it in school or by self-education in various ways.
The people who wander through these discussions bludgeoning evolution with their ability to play "Twist and Shout" upon it and slaughter strawman versions of it are suspected of not maybe telling the whole truth about who they are and what they are up to. Especially since none of them ever remember Jack from one thread to the next.
So that's your problem. One burning question of these threads is whether "ID," the accumulated disingenuous misunderstandings to date of seething evoluton deniers (99 percent of whom only know the kind of "science" available on sites like ICR and AiG) deserves a slice of the science curriculum in High School.
I'm curious. You concede you might be confused. Are you willing to go into a High School and present your confusion as evidence against evolution? I've been debating creationists for six years now on FR. There are no good pennies among the creation/ID arguments. I don't know of one that bears up under examination. Any and all can be torn to shreds by any of several posters that I can name. I see it done repeatedly, and it never matters. The essence of the opposition is that, so long as they are confused, they're right.
Congratulations, you fell for a creationist's lie. How proud you must be.
Here's a post I wrote about this on another thread:
Now, "antihannityguy", I'm curious to know whether you've learned anything about the reliability and honest of "creation scientists" from this experience. And I'm curious to know if you're in any way upset that they lied to you.In layman’s terms, these volcanic rocks that we know were formed in 1986—less than 20 years ago—were “scientifically” dated to between 290,000 and 3.4 million years old!
No, in layman's terms Austin the creationist is either a fool or a charlatan (perhaps both).
"In layman's terms", here's what he did wrong (I'll leave it to you to decide whether he did so out of dishonesty or incompetence):
1. He chose an analysis lab which CLEARLY STATES that its analysis equipment is not sensitive enough to correctly measure samples less than two million years old. Read that again until it sinks in.
2. Austin then took the first set of measured results, WHICH INDICATED LESS THAN TWO MILLION YEARS OLD, and rather than doing what an honest scientist would have done (which is say, "ah, these results are below the lower bounds of the testing equipment, thus they're just reporting equipment noise"), instead Austin ran around in circles and tried to ridicule K/AR dating for giving him out-of-bounds results that made perfect sense.
3. As for the 2.8 +/- 0.6 Mya sub-sample, Austin sort of "forgets" to inform the reader that almost without exception lava rock contains what are known as "inclusions", which are bits of older crystalline mineral mixed in with the fresh lava flow. A volcanic eruption is a violent and hardly "clean" event and pulverized (but unmelted) minerals are incorporated into the lava as it flows up and outward from the volcano. These inclusions will produce K/Ar dates older than the date of the lava flow because they are, indeed, *older* than the lava flow. A real scientist (unlike, say, Austin) will take a great deal of care to extract inclusions from his sample before sending it to a lab to determine the date when the lava itself flowed, and/or hand-pick a "clean" lava sample which has relatively few inclusions compared to the flow as a whole. That's because they *want* to get as valid a date as possible for the lava flow. Now, guess what Austin didn't do? Gee, now guess *why* he didn't do it? Can you say, "*trying* to get an apparently invalid date so as to have a cheap, dishonest excuse to allege that there's something 'wrong' with K/Ar dating"?
As the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out" and Austin (unlike the honest scientists who *want* to produce valid dates) had no interest in getting a clean result -- the more "garbage" the result, the more he could claim a creationist "success". So he *submitted* garbage as his sample (i.e., a sample with inclusions, to a lab unable to date anything younger than roughly two million years).
As Henry Barwood notes, "Bad measurements, like bad science, reflect only on the measurer (Austin), not on the measurement (the procedure)."
For more details, see: Young-Earth Creationist 'Dating' of a Mt. St. Helens Dacite: The Failure of Austin and Swenson to Recognize Obviously Ancient Minerals. More at: Skeptics Visit the "Museum of Creation and Earth History" .
Here is a link showing similar problems with the Rubidium-Strontium dating method. Where one set of rocks are dated much older than they are known to be.
Exact same issue (lava rock with inclusions) submitted by the exact same creationist "researcher" (Steven A. Austin). He appears to be a one-trick pony.
Whether such problems have been identified in all radiometric dating methods, I do not know.
"Such problems"? Yeah, if you submit "dirty" samples for testing, you get "dirty" results. So what else is new? Honest scientists clean their samples first. Creationist "scientists" don't, then try to discredit the testing methods when they get bogus results. Go figure.
But it certainly casts significant doubt on it.
The only thing it "certainly casts significant doubt on" is the honesty/competence of "creation scientists".
I'd also like to see replies from K4Harty and D Rider to those some inquiries, since they hooted approvingly at your repetition of this creationist lie...
Hint: Trying to "learn" about science from a creationist source is like trying to "learn" about conservatism from Michael Moore.
Fascinating... And about what timespan *do* you think it will "show"?
Little do you know how little you know...
I could literally *bury* you in the facts evolution is "built on", if you'd meet me in any reasonably well-stocked research library.
Where do you guys *get* these goofy beliefs?
Actually, that's an easy one to explain evolutionarily. But I'm *really* curious to hear how the "God designed us" folks try to explain it... Why'd He give us something useless like that?
Anyone who claims that evolutionary biology is about "random or by chance" quite simply doesn't understand it. But that's the common creationist cartoon-version of it. I just wish they'd bother to *learn* something about the topic before they spout off.
I can't imagine a transitional series such as evolution actually predicts which cannot be dismissed as evidence by this kind of lawyering. Clearly, you will happily do this indefinitely.
Look at me, Zippy! This is important.
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Furthermore, almost as an aside, let me add that what is reasonably expected from the fossil record isn't missing. What is missing isn't reasonably expected. We have about the fossil record we would expect from what we know of evolution and geology in 2005.
Because the creationist manure-mills keep spewing mega-tons of disinformation about it.
There are no secular skeptics of evolution who think there has to be a separate mechanism for "macro" and "microevolution," or that evidence for one is not evidence for the other. You see, the "micro" lawyers are saying that there are some N original "created kinds" like the lists in Genesis and "microevolution" is the allowed variation these baramin can have.
It keeps turning out your science is YEC science.
Where is your evidence.
You mean *besides* all the evidence showing that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, and no humans of any kind existed before 2-3 million years ago?
If you read the Bible there are various passages about dragons and the leviathan. Dinosaur is a relatively new term invented in the 1800s I believe,
Well, since the evidence that dinosaurs died out looong before humans existed is about as ironclad as anything can be, you have two options here:
1. The Bible made a mistake.
2. The Bible is talking about creatures other than dinosaurs.
Your choice.
No, I wouldn't. Would you agree that creationists have, "on occasion", understated or misrepresented evolution and the evidence for it?
but the complexities that we see in biology, many of which required parallel evolution of system components that make no sense by themselves
Name your favorite example, let's see if you actually know the subject, or are parroting a misrepresentation by some creationist source.
leave leave some honest, not-too-stupid laymen suspicious about evolution as the ultimate answer.
See above -- is your "suspicion" based on actual deficits in evolutionary biology, or on creationist misrepresentation or "overstatements" about their own position?
I am not saying the world was created in six 24 hour periods.
That's a good start, anyway.
Nor am I saying that if all the apparent deficiencies in the theory were convincingly resolved in favor of evolution my faith would be crushed.
Good, because there's no need for such a conflict.
What I am saying is that I am neither convinced nor satisfied by the theory, so I don't feel like drying up and blowing away when someone with a different post-graduate degree than mine shakes the voodoo mask of Science in my direction while making spooky noises.
LOL! I like the imagery and your way with words, anyway, even while I disagree with the characterization.
Like I always tell people when I am preparing them for cross-examination. There's nothing wrong with saying "I don't know" if that's the honest answer.
You'll find that the creationists are far less likely to make such an admission than the scientists. :-)
But you remind me of one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes:
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know."
Most people would say that they show a slow morphing of shall we say adjacently similar things into something different. You need labels so you can go Google up some dumb-dumbisms from AiG to throw out some links and make them "missing" again.
I'll fast-forward us if you don't mind. I've already seen all those web pages and can do this faster than you, member since last night, can.
<Cretinism_mode>
Solly Zuckerman said bad stuff about Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis). Toss all the australopithecines.</Cretinism_mode>Some "evolutionists" argue that Homo habilis should be grouped with the australopithecines, so throw that out. Ergaster and erectus are close to the same, and Gish says erectus is some kind of ape. Toss.
Neanderthals are arthritic modern men. Toss. Cro-Magnon is modern man. Toss.
All gone! So where is the evidence?
But why does the picture make the picture it does? What would an example of "missing links" look like if not exactly that?
Second Why the personal attacks you sound like a liberal just personal attacking instead of having a polite discourse.
I'm already mad because for six years now I don't get answers and I'm not getting them from you. What are you thumping your chest and demanding? We have plenty of it. Plenty, plenty, plenty. Here's a list of just the vertebrate tree of life up to about 1997.
The whole posturing you guys do is all so bogus. You're never going to allow any evidence. Never. Why pretend otherwise?
Third The way that most Darwinists today claim that species evolve is through mutations.
When you show up demanding hard evidence already there in abundance for anyone who desires, don't expect anyone to care if no one can make you see your own misunderstandings about mechanism. We have incredible amounts of evidence for common descent. I want to see you got that before I waste any time explaining that we also understand a fair amount about how that happens.
Indeed. The anti-evolutionists seem to spend a lot of energy making such excuses. Here's my favorite, from a few days ago by another FR anti-evolutionist:
LOL. Nice rant. Doesn't pass for an argument; but, did you get it off your chest. I said it before and I'll say it again. Claiming piles of evidence doesn't make it so. Claiming something is evidence for a specific thing requires more than claiming it so. When it's evidence in support of a one or more other possibilities, it is hardly specific support. I'm saying nothing that first week logic students don't know; but, y'all sure don't act like you've ever been acquainted with it. I understand why you're reticent to just admit it's your "belief"; but, that doesn't make your endless claims any less dishonest or more scientific.That was his entire post. Note how pristinely devoid of ANY specificity this is. The exact same rant could be used to hand-wave away evidence/arguments for/against *anything* without changing a single word -- global warming, monetary policy, the Holocaust *or* its denial, the war in Iraq, etc. etc.
It's so all-encompassing in its "you can't convince me of anything I don't want to believe" subborness that it's like an archetype of closed-mindedness.
I'd ask you to try to guess who the author was, but the sad thing is that it's pretty typical of so *many* of them...
I think one of these days I may use that exact passage in reply to one of them, just to see how it goes over...
Post your favorite example from there of what "Darwinists" allegedly "overlook", and I'll show you why their material is not as "very good" as you believe it to be...
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