Sep 19 2011

Just like every religion…

Categories:

Creationism, Humor

by PZ Myers

This post has no tag

29 comments

Skip to comment form ↓

1

Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls

19 September 2011 at 7:12 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

*headdesk*
Carbon dating to 300,000,000 years ago? I don’t think so Tim.
2

ChasCPeterson

19 September 2011 at 7:13 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Kid was full of crap anyway.
What was the catch phrase?

Oi, kid! There ain’t no carbon in it!

(and if there is it’s way way way too old)
3

Zeno

19 September 2011 at 7:13 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Arrghh! Wiley thinks carbon-dating works on dinosaur fossils. But he clearly understands religion better than he does science.
4

chigau

19 September 2011 at 7:20 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

“The quarry was formed…” by the folks with the bulldozers.
5

First Approximation

19 September 2011 at 7:34 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

What was the catch phrase?

There’s no f@#%in’ in it!
6

Becca Stareyes

19 September 2011 at 7:36 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Figured. I go to chime in on the carbon-dating comment and someone beat me to it.

I’ll settle for noting that 300 million years is too early for dinosaurs.
7

speedweasel

19 September 2011 at 7:39 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Fuck your blasphemy.
8

Wonderpants

19 September 2011 at 7:43 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Am I the only one to think that girl looks like Lil Suzy from the Jack Chick tracts?
9

Brother Ogvorbis, Fully Defenestrated Emperor of Steam, Fire and Absurdity

19 September 2011 at 7:43 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Yet another reason I am so glad I became a Park Ranger rather than a teacher.

Though Girl really, really, really wants to teach high school history and psychology.

I hope she is prepared for shit like this.
10

pelamun

19 September 2011 at 7:48 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

sorry if it’s OT, but since PZ was posting about Non Sequitur and also Pearls Before Swine on another thread…

The Houston Chronicle used to have this awesome comic buildup page, allowing you to keep up with a large number of newspaper comics (8 in my case) at the same time, very time-efficient. That site no longer works, anyone has a tip how I can get my daily NS and PbS etc fixes without having to visit each site? My understandig that there is nothing like the buildup page anywhere, where you could look at 8 comics in one click, is correct isn’t it?
11

barbrykost

19 September 2011 at 8:17 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Pelamun, try gocomics.com
Requires registration, but doesn’t spam you.
12

God

19 September 2011 at 8:32 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

The story line in the comic is Danae (The pontificating little girl) has decided to form her own religion, mainly so she make up her own commandments- The best one being “Thou shall make room for donuts” followed by a belch.
13

Birger Johansson

19 September 2011 at 8:34 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Hmm…if there are layers of volcanic ash in among the fossil-bearing strata you can date them using isotopes (but not carbon isotopes). You now have an absolute date for the layers bracketing the trace fossils. Now check exactly which fossils are present in the quarry and see which date (or rather, period) they correlate to in well-dated sites.
— — — — —

BTW, 300 Myr ago is about the time of the first amphibians. An interesting time with high oxygen content of the air, making gigantism common among invertebrates. The first primitive “trees” contained lignin that was not easily biodegradeable, thus sequestering coal while the oxygen released through photosynthesis remained in the air.
This is followed by a gap with few well-preserved fossils.

Some million years later you get very diverse amphibians as well as the first stem-amniotes (reptiles).
This is the time of the divergence of the line that led to very clever parrots and the line that led to humans, so complex brains arose twice.
14

tfkreference

19 September 2011 at 8:48 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Scientific inaccuracies aside, it’s good to see this message in a popular medium like the comics. Wiley actually exaggerates the difference between the YEC belief and the scientific estimate of how long it’s been since the dinosaurs by an extra five orders of magnitude, which adds to the irony of the message (don’t let the facts get in the way of your beliefs).
15

coralline

19 September 2011 at 9:35 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

pelamun, #10:

If you happen to use linux (I’m pretty sure there’s equivalent for Macs and Windows machines, too), there’s a nice little widget called “Comic Strip” which will download and cycle through a huge number of comics (of which, of course, you can choose what you want to see). I’d search for something like “comic strip applet” or “comic strip widget” online.
16

Rey Fox

19 September 2011 at 9:44 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

I get the feeling that people are going to not notice the cover of her book and consider her a brave Warrior for Truth.
17

Glen Davidson

19 September 2011 at 10:10 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

I think that if Danae had questioned the “carbon dating,” it wouldn’t have been much of a joke–or much of a point. And please, it wasn’t said the best, but we know what the kid presumably meant when he said that the quarry was formed 300 mya.

Sort of a last Thursdayism joke, as in, why do fundamentalists get their nonsense privileged, while Danae is supposed to be ridiculous claiming that it occurred 67 years ago? Well it is actually more absurd, since we have county records that say otherwise, the point being that both are silly, unscientific BS.

6000 years actually makes no sense either, as nothing but endless miracles could explain geology within that time period.

Glen Davidson
18

pelamun

19 September 2011 at 10:23 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

11, 15, thank you for your suggestions.

GoComics looks great, I got 5 out of my 8 there, but maybe it’s time to change the line-up…

I don’t have Linux, but I tried looking for widgets (my google-fu can be weak sometimes), but the ones I’ve found so far only display one at the time… But I’ve thought about comic aggregators in the past, I wish there was some kind of way to keep track of webcomics too, but most of them don’t have RSS, so it’s a mess… Does that Linux widget you speak of work with any random webcomic site as well, or does it have to be maintained by hand (maybe similar to the way Instapaper is able to save entire articles from certain websites it has been optimised for)?
19

David Marjanović, OM

19 September 2011 at 11:40 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

I’ll settle for noting that 300 million years is too early for dinosaurs.

Yep. 230 maximum.

300 Myr ago is about the time of the first amphibians

More like 335.
20

Escuerd

19 September 2011 at 12:19 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Wiley actually exaggerates the difference between the YEC belief and the scientific estimate of how long it’s been since the dinosaurs by an extra five orders of magnitude…

I think you mean by a factor of five (and that would only be if the student were referring to the dinpsaurs’ extinction rather than some other point in their history). Off by five orders of magnitude would mean off by a factor of 10^5.
21

tfkreference

19 September 2011 at 1:31 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Thanks, Escuerd, I was thinking that a million was 10^9, not 10^6. It’s only exaggerated by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude.

YEC age of dinosaurs: 6 x 10^3 years ago.
Scientific age of dinosaurs: 2 x 10^8 to 6 x 10^7 years ago
(4 or 5 orders of magnitude difference)

Danae’s age of the dinosaurs: 7 x 10^1 years ago
Other kid’s age of the dinosaurs: 3 x 10^7 years ago
(6 orders of magnitude difference)
22

tfkreference

19 September 2011 at 1:34 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

My coffee still hasn’t kicked in: the other kid’s estimate is 3×10^8 years ago, meaning 7 orders of magnitude, so an exaggeration of 2 or 3 orders.
23

Sili

19 September 2011 at 2:39 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

I think I’ll just consider myself an adanaeist.
24

Therrin

19 September 2011 at 2:55 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

pelamun

That site no longer works, anyone has a tip how I can get my daily NS and PbS etc fixes without having to visit each site?

Buy a newspaper.
25

What a Maroon

19 September 2011 at 3:15 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

I think I’ll just consider myself an adanaeist.

Why do you hate donuts?
26

pelamun

19 September 2011 at 4:06 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Therrin, US-centric much? Where I am right now buying the newspaper would not help me at all. Even in the US I’d usually buy the New York Times (and subscribe to its Sunday edition), now tell me where the funny pages are in that newspaper!
27

pelamun

19 September 2011 at 4:11 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

I think I’ll just consider myself an adanaeist.

Why do you hate donuts?

“Thou shalt tax everyone else” also sounds like a great commandment!

(http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2011/09/10)
28

What a Maroon

19 September 2011 at 9:52 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment

Therrin, US-centric much? Where I am right now buying the newspaper would not help me at all.

FWIW, Non Sequitur runs in the International Herald Tribune (along with reruns of Calvin and Hobbes, which are still better than 99.99999% of the cartoons out there now).

Not much else, though.
29

pelamun

20 September 2011 at 8:30 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment

FWIW, Non Sequitur runs in the International Herald Tribune (along with reruns of Calvin and Hobbes, which are still better than 99.99999% of the cartoons out there now).

Not much else, though.

I do buy the IHT whenever I have the chance, but it doesn’t have all 8 of my regulars (I used to read a Texas newspaper in hard copy, and later when switching to the online H.Chronicle builder page, I limited myself to 8 comics)