The Science of Watchmen thread has bloated up abominably, and the topics have wandered far afield. It is now closed, but you can talk about whatever right here, instead.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Alan Clarke may be a self-deceived old fool, but damn he has some persistence. Too bad his knowledge in areas of science doesn’t match.
Aaaaaaaaaah. Thank you.
I’m listening to the Ghost in the Shell (1995) soundtrack album all the way through for the first time, and track 11 is something called “The First Sight of You Was Like Looking at Heaven”. It’s. . . strange. For very J-pop values of “strange”.
Awww, it closes just right when the topic goes to Wolverine getting a blow job.
It’s all about the SIWOTI. For days and weeks and months, now.
SIWOTI!
‘Twas weird. A post about the science bases for superhero powers in a movie became a fisking of Noachianism.
Will our fearless protagonists return here, or will this whole spawning thing confuse the delugionists?
Stay tuned.
Can we talk about puppies? Puppies are cute and adorable! Let’s talk about puppies.
Puppies!
Okay, since this thread has no topic, I won’t be off topic.
I’ve got another request post on my blog:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2009/04/atheists-on-youtube.html
Drop a comment on my blog linking your favorite atheist youtube.
It was taking about 1 whole minute in order for me to load that other blog post.
Terror at Fermilab!
I can only imagine what you biologists have had to deal with this week. . .
The God, abortionist thread will catch up to the Watchmen thread in a few more days. Please kill the stupid before it breeds…
fuck puppies, we need more BACON!
wait.
can you make bacon out of puppies?
By the way, Blake, if you feel like it, someone dropped some Omega Point on this thread:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/03/the_heathen_are_raging_again.php
If you feel like doing a more thorough deconstruction than “That’s bullshit!”, well, it would be cool.
Or you could do it here. Why not? Open threaaaaad!
Blake Stacey, is the music composed by Yoko Kano? The music she made for Cowboy Bebop and Stand Alone Complex is great.
Ichthyic,
Can we have bacon while fucking puppies?
Possibly baby-bacon?
So close, and yet not quite right.
any thoughts?
Can we have bacon while fucking puppies?
I don’t see why not!
I’m going to go make a Bacon Mary, ala RBDC., to drink while I consider what really should be done with puppies, now that you mention it.
I’ll let the good Reverend of Bacon take over if he’s around.
Janine (#14):
It’s by Kenji Kawai, or so the Interrunes tell me.
(And yes, Yoko Kanno is teh roxx0r.)
Toxic megacolon, is that it? Oh wait, he said bloating abominably!
Everyone go to my blog. Read. Enjoy. Have some snacks.
By the Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots on 5 of my speakers plus the subwoofer.
OT, if there is a topic: “Man with bible tries to lure children into car.” The good news is, they caught the bastard. He came back the next day to try to get a five-year-old girl or two.
ohh yesss
Ken Cope wrote:
I’ve been thinking about the 5.1 of Yoshimi for a while now – it’s very tempting, ’cause these days I’ve got a 6.1 system that it’d be mindblowing on; Wayne and the boys sure know how to use a studio.
Have you seen them live? I caught them at the Big Day Out a few years back and they were phenomenal. Of course, I had consumed a reasonable amount of mood enhancer at the time, but I like to think that only makes good things great rather than bad things good.
Touching cotton balls makes my teeth hurt. Is there any rational explanation for this?
There’s a sinister note to this. His name appears on some anti-abortion prayer sites. I hope he’s not one of those “an ovum equals a five-year-old” zealots. I hope he’s *only* praying.
The Lips played on my campus back in 1988. That was when they were supporting Oh My Gawd! The Lips were a very different band then. Everything’s Exploding
@25 Fiisi …
That dental surgery CAN be a bitch.
Is it safe?
Is it safe?
Tax Religion. See Dustin run.
Tark
(obviously, I didn’t read the thread while it was ongoing)I saw and instantly thought:
God hawked a loogie
And earth went all gooey.
God got a tissue
And gone was the issue.
PZ, why don’t you set up a forum here, or let Seed set up some fora to organize the discussion. It would make a great central meeting point for atheists, agnostics and other interested parties world-wide. I’m sure Seed would be able to come up with a nice design and good functionality.
In answer to your earlier question, Dr. Meyers, as to why we’re here, in my case, I’m working on an independent blogumentary on the intersection of faith and science in the 2000s, tentatively called “Crossroads.”
We’re interested in interviewing people in all areas of interest here, and in addition to interviewing you (either by email, Skype, or generic vid-chat), we’d appreciate if you could ask your friend the British Darwinist Richard Dawkins if the project sounds interesting to him?
http://crossroads.blogspot.com for more info.
Sorry, the above was a typo:
It’s crossroadsthemovie
Long-time lurker, and very occasional poster here.
But I’m going to throw something in – as PZ started by talking about Watchmen….
I never read a graphic novel before, though I’m a voracious reader of most genres, so I thought I’d give Watchmen a try.
Uh….was that it?
1) The story is daft, frankly. And what exactly was the point of the pirate ship bit, except to take up space?
2) The dialogue was trite and stilted. And that’s being kind. The bit where that blue guy and the young lady were on Mars, and she persuaded him that life was worth something – well, that was so dreadfully laughable, it wasn’t true. It might have impressed me when I was sixteen, but it didn’t impress me now.
3) It’s graphically violent. Blood everywhere, and brains and broken teeth and bones. But there are also several references to sex. And there is not so much as a glimpse of a nipple anywhere. Loads of curving breasts, long legs, round bums – but heaven forfend you actually SHOW anything. What IS it about depiction of violence being acceptable, but depiction of sex is not?
Oh, yes – you have to play at spot the clever-clever bits, like the lesbian girl handing over a copy of R D Laing’s Knots and then references to knots on the next page.
You’ll realize that I’m not impressed. No amount of calling it a graphic novel takes away from the fact that it’s just a long comic book. And no amount of deep meaning (yeah, right) makes it any more than that.
One of the best books of the last hundred years? HA! Time Magazine just trying to be trendy.
Like I say – I’d have been impressed when I was sixteen. But I outgrew comic books long ago.
But at least I tried.
(Perhaps I’ll try some Neil Gaiman “graphic novels”. His real novels are well worth reading.)
!! But then where will I mock Walton?
blue dicks?
E.V. Re your comment on the word Bayesian – kind of mirrors mine over at Michael Tobis’ “Only in it for the Gold”
What I said was “And by the way, starting to think certain people need to have their ‘Big Words’ privileges revoked. And just to tide them over, I mean the denizens of the subpontic denialosphere.”
But I did kindly cite right to a Google books thing where a statistics textbook was explaining why arguments like the (climate denialist in this case) makes are meaningless abuse of Bayesian inference, not use of it.
Paul Z Myers is an anagram for sleazy rump.
CosmicTeapot: The 5th Egyptian dynasty lasted from 2465 BCE until 2323 BCE. The last pharoah of the dynasty, Unas, lived from 2356 BCE until 2323 BCE. 2348 BCE, the year of the biblical flood happened in the middle of his reign. What did he do for 100 days, tread water?
The Biblical date for Noah’s flood is around 2300 – 2400 B.C. Prior to the flood, there was no Egyptian empire. If people were living in that area, they were NOT the descendents of Ham and their land did not look the same as today. Egypt is referred to multiple times in the Bible as “The land of Ham”. The flood changed the entire face of the Earth dramatically. The Nile River, and current shape of the continents and mountain ranges, did not exist prior to the flood.
Is it reasonable to think the Egyptian Empire started around 2300 – 2400 B.C.? The answer is “yes” because all of the Egyptian Dynasty charts come with a caveat emptor: “All the dates until the Late Period (664-332 B.C.) should be taken with a grain of salt. Some think a good deal more than just a grain.” (source)
Another factor to take into account is that people were living much longer for several generations after Noah exited the ark. This would include, Ham, Shem’s brother, who started the Egyptian empire. These longer life spans could be very important if Egyptologists are cramming too many kings and dynasties together because they ASSUME their life spans were like today.
Life Spans
950 Noah
600 Shem
438 Arphaxad
433 Salah
464 Eber
239 Peleg
239 Reu
230 Serug
148 Nahor
205 Terah
175 Abraham
An important question to ask is, “How certain are historians that Unas lived from 2356 – 2323 BCE?” One must go beyond quoting an encyclopedia. One of the best historical documents available today nearest the time of the Egyptian dynasties is the Bible itself. Click here for numerous Egyptian archeological evidences that support the Bible’s veracity.
Additional resources that explain potential inaccuracies in dating Egyptian dynasties:
The pyramids of ancient Egypt
Fall of the Sothic theory: Egyptian chronology revisited
And here we go again…
*Sigh*
here we go again……
And no Alan,persistance is not a virtue in itself !
Did anyone see this recent discussion with Hitchens?
http://www.tangle.com/view_video.php?viewkey=41178da2dab2e1e83d93
Hitchens got together in a panel with William Lane Craig, Lee Strobel and 2 preachers. The apologists presented a bunch of arguments for God . I didn’t expect Hitchens to be able to engage all their arguments but it looked like he didn’t care too. He went on to talk about how God was watching all of all of us like a totalitarian dictator and watched people suffer like a sadist.
What I found rather disappointing was Hitchens refusal to answer any kinds of questions as to what humanistic philosophy offered for people like us.
Alan changes tack, but does not disappoint:
Myths, Heh.
Interesting.
Not to long ago i actually wrote an article about debunking the Noah story on my website.
I posted it in both english and dutch.
( http://www.slim-blondje.com/eng/?page_id=32 )
On the dutch one, a guy responded that i was wrong, and wanted to set me straight and advised me to read 2 websites: http://www.worldwideflood.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah%27s_Ark
In his opinion i’m misguides in my research about the amount of water and the amount of animals, but neither website actually contradicts me.
What do you think?
@42: it is unnecessary to engage with apologetic arguments because they are uncompelling, so nobody has to care.
Of course, the bible is wrong, since there was no global flood.
Since you have no response to the theodicy of the flood, you of course concede that God is evil, murderous, and genocidal.
The so-called “long lives” of the patriarchs whose very existence has no evidence are, of course, false.
And of course Egypt is older than 2400BC. Hell, you completely and utterly forgot from the other thread that the oldest mummy is several thousand years older than that.
Nothing you write matters anyway, since of course it ASSUMES that the proven-false bible is true.
The Sumerians had invented glue and were brewing beer at 6000BC.
LOL
You might also want to look at these:
http://www.grahamkendall.net/Unsorted_files-1/A130-Noah_Ark.txt
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
Lots more numbers crunched.
In conclusion, an ark of the size specified in the Bible would not be large enough to carry a cargo of animals and food sufficient to repopulate the earth, especially if animals that are now extinct were required to be aboard.
I’m sure I asked one (or both) of the delugionists these questions in the last thread (or perhaps the one before), but I didn’t get an answer
Why did there need to be a flood? Your god allegedly created the universe; why were his powers suddenly diminished so much that he dropped to the level of an second-rate rain god?
An all-powerful god could have simply wished away all the people and animals and plants and bacteria and so forth that the flood killed (by drowning; he’s a loving god, right?) and saved everyone the time and effort.
Ditto the animals on the ark. Why couldn’t he just create new ones? It’s not like it was that big a deal to create them in the first place; he didn’t even need the clay he seemed to need to make the humans. Wow, you’d think we’d be more different if that were the case, wouldn’t you?
Anyway, all I’m saying is, seems like a whole bunch of carrying on for what could have been achieved in a simple finger click, nose-wriggle or wave of the magic wand.
Of course, this kind of ties in with how an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent god could create a world in which he didn’t already know what was going to happen, and then act completely irrationally by getting angry at something that was really his fault and which he easily could have prevented by designing things better (or even just designing them well.
But hey, you’re no doubt going to dodge this question; why should I give you two-for-one? Someone else can get the pleasure of calling you out for cowardice on that one.
Alan Clarke, I quote you, “Darwin’s theory fails consistently to explain the complexity of life. I think programmers of all people would be the least likely to fall for this. Next time someone can’t get their program to compile, I propose this: Create a program to open your source code, locate a character at random, then change it to a random ASCII character. More than likely things won’t improve on your first try but don’t give up! You have time on your side! Simply run the routine on an over-clocked CPU to speed things up. You can easily simulate millions of years. That misspelled function GatNamedPipeHandleState, will eventually start working. Given enough time, new routines will develop that wholly bypass the Windows API and you’ll find matching documentation on these new routines in F:/ierpuriujkjjuii.hlp. Don’t worry about that strange path, it will eventually become more readable as time passes. Folks, the bottom line is this: the complexity we see in life today was pre-programmed by a designer (i.e. God).”
Buddy-boy, you forgot the winnowing effect of natural selection. Or are you so indoctrinated by an ideology based upon Bronze Age myths that you can’t think straight? I guess it’s the latter, as you give credence to that crock of shit called the bible. Don’t you realize that the source material has been mis-copied, mis-translated, and redacted over thousands of years by people with various agendas?
What does everyone think about christening/baptising babies? Would you attend the christening of a relative?
I’ve always liked reading Hyphoid Logic, but it hasn’t been updated since the holidays last year. I tried posting a comment to it recently, but it disappeared into the ether. Does anyone know what happened? I hope Mike’s out in the field, or else just taking a break from it for a while, but the long silence does concern me a bit.
Alan still can’t explain the distance of galaxies, any point he makes that doesn’t explain the 13.7 billion year old universe is mute.
Wowbagger, there is evidence that the people who created the myths upon which the bible was based, basically, Bronze Age Mesopotamians, thought that their gods should, & would, have morals no better that those of men.
@48
I’ll read up on those sites you gave me, thanks :)
On the saving of a species..
I have once seen a documentary on National Geographic channel (earth investigated, season 5 episode 1: Ancient Mariners/Naked Sience: First to cross the ocean) about how people inhabited australia (the original people) and how many people were nessecary for a species (in this case humans) to not die out.
John Moore of the university of Florida used a computer program that was actually made to see how many people were needed to colonise outer space, to see when a group would not go extinct.
He came to a number of 15 couples (or higher). Anything less than that had about 100% fail ratio.
Another argument that we really couldn’t have decended from either Adam and Eve, or from Noah and his family.
Alan Clarke has no idea how evolution works, nor does he have any idea in rectifying that situation. It’s really sad, you’d think the least he could do is find out what scientists say evolution is in order to be able to better ague against us, but no. Why is it the ignorant persist in maintaining their ignorance especially when trying to convince others far more knowledgeable than them on the matter that they are wrong? (the answer of course being the Dunning-Kruger effect)
You can’t compare evolution to a computer program.
A computer only has Yes and no.
Evolution uses Yes, No and Maybe :)
On another note.. while i was looking up the page of that documentary, i came across this:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070323-giant-squid.html
:)
I assume that was some kind of joke,right?
A computer program might be Yes and No,in the sense of 0 and 1,on a binary/machine level,but thats not how programs work and what they do.
And how does evolution use yes/no/maybe??
That comment did not make an awful lot of sense.
Well you can use simulation on the computer as an analogy, and indeed it’s been done multiple times successfully. Alan neglects two things: 1. the role of selection, and 2. the absence of a goal. Evolution has no goal, so expecting it to produce any specific functionality is stupid. And randomness alone is not going to produce anything of value – that’s why there is selection involved in inheritance. If you program software that takes into account both of these things, then a suitable simulation analogous to evolution can be made – such as Dawkins’ biomorphs program.
But even if it couldn’t be done on the computer, it doesn’t matter. Alan is trying to disprove a biological process with an analogy, and that’s just silly. All you can do with an analogy is disprove the analogy, and until the likes of Alan (Stimpy does this too) realise that an analogy is just that, then they won’t get anywhere. Show that evolution is impossible with biological organisms, that modification of code cannot build novel features or changes in time. Of course doing this actually requires understanding biology and biochemistry, something that Alan will never do. All he can do is use an analogy because he has no actual knowledge in the field.
Since it’s an open thread, I’ll mention a drink I found in the supermarket the other day: Happy Monkey. Naturally, I had to buy it. It’s a mixture of acai and pomegranate. I’m sorry to report that it’s fairly unpleasant. Not so much due to the taste, which is just meh, but due to the appearance in the glass, which is reminiscent of grape juice mixed with a good quantity of soap scum. So, I’m unable to recommend it as the official drink of Happy Monkey celebrations.
http://www.happymonkeydrinks.com, if you’re interested.
Martin_z (#33), I guarantee that someone will think your favourite work of fiction is a piece of trash.
clinteas, it wasn’t a joke, but you are right, i could have worded it so much better.
First off, i have a problem with comparing life and evolution with a computer program, especially if you try to explain why it is so complex.
We as humans lack the skills to make such a program in a way that it will do justice to the complexity of everything. Not only that, but computers themselves are limited to the 1-0 response they can produce, even in a complex program.
Besides that, the way alan puts it, is that in the whole program you make 1 thing random, and see if the rest reacts to it, while in evolution anything can change just a little bit and than influence a change in something else (or not).
I guess i wanted to try and put it too simple, and just stepped over a lot of the thoughts inbetween.
I read back to the other thread to try and find the actual post it was quoted from, but i couldn’t find it. I did find a lot of other drivel from alan and concluded the moment i just kept seeing bible quotes that this guy could never ever be taken seriously anyway.
Alan Clarke: if people used to live for a really, really long time, then how do you explain floppy discs?
Fight theologic with theologic.
I dont think thats true.
If you look at Dawkins’ cheap lil biomorphs program from 25 years ago,it achieves a breathtaking level of complexity with the simplest of algorithms.Which is what he wanted to show,of course.
And the 1 and 0 on the machine level translates to a great deal of complexity on the program level.Havent done more than basic Assembler programming,but there’s your example how simplicity can bring about complexity…:-)
Kel would be more qualified to comment on this.
@clinteas
True, it can get very complex, but still not complex enough.
I have to admit, i’m not a programmer either, nor a biologist.
I’m just a very logical thinker and my logic has trouble with the concept of a human being able to create something as complex as the whole of nature AND use it to explain/test some scientific theories we have about it.
But if the God, abortionist thread closes, then Maggie might spread elsewhere on Pharyngula! Right now we have her contained so as to minimize the total damage.
I haven’t done much work with evolutionary algorithms, but I have done a bit with artificial intelligence. It doesn’t take much variation to produce some unpredictability, especially if there is some randomness thrown in. It’s amazing to watch creatures programmed with but a few simple rules interact in a very finite world. I should go back to the project now and finish it to the state in envisioned – one that had many variables that were heritable, and through variation passed on down through reproduction would create even more unpredictability.
I don’t think anyone’s claiming that any computer program is as complex as the whole of nature. Can any proper subset of “Nature” be as complex as “the whole of Nature”? However, I don’t see the logical problem of creating something as complex as some subset of nature, and using it to test theories about that subset. Could you explain what you mean? Because so far all I see are one strawman fallacy and one argument from personal incredulity.
Noah’s Ark eh. Here’s a question I always wanted a fundy to answer; how much rainwater was required to fall over the 40 days?
Let A = the volume of a sphere whose radius is the distance between the centre of the Earth and average sea level before the ‘flood’ began.
Let B = the volume of a sphere whose radius is the distance between the centre of the Earth and the top of Mount Ararat (where the ‘Ark’ ‘landed’).
B – A = the volume of rainwater that had to fall over the 40 days. What I’ve always wondered is, what would that intensity of rainfall actually look like? Could you even stand up in it? Could ‘the ark’ have withstood that intensity of deluge without disintegrating? Wouldn’t it have beaten everyone to a pulp before they even had a chance to drown?
Yes I know it didn’t happen. I’m wondering hypothetically what it would look like and what kind of forces would have been involved.
Alan Clarke wrote: These longer life spans could be very important if Egyptologists are cramming too many kings and dynasties together because they ASSUME
their life spans were like todaywe are encumbered by facts and logic.Fixed it for you.
Pascalle writes: True, [life] can get very complex, but still not complex enough [through evolution]. I have to admit, i’m not a programmer either, nor a biologist. I’m just a very logical thinker….
Either your self-appraisal doesn’t appear to be justified on current evidence, or your logic mill is in sore need of the grist of 150 years or so of a nigh-Noachian deluge of confirmatory facts supporting evolutionary theory. Go read some, why don’t you?
Sean B. Carroll and Carl Zimmer are suggestions for starters….
Sigh…
*looks wearily around, stands up, wipes some mud from his arm, re-buckles his chest-rig, picks his M4 back up, locks and loads and trudges back into the fray*
Alan, FM, SfD(cand.), in comment #38 wrote:
Is there Biblical support for the idea that the continents changed shape during/after the deluge? Do you have some citations for this?
Is there Biblical support for the idea that the Nile is a post-deluge feature? If so, then how do you explain that the Nile cuts down through Precambrian crystalline “basement” rocks in Sudan and southern Egypt (1-3)? Or, perhaps that question is premature. Maybe we should start more basal. It ?appears to be a general perception (based on what reading I’ve done) among delugionists that Precambrian “basement” rocks are pre-flud and that only the Phanerozoic rock record (last ~550 million years) represents flud deposits. So, are you presuming that the “basement” rocks cut into by the Nile are pre-flood or post-flood? If they are pre-flood, then, like the quartzite that makes up Wheeler Peak (return to our Watchmen discussion on “Prometheus”), then what is the mechanism by which the metamorphic rocks were altered from their original states (e.g., sediments into metamorphics)? If they are post-flud, then where is the evidence that this river could do this amount of weathering and erosion in 4000 years? Of course, it’s closer to 3000 years, since we have a had a really good idea of discharge rates on the Nile for about the last 800 years (4-8) and I’ll go out on a limb here and simply assert that you can’t demonstrate that the Nile could have cut that channel into crystalline rock in 800 years.
Also, if we’re going to keep this up, how’s that homework coming? I recopied comment #923 from Watchmen below so that you’d have it handy. To this still outstanding assignment, we can now add the questions from comments #930, #932, #961, #1006, #1059, #1080, #1123, #1126, #1245, and #1330 (all from Watchmen). Also, since RogerS seems disinclined to engage on this subject, you could of course, if you like, also answer the questions regarding “Prometheus” that I asked him in #1092 (whichever ones weren’t also asked to you in #1123 that is).
From comment #923 from Watchmen:
To Recap:
1. Any thoughts on the Salem Limestone as a tsunami deposit? You commented on the Salem in #691, but didn’t actually respond to the questions that I asked you #652, which was a response to your assertion (in #615) that the Salem Limestone was a tsunami deposit (or included tsunami deposits; that wasn’t clear from the text of #615). The point of discussion is whether or not the Salem Limestone is a tsunami deposit or not.
Have you read comment #652? Do you agree with the information presented therein and retract your assertion that the Salem is the result tsunami activity, or are you going to (as I asked you in #652) present evidence to support your assertion?
2. Any thoughts on the Morrison Formation as a tsunami deposit? Have you read comment #645? Do you agree with the information presented therein and retract your assertion that the Morrison is the result tsunami activity, or are you going to (as I asked you in #645) present evidence to support your assertion?
3. Any thoughts on the Athabasca Oil Sands as a tsunami deposit? Have you read comment #630? Do you agree with the information presented therein and retract your assertion that the Athabasca is the result tsunami activity, or are you going to (as I asked you in #630) present evidence to support your assertion?
4. Any thoughts regarding my comment (in #645) about your assertion that the Athabasca Oil Sands are the result of gradual accumulation of peat?
5. Any thoughts on the questions I asked you in comment #407?
6. Any thoughts on the article on radiometric age dating that both Owl and David have been suggesting that you read for some time now (e.g., see comment #224)?
References and Notes
1http://www.utdallas.edu/geosciences/remsens/Nile/GreatBendPaper.html
2http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/274/5293/1696?ck=nck
3http://www.scialert.net/qredirect.php?doi=jas.2007.3477.3484&linkid=pdf
4http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A3151982
5http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/cairo/
6geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/2/147
7Hassan, F. A. 1981. Historical Nile floods and their implications for climatic change. Science 212:1142–1145.
8Quinn, W.H., 1992. A study of Southern Oscillation-related climatic activity for AD 622– 1900 incorporating Nile River flood data. In: Diaz, H.F., Markgraf, V. (Eds.), El Nin˜o Historical and Paleoclimatic Aspects of the Southern Oscillation. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 119–149.
@BigBob:
lets ignore the fact that the surface of a sphere gets bigger as the radius increases for a little while (It#s not that much anyway, since Ararat is small compared to the earth#s radius).
Ararat is about 5 Kilometers high, so in order to raise the water to that level in 40 days, we divide 5000 meters by (40*24*60) to get the amount the water level has to rise in one minute. That comes to about 8.7 centimeters, or 87 litres per square meter (a minute). the most ever measured by man is about 3.8 litres per square meter per minute (see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederschlagsmenge it’s german, sorry).
this is a rough estimate, and a lower bound, certainly. I am no sailor, but I imagine that must have been quite a strain on any vessel. If the surface of the vessel had about 500 square meters, that is about 4.35 metric tons a minute it is taking in on weight – unless all surfaces are slanted…
Anyone find any obvious mistakes i didn’t consider?
I think her head’s probably exploded with suppressed rage and confusion. She’s most likely never been on the receiving end of a thrashing like the one she got here over the last few days.
She’s probably used to winning debates about Catholicism’s superiority over other Christian sects (or, in her eyes at least, some No True Christian™ religions that don’t count as ‘real’ Christians) who depend on old, predictable arguments that she knows how to refute – and, since they pretty much believe in the bible, they can’t use its fallibility against; similarly, they believe in god and the historical Jesus, so they can’t use that against her either.
But here she, as Rodney Dangerfield put it, ‘didn’t get no respect’ – we didn’t let her push through her assertions and assumptions as fact, no matter how many apologists’ names she could list.
I’m done trying to get her to think – or be honest. But it’ll depend on what she writes if she braves the house of pain again.
I don’t think any computer model has been purported to duplicate the complexity of life as a whole. Most of the models I’ve seen discussed in relation to evolution (such as the Dawkins’ program mentioned above, or the “Conway’s Life” worlds program that Dennett refers to in Freedom Evolves) are intended to show how the processes of evolution–namely random mutation combined with natural selection–can explain the development of complex creatures from simplistic, basic building blocks without the intervention of an outside intelligence.
Successfully modeling a simulation of evolution on a “simplistic” binary machine for this purpose actually reinforces the argument being made, since if you can do it in the binary world of a computer environment, it should be even easier–albeit with more complexity and variation–in the “quadrinary” world of the genome.
Examples of complexity from such models are limited, but still create a wide variety of unexpected, un-designed but viable “offspring”. When we then extrapolate to a more complex system (i.e., the real world) we expect even more diversity and complexity.
As with any experiment, it is important to understand what the purpose of the model is and not expect it to comment on or duplicate aspects of the natural world that it is not designed to account for. The point of modeling is to simplify and isolate particular features in order to clarify, illustrate and/or quantify the effects of those features, not to create an exact duplicate of the world. The map is not the territory.
BigBob wrote:
Nah, that won’t wash (no pun intended); the delugionists obviously heard that argument a long time ago and – after some wailing and gnashing of teeth, no doubt – hit upon the idea that much of the water came from underground – something to do with a line about ‘fountains of the deep’.
I think there’s some back-and-forth abut it in the original Watchmen thread – though I warn you, there’s a lot of weapons-grade bolonium in there…
dreamstretch
Damn blockquote fail!
Dreamstretch, I was baptized as an infant, had no say in the matter, consider it much like the circumcision I also did not ask for. In other words, child abuse.
@Davel (69)
I was responding to alan with this comment, as he tried to use a computer program as an analogy to point out that god did create us.
In my point of view, if you want to come even close to _any_ claim like that, your computer program has to be as complex as nature itself, or your claim is invalid.
Though Alan’s lack of understanding was already pointed out by Kel perfectly i must say in post 60.
On another note, I love how you force me to rethink on my own post. I love being challenged on my views and because of you guys i’m learning to research and document a lot more things better. So thank you :)
@Jud (72)
Don’t quote me the wrong way. I was not talking about life, i was talking about a computer program in that post. I should have written it more clearly (and will in the future :) )
@emil (76)
I agree with you. I didn’t try to point out that computer models were not the right thing to use to prove stuff (they can actually be quite excellent), but there isn’t a computer model complex enough to prove that “goddidit”.
@#57 Clinteas
“Evolution uses Yes, No and Maybe :)”
How? How does it use Yes, No and Maybe?
He quoted me, 10ch.
and i was comparing it to the yes and no (1-0) of a computer model.. and..
Read back a little.. i don’t want to explain it all :)
@#77 Wowbagger
“after some wailing and gnashing of teeth, no doubt – hit upon the idea that much of the water came from underground – something to do with a line about ‘fountains of the deep'”
Where did you hear that? I have never heard that version of the story before.
Logic is a verb, it needs nouns to act on. That is, logic applied to bad or incomplete information–even good logic–will lead to erroneous results. (Garbage in, garbage out.) As suggested above, you should look into what other people who are experts in the areas you admit to not being expert in are doing and saying (and yes, by all means, apply your logic to those arguments and evidences) before criticizing the techniques and procedures.
Arguments from incredulity are generally shown to be based on incomplete and/or bad information, or indicate a lack of imagination in the speaker. I am also not an expert in either of these fields, but I listen, read, and THEN apply logic.
Any of you guys seen this piece of scientific investigation/ comedy gold, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irw2tmUTRtU ?
One poster did point out a striking resemblance to Napoleon Dynamite.
And before people start, we have every reason to believe that this kid is being serious and not merely joking.
It’s from Genesis directly (7:11). The KJV has: In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
Alan @38
Well done, you are quiet correct in that we have to be cautious about the ages for the Pharoahs. If only you applied this caution to the bible though.
I was actually more interested in the sources you would bring to the debate (if I may call it that). Should make some interesting reading (I hope).
Now, about the age of the universe Kel asked you about…
Well, since this is an “anything goes thread:
Was it during the physical act of love that you first became aware of this, Alan?
OK, point taken, (sorry I didn’t see this before my last post–goddamn refresh!)but I think this is the wrong tack to take here. It’s not that the computer model he uses in his example is trying to prove goddidit, he’s just trying to show that evolution doesn’t work by poorly/incompletely modeling evolution.
Martin_z @33:
I couldn’t have said it better. Let the brickbats fly!
I was bathed as a baby, but I don’t consider it abuse. Also, various words were mumbled in my presence. More data for language acquisition.
Baptism consists of some wetting and mumbling, and is otherwise utterly meaningless.
Which would work well if there were either fountains of the great deep or windows of heaven. The Genesis storytellers were demonstrably ignorant of the water cycle.
I feel strongly that if PZ closes ‘God, abortionist’ and then offers, as usual, that folk continue the discussion therein in a new thread opened for that purpose, that he really should open the new thread under the title ‘The house of pain’.
I’ll take understatements for 1000, Alex.
*claps*
Wowbagger wrote:
But wouldn’t that produce the same problem, just going up rather than down? Either way there’s one hell of a lot of water exerting enormous forces in order to get where the Bible says it has to be in the time. Whether it’s getting there from underground up or from the sky down that’s still a lot of pressure exerted on a wooden boat> I mean if the water fountains upwards all that pressure would been that the poor boat would be flung high into the air rather than smushed into the ground (assuming the initial blast doesn’t cave the bottom of it in to start with), but either way I can’t see it being particularly seaworthy after going through all that!
or am I missing something?
@70 and @73:
If there are any fundies out there pushing the flood myth and reading this:
Explain how the rock sediments got laid down in radically different planes in direct contact with each other (i.e.: non conformities such as Jedburgh).
These are just the things that directly led Hutton and Lyell et al to realize that geology is a a long, slow, and (more or less) continuous process.
Also: How did sedimentary rocks get warped into the distorted shapes they have today. Provide the force-balance equations for these changes. Show your work.
Magic explains nothing.
Emil (@ 85 and 90)
(i thought i would break the refresh thingy by waiting till you had responded ;) )
As to logic. I agree.
In the last 3 months i have read more scientific texts than in the 10 years before that it’s all the fault of websites like this one ;)
I’m nowhere near having read what i want to read, so yeah, i’ll mess up. Probably often too. As long as i learn from it, it’s ok.
As for post 90. That is exactly what i was trying to point out.
I quote alan: “Folks, the bottom line is this: the complexity we see in life today was pre-programmed by a designer (i.e. God).”
And he comes to the conclusion through that poor and incomplete model, of which i said it wasn’t complex enough to get to such a conclusion.
Evolution-deniers take delusion to a breathtaking new level of crazy.
Evolution is an observed fact, much like rain.
If the field of meteorology threatened their beloved myth, they don’t argue “I don’t like your explanation”.
Instead, they assert “It never rains”.
Oh, the horror…the horror…
I just went over to the other thread and read Alan Clarke’s drivel on the decaying geomagnetic field as evidence for a “young Earth”. What utter, irremediable horse puckey! The real physics is interesting and beautiful. And guess what, it suggests that the planet is billions of years old.
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~glatz/geodynamo.html
Creationists and other anti-science morons always follow the same pattern–take one single result out of context and distort it so that it seems to contradict the overwhelming body of scientific evidence. Well, either that or they say it violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Anybody who claims the existence of intelligent life (or the greenhouse effect or the geodynamo…) contradicts the 2nd law:
1)doesn’t understand thermodynamics
2) would not, themselves, qualify as a violation even if intelligent life were a violation
3)has never changed a diaper.
http://xkcd.com/54/
@97–Hell, I hadn’t even busted out unconformities yet. From what I’ve read so far, I’m not yet convinced we’ve actually gotten past the concept of bedding itself, never mind trying to crumple it. Although since Alan made noises late in the Watchmen thread that suggest he might actually be a Plate Tectonics denier, his reply to your comment #97 might be interesting. He might turn out to be Plutonist (ala Hutton) or something. *shrug*
I saw Watchmen, then read the graphic novel. Although the graphic novel was flawed, I liked it… but I do have to say, I did not like the ending. Deus ex, anyone? THe movie ending was an improvement.
After having read what I could of that last thread, I have come to realize how poor my geology education is. As such, any of you all, besides referencing me back to Josh’s excellent posts, have a good resource or few for learning about basic & advanced geology?
Yes you are missing something. If the “fountains” opened up in the deep ocean, the oceans rise fast but the ark just floats on top. Think of filling a bathtub, put your boat at the opposite end from the spigot. Or did you ever try to fill a bucket from a powerful hose? There is a lot less drama on the surface if you stick the hose under the water.
Planet Earth is often considered a good starting point :)
Adam, if you think fundyloons see baptism as just a bath, I would guess you never had to deal with the consequences of membership in something you despise, but are told you nonetheless must adhere to it, because you’ve been initiated. I realize this was my personal experience, not everybody is abused this way, but really, fuck them. Not you, of course, but forcing membership in a psychotic cult without your say-so is pretty heinous, in my book.
I don’t understand the logic (if that’s the right term) behind the “Egyptian kings/lifespans” argument. If you have a lot of kings and a (too) short time period to fit them into, wouldn’t longer life spans just make the problem worse? Shouldn’t you try to claim that they all died at 20 or something?
I see him more as a Plate Tectonics a la carte manipulator. He uses it where he needs to and distorts it when he has to.
@103: Personally, I’m pretty much a text-book hater. I really don’t like many of the introductory geology texts. People tend to write texts to puff themselves up in front of their colleagues more than write them for the students. So they’re often pretty aweful. So, out of a bunch of books I don’t really like, the better ones (my opinion…) follow.
Press and Siever is the classic:
URL LINK: http://www.whfreeman.com/presssiever/
Hamblin and Christiansen isn’t bad:
URL LINK: wps.prenhall.com/esm_hamblin_eds_10/
Skinner isn’t bad:
URL LINK: he-cda.wiley.com/WileyCDA/HigherEdTitle/productCd-0471152285.html
If you’re looking for a historical/history of the earth text, then I like:
Prothero and Dott:
URL LINK: http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Earth-Donald-Prothero/dp/0072528087
Stanley is really good:
URL LINK: bcs.whfreeman.com/esh2e/default.asp?s=&n=&i=&v=&o=&ns=0&uid=0&rau=0
If you end up wanting more advanced texts, then there are some good ones to choose from…
The rain is God’s tears, because His children have forsaken Him and turned to worshipping the false god of evolution.
Science tells us that there are fossils from creatures that lived long ago. It doesn’t tell us HOW those creatures transformed into those we know today. Without eyewitness evidence, we can only know that species change over time. We don’t know whether that change is a natural process or one guided by the hand of God. This is a 50-50 choice, so plumping to either option is a faith-based choice. I prefer to make the faith-based choice that’s in the Bible.
Uhm, actually it does. I think you’re holding this particular theory to a higher standard of how than you are other theories.
@bob
*blink*
So.. ehm… in the time of Noah, they created the evolution theory and that made god angry and than he cried and caused the flood?
EH???
How about we start a nice, healthy, science-based discussion?? And somehow not let it be hijacked by fuckwits…hmm…
So I will start. I am reading a paper just published in Bioessays by Heng “The genome-centric concept: resynthesis of evolutionary theory”. Not sure what to make of it at the moment – he’s talking about how he believes (it’s a review) that macroevolution is caused by whole genome changes e.g. genome shuffling, while microevolution is due to changes at the gene level (mutations and the like). One question for some better scientists than I to answer – how could the karyotype of a sexual population change in a heritable manner?
Thanks, “Bob the Creationist”, but we really don’t need any more Poes here.
Sorry for probably asking a silly question (but as anything goes in this thread i guess i can).
What is a Poe?
I have read it several times, but i’m not exactly sure what’s meant by it.
Alan Clarke: Next time someone can’t get their program to compile, I propose this: Create a program to open your source code, locate a character at random, then change it to a random ASCII character. More than likely things won’t improve on your first try but don’t give up! You have time on your side!
Richard Harris: Buddy-boy, you forgot the winnowing effect of natural selection.
“Natural Selection” was not programmed into my example. Where would one start? I’m not asking you to describe a complete complex detailed model of natural selection. I just want to know where one would begin for simulating such a mechanism. I was always under the impression that “natural selection” was performed by the harsh & random environment. But I’m obviously on the wrong track because the “environment” is not intelligent and would therefore not be able to “select”. I’m not being facetious in any respect. All I want is a clue for where to begin simulating “natural selection”.
My GF was taught (at a fundie school in FL-suprise!) that people did not actually live longer in biblical times, but that years were shorter, because the Earth was a lot closer to the sun. SRSLY!
Pascalle
Poe’s Law
bob, just becuase you are either to lazy to do the research, to ignorant to understand it or to willfully ignorant to want to understand it does not mean that we do not know a lot about how it happens.
bah crap
preview before post
typos ftw
bob, just because you are either too lazy to do the research, too ignorant to understand it or too willfully ignorant to want to understand it does not mean that we do not know a lot about how it happens.
You are really wrong. What you need to know about natural selection:
1. Species have more offspring than needed
2. There is a finite set of resources species compete for
3. There is variation among among offspring
4. That variation is heritable
5. Variation that will increase the chance of survival and reproduction will more likely be favoured than variation that inhibits survival and reproduction
6. Over time, advantageous heritable variation accumulates
That’s it, that’s natural selection. Offspring better suited to the environment pass on that advantageous trait to future generations, and over time this leads to a change in population. No catastrophic environmental effects required at all. Rather change over time is inevitable through natural selection because quite simply the environment is never static, and different traits emerge that fuel competition and selection.
Oh rev, thanks for that link.
*reads*
Another deliberately stupid idiot who doesn’t understand DNA. We have evidence on how species form. You just refuse to acknowledge it, like any true godbot. Any evidence that upsets your beliefs causes this: *hands in ears and keeps shouting “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing”*
We have something in common. Neither one of us knows what the fuck you’re talking about.
Fossil evidence isn’t the only evidence for evolution – it has become a good source of evidence as it can show glimpses of the past, and we have found many transitional forms in many key stages of development that only make sense in light of evolution. Finding feathered dinosaurs for instance, finding birds still with dinosaurian features. Finding humanoids that weren’t quite human, and get closer and closer to other apes the further back in time. Fish first crawling out of the ocean. Big mammals crawling back into the ocean – the fossil record is good evidence, but it’s only one line.
There’s also modern genetics where we can look at the genetic code of each species for similarities and differences. Again, the results of this only make sense in the light of evolution. ERV markers, fused chromosomes, pseudogenes, the effects of genetic drift – all this and more is glaring out at studying genetics. The genetic patterns happen to fit with an ancestry tree that evolution predicts – that we are closer genetically to chimpanzees than gorillas, further still to spider monkeys, to lemurs, and then to all other mammals. Even further still are the reptiles and birds, while birds being saurian in origin are closer genetically to crocodiles than to iguanas.
Then there is morphology, that we share very similar morphological and anatomical traits with chimpanzees and the other great apes, and there is a pattern of divergence when moving away from the primate family to other mammals, then to reptiles, to amphibians and to fish. Through looking at the anatomy of these creatures, we can see why certain things in our body are the way they are – for instance the descending of the gonads. Then there are the vestigial traits, like our appendix or the kiwi birds wings. Traits that once had a purpose but aren’t there now.
Not to mention embryology, where many ancestral traits are part of our development. Humans for instance develop a coat of fur around 6 months then lose it almost immediately. The embryos at the start of the development look remarkably similar to other species too. And I’ll bring up the biogeographical distribution of life. Why is it that Australia is filled with marsupials while there are none in Europe? Why is it many islands have no mammal, reptiles or fresh-water fish?
Then there are the mechanisms for evolution. We can test the rates of mutation in a species. We can test how that corresponds with selection. We can test how barriers can create genetic isolation and fuel new species. And all this shows that evolution not only can happen but should happen in the time spans provided
A scientific hypothesis is validated by surviving rigorous attempts to falsify it, and that is done through making falsifiable predictions. Evolution for the last 150 years has not been falsified, despite the mountains of evidence that have accumulated in that time. If it weren’t for the theory of evolution, we might never have found a Tiktaalik fossil. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a god guiding the process, such a claim is untestable. But to throw out evolution after what the theory has been able to explain and to predict for the sake of god is being an ignorant fool. Evolution happened, all the evidence points towards it. Don’t ignore science for the sake of belief please.
SteveM said:
Ah, that makes a bit more sense – thanks!
Although thinking about it you still have the sea level rising at one hell of a rate, so that rather water jetting up from the land you have the whole sea rising upwards, very fast – sort of like a tsunami only going straght upwards rather than along (if that makes sense).
Still seems like an awful lot of force for a wooden boat to put up with without breaking up!
(Sorry to be a pest about this – I hate not being able to get things straight in my head)
Does Alan Clarke live in Hawaii? Because the only way #38 makes sense is if it were still April Fools’ Day when he wrote it.
Hey! I was under the impression that open threads were available specifically for the discussion of hot lesbian sex and bacon. WTF?
One of the (numerous) criticisms leveled at this story is that a wooden boat just isn’t very likely to survive the deluge as depicted.
@113: look up “Roberstonian translocation”. There are some animals (I think the okapi?) which typically have an odd-numbered karyotype as you can pair a fused chromosome with two unfused ones. Also look up the human chromosome 2 synteny with two chimp chromosomes, a rather significant piece of evidence for our recent common descent.
I don’t buy the book’s argument that macro= large genome arrangements and micro= point mutations, because there need be no particular correlation between the size of the evolutionary effect and the scale of the genetic change. For comparison I could put two subroutines in the opposite order in my program and have no change at all in its functioning, whereas if I change a + for a – the effect could be dramatic…
Genetic algorithms.
The rain is God’s tears, because His children have forsaken Him and turned to worshipping the false god of evolution.
That seals it: God is a cumulus cloud.
Clinteas @47
I suppose the glue was used to stick the labels on the bottles?
There is evidence for the use of glue by the paleo people in the Americas over 13000 yrs bp.
@116: I have walked on a few miles of pebble beach where the waves have sorted the pebbles; at one end of the beach it’s sandy, midway along it’s small pebbles, and down at the other end it’s quite large stones.
Waves are not intelligent yet somehow sorting and selection takes place.
Pharyngula has a strict BYOSB policy.
I’ll be stealing that thank you.
I heartily recommend Kathy Schick’s Making Silent Stones Speak for a discussion of how we recognize tools and patterns of tool use.
IIRC the earliest supportable and extant evidence of tool use is circa 2.5mya.
He wasn’t white and fluffy
He just had sideburns
He just had sideburns
And a quiff
#130 – thanks a million.
I guess my main question with regards to chromosomal aberrations is how are they fixed within a population. I can see how from one person a chromosomal change could be inherited by their progeny, but how could a whole population share this trait?
But I haven’t looked up and read “Roberstonian translocation” or the human/chimp evolution story yet, so I will not crap on until I have done some of my own research. It’s weird – we never actually got taught any of this stuff at uni…(and I did a science degree).
A few minutes ago on the Diane Rheam (sp) show on NPR, some expert evolutionary biologist just said that science and religion were compatible! This was in response to a 7 yr old’s question too.
What a jackass.
He had a huge opportunity to deny that a compatibility was logically possible. He failed… Instead he placated the ignorant.
Ugh.
P.S. to #139 in response to #130; I don’t buy macro=whole genome, micro=gene thing either… interesting theory… but..hmm..
Matt @#140
I think maybe it’s just a case of pick your battles. At least get religious fucktards to expose their kids to evolution (if it’s said to be incompatible with religion, it is obviously the work of the devil), and then hopefully these kids will grow up, see sense and the next generation will be a whole tribe of lovely atheists :-)
Remember when I told you scientists used to get expelled from academia for questioning evolution or supporting ID.
There is this guy who was expelled from his DVD club just for watching “Expelled” and handing out some DVDs from Dr. Kent Hovind and now is unemployed.
Hear about it here
A. What Rev. wrote in #136.
B. @#134. Brilliant example, Stephen. It didn’t occur to me to offer it up as a response to #116, because I’m a fucking moron, but:
I was standing on a small river point bar(1) on Sunday afternoon (just a little bigger than this one: 2) that displayed crazy sorting. The upstream starting side of the bar was mostly cobbles and pebbles (including bricks and little mollusk shells too) with a sand background “matrix.” The sediment of the bar graded across its length from that pebble/cobble gravel into a beautiful coarse sand (with some shell fragments) by the downstream terminous.
So, Alan, as Stephen so well described, water waves can easily sort particulate material (in this case sediment) into very distinct groups. But you don’t even need waves. Small variations in current velocity will do the same thing (fast enough that we can watch it happen in real time). No external intelligence necessary.
The world is an amazing place, Alan. Why do you keep trying to make it smaller and grayer than it actually is?
1 http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Point_bar
2 http://www.environment.gov.au/about/publications/annual-report/ss02-03/images/fig3-11.jpg
Thanks for the responses to my question, esp Mike K for doing the sums. I’m half way through Robert A. Moore’s ‘The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark’, one of the documents linked to by Owlmirror at #48. Impressive. A great read. Maximum feasible length for a timber vessel was 300 feet, and that by skilled, time-served boatwrites in the 19th century. So Noah and his boys are going to float a 450 foot ‘Ark’ in violent storm conditions. Place your bets.
Bob
Facilis: did the DVD club have conditions under which its members could achieve and be granted tenure? Did the “expelled” person fail to meet those conditions such that belief in or curiosity about ID was incidental?
If not, then you can add “analogies” to the long list of things about which you’re not even wrong.
Alan, if a civilization had been present in say (pick a continent and country), and that civilization had a written record. What would be consequences of the flud?
First of all, there would be massive evidence, in the right time frame by radiometric dating, of fresh sediments. In the area below the sediments, would be evidence of the now extinct civilization. Above it, would be evidence of more recent civilizations. There would also be a period where the humans who survived the flud would have to migrate as their families expanded, from Mt. Ararat region. Now, the new peoples would be of a small population and genetically similar. They would also have a language and maybe written language different from the now extinct peoples. These are the logical consequences of the flud.
Now, in Egypt we hieroglyphic writings from 3100 BC to about 300 AD, which covers the time of the flood. So, if the flud actually happened, then the people who developed heiroglyphic writing would have been wiped out in the flud. There would be sediment covering all the writings that is devioid of life. Then the later peoples repopulating the area would have brought in a different writing system and language. And guess what isn’t seen in Egypt? Exactly this. There is a continuous recorded history of people populating the area from 3100 BC to present, with a slowly evolving language and writing. And no sign of the flud is seen in the sediments. Not exactly the type of evidence you need to convince scientists that you aren’t deluded, and your flud theory isn’t false.
This would also occur in the Indus valley, China, North and South American, Europe, Africa, and Australia. All these areas were populated prior to your flud. Now, what physical evidence is there for something like your flud happening in these areas? Europe-None. Africa including Egypt-None. North America-None. South America-None. Asia including the Indus valley and China-None. Austrailia-None.
DNA data strongly suggests Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and spread out from there. And did so starting 60,000-90,000 years ago. With no DNA bottle seen since. DNA says you lie. Languages evolve like humans, so we would also expect to see a language bottleneck if the flud was true. Guess what, no evidence for the bottleneck and recent studies tend to show the protolanguage dates back to the original migrations.
So Alan, there is simply no evidence for your flud. You must prove your theory with proof positive, and there is no evidence outside of your fictional bible for that.
TING:
The question was asked on air by the mother. Just wanted to clarify that.
As to”picking your battles”: Yeah, I get that but, when you have such a HUGE platform as NPR, don’t take this milquetoast middle of the road nonsense stance! He’s supposed to be a expert on evolutionary biology. Anyone who says religion (pick any) and evolution are compatible is kidding themselves.
That is just the truth. That is not being strident or militant. Them’s the facts.
His response (and Diane’s lapping it up) will only bolster the further compartmentalization of faith and reason within the minds of the deluded masses.
The rain is God’s tears, because His children have forsaken Him and turned to worshipping the false god of evolution.
So then if you want it to rain then the thing to do is to hold a seminar on evolution. If it’s a bad drought, might have to ask PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins to speak. Maybe even bring in some bacteria and selective media to demonstrate evolution in real time…Quite handy this ability to make God cry. But are you sure that the rain isn’t God’s pee from when He hears one too many people bring out the stupid in His name and has to go get blind drunk and isn’t looking where He’s pointing when relieving Himself?
Matt – I’m with you, I’m with you, don’t worry, and you’re right…except that if I had to choose, I would rather the religo-tards have a compartmentalised mind of faith and reason, than a big black hole of just faith.
Which has any bearing on what? Sounds like he probably pissed his boss off for proselytizing at his job. Plus his subject matter probably pegs him as an annoying twit.
Oh wait, it was VenomFangx. No wonder.
He is an annoying idiotic lying twit.
Aha. I can’t view the video right now, but I suspected it was something like that.
Facilis, for someone who tries to apply radical scepticism to materialsm, you’re an embarrasingly credulous boob about anything that confirms your cherished beliefs.
I don’t know, look at the Bay of Fundy, something like 40ft rise in 6 hours? Or really any ship in a canal lock. I think the ark could easily have survived the rise itself. The question is would it have been able to survive any wave motion where the bouyancy is now unevenly distributed on the hull.
Re the ocean sorting pebbles:
Interesting experiment is to take a new can or jar of mixed nuts and gently vibrate it for a little while, all the Brazil nuts (and cashews) will “float” to the top and all the smaller nuts will sink.
TING:
baby steps, I guess.
On the ark surviving the conditions of the flood. The ark was clearly made of superwood. It had carbon nanotubes instead of cellulose.
We can’t test this, of course, because the supertree from which the superwood was harvested is extinct. Noah had to use them all to make his ark. Every single one.
And the roots, stumps, sawdust, scrap, etc, that might have fossilized and left evidence behind? Destroyed in the flood.
BigBob: Noah’s Ark eh. Here’s a question I always wanted a fundy to answer; how much rainwater was required to fall over the 40 days?
It’s amazing what one can learn if they actually open the Bible and read it:
Gen 7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
From this we can clearly see that the rain water was only a compliment to the subterrestrial waters. If the Earth’s pre-flood surface wasn’t as “lumpy” as it is today with the highest mountain peaks and deepest valleys (Mariana trench), then the amount of water required to completely submerge land masses would be less. As a matter of fact, if the Earth’s land masses were completely flat, the globe would be covered by 1.7 miles of water from our current ocean volumes. The Earth is already 71% covered by water. The atmosphere contains water. Practically everywhere one drills on the continents, a water table is reached. Currently there is much fear that land masses will flood if the polar caps continue to melt. The Earth is often referred to as the “Blue Planet” because of its abundant water. The big question that needs to be answered by evolutionists and uniformitarianists is how did this planet get all of its water in the first place? Thus far, the answers have been more unbelievable than the Biblical flood:
BigBob, perhaps you could use your calculator to figure out the current ocean volume then divide that by 1 million to see the average amount of water required for each comet to deliver.
Facilis, he would have gotten fired if he were handing copies of Planet Earth, Battlefield:Earth or The Last Man On Earth. That was not part of his job.
Or is it that you want to believe that Evilutionists have such a tight grip on society that we have set up a 1984 style system?
For the record, VenonFangX has a history of being dishonest. Check out his battles with Thunderf00t.
Alan, still missing the big picture. One of these days you will have to acknowledge your flud didn’t happen. Until then, just another stupid *hands covering eyes and ears to avoid seeing evidence* creobot.
Once again Alan back to my [c]rudimentary calculations on the height of Everest when the flud supposedly happened.
Please point me to the catastrophic geological even that would have caused everest to be raised to 8000 meters in 4000 to 5000 years.
I have actually done research if there is enough water to indeed flood the entire earth.
After all the ice and snow melts, and all the water in the atmosphere falls doen, the water level will rise about 60-70 metres.
This seems like a lot, but if you keep in mind that the mount everest is over 8000 metres and the bible says that the water rises over 6 metres over the highest mountain on the earth, you know the flood story is bogus.
I love the explenation about the different cultures and such though, and how everybody should have one language if it was indeed just 1 group spreading over the entire earth after everything else died due to the flood.
Over 1500 posts and I missed out on it completely. Let me express my happiness over that.
that should be “catastrophic geological event“
OK, we’ve got Alan flat-assed wrong on geology, electromagnetism (geomagnetic field), geography (a new “flat-earth” model), oceanography, glaciology, hydrodynamics, meteorology, hydrogeology, biology, paleontology, linguistics, and now we’re trying to show he’s clueless on orogenesis (mountain building).
Did I miss anything?
Alan, a word, please. When a central tenet of your belief system causes you to be so wrong on so many topics, does it ever worry you?
heliobates @137
Thanks. For 98 cents, I can hardly go wrong. Hope it isn’t a superficial treatment.
I’m sure most here share your happiness about that, especially those who participated on that thread.
While you’re at it, Big Al, please use flood geography to explain why the summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone, and how did it get deposited in that specific location?
And if you’re feeling particularly feisty, please explain how flood geography accounts for the Livingstone formation; 2,000 feet tall at its highest and composed largely of fossilized crinoid plates.
Finally, assuming a 6,000 year old earth, and no plate tectonics, what was the cause of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami?
I’ve often wondered why an all-knowing God didn’t just start with Noah and his family to begin with.
Looking over this thread, nothing could be “off-thread”, so let me explore this: Maybe PZ could give us some home town information on it.
I didn’t realize that Minnesota was the new Mecca for Somali Muslims and that there was such rank religious discrimination there. The Muslims just won a law suit over Gold’n Plump chicken processors and an employment agency for 3.5 million. Gold’n Plump is based in St. Cloud. The Muslims claimed that the employer discriminated against them since they would not allow prayer breaks during the day and forced them to handle pork. Look like there are some Godbotting judges in Minn.
We have noticed your lack of posts for a while. Let us express our hapiness over that.
Then you posted again…
It’s authors have some serious street cred.
Since it’s aimed at the nonspecialist, I guess it is (for-sufficiently-large-definitions-of-) “superficial”, but it’s a great introduction to the field.
Some reviews
I doubt you’ll be disappointed.
…Including VenomFangX’s apology for making false accusations about Thunderf00t. Um, Kel, very nice summary of the basic explanation for major evolutionary mechanisms (my new phrase for “evolutionary theory); I’m going to link to it. One minor thing from a previous comment, it’s not “mute,” it’s “moot.”
As I recall, someone has already calculated that if all the water for the Flood were actually supported on top of the atmosphere, said atmosphere would be too thick to see through and insufferably hot. It’s a pre-scientific story. One might actually think of it as an early hypothesis that’s been disproven.
Being all-knowing, the big sky daddy needed a population to wipe out so that he may be able to point at the action and say ‘It could happen again’. After all, a threat is meaningless unless there is an actual menace to back it up.
I’ll be honest SF, I’m not sure how I feel about that decision.
While I think that if you take a job you should be required to do the same work at the same hours as your position requires, I also think that some accommodation for people needs to be at least minimally acceptable. I do think the handling pork and time for prayer things are different issues… sort of.
What needs to be made clear is at the hiring that the position requires you to handle pork. If you are not able to do that, then you shouldn’t get the job. I don’t know shit about accounting so I can’t do the work and there for can’t do the job.
The prayer thing is another as Jews and Christians get holidays off in many places. But I see a large difference in that from time during regularly scheduled work hours every single day. It can be very disruptive to the whole production thing.
Alan Clarke says:
The King James version of Genesis says:
Alan disagrees with the Bible.
Let’s stone him.
Whenever I hear people defending the “flud”, I think of
Kel @ 121:
I would add to this, Variation that has no significant effect on survival and reproduction one way or another in the current conditions may or may not catch a free ride, neither selected for or against, as chance may take it. Later, if conditions change, these variations may become relevant, and be subject to selection.
For example, a genetically-heritable ability to digest bacon with unusual efficiency may have no effect on survival or reproduction odds in, for example, totally vegetarian conditions, but may become acquire crucial importance under other, more carnivorous conditions.
I decline to speculate on the effects on survival and reproduction, and the inheritability, of a tendancy to fantasize about hot lesbian sex, other than to suggest that a sex-linked element may or may not be involved.
*smothered snortle*
Life Spans
950 Noah
600 Shem
438 Arphaxad
433 Salah
464 Eber
239 Peleg
239 Reu
230 Serug
148 Nahor
205 Terah
175 Abraham
Jud: Alan Clarke wrote: These longer life spans could be very important if Egyptologists are cramming too many kings and dynasties together because they ASSUME
their life spans were like todaywe are encumbered by facts and logic. Fixed it for you.Facts and logic refute ancient longevity?
1. Genetic load increases with time, thus viability increases as we extend farther BACK in time.
2. Extinct land animals were much larger than those today. (Perhaps longevity played a role?)
3. Food sources were more abundant as we extend back in time as evidenced by the dinosaur fossils being located in areas which are currently uninhabitable. Wooly mammoths inhabited the currently-barren area of Siberia, ancients forest existed on Antarctica, etc. Why wouldn’t organisms live longer under superior conditions? Refer to the Pharyngula’s old “Titanoboa” thread for an oversized snake.
4. The Earth’s magnetic field deflects harmful radiation. The field used to be stronger than it is today, thus producing fewer life-threatening mutations. I realize that uniformitarianists argue that the field is cyclical and we are only on a “current” downswing, but this has never been proven conclusively. Refer here to a previous Pharyngula post where I present a creationist theory that has already beat the uniformitarian “dynamo theory” in properly predicting the field strengths of Neptune and Jupiter.
5. The Earth could have been further shielded from harmful radiation by an atmosphere that is more shielding than the current atmosphere. Even non-creationist scientists acknowledge that the atmosphere during the age of dinosaurs was not like that of today. Some giant dragonflies had wingspans of almost 2.5 feet.
6. When were the ill-effects of overcrowding of human population most prevalent? Now or 4400 years ago?
7. Last but not least is the Bible record itself. Uneducated people often think that the Bible is the work of one individual when in actually is a compilation of books by more than 40 authors over a span of about 1600 years. This makes conspiracy theories concerning its origin hardly believable.
Alan, this post has nothing to do with anything, and is a repeat from Science of Watchman. In fact, you have been repeating yourself a lot lately. All of it previously refuted. It is tantamount to admitting defeat for your flud. You have no scientific evidence. We know that. Your bible is not scientific evidence and never will be.
Damn Alan that is some stupid shit right there.
Lots of conjecture with nothing backing it up.
I’m completely baffled.
Seriously.
He’s got to be joking with that, right?
He can’t be _that_ ignorant and stupid that he really believes that?
Please.. tell me he’s joking.
Fixed the stoopid. Now let’s hear the ineluctable relationship between body size and longevity. And then some–any!–relevance to the longevity of ancient humans.
I’d like to hear how creationists account for the correlation between the CO2 cycle and gigantism.
Evolutionary models explain this. Creationism? Not so much.
Genetic load increases with time, thus viability increases as we extend farther BACK in time.
I’m not sure what you mean by “genetic load”, but the human genome (and the genomes of other mammals) contains several genes which suppress cell turnover and decrease the viability of rapidly dividing cells over time (i.e. p16ink4a). These genes are necessary to prevent cancers (knock out mice without them tend to die young of malignancy) but also cause at least some of the pathologic changes of aging (i.e. your blood cells don’t recover as quickly at 60 as at 20). So there are clear, known biological reasons why people don’t live more than 120 years at most. If you are hypothesizing that people used to live hundreds of years, then you have to explain how this gene arose, how it was propogated not only in humans but in other mammals as well (I’m not sure about non-mammals). In other words, to justify a literal view of the Bible, you have to postulate human evolution.
I’m also interested in claim #3. Many of the public health problems of modern industrialized countries come from an excess of nutrition, not a lack. Just how obese were the patriarchs? How did Noah avoid dying at 60 of CHF in his world where food was even more abundant than it is today?
Genetic load increases with time, thus viability increases as we extend farther BACK in time.
That just made my head hurt. Holy hobbling hell you’re a moron.
In comment #156, essentially going all the way back to the unanswered questions from comment #407 in Watchmen, Alan wrote:
Seems rather unlikely, doesn’t it? That the world was completely flat? Doesn’t that contradict Genesis?
In Genesis 7:19, it says:
And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.(KJV)
And then of course there’s Genesis 7:20:
Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.(KJV)
which is what you and I were discussing in comments #396 and #407 of Watchmen.
And then Genesis 8:4:
And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.(KJV)
And then Genesis 8:5:
And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.(KJV)
Where does the text allow for the world to be “completely flat?” Why the heck would it refer to “mountains” if the world were flat?
And what does “completely flat” mean anyway? In Watchmen comment #396, you both referred to the world as being completely flat and asserted that “Pre-flood Everest wasn’t as high.” You never indicated that Pre-flood Everest wasn’t there at all. So what’s flat? Alberta-prarie flat or lake-bed flat?
And if the surface was flat, what was the pre-flood crust like? What rocks made up the landmasses? How do we determine what’s a pre-flood rock and what’s a post-flood rock? Is the quartzite of Wheeler Peak pre-flood or post-flood(1)? The glacial moraine that “Prometheus” grew from(1)? Thoughts? Any?
Alan then continued:
Source?
And continued:
You know what a water table is though, right? That it’s the upper limit of a saturated zone in a surface aquifer(2) derived from essentially modern precipitation? You know that the saturated zone under a water table is usually only a few to a few dozen meters thick, right? You know that you can drill through that zone and that, whereas there might be other aquifers deeper down (in other geological units), below those you will ultimately reach a point where will be no appreciable water in the rocks, right?
Alan then finished off with this gem:
If anyone wants to read the REAL science of the geomagnetic field (as opposed to the garbage Alan Clarke is posting), this is a good starting point
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~glatz/geodynamo.html
Gary has also done work on the Sun and giant planets:
http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~glatz/sun_giants.html
Do you forget that up until a hundred and fifty years ago everyone agreed with you? The flood was taken for granted, creationism was taken for granted, and why do you think this changed?
The more people learned about the world the more obvious it became that the flood was simply incapable of creating the world as it is today. This was very hard for people to accept, even the scientists who were figuring it out. Remember even Darwin was convinced as a young man. Why else do you think this monumental shift in how scientists understand the world would have happened if the evidence AT ALL pointed to Noah’s Flood?
Satan.
Yes, they refute the fantastic claims made by those who insist on the ages of the people in the Genesis stories.
That claim has no scientific support. It really doesn’t mean much at all, but to the extent that I can understand what you are claiming, there is no evidence to back it up.
Some were. There’s not much evidence that longevity plays a role though, since almost all animals stop growing at maturity.
Yes, the climate of the earth has changed over time, millions of years, but that has nothing to do with the silly creationist claims of those who ignore that the evidence clearly shows that Noah’s Flood never happened.
Your argument ignores all of the evidence that your argument is wrong. I wish I could spin a yarn that is allowed to ignore every bit of inconvenient evidence. Anyway, harmful radiation is not the primary cause of death for organisms on earth.
There weren’t any humans back then. I fail to see what you are trying to accomplish with this argument.
It’s hard to say, since the human lifespan has been increasing lately. We do know that the shortest life span tends to be in poor cities without modern health care. Lightly settled agrarian and hunter-gatherer tribes tend to be reasonably healthy, but still fall short of Western life spans. There’s no credible evidence for very long lives claimed in any stories at any time.
But, of course, the Bible is not 40 independent authors who happened to have their writings brought together by dispassionate aggregators. The Bible is a collection of stories, edited as needed, gathered by priests for the purpose of furthering their religious doctrines. The Bible also has a problem with the huge number of errors and claims that should be verifiable by secular sources, but cannot.
The evidence shows that nothing in Genesis is reliable. There was no creation that was remotely like the creation stories. The Flood described did not happen and could not have happened. The stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are unsubstantiated and the stories of the Sojourn in Egypt and Exodus are at variance with the available evidence. No accounts by other sources support any of the claims about the kingdom of the Twelve Tribes under Saul, David or Solomon.
In the New Testament, there is nothing to support the claims about two very public acts: the Slaughter of the Innocents and the physical events said to have happened on Good Friday.
There’s no reason for anyone to believe any of the special claims of the Bible. It just isn’t trustworthy.
TING, I am working on a talk about human evolution so have been pulling papers that address some of your questions. I have listed a few of the reference that I am using, any or all of which might help you understand how chromosome changes become fixed in populations (ref. comment 113). I regret that some (most?) of these are behind journal firewalls, but if you have access to a good university library, you’ll be able to give them at least a cursory read (paper versions). Cheers, Ctenotrish.
Charlesworth B. 2009. Fundamental concepts in genetics: effective population size and patterns of molecular evolution and variation. Nat Rev Genet 10(3):195-205.
Keinan A, Mullikin JC, Patterson N, Reich D. 2009. Accelerated genetic drift on chromosome X during the human dispersal out of Africa. Nat Genet 41(1):66-70.
Marques-Bonet T, Kidd JM, Ventura M, Graves TA, Cheng Z, Hillier LW, Jiang Z, Baker C, Malfavon-Borja R, Fulton LA and others. 2009. A burst of segmental duplications in the genome of the African great ape ancestor. Nature 457(7231):877-81.
Marshall OJ, Chueh AC, Wong LH, Choo KH. 2008. Neocentromeres: new insights into centromere structure, disease development, and karyotype evolution. Am J Hum Genet 82(2):261-82.
Stanyon R, Rocchi M, Capozzi O, Roberto R, Misceo D, Ventura M, Cardone MF, Bigoni F, Archidiacono N. 2008. Primate chromosome evolution: ancestral karyotypes, marker order and neocentromeres. Chromosome Res 16(1):17-39.
Volfovsky N, Oleksyk TK, Cruz KC, Truelove AL, Stephens RM, Smith MW. 2009. Genome and gene alterations by insertions and deletions in the evolution of human and chimpanzee chromosome 22. BMC Genomics 10(1):51.
Dreamstretch:
If you can’t tolerate feeling that your presence would indicate delighted approval of the water-and-words process, find an excuse to miss the ritual and show up at the party afterwards to enjoy a good time with your relatives. If you’re willing to attend as merely a skeptical observer, then you can mentally play the wicked uninvited fairy, bestowing the gift of sweet reason on the oblivious babe in hopes it will take root in the garden of glurge. If they’d be hurt or offended by absence, you might lose the future to water your gift, encourage its growth, and help counteract the religious brainwashing.
Surely there are many here who were baptized but not drowned, and who participate in the social aspects of religious observances, enjoying what we can while remaining cynical and subversive.
Uh, make that future opportunity….
Gesus, the flood. It’s a stupid, stupid story.
Besides the obvious flaws, how does one explain how Noah and his boys gathered up all those animals from around the whole world, including the Americas and Australia and all the islands of the world (F.U., Columbus!) and then returned them! While they and their wives are trying to repopulate the Earth. And what the hell did all those animals eat as soon as they got off the Ark, I mean the ones Noah and his boys didn’t bar-b-que for god. Because, after 150 days of the world being covered in water, there ain’t going to be any plants left to eat. And the carnivores are screwed anyway, as soon as they eat whatever animals Noah brought with them. And never mind how the fresh water and salt water fish are going to be able to survive whatever salinity the flood-waters end up being and how they are going to find their way to their proper environments.
Oh, I know! Magic!
Grow. Up.
I think Alan is treading dangerously close to “NOTE: If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS??” line of argumentation.
If you deny evolution, how do you explain LESBIANS + BACON??????
I’m an atheist, and even I have more faith in god than that shithead Alan does.
Woe to thee who needs to find his god under a microscope….
Nicely put, though I tried not to make it too complicated for Alan. He has a learning disability in which if it’s not 100% Jesus approved it will go over his head. And this is someone who thinks he’s had “evolution shoved down his throat.” He’ll come back in a few posts time talking about evolution and make the same incorrect assertion about natural selection again. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t want to correct that, he’s just here to preach his bible. Even if understanding the process doesn’t require him to believe it, he still won’t try to understand. It’s sad that someone who is an adult has shut himself off to learning anything that doesn’t conform to his own worldview – even when that’s the topic he wants to discuss.
Does anyone else think that facilis is a parody of himself? Because seriously no-one could be this fucking stupid on a regular basis.
For the love of Azura! Today, I’ve read every comment in this thread AND the Watchmen one, and I must say this: Alan Scott, you are a flipping moron!
Not a single item from your lists describes a mechanism that can “intelligently select” in order to create new information. As a matter of fact, “selecting” decreases genetic information. A crude illustration would be an automobile assembly line. How long would the quality control people have to accept and reject Volkswagon Beetles to come up with an airplane? The answer is it would never happen inside the quality control department. You would have to resort to the engineering & design department for such a drastic change. Even in my example where I have generously afforded you human intelligence to select and reject, you will not be able to change the design. The quality control dept. did not develop this machine, nor did this group develop it.
What’s more, I asked for the simplest flow chart or block diagram that I could utilize in a computer program that would simulate “natural selection”. If you can’t model it then why should anyone believe it can happen? Look at your item #6. What will decide whether the “heritable variations” are “advantageous”? The survival? Surviving does not add heritable information. If I trek across the desert with Albert Einstein and survive because I drink more water than him while he dehydrates and dies while wasting time musing on relativity, what heritable trait will I pass to my future generations that will be advantageous? If my trait was one of impetuous over-drinking, will that advance my descendants? Your selection mechanism is so pitifully coarse as dictated by generation spans that may exceed 20 years, and so prone to failure (Alan Clarke overtakes Einstein) that nothing would ever be fine-tuned. Certainly not to the degree of a complex human being. Perhaps humans are a bad example because they possess a complex trait of morality, unlike animals, that defies evolution. Why hasn’t the idiotic notion of sacrificing one’s life for another finally been eliminated through natural selection? Because it’s learned and not inherited? Then perhaps those who have not the ability to learn will have a better chance for survival.
Somewhere hidden in your six-item list you will discover that the engineering & design department has already built-in features that allow for a limited range of variation. Often, this built-in design feature is mistaken for “evolution”.
Last but not least is the never-ending cyclic reasoning of step #5 and #6.
START HERE
Q: What variations increase the chance of survival? (#5)
A: The heritable variations that are advantageous. (#6)
Q: What heritable variations are advantageous? (#6)
A: Variations that increase the chance of survival. (#5)
Go to “START HERE”
In other words, a computer programmer will immediately see through this endless folly advertised as a mechanism to achieve new genetic information. This mechanism achieves “new information” like a chain letter achieves riches.
Ryogam @ 193 – Don’t you mean the herbivores are screwed as they’ll be eaten by the carnivores?
I once heard a silly argument that the carnivores were not carnivorous until after the flood! Oh, well, if you want to believe in a global flood….
*bangs head against desk*
Alan, still all these avoidances demonstrate your real lack of scientific evidence. We see you dancing, bobbing and weaving, but not acknowledging your inability to actually show you are right. That is the downfall of a lot of creationist thought, where they think they just need to take a couple of whacks at evolution, then they are right by default. Science doesn’t work that way. Evolution 500, Alan 0.
……..Alan Clarke.
Too many comics. My apologies to the Lantern, who is NOT a flipping moron.
Wow. Do you run marathons for a living?
Didn’t Humphreys misinterpret what Napier and Guthrie were saying in order to argue the earth is the center of the universe. Seems like he started with the assumption that the earth was the center and cherry-picked until he arrived at his conclusion. He certainly ignored their conclusion.
*facepal* this is natural selection, not intelligent design. Organisms more suited for the environment will have a better chance of reproducing and those adaptations will accumulate. How hard is that to understand?
Can you define what “genetic information” actually is? Because we have found how to get more genes – it’s a process called gene duplication. For instance there are about 1000 genes that control smell. All these genes are but duplicated and modified copies of one original gene. Gene duplication has been observed countless times in nature. Remember, genes that are no longer useful get inactivated rather than deleted. So the genetic code should get larger as time goes on as new mutations increase information and leave redundant information sitting in our genetic code.
perhaps those who have not the ability to learn will have a better chance for survival.
Yes, Alan. Since, to our dismay, you have survived to reproductive age and are availing yourself of the privilege, I’d say you’re onto something there.
Look, people. I know a set-up when I see one, that’s all.
OMG Alan, for a monkey in front of a keyboard you manage to put a lot of words together in a semblance of communication. But for fuck’s sake you are thick. Nothing can “intelligently select” because it isn’t intelligently selected! Hence the moniker “natural.” You pretty much shoot down your own argument there, seeing as there is not an intelligent design in that system. Read that again – there is not an intelligent design in that system.
Now make that your mantra and fuck off.
Of course it’s circular, it’s the cycle of life silly. Though the reasoning is irrelevant, what matters is the process. Generation 1 has offspring, and some of those offspring are better adapted for the environment than others. So those ones will be the ones from generation 2 that reproduce more. So generation 3 will inherit the good genes from generation 2. And again generation 3 will have an environment that favours a certain trait, and thus the variation from generation 3 will survive.
What is advantageous is post-hoc reasoning. But it doesn’t make it any less true, as we can set up tests in the laboratory and look at conditions in the wild that will act as selection and see if organisms conform to that. Say for instance if there is pollution covering trees and buildings, that moths that blend in with the environment will be more camouflaged than the competing offspring that don’t. Over time, the population should be better camouflaged – it’s estimated that this takes about 50 generations for an advantageous gene to be present in all the population.
Wow. Do you run marathons for a living?
Haha, no, I just read quickly, especially if we’re in the middle of a good Crazy Harvest*. Seriously though, Alan Clarke, you really, really, really need to learn some basic principles. Do you have a local community college nearby, or some other adult learning type thing, that would have geology and biology courses? It might be worth your while…
*My personal term for the finding of fundie/kooky/SIWOTI entertainment :-)
Josh:
Thanks for the the recommendations, I’ll look into them. They don’t have to be books, though (at the moment, anything on a monitor is easier for me to read anyway), and advanced=good (makes it easier for me to understand it).
@Sastra, 167: bear in mind that the god of Genesis (or is that gods…?) is not omniscient or omnipresent. If we actually _read_ the thing, as we know creationists never do, we find god telling Abraham that he has _heard rumours_ that Sodom is terribly wicked and he is _going there to check_ and he will _find out_. It’s Genesis 18 verse 20:
20 Then the LORD said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous 21 that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me. If not, I will know.”
Fun, huh?
So of course he screwed up with the creation and the flood and all. No foresight at all. The whole omnimax thing is just later philosophical wibbling.
Josh: Seems rather unlikely, doesn’t it? That the world was completely flat? Doesn’t that contradict Genesis?
I didn’t say it was “completely flat”. I used this as a hypothetical example only to illustrate how the Earth is covered by water more easily as the magnitudes of the hills and valleys are reduced (not eliminated). The fact that Genesis mentions hills and mountains in no way means that the the pre-flood valleys and mountains approached the extremes of today’s Everest and Mariana Trench. Since the pre-flood Earth was not completely flat (as we agree), it was not covered by 1.7 miles of water, but by only 15 cubits on the highest mountain (highest at that time).
Unfortunately, uniformitarianists can’t visualize how things change much. In 1812, the Ohio River near Evansville, Indiana, changed its course after an earthquake such that a horse race track that was formerly on the Kentucky side of the river where horse racing is legal is now on the Indiana side where horse racing is illegal. (ref: Ellis Park) The current state borders therefore, do not follow the actual river course so it’s useless to describe the Indian/Kentucky border using uniformitarian principles. If Greenwich changes, then we’ll really have problems. But Greenwich has its own problems. Click here to learn why Greenwich’s coordinates cannot be determined absolutely. Greenwich didn’t exist before the time of the flood, nor did the entire British Isle’s as we know them today. The global flood occurred while the current mid-Atlantic ridge was in a state of unprecedented upheaval. If a small earthquake in 1812 can make the Mississippi river run backwards, then you must adjust proportionately for a global flood.
dreikin–my pleasure. Happy to help. But in light of them not having to be books, let me do some more thinking. There might be something better. I’ll get back to you on that.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that if the flood caused mountains to grow, the bible would have mentioned it. You have to love how the fundies _make stuff up and claim it’s biblical_. Revelations specifies what’s going to happen to _you_, Alan, for adding to the Book.
Fixed it for you, Alan.
None*, unless you are drinking more water than Albert because you are genetically predisposed to drink a lot of water. If so, and if this is a heritable trait, then you should pass on a similar advantage to your offspring. It will only be an advantage in those situations where drinking a lot of water is beneficial (e.g., if your offspring find themselves crossing a lot of hot deserts prior to reproducing), but in those cases, yes, it will be an advantage.
It will advance your descendants if they end up walking across a lot of hot deserts during their lives before they reproduce. In those cases (i.e., in situations where drinking a lot of water increases ones chances of survival), they will be slightly more likely not to die than the desert-trekking Albert Einsteins who for some weird reason don’t get thirsty. Therefore, they will be more likely to end up reproducing than those Alberts, by simple virtue of the fact that they will probably still be alive and the Alberts probably won’t.
*And -10 for subtly trying to imply a Lamarckian situation for what I presume was a set-up.
Alan, please point to the geological event that caused Everest to raise up to 8000+ meters in the last 4-5000 years from a level that would have it 15 cubits below flud levels instead of dancing around.
Are they now horseracing near the alpine tree line in Evansville?
You know, I just started typing yet another correction to yet another idiotic misunderstanding of the idiotic Alan Clarke, but what’s the point? Clarke’s a fuckin brick wall of stoopid, and nobody lurking here could possibly still be following along with this shit. At some point, argument becomes entirely pointless, and I have reached that pointless-point.
Farewell, Alan, I shan’t be visiting your idiotic thread(s) again.
*yawn*
You should perhaps look at a map and check out (just as one example…) the boarders of Louisiana and Arkansas, where they run along on the Mississippi and see how much the river has changed its course, through what you like to call “uniformitarian processes,” since the boundaries were drawn. No earthquakes needed, Alan. Just channel migration and meander cutoffs. Business as usual for a meandering river.
Another evasion by our champion subject changer. That is the only thing you show talent for Alan. Still no evidence for truly showing scientific evidence for the deluge and creationism. Evolution 501, Alan 0.
Oh for crying out loud Alan. In that single sentence you’ve demonstrated for everyone here that you have no clue what you are talking about when it comes to natural selection.
There are pigs on the island of Lesbos.
What of it?
Kel: Say for instance if there is pollution covering trees and buildings, that moths that blend in with the environment will be more camouflaged than the competing offspring that don’t. Over time, the population should be better camouflaged – it’s estimated that this takes about 50 generations for an advantageous gene to be present in all the population.
Going from black to white or visa versa is not always attributed to a mutation. Often such color variability is pre-programmed into the organism. In the case of human albinos, the mutation comes with an expensive price tag: they can burn more easily from exposure to the sun and the risk of cancer is increased. Lack of melanin in the eye often results in problems with vision, as the eye will not develop properly without the pigment.
But this is not surprising. When random events are called upon for mechanisms of “change”, no new information is added. If I throw rocks at my keyboard, some may argue that the missing period on my old keyboard will be re-established if the rock hits it just right. But how many rocks will be required and how many keys will be ill-affected? Without a pre-meditated purpose based in intelligence, randomness will never build an ordered universe with humans. Click here to see the results of random mutations.
If Greenwich changes, then we’ll really have problems. But Greenwich has its own problems. Click here to learn why Greenwich’s coordinates cannot be determined absolutely. Greenwich didn’t exist before the time of the flood, nor did the entire British Isle’s as we know them today.
Fuck, that’s not even a coherent thought, let alone argument. Somebody needs some thorazine, stat.
Alan, more evasions. Still not showing all continent physical evidence from the scientific literature for the flud. Evolution 502, Alan 0.
When random events are called upon for mechanisms of “change”, no new information is added.
Not. Even. Wrong. You’re not even operating on the same plane of existence as rational people are.
Alan, you’re a moron, and I too am now done with you.
Me too, me too Josh on the resources. I have bookmarked the books you listed earlier.
and thank you again for your patience.
my cats are smarter than Alan Clarke.
I don’t understand what you saying. I think evolution is process of random genetic mutations that can lead to advantageous traits which are favored by natural selection. Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations.
Your examples are bogus. Biological evolution refers to populations and not to individuals and that the changes must be passed on to the next generation.
As for your programs, there are such things as evolutionary algorithms. They are generic population-based optimization algorithms. They were inspired by biological evolution. Selection, reproduction, mutation and recombination are part of the algorithms. Individuals of a population are represented as candidate solutions to an optimization problem. There is a fitness function that defines the environment. Evolution of the population then takes place by repeatedly applying the algorithm operators. The programs can be used to find solutions to a large number of problems. The main reason the programs work as well as they do is because they don’t make assumptions about the fitness landscape in which they operate. There are plenty of examples. One I’m interested in is web search engines using these types of algorithms in an attempt to have search engines produce better results. Programs can be written, just not the way you imagined.
Just because you can’t imagine something doesn’t give you the last word, it just means you can’t or won’t think about it. I think that’s called argument from personal incredulity.
Alan Clarke says: “When random events are called upon for mechanisms of “change”, no new information is added.”
Aw, batshit, all that time spent studying statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics for nothing. Golly, gee willickers.
In terms of circular reasoning on selection and ‘advantageous’, it’s nonsense:
“Survival of the fittest” is a conversational way to describe natural selection, but a more technical description speaks of differential rates of survival and reproduction. That is, rather than labeling species as more or less fit, one can describe how many offspring they are likely to leave under given circumstances. Drop a fast-breeding pair of small-beaked finches and a slower-breeding pair of large-beaked finches onto an island full of food seeds. Within a few generations the fast breeders may control more of the food resources. Yet if large beaks more easily crush seeds, the advantage may tip to the slow breeders. In a pioneering study of finches on the Gal?pagos Islands, Peter R. Grant of Princeton University observed these kinds of population shifts in the wild [see his article “Natural Selection and Darwin’s Finches”; Scientific American, October 1991].
The key is that adaptive fitness can be defined without reference to survival: large beaks are better adapted for crushing seeds, irrespective of whether that trait has survival value under the circumstances. [source: scientific american, linked above]
Just to ram the point home further Alan, natural selection is not a guiding force. It’s simply a term to describe the notion that life is shaped by the quest to survive. Too many offspring fighting for limited mates – that is natural selection. Too many offspring fighting for food resources – that is natural selection. Environmental changes bringing on a new niche to exploit – that is natural selection.
What is advantageous is dictated by the ability to pass on genetic material, if you don’t survive to reproduction age then the immortal journey of the genes in your lineage has ended. If you want to be technical about it, combine step 5 and 6 together. Not everyone who is born survives to reproduce. Variation happens in a population, and that variation that gets passed on will accumulate.
BigDumpChimp: Alan, please point to the geological event that caused Everest to raise up to 8000+ meters in the last 4-5000 years from a level that would have it 15 cubits below flud levels instead of dancing around.
Some have theorized that the geological event is a small subset derived from the larger uniformitarian domain of 1 million comets delivering the Earth’s water. But many believe the larger domain to be a fable, so I must look elsewhere.
Earth’s current topography explained using global flood model
“The catastrophic plate tectonics model gives a mechanism for the deepening of the oceans and the rising of mountains at the end of the flood. As the new ocean floors cooled, they would have become denser and sunk, allowing water to flow off the continents. Movement of the water off the continents and into the oceans would have weighed down the ocean floor and lightened the continents, resulting in the further sinking of the ocean floor, as well as upward movement of the continents. The deepening of the ocean basins and the rising of the continents would have resulted in more water running off the land. The collision of the tectonic plates would have pushed up mountain ranges also, especially toward the end of the flood.” (source)
Psalm 104:5-10
*facepalm* could you actually read my post for what it is instead of pointing out what it isn’t? I was talking about selection, and selection happens on variation. Whether that variation is pre-existing or new, it doesn’t matter. In the case of the moths, it probably was that the allele for black pigmentation was pre-existing. Natural selection is what allowed that certain allele to become a dominant gene as it was able to get passed on. The example was how selection works, not how genetic information is added.
In terms of creating the variation, that’s another story. Variation comes about through point mutations, insertions and deletions in code, duplications and modifications. For instance, the genes for smell receptors are all duplicates of a single gene – and in humans more than half of them are inactive (which happens to coincide with trichromatic vision.) Don’t mistake mutation and selection, they are both different facets of the process. So when I’m explaining selection, I’m going to give examples of how selection works with real world examples. Do you want me to explain mutation for you as well?
Alan, still more dodging. And I deduct a point for using a quotation from your fictional bible. Since you have 0 points, I’ll add one to evolution. Evolution 504, Alan 0. Alan, may I suggest the peer reviewed primary scientific literature for your perusal. Citing books of fiction in a factual argument is not how you win.
Reboho: As for your programs, there are such things as evolutionary algorithms…There is a fitness function that defines the environment.
The closest thing I could find to something that actually “selects” in your description of “natural selection” is the “fitness function”. Who determines what is fit? Is it the programmer? Or has the programmer wisely chosen a random generator so as to eliminate his subjective opinion? After all, “Mother Nature” is the mindless environment of wind & water erosion, entropy, a damaging and scorching sun, etc. Or does “Mother Nature” have god-like qualities that lift her above the limitations of randomness?
Sex Alan. Sex drives evolution. It’s all about reproduction, it’s all about survival of the genes. When you have a child, you are continuing your genetic lineage on. You have offspring, and they have offspring after that. If at any point an organism fails to have successful offsring, that lineage ends. The selector is the ability to survive, the mode of survival is reproduction. The reproductive process is not perfect and thus there will be variation from generation to generation.
That’s all nice and dandy except every single model of plate tectonics requires exponentially more time to cause such a major shift such as the one required to cause what you have to explain. You can’t use plate tectonics unless you recognize the scale required for such events to occur.
Kel- “Sex Alan. Sex drives evolution.”
I’ve been wondering if this isn’t the heart of the fundy distaste for evolution. I mean, it’s certainly consistent- they hate sex in all it’s forms….
Alan, you making a fool of yourself, Evolution 505, Alan 0. You need some background, try this. It will give you the background you so lack, and keeps you at zero points.
haha, maybe. Though I find it funny from a religion that has on page one of it’s holy book: “be fruitful and multiply.”
Alan, you are one incurious SOB. Why don’t you use teh Google and and make a serious attempt? There are plenty of examples of how the algorithms work and no, you don’t want the programmer picking the winners. That’s the point of using the algorithm. Did you even read what I wrote? Piece of advice, it’s Google, not Godgle.
You really don’t understand what anyone is talking about. So you’re either ignorant or stupid, but you just keep running in circles. Seriously, when in a hole, stop digging.
Total Physics FAIL!
Fixed!
Because the Earth is made of magical Play-Do, right?
(We’re going for another thousand posts with Alan learning absolutely nothing (because he worships the God of stupidity), aren’t we?)
________________________
* [“Sunk” how? “Sunk” to where? Who the fuck knows? Who the fuck cares? Not the morons making this shit up.]
This is the funniest thing I have read yet, in 1000+ posts full of howlers:
LOL! You’ve got to be kidding. I got no thrashing here. You did indeed enrage me with your intellectual dishonesty and, in your personal case, Wowie, your utter, embarassing ignorance of the subject on which you have felt free to pontificate. But I am used to that from atheists. I have spent most of my leisure online time over the last three years battling your sort. If they couldn’t manage to defeat me, what makes you think that a fresh bunch will manage it?
Let me offer you a clue. Thrashing requires you to have actual arguments to offer instead of mindless spew. You didn’t. you know nothing about the subjects I raised. Nothing. Only a couple of you have shown evidence that you do have such knowledge but, even if they did want to engage in a real discussion, your sort wouldn’t allow it to happen.
Dumb, beyond any belief. I do not argue with other Christians. I have stated repeatedly that all who hold to the Nicene creed, the vast majority of those who call themselves Christians, are Christians. I have no quarrel with any of them.
You are beginning to fascinate me. What world do you inhabit? What you didn’t “let me push through” were simple facts that any semi-literate fool could find in any one of the dozens of good academic reference works available.
Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. You can’t teach what you don’t know. I could teach you to think, if you were teachable. But you aren’t. You are proud to be ignorant as a stick. What good is an above average IQ, which you might be in possession of (how would I know? You have given no sign of it), if you don’t actually know anything?
Someone claimed I would find intellectual rigor here. I have a flash for y’all– your rigor needs Viagra.
*sigh* still showing no sign of any humility there Maggie, still thinking you are God’s gift to mankind and infallible. Still throwing out insults to others and complaining about them doing the same to you. Why are you so afraid to be human?
Mendacious Maggie the Gag Lady. Your logic has been thrashed from Morris to the Antipodes. You logic has holes in it the size of Saturn (the planet, not the car). You have attitude and nothing else. Your god doesn’t exist and your bible is a work of fiction. To say otherwise is a lie, which you say often, which makes you a liar and bullshitter. What part of that don’t you understand? I can explain it to you in words of one syllable or less.
Some more geology: I live in SE England, famous for the White Cliffs of Dover etc. These cliffs are the outcrops of a large chalk layer that lies underneath the whole of Western Europe. The chalk starts in England, and extends under the Paris Basin, through Germany, up to Sweden. Under Germany, the chalk layer is no less than 2,000 metres thick. Surrounding this chalk layer, there is evidence of fossil beaches, ie the shores of an ancient sea.
Formerly believed to have 3 layers (Upper/Middle/Lower), recent research has now identified more than 30 different layers.
Now we know that chalk forms very, very slowly, from micro-organisms in the sea. We can see this happening today. It would take millions of years to lay down 2,000 metres of these,
Locally, the chalk contains very thin layers of clay, probably from estuarine deposits. These can be seen as slightly greyer layers within the chalk, typically 1 or 2mm thick.
Within the chalk, there are 5 or 6 (I can’t remember now) layers of volcanic ash. These are of uniform thickness(a few mm), and extend across the entire continent intact. the implication being that the volcanoes producing them were a) huge, b) outside Europe. For volcanic ash to settle on a sea and the layer to reach the bottom of that sea in one uninterrupted layer requires absolutely quiet conditions, not a raging flood.
Both these types of layer, are of course, extremely sensitive to water currents. If there was any measurable current at all during the deposition of these layers, they would have been mixed into the surrounding chalk (not yet compressed and hardened), or be broken up.
Within the chalk itself, there are layers of flint, very evenly sorted, thought to be the remnant of fossil sponges. They are again, strictly layered,not randomly mixed up.
When looking at fossils within the chalk, one can see evolutionary progress in a continuous line. eg one can see micraster (sea-urchin) shells change shape as you look higher up the deposit. There is no way that a raging sea/flood would have neatly sorted the shells into their evolutionary order so neatly.
Chalk : yet one more nail in Noah’s Ark.
It really pains me to see someone who is so fucking arrogant that they cannot even admit when they are wrong. It’s frustrating to watch someone who is so self-righteous that they consider their point of view the only possible way to understand reality and thus never take on board anyone else’s point of view. Not once in the ~1000 posts that Maggie exchanged did she even stop to consider that someone could have arrived at a different conclusion to her from perfectly valid reasoning. Instead just proceded to call any point of view that differed from hers idiotic.
Where is your humility Maggie? Where is the indication that you are human? What is wrong with being fallible and taking that into account when arguing with another? Why are you so afraid to be human?
Maggie, many of your
argumentsassertions were refuted. But instead of even paying attention to the comments made, you threw ad hominems, non sequiturs, and outright silliness around. You are nowhere near as smart or educated as you pretend you are. The only points where you rank high are hubris and condescension.Duh. The quality control department’s job is to make sure every car rolls off the line as close to original specs as possible. Variation is eliminated when detected, and it never accumulates because they’re all built to the original specs, not to the previous car they built!
You’d really have to wander off into bizarro-land to make a car analogy fit evolution. Shall we go on a journey?
There are no official specs to work from; every time a factory builds some cars, they drive an existing one into the yard, measure it up, and have a best go at reproducing it. Only cursory quality control is done to see if the car runs; if it looks about right, it’s put out in the yard for sale.
Some cars sell quicker than others. After a while, anything left in the yard is scrapped, and they call the most popular “models” back in for reproduction. The process starts again.
Over time, slight errors in measurement accumulate; some cars’ engines get more powerful, some get smaller, or bigger tailfins. The company notices that certain people prefer different features in their car, and that the smaller cars sell well to commuters, and the gutsier cars are popular for towing stuff, etc. Even the weird cars with the increasingly massive tailfins have found a tiny niche in the “bridge jumping” sports market.
Eventually the company diversifies, and sets up specialised factories to service the local markets. The small cars get smaller and more economical; the big cars start looking more like trucks; the bridge-jumpers get more aerodynamic with every generation. One day someone drives their tiny commuter into the truck factory for new models, and they find their technicians no longer have the skills to service this model, and the owner will have to go back to a commuter specialist for future models…
That’s because it is not an intelligence-driven process.
Of course it does! Heritable mutations are passed on through reproduction; if detrimental mutations never affected an organism’s ability to reproduce, then clearly they couldn’t kill them either (otherwise they would die before breeding) — you’d end up totally random blobs (due to lack of any selective pressure) that nevertheless somehow continued to reproduce.
Because natural selection operates on populations, not individuals (as individuals have to fail to breed to be “selected out” of the gene pool). So if a predisposition to sacrifice one’s self for others has a genetic basis, and you’ve already reproduced, you might die defending your kids, but those genes have propagated further into the population. If over many generations such sacrifices (post-reproduction) continue to benefit the whole population, the genes will spread.
You’re misreading the list. #5 and #6 are talking about the same thing, not defining one based on the other.
5. Variation that will increase the chance of survival and reproduction will more likely be favoured than variation that inhibits survival and reproduction (because if the organism dies before breeding, those genes aren’t passed on to future generations and will disappear)
6. Over time, advantageous heritable variation (as described in 5) accumulates
The emphasis is on that last word.
I just want to see if I understand the position of certain Catholics posting on this blog.
The Bible, and all its teachings,
1) is supposed to have been “inspired” by an all-loving being, implying he would desire, out of this love, for us to understand the Bible’s teachings easily;
2) an all-knowing being, implying that he would know how to make us understand the Bible clearly if he had that desire;
3) and an all powerful being, implying that he has the power to make the Bible clearly understood if he so chose, THAT Bible,
nonetheless,
4) can only be interpreted through the Catholic church in order to understand such problematic Bible stories, among hundreds, as the fact that Jesus curses fig trees to death when they don’t have the fruit he wants, uses swines to cast out demons and could not even convince his own family that he was the son of god?
Am I missing something?
That seems to be the hardest notion for many to get their head around when understanding evolution. Individuals operate within a population, but it’s the population that evolves overtime as vertical gene transfer will distribute genes that are good at surviving through offspring. The more recent the common ancestor, the more two organisms have a genetic similarity. So if an individual has genes that would sacrifice itself for the good of many others, it’s a pretty safe bet that the pay-off in terms of gene survival is far greater than the individual sacrifice of one particular lineage within a group.
Gee, maggie, could you answer some tricky questions?
Are all Catholics in fact Christians?
Some people seem to think that transubstantiation of the Eucharist is “atomic materialism” (what ever that means); that veneration of statues, crucifixes, and rings is “idolatry”; that “Marianism elevates Mary to a goddess”… and that agreeing that Catholics are Christians is judging names and labels over characters and actions, and is therefore bigotry.
Any comments?
< *innocent whistling*>
In comment #213, Alan wrote:
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. And that is super clear from what you wrote in #156:
But okay, let’s say I bite. It was just a hypothetical that you didn’t think related to the pre-flood Earth at all. Then why the hell did you offer this as a hypothetical? What was the point? If the Earth were a giant sponge, it would absorb of all of that flood water as it drained away. But it’s not, so there is not much point in me offering it as a fucking hypothetical, now is there?
What evidence do you have for this? What the hell does “a state of unprecedented upheaval” mean? How does this “state of unprecedented upheaval” express itself in the rocks of the mid-Atlantic ridge? Are you just making shit up again, Alan? Nahhh…that would never happen.
Oh, and maggie, you did say that those who read the OT literally were fools, right?
Just checking!
#251 & #253
I so hope that will work
*gets popcorn*
Hm – I’m working on a programming project directly related to this (of my own accord). What, all of you, do you think would be conditions that would have to be factored into whether an organism will survive or not? (e.g., water availability)
In comment #231, Alan cited some AIG nonsense.
Alan, I’m not going to give that website a page view, so we’ll add some new questions to your homework:
1. Why were there new ocean floors forming at this time? What was the mechanism that caused the volcanism that produced the new crust?
2. Why did this volcanism produce crust along long linear divergent plate boundaries?
3. Do subduction zones and all associated volcanism all post-date the flood?
4. Did we have hot spots during pre-flood times? If not, then when did this mechanism of crustal formation start up? How did Hawaii form in 4000 years?
5. Does this assertion imply that there were no oceans before the flood? In that case, was the entire planet continental crust? This leads me back to my prior question: what was the character of the pre-flood crust?
6. What was the tectonic engine doing pre-flood?
7. How do you explain the radiometric ages obtained from the rocks of the ocean floor (hint: these are not radiocarbon ages) that date the oceanic crust back to the Jurassic?
8. What sediments that are veneering the ocean floors are flood-related, and which of them are post-flood? They are, of course, accumulating right now.
9 How did the sutures between the oceans and the continents work? Doesn’t this imply that all ocean-basins should be fault-bounded? If so, then where are the massive complexes of normal faults at the edges of the ocean basins? If not, then how does this model explain the sutures? Or, if there was supposed to be crustal warping, then where is it?
10. How does this model explain passive continental margins?
11. If all of this magma was cooling, then why didn’t the water that flowed into these basins flash into steam, causing major rains worldwide?
12. How does all of this magma cool in 4000 years?
See previous set of questions.
13. What collisions? Why would there be tectonic collisions at this time? What was the mechanism? Which plates were colliding?
14. If the tectonic engine was operating superfast to produce all of these mountains during/at the end of the flood, then when did the engine slow down to its present rate of operation? Why did it slow down?
15. What was the pre-flood tectonic situation? Where there plates?
These are just the questions that immediately pop into my mind on quickly reading that paragraph. Alan, I can provide explanations for all of the real world geological observations that spurred these questions. If you can’t, then this model of yours would seem to lack some explanatory power…
Whoa.
Maybe that explains why Alan won’t give an answer regarding the distance of galaxies (and hence the age of the universe) — galaxies, stars, maybe even the rest of the solar system… all fables!
(Perhaps I’ve misinterpreted, and you’re not that crazy. But when you throw around garbage phrases you’ve made up yourself, like ‘larger uniformitarian domain’, expect to be misinterpreted.)
FreeLunch: No accounts by other sources support any of the claims about the kingdom of the Twelve Tribes under Saul, David or Solomon.
I would pay good money for a ring-side seat to see you explain your belief to Benjamin Netanyahu or Shimon (Simeon) Peres: “Dear Sirs, I believe you descended from a fable or your parents named you so in honor of that fable.” When a theory collides head-on with observed phenomena, there is a high level of satisfaction, especially when the observed phenomena is seen not only inside a laboratory, but outside a laboratory without the need for expensive equipment. Such is the case for the twelve tribes of Israel. Today, there are many whose names bear either direct or indirect resemblance to Simeon, Levi, Benjamin, Judah, etc. Many of these same people have migrated back to the country of their origin, Israel. Not only the name of the country is retained in “Israel” who was the father of the twelve patriarchs, but the majority of the Biblical cities are intact today or have been uncovered in archeological excavations. My personal experience is that I don’t find many people named “Hercules”, “Zeus”, or “Atlas”, but I do find those whose first or last names are “Alexander” or “Phillip” which confirms my belief that the former are fables. How about the body builder, “Charles Atlas”? His original name was, “Angelo Siciliano”. His last name connects to “Sicily”. So much can be learned by thinking on your own without a professor giving you a head massage.
Y-chromosomal Aaron
If you don’t like creationist sources, then read about the “Cohen Modal Haplotype” on Wikipedia for yourself.
A God who would commit genocide probably is open to lying a lot too. 13 billion years’ worth of starlight is but one gargantuan deception of many for Yahweh.
Maggie reveals herself as a liar yet again! Have you worked out my complex sin/lightbulb analogy yet, or do you need me to dumb it down ever further for you?
Anyway, to the real fun.
Alan Clarke, Maggie is a Christian who thinks people who read the OT literally are fools – what do you, a Christian arguing for the literal Flood, say to that?
Maggie, Alan Clarke is a Christian who claims that it’s entirely possible (if not a demonstrated fact) that Catholics aren’t Christians at all. Some of his words on the matter:
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Here’s a pearler – check the picture he links to:
Care to comment on that, Maggie? All ‘true’ Christians believe essentially the same thing?
You’re evil Wowbagger ;)
But are they indigenous to that island?
Or are they the descendants of those guys that make Girls Gone Wild videos?
I know – I can’t help it. Lucky I can blame it on sin.
Eh, Maggie’s gone for good this time. She won’t be able to deal with the fact we’ve got a living, breathing and even more unceasing example of what she was pretending didn’t exist right here on this thread. Truth scares people like Maggie away.
Plus, there’s no way she could best Alan Clarke. He’d mop the floor with her Mary-worshipping ass…
Fight! Fight! Fight!
Maggie and Alan share something in common (other than the fact that they are primarily responsible for my losing a few dozen precious hours of life reading through their pseudo-intellectual spew): their beliefs were determined long before their rationalizations for them, whereas those who have attempted to engage them come from the other direction. That’s really it in a nutshell (and where else would you find nuts?) – and you will never, ever, get anything close to an acknowledgment of a mistake or a hint of uncertainty. Their spiritual revelation is superior to scientific observation; how else to explain Maggie’s incredibly painful assertion that HER god’s mystical deeds are true, and all others false, because – well, because SO many people SAW them and wrote about them (whereas Mohammed’s revelation is false, because he was the <>only one to have received [read: witnessed] it… I’m gagging again, excuse me) and Alan’s denial of pretty much every single physical science in making his YEC claims (and how fun it was when he finally starting quoting Bible verses).
As always, I am struck by the lack of historical perspective. How many gods predate Yahweh? How many of them have been discarded and forgotten? If Maggie and Alan could go forward in time some six thousand years, would they recognize their religion? Or would Yahweh (and his supposed son, Jesus) follow Zeus and Amun-Ra and Enlil into obscurity?
No matter how many points are made on the side of reason, these two will never, ever, admit that you might, just might, have a point – because to do so would destroy the essential edifice of their faith, and it is obvious how important that faith is to them. Their faith is more important to them than truth, and they would rather throw up smokescreens, strawmen, and (in Maggie’s case) a show of substanceless bravado that would make the most flamboyant peacock hide his head in shame for having been so upstaged.
I admire the perseverance of those who have done so excellent a job refuting the misinformation that Maggie and Alan have regurgitated on these electronic pages. Sadly, all they are getting out of it is a sick satisfaction over having supposedly defeated heathen infidels in intellectual combat. They remind me of Woody Allen’s character from “Play it Again, Sam” who, after getting beat up, explains, “Yeah, I’m fine. I snapped my chin down onto some guy’s fist and hit another one in the knee with my nose.”
Poor kids each need an ice pack and a serious dose of humility.
Oh, LOL. Alan is being stupid, again, about his own bible. And about names. Because of course having names from the Bible proves… what, exactly? It doesn’t tell us squat about a certain professor named Paul Zachary, whose family hails from… Sweden.
LatkesLefse, anyone?Of course, Alan has forgotten his biblical history. He focuses so much on the early part that he forgets the latter part, the one where all of the northern kingdom of Israel is conquered, the people of the TEN NORTHERN TRIBES taken captive and moved elsewhere by the Assyrian troops of Sennacherib. The northern kingdom of Israel was what the kingdom of Judah wanted to assimilate, only to have their ambitions thwarted by military force, because the God who drowned the world couldn’t be bothered to help hold off the Assyrian army, or the forces of the Egyptian Pharaoh Neco, or later, the Babylonian army. What happened? Was God sleeping? Was he distracted by something shiny?
The reason the Jews are called Jews is because they all descend from the tribe of Judah (and the small minority of the priestly descendants of the tribe of Levi (the genetic assay only holds for the latter, of course)). Two tribes, not twelve.
If you told Benjamin Netanyahu or Shimon Peres that they were descended from the tribe of Benjamin or the tribe of Simon, they would, indeed, laugh in your face.
Lets see Alan, time for a recap. Physical evidence for your imaginary god. Zero. Physical evidence to demonstrate your inerrant bible. Zero. Physical evidence for an all continent flud. Zero. Physical evidence for all biota dying at once. Zero. Physical evidence for death of civilizations due to flud. Zero. Physical evidence radiometric dating is wrong. Zero. Alan you are still batting zero. Now Evolution 510, Alan 0 due to copying AIG. That is a stupid no-no, like quoting your fictional bible.
Now that’s what I call a rout!
Shouldn’t the referee put a stop to this bout?
I mean, the guy can’t even defend himself anymore.
Anymore? He never could. AIG is his main copy/paste source, and I really don’t think he understands the arguments, just the conclusions. The guy is stubborn, and thinks he is giving testament to his god. Sigh, I hope he either he or PZ gets bored soon.
I realize that Alan Clarke will find a reason to ignore it (probably due to a) its simplicity, and b) the fact that filter function is provided), but I tossed together a quick evolution simulator. You’ll need Python 2.5 or 2.6 to run it, but there’s a number of parameters near the beginning that you can tweak, so you can see how different factors affect things, and how things fare when there are no ‘good’ mutations, only bad or neutral ones.
The real point of the program was to rebut Alan’s claim that
After a fashion, he is quite correct. At the start, each organism’s ‘DNA’ requires a number of bits to describe equal to its length. (Each gene in the model is either on or off.) After a number of generations, the relative frequencies of the genes has shifted so the amount of entropy in the average gene has decreased. For instance, while before it would take around 128 bits to describe a gene even given the relatively frequencies of each gene, after 20 generations the fitter members of the population only require around 100 bits.
On the other hand, if we know the relative frequencies of different genes, we can better predict features of the environment that would affect selection. In other words, while natural selection decreases the average entropy of the genes in the population, they now contain information about the environment that selected for them.
Using a few rough heuristics (<35% frequency == bad, <70% frequency == neutral, otherwise good), I was able to get a success rate of about 100/128 in guessing the elements of the selection filter, compared to a blind guess (knowing only the relative frequency of bad vs. neutral. vs. good) of about 55 / 128. If I actually experimented and used conditional probability, I could probably improve my heuristic and my accuracy.
Point taken, Nerd.
I hereby retract the “anymore” bit.
Bobber check out http://www.godfinder.org
It’s undernet #atheisms list
Somewhere about 5 thousand gods and goddesses last I checked
Let me know if we missed any.
Thank you kindly
That makes no sense.
Probably.
Though in most cases, “in honor of” doesn’t even come into it. My wife, my daughter and I all have biblical first names, but that has no bearing on my beliefs, our parents’ beliefs, or our genealogy. In all cases, they just liked the sound of the names.
It’s called a “given name” because it is given, not inherited.
Some of them may even be able to trace there lineage back to the Middle East. I know several people with names derived from the above (including a Levi sitting 2 desks away), but I doubt any of them are Jewish. (~0.5% of Australian population, even lower in Adelaide)
You’re getting sloppy with your language again.
I’m sure you’re aware that Israel, as a country, has only existed since 1948.
How many is “many”, anyway?
I don’t doubt that the bible gets a great deal of its geography and history correct. That has no bearing whatsoever on the truth value of its other claims.
Joe Bloggs lived in Sydney Australia, in an apartment near the Opera House. He worked in the offices of the ANZ Bank for 12 years, until the day he was hit by a truck and his spirit ascended to Mars, to establish the Kingdom of the Ghost People.
Even if everything but the last part is verifiable, it doesn’t make the Ghost Kingdom true.
Perhaps you should meet more Greek people. All three of those names are still in use.
The popularity of a name has no bearing on the truth of its origin.
Again, that the bible may have some independently-verifiable genealogy correct, does not indicate that all of its claims are correct.
Kagato, you’re in Adelaide?
Indeed! Maybe we should start a local chapter or something.
John Morales lives in the Barossa – so that makes three (that I’m aware of).
That must mean that the goddess Diana is real, and Arthur and Guinevere (=Jennifer) really existed!
Well, if that’s the case, Jesus must be a fable! I mean, who goes around with that name these days? (in English, anyway)
Many people were named after the God Dionysus, including many Christians of greater or lesser notability, such as this guy.
Many flood post calculations have failed to include a major variable that Alan Clarke’s #156 has clearly pointed out.
The variable is “terrain” during each of the following periods:
1. immediate pre-flood
2. flood crest
3. immediate post-flood
4. post-flood settling
No one knows (1-3) global terrain, and little except the end result of 4. Books therefore that have “proof” of insufficient water give false assurance to a segment of society.
A lack of comprehension to the magnitute of forces on topography exerted by a global flood is often obvious. The weight of rock and huge boulders are reduced considerably by the buoyant force of displaced water. Rapidly moving currents or tides can propel sharp rock laden water with all ranges of “grit” size for whatever stands in it’s way. Hardened steel is rapidly cut by water borne abrasive in waterjet machines. As far as flooding goes, the Genesis flood was a REAL LONG ONE too. Can millions of cubic feet of earth be rearranged by such an event? From evolution we learn that the magic pixie dust is TIME; only your immagination is the limit.
More recent flooding observations-
http://www.icr.org/article/3943/
WRONG POST SENT, INTENDED VERSION (getting late!)
Many Genesis flood post calculations have failed to include a major variable that Alan Clarke’s #156 post has clearly pointed out.
The variable is terrain which logically would have had significant differences during each of the following periods:
1. Immediate pre-flood
2. Flood crest
3. Immediate post-flood
4. Post-flood settling
No one knows (1-3), and little of (4) except the end result. Books therefore that have “proof” of insufficient water give false assurance to a segment of society.
A lack of comprehension to the magnitude of forces on topography exerted by a global flood is often obvious in these discussions. The weight of rock and huge boulders are reduced considerably by the buoyant force of displaced water. Rapidly moving currents or tides can propel sharp rock laden waters with all ranges of “grit” size for whatever stands in its way. Hardened steel is rapidly cut by water borne abrasive in high pressure waterjet machines. Flood action is often reported one day and is over the next. The Genesis flood was a REAL LONG ONE! Can millions of cubic feet of earth be rearranged by such an event? (From evolution we learn that the magic pixie dust is TIME; only your imagination is the limit.) During the period of (2-3), sediments would form as water borne dirt, sand, gravel, rocks, boulders, marine life, plants and animals shift and sort into sedimentary layers. Sedimentary depths would be influenced by but not limited to: depth of water, the amount of water borne material, turblance, duration, and crust activity. EACH one of these factors was HUGE accounting for tremendous depths.
For creative thinkers only:
Question: If only the process of erosion was highly accelerated today to simulate soil mobility during the flood, what would eventually happen given sufficient time?
Related link: http://www.icr.org/article/3943/
Some questions for RogerS:
1) Do you consider yourself a Christian?
2) Do you consider Catholics to be ‘real’ Christians? If not, why not?
3) What do you think of other Christians (and/or Catholics, depending on whether they’re ‘real’ Christians or not) who call literal readers of the Old Testament (for its information on something like the Flood) ‘ignorant’, ‘uneducated’ ‘fools’, and ‘stupid fundamentalists’.
Maggie, please pay close attention to RogerS’s answers.
That sounds risky, haven’t they seen Choke?
—
Didn’t you know that Swedish is the original language of Adam?
Alan Clarke: I don’t find many people named “Hercules”, “Zeus”, or “Atlas”, but I do find those whose first or last names are “Alexander” or “Phillip” which confirms my belief that the former are fables.
Windy: That must mean that the goddess Diana is real, and Arthur and Guinevere (=Jennifer) really existed!
You may have uncovered a new truth Windy. You listed one man and two women.
Arthur (“his historical existence is debated and disputed by modern historians” *)
Diana (mythical “goddess” status is not disputed)
Guinevere (legendary status is not disputed)
Windy (universally accepted as light; unstable; empty **)
Lesson to be learned
Women have less credibility than men, but their credibility is not important for success. Thus mythical and bewitching names are acceptable for women. I’ll make a modification to my theory: Only men’s names are acceptable for tracing fiction/non-fiction ancestry. Remember that this is only a general-purpose ad hoc theory which my fail with Las Vegas show names like Eros, Dionysus, or PZ.
* Wikipedia – “King Arthur”
** just kidding!
Pfft. So having FAILED at Logic, Apologetics, Theodicy, and Ethics, you’re back to FAIL at Geology yet again?
Except for geologists who have been studying the rocks for the past couple of centuries! Are you completely illiterate? Are you stupid? Do you worship the God of Stupidity like Alan? Oh, of course you do.
You do not get to claim that there was a different “pre-flood” terrain without any evidence whatsoever when geologists who have been doing the hard work of actually studying the Earth have all of the evidence of the Earth’s ages, and the processes that change the Earth, including the actions of water, wind, temperature changes, continental plate motion, magma plumes, acidity/alkalinity, and the actions of living things as well, and so on, and say that there is no evidence for any global flood.
Where do you Creationist morons get off telling the people who have been doing all of the work that they’re not doing their jobs!?
Yes. And there’s also the Scablands that Alan pointed to, so proud that he could show that there had been a big gush of water, as if it proved Noah, fucking moron that he is.
You are so completely mentally incompetent that you do not realize that if there had been a global flood that then drained, by whatever means, then every single fucking landmass would have been scoured down like the Scablands, all over every continent everywhere.
You don’t get to just point at the Scablands, because everywhere would look like the Scablands! Every-fucking-where!
That’s more of the evidence that Creationists do not have.
Sheesh!
ah. alan is not just a creobot and plate tectonics denier, he’s a fucking misogynist, as well.
Eros is a perfectly common name in Italy, you stupid WASP.
also, I guess the nibelungen saga is true, since Sigfried is a perfectly common German name. and so is the story of the Golden Fleece, since Jason is a very common name
stop pulling these idiotic ideas out your ass, and most importantly stop calling them theories. they’re brainfarts.
Questions for Wowbagger:
1) Do you consider yourself to be a scientist?
2)Do you consider psychologists to be ‘real’ scientists? If not, why not?
3) What do you think of other scientists (and/or psychologists, depending on whether they’re ‘real’ scientists or not) who call literal readers of ‘The Origin of Species’ (for its information on something like men descending from Old World monkeys) ‘ignorant’, ‘uneducated’ ‘fools’, and ‘stupid fundamentalists’.
Maggie, please pay close attention to Wowbagger’s answers.
* “Logically”? How is it logical?
So first you start by asserting an event occurred for which there is no evidence, aside from a story in a book.
You then take any evidence supporting different events, and deny its validity or try and reinterpret it to support your story.
Now you find your interpretation of the story and twisting of evidence leaves you postulating a hypothesis for which there is not only no evidence, but not even any support within the story!
* Geology sees no evidence of the entire surface of the Earth being rearranged via some rapid process.
* The bible contains no anecdotes about the Earth’s surface rearranging itself before, during or after the supposed flood. It talks about mountains, valleys & rivers (sometimes by name) both before and after the event, and makes no mention of their radically changed state.
* Even if you think all this upheaval happened in the period between biblical recording and modern day, don’t you think at least some of the intervening cultures would notice that “holy crap that mountain’s way bigger than it used to be”?
Yes, you indeed FAIL. We remember. You won’t ever let us forget your FAIL, will you?
Psalm 103:16, bitchez.
err, wow, that’s some high quality crazy!
The pigeons are just a metaphor!
My fucking skull just imploded.
Alan Clarke wrote:
No – I don’t.
That threw a spanner in your works, didn’t it? Just because I’m a regular here doesn’t mean I’m a scientist, unlike all the other people handing your ass to you, day in and day out. I just like to
pick holesfly jumbo jets through the holes in your ‘logic’ from time to time; I find it entertaining, and I know the other readers do too, ’cause they voted to award me a Molly.So there’s not much point bothering with the rest of your now-irrelevant questions.
But I will ask you why you’re trying to win back Maggie’s favour. Have you realised that Catholicism is the True Faith? I’m sure she’ll be quite happy to give you some instruction on it once you’ve apologised and kissed her ass and called it ice-cream a couple of dozen times over while holding a picture of her.
Considering practice for when you’ve given up and gone Catholic!
I would suggest Hosea 8:7…
At this point I wonder how Alan Clarke can keep himself from falling through the ground toward the Earth’s core every day through sheer, uncomprehending mental incompetence.
I’m just waiting for enough posts to go past that he’ll post again his bad definition of evolution and the same argument will start again. The amount he goes through not to learn is amazing, he’s rivalling facilis in that respect!
Alan Clarke, uniformitarianists, that is so 18th century.
Maggie, perhaps you can explain how the flood story is just a racial memory of a local flood and how Alan should read the bible intelligently!
Offa, Egbert, Ethelwulf, Ethalbald, Ethelbert, Ethelred, Athelstan, Canute, Harthacanute – gosh, all these English Monarchs must never have existed, according to Alan, since we never see those names today (nor Jesus, as I said earlier). Yet all the women monarchs are still common, more or less, yea even back unto Matilda.
Alan Clarke:
That’s Windy, OM.
You can’t even try to condescend without looking foolish, can you? :)
Oh yes, I forgot:
Lesson to be learned
Men have less credibility than women, but their credibility is not important for success. Thus mythical and bewitching names are acceptable for men. I’ll make a modification to my theory: Only women’s names are acceptable for tracing fiction/non-fiction ancestry. Remember that this is only a general-purpose ad hoc theory which may fail with Las Vegas show names like Jezebel, Kyra, or Windy.
Oh,how sweet !
We have an alliance forming between Mr “facts are for elitists” Clarke and Mrs “your facts cant harm me” Maggie,a marriage truly made in heaven !!
@ 291,
There goes my hope of skull-fucking Janine some day while exchanging YT music vids….:-)
Alan
There are 13 tribes of Israel.
I kid you not. Go on, list them.
Alan, there’s a city called Athens. You might have heard of it. Quite big. Named after Athena. Therefore the Greek pantheon exists and you should be worshipping Dionysus.
Ryogam @249 on the bible
Yes, Jesus could not convince his own mum he was the son of god, despite:
1. Some cosmic event that followed them about while she was pregnant and a
young woman of marrigable agevirgin.2. Wise men, kings or Magi (of indeterminate number) bearing gold, frankincense, and a wild animal with sharp claws and teeth, explaining everything.
3. Herod and the killing of the innocents.
4. Being born a second time about 10 years later.
5. Angels of the lord telling her about the role of her son.
6. Sheperds being told by angels of the lord to explain to Mary the thicky, as she obviously didn’t believe men wearing womens clothes (especially the ones with wings and halos).
Am I just imagining things, or does Alan Clarke consistently ignore responding to Josh’s excellent points, specifically in matters of Geology?
He should address that list – instead of being allowed to come with assertions and then ignore the rebuttals.
So keep him to that instead of letting him jump about throwing out increasing numbers of assertions in all sorts of different fields. Since it clearly takes a bit of work to get to the bottom of each one – hold him to answer Josh’s rebuttals before moving on to the next item.
And to add to Josh’s rebuttals – I would personally be interested in hearing how “flood theory” explains how the grand canyon sediments where laid down by the flood. A calculation I saw made it out to be some 41ft of sediments on average EACH DAY. nicely sorted into layers. Some layers containing un-reworked bryozoans (which indicates in-situ covering by sediments in calm waters), reptile footprints, even traces of raindrops and desert sands.
But first, address Josh’s posts or concede that the evidence is overwhelming for long periods of the forces we see acting today – and indeed NOT for floating forests and global deluges.
Molok, such as he are why the neologism creobot exists.
Concession to reality is not in their programming; their cognitive apperceptions are filtered by their programming, so they ignore contradictory ideas. The result is as you see.
Alan, go do your homework! Your excuse in the Watchmen thread was that you didn’t have time. You’re commenting in here frequently enough (and thus wracking up more homework) that you obviously do have time. Do you homework–answer thequestions in #73. It’s a nice recap of everything that you owe. If you don’t, then I’m going to have to conclude that you can’t, and I’m afraid I will have to give you an F*.
Note: F doesn’t stand for Flood.
Crap. Okay, could someone give me a head’s up on turning text into links? In comment #306 just above, I tried to link to comment #73 with the word “questions.” Obviously that was a fail.
I opened with:
url=(link) enclosed in brackets
and then closed with:
/url enclosed in brackets
which didn’t work. What did I do wrong?
Josh,
should be something like this:
name of link,snappy title
Oops,total HTML failure….How embarrassing
I think this rather illustrates the importance of knowing something about a field before promoting one’s opinion about it. Personally, I know virtually nothing about geology. But, unlike Mr Clarke, I don’t go around pretending that my uninformed opinion is of any value or that it should influence anyone’s beliefs.
Unfortunately, we cannot apply this attitude in all areas of life – because there are some topics on which we are compelled to have an opinion. For example – and this is rather OT, but it is an open thread after all – if a person wishes to vote, and intends to do so responsibly, then he needs to have opinions on politics and economics, because his act influences the political and economic future of his country. Unfortunately, most people are not particularly informed about these subjects.
Which is why I actually see high voter turnout and mass rallies as a fairly bad thing. How many of the millions of young people who got excited last year about Obama had actually made a detailed study of his economic policies and their potential impact?
How about this?
<a href=”yourUrlHere” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>
Regarding RogerS’s comment #281: I don’t have that much to add, since Owl and Kagato did such a nice job of rebuttal (well done, young Padawans). Just a couple of quick questions or comments (a number of which I have had to write several times before):
Yes, but in order to postulate that those forces happened, you need to provide evidence and offer and explanation. Your “side” is very good at postulations, and absolutely terrible at evidence and explanations.
A. Source?
B. Why are you distinguishing between “rock” and “boulders” here? How are you envisioning rock in this statement?
Yes, but do keep in mind that initial flood action is erosional, but the majority of the event is depositional.
That is accurate if we’re envisioning a global flood. What your model needs to do now is explain the rocks we see. As I have repeatedly stressed, in several threads, to both you and Alan:
You must explain how four months of receding flood waters can deposit the sequence of rocks that we see worldwide. You must do this at the outcrop scale (e.g., see Watchmen comments #1294, #1123, and #882) and you must offer explanations as to HOW the receding waters can produce this geology. We have explanations for these observations, at the outcrop level, that are internally consistent and congruent with our understandings of physics. If you want to assert a flood as a mechanism for erecting these deposits, then you must explain all of the observations better than I can. Otherwise, the flood model FAILS. Period. This is not optional.
If you can’t do this, then just stand on the damn miracles. You don’t get to have it both ways. You do not get to pick and choose what geology you accept and what you reject based on an a priori assumption. Why is that so fucking hard for you guys to understand? You don’t get to tell us that we know what we’re doing over there, but that we’re wrong over here when you consistently demonstrate that you don’t understand enough about geology to have an opinion in the first place.
Address Watchmen comment #882 and then come talk to me. For the moment, we can ignore unconformaties, The White Cliffs of Dover, and everything else. You need to propose a mechanism by which four months of receding flood waters can explain THIS sequence of rocks. PERIOD. Until you can, your flud’s got nothin.
That settles it. The English should be allowed to name nothing or no one ever again.
Holy. Shit.
Evolution 515, Creationists 0. Come on guys, there is this thing called the peer reviewed primary scientific literature. It consists of EVIDENCE. As long as you ignore it you will get nowhere. Which is what you are doing. We are laughing at the two of you.
Walton @310, excellent first paragraph.
The second, however:
But, you see, for some, responsible means seeking to support their own views – the moral views, and decency as they see it. For others, it may mean other things.
For us, it means being an informed voter.
Would you privilege us?
Not exactly. The problem is that voting is not merely a decision about one’s own life. Each person has a right to make their own life choices according to whatever criteria they see fit; I doubt many of us would deny that. But the problem is that, when you vote, you decide which forms of coercion you wish to impose on other people. If you vote for a politician who intends to raise taxes, you aren’t just opting to raise your own taxes; you’re opting to let the State take everyone else’s money, too.
This is why I don’t believe voting is a “right”. But don’t misunderstand me – I certainly don’t believe we should restrict political activity to some sort of self-perpetuating elite. That would be both foolish and immoral, since it would give these people unaccountable power over the lives of others.
Rather, I would tentatively suggest that the State should be so powerless that it wouldn’t matter how its officials were selected. If, for example, the tax rate were constitutionally prescribed and completely unalterable, the currency were put back on a gold standard, and the government (at all levels) were restricted by law to a (very limited) enumerated list of permissible functions – then it wouldn’t matter whether we chose our leaders by voting, inheritance, wealth, random selection or kakistocracy, because they wouldn’t actually be able to make any substantial difference to how we lived our lives.
Walton, I have responded to your question on the Molly thread.
SC, OM, just what exactly is wrong with those illustrious names from 1000 years or more ago?
I’m seriously offended.
Egbert Teapot.
What, you thought my first name was really ‘Cosmic’?
Actually, if I read them a few times, I do see a certain odd beauty – especially in Ethelwulf and Harthacanute.
They reminded me, though, how fortunate I am not to have been given any of a number of family names.
(Now that I think about it, Cosmic would be a pretty cool name…)
Late to the open thread party as usual….
I don’t know if anyone has seen this
http://alicebot.org/igod/, where you can have an online chat with god – it’s hilarious!
Here’s my little chat I had with god….
Human: what is your name
God: My name is God.
Human: but what about isis, thor, zeus and ganesh
God: Huh. Does it have anything to do with ?
Human: explain transubstantiation
God: You tell me.
Human: You’re the god, you tell me
God: Thanks but surely I am not the only one.
Human: so in other words, you don’t know
God: Are you kidding? I know that I do not know.
Human: then please explain transubstantiation
God: Thanks for asking politely. Is there only one?
Human: ok, now that answer has to be proof that god also smokes weed
God: Why now? ” Is there only one?” answer has to be proof that god also smokes weed ? I understand. Ahem.
Human: holy cow, are there seeds on earth for the shit you’re obviously smoking
God: Are all cow the seeds on earth for the shit I am obviously smoking?
This is a test; this is only a test:
TEST
DaveL, this appears, at least at Preview, to have worked. Thanks for squaring my worthless pogue ass away.
Walton,
Sigh.
Such idealism.
Ooh, by the way (open thread and all), Social Security in the US maintains this site about names and their history in terms of popularity:
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/
I find it fascinating.
For example, the name Madison, now #5 in popularity, didn’t appear in the top 1000 until 1985, the year after Splash was released.
Josh – please consider condensing your rebuttal of creationist flood arguments into an article (e.g. for Talkorigins / Pandas thumb) which deals with this in a level of detail that you as a geologist can – it sounds like you have ample ammunition against all their arguments.
Just a thought.
@319
Well, I think we know from which server Facilis escaped.
I always suspected he was nothing but a PERL script.
I apparently did have a bit more to say about comment #281.
*Sigh…*
In comment #281, RogerS wrote:
See, this is a perfect example of what I mean when I say that you don’t know enough about geology to be forming assertive opinions about it. That word soil: you keep using it, but I know it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Unless you’re postulating that the entire pre-flood continental landscape was largely dominated by enormously thick sequences of soil horizons, then the word that you’re grasping so desperately for is sediment. And no, you cannot use them interchangeably.
Sediment and soil are too very different things. In fact, they are two very different categories of things. They are referred to with different words for a reason. Moreover, when you erode a particle of soil away from an in-place soil horizon, it becomes sediment until such time, after redeposition, that the new deposit is transformed into a new soil via soil formation processes (again, the two words cannot be used interchangeably). Using one when you mean the other is as bad as using fish when you’re talking about birds(1). And no, this isn’t splitting hairs. This is goddamn science. Word choice matters; know what you’re talking about or go the hell home. Sedimentologists and soils geologists: by and large not the same fucking people. Here’s yet another assignment: go figure out the difference between these two categories of material (sediment and soil). I’ll even let you start with Wikiblabbia.
What you’re doing(2) is akin to walking onto a job site and telling the carpenters there, who are building an addition, that they’re doing it wrong. But the problem is that you don’t know enough about carpentry to understand that 2X4s and sheets of plywood are different things that are referred to by different names. And that the differences matter. And then you’re walking off the job site, totally secure in your self-righteous opinion that all of those foolish carpenters are blind and ignorant. Nice.
Why do you persist in arguing so assertively about a subject that you obviously know nothing about?
Notes:
1In a non-phylogenetic sense…
2As with your use of the word dirt earlier in comment #281. There is no definition in geology for dirt, really. It’s kind of a meaningless term (like stone), so for you to use it as you did:
only weakens the authoritative punch of any argument that you put forth. As does, incidentally, your inclusion of rocks in that list. Sand, gravel, and boulders are all rocks. The words refer to different sizes of particles. Including rock in there with those other terms, especially positioned between gravel and boulders, strongly suggests that you don’t understand what these words mean.
Josh, if you use Firefox, there a couple of plug-ins that work wonders for HTML insertion. I tried on my home computer and I like it. For your example above, I would copy the link to my clipboard, then highlight the word and have the plug-in put the HTML code with the link around the word. It also does blockquotes, italics, bold, and the like. I’ll see if I can find which thread they were in.
Nerd, I’ve got that plug-in. That was what I tried. It put brackets around a url= and a /url code. But it didn’t work (it does work for italics et al.). *shrug* Maybe I just ain’t so good with this new technowlogy thang.
Canute? No Canute? What will the Fighting Irish and the worshippers of Zombie Reagan say about this. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more legends about Knute Rockne All American than there are about the original Knute.
I love how Josh totally owns creationists with SCIENCE!
Josh for a Molly!
x 1 billion
I can claim that the Grand Tetons and surrounding ranges were caused by a meteorite slamming into what was the snake river plain and causing the terrible upheaval that formed and forced the igneous and metamorphic formations of the Grand, Middle, South Tetons along with Teewinot, Mount Moran, Mount Owen and the various sub peaks the Gros Ventre Range and Targhee area to catastrophically raise to form the ranges as we see it now.
I can even use specific geologic formations that we see in the ranges such as the Phosphoria Formation, Madison Limestone, Bighorn Dolomite, Gros Ventre Formation and Darby Formation to make it sound like I know what I’m talking about.
The problem is that every single bit of science says that that is wrong. No matter how much dancing I do the fact is that it did not happen that way. No matter how many postulations about how certain formations are formed or how various canyons in the range such as Cascade Canyon or Death Canyon show a certain rock formation that could be explained by the impact of a significant meteorite it does not follow the evidence. It does not follow in the same way that just because you can name formations or processes by name that doesn’t mean that it follows the evidence for a global flood.
There is no evidence for my meteorite hypothesis or for your flood hypothesis.
None
Zero
Zilch
Bagel
All evidence points to upheaval along the Buck Mountain Fault that cause the exposure of various formations and then the weathering, glaciation and erosion and in some locations other volcanic activity giving us what we see today. The upheaval from the Buck Mountain fault is a result of a much larger tectonic event (or series of events) where the Farallon Plate was subducted below the North American Plate beginning some 80 million years ago and lasting until sometime around 30 million years ago.
If you are going to co-opt scientific explanations for your wild fantasies, you have to accept all the science involved.
Josh some of those plug-ins offer different types of code you can use. It’s not just straight HTML a lot of the time so yuo may have one that used brackets and one that uses greater/less.
If they offer different types of code it might be worth experimenting.
Rev…hmmm….I’ll go back and see. The one I installed requires brackets, which don’t work. I have to edit to greater and less than to get it to work. But it just simply said “fuck you” to me when I tried to create the link. I’m pretty much teh stupid when it comes to this shit. But good advice from both you and Nerd. I’ll do some mucking around.
Oh, and by the way–nice job in #331.
Josh: But the problem is that you don’t know enough about carpentry to understand that 2X4s and sheets of plywood are different things that are referred to by different names.
Obviously RogerS isn’t a geologist. But as an engineer, he sees that a flimsy house of potential termite-laden wood isn’t going to last as long as one made of limestone. And so it is with his understanding of evolution and uniformitarian theory. The level of training of carpenters will not insure longevity or viability of a wooden structure built on top of sinking sand. The carpenters would do well to take heed.
So when RogerS says, “soil”, I can easily interpret that to mean topsoil (humus), peat, sand, and other lighter non-compressed materials in contrast to the lower “basement” materials of granite. The key to success for people relationships is taking time to understand their reference point. A dogmatic carpenter that disdains masonry cutting tools is not as valuable as one who appreciates those outside of his trade.
Amen. Very good analysis Rev. BDC.
Josh, sounds like your plug-in preferences is set up for BBS. You should be able to change the preferences to HTML.
Josh, here is how to make hyperlinks.
(a href=”site you are linking to”)The words you want to appear.(/a)
Replace the brackets with the greater and lesser than signs.
If a computer bungler like me can do it, well…
Yawn, Alans still presents nothing but suppostion and presupposition. Lights on, nobody home.
irony meter just went into core meltdown
Molok: Am I just imagining things, or does Alan Clarke consistently ignore responding to Josh’s excellent points, specifically in matters of Geology?
Good point Molok. But my belief is that Josh enjoys posting in quantity more than quality. Perhaps Josh could give me TWO BEST geological arguments in favor of uniformitarianism or NO-FLOOD theory. I’ll be happy to give it my best shot. I developed the bad habit of tuning out my child when she petitions for too many things simultaneously.
Oh please. That is such a thinly veiled dodge it is ridiculous. He is utterly dismantling your idiocy at every level and you are conveniently ignoring it.
But my belief is that Josh enjoys posting in quantity more than quality.
The rubble that is my skull just imploded again.
Even your two-year old asks you questions you aren’t intellectually (or intellectually honestly) capable of answering?
Who stamps their feet more afterwards, you or her?
Alan, you are the one making the claim for the flud. The burden of proof is upon you to show that it happened. Then we refute your idiotic claims. You have zero points to date proving your flud. I must say, you are consistent, but in a way that would embarass anyone with have a mind.
Alan wrote:
Obviously, and this isn’t a problem. At all.
What IS a problem is that he (and you):
A., Authoritatively assert bullshit theories despite not knowing anything about the subject, when a little bit of knowledge would show you how those theories are wrong.
B., Do so despite having those theories shot down repeatedly.
C., Cherry pick only those data that support your a priori assumptions (and frequently mischaracterize even those data) and wave away any evidence that you don’t like.
D., Show a complete unwillingness to LEARN (e.g., WHY haven’t you answered the questions put before you in comment #73?).
And herein you demonstrate clearly, in your defense of RogerS, the problem. Neither of you understand evolution or geology at all enough to argue it (or you wouldn’t fucking persist in referring to geology as “uniformitarian theory”). But instead of trying to understand the topic (=LEARNING), you persit in setting up strawman arguments and misrepresenting both our positions and the evidence. So your views on the viability of the house are fucking irrlevent. You might think me dogmatic and that’s fine, but I need to understand some basic math and design terminology before I get into a discussion of airplane design with an airplane designer. AND, the airplane designer is NOT being inflexible or unreasonable in making me use her definitions for what wings are. She simply isn’t.
That would be true, except that you are trying to tell them that they’ve built the house on sand when they’ve built it on bedrock. And you can’t tell the difference because you think sand is coal and you’ve never even heard of bedrock.
Thank you for again proving my point. Who are you–Maggie?
Soil doesn’t equal humus.
Peat and sand aren’t soil.
“basement” doesn’t equal granite.
Your interpretations of RogerS’s poor understanding of the subject are equally poor. I pointed out RogerS’s incorrect word usage to make the point that his incorrect word usage is a symptom of the larger problem (not understanding geology). The problem isn’t his lack of precision in words anywhere near as much as it is his completely misunderstanding of how things work. But, when there’s pretty much no understanding going on at all, then you start with a common vocabulary.
You aren’t really accusing me not being patient enough with you both, are you? Seriously? Are you really insinuating that I haven’t been trying to discuss this with you in good faith?
Josh: Is there Biblical support for the idea that the Nile is a post-deluge feature?
The surface of our ENTIRE Earth is completely ridden with nothing but post-deluge features. How could it not be if the highest mountain was 15 cubits under water? Instead of me trying to describe 1000 places in detail, give me one spot that you think is flood-free.
Heck, I don’t need Josh-level science-fu to counter this delugion: evidence of numerous (or even worldwide) individual floods ≠ evidence of 1 global flood.
Josh, for commenting, I keep a text file sorta like this on my desktop to copy-and-paste from. If you replace all the parentheses signs with greater and less thans, this should work for you.
moniker
e-mail@address.com
(a href=”http-of-target-goes-here”)words-to-click-go-here(/a)
(BLOCKQUOTE)text-goes-here(/BLOCKQUOTE) only works on one paragraph at a time
(I)italics(/I)
(B)bold(/B)
(U)underline(/U)
(BR) line break
Alan wrote:
Another dose of shame is yours, Alan. Josh has systematically, meticulously, and repeatedly addressed each of your claims, explained in fairly plain language where your attestations are invalidated by the work of untold numbers of scientists of the appropriate discipline who have examined the data thoroughly and have had their own work validated by equally-educated peers, and provided voluminous links to much of that data that you can examine for yourself. Josh has consistently debated your points, and refuted them, in what is a scholarly manner – he has backed up his own assertions with evidence and with citations of expert analysis. You, on the other hand, have offered no effective defense of your assertions; you have provided no evidence for your claims that is not seeped in predetermined outcomes (AiG attempts to squeeze the size 18 data into their size 2 philosophy); and you have thus far responded to Josh’s respectful, well thought-out, and quite complete words with nothing but evasion, goal-post moving, and rude indifference.
In short, you will not address Josh’s points because you can’t – not without exposing yourself as less knowledgable on the subject than Josh (and others), and not without creating the potential for a hole in your faith – and THAT, as I pointed out once before, you will not do, for you value faith over truth.
For you to make the outrageous claim that Josh’s posts are an example of quantity over quality indicates to me one of the following:
(a) you don’t understand what Josh has been telling you.
(b) you understand it and are ignoring it because you have no way to refute his evidence.
I admit I can’t see any other alternative.
Mr Clarke: you have just dogmatically refused to consider a whole series of very strong, detailed comments that discuss precisely the claims that you’ve been making, and addresses them with scientific evidence.
I confess, too, that when small squalling children make lots of noise, I tune them out as well, and I’ve pretty much been ignoring you. This makes me perk up, however. Your arrogant comment makes me realize that you are worse than a whining child — you are a fucking obnoxious moron who has nothing to contribute.
You will try to actually grapple with the evidence that Josh has so thoroughly presented to you, or I will do to you what I can’t do to whining kids: I will boot your petulant, incompetent ass out of here.
I’m paying attention now. No more free pass for Clarke.
Molok:
Alan Clarke, hiding from reality @ #339:Good point Molok. But my belief is that Josh enjoys posting in quantity more than quality. Perhaps Josh could give me TWO BEST geological arguments in favor of uniformitarianism or NO-FLOOD theory. I’ll be happy to give it my best shot. I developed the bad habit of tuning out my child when she petitions for too many things simultaneously.
Oh, so you freely admit that you are hiding in abject terror from the science that refutes your nonsense. And you admit this is a bad habit! But you do nothing at all to correct it.
But two can play your silly game. Since you’ve spent hundreds of posts on two different threads babbling idiotic flud nonsense, then obviously you enjoy posting in quantity more than quality. Your failure to limit yourself to the TWO BEST geological arguments in favor of your delugionist nonsense is ample proof that the Flud never happened.
So go away. You’re worthless. You have nothing to offer. Your bullshit has been refuted countless times, but you’re too much of a coward to admit it.
Alan Clarke @ #345:
The pyramids of Giza. The Sahara desert. Antarctica. Mt. Everest. Mt. Rushmore. Washington, D.C. The Grand Canyon. The Mariana Trench. The creek out behind my old elementary school.
Alan, get it through your thick skull. THERE WAS NO GLOBAL FLOOD! In all the time you have wasted here, you have not even comee clos to presenting the slightest speck of evidence that there was such a flood. You just hide from the facts because your delusions will not allow you to face reality.
Alan, there is no evidence in the peer reviewed primary scientific literature backing up that claim. You lied again, and deliberately. Evolution 520, Creationists 0. You still have a perfect record, but not one you should be proud of.
The Grand Canyon is often offered as evidence for the Flood. The entrenched meanders could not possibly have been formed by intense runoff–see the English Channel and Glacial Lake Missoula for examples of catastrophic run-off. The high vertical walls of the Grand Canyon could not have been formed in soft, post-flood sediments, only gradually in firm rock.
Chalk formations all across Europe have identical bands of volcanic ash sediment. Those bands could not have formed in turbulent water, nor does the Bible mention volcanic activity during the Flood.
Rev.,
These flashes of geological insight are very sexy. :)
Want to know what is not sexy? Imploded skulls.
As long as we are getting sidetracked here..
Josh, do you know what happened to the GRE in geology?
I was looking at some university web sites when the whole watchman thread started and I noticed several that say they require it for graduate students but I thought it was discontinued a good decade or so ago.
Thanks again
Yeah, what a fantasy destroyer.
(Seriously – I’m still in shock. Couldn’t believe my eyes.)
I thought it was discontinued as well. I’ve long presumed that someone with a brain finally realized that the exam was dumb and didn’t assess what it was intended to assess (good luck getting a single standardized test to integrate across the world’s undergraduate geology curricula) and dumped it.
I took it back in the day. I, shall we say, did not fair so well in battle that day. *shrug* It didn’t prevent me from getting admitted to my fancy PhD program. The admissions committee didn’t care. Some will. It shouldn’t be the thing that holds anyone back from admission, I would hope. *shrug*
Since it seems that Alan has tucked tail and run since PZ made it clear that Big Al’s idiocy will no longer be tolerated I would like to take the opportunity to ask you a question, Josh.
How long were you in the Army?
Why thank you! But to drive my point home even further, it took merely an intimate knowledge of the area (I spent 10 years climbing and skiing in the Tetons… oh the 90’s how I miss them) and 10 mins of research to gather that information. Something Alan could easily do, but refuses to.
What is it this year? 17 years? Something like that. I lose track, since they can’t seem to get my retirement points squared away anyway.
Shorter PZ
Put up or shut up Alan.
@ Josh
So you’re still in then? And pursuing a PhD? Must be Guard or Reserve then, I would guess. I remember the disdain that Active Duty had for independent thinking, whereas the Guard and Reserve only ask that you suspend it one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer!
Already have the PhD. I serve in a National Guard combat unit within the sphere of USASOC (keeps me young; and my team needs a token liberal). Yeah, the active duty guys sometimes refer to us as “summer help,” but that’s largely changed given everyone’s operational tempo now that the U.S. is busy invading everyone and their fucking brother.
Wait. We’re invading them and fucking their brothers!?!
OHHH and their fucking brother.
Sorry, touch of dyslexia got me there.
So if I had to guess I would say you are in the Utah Guard then? At any rate, as one serving vet to another, thanks for your service. More importantly, thanks for being a fellow liberal serving in an organization DOMINATED by some very small minded conservatives (not all, mind you, but a great many of them).
Wait – was that supposed to make it less sexy? I’m confused.
;)
No, not Utah, but let’s just say with that guess you’ve gotten the flavor correct. I suspect you can do the math with those clues? I won’t say anymore on a blog–issues of PERSEC and OPSEC to consider (I’ve got close friends in harms way as I type this).
And to you, brother. All the way…
It’s quite amazing, isn’t it? I mean, I’m in what could be classified as the thinking-person’s corner of the Army, but still. Damn…
Jadehawk: Eros is a perfectly common name in Italy
‘Eros’ doesn’t appear on the top 20 men’s names in Italy nor does it appear on the list of 1600 Italian names.
Janine, I think my male chauvinism caused you to implode prematurely. You didn’t read my original footnote disclaimer to Windy where I admitted I was kidding. Actually my regard for women is so high that I think every man should own one. And I’m not being hypocritical because I paid good money for mine. ;-)
PZ Myers “warns” me? I can’t believe that I even appeared as a blip on his radar screen considering his celebrity status. My first glimpse and impression of PZ Myers was here. I feel that I’ve always been courteous to people, especially to those who I’ve never met. I form opinions quickly, but I don’t attack their person as in, “Alan Clarke, you are an idiot.”
I form opinions quickly, but I don’t attack their person as in, “Alan Clarke, you are an idiot.”
Oh take your little persecution complex and shove it, Alan. When someone (you, Alan) has been proven wrong, stupidly, provably, holy-crap wrong and still refuses to listen, that person (you, Alan) IS an idiot. And stating that you, Alan Clarke, are an idiot is not attacking your person — it is a statement of proven fact.
I think PZ does a more than adequate job of explaining what it is that he expects from even creationists on his site.
Even the mighty PZ gets tired of reading drivel.
Sooooo, would his job be open?
Alan, your not reading the refutational literature is rude of you. You know that. So you have lost the courteous game. Just another lie.
Stop that!
You are commenting on his blog. Commenting and Ignoring the damning evidence repeatedly laid before you that exposes your arrogant ignorace on nearly every subject you have spoken about.
You are acting the part of an idiot. If you would not liked to be called an idiot, do not come into a room full of people and start acting like one.
Alan Clarke lied @ #368:
No, you have not been courteous. Not even close. And there’s a simple reason for that. It is not courteous to lie. Doesn’t matter what flowery language you dress it up in, a lie is a lie is a lie. And lies, delusions, and denial are all you have, all you’ve ever had, all you will ever have.
The reason people call you an idiot is because you ARE an idiot. You believe things that are demonstrably false, and maintain this belief no matter how much evidence to the contrary is presented to you. You actively hide from refutations of your delugionist bullshit. You show so little respect for others that you refuse to even look at the evidence. You declare that every scientist on Earth is wrong by many orders of magnitude, based entirely on the sworn testimony of the voices in your head. This is stupid, and it is rude, and it is astonishingly arrogant. And all your pretending will not change the facts. No amount of whining about tone will change the facts one iota. Your only hope is to throw up enough of a smokescreen of whining to divert attention from the fact that all your arguments have been soundly refuted.
Well that hope is dead now. It’s not going to work. It might work with your fellow cultists, but the people here are smart enough to see through your lies. And deep down you know this. That is why you hide from the facts. Because you know they aren’t on your side.
Alan, you sad little creep, that post you linked to does not show that you came here with an open mind. It shows that you think that Dawkins and Myers are in the same class as Kevorkian, Lenin and Stalin.
Not that it proves anything about you, it merely is more confirmation that you are not open to honest talk.
Also, comparing people to murderers is not being courteous. In fact, it is the exact opposite of being courteous.
I wonder if clinteas is confused about what the word he used *means*…?
clinteas, take a look at the Urban Dictionary; did you really mean to say that?
It’s possible, if only because such would be impossible “while exchanging YT music vids.” Could he have had in mind some sort of telepathic alien sex? I’m imagining large crania. Not entirely convinced.
Windy, the original quote is mine. And I meant that word. What Alan has written made my brain disappear, causing my skull to cave in.
Janine, we’re referring to clinteas’ comment @ #300.
sorry
I’m sorry, what? Where exactly have you successfully rebutted one of my responses to something you’ve written? Where is that comment, please? Alan, that you seem to be going OUT OF YOUR WAY to avoid answering the numerous questions that I’ve asked you, implies that you perhaps can’t answer them. In that case, I guess I’m not going to loose any sleep over what you think of the scientific quality of my commentary.
Alan, they were far from simultaneous requests for clarification, and most everything I’ve written to you was a direct reply to a comment of yours… And I’ve already given you plenty of stuff that you should be trying to address (see again comment #73…).
But fine. I will throw you one last bone. In fact, I’ll make it sporting. Even though your flood model does have to explain this:
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/hefferan/geol320/folds.18.jpg
(i.e., how did these rocks lithify and fold and get exhumed in 4000 years)
and this:
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/geology/classes/RWA/GS_326/_Media/dscf0664_large.jpeg
(same questions)
and all of this:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2001/of01-227/of01227p1.pdf
we can start small. Choose two of the three following assertions and address:
I assert that the Morrison Formation is flood free. I made this assertion in Watchmen comment #781. I challenge you to explain the Morrison Formation (geology and paleontology) in terms of receding global flood waters (I explained in the comment what you need to address) and answer all of the questions that I asked in that comment.
I further assert that the sequence in Iowa that I presented to you in Watchmen comment #882 is flood free. I challenge you to explain that deposit in terms of receding global flood waters (I explained in the comment what you need to address) and answer all of the questions that I asked in that comment.
Finally, I assert that the glacial till deposit upon which “Prometheus” grew is flood free. I made this assertion in Watchmen comments #1092 and #1123. I challenge you to explain the moraine, the Prospect Mountain Quartzite, and the fact that “Prometheus” was alive for about the last 5000 years in terms of receding global flood waters from a flood 4400 years ago (I explained in the comment what you need to address) and answer all of the questions that I asked in that comment.
To give the benefit of the doubt to clinteas, Janine did say:
(emphasis mine)
It was maybe just an off-color play a la “fucking couch? Didn’t know they even got horny!” {insert bad rimshot}
Now I’m off to Urban Dictionary to see if anything can be made of “Insert rimshot”.
Josh for a Molly! And a week’s vacation to rest up.
Shorter PZ:
Keep yer dukes up, or I’m stoppin’ this thing.
I’m not holding my breath in anticipation of something of substance from Alan.
Oh, dear. I shouldn’t have checked that…
*nods in agreement with Rev.*
This thread needs fucking bacon.
@MikeG. Yeah. We could have warned you, but you rushed off so quickly…
And tankards of grog.
Awww, no Rev. BigDumbBlueChimp?
I agree, though. Anyone with any honesty or real curiosity (features not common among creationists, I admit) would have been either learning from Josh and asking honest questions or be cowering, whimpering in the corner from the thorough intellectual beat-down.
Josh has not made me regret casting my Molly vote for him. (That and the Army thing: physical and mental ass kicking ability? Damn!)
No, I don’t want to know if bacon-fucking is in the Urban Dictionary.
agreed.
moar bacon and grog
Like this?
There is something so right and so wrong about this product.
While I applaud their dedication to the idea of bacon I cringe at the application of said dedication.
And the strange thing is I think I know on of the founders of this company as they started it in Telluride where I used to live.
If you’re going to do pork, just do pork. Don’t do some contrived vegetarian off-take of bacon.
This angers the Bacon gods.
Products like this give a who new meaning to jerk pork.
And no more rushing off to Urban Dictionary for me. I’ve learned that lesson.
Now bacon salt would be great on eggs, with a side of bacon.
Who new meaning? That should have been whole, or hole, or maybe ho. Anything but who. The KoT’s influence is strong.
/flex
Re: igod, @#319.
Actually, that’s been posted here before, and I managed to get God to confess to being a pothead and a lush:
Janine and Menyambal,
Thanks to both of you for your formatting suggestions. I looked right past them earlier.
MikeG,
That product’s disclaimer made me laugh:
Also, to Josh:
Thanks for the excellent geography posts! I’m by no means a geologist, but I’m not totally ignorant either. Your posts were/are quite informative. Too bad Alan can’t understand them.
I had a realization: Alan and RogerS are fundamentally using the presuppositionalist algorithm outlined by T_U_T (which of course means that they are not interested in learning or discussing, or even in communicating, really):
1) Make assertion about the Earth (or sometimes, about God or the Bible) (in this instance, based on assuming that the bible is inerrant and true, and that “science-like” apologetics (now with extra truthiness!) from AIG/ICR/YEC-org-du-jour correctly interpret the bible and the evidence of science)
2) Use radical skepticism to dismiss anything the enemy says (where “enemy” in this case means anyone who agrees with or suggests that the evidence-based scientific consensus is correct, or at least, is correctly arrived at; all attempts to use the ground rules of logic, reason, evidence, etc). Josh may know all about geology, and tries to discuss geology reasonably, but he’s the enemy as far as YECs are concerned, so his discussions are simply rejected. The same goes for me, David Marjanović, Kel, Wowbagger, Nerd of Redhead, etc… we’re enemies, so nothing we say matters. We can be polite as Miss Manners or as foul-mouthed as longshoremen: It’s all irrelevant to them. Heck, Roger Wiens (author of Radiometric Dating – A Christian Perspective) is the enemy to them as well! Of course they’re not going to try to understand his paper.
3) Declare that because the enemy “failed” (that is, the YEC successfully dismissed responses, refutations, rebuttals, etc), original assertion is in fact true. Sometimes the dismissal takes the form of finding some pathetic “science-like” apologetic (with extra truthiness) on an AIG/ICR/YEC-org-du-jour website. But if they can’t find anything, they are prefectly capable of simply ignoring it.
4) Refuse any objections by radical skepticism (Note, for example, Alan’s constant harping on ASSUMPTIONS; that science ASSUMES that God does not exist, and his constant sneers that demonstrate that he understands neither what he says nor the things about which he makes assertion).
5) If the enemy objects against the obvious double standard used (radical philosophical skepticism against scientific and logical claims, unquestioning unthinking acceptance of YEC BS and their own made-up BS), then dismiss objection with radical skepticism.
YEC presuppositionalism is just a denial-of-service attack by the YEC against the reality-based community.
In Alan’s case, he also has the odd habit of abandoning the playbook to make rambling psychotic personal comments about himself or against his interlocutors. RogerS usually sticks to the script, for whatever that’s worth.
If only that were the case. Unfortunately, Alan has a much more serious problem. He has refused to learn. He is suffering from self-inflicted ignorance because of his religious delusions. Josh’s explanations have been clear enough for anyone with an American high school education to follow. My thanks to Josh, too.
You haven’t been courteous. You’ve been evasive on questions, then come back and made the same assertions time and time again regardless of whether they have already been refuted. Showing complete ignorance in the field of science and asserting you know better than all those who actually have knowledge on the matter (including a Ph.D wielding geologist) and showing no inclination to take anyone’s perspective but your own on board – that’s not being courteous in the slightest.
We’re not asking you to believe in the scientific principles, hell we aren’t even asking you to stop believing in your holy book. We’re just showing you where the evidence leads. You tried to say before that both creationists and evolutionists are both looking at the same evidence from a different perspective, but all you’ve done here is asserted the impossibility of anything other than the biblical perspective by showing a complete misunderstanding of the evolutionists actually say. The reason we support evolution is the theory has the power to explain the diversity and distribution of life on earth. If the process didn’t work we wouldn’t support it. So even if you don’t believe in evolution, surely you must recognise that the process has the potential to work – otherwise the millions of scientists working in the field of biology would have stopped supporting it a long time ago.
As Jerry Coyne writes in Why Evolution Is True (excellent book by the way, well worth a read):
Me: Am I just imagining things, or does Alan Clarke consistently ignore responding to Josh’s excellent points, specifically in matters of Geology?
Alan Clark: Good point Molok. (Glad you agree.)
< -snip->
Perhaps Josh could give me TWO BEST geological arguments in favor of uniformitarianism or NO-FLOOD theory. I’ll be happy to give it my best shot.
——–
Here’s a tip. Make sure your next post adresses one or two of these (from #382) assertions from josh:
1. I assert that the Morrison Formation is flood free. I challenge you to explain the Morrison Formation (geology and paleontology) in terms of receding global flood waters (I explained in the comment what you need to address) and answer all of the questions that I asked in that comment.
2. further assert that the sequence in Iowa that I presented to you in Watchmen comment #882 is flood free. I challenge you to explain that deposit in terms of receding global flood waters (I explained in the comment what you need to address) and answer all of the questions that I asked in that comment.
3. Finally, I assert that the glacial till deposit upon which “Prometheus” grew is flood free. I made this assertion in Watchmen comments #1092 and #1123. I challenge you to explain the moraine, the Prospect Mountain Quartzite, and the fact that “Prometheus” was alive for about the last 5000 years in terms of receding global flood waters from a flood 4400 years ago (I explained in the comment what you need to address) and answer all of the questions that I asked in that comment.
If you do not, but continue to bring forth different arguments in different areas, I think all will agree that you have forfeited the argument.
So surprise us. Delight us – show us why the last two centuries of geological understanding is wrong, and how and why these geological formations MUST have been the product of a global deluge as per the biblical account.
SC, OM:
Well, to be honest those were back in the days when English was still pretty close to Dutch/German. The Norman invasion in 1066 started
ruiningFrenchifying‘beautifying’ the language. You can check out more here as well. The people they were related to often had nicer names.Free Lunch:
Hm. The name did sound a bit familiar, but I thought that was from all the canucks..
Josh:
So, while we wait for Alan to get up the gumption to do or
diesay bye, any ideas on the geology stuff?Also, if you didn’t already know (since I saw the tag-talk above), be wary of adding too many hyperlinks – more than two in a post, I think – else your comments will be held in moderation. Text if fine, but clickable not so much.
Text is fine. Gr!
Sorry, I couldn’t let this one pass. It’s just too hilarious.
I’m going to have to assume you pasted the wrong link.
You couldn’t possibly be that dumb.
Right there on the page:
And if you’re complaining that it’s “not in the top 20″… that’s because it’s in alphabetical order, you moron!
Haven’t read this thread yet, just seen that Alan has come back and appears to still haven’t done his homework. (Is it day 60 yet?)
So, just so much. From near the end of the old thread:
We are not interested in courtesy!
Instead, we are interested in science!
We can ask you as nicely as you want – but we still insist that you do your homework. That’s because as long as you don’t do it, it’s simply no use trying to talk to you. You (or we) might just as well shut up and go away, but that’s the worst option, because nobody would learn anything from that.
I know I’m late here, but I just couldn’t pass this up.
Alan Clarke wrote:
Ok. So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that people did live much longer back then. In that case, the dynasties of individual pharaohs would have lasted much longer than archaeologists think.
This helps your argument… how, exactly?
dreikin and Britomart,
So I’ve been looking around off and on all afternoon. I gotta tell ya, it’s been kind of depressing. There’s a lack of really good stuff out there (in terms of clear overviews of the science–an online text, so to speak). There are a ton of very technical sites, but there seems to be a real paucity of good sites dedicated to education. But I did find some interesting stuff (in fact, I’m glad you asked me to do this, because I should have done this search a long time ago). Anyway, I hope this helps.
This first stuff wasn’t what you were asking for, but if you just want to keep your pulse on what’s going on in geoscience, then I recommend:
URL LINK: http://www.earthmagazine.org
URL LINK: geology.com/news/
Also off topic, but a gem. The National Association of Geology Teachers publishes the Journal of Geoscience Education. Now, this is a professional, peer-reviewed technical publication, but as the articles tend to be focused toward teaching, they’re most accessible than your typical Journal of Geology article. And it’s free. It’s worth a browse, I would say. You’ll probably find something in there that’s cool and worth reading.
URL LINK: http://www.nagt.org/nagt/jge/index.html
GEOLOGICAL LINKS:
This is a good online geological dictionary:
URL LINK: http://www.ge-at.iastate.edu/courses/
Geol_100/old_files/glossary.v2.html
If you’re looking for general information on minerals:
URL LINK: nature.berkeley.edu/classes/eps2//wisc/glossary2.html
If you’re looking for general information on minerals:
URL LINK: minerals.er.usgs.gov/minerals/
This is a great place to start for everything:
URL LINK: facstaff.gpc.edu/~pgore/geology/geo102.htm
This is a new site on general geology, which seems to be expanding. I haven’t really scanned it yet, but it seems to have promise:
URL LINK: http://www.eoearth.org/
And of course the UMCP site is a good overview of historical geology and paleontology (and it includes pretty much the only halfway decent evolution primer out there that I’ve seen):
URL LINK: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/exhibits/index.php
A good one on volcanoes:
URL LINK: volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/
A good one on deep time:
URL LINK: pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/contents.html
This one is technical, but it’s for real. If you want the latest real timescale dates, this is the place to go:
URL LINK: http://www.stratigraphy.org
There is some good general geology stuff here (online course at MIT):
URL LINK: ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Earth–Atmospheric–and-Planetary-Sciences/
12-001Spring-2008/CourseHome/index.htm
Kind of hokey, but there’s some data here:
URL LINK: http://www.sciencecourseware.org/GLOL/
and here:
URL LINK: http://www.can-do.com/science/geology.html
Kind of hokey, but there’s some good volcano data here:
URL LINK: volcano.oregonstate.edu/
It’s none too soon for Alan to be given this ultimatum.
I await with bated breath for the denouement.
#282 Wowbagger, OM
1) If I find myself standing before God, I hope there would be enough evidence to convict me.
2) You often find cookies in cookie jars, but if you find a mouse in a cookie jar does that make him a cookie?
3) I have heard it said, “The church is one of the few institutions that shoot their wounded.” This being true one time is too often. A child that goes uncorrected will bring shame to the parents, but an abused child will bring shame on the parents. The apostle Peter had denied he even knew Jesus and once with an oath. Was he a Christian? His remorse was great which served as the seed for his eventual reconciliation. In Revelation Ch 2 & 3, the 7 churches in Asia are basically appraised of their good grades and their low grades that require change. Unfortunately, we have become an undisciplined culture that will only tolerate praise.
Yet without the Catholic Church, none of you protestants would exist. They were the church, which is why I find it so funny how much protestants hate Catholics. The bible you protestants find inerrant – the content was decided by catholics!
To avoid being misunderstood, I will expound on my answer to question #2:
Cookies: Many houses have cookies and you can find at least a few cookies at most all households.
Mice: Poorly kept households may have many mice but a mouse may be found in the cookie jar of the best of households.
<*sigh*>
No. To “convict” means to “find guilty of breaking the law”. You hope to be exonerated — or to use the language of your own theology, to be justified.
If you want to avoid being misunderstood, don’t use poor and ambiguous analogies.
Let’s put it more bluntly and specifically: Does believing that Genesis is not a literally true and exact history of the Earth sufficient to bring about eternal damnation? Is someone who believes that Genesis is not a literally true and exact history of the Earth not a Christian?
Catholics were only Christians until they sold their souls by looking to science for answers about the natural world. They aren’t True Christians like the computer wielding fundies. Science may say a computer is made using the processes of nature, but a fundie knows better – and is not a hypocrite for using a computer because they know it’s really angels that make it work… ;)
#288 Kagato
“Geology” can see nothing; people place their interpretation on the evidence that we all see. There are geologists that interpret the evidence in support of the Genesis flood account.
Questions: Do you believe everything you read in the papers because they are written by journalists? What percentage of economists in Russia claim that capitalism works?
Let me point out a few things you may have missed in your Bible study.
The water system described was totally different than today relying on subterranean water sources. Gen 2:5-6 for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
Here we learn that fowl fly in the open firmament so how can it be hard?
Gen 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
The following verses speak of waters divided both above and under the firmament which yet again does not sound familiar in terms of today’s environment.
Gen 1:5-7 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
The flood is the first account of rain. “Fountains of the deep” were broken up being likely a significant contribution to the total water. Bottom line is the original design for watering the planet was destroyed. The “waters below” were broken up as well as the “waters above” had collapsed in rain. The purpose of the “waters above” are thought to have shielded the planet and there are further theories about interplay with the earth’s magnetic field. The flood would have ravaged the earth’s surface to great depths preventing observation of the model for study. Geologists also acknowledge large continental areas being under water at one time (to account for the evidence) but I never heard Evolution or uniformitarism providing a satisfactory explanation.
#326 Josh
In today’s post-flood geology, you are correct. I would however postulate that there would not be typical sedimentary layers pre-flood if the flood was later the source of the sedimentary layers we see today.
RogerS
babbledpatiently explained:Echoes of World of Tiers?
RogerS is a denizen of La-la land.
Evolution = diversity of life. Uniformitarianism is an outdated term that does not currently reflect how modern geology is done. Are you through making straw-man arguments against your opponent’s position? Or do you genuinely think that the geologist (Josh) doesn’t understand the field he’s worked in for the last few decades?
Why do creationists honestly think that everyone else is more ignorant than they are – especially on matters where it’s so fucking obvious they have no idea what they are talking about. Like Alan Clarke’s “I’ve had evolution shoved down my throat” yet doesn’t even understand the basic process behind it. it’s fucking pathetic to read grown men proud of their ignorance.
RogerS launches another denial-of-service attack on the reality-based community…
No. They are not being geologists when they do that. They are being religious fanatics. They are ignoring, lying about, distorting, and sometimes even faking the evidence.
Much like you ignore the complete absence of global flood scouring and global debris and mud flows.
Questions: Do you understand what the process of peer-review is? Do you understand what it means for a geologist to say one thing in peer-reviewed science journals, and the complete opposite in creationist essays? Do you understand what it means that a creationist “geologist” refuses to discuss or even debate the plausibility of a global flood with real geologists?
Do you know what a hypocrite is? Do you know what a liar is? Do you know what it means to bring false testimony?
Let me point out that the Bible is not a textbook on geology or hydrology or meteorology or biology. It does not provide evidence. It makes bare assertions with no evidence.
Oh, and let me point out something you definitely missed in Bible study: The Bible contradicts itself.
Gen 1:20-25 God makes all animals first
Gen 1:26-27 God makes man and woman
Gen 2:7 God makes man
Gen 2:18-20 God makes all animals
Gen 2:21-22 God makes woman
These two accounts give completely contradictory sequences of events. At least one sequence must be false. If one sequence is false, then the factual consistency of the Bible is proved false. If the consistency of the Bible is proved false, then the second sequence may be false as well (and of course, it is).
The Bible has been falsified.
Your entire belief system is founded on falsehood.
[…skipping Creationist lies and garbage science…]
And if it had, we would see the evidence of this ravaging everywhere. We do not see the evidence of this ravaging everywhere, because it does not exist.
There was no global flood.
<*sigh*>
And if Josh carefully and slowly explained plate tectonics to you at an elementary school level suited to your childlike level of intelligence, very, very patiently going over every single step of explaining how changes in the continental plates can and do affect the altitude of parts of the continents, lowering them below sea level to form new seas and raising them high above sea level in the form of mountains… would any of this explanation “satisfy”, or would you simply reject it out of hand; dismiss it utterly; forget you ever even heard it — because you consider Josh and all non-Creationist geologists to be enemies?
Oh and Alan –
This is probably superfluous to mention, but I will do it for completeness:
If you choose not to reply, and in effect just leaves this thread without responding – then that will also be seen as an implicit forfeit of the argument.
So how long should we wait? From your previous posting speed up to recently, it should not be so long. But you should have a fair chance of putting together a decent reply to Josh.
Everyone: What would be the limit of time we should wait for Alan to address 1-2 of the issues in #382 (summarized by me in #405)?
I would say by end of Monday.
Molok, I wouldn’t set a time limit, Alan may yet not be all used up.
I’m picturing him frantically Googling, and despairing at all the “bad” hits from .edu domains, pop science sites and news reports.
Good times, good times…
This angers the Bacon gods.
Ah! So that’s what set all the recent trolls off…
I’m afraid I’m not familiar with Bacon god baiting, or Bacon godology, theobacony, or whatever it’s called. How do we appease the Bacon gods (and goddesses! I hope there are some goddesses as well!?)? What will get Them to call off Their hoards? Careful attention to the
cookingburning the sacrificial bacon? Organic pork? A jihad as-sayf against the perfidious sausage-eating infidels?Okay, Mr. Obscure-Cookie-Mouse-Catholic-Analogy wants to get pedantic. Take your pick, I’ll stand by either of these rephrasings:
A) Geologists see no evidence of the entire surface of the Earth being rearranged via some rapid process.
B) There is no geological evidence that the entire surface of the Earth was rearranged via some rapid process.
Science: You’re not even doing it.
The scientific approach would be to form a hypothesis and then test to see if the evidence supports it. If you’re interpreting the evidence in support of your idea, it’s just an exercise in propaganda.
Do you always answer posts with questions couched in ambiguous analogies and metaphors? Do you wonder why you people can’t work out what you’re talking about? (Do you notice the Bible suffers the same problems for the same reasons, hence the incredibly fractured Christian faith?)
To answer the questions anyway — no, I don’t put much trust in information provided by individual journalists or economists; but I don’t consider either of them particularly scientific endeavours, either. (I’m sure many economists would disagree, but they seem to fall down on the ‘reproducible results’ step most of the time.)
I’m going to tell you right up front, I don’t really care what the Bible says. I don’t consider it an authorative text on anything, any more than I’d rely on any other fictional work for factual information. But when you start reinterpreting valid scientific results in order to fallaciously shoehorn them into your stories, I get curious.
Creation Ministries advise against using that argument.
I don’t have to justify this because I think it’s all crap. There is no firmament forming a solid vault of heaven, with stars affixed to it like lights.
But let’s pretend the bible can manage to at least be self-consistent in this case. Take a bowl (metal if you want to be precise) and place it upside-down on the table. There’s an open space underneath, yeah?
Is this that firmament that you say isn’t solid? It’s just water -> air -> water, is it?
Yeah. No shit.
From what?
Do we no longer need shielding from it?
Thought by whom?
No. At various times. Wildly various, as in over hundreds of millions of years.
BECAUSE YOU DO NOT LISTEN.
Besides, evolution explains the development of the fossilised organisms found there, but geology explains the formation and movement of the continents. Biologists aren’t the only ones who disagree with creationism; pretty much all the sciences do.
And what the bloody hell is it with you and Alan, and this “uniformitarianism” stuff anyway?
In comment #420, RogerS wrote:
YES! A direct response about the data! Now we’re getting somewhere. Most excellent. Thank you!
Okay, so because I’m a scientist, this response of course created new questions (Shock! Amazement!). As you can probably figure, these relate to the pre-flood world.
A. Given that you wrote I would however postulate that there would not be typical sedimentary layers in #420, and given that you referred to soil in #281, are you envisioning the pre-flood landscape as just being veneered with a thin layer of what you’re calling soil? Am I interpreting you correctly here?
B. If the answer to question A is yes, then what underlies that soil? If the soil is a thin veneer (like soil is today) like the skin of an apple, then what’s under it? What’s the meat of the apple like? What’s the nature of those rocks underlying the soil? I know you wrote previously that “no one knows” the character of the pre-flood world, but surely someone has been thinking about this? How do you “see” the pre-flood world? Specifically, what I mean by that is:
B1., Are you saying that all of the sedimentary rocks that we see are flood related?
B2., If not, then how do you show me which rocks are pre-flood and which rocks are flood deposits?
The answer to B2 is important. For example, if we return to Watchmen comment #1092, you’ll recall that “Prometheus” grew(1) on Wheeler Peak at an altitude of 10,750 feet above sea level, and was rooted in a glacial moraine(2) that nonconformably(3) overlies the Cambrian-aged Prospect Mountain Quartzite(4, 5). Bear with me, I’m going somewhere with this…
Now, the moraine is made of till(2). This is a completely different kind of rock than the Prospect Mountain Quartzite. So there is a gap in time (regardless of how long) between the bottom surface of the moraine (the deposit of till) and the upper surface of the Prospect Mountain Quartzite. As is obvious from the name, the Prospect Mountain is a quartzite. Quartzite is a metamorphosed sandstone(6-8). The grains of sand in a quartzite have been fused into a mass that has this weird sugary texture because you can’t discern individual sand grains anymore without a microscopic study. Quartzites form when a quartz-rich sandstone is subjected to enough heat and pressure that the individual grains of sand start to become altered.
Still with me? Okay, this is why the answer to B2 is important. If we ignore the age of “Prometheus,” ignore the elevation issues (i.e., how did Wheeler Peak itself form?), and ignore the problem of how receding flood waters can form a moraine, then we are still left with the question whether the Prospect Mountain Quartzite is pre-flood or post-flood. If it’s pre-flood, then you need to explain what deposited the original sandstone protolith(9) and what mechanism altered the sandstone into quartzite. If it’s a flood deposit, then you need to explain how the flood event deposited the sandstone and then altered it into quartzite while not altering either the nearby rocks(4, 5), including the moraine from which “Prometheus” grew(4). So, knowing if it’s pre-flood or flood is important because it completely tailors which things you have to explain(10), and the reason that B2 was phrased the way it was is that this question is always going to be important. Even if you’re just talking about the skin of the apple, you’re never going to be able to forget about the meat entirely.
References and Notes
1For anyone following along who didn’t follow the bloated Watchmen thread, “Prometheus” was a bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata) that grew on a mountainside near the Nevada/Utah boarder. It was cut down in 1964, at which time it preserved 4844 annual rings (see Watchmen comments #1092 and #1123).
2A moraine is just a big jumbled bulldozer dump of material, call till (unsorted sand, silt, boulders, cobbles, pebbles) pushed into place by the glacier.
3geology.about.com/od/geoprocesses/a/unconformities.htm
4Currey, DR, 1965, An ancient bristlecone pine stand in eastern Nevada. Ecology 46:564-566 (lakecounty.typepad.com/Methuselah/Curry-Pines.pdf)
5geology.utah.gov/maps/geomap/7_5/pdf/m-140.pdf(this map is from nearby; the stratigraphy is about the same and it provides a good description of the Prospect Mountain Quartzite).
6csmres.jmu.edu/geollab/Fichter/MetaRx/Rocks/quartzite1.html
7geology.csupomona.edu/alert/metamorphic/quartzite.htm
8http://www.pitt.edu/~cejones/GeoImages/6MetamorphicRocks/Quartzite.html
9Protolith is a fancy word for whatever rock a metamorphic rock “came from.”
9Which is, of course, why we like to follow the evidence to the answer rather than starting with answer and trying to force the data to fit it, but whatever…
RogerS, see PZ’s comment #349. This is PZ’s blog, and he has now found you and Alan both stupid and tiresome, and likely to be banned unless you give up the preaching and actually talk the science. Which means you start reading and citing the scientific, not creationist literature, to back up your point. Your bible is less than worthless here, as we all know it is a work of fiction. Your choice RogerS. I suggest you just stop posting on your own.
RogerS, in comment #419, wrote:
Funniest thing, though–they absolutely abandon geology when they do that, or they mangle the science. I’m not talking about them fighting the orthodoxy–I’m talking about them offering up solutions to problems that simply don’t work and are SHOWN not to work.
And what happened to the evidence for these sources? Where is it?
That’s rather convenient, isn’t it?
Not at one time. This misrepresents our position.
Why would evolution, a biological theory, explain the rock evidence?
You might not like the explanation, but at least we have one. You haven’t even attempted to address how the flood explains the actual geology that we see on the ground. See, for example, my Watchmen comments #565, #652, #659, #718 (in particular), #772, #781, #882, and David’s Watchmen comment #787. I realize that these comments weren’t all addressed to you specifically, but the points relate specifically to your repeated, unsupported, assertions that the rocks point to a single big deluge on the continents. I have repeatedly tried to explain that the actual evidence does not support one single big incursion of water across the continents. You’re just not listening. Or just don’t care.
Saying “Geologists also acknowledge large continental areas being under water at one time” completely twists and simplifies what we are actually saying to the point where it misrepresents our position.
#312 Josh
From Physics class.
Weight of an object in water = (Weight out of water) – (the weight of the volume of the water that was displaced)
Granite is quite dense so let’s look at it in water:
Granite = 168 lb/cu.ft
Water = 62.4 lb/cu.ft
Reduced weight as a % = 62.4/168 X 100% = 37 % less weight
Imagine the % weight reduction as felt by a 200 lb person:
200 x .37 = 74 lb loss weighing in at 126 lb.
(The biggest “loser” & ready for a slam dunk)
RogerS at #381. Excellent! Another one. Of course the reduced weight is apparent, but okay.
My Teton meteorite theory is still going strong among geologists.
RogerS, Still the classical evasion. That is keep nitpicking, but never go near what may actually refute you. That will get you banned. Either start talking turkey, by presenting the imaginary proof positive for your flud, or go away. Put up or shut up. Otherwise, I think your name will be added to dungeon.
Josh: Why would evolution, a biological theory, explain the rock evidence?
An amazingly good question. You might want to pose it to this guy too:
URL LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irw2tmUTRtU
It is like… omg.. Poe or No ????
——————–
@Alan: *tick* *tock* *tick* *tock*
The problem with that statement RogerS (and Alan can read this too) is that the “Geologists” you speak of are not just interpreting the data one way, they are abandoning the scientific method. They have a preconceived outcome they have to support. Mamely the Bible being inerrant. They are eschewing the methods, intellectual rigor and self correcting infrastructure of science that keeps it honest.
Geologist that support the Flood are not being honest.
They are deceiving themselves and those who support them.
Honest geologists (and scientists in general) follow the evidence. The evidence, 100% does not point to a global flood.
Does not.
At all.
none.
Alan Clarke (#339):
One will suffice: the existence of preserved terrestial surface features in strata throughout the geological column that could not have been formed if the strata were being laid down in a single episode of water-borne deposition like a global flood. Quite apart from the obvious examples of animal tracks and burrows, there are also features like cracked, dried mud and raindrop impressions. (Yes, fossil evidence of rain in the past helps falsify the flood hypothesis. Gotta love the irony.)
Fossilised coral reefs provide a similar source of contrary evidence. Corals grow slowly, and can only grow in clear, shallow waters. So if you find a coral reef in the middle of the geological column, then you know that the rocks above them and below them were laid down at least hundreds (if not thousands) of years apart. It’s simply impossible for a coral reef to form midway through a global flood, in deep sediment-choked water, where that sediment is being deposited at an average rate of several meters a day. It would be more credible to claim that Satan put the fossil corals there to test people’s faith.
Janine,
as SC pointed out to me ,my comment 300 was absolutely fucked up,and I apologize for it,been posting rather diatractedly over the last few weeks,but thats not an apology,twas a stupid comment…And I apologize.
RogerS #431
Roger, you don’t understand how buoyancy works.
Many years ago I served in the U.S. Navy. During most of that time I was a submariner. I’ll explain how a submarine works.
A submarine or any other ship can float on top of the water because the weight of water that it displaces is greater than to the weight of the ship. This displacement of water creates an upward force called positive buoyancy and acts in opposition to gravity, which pulls the ship down. Unlike surface ships, a submarine can control its buoyancy, thus allowing it to submerge and surface at will.
To control buoyancy, the submarine has main ballast tanks (MBTs) that can be alternately filled with water or air (see animation below). When the submarine is on the surface, the MBTs are filled with air and the submarine’s overall density is less than that of the surrounding water. MBTs have closable vents at the tops of the tanks and are open to the sea at the bottom. As the submarine dives, the vents are opened, allowing the air in the MBTs to escape, so the MBTs are flooded with water. The submarine’s overall density becomes greater than the surrounding water and the submarine sinks. This is called negative buoyancy.
When the submarine surfaces, the MBT vents are closed and compressed air is blown into the ballast tanks, forcing water out of the MBTs. The submarine’s overall density is less than the surrounding water, thus gaining positive buoyancy, and the submarine surfaces.
Incidentally, when operating submerged, the submarine’s weight in controlled by flooding water into or out of auxiliary ballast tanks called trim tanks. When the submarine’s weight is exactly equal to the surrounding water, this is called neutral buoyancy.
In case it’s lost on anyone, what Iain implied, but didn’t specifically say, in #437 (because he knows that he shouldn’t have had to…), was that we have fossil coral reefs in the rock record.
Clinteas, about that “joke”, I just assumed it was a failed attempt at humor. But I had no idea what you meant. But frankly,
I was a bit more pissed off about your joke in the Iowa thread. I am hardly a nationalist but you do realize that many of the regulars are from the US. You are implying that all of us is lacking in being civilized. It is true that in the US, we have a sizable percentage who are like that asshole. (How else are the likes of Limbaugh, Beck and O’Reilly going to have media jobs?) It is the reason why I will not engage in call a people an idiot just because they are from the American south.
Bacon
Bacon Lube
Squeeze Bacon
Bacon Bra
I’m so confused, do I have wild passionate breakfast or a juicy, yet crispy sex?
Oh. My. God. I skipped this thread because I didn’t want to read about Watchmen, and I missed geology, a guest appearance by Maggie, and bacon???? Dammit.
I didn’t see anything about the water; Alan, was the flood made of freshwater or saltwater? Be careful how you answer, as either way you’ve just doomed half of the fish in the world. And if they were all adapted to live in some kind of inbetween state, wouldn’t there have to be some extremely rapid evolution to get to the highly saline-specific fish we see now?
Also, I think I have a crush on Josh.
This always happens. The rugged geologist in his manly field gear strolls in, and all the bench-nebbishes get ignored while the pretty girls swoon at his feet.
Carlie, you just made PZ show off his jealous side! Congratulations!
We had gotten to bed late last night and we both had early engagements, being the kind soul that I am, I slowly rolled over rose from a slumber…I slipped my nibble,quaking hands under the cellophane and gently… ever so gently removed my precious from a long cold stay, there was not a word of dismay only quiet approval. Gently placing my precious on the alter of love(with tears in my eyes).The passion progressed smoothly, there was squirming at first yet no desire from either of us to stop, the phone rang in the background and then faded to oblivion.It was really getting HOT now and under the anticipation we swooned together, smells unlike any before filled the room and we longed to make the moment last…the time had come.
I had breakfast.
Here is a dedication for PZ.
My training was in paleontology – I can’t help it. However, since I’m one of those amoral atheists, I can be profligate with my crushes; there are plenty to go around.
Alan seems to have gone away, so I’ll just reply to the biggie:
Sure:
You’ve completely forgot selection. (No wonder. You still haven’t understood it.)
Most weren’t. It’s also telling that you restrict yourself to land animals, because today’s whales simply surpass all other animals dead or alive.
Also… to reach the size and shape of a sauropod, you need to be quadrupedal and to have bird-style lungs. That combination doesn’t exist anymore.
A reasonable assumption, but wrong. Bones often have something similar to year-rings; even the biggest dinosaurs reached the adult size range within two to three decades. Welcome to the science of bone histology – yet another entire branch of biology you didn’t even know existed.
This looks like a reasonable set of assumptions, but it isn’t.
Let’s take the mammoths as an example:
It goes without saying that the Antarctic inland ice was bigger than today at that time. There haven’t been forests in Antarctica for, like, 35 million years or something. And, with the exception of birds, dinosaurs lived even earlier.
Titanoboa lived during a very warm period, and apparently the temperature is the only limit on the maximum size of snakes, provided that enough food is available and there are no predators (which was the case at that time, but not before or after).
But also fewer beneficial mutations…
Hey, look, the Dunning-Kruger effect.
That you don’t know the evidence exists doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist!
The strength and the orientation of the magnetic field get recorded in all rocks that contain iron in almost any form, and that’s a lot. That’s how we know what the magnetic field of the Earth has been up to. (It’s not so much cyclical as chaotic, but the changes are gradual nonetheless.)
Remember: When tens of thousands of scientists agree on something, they usually have a good reason, or even several. That you don’t know those reasons doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It means you have to read more.
7. Last but not least is the Bible record itself.
Bible, or record?
Not at all. Most vertebrates just switch to a slower growth mode. Complete cessation of growth is, roughly, a bird/mammal thing.
1) As mentioned, evolution isn’t something that rocks do. Rocks don’t reproduce.
2) “At one time” could hardly be any wronger! “The sea goes, and the sea comes.” In the western interior of North America there’s a repeating sequence of sea deposits (containing sea animals) and river deposits (containing land plants and land animals) stretching from the Middle Jurassic to the Paleocene. Josh, how often did the sea come in there? Ten? – And that’s completely ignoring the fact that the area was under the sea several times long before that.
3) Uniformitarian explanation for changes in sea level? So easy that you should have found some of them on your own, just by thinking.. Really, Roger, it’s embarrassing what a long list of activities you dodge.
Unsurprisingly, the sea level curve agrees very closely with both the climate history of the Earth and the history of the speed of plate tectonics.
w00t!
Janine, ROTFLMAO is just so inadequate to describe my reaction that is embarrassing to type it.
Since RogerS doesn’t really understand anything being said here and Alan has both burned out and faded away, perhaps Bill Hicks could help to explain why it all seemed so plausible.
If you don’t know Bill Hicks it’s well worth the 4:30 of you life it takes to watch the video.
It all seemed so plausible
Messed up the link
Pssst… David, you meant lower, right?
This came up on the old Watchmen thread. They’re fine with forests in Antarctica; they “just disagree with their time line and dating assumptions”.
Now watch as everything you wrote is dismissed equally casually with radical skepticism. Because all non-Creationists are to be considered as “the enemy.”
#447 Carlie
Hi Carlie, welcome to the discussion.(here). Localized fresh water sources included rain water, “fountains of the deep”, and ice/snow melt. Our endearing fish have an advantage the trees don’t –intelligence. All varieties of both fresh and marine water fish have keen survival instincts. The fish may have sought shelter in the floating vegetation mats or “vege-mats”. Hollowed out logs, trees with rotted out holes, leafy beds within the “vege-mats” holding rain water, or just hanging out at the nearest fresh water spring vent may have helped a small percentage survive.
The salinity topic was raised before in relation to (2) bristlecone pines that may have pre-dated the flood. The trees are renown for their survival ability and I pointed out sources for localized fresh water in Post #1174
This is good comic relief when I find myself defending how a totally viable life form can SURVIVE when others in the audience only start with “soup” to bring them to this point. Cream of cell-ular?
RogerS, still dodging and weaving. Time for your banning as a fool, since you won’t show complete positive evidence for your inane theory.
Post #1174 Science of Watchmen
Sorry, left out a character, try (here)
RogerS flounders:
LOL
Too precious!
FSTDT.
Yawn, still nothing RogerS. Boring Troll who should be banned.
But Nerd, the fish survived the Flud in hollowed out logs!!
<giggle>
See what I mean? He repeats the same idiocy he did before. All his arguments were refuted; every point of contradiction between his fever-dream of a global flood forming mats to gently ferry bristlecone pine around was pointed out…. and he ignores it all. He dismisses the words of those he considers his enemies. Nothing we said matters.
And of course, this scenario is ludicrous, because he’s positing this successful shelter-seeking during flood actions so violent that they rearrange the face of the Earth, and certainly puree any fish around. Does he care that it’s ludicrous? Of course not. It’s being pointed out as ludicrous by someone he considers his enemy.
And again: The entire logic of abiogenesis was carefully explained, and he ignored it. Once again he mocks it with the same confusion, stupidity and ignorance that he did last time, because those are all more important than logic, reason, and understanding. Once again, he rejects the words of the enemy with radical skepticism.
Get the popcorn, hope you enjoy this one–
I don’t know how may of you have had the pleasure of working with a variety of animals but there are some unusual “quirks” of nature. The Jenny Poncha had not returned for the evening feeding; very unusual. She was later spotted far in the field without moving a muscle. Why? A baby sheep or goat had just been born and she was guarding it -very motherly. Donkeys have a natural enmity with canines and are known to trample predators of their adopted flock of sheep and/or goats. I witnessed this behavior when the farm sheep collie had worn out his welcome and had “crossed the line”. The donkey’s head and ears lowered and her feet began to stomp in a very short and rapid coordinated rhythm in direct pursuit of the dog. It was totally deadly, lethal, and I thought the best dog I ever had was history. I attempted to intervene and the dog escaped at the very last moment. I thought that dry coyote carcass found in the field may not have expired from natural causes after all. One donkey in the field and you can rest assured at night.
Varieties of animals (horses, goats, chickens, Barbados sheep, guinea fowl, etc.) are often working out the “pecking order” within their kinds to see who is boss. Bouts and cross-strife between different kinds of animals is not uncommon. My wife and I have both noticed that during unusually bad weather conditions, like blizzards or severe thunder storms, when the animals were checked on, their behavior was totally changed. The quietness, peacefulness, and unity between them was a sight to behold!
RogerS, another evasion showing you have no real evidence to present for your whole argument. Either put up or shut up. Otherwise, based upon Owlmirrors finding of how you are arguing, PZ should just ban your ass for stupidity and be done with it.
RogerS, very soothing, your little fantasy. Very mystical.
Very evasive.
Both the universe and earth are old. The laws of physics clearly demonstrate this. Why are you wasting your time arguing about a flood that relies on the assumption that all known laws of physics are wrong instead of disproving the fundamental reality that is physics?
Teh Stuupid is strong in this one.
Geology: Fail
Biology: Fail
Presentation of Evidence: Fail
To the trebuchet with him!
The MadPanda, FCD
And Carlie gains, oh, about 5000 awesome points.
Of the top of my head I know there were six major marine transgressions (“sea comes in”) across the North American craton (the continental interior) in the Phanerozoic (~550 million years ago to present). I’m not sure how many more if we’re going worldwide and further back into time.
At least six of them, though*.
*all of which of course had associated regression (“sea goes out”)…
Holeeeeee Shit.
That’s abso-fucking-lutely ridonculous. No wonder I’d given up on the Watchmen and Titanoboa threads. Luckily my mind is well cushioned by ethanol this evening.
And of course, Alan is still dodging and weaving like a… like a…
Fuck it, I can’t think of a good analogy.
Alan is dtill dodging and weaving like a chicken-shit idiot who realizes how out of his league he is in his attempt to justify and defend a position built on fabrication and superstition but is too stupid to either acknowledge defeat or abandon the fight.
I’ve said it before, Alan: you are severely limiting your god by your line of “reasoning”. If you want/wish/need to believe in a supreme being of some sort in order to get through the day/your life, fine. But you seem to insist on your god being a ridiclously small, weak, and stupid being compared to a god that could actually be responsible for planning, creating, organizing, and maintaining the observable universe. Human knowledge has grown massively since the god you worship was described in ancient Judea. Why don’t you want your god to grow along with that?
Why is your god so small?
Carlie: Alan, was the flood made of freshwater or saltwater? Be careful how you answer, as either way you’ve just doomed half of the fish in the world. And if they were all adapted to live in some kind of inbetween state, wouldn’t there have to be some extremely rapid evolution to get to the highly saline-specific fish we see now?
Most fish didn’t survive the flood. Indiana limestone is a perfect example and tribute to the ill-suited environment for sea life at the time of the flood. Some fish did survive, and we see their descendants in the oceans today. How did freshwater fish survive IF the oceans were too salty? There are areas in the world today where freshwater and salt water remain separate and don’t mix. Certain organisms may have survived in pockets of fresh or salt water. The mechanism of natural selection, which creationists accept, explains how today’s fish have become very specialized. Fish at the time of the flood would have been less-specialized and more adaptable to the abrupt changes from the flood. Current-day salmon and eels can move freely between fresh/saltwater at certain stages of their lives.
How do we know for sure what the salinity of the oceans was 4400 years ago? Uniformitarianists only “assume” it was near the same as today but their assumption may be wrong. The Bible describes the source of the flood waters as being subterrestrial as well as atmospheric which is not assumed or accounted for in uniformitarian theory. Before the flood, the Bible describes an ecosystem unlike that of today:
Genesis 2:5-6 “…for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and [there was] not a man to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.”
Click here for instructions on using salt as a healing remedy for freshwater fish.
Click here for another answer to this question.
If my answer fails to instill faith, that at minimum, a pair of fish from each species could survive among the billions, then you should dump evolution theory now.
Carlie, you pose a very interesting point in your question, “…wouldn’t there have to be some extremely rapid evolution to get to the highly saline-specific fish we see now?” Why do you assume “evolution” is taking place when perhaps only “natural selection” is at work? The beak sizes of Galápagos finches illustrate the power of natural selection to make quick changes in populations in only a few generations. After years of brutal Communist rule and famine, the North Koreans are shorter than the South Koreans by about 2.3 inches and it has nothing to do with evolution. Are you aware that dogs can be bred to be large or small without the need for evolution? Despite all of the variations which the pre-existing genetic code allows for, the aforementioned examples are still finches, humans, and dogs. No one has ever seen, nor has anyone ever proven that “macro-evolution” occurs. Everything is inferred from sequences and homologies. It’s a novel idea but the fact that fish eggs and the Moon are both round doesn’t prove that one came from the other. Nor is there any proof that credit cards containing the sequence “1040” were issued by the Internal Revenue Service.
Josh, I’m preparing a post for your geologic question challenge. I must admit (as you can see from this post) that shooting ducks in the bathtub is not very sportsman-like but I don’t want to think too hard since it’s late, and Carlie addressed her question to me personally and with courtesy, so I felt compelled to answer. So don’t think I’m avoiding you.
Has he conducted science?
Richard Errett Smalley (June 6, 1943 – October 28, 2005) was the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University, in Houston, Texas. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for the discovery of a new form of carbon, buckminsterfullerene (“buckyballs”) (with Robert Curl, also a professor of chemistry at Rice, and Harold Kroto, a professor at the University of Sussex).(Source)
After reading the book “Origins of Life” by Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, among other books by Rana, Richard Smalley make the following endorsement: “Evolution has just been dealt its death blow. After reading Origins of Life, with my background in chemistry and physics, it is clear evolution could not have occurred.”(source)
Ragutis: Human knowledge has grown massively since the god you worship was described in ancient Judea. Why don’t you want your god to grow along with that?
Knowledge: pieces of information gained and retained through experience or association.
Wisdom: ability to discern inner qualities and relationships; ability to use knowledge effectively.
All knowledge and no wisdom makes Jack a dull boy.
And claiming wisdom without knowledge is indistinguishable from insanity. We know that the universe and earth are old because the laws of physics show that the universe and earth have to be old. If you think the laws of physics are wrong, please go ahead and demonstrate that!
Um, Alan… how does willfully ignoring so much of the knowledge we’ve accumulated make you wiser? How are you wiser for dismissing the evidentially supported age of the Earth or desperately clinging to the flood fable?
As far as I can tell, you are neither availing yourself of available knowledge, nor expressing wisdom of any kind.
BTW, I must commend you on yet another sterling example of avoiding the meat of an argument or question. Bravo. Are you wearing “Boots of Reflexes” or is “Uncanny Dodge” one of your class feats?
Why is your god so small, Alan?
Kel: We know that the universe and earth are old because the laws of physics show that the universe and earth have to be old.
You ASSUME that the universe and earth are old because you ASSUME that the laws of physics were never violated if they were indeed created as I hypothesize. Would you agree that a “law” doesn’t come into being without a “lawgiver”? I know examples of things that were made before a law went into effect that would have prevented the original “making”. The United States is a good example. By your argument, the United States should not exist because there is a law that prohibits the act of “treason”.
Without laws, there is no order. The presence of “order” is a good argument for the probability of God’s existence.
1 x 8 + 1 = 9
12 x 8 + 2 = 98
123 x 8 + 3 = 987
1234 x 8 + 4 = 9876
12345 x 8 + 5 = 98765
123456 x 8 + 6 = 987654
1234567 x 8 + 7 = 9876543
12345678 x 8 + 8 = 98765432
123456789 x 8 + 9 = 987654321
1 x 9 + 2 = 11
12 x 9 + 3 = 111
123 x 9 + 4 = 1111
1234 x 9 + 5 = 11111
12345 x 9 + 6 = 111111
123456 x 9 + 7 = 1111111
1234567 x 9 + 8 = 11111111
12345678 x 9 + 9 = 111111111
123456789 x 9 +10= 1111111111
9 x 9 + 7 = 88
98 x 9 + 6 = 888
987 x 9 + 5 = 8888
9876 x 9 + 4 = 88888
98765 x 9 + 3 = 888888
987654 x 9 + 2 = 8888888
9876543 x 9 + 1 = 88888888
98765432 x 9 + 0 = 888888888
Brilliant, isn’t it?
And look at this symmetry:
1 x 1 = 1
11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12321
1111 x 1111 = 1234321
11111 x 11111 = 123454321
111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321
What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? This question may be answered with the following mathematical formula:
If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.
If:
H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+ 15+18+11 = 98%
And:
K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+ 12+5+4+7+ 5 = 96%
But:
A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+ 21+4+5 = 100%
THEN, look how far the love of God will take you:
L-O-V-E-O-F-G-O-D
12+15+22+5+15+6+7+15+4 = 101%
Therefore, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that:
While Hard Work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you
there, It’s the Love of God that will put you over the top!
We see galaxies that are billions of light years away, we see rocks that age to the billions. It’s the amount of radiometric decay and the distance the light has travelled that tells us that the universe is old. If you believe that it was “created” then you believe that God is tricking us by faking the age of both the earth an universe. Are you calling God a liar?
Only if it were possible to ask where does the lawgiver come from… ;)
But in all seriousness, that’s some pretty bad equivocation. Forego the fact that the use of law in science is different from it’s use in socio-political matters, but remember that the laws of nature are. Descriptors of reality. The law of gravity means that two objects will exert an attraction to one another, the law of attraction is nothing more than our way of understanding that behaviour.
Yes, the laws in the universe show that it’s about 94 billion light years wide. That there are about 1023 stars in the universe, and around one star there exists a planet that is teeming with life. Over the 4.55 billion year history, billions of different forms of life has come and gone. Yet 10,000,000 species survive today, many of them have been around for millions of years and survived… so the only logical conclusion is that one species that has been around for 0.001% of the entire span of the universe is the focal point of all reality.
Your logic amounts to: We exists, therefore God exists. QED
Putting aside the fact that all physical evidence contradicts the deluge myth, Genesis isn’t even consistent with itself.
In Genesis 6:19 God says:
I’m pretty sure creating a zoo-boat large enough to fit 2 of every creature isn’t even possible with today’s technology. Also, how are you going to feed all these creatures? How are you going to keep them from killing each other?
Creationist reponse: In a crisis you pull together!
But I digress. Now in Genesis 7:2-3 God says:
Also, Genesis 7:17,
This contradicts Genesis 7:24,
Now the Noah’s ark tale is told very oddly. The details of the story are often repeated with some changes made. A very odd form of storytelling. Not only that but these repeats differs in style from the earlier telling. At times in the story it refers to ‘Yahweh’ and at times to ‘God’. Sometimes it is vague with details and at other times obsessed, listing numbers such as the dimensions of the ark or the age of Noah to the day during certain events. God is portrayed as an both anthropomorphic deity regretting creating humanity and a distant transcendental figure. I’m told the style differences are even more obvious in the original Hebrew.
This is in fact not unique to the flood story. The entire Torah is like this. Stories get repeated twice (or sometimes thrice) with details changed.
According to the Documentary Hypothesis the Torah was cut and pasted from 4 different texts without attribution. Creationists have kept the tradition ever since!!! The flood story itself (Geneis 6-8) is a composition of two texts. If you look here(based on Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible?”) you can see that if you splice the text into two based on style you end up with two slightly different versions of the story. In fact, these split up versions make more sense than the conjoint Genesis version. This is great evidence for the Documentary Hypothesis. Just take any story, splice it up, and see if you end up with two different versions of the same story. This is EXTREMELY unlikely to just be a coincidence. It’s also much more interesting and scholarly than the supposed “Bible Codes”.
So, what the creationist basically have is a story that contradicts the geological evidence AND contradicts itself.
Alan Clarke
Hmmmm, haven’t heard that one before. Numberology, therefore God!
I’m almost convinced by #479 that Alan is either a poe, or he has a weird sense of humour. Look, numbers do cool things – therefore Jesus rose on the 3rd day for the sins of mankind… I think I missed a step in there somewhere.
Though I will agree that mathematics is awesome, patterns in mathematics are fantastic, which is why I got into mathematics at a young age and then computer programming after that. The patterns that one can create in logic are sublime, especially when it comes time to represent them graphically or apply them to practical purpose. How that at all relates to God, I’m guessing it’s nothing more than Alan putting a joke into his post.
Alan, you’ve quite possibly just posted the most ridiculous, inane, laughable, batshit-crazy thing I’ve witnessed during the last few years that I’ve read this blog.
I’ll address the first part, the bit that is almost, sort-of, kinda coherent:
You have no clue what the term “law” means in a scientific sense, do you? No need to answer that. You’ve made your ignorance clear enough. FFS, this is about as basic as it gets, you simpleton. It’s part of the foundation all science is built upon! If you don’t know this, you know nothing about science.
It’s an observation, you moron. Not a decree by your fairy father figure in the firmament, you fatuous felch.
You’re ignorant, Alan. Apparently, willfully so. And that’s a damn shame to see in any human being.
numerology…? this thread has officially jumped the shark.
Using Alan’s mathematics:
E+V+O+L+U+T+I+O+N = 5+22+15+12+21+20+9+15+14 = 133%
Evolution > Love of God.
You should really try and think these things through, Alan.
Alan, having lost his struggle to make any coherent argument at all, copies and pastes 1 a bucket of glurge 2.
FACEPALM
Because expressing how dumb that was in words just doesn’t work.
__________________________________________________
1: Google on phrase “Love of God that will put you over the top“. Voilá. 7500+ hits. I am not PZ, but I think this counts as Grievous Insipidity
2: “What is glurge? Think of it as chicken soup with several cups of sugar mixed in: It’s supposed to be a method of delivering a remedy for what ails you by adding sweetening to make the cure more appealing, but the result is more often a sickly-sweet concoction that induces hyperglycemic fits.” —Snopes
RogerS, having lost his struggle to make any coherent argument at all, resorts to a blatant argument from authority fallacy, combined with an argument by fiat:
No. Next question?
By the way, I note that Hugh Ross is an Old Earth Creationist.
LOL. Creationist heretic burning!
Is Hugh Ross going to Hell for rejecting a literal interpretation of Genesis?
I missed that PZ got hold of one of Ross’s books a while back.
Alan,
Okay I may not be able to qualified to dissect your geology bs, but I will have no trouble doing it to your math bs.
I can prove the pattern not only for base 10 but in any base n (greater than 2) without ever invoking God.
Claim: [12…k]x(n-2)+k = [n(n-1)…(n-k)], 1 ≤ k but less than n.
Where [12…k]= 1xnk+2xnk-1+…..+k
Proof
Mathmatical Induction
P(1):
[1]x(n-2) + 1 = [n-1]
Thus it holds for k=1.
P(k)→P(k+1):
[12…k(k+1)]x(n-2)+(k+1)
= ([12….k0]+ (k+1))x(n-2) +(k+1)
= (n[12….k]+(k+1))x(n-2)+(k+1)
= n([12….k]x(n-2))+ (n-2)(k+1)+(k+1)
Now since P(k) then [12….k]x(n-2)= [n(n-1)…(n-k)]-k and
= n([n(n-1)…(n-k)]-k) + (n-2)(k+1)+(k+1)
= n[n(n-1)…(n-k)]-nk + (n-1)(k+1)
= [n(n-1)…(n-k)0]-nk +nk +n-k-1
= [n(n-1)…(n-k)0]+ (n-(k+1)
= [n(n-1)…(n-k)(n-(k+1))]
QED
Your other claims can be proven in a similiar fashion.
Now, what does this mathematical pendantry show? It shows that using reason can get you alot further than just throwing up your hands in the air and saying “God did it”. While these relations are interesting there is nothing supernatural to them.
As for your numerology crap, if it wasn’t meant as a joke than please seek help.
Natural Selection is evolution. The fact that you think the two are somehow totally distinct shows that despite everyone’s best efforts you’ve learnt nothing. (Not all evolution is natural selection however.) It is natural selection that controls which variations survive, and which mutations spread.
And if you gave them a western-style diet they’d be much taller. This has been seen in Japan. Its well understood as a result of diet. But how is this supposed to help our fish? If we put a freshwater fish in the sea it dies. Its eggs die, its young die. The flood would kill them- not least because of the sediment load you need to produce the rock record. (Which doesn’t look like a flood made it).
But evolutionary theories account for the diversity, similarity and differences between the various species of fish. Note that your first link about treating fish diseases specifically warns that some fishes cannot tolerate salt at all. Similarly the link discussing the 55 gallon tank experiment provides no references to original literature. What species were involved? How still was the water kept? This doesn’t account for the diversity of temperature tolerances, pressure tolerances or other aspects of water chemistry that you need to account for. And we haven’t even started on the regional differences between fish species.
And yet speciation has been seen in both nature and the lab. When have fossils demonstrating the pattern of evolution in birds, fishes and many other groups. Creationists often propose that only “kinds” were taken aboard the ark. And yet “kind” is never given a rigorous definition. Are all cats a single kind? In which case you need to invoke a vast amount of divergence between the various species of cats. How about insects? There are hundreds of thousands of beetle species, divergence must have been insane, with hundreds of species arising every day after the flood. In order for this idea to work animals would have to evolve at an insanely fast rate, faster than anything the “evolutionists” have ever proposed. We’re back in “can walk across a room, but not the country” territory.
Now answer the questions about the Morrison.
Premise: ALAN CLARKE IS A WANKER
Proof using the method of Alan Clarke:
A + L + A + N + C + L + A + R + K + E + I + S + A + W + A + N + K + E + R
= 1 + 12 + 1 + 14 + 3 + 12 + 1 + 18 + 11 + 5 + 9 + 19 + 1 + 23 + 1 + 14 + 11 + 5 + 18
= 179
Q.E.D.
BTW, note “denial-of-service attacks” in Alan’s latest posts:
Note presuppositional assertion combined with radical skepticism. “Indiana limestone” was addressed by Josh (#652, #718, #772, Science of Watchmen) and David Marjanović (#774, Science of Watchmen), (and possibly others). But their arguments were rejected, because they are considered as enemies.
Note quote-mining and distortion of science. Estuaries are not catastrophic global floods. Does it matter? Not for Alan’s purposes of basically lying about science.
Note presuppositional assertion combined with radical skepticism. This was addressed by Josh (#1136, Science of Watchmen), but his argument was rejected because he is considered as an enemy.
Note presuppositional assertion combined with radical skepticism. Ocean salinity was addressed already be David Marjanović (#1077, Science of Watchmen), but his argument was rejected because he is considered as an enemy.
Note fanatical presuppositional assertion combined with radical skepticism.
Note radical skepticism, and insanity and stupidity. If Alan is wrong, evolution is wrong?
Note radical skepticism, and stupidity, and arguing from ignorance and incredulity.
Note a rare glint of honesty among the myriad lies, arguments from ignorance, and other fallacious arguments.
Note fanatical presuppositional assertion combined with radical skepticism. This was addressed already by Kel (#387, #462, #508, #627, #1263, #1272, #1275, #1310, #1312, #1318, #1324, #1348, Science of Watchmen), and me (#1313, Science of Watchmen), and Josh (#1321, Science of Watchmen) (and possibly others). At various points, it was also explained how science works.
But of course, the arguments were rejected, multiple times, because we are all considered as enemies.
Yawn, still nothing from the mentally undynamic duo. PZ, they can’t discuss the science, and aren’t going away on their own.
This thread is becoming rather surreal…
Bloody hell!
Typical British understatement, Walton. When numerology reared its head, surrealism was passed and chaos was approached.
In comment #334, RogerS wrote:
Hi, Alan. I didn’t think you were avoiding me. Others made that accusation; that wasn’t me.
I’m confused by the “shooting ducks in the bathtub” statement here. Are you saying that the geological observations that I want you to explain with the flood model somehow aren’t fair? I don’t really see how that’s the case. As I told you early in Watchmen and back in Titanoboa, the flood model must explain the geology we see, at the outcrop level, better than I can explain it using current scientific understanding, or the flood model fails. That’s simply how this works. If you’re not going to just stand on miracles, and are going to assert that geological evidence supports the flood, then you must address the full measure of the evidence. You cannot ignore that which you don’t like. I’m sorry if you see that as me not being fair. I didn’t erect the flood model. Nor was it me who asserted that there is evidence to support it.
If the Salem is a tsunami deposit, as you have repeatedly asserted, then why would it be representative of any environment? Do you really think that tsunamis create rock deposits that preserve good indications of what the climate was like at the time? Or are you now backing away from the tsunami idea? Seriously, Alan, learn how to use the hammer before you try to build the shed. You’re trying to use it to saw boards; we have better tools for that. And please stop calling the Salem the Indiana. We’ve been over this at least twice.