A professor at the University of Vermont, Nicholas Gotelli, got an invitation to debate one of the clowns at the Discovery Institute. Here’s what they wrote.
Dear Professor Gotelli,
I saw your op-ed in the Burlington Free Press and appreciated your support
of free speech at UVM. In light of that, I wonder if you would be open to
finding a way to provide a campus forum for a debate about evolutionary
science and intelligent design. The Discovery Institute, where I
work, has a
local sponsor in Burlington who is enthusiastic to find a way to make this
happen. But we need a partner on campus. If not the biology
department, then
perhaps you can suggest an alternative.Ben Stein may not be the best person to single-handedly represent the ID
side. As you’re aware, he’s known mainly as an entertainer. A more
appropriate alternative or addition might be our senior fellows David
Berlinski or Stephen Meyer, respectively a mathematician and a philosopher
of science. I’ll copy links to their bios below. Wherever one comes down in
the Darwin debate, I think we can all agree that it is healthy for students
to be exposed to different views–in precisely the spirit of inviting
controversial speakers to campus, as you write in your op-ed.I’m hoping that you would be willing to give a critique of ID at such an
event, and participate in the debate in whatever role you feel comfortable
with.A good scientific backdrop to the discussion might be Dr. Meyer’s book that
comes out in June from HarperCollins, “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the
Evidence for Intelligent Design.”On the other hand, Dr. Belinski may be a good choice since he is a
critic of
both ID and Darwinian theory.Would it be possible for us to talk more about this by phone sometime soon?
With best wishes,
David Klinghoffer
Discovery Institute
You’ll enjoy Dr Gotelli’s response.
Dear Dr. Klinghoffer:
Thank you for this interesting and courteous invitation to set up a
debate about evolution and creationism (which includes its more
recent relabeling as “intelligent design”) with a speaker from the
Discovery Institute. Your invitation is quite surprising, given the
sneering coverage of my recent newspaper editorial that you
yourself posted on the Discovery Institute’s website:http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/02/
However, this kind of two-faced dishonesty is what the scientific
community has come to expect from the creationists.Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics
need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist
to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite
an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a
Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and
that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars.
Creationism is in the same category.Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren’t members of
your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed
journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by
scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish.
Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas
that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly
explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying
to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or
scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel
Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the
prominent mainstream journals.“Conspiracy” is the predictable response by Ben Stein and the
frustrated creationists. But conspiracy theories are a joke,
because science places a high premium on intellectual honesty and
on new empirical studies that overturn previously established
principles. Creationism doesn’t live up to these standards, so its
proponents are relegated to the sidelines, publishing in books,
blogs, websites, and obscure journals that don’t maintain
scientific standards.Finally, isn’t it sort of pathetic that your large, well-funded
institute must scrape around, panhandling for a seminar invitation
at a little university in northern New England? Practicing
scientists receive frequent invitations to speak in science
departments around the world, often on controversial and novel
topics. If creationists actually published some legitimate science,
they would receive such invitations as well.So, I hope you understand why I am declining your offer. I will
wait patiently to read about the work of creationists in the pages
of Nature and Science. But until it appears there, it isn’t science
and doesn’t merit an invitation.In closing, I do want to thank you sincerely for this invitation
and for your posting on the Discovery Institute Website. As an
evolutionary biologist, I can’t tell you what a badge of honor this
is. My colleagues will be envious.Sincerely yours,
Nick Gotelli
P.S. I hope you will forgive me if I do not respond to any further
e-mails from you or from the Discovery Institute. This has been
entertaining, but it interferes with my research and teaching.
I don’t think it’s a dinosaur, actually. I think it’s been improperly classified. We’re talking about a definite cold-blooded animal here; there’s no question regarding the “temperature of the blood” flowing through this creature. Besides, whatever twit named this species fucked up in their diagnosis. They named it Buttarsaurus Chris instead of Buttarsaurus chris as they should have. That’s a not a mistake a good biologist is likely to make. I interpret that as further evidence the namer didn’t know what the hell they were doing. As such, I feel fairly confident in condeming their systematics.
I bet it’s a pelycosaur or something (there’s probably a fin hiding back there out of the frame).
Sure, but “dromaeosaurine” teeth are so far unique.
Yes. =8-)
Yes, though it’s not clear which species it is.
What kills Aussie lungfish out of water, but not in their aestivation burrows?
There is no such thing as a pelycosaur, and that photo with the absurdly short snout points at an iguanian squamate.
Interesting to see that Nat hasn’t come back. Is he really heeding our advice and reading about radiometric dating?
Nat>crucifix>Onan.
And no such thing as a “monkey.”
I’m going to go out on a limb and say–no… We could wager something on it, but given what we’ve seen out of Nat so far, will we be able to tell even if he did go and study up? There might not be a noticable difference.
Call me cynical, but it’s difficult to say that with certainty when the vast majority of work on dromaeosaurid teeth (unless I missed some major comparative study on teeth in skulls) has been done on isolated teeth, and not on teeth that are sitting in the jaws of known dromaeosaurs (and thus definitively dromaeosaur). There is some circularity in the way people tend to approach dromaeosaurid teeth. Especially when people are using, as their sources, studies that were done on mostly or all isolated teeth themselves.
Until someone gets a handle on the actual range of morphological variation in dromaeosaurid teeth (based on real teeth in skulls), I remain skeptical when someone tells me about their new tooth discovery.
“Hey, I have this cool dromaeosaurid tooth from X locality.”
“Cool! But how do you know it’s a dromaeosaurid tooth?”
“Well, it looks like one. I compared it to the descriptions and illustrations in these papers.”
“Huh…those papers are focused on isolated teeth and these two over here have really vague tooth descriptions. How many actual definitive dromaeosaurid teeth have you looked at.”
“Well, I read Ostrom, 1969.”
Doesn’t cut it. I’m not saying they’re wrong. I’m saying that I reserve the right to remain skeptical.
Maybe so, boyo, maybe so, but I’ll say there’s no such thing as a naughty monkey.
That’s my point about the “dromaeosaurine” teeth. “Velociraptorine” ones have a rather unremarkable shape and are similar to the teeth of many theropods; “dromaeosaurine” ones are so far distinctive.
Deinonychus has “velociraptorine” teeth, though some analyses have found it as a basal dromaeosaurine.
Correction, father. I was frequently a naughty little monkey. My mum partiularly objected to me masturbating in front of visitors and throwing shit at their cars. Ah, happy days. Still, a year on….
Isn’t “naughty monkey” Isis’s favorite brand of silly expensive shoes? Somebody who can stomach her style ought to link over there.
Distinctive, yes. Definitive, No.
Anthony, you poor, poor lad. You were never a naughty little moneky, you just needed to be loved. Come to me, child. Come to me.
Sorry Father, not this time. How do you think I got to be so naughty in the first place?
Lax parental influence and a childhood filled with coffee?
No, just too many Fathers.
Australian Lungfish don’t aestivate. Wikipedia (citing a field guide to Australian fishes) says they can survive for a out of water for a couple of days if kept moist. Knut Schmidt-Nielse in “Animal Physiology” (1997) says “it also aestivates in dry periods, but it depends much less on the lung and is primarily a gill breather”. And then refutes this on the next page, showing a graph where the poor beastie starts asphyxiating
Hey, he’s just like PeeZee, no argument, just arguing.
THAT’S the way we all like it! :-)
<headdesk><headdesk><headdesk>
I thought so, but I was too lazy to look it up. Si tacuissem…!
Days? That’s not bad!
Pfft. I can survive _years_ out of water if kept moist! Beat that, lungfish!
Greetings Kel,
One of the evolutionists angry at me during the course of our ‘discussions’ (probably the one with the foul mouth whom I won’t respond to) apparently downloaded 65 packets of corrupt information which, with the help of expensive experts I’ve finally cleaned up. My computer is just now working again. Sorry about the delay
It seems to me that there are a number of issues here when it comes to understand ERV-K. First of all these “retroviral” DNA sequences may not viral at all but rather another form of retrotransposon. Thus, it would be another created tool for horizontal gene (and non-gene DNA) transfer. The jury is still out on that.
In addition, there is clearly a very real problem with what biological molecules (DNA and proteins) tell the evolutionary scientist, versus what morphology (fossils) says. Evolutionary medical journalist Trish Gura exposed this weakness when addressing a raging debate within evolutionary circles: “When biologists talk of the “evolution wars,” they usually mean the ongoing battle for supremacy in American schoolrooms between Darwinists and their creationist opponents. But the phrase could also be applied to a debate that is raging within systematics. On one side stand traditionalists who have built evolutionary trees from decades of work on species’ morphological characteristics. On the other lie molecular systematists, who are convinced that comparisons of DNA and other biological molecules are the best way to unravel the secrets of evolutionary history.” (Nature v 406). New Scientist recently admitted that the neat, classical Darwinian tree of systematics “lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence.” (New Scientist 2692).
Human ‘evolution’ has also recently taken a pummeling from within. Formerly rock-solid examples of our alleged ape-like ancestors have been removed, without fanfare, from the classic transitional ape-to-man series that is still found in public school textbooks. DNA makes clear that [Homo erectus] was almost certainly a dead end and not our ancestor. Even Lucy is no longer a missing link. “Lucy’s kind occupied only a side branch of human evolution. A. afarensis evolved into the relatively small-brained, large-jawed robust australopithecines but didn’t contribute to the evolution of modern people,” says anthropologist Yoel Rak of Tel Aviv University. See: http://www.icr.org/article/4539/
Wouldn’t it be important to ask why the molecular data does not line up at all with the fossil record? The paleontologists have their explanations for human ‘evolution’ while the molecular biologists have theirs – and the 2 camps do not agree. They’re not even close. Why don’t the paleontologists agree with this ERV-K ‘evidence’? And if they do, wouldn’t that shoot down the fossil evidence?
I see similar issues with HERV-K12q24 which shows evidence of a gene conversion event because the human 3′ LTR sequence clusters with the 5′ LTR sequence of the other species. However, because the 3′ LTR sequence information is lacking in all of the species except humans, it cannot be determined if the reason for this unusual clustering is conversion of human 3′ LTR sequence to 5′ LTR sequence or merely the independent divergence of the human 5′ LTR. A BLAST search of the chimpanzee genome sequence (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/seq/PtrBlast.html did not identify the 3′ LTR of this element or its flanking sequence.
The tree for HERV-K10p14 deviates from the predicted topology because, although the sequences of the two LTRs form separate clusters, each cluster gives a different estimate of host phylogeny [evolution]. Grouping the chimpanzee and bonobo sequences into one clade, the 5′ LTR sequences give the branching pattern (H/G)C, while the 3′ LTR sequences give the branching pattern (C/G)H. This pattern was also seen when a maximum-likelihood approach was used (data not shown). One explanation for this discrepancy might be the occurrence of a recombination event between two different alleles of the HERV element in the common ancestor of all three species and then the segregation of the two different alleles into the chimpanzee and human lineages and the recombinant allele in the gorilla lineage. However, examination of the substitutions along each of the lineages reveals that support for each of the branching patterns is weak, as is also indicated by the low bootstrap values. In the 5′ LTR cluster, there are only two changes along the lineage leading to humans and gorillas. Both of these substitutions occur in CpG dinucleotides, which have been shown previously to be mutational hot spots in HERV elements (JOHNSON, W. E., and J. M. COFFIN, 1999 Constructing primate phylogenies from ancient retrovirus sequences. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 96: 10254–10260), so they may reflect instances of homoplasy. In the 3′ LTR cluster, three apparent substitutions are common to chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas, two of which are also in CpG dinucleotides.
So too, the analysis of the HERV-K(II) sequences deviated quite strikingly from the predicted topology [i.e. evolutionary estimates!]. The 5′ and 3′ LTR sequences did not cluster separately and there was no clear indication of species relatedness, indicating that a high level of concerted evolution between the LTRs has occurred at this locus and that these events probably occurred independently in the different species. The two LTRs in the gorilla cluster together, with the human 5′ LTR forming a sister taxon. The 5′ LTRs of the chimpanzee and bonobo form a distinct cluster, while the human, chimpanzee, and bonobo 3′ LTRs cluster together. Examination of the substitution pattern along the different lineages reveals a rather complex evolutionary history. First, only 4 changes appear to have occurred in the LTRs after integration and prior to speciation events. This is in comparison to 10 such changes that occurred between the LTRs independently in the lineage leading to chimpanzees and bonobos prior to their separation. An estimated time frame for the accumulation of these mutations in the chimpanzee and bonobo common ancestor is 4 million years, perhaps indicating that this element integrated just prior to the radiation of all three lineages (gorillas, chimpanzees/bonobos, and humans).
The integration time estimate for this element indicates that the LTRs might have undergone some homogenization, reducing their degree of divergence. However, because the 5′ and 3′ LTRs do not have enough shared derived substitutions to distinguish the different lineages, clear cases of gene conversion could not always be identified. Another method for the detection of gene conversion is to look for the presence of “co-double” sites in the sequences under examination (BALDING, D. J., R. A. NICHOLS and D. M. HUNT, 1992 Detecting gene conversion: primate visual pigment genes. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. Ser. B Biol. Sci. 249: 275–280).
These sites reflect the independent acquisition of a mutation in one LTR in a species and the subsequent transfer of that mutation to the other LTR through gene conversion. The occurrence of homoplastic mutations in both LTRs of a provirus in any given species would be an exceedingly rare event, so the appearance of multiple co-doubles in a species would be more likely explained by single-mutation events in one LTR followed by homogenization between the LTRs. The table at http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/171/3/1183 shows the number of sites in the different species showing evidence of gene conversion because of the presence of co-double substitutions. The test statistic is the frequency of co-double sites, given a random distribution of mismatches among the sequences. Using this test, all of the species demonstrate statistically significant evidence for gene conversion.
All that said, let’s go back to trying to find at least one bit of hard scientific evidence which has been around long enough to be well established and better understood.
…Because truth matters,
Nat
Lucy was NEVER a missing link. We don’t search for missing links. Is this more Nat copy and paste?
More cut and paste idiocy from Nat. Truth does matter. And you have none.
Because plagiarism matters.
http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/171/3/1183
You don’t understand a word of that article, do you?
WE’RE ALL “MISSING LINKS”, STUPID. WE’RE ALL TRANSITIONAL FORMS!!!!
I see that Nat is one of those creationists who is apparently an expert in every area of evolutionary biology without accepting the validity of any of the evidence.
Either that, or Nat is one of those creationists who cuts and pastes long, sciencey tracts without understanding any of it.
One or the other.
Because plagiarism matters.
http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/171/3/1183
You don’t understand a word of that article, do you?
BINGO!!!
*touches tip of nose with forefinger several times*
Sorry about the double-post.
I was unaware there were any extant samples of usable Homoe erectus DNA. What’s your source for this claim?
Greetings yet again Kel – It is nice to be back on-line. Understand, please, that my objective is not so much to win the day and destroy arguments but to indicate that there is other scientific research out there worth considering. As for faith, it doesn’t have to be blind faith, but a reasonable one. Perhaps you’ve already discovered that it actually takes more faith to believe in evolution than in a god who created. The church, back in Darwin’s day, made the mistake of claiming that God created everything as it existed when investigated by man. This is unbiblical, and Darwin proved the church wrong. God created kinds (like the dog kind) but He did not create springer spaniels and dalmatians specifically. He simply gave the dog kind the genetic potential which through natural or induced cross-breeding could develop into different types. The church made a similar mistake by claiming the earth was in the center of the solar system, rather than the sun. This was Ptolemy’s idea, but not the Bible’s. This brings us to your thoughts on #2.
You wrote that for humans to share a common ancestor with chimpanzees/primates (I, of course would suggest a common designer instead) there has to have been either a split in their genome or a fused pair in ours which appears to be our human chromosome #2, which has two fused chromosomes, with two centromeres (one inactive) and telemeres in the middle of it. In a chimpanzee genome those two chromosomes are unfused. You then asked, reasonably, “How does one explain that without common ancestry?”
Centric fusions are where two acrocentric chromosomes fuse to make a large metacentric chromosome. All of the necessary information is there in the proper amount; it is just packaged differently. Dr. Miller, for one, claims that since human chromosome 2 corresponds to ape chromosomes 12 and 13, we used to be apes.
By way of reminder, humans are clearly distinct from other animals in cognitive and language ability. Birds, ottes, chimps can use tools or simple sign language but while intelligence in animals is quite fascinating, it is still significantly different from that of humans and gives no hint of common ancestry. I suggest that the similarities are much more easily explained by the fact that these animals all had a common designer who reused certain excellent design elements much like engineers do in their creations today.
y-six different karyotypes were identified in the 42 individual rodents (Holochilus brasiliensis). Goats and sheep also harbor one or more centric fusions, phenotypically indistinguishable from other animals. Some sheep studied carrying up to three different centric fusions. Centric fusions themselves do not inevitably result in a new species; it is conceivable that some apes exist with 46 ch Twentromosomes. Yet these animals will be distinctly apes; they will not be “evolving” to become a human. It is not the number of chromosomes that is really a significant difference between humans and apes, but the information contained on those chromosomes. Despite the superficial similarities between human and ape chromosomes, there are important differences on the molecular level. There are many protein coding genes in humans that are distinctly human and are not found in chimps. Perhaps more significantly are the differences in genes that don’t code for proteins. Genes have been described which code for microRNA (miRNA). The miRNA molecule is not translated, but acts directly to control gene expression. A single miRNA can regulate the expression of dozens or even hundreds of genes. A study of miRNAs expressed in the brain found 51 of 447 new miRNAs were distinctly human and 25 were only found in the chimp (E. Berezikov et al., “Diversity of microRNAs in human and chimpanzee brain,” Nature Genetics 38 no. 12 (2006):1375–1377). The idea that so many genes were altered so that they are expressed in the proper concentration according to cell type and can effectively control the many different genes they regulate is not what we would expect of chance processes. Doesn’t it sound more like design? While the evidence for a fusion appears consistent with the evolution model, Dr. Miller implies that it is inconsistent with ID or creation models. Why couldn’t humans and apes (and perhaps other animals too) have been created with the same number of chromosomes with similar banding patterns. A Biblical creationist would find nothing in the Bible which implies that God must have created different kinds with different chromosome numbers or even different banding patterns. Since chromosome numbers vary within created kinds, it is not in the chromosome number where we should expect the most significant differences to lie, but in the coded information.
On to ERV-k where you pointed out that these markers (horizontal gene transfer by retroviruses), tracing common ancestry, are found in the same spot in the chimpanzee and human genome, concluding that, “You won’t get that kind of thing by chance, it’s just too improbable for the exact same markers to be in the exact same spot without ancestry.” Not by chance? Are you favoring design? You don’t want to sound like a creationist since evolutionist depend on chance, don’t they?
Greetings, David Marjanović – Thanks for the links and the updates. I appreciate you thoughtfulness. I guess we are all trying to keep current.
Sorry, Owlmirror, you’re out of the conversation with me
Greetings, ‘Dear’ Iain Walker – You wrote, The idea that “the survival of the fittest” simply means “the survival of those who survive” is based on a misunderstanding of what evolutionary “fitness” means. What makes an organism fit (or unfit) is how it is put together and how it interacts with its environment. Consequently, it is not tautologous to speak of “the survival of the fittest”, because this means more than “the survival of those who survive”. Oh? What more does it mean? Doug Futuyma in Science on Trial (NY: Pantheon Books, 1983) p.171 points out that, “The claim that natural selection is a tautology is periodically made in the scientific literature itself.”
Why would we not want to get rid of the less fit and make room for what Darwin called the ‘favored races’? Evolution (as opposed to de-evolution) is something we should all look forward to and expect to see as our environment becomes more stressed. Who knows what fascinating animal will replace the polar bear when it becomes extinct?
I appreciate you, “Fallacy of the False Dilemma alert!” but can you think of any other possibilities?
You concede then that Darwin’s theory was falsified and in fact replaced with NeoDarwinism but the Mendelian mechanism of heredity proves kinds of creatures can not evolve. Mendel made a major contribution to the arguments of creation geneticists.
You continue, “Goddidit” is not a mechanism for creating life.” It is not subject to scientific verification but all the scientific evidence points in that direction. If you made an engine, how could that be proven scientifically? I can’t be. The engine can be evaluated but there is no way, according to the scientific method, whereby we can know who made it. Nevertheless, you still made it. And by what ‘mechanism’ did you make it?
Greetings Josh – I’m glad you recognized my use of strata/layer as nested/bed. Those were fine terms when I was in grad school and still used in scientific journals today. I realize that not all fossils are index fossils. We ought not willynilly apply that term to every critter we find (and I appreciate your concession that creationists don’t get to do that, either). I also agree that if the critters cross lots of time, then they’re poor index fossils. Not knowing, therefore, which are reliable and which have crossed lots of time (but not yet been dug up) they, as a whole, ought not be used to date nested beds. I also realize that index fossils are those fossils that indicate a particular time period, because they are only found within that time period….until they show up elsewhere. That has been the case with lots of ‘reliable’ index fossils.
You are honest to point out additional problems: “Again we run into the problem of strata as a term… If it crosses several formations, then we might have a problem depending on the paleoenvironment and the rate of deposition.”
You reason, “So, in short, stating that index fossils are found at different layers of strata somehow weakens evolution (or is evidence against an old earth) is poor reasoning. If a fossil species crosses “a lot” of time, we won’t use it as an index species.” But Josh, how would you know if an index fossil does that? We may use it for a hundred years before we find it swimming in the ocean or growing in a valley! Then, all the conclusions based on that ‘index’ fossil going back 100 years would be wrong.
… because truth matters, eh?
Nat
Good grief, Nat, have you no shame? How many times do you have to be caught plagiarizing before you stop doing it?
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v3/n1/tale-of-two-chromosomes
Truth matters, but not to Nat. He plagarizes refuted information. Not the truth Nat. Liars and bullshitters do that Nat. If truth matters, stop cutting and pasting.
E.V. @1523. Yeah–that’s my new email signature.
Yes, Nat. That’s what would result. Welcome to science. Thankfully, we rarely have to rely on a single index fossil to date a particular formation. Sure, it happens on occasion, but it isn’t common. Most of the time there are several index fossils available, or we have multiple means of determining the age (e.g., index fossils plus palynology, paleomag, something). And even if a particular formation’s age gets revised, well then so what? It happens, but it isn’t as thought the geologic time scale is such a house of cards that revising a formation’s age brings the whole system down. It’s not like we’re the stock market. You’ll notice, if you watch the literature, that the revisions are becoming smaller and smaller as time goes on. We continue to tighten the error bars on all of the dates in the geologic column.
Which ones are you referring to specifically?
NotAThinker, the tap dancing creationist! See him misconstrue and evade all reasonable questions! Witness his cut-n-paste constructs from Answers in Genesis! Watch him avoid logic at all costs! No cognitive dissonance for this Christer! It’s an all bullshit, all denial extravaganza! The triumph of Truthiness over Truth! Defending creationism and The Floodno matter what!!! Yowza! Yowza! Yowza!
Nat is just copying and pasting again.
Gish Galloping.
Obfuscation Filibustering.
Pretty dishonest way around things Natty.
Nat a few questions.
Please explain, in your own words what 3′ and 5′ mean in the context of DNA chains.
How many “kinds” of protist are there? Show your reasoning.
I should point out that the New Scientist “Darwin Was Wrong” headline was roundly criticised by most scientists, and we’ve known for quite some time that the “tree” of evolution becomes a “network” at the base- for one thing your mitochondria are very similar to one type of (true) bacteria, while your nuclear DNA looks rather different- much more like a type of “bacteria” called the archaea. Plant chloroplasts are different again.
The arguments between molecules and morphology has been going on for quite some time, and is gradually being resolved for each group at a time. (The current position for whales was first suggested by DNA analysis, and later fossisl supported this find- in contrast to what earlier discoveries had suggested).
Why would God create two groups of animals, give them similar characters- “shared design features” in your language, and yet in the DNA show a second set of different design features? Evolution has an answer. What it creationism’s?
SI{Fractally}WOTI!
Oh, nonsense. You can’t blame anyone here just because you don’t know how to use a computer, or don’t have adequate protection for your computer. You’re just incompetent and/or unlucky.
Pity your brain isn’t.
But, I’m glad that you agree that humans are related genetically to all apes, as was demonstrated by the journal article you plagiarized. Hahahahaha!
Liar.
Wrong
You haven’t been having a conversation; you’ve been plagiarizing and lying.
Guess I can call you the liar that you are, and you can’t respond! Because it’s true! You are a liar!
Evolution is not prescriptive.
Wrong. Modern genetics, which improves on the understanding of Mendelian heredity, provides evidence that organisms can and do evolve.
Mendel did no such thing. Especially since there is no such thing as a “creation geneticist”.
If someone makes an engine, they can demonstrate their engine-making ability by showing the tools and materials they used to make it — and by making another one using those tools and materials while being observed to make it.
Which is why God performing the act of creating living organisms from rocks and earth while being observed by biologists would disprove evolution.
Got God? Bring him on!
But not to you. And not to any other creationist.
Nat [@ 1519], WTF does this even mean?
“One of the evolutionists […] apparently downloaded 65 packets of corrupt information which, with the help of expensive experts I’ve finally cleaned up.”
Nat gets a computer virus because he doesn’t know about Norton evidently. Nat, being the paranoid religiously deluded magic believing goof, suspects PERSECUTION and SABOTAGE by evolutionists. Nat is funny. You just know that every bad thing that happens to Nat he attributes to a vast conspiracy.
I did not know that from a public blog that one could infect a specific computer with a virus. How come no one fills me in on the cool super villain tools?
Nat #1528 wrote:
You surely realize that many Christian sects today consider the rejection of the theory of evolution “unbiblical.” When it became clear that the earth revolved around the sun, theologians looked back and realized that the Bible had never implied otherwise. As evolution becomes established beyond reasonable doubt, theologians (and of course laymen) come to the conclusion that those who interpreted the Bible in such a way as to absolutely require Special Creation — did not understand the Bible, Christianity, or God.
A quick question, then. If you were to be persuaded, on the evidence, that the Theory of Evolution is an accurate explanation for the diversity of life on earth — would you say that the Bible was therefore wrong, and reject Christianity?
Or would you say that your interpretation must have been off — and remain a Christian (and theistic evolutionist)?
How much is riding for you on this issue?
That’s a big lie. Not possible. Not only do you copy and past from websites of creationist known to lie liars you also do so without attributing your copy and pastes to them. On top of that you are lying about the above quoted passage.
It’s like a nested hierarchy of lies.
The two major places to pick up viruses are music download and porn sites. Nat, what have you been up to?
Also, sites that offer pirated software or hacking tools.
Nat: It’s impossible for someone here to have “downloaded” anything at all to your computer. Sorry for your virus problems, but… sheesh. Get a grip, lad!
This addresses one of Nat’s points.
Same old same old.
@ Nerd [#1542],
Considering Nat’s exposed perusal/plunder/plagiarism of places like AiG — and the correlated timing of infraction & infection — you might as well add “creationist sites” (e.g., AiG, ICR, DI, etc.) to that list of potential places to pick up a virus.
———-
Hey, Nat. Next time, you might want to stay away from that file named
“DatabassOfEvryAnsurz2DemEvilushunists.exe”.
———-
(Still, mewonders which of us “angry evolutionists” will get the bill for his computer repair.)
Given the power of explanation of evolution – the fossil record, the genetic marker, the geographical distribution (serious, come check out the animals we have in Australia!), the morphological similarities, the anatomic similarities, vestigial structures, the age of the earth and age / size of the universe, and above all – observations of all the mechanisms by which evolution works: mutation, selection, adaptation and speciation. They all point to evolution happening.
On the other hand saying “God did it” tells us absolutely nothing about anything and posits the existence of an infinite consciousness. We can show you evolution in action, we can show you progression in the geological strata, we can look at the genetic code and show similarities in genes, we can also see in the genetic code ancestral viral markers, we can show you so much. For instance did you know a Koala has an upside-down pouch? Why is this? Because it’s ancestor it shared with a wombat was a burrower. So having an upside-down pouch would have been advantageous. But Koalas are tree-dwellers so having an upside-down pouch could be dangerous to the young. So how did evolution fix it? It make the koala have muscles on the pouch by which it could tighten and prevent it’s young from falling out. Such an explanation only makes sense in the light of evolution.
So no, I don’t think it requires more faith, or even any faith, to believe in evolution. To believe in God requires faith because we cannot test for God. I’ve tried and my experiment has a 0% success rate. In short, we can see evolution happening in the wild today. And by looking at circumstantial evidence, the only solution that even remotely fits the puzzle is the modern evolutionary synthesis. Saying Goddidit is a non-answer, it doesn’t explain how it happened and refuses to explore the question further. How life came to be is the mysteries of mysteries, and the reason we are so confident about evolution is that every step along the way the explanation has passed a mountain of evidence.
Nat, why have you come back without reading that article on radiometric dating???
You don’t seem to have learned anything else either. Just three examples:
There are no different forms of retrotransposon.
LOL. The jury is not out on the principle of parsimony. Please.
Nature volume 406 was long, long ago. In the meantime, we have gained some experience. Lo & behold, the more work people do, the more similar do the results of molecular phylogenetics and morphological* phylogenetics become. Take whale relationships. For a long time, people thought the closest relatives of the whales were unspecified carnivorous placental mammals. Later this was narrowed down to mesonychians; this came as a surprise (mesonychians are closely related to artiodactyls — even-toed “ungulates” –, not to carnivorans) and was the result of a couple of small phylogenetic analyses — you make a matrix with species and characters, feed this into a computer, and the program will count the shared derived features, apply the principle of parsimony that I just mentioned, and find the most parsimonious tree ( = phylogenetic hypothesis) that explains the data. Then came the first phylogenetic hypotheses built on molecular data, and they found the whales inside the artiodactyls, with the hippos as their closest living relatives. That was an even bigger surprise. Many suspected that something was wrong with the molecular data or the methods of analysis, but more and more studies kept getting the same results. Then half-complete skeletons of several very early whales that had been known from skulls only (in three cases) or not at all (in another) were found, and published in 2001, together with morphological phylogenetic analyses of where they belong. Artiodactyls are very easy to recognize because they have two joints in the heel, not just one like all other mammals that have a heel. The mentioned whales were so early that they still had functional hindlimbs… with… the exact same two ankle joints as artiodactyls. The phylogenetic analyses found artiodactyls and whales as sister-groups, and the mesonychians farther away. Then, two years later, a bigger morphological phylogenetic analysis was published. (Find me in Google Scholar, drop me an e-mail, and I’ll send you the pdf of that paper.) It found whales and hippos as sister-groups inside Artiodactyla. Two years later an even bigger analysis was published. It found the hippos inside the mysterious anthracotheres, and the anthracotheres as the sister-group of the whales. (I can send you the pdf of that one, too.) There’s now a third such paper. You see, the results of analyses based on molecular and on morphological data converge.
What is really going on here, you silly plagiator of quote-mines, is not the introduction of molecular data. What is really going on is the introduction of method. Phylogenetics used to be an art (“this looks similar, this shares an important character, I can make up a nice story that explains this other character as convergence, and it vaguely fits the stratigraphy too…”), and now it is a science (it tests hypotheses against the principle of parsimony).
This means it has become much harder work. And that’s where a difference comes in: A molecular phylogenetic study of serious size is a matter of a few weeks or at most months. A morphological phylogenetic study of the same size is a PhD thesis. There have been lots of serious phylogenetic analyses of placental mammals since 2001, for example (…and they all find very, very similar results), but the only serious morphological one was reported at the SVP meeting last October; it’s in a PhD thesis that probably hasn’t even been defended yet. Various small morphological analyses have begun converging on the molecular results, but slowly. We’ll need to wait for several big ones.
The work — the fun — has only just begun.
BTW, it’s not like molecular studies automatically got everything right. In 1993 there was a study that found the sperm whales and the baleen whales as sister-groups. This contradicts not only all studies on morphological data, but also all studies on molecular data that have been done since. The methods keep improving, and so does the computing power, which means that not only more sophisticated methods but also larger datasets can be used.
* This means looking at the phenotype instead of the genotype. It’s not the same as looking at fossils — except that DNA doesn’t preserve for longer than about 100,000 years, so no molecular data can be gained from most fossils.
Hypocrite. Doesn’t ask a single question about the three abstracts, doesn’t even tell me if he now accepts the fact that no liquid blood was found in any fossil bone, still hasn’t read the page on radiometric dating, and then thanks me for providing him with information he apparently doesn’t even intend to ever use!
And that he puts in the middle of a fucking Gish gallop!!!
Now go read. I didn’t say I‘m excluded from the conversation till you have read that article and showed that you’ve understood it. I said you are.
————————————————–
Well, pollen are fossils, too, in this case index fossils…
For Nat’s undeserved benefit: Palynology is pollen & spore research. Paleomagnetics is figuring out how iron-containing minerals in rocks are oriented; this can be used to do magnetostratigraphy, because the Earth’s magnetic field reverses itself in irregular intervals, making a pattern like… like dendrochronology, only much, much bigger. The last magnetic reversal was 780,000 years ago.
Then someone gets a paper out of it, and before that, an SVP meeting abstract.
Randall Irmis & Roland Mundil (2008): New age constraints from the Chinle Formation revise global comparisons of Late Triassic vertebrate assemblages, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 28: supplement to issue 3, 95A
This particular case is not very surprising. Big land vertebrate fossils are rare compared to fossils normally used for biostratigraphy — rodent teeth, ammonite shells, nannoplankton, pollen, conodonts, trilobites, and so on. This means larger error bars. Then, it’s easy to have a wide (even global) distribution in the sea, but on land that’s more difficult; this means larger error bars for terrestrial sediments than for marine ones. Furthermore, on land, the environment has an influence not only on where which animals live, but also on where sediments are deposited at all; this means that barriers to the dispersal of land animals don’t leave a lot of evidence of their existence, except if they’re stretches of sea. Before the research described in this abstract, there were no radiometric dates from the Chinle Fm, so more or less the only clue to its age were the land vertebrates, which come with large error bars.
There was another abstract in 2007 that indicated that most of the Morrison Formation had to be moved from the later to the earlier half of the Late Jurassic. However, it seems that this has already been refuted before ever seeing the light of proper publication. We’ll see.
The dichotomy between chance and design is a false one, there’s the process of cause and effect. Do you think that earthquakes are merely chance, or that there’s a set geological process of cause and effect that makes them? Do you think rain is chance, or that there’s a set process by which water evaporates to form clouds in the lower atmosphere then unload? There is cause and effect, the fundamental forces of nature shape the environment around us.
Do you think it’s chance that when you let go of a pen that it falls towards the earth time after time? I don’t, I call it gravity. It’s neither chance nor is it design. Same goes for the ERV-K markers sitting in our DNA. We know what causes these markers – endogenous retroviruses. We know that through reproduction these markers are passed on. So when we see the same marker in the same place on two different organisms, we know that it must have had a common ancestor. When we see multiple markers all in exactly the same location – it just seals the deal.
Because that’s what science is. You observe a phenomenon, then make a hypothesis to support it. After that, you test it and make sure that there’s validity to the hypothesis. And that’s exactly what’s been done with HGT. How do you explain that so much of our code is virus DNA?
To be fair, there are much more harmless sites, too, that form part of pop-up hell. Take the harmless web-hosting service 0catch.com, which provides free webspace and finances itself by advertisements. You visit any site there, you get phenomena like large files suddenly starting to download, Windows asking you if you want to install something you’ve never heard of and allowing you to check the box “Always trust content from The Gator Corporation, Inc.”, windows popping up that don’t close but lead you to some of the above when you click on the square with the X in the top right corner — you have to close them with Alt F4 instead, and I’m told even this doesn’t always work –, and so on.
Whatever. Probably Nat got a fake virus warning that popped up on a newspaper website, the fake warning told him to download an antivirus program right now, and he was stupid enough to actually download the fake antivirus program which was actually a virus.
It’s like with science: if you don’t know anything about the Internet, you can’t use it without running into big trouble.
(Well, unless you use Linux. I think there are no Linux viruses out there yet. I could be wrong, though. There are now a few Mac viruses, and Macs are traditionally completely unprotected…)
David, Kel, Josh, EV – I find it astonishing the lengths you go to to respond to these idiots’ nonsense. What detail! Yes, I know it matters but…
Especailly when you consider that Nat is deeply deeply stupid, and lies about his motivations in coming here.
This is, after all, a grown man, who has an imaginary friend, and believes in a magic boat, a talking snake, someone who’s dead (but didn’t die) and a whole bunch of other kiddy tales, it’s remarkable.
I dunno, I reckon Jesus caught him masturbating once and he’s never got over it. But sheesh, what a fool.
I find it great that the likes of David, Josh, EV and Owlmirror are posting rebuttals, I’m learning quite a lot out of this.
*sigh*
Yes, I know that, David. I figured (rightly, I think) that some baby steps were probably in order where Nat was concerned.
Nope. You make up a hypothesis — no matter how: by generalizing over observations (induction), by dreaming, whatever. Then you try to disprove it (by finding a repeatable observation that disagrees with it). If you chronically fail, you publish, so that others can help you try to disprove it.
Science is exactly what Nat fears: an utterly negative approach that works by elimination.
Correct.
He doesn’t. He flatly denied it by waffling about imaginary “other form[s] of retrotransposon“.
Not only that — it’s also silly to assume that there is anything that’s globally “less fit”. Whether a trait is beneficial, neutral, or harmful depends on the environment. This is why genetic diversity is a protection against extinction. Inbreeding leads to problems in that respect: inbred populations fare well as long as the environment stays constant, but once it changes, they easily die out completely.
The infamous WinDefender virus is a prime example of this.
Windefender
Windows Anti-Virus 2008 and 2009
XP Anti-Virus 2008 2009
I see them allllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the time.
The outside sales folks in my company get them constantly.
Huge fucking pain in the ass.
All this virus talk makes me happy I still have my G4 Mac. With virus protection, so I am not a “Typhoid Mary” for other PC’s.
Between two cephalopods, science by PZ, DM, and the rest of the regulars this has been a good day.
My point — which I certainly haven’t made clear enough — was that it basically never happens that a single index fossil is used. There’s always a whole assemblage. Because each member of that assemblage has its own first- and last-appearance dates, relative dating can be quite fine-grained.
It just flows out of my fingers. I actually have to restrain myself from answering Nat’s entire copypasta (and breaking my promise of not continuing the conversation till he has learned what radiometric dating is) — it’s a quarter past 2 at night over here, and I’m quite tired; I should, like, go to bed for a change…
SIWOTI syndrome.
Not really. When people don’t know anything, they make up explanations that they think make sense (…especially when they don’t think too much about them… but most people are too lazy for that). That’s probably how religion started in the first place.
What is remarkable is that Nat still hasn’t grasped the fact that it’s not the scientists that know as little as he does. It’s the AIG people who wouldn’t know Ventastega or Ossinodus if it bit them in the proverbial ass. It’s they who don’t know why the 3′ end of DNA is called the 3′ end and (therefore) what the difference to the 5′ end is. It’s they who haven’t even noticed how far behind the state of the
artscience they are in so many fields. And there he goes, plagiarizing their convoluted arguments from ignorance and personal incredulity, and believing they are logical and convincing…<headshake>
Go read, Nat. You have a lot to learn.
That was my original point to Nat, which obviously I didn’t make nearly clear enough.
Fucking Fridays.
Fuck, dude. Get some sleep. We’ll watch the fire until you get up.
Yep, my little sister downloaded Windows Anti-Virus 2008 a few months ago while I wasn’t in Vienna. It hides somewhere. We let our real antivirus program run again and again, it found and deleted the virus again and again, and in the end made only crashes… then came Service Pack 3 (for XP), and the virus was gone, and a few weeks or months later it (or something disturbingly similar) came back… I think we’ve finally got rid of it, but who knows.
Nat, check your systems folders for files with long names that look like randomly generated. They are randomly generated and contain a virus (or other malware) that is, in that form, not necessarily detectable by antivirus programs. Also, look what processes you have running (in the Task Manager); immediately stop the one that has a long, randomly generated name.
It could be worse David, think what would happen if you got a mindvirus….of course, you would never know you had it…
Yeah I typically just re-image their laptops. It’s way faster than trying to fuck with it. Plus as short staffed as we are now, I don’t have time to track down every file or rather have one of my minions do it.
That’s Nat’s problem, eh?
The way to get rid of those fake Antivirus 2009 and all their myriad variants is with a nifty freeware tool simply called AntiMalware from http://www.malwarebytes.org. I use it as an IT professional on a regular basis.
This could very well be poor Nat’s infection:
http://fstdt.com/winace/pics/index.htm#copying_misinformation
(found via the link in SEF’s comment [#132] on the “Hey, is the blog still here?” thread)
I was going to go to bed over 4 hours ago. Then I made the mistake of seeing if anything had been added to this thread in the past week. Damn you people and your incredibly long, fascinating and informative posts (Nat’s copypasta not included) with equally fascinating and informative external links! My insomnia does not need this sort of help!
David Marjanović (#1558)
Indeed. And they start really young, too. One of my first friends was taught where babies come from at a very young age (maybe three or four) and decided, since it was so unlikely something as large as a whole baby could come out of a vagina, babies came out in pieces and the doctors put them together. Add a fancy label like “the assembly theory of parturition” and it’s about as sophisticated as anything in so-called creation science.
The best about that page is the copyright statement at the bottom, though there are several very good pictures that fit Nat very well.
Nat (#1528):
I explained it to you, in the very passage that you (incompletely) quoted from my post at #1347. Since you didn’t understand it, let me put it in simpler terms: it means “the survival of those who are best adapted to their environment”.
Now in this context, “best adapted” is ultimately measured in terms of relative reproductive survival rates, but is defined in terms of the organism’s functional efficiency relative to the conditions in which it lives. Given its environment, do its physical and behavioural characteristics make it more or less likely to escape predators? Find food? Attract a mate? Resist parasites and infections? These are the considerations that apply when judging the fitness of an organism, not the simply brute fact of its survival.
To put it another way, to talk about an organism’s fitness is to make a statistical prediction about its survival prospects. That makes natural selection testable, because if fitness, as defined above, did not positively correlate with survival, then that would constitute a disproof of the principle that the fittest are more likely to survive. And you can’t test or disprove a tautology, because tautologies are true by definition.
Being a scientist isn’t always an automatic guarantee that one will fully understand the logic underlying a given scientific idea, even in one’s own field. Scientists are human, and hence fallible. And, as I mentioned, there’s a potential source of ambiguity in term “fitness”, because of the way population geneticists sometime use it as a mathematical term measuring reproductive success. So perhaps the occasional misunderstanding is forgivable.
Why would we? Natural selection is just a natural process like any other. Do you think that because someone believes that a process occurs in nature, they must think that it’s a good thing? Do you think that solar astronomers would like the sun to burn out faster? Do you think that geologists studying plate tectonics want to speed up continental drift to form a new super-continent? This is what we call the Appeal to Nature Fallacy.
In any case, the “favoured races” are only those populations which are (on average) best suited to their local environment (i.e., change the environment, and you have a good chance of changing which “race” is most “favoured”). It’s a descriptive term, not a value judgement.
An unintelligent creator that works by instinct, spinning universes as a spider spins its web. An impersonal supernatural force (i.e., not an agent at all), such as the life-force posited by vitalism. Experiments by starfish-headed aliens living in Antarctica. Any number of undiscovered natural processes.
Sigh. Darwin’s theory of pangenesis was effectively falsified by Mendel, not his theory of evolution, which did not depend on pangenesis at all (and indeed conflicted with it). Learn the fucking difference.
… is the complete opposite of the truth.
In the same way that any forensic scientific investigation is conducted. Acquire background knowledge about engines and their manufacturers, use said knowledge to form a hypothesis as to the manufacturer of this particular engine, and test the predictions of that hypothesis. For crap’s sake, this kind of scientific detective work goes on all the time.
By physically assembling pre-existing parts. By burning energy in order to apply physical force to said parts (if I did the heavy lifting myself). By applying heat, pressure and chemical reagents to the raw materials if I had to manufacture the parts myself. And so on. In short, physical cause and effect.
Greetings, Dave M. – I’ll get to your Youtube recommendation (and Kel, I’ll take a look at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/04/aig_on_tiktaalik.php, watch lecture about Tiktaalik, review http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/archaeopteryx/info.html, and perhaps read the book “Your Inner Fish”), but at present I want to respond first to participants who are invested in this present discussion. I’m way behind with them and they are waiting. That’s only fair.
Now, Dave, you, Nerd, and Kel claim that the authors/authorities I quote don’t have “any idea what they’re talking about,” and consist of, “nothing but misunderstandings, and…outdated information, outdated by decades in many cases. It’s painful to watch such incompetence at work, such delusions of knowledge!” For others who have been following along, are you noticing how once again an evolutionist critiques the messanger rather than the message? Dave, may I again ask you to give me an example? Go back over the quotations I used and tell me which one you have a problem with. Which reference have I used which is unscientific? I’ve not quoted any creationists or members of AIG, ICR, etc. In fact, I prefer and delight in quoting evolutionists – your heros.
I stand corrected. You are right. In Darwin’s day, the earth was only suspected to be millions, not billions, of years old. As Prof. Whipple at Harvard used to say, every decade the evolutionists run into more problems which require more millions of years until we get to the billions.
As for that, “something else that was presented at the SVP meeting of 2007 and still hasn’t been published.” Let’s wait for peer-review before using this something as proof of evolution. I suggest that the jury is still out on the “velociraptorine,” and “dromaeosaurine” teeth found in England, Scotland, Russia, and the Morrison Formation as well. We’d be more impressed with citations and references.
Greetings Josh – I suspect everybody appreciates your fairness in cautioning Dave M. and Janine. To Dave M you suggested that, “To be fair, it’s likely that at least some of these teeth are misindentifed…” I too remain skeptical. To Janine you cautioned, “That’s actually not really accurate (especially the last sentence). The simple fact that you have…” You sound like a truly objective scientist without a drum to beat, a scholar actually interested in where the facts lead. I know you probably don’t care to support any of my contentions, but your integrity is a breath of fresh air because those are important points and accuracy matters.
I was, however, wondering whether you are telling us that while dinosaurs are not reptiles, birds aren’t really birds because they are reptiles? We don’t classify birds existing today as reptiles, do we? You ask, “Are you’re going to assert that you don’t buy that birds are classified within dinosaurs,” according to “the current science on this subject?” I respond, “yes,” and suggest we go back to the former classifications based on real science and not on cherished assumptions. In acknowledging ‘bird hipped’ dinosaurs, I was describing the current classification system, not expressing my opinion. You know that there is more to classification than skeletal features. However, only birds have feathers. Do those who study clouds classify them by the images they imagine therein?
Greetings EV – You’ve hit the nail on the head and indeed the only thing that does not change is the conviction that science will be found to support the theory of evolution. Until then, it is a faith which must not be questioned as the brontosaurus disappears and the Dromaeosaurus becomes a Sinornithosaurus to make the ‘just so’ stories work.
Greetings Dave G. – You wonder, “If the world really is 6-10,000 years old then why doesn’t it look like that?” Oh, Dave, what a great scientific approach to assessing the age of anything. This is exactly what we are objecting to! And, pray tell, how old does a 10,000 year old world look? Claiming that, “Acanthostega almost certainly has lungs.. Gills might still have been essential for it,” is fine philosophy but science waits for the “almost” and the “might” to be confirmed by experimentation. This can’t happen, therefore the scientific method doesn’t apply and such pontifications aren’t scientific…although they do support your faith. Let’s talk science.
Greetings Owlmirror – Sorry, you are out of this conversation with me.
Greetings John M. – Wow – the threat has indeed gotten too big. Can we all agree that if the earth is less than 100 million years, evolution could never have taken place? Anybody want to deal with the age of the earth?
Enough for now. I’m out of time. I’ll pick up with comments from #1500 on.
…because Truth matters,
Nat
Shouldn’t it be better to check your arguments against already detailed sources of information before answering the questions?
Nat, the message and the messenger have been dealt with ad nauseum. The ICR and all of its “science” is an exercise in working backwards from the bible. They start with a conclusion and then look at the evidence and chose to deny it, obfuscate, distort or out right lie about it if it doesn’t fit within their already predetermined conclusion that the bible is 100% factually true. They are notorious loose with the facts and have methods that go beyond being suspect.
So the fact that you have used them (in some places with out even giving them credit) is old hat for many of us and leads us to believe you are yet another apologist, which you are. ICR has one purpose, to support the Bible at any cost to facts and honesty. So we aren’t shooting the messenger in so much that we have already seen the message and it had been exposed as weak apologetics and lies many many times before.
ICR and creationism is anti-science. Science takes the evidence that is discovered or presented and then follows it to its conclusion. it has an internal self checking process that ensures that the scientific community continues to present good well supported and repeatable research.
Creationists never alter their predetermined conclusion no matter what is presented. Their self checking consists of whether or not it is in line with the bible and then a hearty pat on the back. It is the definition of what is not science.
Nat the Nimrod is back. Nat, so far you have produced zero evidence against evolution, and absolutely no evidence for any other scientific theory to explain biology. Yawn. You are a big cut and paste bore, who doesn’t understand how science is done. I speak as a PhD with 30+ years doing science. Otherwise, your post would have stopped about 2 weeks ago. Time for you to go away and quit lying to us, and most importantly, yourself.
If the truth really did matter to Nat, then he would attempt to look at the fossils themselves rather than blindly repeat the garbage he read at Answers In Genesis.
I mean, honestly, what sane person would trust a site like that? One person wrote a polite letter to them in a futile attempt to rebut their article claiming that the Chinese word for “boat” represented “eight mouths (of Noah and his family) on the Ark.” Because he included the phrase “because I respect all religions,” the staffmember who replied to the gentleman castigated him for 4 or 5 paragraphs on how he allegedly respected those religions that practiced human sacrifices. Or, should I also mention the loving eulogy Ken Ham gave Steve Irwin, detailing how he’s probably burning in Hell for the unforgivable sin of not repenting the crime of not thinking exactly like Ken Ham (as will everyone else who makes Steve’s mistake, too)?
gNat wrote:
But I thought you said the truth mattered, gNat. Were you lying? Your cowardice in the face of Owlmirror’s post proves you are.
Sorry Nat used AIG not ICR without giving credit.
However, Nat may replace ICR with AIG in my comment and get the same meaning.
Nat appears to have dropped/ignored the link to “Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective” that was offered by Ragutis, and is now starting to blather about an Earth less than 100 million years old. Nice demonstration of the “Truth mattering” there, Nat!
So, I began wondering just who this “Nat” was.
Interestingly, comment #1193 is signed “Nat Weeks” (with the same sign-off of “Truth matters”), and mentions “students”. Is Nat the plagiarist actually a teacher?
@#1193:
Interesting. Does Nat teach his students that copying the work of others and claiming it as their own is OK? Does he teach them to make false boasts of knowledge; to claim to know more than they actually do? Does he teach them to simply ignore and reject the evidence if it isn’t convenient for their argument?
Googling for “Nat Weeks” yields some interesting hits. For example, a Nat Weeks wrote this guest article for AIG:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2006/0701search.asp
And claims therein to have graduated from Dartmouth, just like the Nat here.
There are also other hits for a Nat Weeks who graduated from Dartmouth in 1974; the Dartmouth alumni website has a page which gives his full name as Nathaniel Weeks, living in Arvada, Colorado — and is described as teaching at the Jefferson Academy.
There are different institutions called “Jefferson Academy”, but the primary hit appears to be a public charter school in Broomfield, Colorado, about 14 miles from Boulder… and 12 miles from Arvada.
However, the tidbit about the Jefferson Academy was from 2002, or possibly earlier. There does not appear to be anyone of the name “Weeks” on the faculty list currently, in either the elementary school, junior high, or high school.
Hm. Searching for “Nathaniel Weeks” finds a lovely tidbit on a page of political donations in Arvada, Colorado. I’ll refrain from pasting it, though.
The AIG essay also mentions a prep school called “Milton Academy”. Indeed, the academy’s website milton.edu has a newsletter from 2005 with pictures of alumni of various years; a Nat Weeks is listed as being from the class of 1970 (which looks about right for then going on to graduate from Dartmouth four years later).
Given that this Nat claims to have graduated from Dartmouth, and assuming that he is the same as the Nat who wrote the AIG piece and was found in the alumni hits, I find myself wondering how he can possibly have graduated, given his utterly nonexistent standards for citing the words of others, and for ignoring scientific research. Could he have gotten his degree (in what, I wonder?) by cheating and/or plagiarizing from others?
It’s probably too late now to find out from Dartmouth… Or is it? If he was found to have cheated his way to graduation, would his degree be revoked?
Because Truth matters (but not to creationists),
Owlmirror
Priceless. I’ve clearly been missing all the fun.
That there was a piece of beauty,Owlmirror……:-)
How do the kids say these days…
*PWNED*
Owlmirror FTW. We love you, babe; we truly and dearly love you. You are made of awesome.
That’ll teach Nat to be snooty to our Owlmirror. However, I must object to any instance of cyberstalking, even if the subject is a lying creationist.
Vee haf ways of finding thinks out. Bwaaaaaa.
Beware of lying at Pharyngula. Vee know what secrets lie in the hearts of men.
(Owlmirror FTW.)
Well…. sometimes I am given to fits of curiosity.
Note that really, for the most part, all I did was confirm Nat’s own claims of academic membership. I don’t see that he would be ashamed to have his affiliation with AIG demonstrated, given how authoritative he thinks that organization is. And I then provided evidence for his having gone to the prestigious Milton Academy and to Dartmouth College, which, again, is only what he has claimed himself.
I probably should have not even mentioned the political thing, as it was not really germane to the academic issue as such.
Still, all that having been said, I found myself wondering how one would go about finding out if there had been some sort of academic scandal 35 years ago at Dartmouth, and found that there has been some sort of academic scandal near Dartmouth just recently (a high school in the same town). That, in turn, led to this:
The Dartmouth College Academic Honor Principle, a few choice citations:
[…]
[…]
Verbum sapienti, Nat Weeks. Verbum sapienti.
Although it might be unwise of me to assume that Nat knows any Latin… or is wise. Oh, well.
The CCSC would have handed him his ass on a plate.
Using the Internet to verify the claims someone has made on the internet is not “stalking”. Owlmirror has not posted any information that wouldn’t be readily available to anyone with an internet connection. I doubt that Owlmirror is harboring an obsessive love for Mr. Weeks, or that he intends to use this information to attempt to communicate with Mr. Weeks outside the cozy confines of this comment thread. Nor has Owlmirror suggested, either implicitly or explicitly, that anyone else ought to do so.
Nat… Weeks…
any relation to Thomas Weeks?
Nat (#1570)
They’re critiquing the credentials of the messenger. That’s not the same as critiquing the messenger himself. Now, I’m not saying that the credentials of a messenger make the message true, but it’s not at all appropriate to accuse people of making ad hominmen remarks when they aren’t.
How stupid do you think we are? You copied and pasted hundreds of words directly off AiG and a few other sites without citation. I noticed your plagiarization and confirmed it with a quick Google search before I saw others mention it.
Well, I suspect you can bend down and kiss Dave M., Janine and Josh’s asses, except with all the shit that spews from your trollish lips, that would be terribly, terribly unsanitary. (And I don’t give a flying fuck if you exclude me from the converstaion, you pathetic, patronizing plagiarist. I’m here to do what you won’t–learn from the responses given to you.)
I think the people who directed you here would appreciate if you’d actually read it and demonstrated your understanding before blabbering on about the age of the earth.
Errr, “conversation” not “converstaion” and “appreciate it if you’d…demonstrate.”
Off topic, is there a guide anywhere for how to beat the comment auto-spacing into submission?
Well if the world was 6-10,000 years old then C14 dating would give that result, We wouldn’t have annual layers in ice cores stretching back several hundred thousand years, and the other radiometric dates wouldn’t all indicate that the world was in fact 4.2 billion years old. If we had the Earth history you are suggesting we do, then you would see rabbits in the precambian, and the strata we have would look totally different- no coral reefs followed by swamps and then deserts. The rock record would be utterly different.
The point is that the world does look like its millions of years old. It doesn’t support the existence of a global flood. Therefore we can reject your hypothesis.
They neither support or deny any “faith”. They are suggestions based on what I know of Acanthostega– it had a robust gill skeleton, which indicates gill breathing was still important to it. David Marjanović and I are batting about ideas about how it may have lived. It amy be idle speculation, but its speculation based on knowing about the animal. Conversely the evidence for a 4.2 billion year old Earth is not idle speculation.
Now go and read that link.
@ Owlmirror #1536:
Actually it wouldn’t quite. It would demonstrate plausible godness for that entity but it wouldn’t do away with all the evolution already observed without godly intervention (unless you include god being incompetent or even evil over many of the changes). It would make it less clear exactly which prehistoric changes were evolution as opposed to interventionist acts of gods though. However, what we do know for certain is that the biblical god isn’t right – because it is consistently refuted by all the evidence. So any god candidate who turned up would necessarily be different than the gods claimed by the various existing religions.
WTF? You copied — plagiated — entire pages from the AIG website.
Oh, do you mean the fact that the AIG quote-mines scientists with relish & abandon?
For others who have been following along, are you noticing how once again a creationist refuses to even look at any other sources than AIG, and refuses to retract his ludicrous claim that liquid blood had been found in Late Cretaceous bones?
I did mention that I urge to reply to your entire copypasta in detail. It’s itching. But I won’t do it before you haven’t read the article on radiometric dating and demonstrate that you’ve understood it (we can of course help with that, if you have any questions). Till then — dance, trollboy, dance!
What? I wasn’t using that as proof or even just evidence of evolution. I wasn’t even talking to you. That abstract says the Morrison Fm is a bit older than usually thought, that’s all. It’s not even evidence against Old Earth Creationism.
For the “dromaeosaurine” teeth from Guimarota, which establish the very minor point that dromaeosaurids were already around at the age of Archaeopteryx, see for example chapter 11 (by Oliver Rauhut) in this book, and the references therein.
This is hilarious. You aren’t capable of forming an opinion on this matter, because you couldn’t tell such a tooth from that of a monitor lizard! So why do you pretend to have an opinion? :-D
Those people who still use the term “reptile” exclude the “mammal-like reptiles” from it and instead include the birds. That’s so that Reptilia comes to designate a clade: an ancestor and all its descendants. Perhaps this highly simplified tree will make it more obvious (time runs from left to right, but not with the same speed along each branch, + indicates bifurcations, the vertical axis is meaningless, only the branching pattern counts):
--+--Theropsida/Synapsida (includes mammals, Dimetrodon, and so on) `--+--Testudinata (turtles) `--+--+--Squamata (lizards including snakes) | `--Rhynchocephalia (tuataras) `--+--Crurotarsi (includes crocodiles) `--Ornithodira (dinosaurs -- including birds --, and pterosaurs)See? The crocodiles are more closely related to the birds than to the lizards. If both of them are reptiles, so must the birds be.
Of course, other people argue that the term “reptile” should simply be abandoned because it’s just confusing that way. Yet others (like the Center for North American Herpetology) restrict it to Lepidosauria.
Birds are not bird-hipped dinosaurs. They are lizard-hipped dinosaurs.
Then why do you treat dinosaur phylogenetics as if it used a single character (whether the os pubis points forwards or backwards)?
Because you don’t know any better, that’s why. Because you have not the faintest idea what you’re talking about.
My oh my. Someone has been sleeping since 1996, and has furthermore not even read comment 1490 where I listed the animals that are not birds and nonetheless have feathers. (I forgot to mention Shuvuuia, which is from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia and preserves feather remains as well.) All of them are closely related to birds, so it could be argued that we should just define “bird” so that all these animals are included — but that would mean that Tyrannosaurus rex was the biggest bird ever.
Irrelevant comparison. Clouds do not descend from each other, they do not reproduce; it’s therefore impossible to erect and test phylogenetic hypotheses of them.
Wow. This combination of ignorance and paranoia is beyond anything I’ve seen so far.
That Brontosaurus was sunk into the synonymy of Apatosaurus does not make any stories work or not work; it’s merely a statement on how similar these closest relatives of each other are.
No Dromaeosaurus ever became a Sinornithosaurus. Someone had just misremembered where this individual belongs, and had forgotten that Dromaeosaurus comes from the end-Cretaceous of Canada and the USA rather than the middle Early Cretaceous of China. Sinornithosaurus is a dromaeosaurid, and while it was originally unclear whether NGMC 91 belongs to Sinornithosaurus, it was always clear that it’s a dromaeosaurid; that’s how the confusion must have started.
It doesn’t contain anything that’s older than 10,000 years, for a start. For example, it doesn’t contain ice that was laid down 740,000 years ago — as determined by counting annual layers, not radiometric dating or anything; it just so happens to give the same results as radiometric dating… (I recommend you read the whole page and those linked to it about EPICA and stuff.)
Haven’t we already explained the principle of parsimony to you? Falsification and parsimony are the two parts of the scientific method.
To wit:
1) Acanthostega has a sheet of bone projecting from the front of its shoulder girdle (called the postbranchial lamina). This is otherwise only seen in “fishes” (that is, vertebrates with gills), and no other possible function than forming the rear wall of the gill chamber has yet been found (for example there are no muscle attachment sites on it).
2) Acanthostega has a few ossified gill arches. Now that’s not surprising; these bones got reused for other functions in land vertebrates — our hyoid bone is the fusion of two such gill arch bones. But in Acanthostega these bones carry longitudinal grooves. These are not found in land vertebrates, but are found in “fishes”, where they carry the arteries that lead to the gills. Again, no other possible function has been found.
3) Based on other features, Acanthostega is not more closely related to today’s land vertebrates than any animal known to lack the two features I mentioned.
4) To have lungs is normal for bony vertebrates. Only sturgeons, teleosts, and the modern coelacanths have lost the respiratory function of the lung and use it as a swim-bladder only (in the first two cases) or as a fat-filled sac that may have a similar function (in the latter). All others have lungs in addition to gills, unless of course when the gills are lost. (Or when both are lost — as in lungless salamanders that breathe through the skin only.)
5) It is theoretically possible that Acanthostega had lost (!) its lung; the bones don’t tell us, because lungs, unlike gills, usually don’t leave any traces on the skeleton. It is also theoretically possible that the grooves on the gill arches and the postbranchial lamina served whatever unknown function. It is furthermore theoretically possible that (very, very similar) lungs appeared about 10 times independently. Finally, it is theoretically possible that our phylogenetic hypotheses are all wrong and Acanthostega belongs somewhere else in the tree entirely. But, increasingly so in this order, these options are removed by the principle of parsimony. Unless and until we find evidence that is compatible with them and not with the current interpretation, they must be taken into account only so far as to prevent us from expressing complete, metaphysical certainty. Scientists are simply pedantic about this. Instead of “proves”, we write “strongly indicates” or “strongly” suggests”. Instead of “almost proves”, we write “suggests”…
You see, there are very good reasons for why we say what we say. The wishy-washy-ness of our statements is precisely calculated; its exact extent is deliberately intended — and easily overestimated by people unfamiliar with this fact.
How much evolution? Common descent of all known life would almost certainly be impossible, but evolution in general… I’ve seen evolution — descent with heritable modification, obviously due to mutation and selection — happen overnight in a petri dish (lab-work course Molecular Biology 1B, compulsory for all students of molecular biology).
Will you read the blasted article on radiometric dating at last? If you don’t read it, you don’t understand where that figure of 4.56 billion years comes from, and it is no use to talk about it.
It’s nice that you promise to watch the videos and read the pages Kel linked to. Now please actually do it, and read the page on radiometric dating, before you come back. You can read the last 100 comments on this thread later. First things first.
Nat wrote:
Hi Nat. That’s not really fair. Take a close look at the criticisms that have been presented. That have at least as often been focused on your sources as on you.
Further:
Several of us, definitely including David, have already presented concerns regarding stuff you have quoted. Perhaps starting first with those concerns that have already been put forth in this thread makes sense?
Nat then wrote:
On what do you base this skepticism, Nat? I’m not saying that it’s not valid; I’m asking what you base your skepticism on. Did you read the SVP abstracts that David provided? More to the point, do you understand the morphological differences that David is referring to when he calls a theropod tooth “velociraptorine,” versus “dromaeosaurine?” Could you distinguish a putative dromaeosaurid crown from one that we would instead probably refer to Troodontidae?
Hello, Nat.
I understand that my skepticism in this particular case makes you happy, but let’s be sure to keep this in context. My conversation with David was a disagreement among specialists. I know a lot about theropod teeth, and am well qualified to raise the question that I did. I state this not to belittle you or to be obnoxious, but to make sure that you understand that my disagreement with David was a minor tweak in this thread. So too my discussion with Janine. It does not alter the overall thread. It was a detour. Don’t get distracted by it.
What David and I were doing is analogous to two car mechanics arguing about whether or not there is air in the fuel line of a specific engine. You’re coming at this same conversation from the perspective of someone who both owns and uses a car, but who A, doesn’t believe that there is an engine under the hood and B, has never actually opened the hood or the owner’s manual.
The two converations are very different. You might see that as an unfair indeitment, but it’s my honest appraisal of what’s going on. Let’s focus on getting that hood opened up. Then we can worry about the air in the fuel line if you want.
Again, I’m not telling you this from the standpoint of “shut up, Nat, the adults are trying to talk.” Rather, I am trying make sure that you understand that at no time were David and I arguing about whether or not your car has an engine. Because accuracy is important.
Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s certainly how I try to conduct myself.
Easy, Nat. Don’t put words in my mouth. If you make a point that I agree with, I’ll acknoweldge it.
It does, Nat. Keep this in mind as our conversation moves foward.
Nat continued:
What I was telling you is that reptile really only makes sense as a group if we do classify birds as reptiles. I was also saying that calling a dinosaur a reptile (in the sense that you seem to be using the word “reptile”) and then trying to impose “reptile-like” physiology on a dinosaur because you’re calling the dinosaur a reptile is dangerous. The data on dinosaur physiology do not suggest that all dinosaurs were sluggish, “cold-blooded” swamp dwellers, so saying that dinosaurs have to be “cold-blooded” because they are reptiles doesn’t make sense. Even if you ignore the fact that “reptile” is really an outdated and problematic word, classifications are NOT data.
What “cherished assumptions” would those be? Please list.
On what basis are you judging some science as being real and arguing that other science isn’t real? Please provide your basis for making that assertion.
How else do we classify non-avian dinosaurs, Nat?
Nat, this statement is demonstrably false. I’ve personally seen non-avian dinosaur feathers. Are you saying that I’m lying?
More importantly (because opinions are whatever), can you falsify the results of this paper?
Chen, P.-J. et al. 1998. An exceptionally well-preserved theropod dinosaur from the Yixian Formation of China. Nature 391:147-152.
This one?
Qiang, J., P.J. Currie, M.A. Norell, and J. Shu-An. 1998. Two feathered dinosaurs from northeastern China. Nature 393:753.
This one?
Xu, X., Z.Tang and X.Wang. 1999. A therizinosauroid dinosaur with integumentary structures from China. Nature 399:350-354.
This one?
Xu, X., X.Wang & X-C.Wu. 1999. A dromaeosaurid dinosaur with a filamentous integument from the Yixian Formation of China. Nature 401: 262-266.
This one?
Zhou, Z-H, Wang X-L, Zhang F-C, and Xu, X. 2000. Important features of Caudipteryx – Evidence from two nearly complete new specimens. Vertebrata Palasiatica 38(4):241-254.
This one?
Ji, Q., M. A. Norell, K.-Q. Gao, S.-A. Ji, and D. Ren. 2001. The Distribution of Integumentary Structures in a Feathered Dinosaur. Nature 410: 1084-1088.
This one?
Currie, P.J. & P-J.Chen. 2001. Anatomy of Sinosauropteryx prima from Liaoning, northeastern China. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 38:1705-1727.
I could go on. You’ll notice that the most recent article that I chose to list was published in 2001. Do you think there haven’t been more…?
This is how the game is played, Nat. These are the components of our car’s engine. Simply asserting that the various parts of the engine don’t exist isn’t going to cut it. What basis do you have to make this assertion?
A few minutes spent in Google can hardly be called stalking. Owlmirror didn’t even try to figure out any pseudonyms.
What do you mean?
I always leave an empty line above and below every blockquote, and I think you don’t; is that it?
For me, it depends on whether I want the blockquote contents to be associated with the text preceding it and/or the text following it. A simple carriage-return line-feed round here leaves too little gap within ordinary text (separate paragraphs are barely distinguishable from adjacent lines within a paragraph) and too much gap around blockquotes.
This first blockquote:
was created inline with the preceding and following text and gives the sort of gap I want to see.
This second blockquote:
was placed on a separate line from the preceding and following sections of text.
What I find depressing is that Dartmouth College doesn’t appear to have carried on the policy started by William Patten in the 1920s- it was the first college in the US to make a course on evolution compulsory for all students. “Dartmouth Compels What Tennessee Forbids” was how it was reported to in the press.
I wonder if the blockquote behaviour has changed a little (since the blog moved and Sb had a revamp), because the gap above the box is now the same in both cases. However, the inline version’s gap below the quote box is still only a little large and the merely next-line version is, just as I recall it being, visually dire.
Dangerous? It’s circular logic.
And perhaps the most stupid thing I’ve seen the AIG say so far. Although I haven’t read a lot of AIG (so there may well be even dumber statements hidden on their fairly large website), this title was already hard to win.
Plus, I don’t think the AIG people are capable of stupidity on the level of Ray Comfort’s banana argument. If correct (and I sure hope so), that doesn’t leave much room for stupider statements that the AIG could make.
—————
As you point out, it’s also wrong, and thus shows that the AIG people (Nat included) have been sleeping for the last thirty years.
Oh, for the record, so have I. I’ve been two both of the relevant museums in Beijing, and to those in Beipiao and Sihetun.
Nature had to print an erratum because they had misinterpreted the order of the Chinese names. In “Ji Qiang” and “Ji Shu’an”, it’s “Ji” that’s the surname.
(BTW, it’s not the same surname. Two different characters are used for them in the paper on Jinfengopteryx cited below, and in the paper on the long-tailed bird Jixiangornis; probably they aren’t pronounced in the same tone.)
——————————
Here are some more references:
Microraptor zhaoianus:
Xu X., Zhou Z. & Wang X. (2000): The smallest known non-avian theropod dinosaur, Nature 408, 705 — 708
S. H. Hwang, M. Norell, Ji Q. & Gao K. (2002): New specimens of Microraptor zhaoianus (Theropoda, Dromaeosauridae) from northeastern China, American Museum Novitates 3381 (all 44 pages)
Microraptor gui:
Xu X., Zhou Z., Wang X., Kuang X., Zhang F. & Du X. (2003): Four-winged dinosaurs from China, Nature 421, 335 — 340
Dilong paradoxus:
Xu X., M. A. Norell, Kuang X., Wang X., Zhao Q. & Jia C. (2004): Basal tyrannosauroids from China and evidence for protofeathers in tyrannosauroids, Nature 431, 401 — 684
Jinfengopteryx elegans:
Ji Q., Ji S., Lü J., You H., Chen W., Liu Y. & Liu Y. (2005): First avialian bird from China (Jinfengopteryx elegans gen. et sp. nov.), Geological Bulletin of China 24, 197 — 210
Ji Q. & Ji S. (2007): Jinfengopteryx compared to Archaeopteryx, with comments on the mosaic evolution of long-tailed avialan birds, Acta Geologica Sinica (English edition) 81, 337 — 343
This one was originally described as a close relative of Archaeopteryx, but, as a quick look at its head and a few other parts of the skeleton will immediately confirm, it’s actually a troodontid — the long-predicted feathered troodontid –, means, a slightly less close relative of Archie. BTW, Liu Yongqing and Liu Yanxue don’t have the same surname either. Oh, and, all birds are members of Avialae by definition, so the title reflects some kind of misunderstanding…
No word beginning with “troodont” even appears in Ji & Ji (2007). Hmmmm. Also, it uses a drastically outdated reconstruction of the skull of Archaeopteryx.
The English and the Chinese editions of Acta Geol. Sin. are completely separate journals; for example, the Chinese one only publishes papers about geology, while the English one includes paleontology.
Sinocalliopteryx gigas:
Ji S., Ji Q., Lü J. & Yuan C. (2007): A new giant compsognathid dinosaur with long filamentous integuments from [the] Lower Cretaceous of northeastern China, Acta Geologica Sinica 81, 8 — 15
Epidexipteryx hui: Just go here.
…and finally, Anchiornis huxleyi, an animal that comes out as just one node further away from today’s birds than Archaeopteryx is:
Xu X., Zhao Q., M. Norell, C. Sullivan, D. Hone, G. Erickson, Wang X., Han F. & Guo Y. (published online before print in 2008): A new feathered maniraptoran dinosaur fossil that fills a morphological gap in avian origin, Chinese Science Bulletin, 6 pages
It is now out on paper, too (which means it now has a volume and page numbers), but I didn’t download the pdf because the contents can’t have changed.
————————-
Unfortunately I don’t have the paper on the feathers of Shuvuuia.
————————-
I mentioned Huaxiagnathus as preserving feathers. Sorry, that was a mistake — I misremembered. It comes from a slightly different layer that does not preserve any soft tissue whatsoever, so all we have of it are several skeletons, described here:
S. H. Hwang, M. A. Norell, Ji Q. & Gao K. (2004): A large Compsognathid [sic] from the Early Cretaceous Yixian formation [sic] of China, Journal of Systematic Palaeontology 2(1), 13 — 30
So leaving an empty line (two line breaks) below a blockquote produces a smaller gap than not leaving one (one line break). Bizarre.
Anyway, more links with pretty photos for Nat — I give just the naked URLs so the spam filter doesn’t hold this comment up for moderation:
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2007/02/feathers_and_filaments_of_nona.php
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2007/03/feathers_and_filaments_of_dino.php
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/02/month_in_dinosaurs_part_i.php (talks about the new Beipiaosaurus specimen, which I didn’t mention because I still haven’t downloaded the paper…)
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2009/02/month_in_dinosaurs_part_ii.php (shows Anchiornis — which, I had forgotten, is from the same kind of sediment as Huaxiagnathus and therefore doesn’t preserve any soft parts. <headdesk>)
And here’s a source for Jinfengopteryx coming out as a troodontid in a very large phylogenetic analysis:
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2007/01/troodontids_and_owls_oh_the_ir.php
I just submitted a comment full of links to posts of the ScienceBlog Tetrapod Zoology with pretty photos for Nat. It got held up for moderation. The trick of posting naked URLs instead of <a>, tags doesn’t work anymore.
You don’t think that circular logic in a scientific discussion is dangerous? ;)
Quite possibly, although their flud stuff is hard to beat…
Which is likely why your eyes haven’t been burned out of their sockets.
What David wrote. See Nat, this is the thing. All those transitional features (not forms!) we love to go on and on about in these comments? It’s possible to go and physically examine the specimens that preserve those features. Are non-specialists allowed to see the specimens firsthand at the museums? Not in all cases, to be sure (which kind of sucks in terms of science education), but they aren’t precluded in all cases, either. There are some museums where you can go and look at the primary data for yourself, even if you’re not a specialist (and of course if they happen to have those data on display, well then anyone can view). And numerous feathered dinosaur specimens have been touring about various parts of the bloody globe for more than a decade. Even if you’ve never seen dinosaur feathers firsthand, though, denying their existence is tinfoil hat level stuff. What, everyone is part of some mass global conspiracy? Seriously? Have you ever seen an electron? Are you skeptical that they exist? If you’re going to try and explain away the feathered dinosaur data as not existing, you’ve got quite a hill to climb.
I know, but if Nat were to hunt for that paper (I know, I know…, don’t say it…), he’d be looking for the original article. As far as I know, the erratum citation shows up separately.
Madness? This is Sparta.
Dangerous? This is circular logic.
Well, it’s possible that Nat has — like Distort D’Newsa — heard of the “Archaeoraptor” forgery (committed by fossil dealers, incidentally, not by scientists, who wouldn’t be so clueless as to basically make a crocoduck), has otherwise managed to sleep ever since 1996, and therefore believes “Archaeoraptor” was the only feathered nonavian dinosaur specimen ever found.
It’s also possible that he’s heard of Lingham-Soliar’s work which says “if I squint really hard and ignore where the feathers actually are, those of Sinosauropteryx look sorta kinda like the collagen fibers in the skin of many marine vertebrates”, which nobody takes seriously anymore for a long list of reasons.
The trick of posting naked URLs instead of , tags doesn’t work anymore.
you mean it did at some point?
I never could post more than three, ever.
what you can do, though, is create a temporary webpage with the list of links, and just link to that.
wtf?
I did NOT intend that text as a link.
hmm.
something tells me BBCodeExtra is sticking stuff in my posts I don’t want.
ahh, nvrmnd. there was a tag in the sentence I quoted.
need. more. coffee.
Tonight, men, we dine in a polytomy!
Yeah–that just wasn’t funny. I got nothin’.
I suppose. Little would surprise me at this point.
Ha! And then there was the endless drolling of “But what about Longisquama?” All of that associated blithering was fun to watch for a minute, I have to admit…
Re links: I just grit my teeth and split them between separate postings.
Although in this case, I doubt it helps. I posted #1495 and #1496 (in response to the plagiarized conclusion of #1418), which links to the Tet Zoo articles on dinosaur feathers, and to the evo-devo of scales and feathers, and to the pharyngula page on dinosaur lungs [O’Connor PM, Claessens LPAM (2005) Basic avian pulmonary design and flow-through ventilation in non-avian theropod dinosaurs. Nature 436:253-256]
I don’t think Nat reads anything not on AIG, though…
Nat wrote:
Nat, I’d be remiss if I didn’t make a note of this comment. The probability that the Earth is less than 100 million years old shrinks every month, in many cases every week. There are thousands of active, publishing geologists on this planet. There are scientific periodicals that come out monthly and weekly, among other periods. Often in the weekly journals and always in the monthly, the error bars on our (science’s) collective understanding of how old this planet is shrink. Not all of the papers I’m thinking of are specifically geochronology-related (the discipline within geology that’s focused on dating rocks (yes, they have heard all of the jokes…)), but all of the biostratigraphic contributions and papers on structural geology are contributing to the overall understanding of the planet’s great age. And these contributions are not moving us toward a young earth. You suggested recently you believe I’m someone who follows where the evidence leads. I’m no different than my colleagues. That’s what we do. That’s what we’re all doing; following the evidence. The evidence is leading us into deep time.
At this point, What is mostly happening is that the ages of established boundaries are getting tinkered with and tweaked. Major re-datings (on the order of tens of millions of years or more) are becoming increasingly rare.
It’s extremely unlikely that we’re all so wrong about the entirety of geology and much of physics that we’ll end up turning back the geological clock to less than 100 million years on the age of the earth.
This isn’t something we don’t know well. This isn’t on the fringe of geoscience. This isn’t even theory. This is a body of facts (observations with associated errors). The earth is old. As with geocentrism, at some point the world’s population is simply going to have to come to grips with the information.
It’s quite likely he doesn’t really read AIG either – at least not in the sense of properly taking in and evaluating the text critically. It’s more probable that he simply copy-pastes whatever comes up – perhaps on a simple word search of the site. We already know he’s not one of the world’s thinkers (let alone an honest person!), after all.
… with a blank line after the blockquote tag ends (ie 2 CR-LF thingies).
OK, that’s officially perverse behaviour. It’s the same as the inline one for the after gap and closer than the inline one for the before gap!
I don’t think Nat reads anything not on AIG, though…
meh, after all these years, I figure anything of even remote scientific interest is posted for the lurkers and the rest of us, regardless of which, if any, creobot it is actually constructed as a response to.
It’s not as if evidentiary argument EVER had the slightest impact on creotards the likes of Nat or Simon.
I’ve gotten into the habit of not even bothering anymore, most times. Which is why I do appreciate the effort David and others make to post useful links. Useful for lurkers, and occasionally I pick up something new myself.
It’s not like grad students typically have oodles of time to organize cogent responses to utter inanity with well-placed links to recent journal articles.
I know I didn’t when I was a grad student!
… with a blank line after the blockquote tag ends (ie 2 CR-LF thingies).
btw, if you’re in “code mode” (using something like BBcode), you can hold down the shift key and enter to get a single line feed.
[br] (with angle bracks, of course) will give you the same as a standard return (i.e., 2 CR-LF thingies).
so you can insert [br] at any time to give yourself a carriage return.
Wow! I stopped reading this thread at about #1150, when it seemed to have petered out. I missed all the fun till now.
I have nothing to actually contribute to the discussion, except to say that I haven’t been reading Pharyngula that long, so I’m willing to be corrected, but I think this must be right up there with the greatest concentration of erudition ever exhibited here. Good work, everybody!
Of course, it helps when you’re motivated by stupidity so dense it’s like neutronium, and equally impenetrable. Nat, you’re a complete and utter imbecile. Quit embarrassing yourself; believe me, you have no idea how thoroughly you’ve been owned here. Just withdraw while you can still live with yourself.
I’m also annoyed by the asymmetry of spacing around blockquotes, and I find it preferable to embed blockquotes
with no line breaks either before or after. This gives a somewhat tight, but at least symmetrical spacing.
If you want wider gaps,
and two after the block of text. Hope this helps.
David Marjanović (#1593)
It’s not just to do with blockquotes, though perhaps they play havoc with all spacing following them. Aside from the spacing around blockquotes, I’ve noticed my double breaks getting eaten a lot and if I try to force them with <br> or by adding a blank space on the “empty” line, I get gigantic breaks instead. Not sure how it’s going from ignoring spacing to adding extra spacing.
Granted, it could be my total lack of HTML knowledge hampering me here–I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know. (I prefer to believe in evil, anti-spacing fairies, though.)
SEF (#1594)
I just can’t figure out the logic behind how spacing is added or removed, even after fiddling about with several posts. Then there’s the issue of the preview giving different spacing than the actual post. Argh.
Thanks for the input, though, both of you. I’ll play around more with what you’ve given me. Now back to the spectator’s box to await Part 216 of the Pwnage of Nat by Real Science.
Double oops! I hit “post” instead of “preview” and they’ve changed it again.
and three after. Live and learn.
Thank you to Ichthyic and Lurkbot, too. I got distracted hunting down how to forcibly display <tags> and forgot to refresh before posting. Again.
Looks like that BBCode add-on is even more complicated than just spelling the HTML out, eh? I won’t bother trying to install it. Even if I means I have to type each
<blcoqkoute><blockquote> tag on average twice.(Also, German keyboard: [ and ] are AltGr 8 and AltGr 9., while < is a key, and > is Shift + the same.)
Most of the part that has come to grips with the demise of heliocentrism has also come to grips with the disproof of YEC. Except in the USA.
(And this time it really is just the USA. The Qur’an doesn’t say anything about the age of the Earth, so not even Harun Yahya has a problem with 4.56 billion years.)
And what, exactly, makes you think I have time?
Time isn’t something you have, young padawan. Time is something you steal.
Yes, I know. The problem is that the software is automatically inserting additional break tags inside auto-added paragraph tags and putting the blockquote inside them too (but not displaying an appropriate gap), eg the posted source behind my test 1 and test 2; while paradoxically eating pairs of typed returns to generate separate paragraph tags with the blockquote then not inside a paragraph (and displaying a closer upper gap for that), eg my test 3.
So both the auto-parsing of semi-plain text and the style settings for displaying things (particularly gaps after/between paragraphs) are faulty.
Yep. This one really does appear to be a US problem (WHOO HOO! Those are my peeps, yo!). I don’t think I will ever be able to express to you just how crazy it makes me to have people use the fruits of our labor to tell us that what we do doesn’t work.
The irony meeters don’t just fail; they succomb to tectonic-level stresses.
Oh no. I don’t want him to run away. I want him to come back after he has read that article on radiometric dating. If he runs away, he’ll never learn — not even that there’s no shame in learning, only in being egnorant (correct spelling).
fuck. meters. goddamnit.
Going over entirely to HTML and not using the return key at all: this is an explicit paragraph which is terminated immediately before the blockquote.
While this is another explicit paragraph opened immediately after the blockquote …
… and containing 2 explicit self-terminating break tags.
Finally, another explicit paragraph following straight after the second one. So the whole thing lacks any visual breaks in the text entry box.
I guess we’ll find out whether knowledge or belief is the truth that Nat says matters. I’m guessing the latter.
Just to briefly return to Nat’s jumbled exercise in plagiarism at #1418, in particular the Dinosaur vs Birds Digit Argument.
Let’s suppose that therapods possess digits I-II-III, and birds II-III-IV. Which digits did Archaeopteryx possess? Well, according to exactly the same criteria by which the therapods are judged to possess I-II-III (i.e., by comparing the relative numbers of phalangeal bones in each digit of the hand), Archaeopteryx also had digits I-II-III. From this it follows either (a) that Archaeopteryx was not a bird (if we insist that birds must have digits II-III-IV), or (b) that the possession of digits I-II-III versus II-III-IV does not coincide with the taxonomic distinction between birds and dinosaurs, and hence that it cannot, in itself, count as evidence against birds descending from dinosaurs.
And if one rejects the diagnosis of Archaeopteryx possessing digits I-II-III, one undermines the only basis for supposing that all therapods must have had digits I-II-III, and the digit-based argument against a dinosaurian origin for birds falls apart again.
In short, creationists cannot consistently assert that Archaeopteryx “is a true bird” (as Nat/AiG claim) and that the digit-based argument is a viable one.
Which rather neatly illustrates the way in which creationists mangle logic as well as science.
Greetings, everybody!
I’ve a quotation which has been hanging on the wall of my study for all to read. If you wish a copy, here it is:
“I use that trust to effectively brainwash [my students]…our teaching methods are primarily those of propaganda. We appeal – without demonstration – to evidence that supports our position. We only introduce arguments and evidence that supports the currently accepted theories and omit or gloss over any evidence to the contrary.” – Mark Singham “Physica Today” Vol. 53, June 2000, p.54 (in reference to teaching the ‘facts’ of evolution.). Maybe he or his peers were your teachers nine years ago. It is even worse today!
Because of his awareness of such intentional deception and other questionable practices, the top butterfly expert in the world, Dernardo d’ Abrera who put together The Concise Atlas of Butterflies of the World, (published by Hill House Publ., Melbourne, 2001) remarks, “My contempt, rather, is aimed at those labours that are tainted by the patently unscientific and wasteful posturings of the religion of Evolutionism. I am all for genuine science, based on the age-old rules of philosophical and scientific method, but I abhor intellectual sleight-of-hand, which contrives to meld truth with error and pass it off, by force, as incontrovertible scientific dogma.” This author, “whose common sense has always been outraged by the dishonest and bizarre silliness inherent in the religion of Evolutionism,” points to the butterfly larva, “programmed to develop through six growth stages.. (!) The implications for those who continue wishfully to bethink accidental and mindless evolution (with or without their equilibria punctuated), are profoundly embarrassing. The butterfly is not simply the romantic winged adult, but an unbreakable composite of four morphologically distinct creatures, all performing to a rigorously and unchangingly pre-set pattern of living events.” [p.22 of his atlas]
Tomorrow, I’m off to Dallas for a five day scientific conference and this afternoon I have to pack and finish up on taxes pertaining to our several companies so I’ll check in later.
…because Truth matters,
Nat
Does the word Christian appear in the title of that conference?
I expect a nutter like Nat to keep coming back to the same overly long thread. But everybody else, please, no more on this thread.
The only brainless unthinking indoctrinated one here is the creationist. Trying to chip away at evolution does not show proof positive for your inane theory. Your god doesn’t exist, so you have no theory. Time either to show physical evidence for your imaginary god that will pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, not natural origin, or to acknowledge you have nothing. Put up the right information or shut up. Welcome to science.
D’Abrera’s argument from personal incredulity proves… what, exactly?
By the way, Dr. Singham’s first name is Mano, not Mark. Trust a cut-and-paste from the ICR quote-mining machine to be wrong.
As for the quoted passage, here’s the entire article. (Did you ever actually read the whole thing, Nat? Tell the truth, now.) Judge for yourselves whether or not the quoted passage was really “in reference to teaching the ‘facts’ of evolution.” Dr. Singham would approve of our forming our own conclusions based on the evidence at hand.
Nope, not interested in learning. Just interested in preaching. After all the effort David went to get you primary peer reviewed articles, the least you could do is read them.
Incidentally, for those of you following along at home, d’Abrera isn’t a scientist – he’s a photographer and publisher. He may well be “the top butterfly expert in the world” when it comes to organizing reference volumes, but he’s not a evolutionary biologist, or even a zoologist. He’s an accomplished lepidopterist who has seen many, many butterflies, and has concluded that what nature hath wrought simply CANNOT BE… he just doesn’t believe it. He therefore “believes” in Intelligent Design.
Naturally, the Discover Institute loves this guy. They love those people who claim scientific dissent from Darwinism, who are commenting outside of their field of expertise, and offer little besides their own incredulity – to the credulous.
Nat’s pompous valediction would, if he were truly honest, read ‘…because Jesus matters more than truth’. But since he’s a disingenuous coward, it doesn’t.
Nat’s continued cut/paste of AIG should be grounds to close this thread. PZ, this will go on forever at this rate.
Also, according to Wikipedia:
Here’s what one reviewer, a developmental biologist, had to say about the book:
Because the Truth matters, eh?
No.
You haven’t read the article on radiometric dating yet. So, stay away.
Remember, it’s written by a Christian for Christians from a Christian perspective. The devil won’t jump out of the screen if you click on the link (or whatever it is you embarrassing little coward are afraid of).
Bonne soirée.
P.S.: We’d also appreciate it if you stopped plagiarizing — citing or quoting is one thing, plagiarizing is another.
P.P.S.:
Hmmm… I think these two paragraphs contradict each other. And not just because even the biggest conferences in my field only take four days (without the field trips). See comment 1631.
Shorter Nat: I can’t respond to the scientific evidence, so I’m going to accuse all of evolutionary science of being mere propaganda.
The article that Nat quote-mines (incorrectly, of course, because creationists would rather lie than check primary sources — the essay was not by Mark Singham in “Physica Today”, but by Mano Singham in Physics Today; at least “June 2000” was right) is available free online (I see Watchman got there first while I was composing this. Oh, well.):
“Teaching and Propaganda”, by Mano Singham, Physics Today, June 2000, and also here in HTML.
Singham’s original article contains the problematic phrase:
Dude. Seriously, WTF? What evidence is there to the “contrary” of a ~15-billion-year-old universe? There may well be refinements in the accuracy of the measurements of the universe’s age… but evidence to the contrary?
What is he talking about?
Hm.
There is also a summation of responses to Singham’s article, and his responses to those responses:
“Teaching, Propaganda, and the Middle Ground”, W. C. Morrey, Hoi-Kwong Lo, Pantazis Mouroulis, Charles K. Scharnberger, Gary Powell, Philip E. Kaldon, Phil Baringer, Moorad Alexanian, and Mano Singham; Physics Today, November 2000
Hm. Here’s some more recent quotes by Mano Singham. Perhaps he found himself being cited by creationists, crowing over the confession of “propaganda”, and decided to make up his mind exactly where he stood on that issue, at least:
http://machineslikeus.com/People/Singham_Mano.html
Iain, agreed. It’s almost painful.
It’s kind of like the question I asked him #1411 that he hasn’t replied to yet. I asked it because of a conversation I was in with another fellow a while back. This other guy accepts our (the geoscience community’s) classification of a suite of marine organisms, preserved in a limestone, as marine, but won’t accept our interpreation of the environment that the critters lived in (marine shelf; warm relatively shallow conditions). Instead, like Nat’s example from above that I responded to in #1411, this guy insisted that the rocks enclosing those marine fossils were evidence of The Flud (disagreeing with my contention that these particular limestones weren’t flood deposits, but instead were quiet water, “business as usual” deposits). In doing so of course, he ignored and got trapped by the fact that our classification of those fossils as marine (which he accepted) was made in part by our interpretation of the sedimentary environment that buried the damn things (which he rejected)! Yay thinking!
Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to matter that Nat’s source isn’t being very logical about the theropod/avian hand issue. Whereas this water has been muddy for a while (as you probably already well know) about whether the avian hand is I-II-III like a theropod (as the morphology suggests), or is II-III-IV (as the embryology has sometimes appeared to indicate). This has allowed the creationists to do some pouncing (on papers like Burke and Feduccia, 1997, Science 278:666)–albeit clumsily because as usual they don’t actually know enough to offer a reasoned opinion). But it seems like things are getting sorted out, with the interpretations currently falling on the dinosaur-to-bird side of the fence.
See, for example (just add the http://):
LINK: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0003325
(I thought this was a way cool paper, even though embryology and gene expression is a long fucking way from my research comfort zone)
As well as:
LINK: http://www.springerlink.com/content/b587073l17u76464/
LINK: http://www.tmd.ac.jp/artsci/biol/textbiodiv/17EvoDev7-18.pdf
Josh, you’ll know – how did Satan put in all those fossils in just the right layers, never making an error? Though if I were him, I would have made a few errors, just to confuse the scientists. Perhaps I should ask Nat, he’ll give me a clear answer…
An interesting extract from an interview with Mano Singham:
http://machineslikeus.com/mlu-interviews-mano-singham.html
[much more of interest in the full interview]
Hm.
His articles here ( http://machineslikeus.com/ArticleIndexTitlesOnly.html#ManoSingham ) and on his own blog also tackle the religion-and-science issue. Such as this one:
http://blog.case.edu/singham/2009/02/13/religious_faith_versus_scientific_commitment_to_certainty
I would be very interested in seeing him revisit his June 2000 essay, and explain what he now thinks about the issue. Would he still use the term “propaganda” to describe science education?
The placing them was easy. How the hell did he carve the damn things and make the insides look all bone-like? Ya know, bones chuck full of Haversian canals and tons of ammonoid genera with all those complex sutures? Son of a bitch is quite the artist.
Nat (#1624)
Wow, why don’t you go read the actual article, you quote-mining weasel? Singham starts out indicting studends for using trust over true understanding and teachers for building on that trust. He says:
Followed by:
See how he’s criticizing the limitations of the educational system? This is the theme of his article. It does not justify your position, however, because he is not saying that a reliance on propaganda techniques makes what he teaches wrong.
You’d do better to quote him when he says:
However, it’s a rhetorical question and can be answered in the negative concerning people who challenge his authority by appealing to a different authority.
Another analysis of this popular quote-mine is here. (In fact, you ought to read all the commentary on that page.)
By the way, Nat, thanks for providing copious evidence as to why people like Professor Gotelli should not waste anyone’s time with creationism. Since you showed up, there have been minds changed (but not by you) and people enlightened (but not by you) and much critical thinking all around (but not by you). You have done nothing but reinforce the stereotype that creationists are dishonest zealots who can’t see truth when it is spoon-fed to them, primary source by primary source. It’s all pearls before swine where you are concerned.
What is an example of a potential scientific discovery that would falsify evolution?
Fossilized rabbit in Pre-Cambrian stone.
Copy-pasting from above @#1373, with some modifications:
1) Organisms reproduce
Falsification: Organisms that do not ever reproduce
2) The offspring of these organisms vary
Falsification: Organisms produce only 100% exact copies of themselves (even parthenogenetic organisms have some genetic/epigenetic variation)
3) The environments that organisms live in varies
Falsification: If the world were like a Platonic sphere, uniform in absolutely every respect, including light and temperature.
4) Organisms in different environments survive better or worse depending on how their individual differences
Falsification: If all organisms survived exactly the same regardless of environment, OR if the least adapted organisms survived contrary to the environment (e.g., naked animals with no insulation or heat-generating ability in the polar regions; thickly-furred and heavily insulated animals with no heat-loss ability in the hot tropics).
5) Those organisms in those different environments that survive better depending on those individual differences will pass on the differences to their offspring.
Falsification: If none of the organisms that were best adapted to some particular environment reproduced, OR if the individual differences cannot in any way be inherited.
And (modifying and expanding on another point I raised in #1373 & #1536, and taking into account SEF’s objection @#1590), if God showed up and demonstrated (a) the ability to generate all results found scientifically by specific miracles, and (b) the ability to alter past and present reality (including, but not limited to, putting a mammal fossil into the Precambrian, and/or messing with stellar and radiometric events and observations at will). If this God then claimed, based on the above demonstrations (and any other demonstrations made subsequently), that all of science was the result of observations of his past and current reality-alteration, which he could change on a whim, this would almost entirely invalidate all of science, I think.
(See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis )
I have raised objections before about the assertion that a Precambrian rabbit alone would falsify evolution… My suggestion was (and still is, for now) that assuming the fossil was shown to be otherwise legitimate, a more parsimonious explanation of such a rabbit would be time-travel. Although, as noted the last time this came up, time-travel would also cause problems for science, inasmuch as science as we currently understand it depends on regular and irreversible causality. Or so I understand, anyway.
Transitional fossils between birds and mammals
@Rico
An example that would falsify evolution? Your question is vaguely worded.
Are you referring to the theory of common descent resulting in the current diversity of life? Or that species tend to reproduce with mutations that can result in new traits, and that when enough traits change that you have what can be classified as a new (but related) species?
If it’s the latter that you’re asking about…
A pair of dogs giving birth to a litter of actual felines (or some other not directly related species) without some form of medical/technological intervention to cause the pregnancy….
Back on topic for the thread…
Personally, I’d like to see a well known (globally) web site that is moderated by respected professionals in the scientific and medical community, that posts debates about scientific and medical issues. Perhaps it could be funded by a science education organization(s). This would provide an easy to use forum for the public to observe anywhere in the world, while avoiding the downsides to a verbal public debate (such as the Gish Gallop).
Such a site should not only explain how science works to the public, but also defines terms such as “theory” for the average person lacking sufficient scientific literacy.
Debates can then be presented with material submitted by those considered experts on the subject (or the closest thing to it for the non-scientific positions). When they are posted, after moderation by the panel, they can be provided with comments as to why the argument/evidence is considered credible or fallacious for both sides.
A simple scoring system can then be provided to make it easy for the public to compare the relative credibility of the opposing sides. For example….
Logical positively supporting argument = 1 Point
Credible positively supporting evidence = 10 points
Logical Fallacy = 0 Points
I’m under no illusion that those on the side of pseudoscience & quackery will declare it to be unfair or biased when they lose. Also, the members of the public that have already “drunk the Kool-Aid” will also just brush it off when their favorite side loses.
The point of such a site would be to provide a resource for those sitting on the proverbial fence to get a better understanding of both science and the issues. Additionally, it could also provide a “one stop” source to rebut much of the nonsense that permeates so much of society today.
Maybe such a public debate site wouldn’t be practical to get up and running, and selecting suitable experts that can be impartial enough on the various subjects would be a challenge. It’s just something that I’d like to see.
I have raised objections before about the assertion that a
Owl, if you’ll permit me, I’d like to add to this.
Rico, what I think Owlmirror is saying here (Owl, feel free to smack me upside the head if I’m getting this wrong) is that, yes, you are correct in understanding how science uses the word “theory.” Broadly:
1., Scientific theories are considered valid if they explain all relevant observations, and
2., Scientific theories have to be adjusted to fit the new paradigm if we make discoveries (i.e., observations), or erect new hypotheses, that the theory cannot explain, and
3., Scientific theories get falsified if they both cannot explain the new observations (/accomodate the new hypothesis/es) and cannot be adjusted so as to explain them.
(As an example, atomic theory existed before the discovery of electrons. The theory was adjusted to accomodate this new discovery. If we couldn’t have adjusted atomic theory to accomodate electrons, then atomic theory would have been in big trouble we would have had to try and come up with something else that explained everything that atomic theory explained but also successfully dealt with the electron problem (don’t say it…)).
But, while you’re correct in understanding how evolution can be falsified, I think Owlmirror is asserting that, the ToE is so bloody well supported by so much evidence, that if we made a single discovery that evolution couldn’t explain (e.g., a rabbit preserved in rocks of definite Precambrian age, with everything else about the geologic column and fossil record remaining the same), it is much more likely that there’s an explanation for the observation (our rabbit) that we don’t know yet, than the other billion datapoints supporting the ToE suddenly all being wrong*.
Basically, the ToE isn’t a new theory, and it isn’t like we haven’t been tweaking/adjusting/testing the thing continuously for 150 years. We have billions of individual observations now that have so far failed to falsify the theory. A lot of people would spend a lot of energy trying to figure out what the hell was up with that rabbit before we immediately threw the ToE out on its head, because with billions of observations against it, it is way more likely that we’ve fucked something up with the lone rabbit observation than with the multitude of other observations that the ToE explains quite happily.
Of course, it’s possible for a creationist to look at my comment here and say “SEE! WE KNEW IT! Evolution is teh dogma! Even if you found a Pre-cambrian* rabbit, you wouldn’t abandon your evilutionist religion! You just admitted it!” In fact, I predict that’s what they would do, because reading comprehension is teh hard and apparently understanding fucking anything about how science goddamn works is teh harder.
So let’s say it again with more brevity: I agree with Owlmirror. A Precambrian rabbit would be a huge problem for the ToE, but one observation, no matter how damning, would be hard pressed to outweigh billions of conforming observations. It’s more likely that something is weird with that observation and so that observation would be studied very carefully. Creationists would of course see us as trying to waffle out of acknowledging the observation at all, thereby as usual completely missing the point that science isn’t fucking black and white, and probability matters.
* I would agree that presuming a time-traveling rabbit presents enough issues for other aspects of science that it’s probably not even close to parsimoneous (although, *shrug,* it perhaps should be noted here that nature doesn’t always give a shit about our adherence to parsimony).
**Because they seem to hate writing Precambrian correctly.
*sigh* Sorry, Owl. You wrote your comment with much more brevity, but I just wanted to hammer on that point a little harder. Sorry also for the typos. Okay. Breakfast.
tbh if I saw a legitimate Crocoduck in the fossil record, I’d think twice about the strength of the theory…
*seconds what Kel wrote*
Actually, the stratigraphers had a major… today we’d say flamewar about this in, AFAIK, the early 20th century.
Yes, but it’s been settled.
Oh, wait. Are you suggesting that the creationists are as far behind the curve on this issues as the general populace is, say, vis a vis Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus? If so, that’s an interesting idea…
Nevermind. I was in a hurry and misread what you actually wrote. My question is kind of meaningless.
Josh @#1648: Yes, that’s exactly what I meant. You hit the nail on the head firmly and squarely.
Kel @#1646: Hah. Time-travel and bioengineering.
“Calvin! Suzie says you stole her pet Bunnyduck™, and the Temporal Police are here saying that someone around here opened an illegal wormhole to the deep past. IF YOU DID WHAT I THINK YOU DID, YOU ARE IN DEEP TROUBLE YOUNG MAN!“
Owlmirror, nice find (the Singham interview in MLS). I can’t speak for Singham, of course, but I figure that if he knew he was giving ammo to all manner of creationists, in an article in which he unequivocally states that he has no problem with current theories of the age of the universe and of biological evolution, he would have phrased things a little differently.
I disagree that this response is the best response for all. It is certainly the best response if a guy or gal is too busy to spend an evening investigating the poisoned mind. I for one, enjoy peering at creationists under the one on one lens of a debate. The trick is to remember the real topic: How is it that you can be so deluded and yet not look obviously handicapped? The real debate is over whether they can prove they are NOT morons.
YMMV
Greetings everyone!
The convention in Dallas was interesting and worthwhile. Have you ever heard of glycoconjugates and what they do for the immune system? Anyhow, I got home day before yesterday. Unpacked, attended to mail, filed an extension on the taxes for my corporations, grabbed my ski gear and headed to Breckenridge and Vail to join friends for skiing. I’ve not forgotten our line of discussion and shall get back to you all eventually.
…because truth matters,
Nat
Nat, you should email PZ and request a new thread solely for your copy/pas… I mean, lengthy discussions. That way, more Pharyngulites will be able to get involved in the ass-handin… err, dialogue with you, as this thread has dropped so far back in the archive (and is so damn long, as well).
Dr. Nick Riviera, is that you?
Is Nat John Kwok?
Yep, known about that for 20 years.
Nat, the truth does matter, and your cut/paste from a refuted source shows you to be a liar and bullshitter who can’t recognize the truth. If you have something other than AIG sources, you need to show them. Otherwise, I see plonking in your future, as PZ doesn’t like cut/paste specialists like you.
Oh, no. This old thread is deservedly dead, and now some kook wants to resurrect it? No. This one is closed now.
Nat, if you’re going to insist on blithering your idiocy somewhere, find an appropriate current thread and spew there, where more people will see it and find a fresh opportunity to rip you apart.