If you ever want to see the typical course of a creationist’s visit to Pharyngula, we’ve got a good example in medic0506, who showed up to argue and then didn’t. I mostly ignored him, but his announcement that he was disappointed caught my eye.
I was told on DDO that there were actual scientists here who would engage in informal argumentation, so since I’ve had my fun with the whineylibs, I’ll scroll through an see if there is any valid posts by someone who wishes to have a discussion rather than just try to scratch my eyeballs out.
This is standard noise from creationists: get thrown lots of evidence, then claim that there was no evidence and they’re all so very tired of it. So I thought I would take a look at his posting history here to see what kind of substantial, thought-provoking, evidence-based arguments he had made.
Surprise. There weren’t any.
He’s very proud to have coined the term “National Coven for the Solicitation of Evolutionism” for the NCSE. He thinks it fits because Eugenie Scott reminds him of the wicked witch
. Why? Because she lied and said Meyer’s awful paper, The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories, didn’t mention ID (what? It was an ID paper; the whole issue with that is that it was smuggled in by a creationist editor friendly to the idea, making a farce of peer review). As evidence, he provided this video:
I really would not want to cite that as favorable to intelligent design creationism. Meyer was disgraceful, Eugenie was patient and calm, and she didn’t say what medic0506 claimed she said.
Then he declares that he is a young earth creationist. In reply to a comment that he’s flat-out denying the overwhelming scientific consensus, he waves away that little problem of contradicting physics, chemistry, and geology by saying it only takes 1 to be right
.
Next we learn That “old book” [the Bible], on the other hand, paints an accurate picture of what nature should, and does look like, so I see no need to disregard it in favor of what others believe.
He then ignores all the comments that point to verses in the Bible that paint a very inaccurate picture of the world. Sometimes the absence of a reply is as damning as the content of a reply.
When confronted with standard evidence for an ancient universe, like the existence of galaxies farther away than 6000 light years, he simply denies it: your belief in deep time is heavy on theory but light on actual evidence
.
The rest is just repetitive noise, and then he starts talking about retreat because there is a dearth of scientists here. He can’t make a single positive argument for his goofy beliefs, and his entire visit was simply an exercise in evasion.
Unimpressed. Bored. That’s why I didn’t bother to engage with yet another asinine fool stopping by — he had nothing to discuss, and he knew that if he brought up any actual arguments for a young earth or creation by divine poofery, he’d have his head handed to him.
Yay! We have a major eruption of kookery from medic0506!
I’m willing to be proven wrong on this, but I don’t believe that starlight is something that actually physically travels to earth, in order for us to see it. I think that light is emitted from an energy source, and if the amount of energy released as light is enough, the object will be bright enough for our eyes to see it from earth. I don’t buy when someone argues that starlight has been traveling for billions of years to get here. Feel free to prove me wrong by proving the current understanding of light travel, but no one else so far has been able to address this without just throwing more theoretical BS at it.
So light doesn’t actually travel at some limited speed, but if it’s really, really bright, it is instantly transported to our eyes. All that empirical evidence, all those measurements of the speed of light…that’s all just theoretical BS. Why should we throw out all of physics? Because a creationist thinks brightness can substitute for velocity.
Boring trolls are boring.
If medic0506 shows up, I’d like to start off asking for a definition of “kind”. They’ve used that word several times already, for example:
So, what is a “kind” and what objective measure can we use to distinguish one “kind” from another? If two organisms are different, how can we tell if they’re different enough to be two different “kinds”, as opposed to just two variants of the same “kind”?
I feel like the answer to this question would involve repeated use of the word “information” with no actual explanation of a quantifiable or testable characteristic to measure. Maybe an Irreducible Complexity thrown in for good measure.
“Kind” means exactly what it needs to mean to make a creationist argument work. It is okay if it means different things in two consecutive arguments because that’s just micro-evolution.
Say what you like about Graeme Bird, at least he was able to find the thread opened especially for him. This medico gomer seems to be as stupid as Teno Groppi, though, so in his case I don’t know.
Especially when he asks: “The PZ? Does he comment here often?” LOL!
Ken Ham actually defined “kind” as being on the “family” level of modern taxonomy — not realizing that the “family” humans are a part of include all of the apes.
Of course, he then will say that humans are a special one-of-a-kind “family”…yes, there’s nothing more consistent than the inconsistency of creationists.
It’s simple: a “kind” is a set of goalposts mounted on wheels.
What is “irreducible [or specified] complexity” then? Two sets of goalposts equipped with Wrap Drives?
That video was painful. Two men talking over a woman throughout, Eugenie Scott barely got a word in edgewise even with the dude who agreed with her position, giving the lion’s share of time to the IDiot by sheer force.
HahHAHhAHHHahhAHHahHA he said light. /rimshot
@LyleX + captainahags:
I think you’re forgetting medic0506’s powerful presentation of Ontological Deepity.
Thread won.
Wow. THE PZ.
Did you really, honestly miss the part around 3:38 where she tries to tell Meyer that his paper didn’t even mention ID?? Even Abrams caught the lie that she told. So yes, she did say what I said that she said.
And for the record, I never said anything about “retreat”. I suspect I’ll be banned before I retreat. As I explained, I didn’t come here with the intentions of getting into a pissing contest with a bunch of baiters. I said that I would scroll through and address valid arguments, but I’m not going to try and reply to every single post, as I had been trying to do.
You say you use light-year as a measure of distance, but believe that it can’t be used to compute time of transit since origination at the luminous object because the speed of light is variable.
Tell me: what distance could you possibly use as a reliable light-year if the speed of light is variable?
It seems your use of light-year as distance but not basic arithmetic to compute time is rather in consistent unless you elaborate a more specific rationale than “We can’t trust the speed of light”.
Okay, Science! In the last couple of weeks I’ve revised my view of creationists and their anti-science rants, previously I’ve tended to ignore them in public because I hate confrontation and arguing with ignorance has always raised my stomach acid content.
People who say things like Irreducible Complexity to me from now on will be met with the answer that ignorance of science and the hard-won knowledge of mankind in the last 2000 years (okay really since Darwin in this case) means you have no standing to engage in debate.
I’ve been a software engineer for more than the last three decades and if they talk about information I’ll ask if they know about Shannon’s theory of information and its application to biology. I’ll ask if they know that DNA replication has an error rate. Of course if they’re young earth creationists I may ask how they reconcile the physics of radioactive decay and dating of various deposits on the planet with their 6000 year old world.
Lastly I’d probably ask if they’re clutching onto an inflated sense of self-worth as a divinely created chosen people because they’re unwilling to realize that they’re merely a bag of water with impurities which through wonderful happenstance became self-aware. And in their case I think it’s a waste of water.
Now why I’ve changed my mind on direct confrontation: one week ago today I received my first 800 ml bag of a drug built on the principles of biology targeting a specific antigen (CD20) on a rogue cell line in my lymph system. Without science without the study of evolutionary biology and the understanding (and power) it grants humanity I’d be dead in six months, as it is, my prospects are good to excellent.
I will never suffer fools in silence again.
So far you haven’t addressed a single one. Because you have no evidence whatsoever for your fairy tale except a book made up by a fairly primitive people over quite a few centuries. I’ve got better gods in my library’s fantasy section. You don’t even have the background to know how little you actually know. Classic Dunning-Kruger effect. You haven’t brought up anything remotely new to us. Basically, you’re boring.
Here’s a hint. If you try to skew your data to match your preconceptions rather than see where the data actually points, you’re doing it wrong.
The theory is the explanation of the evidence. There was so much evidence, it demanded a theory. (As if Christians who were previously YECs by default weren’t among the people who discovered evidence of deep time. Seriously.) Geologists realized the same thing from a different angle. And oddly enough, it all exactly contradicts YEC, and there is none which supports it.
@medic0506
Without a clear definition of “kind”, the explanation of yours that I quoted above is simply vacuous, meaning nothing at all and “kind” does not have any generally recognized definition in biology that I’m aware of.
As a result, I hope you’ll agree that asking you to define the word, in unambiguous, objective terms, is entirely valid and reasonable.
Quit trying to play coy, as all it does it you look even more ignorant than your posts. Stop trying to control the thread. So, here’s what you should do:
Lay out your theory, and the links to the evidence to back up your theory, and if that includes your imaginary deity and babble, show physical evidence your deity exists, and that your babble is inerrant. The latter requires real evidence for the Exodus occurred, and that the world wide flood occurred despite there being written languages in constant use during the flood.
We will be waiting for you to defend your idea, which is as it should be.
More lies from you, eh?
It is pretty clear from how long it took you to answer questions, and how many posts you made after a question was given to you before answering it that you had NEVER, EVER “been trying to” reply to every single post.
@medic0506:
Let’s see if you’ll answer the question here:
How old do you think the universe is?
2. LykeX
To the best of my knowledge, a kind is a group of organisms that can inter-breed, or share a common ancestor. Unlike the evos view of species, there are discontinuities between these different groups. A horse and a zebra would be the same kind, a horse and a frog would not, not all instances are that easy though.
The difficulty lies in the fact that the bible doesn’t list all the different created kinds, so while it’s easy to say that a hippo and whale are different kinds, it would be harder to argue against a hippo and say, some extinct bovine, having a common ancestor thus being the same kind.
@medic:
Pssssst…he’s holding you up as an example of stupidity. I wouldn’t be so flattered.
medic0506,
I will repeat my query from the other thread here. How, in your mind, does the mere use of “light-year” as a unit of distance diminish the contradictions inherent in a “young Universe” where we can see light emitted from objects over 13 billion light-years away. The very term light-year contains within it the assumption that the speed of light is a universal constant–and indeed, if it were not, we’d see different spacings of hydrogen emission/absorption lines in objects from different parts of the universe.
No experiment has ever given any indication that light can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum. So how does light travel 13 billion light-years in less than 13 billion years?
PZ forget to mention the massive, yet typical, levels of creationist projection. Medico keeps insisting that we are all closed minded. They also insist that they, by contrast, are willing to follow the evidence where it leads them. Just, that, ya know, you can’t make logical inferences from evidence unless medico approves of the conclusion, the Bible trumps scientific consensus, and evolution is foolish and fake science. That’s the face of open-mindedness, folks!
If you keep repeating that to yourself you might even end up believing it. You seem to be good at deluding yourself so chances are you’ll leave thinking that you made a great effort to answer our questions but you were met with nothing but intolerant, unreasonable whineylibidity.
Just in case you succeed, let me be the one to point out that you have very transparently avoided certain questions and that you have made no effort whatsoever to respond or substantiate your claims. All you have done is dismiss what others have said and baselessly assert non-sense. That doesn’t qualify.
I’m sure your arrogance will prevail, though, and you will continue to pretend you even tried…
@medic0506:
So are two lizards the same kind? Even if those two lizards live right next to each other, can’t interbreed, but actually come from the same parent-species?
(Ring species, in other words.)
If your response is that even if they can’t interbreed, but they have the same ancestor, you’ve defeated your own definition of “kind.”
medico
*facepalm*
Zebras and horses don’t produce fertile offspring. WHY is the concept of “kind” helpful and necessary? How is it a better understanding of biology than the normal, less arbitrary and simplistic, distinctions that biologists already use?
medic0506@13,
And the definition of, or test for, being a “valid argument” is what, kemosabe ?
So, there is only one kind (since we have evidence that every living thing on the planet shares a common ancestor)? If not, what is your method for determining whether two individuals share a common ancestor?
Oh la! The martyrdom!
Evos? Is there a missing apostrophe there? Indeed, according to scientific observation, all organisms share a common ancestor. So your definition includes all currently and previously living organisms. Scientifically speaking.
The “or” in between “can inter-breed” and “share a common ancestor” provides a nice wide fuzzy space for wiggling out of precise statements. It could be one or the other. Are you sure you didn’t mean to say and/or? That’s even MORE vague, which I assume is what you’re going for.
medico, here’s a fairly simple question: why do you even bother?
We don’t accept the book of Genesis as an authoritative account of the origin and development of life, and you don’t accept anything but Genesis as authoritative. There’s no common ground between you and us, and neither of us is going to convince the other. So why bother?
@Johnny Pez:
I debate, and hope everyone else does, because people like me are possibly reading. People who used to be on the other side, who are still learning, and picking up things and ways to talk to their loved ones who are possibly also looking for enlightenment in the ways of science.
So in other words your definition is incoherent and deliberately vague. What you’re telling me is that “Kinds” are just “Species” except when you don’t need them to be. Reminds me of Irreducible complexity which has a weasely definition that finagles itself whenever it runs into an unfortunate bit of contradictory reality.
#13, medic0506:
What she said, in the face of Meyer’s intrusive babbling, was that the article doesn’t say what he claims it says about intelligent design — it’s entirely an attack on evolution. I know this is very, very hard for you to understand, since you do the same thing, but what we expect in an article about Theory X is an argument in support of Theory X…not an extended whine about Theory Y.
As I said, you’re doing the same thing. You claim to be here to “address valid arguments”…but you refuse to make any yourself, because creationism is scientifically indefensible. So you will instead rely on ignorant sniping at physics, geology, and biology.
#22, medic0506:
And there you go again…a vague definition of “kinds” that does not reflect biological reality. In real biology, there is a continuum of variation, from closely related species that can interbreed (horse and zebra), to species that produce infertile progeny when they interbreed, to species that aren’t interfertile at all, to species that don’t even have a physical compatibility to allow mating (horse and frog). In reality, the lines aren’t sharp, they’re blurry, allowing for a gradation of forms that reflect degrees of divergence in descent. And even among the most divergent forms, where there is no possibility of interbreeding, we find degrees of similarity in the genes that reflect the hierarchy of descent.
In your bible-worshipping brain, all you see is . You’re missing 99% of the picture. Actually, you have the human intelligence to see the whole picture, but you refuse to…so you’re actively denying that reality to wallow in your religious ignorance.
Horses and zebras cannot interbreed, so presumably you acknowledge that they have a common ancestor.
How do you know this?
And how are you so certain that a horse and frog do not share a common ancestor?
The morphological and genetic difference between a horse and zebra is very close to the difference between humans and chimpanzees. Do you acknowledge that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor?
medic0506:
Since you accept that horses and zebras share a common ancestor, do you accept that Hyracotherium is the ancestor of both horses and zebras?
If not, then which of these animals, here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse do you accept to be an ancestor of both horses and zebras, and which not? And why not?
So…
medic0506: “Organisms don’t change into other kinds of organisms.”
several people: “Define kind.”
medic0506: “Kind is a group of organisms that share a common ancestor.”
… Organisms don’t change into organisms that they have not changed into? Is this your brilliant argument against evolution? Seriously? Can’t you come up with something a little less circular, please?
And after you do a better job of defining “kinds”, can you tell us what, exactly, is preventing the “slight variations due to mutations and recombination” that you admit arise every generation from accumulating, and from accumulating specifically past the “kind” level?
Not to mention the fuzziness of what is meant by . Taken in evolutionary (that is, genetics) terms, the statement is hilarious since, as pointed out, there is evidence all life on this planet does indeed have a common ancestor (thank you, Deep Time!). I suspect some other, flexible, definition, is meant, perhaps as simple as limited to “grandparent”. Maybe, and perhaps a bit more likely (keeping the Horses and Zebras “example” in mind), “superficial physical resemblance”.
Kevin @ 33:
I understand why everyone here responds to medico506, and I agree that sharpening your claws against his dull mind is a useful exercise. What I don’t understand is why medico506 comes here to argue in the first place, given the gulf between his understanding of reality and that of the scientifically literate people here.
medic0506 #22
So, how exactly, aside from direct observation, do you determine if two organisms share a common ancestor? What evidence would be relevant for deciding on that point?
Remember, objective criteria, please.
FAIL.
Hippos are closer to whales than they are to bovids, let alone bovines… We know this because of the fucking shitload of evidence that supports this, see?
Seen we are in the realm of hippos and bovines and whales…are artiodactyls a single kind?
Johnny Pez: medico came here from a debate website. My guess is they are masterdebating all over the place. Just fooling themselves into thinking that they are a skilled and insightful Gladiator of Words, taking on The Horde all by their lonesome, combating us all with wit and expertise and leaving behind swaths of defeated evilutionists. They think they are a champion, a warrior of debate, and this is all just an exercise in ego boosting from someone whose ego is already so inflated that they can’t even recognize their own logical missteps or their own gaps in knowledge.
medico, Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass?
medic0506:
Notice the morphological differences in body shape between horses, zebras and their other relatives seen in this pictures, here:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=horses+and+zebras&es_sm=91&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Z5JiU7z2G9CwyAS93YAg&ved=0CCkQsAQ&biw=1097&bih=492
Since you admit that horses and zebras possess a common ancestor, then their bones must have changed shape over the generations to produce these differences, over time. (Thanks for admitting that evolution occurs, incidentally).
Now, projecting into the future, do you or do you not acknowledge that the changes in morphology can continue into the future, and that horses and zebras can each change in different directions, so that they will become MORE different from one another in the future? Yes or no. If no, what is the mechanism that STOPS them from becoming more different, when they have already been able to become different in the past from a single common ancestor?
You can match the skeleton of a horse and a zebra, bone for bone, and compare them, and you will see that the bones are slightly different. From the time of the common ancestor, the bones in each lineage have changed slightly in their shape, some getting longer, some getting shorter, some getting thicker, some getting thinner, one small bit each generation. Do you or do you not acknowledge that such a process can continue into the future, making the bones even more different from one another than they are now? If not, then what is the mechanism that STOPS this from happening, when it has already happened in the past?
Do you or do not not acknowledge that two bones, side by side, both growing larger with time, could eventually become large enough that they touch each other? If not, what is the mechanism that STOPS this from happening?
Do you or do you not acknowledge that two bones, side by side and touching, can fuse together and become one bone, such that the skeleton of the animal after the fusion will have one less bone than it had before? If not, what is the mechanism that stops this from happening?
Do you or do you not acknowledge that a bone that becomes steadily smaller with passing generations could eventually shrink down to nothing and disappear? If not, what is the mechanism that stops this from happening?
Do you or do you not acknowledge that a bone, in slowly changing shape, could become thinner in one area while staying the same shape in another area? If not, what is the mechanism that stops this from happening?
Do you or do you not acknowledge that a bone, having become very thin in one point, could have its two parts separate, and become two bones in a later generation? If not, what is the mechanisms that stops this from happening?
Now take the skeleton of a frog and put it beside the skeleton of a horse. Note that the bones match up, one for one, all the way through. There is a skull in each, made up of the same set of fused plates, a backbone, made up of separate vertebrae, each of which, in both, have spinous processes and transverse processes and pedicles and facet joints. The vertebrae start with a neck, then with a chest, with ribs attached, then an abdomen, then a tail. Both have a shoulder and hip girdle. Both have four limbs, In both the limb bone structure is one long bone- joint – two long bones – joint with lots of little bones – then finger bones made up of 3 bones in sequence. The frog has 5 such fingers per limb, the horse has one big one plus two tiny ones on either side in some individuals. Some of the bones have fused in one of the frog or horse while not in the other. Some have disappeared, and some have split. But bone for bone, you can clearly see that the version in one can be transformed into the version in the other simply by changing its shape. If the bones were made of clay, you could change one into the other simply by pushing on the clay.
Now, since you acknowledge that the horse and zebra share a common ancestor, and, over generations, the bones of that common ancestor have slowly changed their shapes and numbers to produce the differences between horses and zebras, why do you think it impossible that given more generations, the same process can take a common ancestor and produce both the equid and the frog skeleton? What is the mechanism that stops this from happening?
When we look at the genes of horses and zebras, we can clearly identify the relationship between the genes that shows that they share a common ancestor.
When we look at the genes of hippos and whales, we see the EXACT SAME KIND OF RELATIONSHIPS showing common ancestry that are found in horses and zebras.
Since you accept that horses and zebras share a common ancestor, why do you not accept that hippos and whales share a common ancestor? Why do you think the EXACT SAME FEATURES in DNA say one thing in one case but the opposite in the other case?
E pur si evolves, medic0506.
http://phys.org/news2806.html
One has to question both the competency and the morality of someone who thinks vicariously mocking a blog owner for posting on his own blog (and medic0506 has done it multiple times on the Thunderdome thread already) does anything at all other than draw attention to his own asinine jerkassery.
So, just for laughs, is this the basic creationist argument about the animals on the ark?
Noah didn’t take two individuals from every species. That would be absurd! The bible says “kind,” so he took two individuals of every kind. (Kinds and species aren’t the same thing.) Then starting when they parked the ark and let the animals out, those kinds changed (how? why?) into… the species we know today? From a smaller number of kinds into a mind-boggling profusion of species. All in the course of a few thousand years.
Explain to me again what creationists find implausible about evolution?
They grant that X kind can change into X1 and X2 and X3 species. The only difference is they don’t believe a “kind” could change into other “kinds.” Not exactly a robust theory, is it?
Perhaps, if he came here to learn, rather than “debate,” or lamely try to respond to questions he may gain a little respect.
I don’t know how he can refer to common ancestors and yet deny evolution. When I try to do that I get a parsing error.
Not quite so fast. Mammals and their closest relatives have a phalangeal formula of 2-3-3-3-3 by default, in both fore- and hindlimbs, meaning 2 bones in the thumb/big toe and 3 in all other digits. (Various reductions have happened; horses in the wide sense today retain only the middle finger/toe, but with all 3 bones.) That’s an innovation, though. The ancestral formula for all limbed vertebrates alive today was probably 2-3-4-5-4 in the hand and 2-3-4-5-3 in the foot, as seen today in your average lizard. Frog feet are more or less like this, but their hands are usually 2-2-3-3 – there are always only four fingers per hand (and it’s not quite clear which four).
…The other way around. Sorry.
footface @49
What do you want from a theory made up on the fly to try to squeeze reality into a 2500 year old creation myth which didn’t even pretend to be scientific?
What I’d really like to see is a creationist describe how their theory explains things that evolution doesn’t. Instead we see creationists try to poke holes in evolution. The creationists know their theory will fail if holes get poked in it so they think evolution and the rest of science works the same way. They either don’t understand or refuse to understand that science is self-correcting. If a scientific theory is found to be flawed because of new evidence or a new interpretation, then the theory is modified or even discarded for a new theory. We see that as a feature, they see it as a bug.
medic0506:
Isn’t it thrilling?
You have a whole thread dedicated to you! Here’s your chance to spread the Good Word. To teach people about the truth of christianity and the bible. To show your proof that god exists and the bible is a trustworthy source of information. I’m sure you’ve been working on your best arguments to sway others to your side. So c’mon! What are you waiting for? Bring it on!
But first, perhaps you could apologize for being a sexist asshat:
medic0506
If you believe that the bible, through genesis, tells the story about how the earth and all the animals were created. Which version of creation, in genesis, do you believe and why?
Folks, come on. It’s obvious why, though organisms can evolve dramatically within kinds, they don’t evolve out of their kinds. The earth is only 6000 years old! All of this diversity in only the, what, 4000 years since the Deluge? It would be bonkers to think that a population of frog-things could evolve into a horse like thing in that amount of time. In 10000 years, of course, but we’re talking a time period that individual organisms have lived through.
And you say that you’re scientifically literate. *shakes head sadly*
Funny that medico506 thinks he is close to being banned because he is “bravely” standing for creationism. Please take note of this, YECs have never been banned for being YECs. They ran afoul of “The Great And Powerful PZ” in other ways. A few YECs posted for years here. There was one persistent YEC who kept post along with links to his own site. Want to know why he got banned. He spoke about praying to his deity about his desire for an teen girl and how it was answered because he ended up marrying her.
Yeah, he was banned for being a sad creep and possibly being a pedophile.
So, medico506, still want to play you wannabe martyr card? It i doing you no favors. And of us find your whining to be very funny.
If all this was done by an “intelligent designer”, then that would indicate that existence and life have some “purpose”. Do IDists suggest what that might be? Why are we put here to suffer and hunger and stumble about? Does the grand drama have some end goal? When we die, have our material lives shaped us in some way that prepares us for something? Would that mean that this preparation is necessary, and that life is the only way we can become prepared? This is all such idle speculation. All unanswerable. Certainly not “science”.
And what about things that are HORRIBLY designed? Things which would indicate incompetence on the part of this Designer, or cruelty? What about pathogens and parasites? Cancer and cleft palates? Extinctions and invasive species? Amber and Brittany Hensel? Is the Designer occasionally asleep at the wheel? Does he get a cheap thrill from watching us scramble against his work?
Michael Behe on parasites:
Yay God!
Medico…. Are bats avians or mammals?
Here’s what Michael Behe says about common descent…
Indeed, it’s probably why the Discotute has distanced themselves from him. Behe believes dog engineered the little things, not the big things.
medic0506, please explain the observed distribution, number, and incidences of Y chromosome haplotypes in the living human population in light of your theory’s assertion that all living humans are descended from a single surviving patriarch, Noah, after a severe genetic bottleneck less than 4000 years ago.
“To the best of my knowledge, …”
Look, I can maybe understand someone believing in creationism, if this person is sheltered, brainwashed or stupid enough; most likely a combination between those three factors.
But believing the earth is 6000 years old? In this day and age? Then this person is beyond teaching, a wilfully ignorant person who is unable to change their mind on anything.
57 Goodbye Enemy Janine
Well, medico506 seems to have debated pro-children pageants, so we might get their in the end.
medico:
As a human, I can’t interbreed with chimps (I don’t even find them attractive), but we do share a common ancestor. Humans and chimps, therefore, are of the same “kind.” Y’know who else is in this “kind”? Orangutans, bonobos and gorillas.
Congratulations! You’ve demonstrated that you understand that humans are apes.
Now let’s just work on your terminology…
Of course! It’s to compute the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything!
If god isn’t the Grey Squirrel of Knowledge, it might as well be Slartibartfast. [btw: Slartibartfast? In the dictionary. I love programmers.]
14. CD:
I don’t use it personally, but I’d imagine that you can get an approximate distance, using the speed of light as measured in a vacuum. The constancy of the speed of light is really the secondary problem though. The main problem I have is with the “transit” part.
I’m willing to be proven wrong on this, but I don’t believe that starlight is something that actually physically travels to earth, in order for us to see it. I think that light is emitted from an energy source, and if the amount of energy released as light is enough, the object will be bright enough for our eyes to see it from earth. I don’t buy when someone argues that starlight has been traveling for billions of years to get here. Feel free to prove me wrong by proving the current understanding of light travel, but no one else so far has been able to address this without just throwing more theoretical BS at it.
Beliefs again. Beliefs without evidence, which you don’t provide, unlike scientitist, can be dismissed without evidence. This isn’t about your beliefs. It is about your interpretation of the facts that support your beliefs. And that evidence is MIA, making you a COWARD.
Medico… your second paragraph boils down the idea that stars disprove stars. If they emit light, enough to be seen… how do you think the light arrives here? Does it teleport?
Stars as pinpoints in the sky?
Really, we are going there?
Man, you are dumb. Really, really, really dumb. I honestly don’t understand how you are able to work with a PC, or hell, even remember to breath.
Medico, do you believe in photons or are they “theoretical BS”?
I note that medic0506, intellectual coward, has still not answered my question in the previous thread about winters in greenland, and it does not appear he has answered my question in the previous thread about what his definition of god is, either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_(rover)#Specifications
scroll down to ‘communications’.
It takes ~14 minutes for radio signals to reach Mars from Earth (depending on their relative locations in orbit, the actual amount of time changes).
Are you going to argue that isn’t true? And that NASA has some huge conspiracy?
ever used a GPS?
srsly?
We have seen Supernova 1987 change in real time from a star to an exploding supernova to a supernova remnant. We have seen in real time the gas cloud of the remnant expand in size, and different parts of it light up at different times as shockwave from the initial explosion moves outward.
IF light did not travel we would literally NOT see this sequence as we see it. IF light varied in speed in the past, we would literally NOT see the details of this sequence as we see it. Different parts of this sequence would arrive at our telescopes at different times than what we actually see them doing.
Supernova remnant 1987A, which you admit to accepting to be real, proves you dead wrong, and it does so with direct observation. No theoretical stuff necessary.
There is also a laser that we aim at a mirror on the moon. We know exactly when we fire the laser, and we see the reflection come back in a delayed fashion. This proves that light travels exactly as the current understanding would have it, for if it did not, the reflection literally would not come back at the time that we directly observe it to be coming back.
Do you or do you not accept that the light of that laser is made of the same kind of stuff and behaves in the same way as the light from the stars? Or do you claim that starlight is something different from other kinds of light?
@medic0506:
So, I’m still confused:
You say that light travels from point to point in space at a less than infinite speed (thus requiring some time, even if small, to get from point A to point B) that can be measured to produce a speed and thus, by computing (d/t)* t(1 year) get a unit of distance.
But you also seem to say that light doesn’t travel at all. From your statement:
Is your contention that the brighter the object, the faster the light? Or that if light is sufficiently bright, it teleports from where it originated to earth? Or does it teleport a certain distance based on brightness and then travel the rest of the way?
I don’t really understand what your argument is, so I would have a hard time coming up with arguments against it. If you could clarify, that would be great. Especially the part about why light from each visible sun-like star isn’t of precisely the same brightness as our sun.
Medic0506 is approaching Flat Earth Society levels of zaniness. Only .3 percent of a right angle until we eat teenagers and reach Timecube levels ON ALL FOUR HORSECORNERS.
Looking in my Klingon-English dictionary, I find that “medico506” is Klingon for “uneducable moron.”
I know physics textbooks have lots of big words and math stuff, but do try to learn some science. Any science. Physics would be a good start. I suggest a junior high school level textbook. I think you may be able to understand at least a little of it.
Then, you can educate the National Academy of Sciences, and then go on to collect your Nobel Prize after you have disproven all of modern physics. Then you can build on that achievement and disprove all of modern biology. Hey, then you could collect another Nobel Prize. What a puffed-up moron.
@68:
Wow. Disputing aspects of evolution is something I’ve come to expect out of YEC’s, but this is the first time one has ever scoffed at electromagnetism, in my experience.
Reminds me of the time that some YEC (I forget the name) got up on a stage lit by fluorescent lamps with a digital slideshow going on behind him, and spoke into the microphone to claim that “science has done NOTHING for mankind.”
medic0506, if you seriously think that we haven’t figured out how electromagnetic radiation works, then you might want to ask yourself how humans have figured out how to build computers like the one you’re using to make such bizarre statements.
18. LykeX:
I do indeed agree that your question is a valid one, and one that I answered as honestly as I’m able. Unfortunately, I don’t have a black and white, one-size-fits-all answer, because I don’t know each created kind, and the breeding history of every organism that ever lived on earth.
medico:
When we “see” an object, it means that our eyes have absorbed some of the light that the object is producing (or reflecting).
If an energy source is producing enough light for us to see it, how exactly do we see it if that light is not physically travelling the distance between it and our eyes?
How does the light produced by an object reach our eyes if not physically traversing the intervening space?
How am I able to see what’s on my monitor if the light it produces isn’t travelling to my eyes through the air?
Are you arguing that light isn’t physical?
If you are self-admittedly so ignorant about so many things, why do you think that your unevidenced beliefs should carry more weight than the evidence backed theories built over many decades by people who demonstrably, through experiment and engineering, aren’t ignorant about the subjects in questions?
You admit that you know nothing, then turn around and tell everyone you know more than anyone. Do you enjoy living in a state of ignorant arrogance?
medico (evading a request to define “kind”) #80:
Some things:
1) This is precisely why people look to evolutionary theory when they have questions about the relationships between organisms: it doesn’t have “the breeding history of every organism that ever lived” but it has the investigative tools and the data to start looking for an answer.
2) If you don’t have a working definition for a word, don’t use it. One of the myriad reasons people scoff at creationists is because they very often present a pretense of being educated and knowledgeable scientifically but when challenged, back away from words and phrases that they themselves brought into the discourse.
Nobody particularly wants a “black and white, one-size-fits-all answer”, they just want consistency. Without consistency in your definitions it’s like you’re changing the rules of a game on the fly; like playing Calvinball with language.
“Kind” is a particularly problematic word for creationists, as it’s been variously defined as species, order, family, genus – almost every taxonomic level currently used. Creationists do, in fact, use this word as a “one-size-fits-all” term; as such, it completely fails to be useful, except as an indicator of the ignorance of the person using it.
Amphiox:
It’s pretty easy to tell that I was trying to answer the posts in numerical order by just looking at my responses, but hey, let’s not confuse the issue with common sense, right??
Does sunlight travel? Is the idea that “starlight” and “sunlight” are, somehow, different kinds of phenomena? That the sun is a kind of object from (other) stars?
21. Kevin:
6-10,000 years old.
*a _different_ kind of object, that is.
medico:
medico, you either don’t understand how light works or you don’t understand how eyes work. I’m betting on both.
It’s pretty easy to tell that you were NOT doing any such thing, but skipping the posts with the hard questions you did not wish to answer.
My two questions about Supernova remnant 1987 and the winters in Greenland was a very early post. You answered SEVERAL posts that came after that one before you FINALLY answered half of mine.
And you STILL HAVEN’T answered the question about the winters in Greenland despite answering several more posts in between.
In numerical order?
One glance makes it obvious that you are lying yet again.
You’re pathetic.
medico #86:
And what do you base that figure on?
And yet you are so, so, so, so certain that frogs and horses do not share a common ancestor.
Or is it just that you happen to know, perfectly, the entire breeding history of frogs?
What a hypocrite you are.
23. Nich:
In normal company I’d consider that an insult but here, not so much.
Also, medico:
Please answer whether you think light is physical. More than one person has questioned your statement about light; it’d be nice if you responded in kind. You’re here to debate, after all, right?
If light isn’t physical – if it isn’t physically travelling from stars to reach our eyes here on Earth – then something else is going on with light and how it’s registered by our eyes. You need to tell us what you think that something else is.
medic0506 @68:
Hard to explain how it gets physically deflected as it ‘passes’ near the sun, then, eh? And by an amount predicted by the same ‘theoretical BS’ which predicted the perihelion precession of Mercury, and gravitational redshift, both confirmed by experiment/observation.
Argument from faith, incredulity and ignorance can only get you so far.
medic0506 said:
Really!?!?
That’s your best estimate of the age of the universe?
You have a book that tells you how old it is, by giving ages of people, and an archbishop or two who gave the frickin’ time of day to the creation, based on that book. Plus, in addition, you have all of reality, with decaying magnetic fields, dust accumulations and Ken Ham knows what all, that us evolutionists can’t keep covered up. And you have a god on speed-dial, that you can up and ask, simply by folding your hands, to tell you if you are a-doin’ it right.
But you can’t even get one significant figure in your age of the universe, in a range of thousands of years. And other Christians don’t agree even with that.
The reality-based crowd, meanwhile, has three digits in the billions of years, and an error margin of a percent, and they have shown their work, and everybody agrees that it fits in with their specialties. Science has an answer.
You have nothin’.
Yes, that energy is called light. And it travels.
So I guess you are saying the visible thing we call light is instantaneous. You might be saying what we see from stars in not light.
This also means there is a universal frame of reference. Thus you are also throwing away Relativity.
I think he is saying we witnessed Supernova remnant 1987A in real time, as it was happening. The entire “light as time machine” is invalid to him.
This was only my pet dislike argument. There’s no no need to presume that language used is taxonomic. Although many “bible is inerrant” folk presume the bible is prescriptive might have issue with this as they have with the pi = 3 issue medico doesn’t seem to be such with his “the bible isn’t a textbook”. (Actually, the bible in innerent and prescriptive is logically incoherent to me. It means *every* mention of a persons height most be exact and not a millimeter variance which is absurd and impossible.) Medico’s “god keeps the word from corruption” is actually *stricter* than most “bible is inerrant” claims as errors (the different lineages of Jesus and the two orders of creation for example) are usually attributed to clerical error. (See? The *originals* were inerrant but translations are not. But the word of God is incorruptable so not *serious* errors will be made; just clerical ones.)
A counter argument I used to make was if the work was incorruptable how could KJV translate rheem, a bovine, into unicorn a mythical goat-horse horn critter. For various reasons I don’t use it any more.
But what about the insects having 4 legs? I’m thinking that *that* has to be a clerical error as any-one from any age would know insects have six legs. Some cleric must have thought they were talking about tiny mammals and “corrected” it to four. In any event, that passage is either wrong or corrupted so the bible is either errant or corruptable.
====
Anyway, my theory is medico is a fictional on-line persona. His logic is too internally consistent for your typical brain-dead YEC but his *adamant* refusal of basic science is simply too …. pure … for anyone with internally consistent logic.
I think he’s doing an YEC version of the 3-year-old’s Why to get us to collapse in our individual understading and limitations of science to the fundamentals. If starlight proves the galaxy is at least 100,000 years old, then he’ll question that the speed of light is a constant. If the speed of light being a constant follows from the Copernican principal then we toss the copernican principal. If every observation and relativity shows the speed of light is a constant, we toss those out too. I think he’s trying to see the point where we give up saying “this follows from that” to “and that is a first principal that just makes sense” to “because we say so damn it”.
On the contrary. It can get you everywhere because you can discard everything and believe anything.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov
Adding to my # 95:
The creationists get to date the age of the universe with material found here on Earth, directly. If they have the age of the Earth, they have their whole universe.
Scientists, on the other hand, have to determine the age of the universe with telescopes, looking at things they can never touch, working indirectly. They also have to figure out the age of the Earth, so there’s two jobs.
(And they better hope the Earth comes out younger than the universe, or they’ll need another cover-up. )
They’re bugs. They fly, they’re ugly and hairy.
Makes as much sense as biblical taxonomy.
Medico,
Do you know how radar works? The radar transmitter sends a radio burst which gets reflected by the target. The reflection is detected by a receiver. Since the speed of light is known (radio is electromagnetic radiation as is light, radio uses longer wavelengths than light does) the time between the transmission and the reception gives the range of the target.
Radar has given us the distance (range) to several planets. If the speed of light was not constant, these distances would be wrong. However there are other methods of determining the distance to a planet (triangulation is one) and all these methods agree with the radar distances.
The speed of light (in a vacuum) is not an arbitrary number pulled out of some physicist’s ass. It’s exactly 299,792,458 meters per second, a figure that’s exact because the length of the meter is defined from this constant and the international standard for time.
Rey Fox @100
I refute you thusly.
The bat thing was regarding the idea of ‘kinds’. I was going somewhere with it, which I have since forgotten because argh-it’s-so-hot-in-my-house and why-did-I-agree-to-foster-bottle-baby-kittens-who-never-stop-screaming-at-me.
@medic0506 (92)
Thanks. So you believe the Earth is younger than civilization. The Sumerians were recording their history about 5500 years ago. They were making beer about 6000 years ago. They settled in the Fertile Crescent area around 8500 years ago. We’ve had writing since about 9500 years ago. We’ve been domesticating animals for about 12,000 years. The oldest dildo is 23,000 years old.
We have a chronological history since about 5500 years ago – independent from the Sumerians and Egyptians.
hehehe
http://www.theonion.com/articles/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-creates-worl,2879/
Kevin, Youhao Huo Mao @104
The flood is supposed to have happened about 4500 years ago. Funny how the Egyptians, Sumerians and Chinese all failed to mention how they’d been wiped out in this flood. From their records, you’d get the idea the flood never happened.
@Al Dente:
Well, medic hasn’t mentioned the flood yet, so we don’t know if he believes it. Of course if he does, then yes, he has to contend with the fact that the excellent record-keepers of the ancient Sumerians, Chinese, and Egyptians failed to notice that the world had been flooded and they all perished.
Kevin @ 104
Proof positive in creation. Like many of us who are self-employed, God spent a lot of time procrastinating and masturbating before getting around to making everything else. I imagine the oldest pajamas and frozen pizza are about the same age.
@TMM:
I kind of love you XD
Which is irrelevant to anybody but a delusional fool believing in phantasms and mythology.
I would love to see medico0506 try to weasel out in court from his latest speeding ticket by trying to argue that the speed of light is variable and perception of energy emitting sources is instantaneous, and therefore the radio speedometer that measured his car exceeding the speed limit, which is based on the principle of the fixed speed of light, did not accurately reflect his real driving speed.
He would just spin his court loss as yet another sign Christians are being persecuted.
And thus we see, directly, that medico really was flat out lying when he claimed to be answering replies in order.
Once you start lying for Jesus, I’m sure it is hard to stop yourself from lying about anything and everything.
Yet another reason why I have zero trust in people who claim to get their morals from the Bible.
Ok… we’ve officially hit “not even wrong” territory with medico.
“valid evidence”
I would point out the “Statement of Faith” from AiG, which says (paraphrased)
Mediocre506 (well, that’s what my ARMD eyes saw at first reading) seems to have adopted this, and interprets it as
I think, at this point, that “medico” is a poe, or insane. I can’t imagine a sentient being exhibiting such incredible stupidity on this side of the Time Cube. Having a conversation with medico is like having a conversation with a lump of mud. I really think medico needs to get back on her meds.
I went to school to learn how to repair military-grade radar, and the classes included a lot of the theory. The speed of light is known, you bet.
I also got education and experience with GPS and how it works. The speed of light is known, both for vacuum and atmo, and relativistic effects are figured in.
Astronomers have seen stars blow up, and the non-light particles came in at just the right time afterward. I don’t know how that works, but they know the speed of light.
Ken Ham points out that light is a symbol for God, in many ways. Claiming that the speed of light isn’t known, and/or that it changes, is an insult to God. God is known, and God is unchanging.
God is also crazy mean, so watch your ass.
So, medico, are you serious about this conversation? Three hours plus between responses doesn’t indicate much seriousness.
Creationists: neither terribly bright nor quick.
waldteufel @117
It would be nice if you retract that. Those of us who struggle with depression and anxiety often require meds just to remain alive, and we’re not obtuse or mentally deficient as you seem to be implying about medico.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebroid
There’s some seemingly conficting claims up there, about horses and zebras interbreeding. They can have babies together, so that counts one way, but the offspring aren’t fertile, so it really doesn’t count in the long run, as in making a new breed.
It’s like mules. You can raise all the mules you want, but you can’t have a mule farm without a donkey and a horse somewhere. You also can’t explain mules through Creationism.
The Bible prohibits mules, just in case you decided to think that God allows mules to help us out. Don’t try telling me that I don’t know the Bible.
I know something about mules, because I’m from Missouri, where mules are still a thing. I have seen a runaway mule with the Virgin Mary on top and Joseph and the Angel Gabriel getting dragged along behind. (I was in a church Nativity play, and they didn’t have a donkey.)
Not doing the whole thread so don’t know if mentioned elsewhere, but just two weeks ago it was announced that a Cephid variable in Auriga was measured by parrallax at 7500 light years.
Parrallax has *nothing* to do with speed of light. It’s pure geometry. And within the galaxy sizes are measured by the Cephids, which are brightness compared to their periods. Brightness establishes distance … by purge geometry (sometimes some fudgefactors for intervening dust … but that can be estimated from other stars in the field usually). So we *measure* 7500 light years by pure geometry. And unless an awful lot of variable stars that have spectacularly uniform period/brightness curves for some strange reason are just uniformly different beyond 7500 lightyears …. we’re 30k ly from the center of a galaxy about 100k ly across. period. Measured in ways that have nothing to do with the speed of light.
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/april/nasas-hubble-extends-stellar-tape-measure-10-times-farther-into-space/#.U2KqQVRdUmI
Pfft. Bare assertion, nothing more.
@105 Christopher: http://www.theonion.com/articles/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-creates-worl,2879/
Ha! Okay, this next one isn’t as funny and not really on topic, but it’s funny enough that I feel compelled:
Biologists Confirm God Evolved From Chimpanzee Deity
Hey, medic0506, here’s a little DIRECT empirical experiment for you.
Take a glass of water. Stick your finger into it. Notice how from some angles your finger looks bent at the interface between air and water?
BOOM. Proof that light TRAVELS at a finite speed. Only something that TRAVELS from one point to another can have its path BENT as it moves from one medium to another. If light did not TRAVEL from point to point at a finite speed, lenses, prisms, mirrors, all would be impossible. RAINBOWS would be impossible, and the myth of Noah could not mention one.
Now, guess what? We HAVE STELLAR SPECTRA. You can do this experiment at home yourself too. Take a telescope, focus it on a star, any star. Take a garden variety prism and put it at the eyepiece of the telescope. BOOM. The starlight is split into a spectrum. (You don’t even need the telescope, it’s just that without it, the spectrum is too faint for your human eyes to see).
And BOOM. Proof, without theory, that starlight must travel THROUGH the prism material and be AFFECTED by the prism material as it TRAVELS through it. Proof that starlight travels the distance from the star to the earth.
Amphiox>
nice.
I was trying to think of something pretty much anyone could relate to, and the best that came to mind was lag time in Mars rover communication and GPS.
I didn’t even think of refraction, but that’s probably as close to a perfect example that light (and EM radiation in general) actually travels.
thanks (not that medico will listen/care/think…)
medic0506 #80
Your definition of kind doesn’t actually present a problem for evolution. If all life springs from a common ancestor, then all life is one kind and there’s no problem with changing from one kind to another.
In order for your argument to be at all relevant (and for it to form a rational basis for your rejection of evolution, as you said), you must be able to demonstrate that various species are indeed of different kinds. Do you have an objective method for doing that?
It’s okay if the method isn’t perfect, but give us something to work with. Otherwise, we’re just left with your bald assertion that certain animals are or are not of the same kind, and that’s hardly scientific.
It doesn’t matter whether a noise is a whisper or a nuke; it takes the same time to reach you from the same distance. Same thing with seismic waves; a footstep and an earthquake travel at the same speed. Light has been observed to work the same way: in a vacuum, it will always travel at the same speed, whether it is coming from a laser in a lab, or an LEO satellite, or the Moon. We can, in all likelihood, safely assume that Polaris and Andromeda emit light that works the same way.
that word “emit”; you might wanna look up what it means.
So… if the light is intense enough, it suddenly becomes infinitely faster?
That reminds me of the people who think shouting something louder somehow makes it more true.
and on that note, you also might wanna look up what the word “speed” means. Something that doesn’t travel doesn’t have a speed.
no, I really don’t think it’s even that. He does seem to think that the speed of light varies, but aside from that, he also doesn’t seem to understand what light is and how vision works; I can’t explain the nonsense because it’s so nonsensical, but he is really trying to say that light literally doesn’t travel; that it doesn’t move, not even instantaneously, but that “brightness” of a star somewhere distant has an effect on your eye without any need to bridge these distances physically in any way. It’s magic.
That’s not accurate, and it’s important to hold ourselves to strict standards when arguing with this dishonest fantasist. The earliest historical event we have a record of is the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt by Menes or Narmer, around 3100 BCE: 5100 years ago in round numbers (and the event was not recorded in writing until some centuries later). Writing, in the sense of a system able to represent anything spoken language can, dates from somewhere in the period 2900 BCE – 2400 BCE, depending on the exact criteria used, although Sumerian “proto-cuneiform”, used to record types and amounts of goods, began around 3400 BCE: 5400 years ago. Recorded Sumerian history begins around 2800-2700 BCE: 4800-4700 years ago.
24. Ray:
It doesn’t. Starlight isn’t something physical that has to travel in order to be visualized.
Perhaps, but he(? she?) has not, as far as I know, yet said that eyes emit light and that is how we see. (If he(? she?) did so, that would be the Icing on The Cake, and much hilarity would ensue.)
This is apparently a surprisingly common belief — e.g., Ye Pffft! Of All Knowledge reports on a study indicating c.50% of all USAlienstani college students(!) — believe this. I have no idea how common of a belief it is in fundiegrad, but would not be surprised if it is exceptionally common.
See? I KNEW he thought starlight is magic. (For the record: yes, light is something physical that has to travel. It’s called a photon.)
I really think that’s a strong candidate for the STACHES (Stupidest Thing A Creationist Has Ever Said) record, currently held by Ken “Banana” Ham. Do I have a seconder?
srsly medic0506?
You skipped over the numerous, everyday examples of items, technology, and observances that serve as evidence that light travels, and you dismiss it because…
(I don’t even know…)
Do you have an alternate explanation for how radar, lidar, gps, laser rangefinders, or even bog-common fuckin refraction happens?
If you can’t put forth something to explain this very well-understood phenomenon, you have no standing to be dismissive about it.
So what is starlight ?
How do cameras and film (or thesedays, CCDs) record (“photograph”) the stuff ?
Is starlight related to what you see (or can photograph) when a hand-torch (“flashlight”) is turned on ?
And, Why does a wall prevent one from seeing the stars, or hand-torch, on the other side of the wall ?
27. Kevin:
Yes
Not at all. How do you reach that conclusion??
and how do we know that light is a physical thing?
Because bits of light (photons) can collide with electrons. Physically. Observably.
Somewhere, just beyond the reach of the furthest space probe, lies the crystal sphere with the stars painted on it by medico’s dog. Any minute now and you’ll see the twinkle when Voyager hits it. Trufax.
You may want to look up the meaning of “visualize”. That aside, what do you believe starlight is, and how do you believe it can affect our eyes from millions (and our telescopes from billions) of light-years away? Come on now, this is crucial: your claim that the universe is 6000-10000 years old collapses completely if you cannot answer this point satisfactorily, as you must recognise if you have even a smidgen of honesty.
My candidate for a STACHES would be the recent
You can quibble a bit with the “physical” — photons are currently though to have zero rest mass, so if for some informal definitions of “physical” a photon ain’t — but they most certainly do “travel” for any conventionally understood definition of “travel”.
That’s hilarious. By that definition, everything except the very first bit of life on earth is the same “kind”.
and one more thing about light: if it weren’t physical, we wouldn’t be able to see it: the reason our eyes react to light (and can thus send signals to the brain about it so that we can “see” it) is because the light physically interacts with nerves in our eyes. If starlight weren’t physical, it couldn’t interact with the nerves in the eyes, and thus we wouldn’t be able to perceive it.
Oh man! I have to second Nick Gotts. This is weapons grade stupidity. I mean if nothing travels, then how the heck do we get sunburns from our local star? And the other examples were right on.
I’m done here. There may be words coming from medic0506, but there is nooooo meaning.
Jadehawk @ 133
Wasn’t that one of the medieval European theories of vision? Light wasn’t a substance, it was a property that some things had (like the sun, and fire) and the eye could “sense” that property.
At least, I think I remember hearing something like that somewhere. Anyone more clued in care to correct me?
That certainly makes more sesne than anything this Prime Example of the Dunning–Kruger effect has emitted.
And can be experimentally verified!
──────────────────
Speaking of the Dunning–Kruger effect, is this cupcake in Graeme “Stupider Than a Turkey” Bird territory yet? Both seem to have no concept of evidence, both appear to believe assertion trumps evidence, both routinely ignore or simply fail to answer even simple questions, both repeat themselves excessively, both present themselves as being as (and probably imagine themselves to be more) competent than the people they come very close to talking down to…
Bird was also a conspiracy nutter, albeit to give him some credit, not a Holocaust denier. But he did buy into just about everything else: birtherism, AGW-denial, physics kook, and loads more…
Hey, medic0506, so since you have demonstrated that you are scientifically illiterate and you yourself have, to your credit, confessed that you do indeed don’t know these stuff, i suposse from now on you’ll have the decency to not pretend that you are in any way qualified to critisize physics or biology and make statements of fact about how scientific theories you know nothing about are incorrect, right? And of course you’ll never again pretend that your ridiculous beliefs are in any way supported by science as you and your fellow scientific illiterates like to do, right? Right?? Ha ha ha…nah just kidding, man, just kidding, i know there is no chance in hell that you’ll be intellectually honest..because Jesus.
By the way, thank you for confirming that you have no evidence in support of your ludicrous assertions and that you have accepted a conclussion based on faith or whatever and so you have to shoehorn as much of reality as you can to fit that conclussion and dismiss whatever you can’t distort into fitting it.
Snoof, As far as I am aware, the commonly-held theory of vision until fairly recently was extramission, where the eyes emit a beam of light and that is, somehow, how we see. To explain such awkward facts like why we don’t see in the dark or why we do see stars immediately after opening our eyes, various complications were added (e.g., interactions with this-or-that or instantaneous “eyebeam” travel). It’s all very magical — could that be what you are vaguely recalling?
I am half-wondering if some form of extramission is what this fruitcake believes.
28. Anteprepro:
But they do produce offspring. The fact that they aren’t fertile is consistent with organisms reproducing after their kind. You would expect to run into that infertility problem if there is indeed a discontinuity between groups, as the bible predicts, but if evolutionism were true that would not be the case.
If you classify a human, bat, and whale in the same category, I don’t think I’d call that “normal” or “less arbitrary”. If homology was an absolute indicator of relatedness I would agree that the current system is better, but it isn’t so I don’t.
29. BLF:
A post that asks a question that I haven’t already answered several times, or presents an argument related to the topic.
If I put a prism between my eye and the starlight I am visualizing, the light is refracted into a spectrum. How is that possible if starlight isn’t something physical that travels through that prism?
If the moon moves into the path between my eye and the starlight I am visualizing, I stop seeing the star. How is that possible if starlight isn’t something physical that travels through space, to be blocked in its path by the moon?
If a dust cloud sits between my eye and the starlight I am visualizing, I can’t see the star in visible light, but my infrared detector can see it in infrared light. How is that possible if the light isn’t something physical that travels through space, where a dust cloud blocks the visible wavelengths but lets the infrared wavelengths through?
If I put a telescope between my eye and the starlight I am visualizing, the lenses and mirrors of the telescope concentrate the light, making the star brighter and easier for me to see. How is that possible if the light isn’t something physical that travels through space, into the telescope, through the lenses and off the mirrors?
If light from stars isn’t something physical that moves between the star and my eye, then why do images of stars taken in reflecting telescopes have diffraction spikes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike
If light from stars isn’t something physical that moves between the star and earth then how can digital cameras, which can only detect an image when an actual physical photons strike its detector, take pictures of those stars?
oh, that is fuckin rich. pretty much everything you have asked or asserted has already been answered several times, if not on this comment thread, or blog, in numerous other places.
I’d suggest starting with wikipedia. Not the best source, but it’s a good start, especially if you don’t have any clue on any of the fucking basics.
medic0506 #153
I thought your point was that zebras and horses were the same kind. If they’re the same kind, then there should be no discontinuity and there’s no reason they should suddenly produce infertile offspring.
FALSE. Evolution EASILY explains the infertility problem.
Creationism, on the other hand, actually DOESN’T. All it can do is shrug and saw, “well God made it that way, even though he could easily have made it so that all kinds could interbreed if he wanted to. Why did he make it so that different kinds could not interbreed? We don’t know.”
And that, as a matter of fact, doesn’t explain ANYTHING.
blf @ 152
Yeah, I’m familiar with that one, but it’s not the one I’m thinking of right now.
medic0506 @153
You have a problem with the classification “mammal”?
To be a valid explanation for anything, an explanation has to describe why something is the way it is AS WELL AS why it ISN’T some other way.
Creationism can never provide a cogent answer to the second criteria.
Creationism explains nothing.
Creationism is nothing but a dishonest way of replacing “I don’t know” with a made up excuse to stop searching for an answer, and calling that excuse “god”.
Mammal.
Snoof, “Yeah, I’m familiar with that one [extramission], but it’s not the one I’m thinking of right now.”
Interesting! Offhand I can’t recall any other theory of vision (excepting intromission, of course), so now you’ve got me very curious as to what it is you are vaguelly recalling.
You already admitted that horses and zebras come from a single common ancestor. That common ancestor by definition would have had to have been able to be fully fertile with itself.
And yet, by your own admission, some of its descendants because horses, and some of its descendants became zebras, and now horses and zebras cannot produce fertile offspring together. The descendants who became horses CHANGED WITH TIME, and the descendants that became zebras CHANGED WITH TIME, and as they changed they became LESS FERTILE with one another.
Do you or do you not admit that it is possible that, in the future, with further changes, horses and zebras will become different enough that they can’t produce offspring at all. If not, then what is the mechanism that stops this from happening?
And if it should happen, would horses and zebras cease to be the same kind? Or would they still be the same kind?
And if they are still the same kind, then why wouldn’t humans, bats, and whales be also the same kind, since the SAME GENETIC evidence that shows horses and zebras had a common ancestor ALSO SHOWS that humans, bats, and whales share a common ancestor, only further back in time. And why wouldn’t horses and frogs be the same kind, when, again, the SAME GENETIC EVIDENCE that shows that horses and zebras had a common ancestor ALSO SHOWS that horses and frogs had a common ancestor, only further back in time.
It is not as if there is an eyewitness account of the common ancestor of the horse and zebra giving rise in time to both horses and zebras. The common ancestry, which YOU ADMIT, is INFERRED. Why do you accept that inference but reject the SAME INFERENCE, made using the SAME KIND OF EVIDENCE, for all mammals, and all tetrapods?
Are you a hypocrite? A liar? Or a fool?
Which one is it? Because only one of those three can make the kind of argument you have made.
Here’s what you said @22:
I’m trying to get clear what the force of your “or” is in: “a group of organisms that can inter-breed, or share a common ancestor”. Are you claiming here that only organisms that can interbreed (whether or not the offspring are fertile) have a common ancestor, so your “or” serves to connect what you believe to be two conditions that would always give the same answer? Or are you saying that there are some organisms which cannot interbreed at all – but that nonetheless have a common ancestor? If the latter, how is it possible, even in principle, to discover whether two organisms that cannot interbreed have a common ancestor? If you cannot specify this, you must admit that your definition of “kind” is completely worthless.
30. Corwyn:
If you have that evidence then why not enlighten the rest of us??
Is there any evidence that shows those individuals to be related, any knowledge of breeding history?? Is there a possible pathway to a common ancestor that we can verify, through known relatives?? As David Berlinski says, “Organisms reproduce with highly bounded variations”, with that in mind are the individuals similar enough that one could be a variation of the other?? If so, then we can’t rule it out without further examination of the lineages.
Oh, and in case you think we’ve forgotten your most egregious piece of stupidity, medic0506, or are going to let you get away with not answering this question, what is starlight, and how can it affect our eyes and telescopes without travelling between the star producing it and those eyes and telescopes.
nonsense. the more genetic differences caused by mutations there is between two populations, the less likely successful reproduction, especially once the number of chromosomes becomes affected, thus making consistently successful meiosis impossible. It’s all very gradual, exactly like what the theory of mutation & natural selection predicts.
On the other hand, if there’s “kinds” that are dissimilar, then everything that’s the same kind should be able to have fertile offspring, and everything that isn’t the same “kind” shouldn’t be able to have any; gradations of reproductive success make no sense with such supposedly discrete groups.
who’s “us”? You’re the only one here who apparently doesn’t know about evidence for common descent.
and we’re back to where “kind” evidently means “everything alive”. LOL
Whether one creationists brain melts or not, the world is still 4 billion years old, toolkit genes for heart, eyes and limbs are 500 million years old, the mitochondria in our cells are derived from bacteria that existed 600 million years ago and have a relative alive today, the Rickettsia bug. We share 70% of our genes with sea sponges.
I was going to quote Clarence Darrow from 1925 at medic0506, but I can’t find my own transcript in the wayback machine.
FIFM
@Nick Gotts:
Thank you for the clarification.
@medic0506 141:
You’re saying, at the same time, that a “kind” must be both a species that can interbreed, but might not be able to. That makes no sense as far as a basis of categorization.
Let’s pull back a bit. So you agree that two lizards that can’t breed, but share an ancestor (located physically far away from the two “ends” of the ring), are a “kind.”
Do you think bears, seals, and dogs are a “kind”? We classify them all as canines – mostly due to the fact they have a single chambered enclosure for their middle and inner ear bones.
How about cats and hyenas? They’re both felines – though they look radically different, they both have a double enclosure for their middle and inner ear bones.
Or are you a “if they look the same, they’re a kind” type?
Medico, remove your pacifier and taste the real world. The one you suck tastes of shit.
@22 medic0506
Consistency is something that happens to other people, isn´t it, medic?
It pisses me off that people who know fucking nothing about biology think themselves qualified to make judgements about the validity of current biological understanding. I have some scary words for you, medic, like karyotype and meiosis. These are things that have something to do with why zebras and horses produce poorly fertile or sterile hybrid offspring. Magical boundaries between groups do not. Does your bible explain why some female zebra/donkey hybrids are fertile but the males are generally not? Is the fact that some female mules are fertile but others, and all male mules, are not, consistent with organisms reproducing after their own kind?
Riddle me this, are all snakes a single kind?
and yeah, I’m seconding Nick: I want to know what medic0506 thinks starlight is, if it’s not physical; and how, if it’s not physical, it interacts with things like eyes, electrons, prisms, telescopes, etc.
ALL living things on earth are similar enough that one can be a variation of the other.
Thank you for conceding the argument.
A POSSIBLE pathway to a common ancestor exists, verified through known relatives, for all organisms all the way back to LUCA.
Thank you for conceding the argument.
rorschach>
Thanks for posting that, I had no idea that a possible relative of mitochondria had been identified, I was still under the impression that the endosymbiotic bacteria was sorta accepted, but didn’t have that much clear evidence supporting it.
kinda neat.
:)
I too am waiting for medic0506 to explain how, if starlight is not physical and does not travel between the star and our eye, what we see with our eyes can be altered by putting an instrument, like a prism or a telescope, or a physical object, like a moon or a dust cloud, IN BETWEEN our eyes and the star.
er, that should have read something like ‘endosymbiotic theory’ instead of the ‘endosymbiotic bacteria’ that i typed…
:/
thanks again for pointing it out, was something I completely missed, and it’s cool to hear validation of it.
:)
There are multiple strands of evidence for common descent of very different organisms (the fossil record, biogeography, the pattern of nested hierarchy among large and very diverse groups of organisms – such as all eukaryotes – found indpendently in anatomy, physiology and genetics), and some of those types of evidence cover all organisms known. You can read about this evidence here or here. The evidence for all organisms being related by common descent lies in the use of the same small set of types of polymers (polynucleotides, polypeptides, and polysaccharides) with the same chirality across all life in each case, even though the chiral isomers are chemically equivalent; the use of only 22 out of the 390 possible amino acids in proteins, of just 4 out of over 100 possible nucleosides in DNA, the universality of the genetic code (with minor variations, which follow the lines of major taxonomic groups), the use of the same energy storage molecule (ATP) and metabolic processes (glycolysis, the citric acid cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation). Without common descent of all life, there is no reason to expect these fundamental commonalities. Indeed, it would be highly advantageous for organisms to use very different genetic codes from each other, for example, since this would severely limit the ability of viruses to infect them.
Of course such evidence will have been pointed out to you many times, so you are simply confirming your gross dishonesty in denying its existence.
In medic0506’s creationist worldview, two animals must either be the same kind or not, and the distinction is absolute. If horses and zebras are the same kind, there is no reason why they should not be able to interbreed with perfect fertility. If horses and zebras are not the same kind, they should not be able to interbreed at all.
What we actually see, the intermediate TRANSITIONAL fertility whereby they can produce a live offspring, but that offspring is infertile, is, if medic0506 were actually honest, utterly inexplicable by the creationist concept of “kinds”. The rare mule foal, like this one http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_6464853/mule-foal-fools-genetics-impossible-birth is similarly utterly inexplicable under the creationist concept of fixed kinds.
These kinds of rare transitional events are of course, exactly to be expected in the evolutionary paradigm. When two species gradually diverge over time we fully expect to see a period where they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, but with barriers that slow down gene flow, followed by a period where they can interbreed, but the offspring are infertile most of the time, with an occasional rare exception that isn’t infertile, followed by a period where they can interbreed but the offspring are infertile all the time, followed by a period where they can’t interbreed at all.
or a pair of glasses.
I demand to know why my vision is shit if the problem is not that light enters my eye at the wrong angle.
@172 Kevin
Of course he is. That´s as far as his knowledge about biology gets him. These people think that knowing about farm animals and the existence of these things called “cells” constitutes a deep understanding of biology. As someone else already pointed out, they are so ignorant they can’t even see how ignorant they are.
Ironically, a frog cell and a horse cell, under light microscopy magnification, are virtually indistinguisheable…
You’ve got your work cut out for you, then.
31. Sally:
No, just saying that I don’t give up, and am more likely to be banned than to, as PZ said, “retreat”.
Correct, good catch.
So you’re telling me that you have “scientific observation” of all organisms sharing a common ancestor?? Is this “observation” empirical and objective?? If so, please share this evidence with the rest of us.
*waits for response with evo-friendly definition of “observation”*
There is science, and there are scient-ISTS, that contradict your beliefs, so please don’t presume to be the spokesman for all of “science”, just because you might represent those who believe in evolutionism.
You are correct. Since relatedness can be established through tracing lineages even if two organisms can’t inter-breed, but inter-breeding would make both true as well, “and/or” would be more technically correct.
Why is it “vague” when that’s how biology works?? If it’s vague then the evo position is also vague. You apparently believe that you share a common ancestor with chimps, yet you can’t inter-breed with them, so the and/or would have to apply to “species”, as well.
Well, there is always the option to read a book, you know, or peruse material available on the internet, or attend a lecture. But here’s the thing, you have to be open to evaluate and accept evidence, to allow it to change the beliefs you were indoctrinated into.
And you are not. So while this thread and the thunderdome one have some light entertainment value for the regulars here, we are not actually doing it to sway you, medic0506, we are doing it for the people out there reading who may not be hopeless closeminded numbnuts like yourself.
Nick Gotts gave you the link to the evidence in @181, and even described much of it for you. All of it is empirical and objective.
Which we note you have ignored.
Your continued intellectual dishonesty, medic0506, is disgusting.
medic0506 @ 187, this thread
Where medic0506 claims that the existence of people who believe a certain thing indicates the likelihood of it being true.
medic0506 @ 427, Thunderdome 48
Where medic0506 claims that the existence of people who believe a certain thing does not indicate the likelihood of it being true.
@medic0506:
Humans and mice are related. We’ve traced lineage back to a single common ancestor.
And your egregious intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy and utter incompetency is one of our most effective tools for convincing the people out there. So please keep it up medic0506. You make for an excellent evolution teaching tool.
Why is it “vague” when that’s how biology works?? – medic0506
Because evolutionary biology asserts that all organisms have a common ancestor, and makes predictions based on that falisfiable assertion – see here. You, by contrast, have repeatedly failed to specify any means whereby we can determine whether two orgnaisms that cannot interbreed have a common ancestor. You have said this is done by “tracing lineages”, but you have not said how lineages are to be traced. Evotionary biology, of course, has multiple methods for doing this, and nowadays it is done primarily through genetics, and specifically the existence of genetic commonalities that have no functional significance. These show that hippos and whales, for example, which you cliam to belong to different “kinds”, are descended from a common ancestor. How do creationists trace lineages?
Oh, and medico5060, what is starlight, and how can it affect our eyes and telescopes without travelling between the star producing it and those eyes and telescopes?
32. Johnny:
Call me an optimist, but I hold out hope that there are some people here who aren’t so closed-minded on the issue, and that something that gets said in the discussion might cause them to take a second look. In spite of what you might think about creationists, I am not impervious or immune to evidence if it exists. Yes, I see no reason not to take Genesis as historical and authoritative but if presented with valid evidence, it might be me who is the one taking a second look, though I will definitely scrutinize that evidence. I love to learn, and I’ve found that arguing your own personal beliefs against those who hold an opposing opinion, is a good way of doing just that, especially when you argue an issue that you take great interest in. Hope that answers your question.
Name and cite those scientists. We real scientist want to point and laugh.
By the way, you lie every time you say evolutionism. Evolution is a scientific conclusion based and a million or so pieces of scientific evidence. It isn’t a religion, it has no deity, no holy book, nothing to make it a religion. All science has is a methodology that works to figure out how reality works. That methodology approaches the truth, and there is always room for improvement.
You are the one with the religion. An imaginary deity you can’t/won’t show exists, and book of mythology you pretend is inerrant. All presupposed without evidence. That is religion.
I had wondered earlier whether to laugh or cry when medic0506 demonstrated that they couldn’t do secondary school arithmetic of a kind normally taught to children somewhere around the age of 12 or so (fun with sums of distance, speed and time) when he admitted that he couldn’t conceptually relate the distance of a light-year to the speed of light. Now he says he doesn’t think light is something that physically travels from one place to another at all. This time I’m definitely going to incline towards crying. How is is possible that someone can get through school and come out at the age of 18 or so with no notion of what light is? Of why we see colours in a rainbow, why a pencil looks bent in water, why the moon is visible to us, how we see a reflection in a mirror?
It’s frightening. I can only hope that people as poorly educated – as miserably deprived of education – as medic0506 are far and few between, and that it’s only because the really egregious examples sometimes show up here that they give the impression of constituting more of an affliction than they really are. Well I can hope.
Without providing third party evidence to back up your fuckwitted and bullshit assertions, your chances of anybody doing anything other than pointing and laughing at what you say is ZERO. Not because we are closed minded, but because we require what we consider evidence, which will never be your word alone. Which is why you need to provide citations to third parties to back up what you say. Otherwise, you give us no reason to do anything other than laugh at you.
34. Omnicrom:
You do realize that the logical extension of your response means that you’re saying that “species” is also vague, do you not?? That’s ok though, I agree to an extent, but neither of us can do anything about that, it’s just how nature works.
Kinds and species are not the same, although they may match up at times. You believe that one species flows into the next over time. I believe there is “discontinuity” between groups of organisms, and although organisms can produce variations of themselves, they will remain very similar in form and function, to their ancestors. You believe a horse and a banana to be related, I don’t.
@187 medi0506
It just so happens that the scientists who accept “evolutionism” can SCIENTIFICALLY demonstrate their possition, whereas these creationist scientists that contradict stablished science can’t. Just because a scientist believes something it doesn’t mean that belief is scientific. We tell the difference by looking at wether a particular belief a scientists has can be supported by evidence and follows the scientific method. If it can, that belief is scientific and therefore when that scientist expresses that belief he/she is indeed speaking for “all of science” because he/she is pressenting a scientific view. If it can’t, as happens with the beliefs of the creationists, we can safely say that those particular beliefs are not scientific and do NOT represent science.
Your dishonest insistence on using science as an authority only when it is convenient for you is noted and met with contempt…
@medic0506:
We very much realize species is a vague terminology, but we at least don’t say that there’s some arbitrary, magical cutoff that prevents one species from having the same ancestor as another – everything meets back at some point.
What is the physical barrier preventing two different species from having a single common ancestor?
medic0506, here is your chance to learn something before you die a dumb fool, what you believe to be true reflects what you have been told by parents, peers, teachers etc in your life so far, however your beliefs are not supported by the evidence.
So how do I put this, you may choose to keep your head firmly embedded in the sand, it might feel like the safer option, but if you at all care about whether your preconceptions are true, that is not the way to go.
medic0506 @ 194
How are you defining “valid evidence”? Are you suggesting everything presented so far, like Nick Gotts’ post at 181, is “invalid evidence”? What method are you using do distinguish between valid and invalid evidence?
Apparently not enough to learn how light works.
medic0506
I think I’m beginning to see where you’re coming from. I personally only understand some very tiny areas of science. I couldn’t for example off hand tell you the experiments that have demonstrated that light travels at the speed of light. Nor could I explain why physicists believe the universe to be 13 billion years old. But I trust the result because I trust the process because I’ve participated in it. Scientific theories conform to very specific rules. They have to be testable, they have to make predictions and they have to be falsifiable. They also have to explain the preponderance of available evidence, not just one or two hand picked examples. Creationism fits none of those rules so that while you and others may find it a satisfactory explanation for the existence and behavior of the universe, it isn’t science.
Kevin, Youhao Huo Mao @ 200:
I’m guessing The God Condom.
…but I might be wrong.
187 medic0506
What a smug way of repeating the tired nonsense of “were you there?”. Really, that’s all you got, apparently. But yeah, what more can you expect from someone who believes the Earth is 6000 years old and starlight doesn’t exist? You truly are a stunning example of an imbecile.
194 medic0506
Tell me, are you only dishonest here talking to us, or are you also totally incapable of being honest with yourself? Because if you truly believe what you wrote here, you are delusional to an astonishing degree.
If they can vary a little bit, what is the mechanism that prevents each little bit of variation from adding up over time to end up becoming very different?
If you compare the CELLS of a horse and a banana, it is OBVIOUS they are related.
Then why are you continuing to ignore the EVIDENCE provided for you by Nick Gotts in @181, you pathetic liar?
Still awaiting your answer to Nick Gott’s question about starlight, medic0506.
If light is not physical, and does not travel, how does our moon shine with reflected light? Explain that medic0506.
Speaking of starlight, I already provided you with plenty of direct observational evidence that starlight travels and moves at a fixed speed, BETWEEN your two posts insisting that it doesn’t, which you proved quite impervious and immune to, medic0506, you pathetic liar.
Greetings,
“I’m willing to be proven wrong on this, but I don’t believe that starlight is something that actually physically travels to earth, in order for us to see it. I think that light is emitted from an energy source, and if the amount of energy released as light is enough, the object will be bright enough for our eyes to see it from earth. I don’t buy when someone argues that starlight has been traveling for billions of years to get here. Feel free to prove me wrong by proving the current understanding of light travel, but no one else so far has been able to address this without just throwing more theoretical BS at it.”
This would mean that if a object in the night sky is bright enough – exceeds a specific threshold – we should be able to see it, regardless of its distance.
Either we see it or we don’t.
If that is the case, then telescopes should make no difference to the number of objects we can see in the night sky.
This clearly is not the case, as we can see far more objects in the night sky with the aid of a telescope than with the naked eye.
Therefore, your belief/assertion is wrong.
Kindest regards,
James
medic0506 – is a whale a mammal or a fish?
I wouldn’t ask something so silly normally, but you have to admit that when a person has managed to get all the way through school without learning that light travels it’s hard to know quite how far back to bedrock to take the questions.
Is a bat a mammal or a bird?
Very Graeme “Stupider than a Turkey” Bird–like: Simply does not understand the concept of evidence, and (assuming that analogy holds) is also incapable of providing evidence that he(? she?) does understand what evidence is.
Bird was challenged to show he knew what evidence was. The challenge was simple: Show that he had lost an election in Australia. A reference was all that was needed. It could have been to Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge, the Australian elections authority, an newspaper report, or so on…. And it was on a subject Mr Bird was (self-evidently) very familiar with, so he didn’t even have to do much of anything in the way of research.
Bird couldn’t — or more accurately, wouldn’t (he refused) — to do so. Bird would not demonstrate he knew what “evidence” means, even for about the simplest possible non-controversial obviously-known-to-him challenge.
This fruitcake strikes me as being identical. I simply do not see any evidence at all he(? she?) groks “evidence”, or the concept of evidence. There’s lots of word-salad and assertions to the contrary, all noticeably evidence-free. Almost pathologically evidence-free.
More evidence for medi0506 to ignore.
http://www.speed-light.info/measure/speed_of_light_history.htm
Each calculation of the speed of light, of course, is also a proof that light travels from point to point.
opposablethumbs, The fruitcake does not seem to be familiar with “mammal”; Or, possibly — he(? she?) hasn’t addressed this point directly at the of this writing (which, perhaps unrealistically, assumes he(? she?) will do so, and so do honestly) — asserts there is no such thing, that it is an arbitrary label.
I wonder if medi0506 accepts DNA fingerprinting, such as paternity testing. That is, after all, exactly the same technology that drives our (current) understanding of species relations.
As an extension, I have to wonder if they accept DNA testing for genetic disorders? Same basic tech, same basic assumptions.
Somehow – although I may very well be wrong on this – I rather suspect medi0506 accepts only as much science as doesn’t conflict with their preexisting beliefs. Quite like their acceptance of the bible, I would be willing to bet.
Ah, like “kind”. *snicker*
I’m enjoying how medico apparently does not know how eyes work, and is now ignoring the subject of light entirely.
Those are some excellent debating skillz you have there, med.
Or are you just trolling? I’m leaning towards that, actually…
Are you Cassiterides reborn? It was meant as a bit of a joke when I referenced the similarity ~4 days ago in the dome, but the crap that keeps coming from your keyboard makes me wonder.
@medic0506
Your approach to this argument is fundamentally flawed, in large part because you are arguing from ignorance. If you truly wish to argue effectively about the truth of your convictions, educate yourself on the arguments from the opposing side.
This means learning the science. I know, you don’t want to do that because it’s all obviously “wrong” (to your world view), but until you’ve mastered the basic concepts your arguments will not be taken seriously. Learn about how light works, and how vision works. Learn about genetics, and how scientists are examining the commonalities and differences in the genetic code between species. Learn about how scientists understand taxonomy.
Until you do that, you will continue to make assertions that contradict basic scientific knowledge. Stuff with so much experimental and observational evidence backing it up that you come across as a complete ignoramus for denying or misunderstanding it.
To counter their arguments, learn them.
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.”
– Sun Tzu
If this fruitcake is Cassiterides, that would essentially confirm my suspicion his(? her?) “understanding” of vision is the completely-discredited and nonsensical extramission hypothesis.
I read the whole thread, and I’m still facepalming about medico’s ignorance of light. Human understanding of the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces in the universe, is intimately tied into modern technology. I’m reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes comic, where Calvin’s dad messes with him by explaining that the TV and vacuum cleaner work by magic. I seriously wonder if medico thinks GPS is witchcraft or something.
Treating starlight as something fundamentally different? Might as well go back to the classic elements with stars and moon as ether. I’m also curious how medico would (choose not to) explain that the lenses in my glasses affect my perception of stars. The lenses were designed to bend boring old traveling terrestrial light, so why would they also work on starlight if it’s so fundamentally different to the point of not being affected by space. (Space as in the thing distance and volume are made of, not in the astronomy sense of the word, but yeah, that, too.) Heck, I’m curious how medico would (choose not to) explain my perception of starlight being negatively affected by my eyes’ aberrant focal length that lead to my nearsightedness.
@medic0506
As a first step, try Googling “counting creationist arguments”. You will quickly find lots of sites summarizing the scientific arguments against creationism.
Read the arguments. Think about them. Find the flaws, and then research the flaws to make sure they are real (and not reflections of your incomplete knowledge). Then you may have a start in arguing with people here. You will find that even thus armed, people here will have counter-arguments. Backed up with facts. So you then can go back, learn more, and return with better arguments. This is a virtuous circle in which you learn more with each engagement.
Your basic problem is a common one. People on the Internet tend to gravitate to sites that agree with what they already believe. In this echo chamber, they don’t get exposed to the opposing arguments, and then think they have all the answers.
You’ve taken a first step in coming here. You exposed yourself to opposing viewpoints. The people here are very knowledgeable about science and, believe it or not, very knowledgeable about the Bible. Atheists tend to read the Bible more carefully and thoroughly than most Christians, because they want to understand the arguments of the opposing side in order to counter them.
They’ve done their homework. I challenge you to go do yours.
make that “countering Creationist arguments”
Here’s a question for medic0506 concerning light: If light is not physical and does not travel, how does our moon shine with reflected light? How would something that, as you claim, doesn’t travel and isn’t physical “bounce” off of a physical object? Explain how this could happen.
Cool, but this is not just a matter of belief – the real question is, what does the evidence indicate?
The concept of “kinds” is much like “transitional” in that it relies on gaps in our knowledge. “Transitionals” are whatever is between what we know about the descent of organisms, and “kinds” are groups that use those same gaps as boundaries. The problem with both concepts is that they get more and more irrelevant the more we discover.
@medic0506
For extra credit:
Read the Bible. Start to finish, each chapter and verse. Compare the different sections. Ask questions. This is the book you consider the ultimate reference. See if what is in the Bible makes sense, given what we know today.
As I said, atheists read the Bible. Critically. They will use that knowledge against you, because it is full of conflicting stories and demonstrably false assertions (like insects having four legs!) . You need to really understand this book. It is, after all, what you say you believe in.
Not the same Calvin and Hobbes that Bronze Dog is referring to, but today’s has a similar theme and related to light and logic and evidence…
We really shouldn’t need to prove that light travels at a finite speed, as your schools should have done so, but…
@medi0506: You can see that light travels yourself. We put some retroreflector mirrors on the moon, and you can bounce your very own laser off of them if you like (and have access to the necessary equipment), timing the trip.
BTW medic0506, a quick question (if you’re still around). ‘Nyms can have a point of reference in one’s life, at least to what one considers a facet as to who we are.
Were you Army, with tours during ’05/’06?
I may be reading too much into your ‘nym, but I’m curious.
Oooh, a reply just for me! Probably means I should be asking less obvious, less flippant questions.
As for the evidence for a universal common ancestor, Nick Gotts at #181 gave a pretty good summary. There is a lot of it, so I’d advise picking one line of evidence and reviewing that, rather than trying to tackle it all at once.
Anyone else read this Superman story from the 70s? (I can not believe I successfully googled it!): A bad guy has kidnapped someone at gun point and is making demands of Superman who is an a live TV broadcast. Superman flagrantly ignores the demands which compel the kidnappers to fire the gun to kill the guy. But it was all a trick. Superman knew they would fire the gun so he was listening with his super hearing for the gunshot. He was then able to pinpoint their exact location. He simple flew to the location in the time it takes for the bullet to fly twenty feet and stop the bullet.
This story assumes sounds can be observed by everyone immediately at the moment of the event. I think most people have an (incorrect) intuitive belief in this. That is, if an event occurs, it instantaneously effects the universe and will be observable immediately. It takes a subtle (but not very) mind to realize that means of observation must always travel so no observation is ever instantaneous. Once one makes that connection it’s practically impossible to conceive of observation at a distant without travel. I got to hand it to medico. S/He’s one in a million.
So, no, I don’t think s/he is claiming eye to object light emission or magic. S/He’s just claiming a universal immediate method of observation. However we do have to wonder how the *HECK* does that work.
So again, medico. What is starlight and how does it work? How is the connection between the star and my eye established and why does it bend and refract and block for mirrors, prisms, walls, eyelids etc.? Considering how complex this establishment between source and observer is and how this most be established for *every* *potential* observer in the universe how all all the observation connections processed and established instantaneously.?
Light isn’t a physical thing that travels?
I’ll just leave this here:
Light propagation
This reminds me of a thread back on IIDB back in the early naughties. I think it was someone with the ‘nym DavidInTX or DaveFromTX — or some variation thereof — who argued that radiological dating cannot be measured accurately for anything beyond 50k years. The main reason was because, as he asserted, the radiation doesn’t have the half-life necessary to measure accurately. However, carbon dating was accurate because the cutoff age on that is around 50k years, and he acknowledged that was probably the minimum age of the earth and humans(placing the maximum at around 70k years.) His main line of evidence was that some creationist somewhere tested a 3myo fossil with carbon dating and it came back with an age less than 50k years…
He was… quite a piece of work. He has a few snippets on FSTDT.
medic0506 reminds me of him just a bit.
Some extramission hypotheses do assume instantaneous eye-to-object eyebeam (“light”) travel. This is “how” you can see objects which are known to be very very far away (such as stars) as soon as you open your eyes or turn around to look behind you.
I concur the fruitcake may not believe in extramission — she(? he?) has been noticeably silent on light & vision since bleating out that nonsense — but some form of extramission is apparently a far more common belief than you might expect (see me@136).
That doesn’t rule out the fruitcake believing something even more
magicalsillier, of course…Come on, medic0506, won’t you tell us? Is a whale a fish? If not, what is it?
Is a bat a bird? If not, what is it?
I really want you to answer these – it’s been a rough day and I could use a laugh.
I mean, you being a brave soldier for JC and all – you can’t be scared of a couple of simple little questions, can you? Or scared that some strangers on the internet might find your answers amusing?
@medic0506
Observe the comment above from woozy. It is based on several well understood principles of science:
– Light energy is carried from one location to another in packets called photons. These can be measured, and the speed of light in different media (vacuum, air, water, glass, etc.) is well known.
– Light energy is released by electrons dropping from a higher energy orbital in atoms to a lower energy orbital. The difference in energy between the orbitals is carried by photons, whose energy matches the difference in orbital energy levels. Because different elements have different orbital energy levels, we can determine what elements released the photons by measuring the energy (frequency) of the photon.
– Light is electromagnetic energy, and consists of a small fraction of the total range of electromagnetic frequencies we can measure. This includes radio waves. All of these types of electromagnetic energy travel at the same speed, the speed of light, in a vacuum.
– Our understanding of light enables us to make many different devices that depend on the properties of light to function. GPS? It’s based on measuring the time it takes for radio waves from several satellites to get to a GPS receiver. If that speed were not a constant, GPS would not work. Your digital camera? It works by detecting the photons that come through the lens, which cause electrons in the sensor to jump out of their orbitals, causing moving charges to be detected, which are measured and stored as a picture. Much of our technology is heavily dependent on the properties of light being known and constant.
This is science, upon which we build our technologies. To deny that science is to deny that the technologies we take for granted work. For you to continue to believe otherwise is to deny reality.
Yeah, but that is all just theoretical stuff backed experimental results that were then successfully utilized in engineering endeavors.
That has nothing on going with whatever made up shit you’ve decided to believe at this moment in time.
Scientists live in such a small world, forced to believe in what actually is instead of being free to believe in anything without being shackled by stupid things like facts and logic.
I believe that the problem is medico has an intuitive, elementary school level understanding of the world. They see light as just a really bright color. You can’t see dim stars because there isn’t enough contrast. You can’t see far away stars because they are too small. Light is basically just a color that sticks out prominently, and dark is a color that is harder to see. And we all see with eyes that are basically scanners, directly seeing objects with no light necessary. I imagine if you poke them and get them to talk about gravity, tides, or fucking magnets, they will display a similar ignorance as with every other scientific subject they have blabbered about so far.
@234
Thanks. But I think you might be confusing my comment with another. Mine wasn’t really based on science so much as my attempt to try to comprehend a non-scientific mind. (How do you imagine the workings of something if you believe X. Although I suppose acknowledging a model at all in which X works is itself a “scientific principal”. Although its a pretty basic and abstract one.)
I’m a bit curious. What does an extramission eye-to-object model provide that an object-to-eye-model doesn’t? I suppose there’s a bit of simplicity in that there isn’t any wasted light. No point wasting a photon that bounces through a mirror and lands on my cheek if no-one will ever see it…. except than my cheek isn’t highlighted if someone isn’t looking at me? … and … wait a second … light and illumination doesn’t come from the eye so what is the eye emission if it *isn’t* light and where how is my cheek being illuminated if it has no source of light… this just adds on more extraneous necessity! …. (brain hurts) … unless the light on my cheek is being beamed to the sun? … well, relativistically I guess that’s equally valid but it’s so *stupid*!…..
Any way. As the beam from my eye is just as complicated as the beam to my eye, I don’t see what this is meant to gain. Was time and light speed an issue? I don’t see how either model helps.
Extramission was the theory of some of the Presocratics including Pythagoras and it was Plato’s theory as well. It was probably partly inspired by the reflection from the tapetum in some animals’ eyes in the dark. Aristotle rejected extramission, partly on the grounds that a wide field of faraway objects (such as the stars) could be immediately apprehended all at once. He reasoned that some kind of “beam” would only allow a narrow field of perception. Aristotle’s theory took up the idea that vision was a function of the transparency of the medium that “carried” the perception. So the transparency of air in continuity with the vitreous humor of the eye allowed instantaneous apprehension of objects in an unobstructed view.
It is to the physician Galen that we owe the muddle that became the Medieval concepts of vision. He believed, following Aristotle, that there had to be some property of the eye itself that made visual perception possible, but he moved the “seat of vision” from the clear fluid of the vitreous humor to the “crystalline” lens (which also as it happens is filled with fluid but they didn’t know that). The lens, for Galen, was where the circulating “animal spirits” emanating from ventricles in the brain via the (believed to be hollow) optic nerve were refined into “visual spirits” that interfaced with the transparent and therefore transmitting medium of air and thus delivered visual perception back to the body.
Ancients’ theories of such things were personal, not general like a theory of optics; vision was a property of a body, the power to apprehend objects themselves. So, we see absurdities like the fact that Euclid did devise a substantially correct theory of optics, but because he also held to extramission and considered it absurd that an image was formed “inside the eye” his optics were never applied to the problem. This kind of deference to authority was a major hindrance to empirical study until the 17th century. It should be noted regarding Galen’s theorizing that there is another aspect of thought in antiquity that is alien to our empirical ways: all such communication of ideas about the world had a rhetorical orientation. We look at Galen’s hopelessly convoluted theorizing and wonder how he could have held to it. But Galen was a physician who had other concerns than constructing a parsimonious description of reality. The needless complexity, the hodge-podge of ideas from past esteemed authorities, these were probably features, not bugs. What was important for Galen was obfuscation as much as -er- elucidation. Evidence-based medicine was a long ways off and doctors frankly had no interest in educating their patients; the most important things were sounding knowledgeable and making sure that it was understood that a bad prognosis was due to factors beyond the physician’s control.
medico has no such excuse
That has always puzzled me also, as well as how the feck it’s supposed to work.
My understanding is the extramission hypothesis came about as an attempt to explain some observations, such as a cat’s shining eyes at night. Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge adds that it is also an attempt to explain certain forms of respect for organisation superiors — the example given is saluting is “really” shading yourself from the bright emissions of your commanding officer — which is a new explanation I don’t recall. That “explanation” also could apply to bowing and similar.
For some reason — which I don’t know — extramission is though to be “more obvious” or “common sense” than intromission. And apparently (sorry to repeat myself!) is still held by a surprising number of people.
But as anteprepro points out, a rather more sensible — albeit also not even wrong — hypothesis is that “light” is simply a really bright color and dark a very dim one. So (until you start thinking about it), “nothing” travels. (I vaguely wonder if that is what Snoof was trying to recall?)
Thanks!, CJO, Your summary helps to clarify several points about the history of, and reasoning behind, extramission.
We still don’t know if today’s fruitcake believes in extramission or not, she(? he?) hasn’t said a thing. The guessing that he(? she?) might is mostly extrapolating from what other fundiegrad residents are known to have written elsewhere on the ‘Net.
@blf
medico0506 is a he. He identifies as male in his DDO profile.
Thanks CJO!
This is the first time in my recollection that I’ve ever preferred a tenet of Aristotle over Plato or (say it ain’t so!) Euclid. In fact this might be the first time I’ve ever preferred a tenet of Aristotle over *anyone*. I hadn’t considered the glowing eyes. Yes, *that* would imply something coming from the eyeballs. But even still, I can’t see this being more intuitive then intromission.
More intuitive, I think would be a instantaneous effect; visions do not travel– they simply *are*. Of course that’d lead to questions as to how visions reflect in mirrors, bend in water, and how light illuminates and bounces off things (maybe an entirely different phenomenon).
Extramission has a certain relativistic symmetry to it. (The shore receding from the boat is as equally accurate a viewpoint as a the boat leaving the shore.) But it if the light *starts* in the eye it has to get back to us *somehow* for us to see it.
Anyway, medico. Please explain 1) is starlight different from other light (which has a speed) and 2) how do the mechanics of perception of starlight work at all if not via travel 3) how does reflection, blockage (closing your eyes), refraction, prisms, etc. work with starlight if starlight doesn’t travel?
These are serious and fundamental questions upon which your entire hypothesis rests.
=====
By the way, I still believe medico is a fictional persona. I guess, in this forum that would be a troll.
In keeping with his beliefs about biology, geology and astronomy, “his reality” is the product of a medieval worldview.
I think in this case that it’s more a belief that stars aren’t subject to the same laws of optics as terrestrial phenomena. That is, he would probably grant that we see ordinary objects by the light reflected off them onto our retinas, and that electromagnetism accurately explains how radar and GPS work etc. But the stars, see, are lights that god put in the firmament, not distant objects similar to the sun. Such conceptual discontinuities do not trouble a mind burdened with no expectation of consilience between explanations for diverse phenomena. A given explanation only has to stand on its own under the weight of whether it “seems right” to medico. And so it’s utterly pointless to have a discussion with him as he can ignore any evidence he he doesn’t like.
It seems to me extramission would require some sort of zen-like we create the vision in our eye and project it onto the world. Which I suppose the weirder philosophers might like but even for the weirdos like zeno and pythagoras it’s still pretty out there.
woozy:
The gulf between our understanding and the ancient one is wider than that. Objects in the visual field are perceived directly and instantaneously, there is no reflection or time of transit of energy or information. The extramitted “beam” should be understood as an extension of the perceiving body, and sight as a kind of almost tactical sensation. So a (“spiritual” or at least non-physical) part of the seeing person actually was believed to “touch” the object seen and apprehend it directly.
Except he accepted (at the time) that they were the distances we claimed them to be.
The medieval view point was not without an internal logic. It’s just that it’s a logic that completely and totally broke down with specific data and observation. On the other hand, everything the scientific method determines about any where we can not physically go relies upon the Copernican principal that we take on…. dare I say it… faith. Except the Copernican principal has demonstrated time and time again to have inerring predictive results thus verifying it.
A creationist must reject the Copernican principal else his beliefs are simply demonstrably false.
As a (lapsed) mathematician, I’m fascinated with logical systems based on arbitrary axioms, so I find medieval science fascinating.
@245. Ah, hadn’t thought of the lightbeam as being *part* of us. Yes, touch is the analogy that works.
Yeah, what CJO said at 245. My understanding of extramission theories was that these rays that emanated from our eyes were like a blind person’s cane: they contacted the objects of the world and we felt them through them. Of course, being immaterial, they could change their direction at any speed you wanted. I hesitate to imagine how many times the speed of light they’d have to move at the “sphere of the fixed stars” when you were really whipping your head around.
I suppose there are some extramission hypotheses which postulate that the light does return, but my understanding — and also the reason I can’t even begin to grasp how anyone could think it would work — is that some (possibly most?) extramissions hypotheses do not require the light / eyebeam to return. (Unless I am seriously misremembering, which is always possible.)
In searching around I found Theories of Visual Perception: Problems and Perspectives, which says:
That lecture also gives some more reasons for the ancient belief in extramission (or more accurately, for rejecting intromission), namely that — despite Euclid — there was no understanding of optics, and it was supposed “objects cast of resemblances of themselves, called eidola, rather in the way that snakes cast off their skins. These eidola are captured by the eye.”
There are some obvious problems with that, apparent even in Plato’s day, causing problems for intromission to be accepted.
Slightly related, I finally found a summary of Does Something Leave Our Eyes During Vision? Many Adults Say YES:
Again, thanks CJO. The idea that the eyebeam is “part” of a person was not something I had grokked.
Whether or not the fruitcake believes something like that remains unknown, and several others have proposed alternative ideas (that is, other than extramission) as to what he may believe.
I know! When God created stars Billions of lightyears away only 6000 years ago, He also made photons in-transit to appear to have come from those stars. So, scientists, your measuring stick is an illusion. God created everything, just 6000 years ago to make us Think it is much older, so that by rejecting that illusion, we can finally accept the true light of salvation. [ my brain just asploded .:)*(:. ]
That’s Last Thursdayism, isn’t it.
I still dream of finding out if whales are fish, and if bats are birds … perhaps we’ll never know now. If only medic0506 would tell us!
It may be a while. The message could be on its way, but light is awfully unpredictable, so there’s no telling when it might happen. Or when anything will happen, I guess. Everything is just a big, muddled swamp of chaos smeared in no particular pattern at all. Because the Bible says so.
And he put the photons in transit showing the stars changing, like the star Saduleak turning in Supernova 1987A turning into the Remnant which then continued to change minute by minute as it was continually observed. All just ghost photons placed in transit like some cosmic movie…
You know, medic0506, you’re not somehow required to reply to comments one at a time. It’s possible to include several replies in a single comment. Here, look:
Notably, the 16-year-old he married was living in Uzbekistan up to then, and was probably quite desperate to get out. happily exploited this.
Actually… I don’t think anyone has tried in the last 5 million years.
What do you think seeing is?
Jericho is older than that.
The walls of Jericho are older than that!!! They’re at least 11,400 years old.
Keep in mind that there are several species of zebras.
You can’t, because mules too rarely manage to have offspring; it does occasionally happen, though.
If they had more, they’d attract each other; that would show over really long distances, I’m sure. Gluons attract each other, and look how differently the strong nuclear force behaves from electromagnetics or gravity.
Well. In organisms with sexual reproduction, the production of gametes (sperm, egg cells) involves meiosis; and the first step in meiosis is that the chromosomes inherited from the parents align – they physically move toward each other, and sufficiently similar stretches of DNA physically stick together for a while. The less similar the parents’ genomes are, the more difficult this becomes.
If evolution has been happening for long enough, we must expect this similarity to be continuous, not discrete; while if many have been created separately, we’d expect it to be an either-or affair.
The former is observed. Species that are less and less closely related are less and less interfertile. There are many cases like the abovementioned mules where offspring sometimes but not always happens; and once again, they form a tree shape.
…and then I saw that Jadehawk had already said it all in comment 167, and Amphiox again in comment 182 (with a link to a fertile mule even). :-] But I’ll let it stand. From my experience with creationists, I can’t expect medic0506 to understand anything the first ten times it’s explained!
No, not as Caninae – as Caniformia.
No, hyenas don’t belong to Felinae, though they do belong to Feliformia.
That was 30 years ago, when your highschool textbooks were written! :-)
And they aren’t just theoretically possible, mind. They occur in living organisms today – just not in proteins*, but in other functions (as neurotransmitters for instance, or simply as metabolic intermediates).
In fact, I’m surprised by your number of 390. I was taught that 800 amino acids occur in plants alone.
* Not counting posttranslational modification. Collagen, a group of closely related proteins found only in vertebrates, contains hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine, but they aren’t coded in the genes for collagen – collagen is made with proline and lysine, and then an enzyme comes and modifies some of the proline and lysine residues.
With DNA and RNA together, you get to 5. :-)
With posttranscriptional modifications to tRNA, you get to maybe 10 (counting such things as inosine or pseudouracil). Yet others occur as metabolic intermediates. A few more have been synthesized in labs; some of those would work just as fine in DNA/RNA as A, C, G, T and U do, but they’re never found there.
You might try reading it, then.
It doesn’t merely contradict physical reality. Oh no! It also contradicts itself!
Start right at the beginning: take the two creation stories, Gen 1:1–2:3 and Gen 2:4b onwards. The first says the first man and the first woman were created on the same day and after all other animals. The second says the first man was created first and the first woman was created last, with all other animals in between.
Or take poor Noah, who was explicitly told by God to both take one pair of every (Gen 6:19–20)and seven pairs of every clean, one pair of every unclean (Gen 7:2–3), both of which he then by some logic-distorting miracle did (Gen 6:22, 7:5, 7:8–9, 7:14–15) before entering the ark both on the day the flood began (7:11–13) and seven days earlier (7:7–10) while being both 600 and 599 years old (7:6, 7:11).
Noah knowing which are clean and which are not contradicts Leviticus, but that’s not Genesis, so I’ll let it slide. *toothy grin*
(Funnily enough, the contradictory near-repetitions in the flood story have an almost evolutionary explanation.)
…Of course we do. Species are vague – and the theory of evolution explains both why they’re vague in the first place and why they’re vague in exactly the observed ways and not others.
You’re shooting a most glorious own goal here.
If they’re not, why do they have 50 % of their genes in common?
Why do they both have cells? Why do they have eukaryotic cells with the same phospholipids in their membranes, with the same protein cage around the double membrane that encloses the nucleus? Why do they have ribosomes? Why do they have eukaryotic ribosomes, not the similar ribosomes other organisms have? Why do they have DNA and RNA with the same 5 nucleotides and proteins with the same 21 amino acids?
…and sexism.
The font here does bizarre things to numbers. Compare o (lowercase O) and 0 (zero): he’s medic zero five zero six.
First, many creationists have proposed exactly this. That’s the problem with trying to parodize them.
Second, it means they believe God lies. Apparently they fail to notice.
Perhaps. But it is ironic sexism, at least. The implication is that Calvin’s mother actually gave a correct answer and actually has a rudimentary understanding of relativity which I imagine the typical american does not. The father’s answer implies he’s joking and he knows he’s answer is bs and his wife’s answer is probably correct and thus he is indicating the idea the women are less capable at abstract reasoning (an idea that was sexist then and which still exists now and is still sexist) was bs too.
I will admit I was surprised to find myself a bit startled at reading the comic today while I wasn’t at all when I read it originally (and I do remember reading it originally when I would have been in my 30s in 1994). 1994 was not a period of great sexism and we haven’t gotten really much better since and Calvin and Hobbes was a liberal and humanitarian strip. I think, though, that discussion as to whether woman weren’t as good at math and abstract reasoning was a bit more common then that it was easy to see this as making fun of a sexist attitude. Today the attitude is less commonly explicitly stated (though still assumed) and presenting it, even in jest to knock it down, seems jarring. (“Why would you even say something like that?” In ’94 the answer, “I don’t but others do” would have been a bit more convincing than it is now.) It’s a bit like laughing at Archie Bunker’s racism in the 70s. We know he’s satirizing racism but even *mentioning* these horrible attitudes seems disturbing now because they are so beyond the pale now.
stop saying that. we already know, you (singular) are the only one who doesn’t.
amazingly enough, that’dbe entirely irrelevant to “science”, since “science” is not the opinions of people. A Behe here and there doesn’t destroy scientific consensus on evolution, which exists because said Behes have failed to falsify it.
indeed it can, that’s why your definition of “kind” includes every life-form that has ever existed (except the first one, which didn’t interbreed with anything and didn’t have a parent organism)
except humans and chimps aren’t the same species; they’re the same family.
lol. how about applying that hope to your own closed-up brain.
except you’ve already disproven that claim with your behavior here. We’ve had open-minded creationists here in the past; trust me, you aren’t one of them.
the statement was very clear: you’ve taken a simplistic definition of the concept of “species”, and tacked some non-species stuff (common ancestor) on to allow for weaseling out because it allows anything to be grouped as “kind”.
Aside from that, of course “species” is a vague category; it’s a discrete label applied to a continuum, of course there’s gonna be gray areas at the edges. Point is though, if kinds are meant to be discrete groups, there should be none of that vagueness, because there shouldn’t be a continuum if different “kinds” aren’t related to each other.
except that you don’t actually believe that, if you also believe that two lizards that can’t reproduce can have a common ancestor that could reproduce with others of its kind.
it’s not a question of belief.
Oh, absolutely: the sexism is the character’s, not the author’s.
Yep.
and now, back to the really important part: if light is not physical and doesn’t travel, what is nearsightedness?
and: if light is not physical and doesn’t travel, how do glasses correct nearsightedness?
They squeeze the air in front of yer eyes (increasing the local atmospheric pressure), thus pushing the eyeball back into shape.
lol. but still: how can the shape of my eyeball matter, if the problem isn’t that light travels through the lens at the wrong angle?
Misshapen eyeballs inhibit the ability of the crystalline lens of the eye to refine the animal spirits. Duh.
The elongated eyeball typical of myopia is like a long hallway. To see the candle at one end from the other end, it needs to be bright. But if yer up close to it, it doesn’t need to be so bright. Same with the eyeball. Nearsighted people need brighter light, unless their eyeballs are pushed back into shape by the compressed air behind the eyeglasses.
The Hubble Space Telescope was aimed at a portion of the sky about 1/70 the size of the full moon and exposed for two million seconds (about 23 days). The result is the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (HXDF). There is a galaxy in this picture which is 12 billion light years away (actually it’s now about 14 billion ly away, the expansion of the universe has moved that galaxy and the Milky Way galaxy apart 2 billion ly more during the time it took the light to reach Hubble).
If a supernatural being created all of the billions of galaxies in the universe and all of the trillions of stars in those galaxies, I cannot believe it did so 6000 years ago. And I certainly don’t believe such a being cares if a teenager masturbates.
If light isn’t physical, then what exactly is being emitted by my flaptop screen, received by my eyes (after being slightly refocused by my specs) and interpreted by my brain right now?
How am I reading this bone-jarring ignorance from medico if the light from my screen isn’t travelling to my eyes?
How is that I can block medico’s idiotic posts out with my hand to protect myself from the burning molten stupid?
How is it that I can see that everyone but medico is doing the talking in this thread, while medico kicks back with a shit-eating grin on his face, ignoring 99% of what’s being said and frequently responding to serious questions with a one-sentence soundbite that’d make even Ken Ham embarrassed?
Medico: according to you, what is light?
Al Dente @265:
Something doesn’t look right. If the light travel distance was 12 billion light years, the current (co-moving) distance should be about 20 billion light years (back of the largish envelope). Probably more. Can you give a source?
Hank_Says @#266:
I suspect you probably don’t want to know the ‘answer’. From medic0506:
http://www.debate.org/forums/science/topic/38480/26#1498269
There may be no hope.
—
Although, medic0506, if you’re interested, Feynman explains light.
If light from space was not traveling at a finite speed, the the eclipse times of the moons of Jupiter would not vary dependant on how far away Jupiter is from the earth, in their relative orbital positions .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B8mer's_determination_of_the_speed_of_light
But they DO.
E pur si mouve, medico.
If light from the stars does not travel at a finite speed, then the angle of stellar aberration would be zero all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberration_of_light
But they are NOT.
E pur si mouve, medico.
Rob Grigjanis @267
I was repeatomg something I read some time ago. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I’m wrong. You know what they say about us old folks, memory is the second thing to go and I don’t remember what the first thing is.
There is no way that that isn’t willful ignorance.
Then again, there are people like Ray Comfort in the world, thus I will always second-guess whether it really is willful or not. But surely medic0506 isn’t getting paid for his preposterous bullshit he says online. So at least there’s that. Must really enjoy wasting his time.
Al Dente @270:
I still remember that the knee was the first thing, so maybe I’m not as old as I thought. Yay! What?
what.
what.
I have more questions now. What does medic0506 think energy is? Is he aware that his body runs on energy? That his thoughts are energy jumping around in his head?
I wonder what he thinks the “Electro-” in Electrocardiography, Electroencephalography, Electromyography, etc. means?
I now understand Pauli’s “It is not only not right, it is not even wrong.”
also, I hope people are submitting everything in this convo to FSTDT
Energy = glucose plus oxygen going to carbon dioxide and water plus ATP. link1 link2. But then, poor medico is too fatuous to actually read and understand links to evidence which proves Xim WRONG.
and on that note: if sunlight is NOT energy, why does it damage your eyes to look directly at the sun? if sunlight is not energy, why does sunburn exist?
if sunlight is not energy, why the fuck does it make things warmer!?
cm, I think I hate you for linking to that debate.org thread.
I mean, seriously, evidence for light being energy is fucking trivial: the seasons are evidence for this; sunburn is evidence for this; the fact that you can start a fire with a magnifying glass is evidence for this. The existence of solar ovens is evidence for this; etc.
You really have to try hard to remain that stubbornly ignorant. :-/
?
Collagen is a synapomorphy of the entire Metazoa (even the stuff we used to call ‘spongin’ is now considered a collagen afaik).
wut
That comment has several interacting layers of stupid.
cm, quoting medico @268:
Yeeeah, and why don’t plants fucking spontaneously combust during photosynthesis? There is literally no part of a plant – and nothing between this planet and the Sun – that can deal with the energy from sunlight.
And why don’t we get crispy-fried and covered with melanomas every time we go outside? There is literally nothing in the atmosphere, Earth’s magnetic field or our bodies to prevent that from happening.
And why do solar panels even work? There is literally no reason a solar panel should be able to convert photonic energy into electrical energy. I have literally NO IDEA why so many people stick those things on their roofs and face them toward the arc of the Sun.
And if black is the absence of colour, how do we even see black? Shouldn’t tyres and Playstations and rock band t-shirts be invisible? Why can I even see black people?
—
FFS.
Another reason to hate what Jon Milne did: he brought this Mediocre Buffoon to our attention. I’ve seen some ripe dumbarsery in my time, but actually debating whether LIGHT IS A THING is perhaps the most ripest and dumbest-arse foolery in the history of all of the things, ever. Hell, it’s so ripe it’s practically fermenting.
Mwahaha!
My work here is done. :-)
*fades away*
More from cm’s link to the writing’s of medic0.
As Debate.org seems to be a site for debate for the sake of debate, I imagine medic0 is simply a guy how finds it fun and amusing to take the con side just for the fun of it. That’s okay, I do too. He seems to have mastered the art of deflection and challenging the basic presumptions of the pro. (If light from stars violate the young age of the universe, then he challenges that light speed if constant. If the universality of light is demonstrated, he challenges the very nature of light at all.) Ultimately, this course must deny the entirety of scientific knowledge. We can push to this point and it would be without it’s fun but I predict it will end in the brain in a jar territory when *nothing* we presume about reality will be accepted. I guess the goal of this game is to see how far we can go.
He’s good at this and he’s fairly amusing but he doesn’t offer any alternative as to what he does believe. It’s always easier to deny than to create consistency so I think he will ultimately win this game. (Keeping in mind that I don’t think he actually believes what he says; he’s simply challenging every presumption until we hit a wall. If that wall is all reality doesn’t even exist, he’s fine with that.)
So I’d like to see what he *does* claim. There he performs much poorer. A “kind” is ill-defined. He has no definition of light. His reason for trusting the bible literally is that he has “no reason not to”.
Oh, well.
Okay. Questions:
How many kinds are there? If, I assume, bats and horses are of different kinds (they have no common ancestors and they will never evolve out of or from different kinds) then why are bats an horse so very similar? They both have fur, they both have bones and the bone structure shows a closer similarity than than bats do to birds, and they share more genes in common than they do to birds. Why is that if they are complete and distinctly different kinds and their earliest ancestors were individually and separately created in distinct acts of creation? And why the fuck do snakes have hips?!?!?!?!
What *is* light?
Why does the bible say insects have four legs?
And finally: If light doesn’t travel than literally all scientific knowledge from the time of Galeleo is wrong and Every single scientist on the planet is deluded. How can any collection of wrong information and ideas perpetuate for hundreds of years? How can any wrong system reach agreement and settle descent into a logical and conclusion that is utterly baseless? And most astonishingly, how can they have had any predictive success? I’ll admit, wrong ideas have been adhered for decades even centuries (phrenology, race superiority, geocentricism) yet none of those were ever able to predict anything or settle conflicts from within.
Says the guy who probably charges his cell phone, letting electrical energy physically enter his cell phone battery, and not have it explode.
And eat, letting physical chemical energy enter his body, and not have it explode.
Because darkness ISN’T just a level of photons below what our eyes can detect. And we do not, actually, “see” darkness. Darkness is an abstract concept invented by our brains to label what our eyes perceive when they receive LESS photons coming from one area compared to another area.
It’s easy to debate when you get to dishonestly make up definitions for terms.
If you go to the debate.org thread linked where that quote comes from, you’ll see medic here is actually not trying to talk about seeing darkness AFAICT (not that he’d understand that “black” or “dark” are actually the absence of seeing), but about being able to see in dark areas after our eyes have adjusted to it.
He doesn’t understand that “darkness” is usually not the complete absence of light; he doesn’t understand that widening pupils means more of the existent light can travel into the eye, allowing people to see where just before they couldn’t. He also doesn’t understand how a long-exposure photograph works differently from vision (i.e. why long-exposure allows a camera to see detail the naked eye can’t, even tho a person has been staring at the same point for a longer amount of time), because he doesn’t seem to understand that human vision is something like the brain “watching” a movie at x frames/second, instead of “exposing” a single picture for that long.
Basically, he doesn’t understand anything about anything, and yet thinks he can teach people. :-/
Common English usage suggests eyesight is an extension of your body. A person “casts their gaze” or “directs a stare” at an object as if the eyesight emanates from the eye. Then there’s the “evil eye” that can harm you. People also claim that one can feel a gaze on the back of one’s neck. Makes it harder to convince people that their eyes are receivers not transmitters.
ok, this is gonna bug me cuz it’s an awkward analogy, so let me fix for the record.
The eye interprets the “brightness” of something by the rate at which the nerves are hit by photons: the higher the rate, the “brighter” the image, and below a certain rate the brain interprets the output as “nothing” as we don’t see anything (AKA we see blackness/darkness), which can be very crudely analogized as the “exposure length” of vision, and the number of these lengths you can squeeze into a time-frame as the “frame-rate” of human vision; vs. a single-image exposure, where it’s not the rate of photon hits but the sum of photon hits that matters
btw, will I actually have to read that entire debate.org thread to figure out what medic thinks light is and how it work? does he say anywhere? or does this fall under “post that asks a question that I haven’t already answered several times”, which he promised us he’d respond to?
I’ve got to wonder if medic0506 just likes poking hornets’ nests to see the hornets buzz around angrily. Is he literally that stupid, or does he get off in making intelligent people invest time and mental energy to rebut his ridiculous statements?
Irrelevant in the long run, I suppose. He makes the religious crowd look stupid, lurkers get to see more arguments reflecting how science works, and Pharyngulites get some practice.
As a debater he was pretty weak, though. At best, his defining characteristic was his abysmal knowledge about science. Not something to brag about.
If he is literally as stupid as he came across, I feel more pity for him than anything else.
Hmm. Lots of stupids in that comment. Must be the wine and the late hour; need to proof read better.
Willfully ignorant
Stultissimus
reality impaired
Republican?
Lots of options. None of them labels I would find flattering.
Of course there probably isn’t any place in the entire universe that is completely devoid of photons. Indeed the measurable presence of photons coming from everywhere (ie the microwave background radiation) is one of the lines of evidence pointing to the Big Bang.
I wouldn’t say so. If we assume he doesn’t believe the stuff he argues, then I’d say he’s adept at at isolating a basic assumptions and exposing them. It’s a useful skill when assumptions can be faulty or misapplied. (Obviously not the case when the basic assumptions is “light travels” and “light has energy”.)
David Marjanović
You would be surprised, and possibly dismayed, to learn that it’s only been about a century. Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov tried it (via artificial insemination) in the early 20th; he failed, and eventually lost his funding, freedom, and ultimately life. The Soviet Union was not a good place to work.
Wait, is there a possibility medico isn’t arguing honestly and doesn’t actually believe the things he’s saying? If so, ugh – that makes him even more tiresome. Fucking contrarians/devil’s advocates/pin-pullers – find something better to do than just fuck with people, please. If you think it’s clever of you to get peoples’ backs up, you need to grow the fuck up. Pissing someone else off is not difficult – particularly when it comes to something they care about. So medico, if you’re not arguing honestly, give yourself a clap and sod off.
I don’t care if arguing with a contrarian is “good practice” either – there’s no shortage of wrong people to argue with. I also don’t care if people think it’s good for onlookers – similar to the previous point, there’s no shortage of real arguments to spectate.
The trouble I have with contrarians and devil’s advocates – especially online – is that far too often it’s only they that know they’re taking a position they don’t actually hold. It’s shifty and borderline trollery to bait someone by arguing for something you don’t believe in without their knowledge – they’ll argue honestly and passionately while you’re just gainsaying whatever is said with no stake in the argument at all. Deeply uncool. Argue what you actually believe in or, again, sod off.
/rant!
Being contrarian or a devil’s advocate just for the sake of being one, for one’s own amusement, or just to annoy people — symptom probably being doing it most or all of the time — is indeed fecking annoying. However, honestly playing the role on occasion for part (or, perhaps, even all) of a particular discussion can be useful (very useful sometimes).
If that is what the current fruitcake is doing, he’s terrible at it: He does not seem to be honest, he’s simply repeating himself, he has not exposed any significant mistakes (and has handicapped himself by taking an ignorant stance on essentially everything), and has never done an important part of being a “devil’s advocate” — present and defend an alternative — or a contrarian — examine presented evidence and/or present contrary evidence. All this fruitcake does is deny and make outlandish assertions, which he then either ignores or doubles-down on the absurdity.
I would give this fruitcake’s discussion skills a D-. Only reason it isn’t an F is because there is some interaction with others.
From debate.org
Then again maybe he is that stupid.
*sigh*
Okay, if he is “arguing con” (which is completely different than devil’s advocate; i’ll explain why below) then he lost here. It’s okay to strip assumptions to get the other side to stumble over *basic* ideas, but you can’t simply pretend to not listen and understand when they are presented and not stumbled over.
===
About devil’s advocacy. It’s a valuable (I’d say essential) tool to keep oneself honest and objective and to determine honestly and unbiased if one’s argument is actually sound or even if one actually believes it all things considered rather than simply believing from preconceptions or other invalid reason. (We’re all capable of self-delusion and devil’s advocacy can expose that.) And, when applied to another’s argument, it prevents one from going into battle with ones underwear exposed.
It does need to be done honestly though. And one most specify or make it clear that its purpose is the clarify and tighten and balance an argument.
It’s not the same thing as “arguing con” and arguing under an fictional persona. Those are both okay in other forums but not in a forum in which one like this were the purpose is serious discussion and not wasting time (for the reasons stated in 296).
I didn’t say he was playing devil’s advocate. I said he was “arguing con”. Which is fine in a place called debate.org. It is not okay here. Here that is simply trolling.
He has *one* skill at arguing con that he is good at; forcing the opponent to defend his/her basic axioms and not falling for the trap of arguing on the axioms when his own position will not follow. He’s bad at defending his own side or suggesting plausible alternatives to the opponent’s basic axioms. He’s very bad at refuting the opponent’s arguments. And he fails listening when he simply refuses to hear out the the response to the refutation.
I’d give him an F at devils advocacy because if he’s playing devil’s advocate he’s being dishonest by not saying that’s what he’s doing and he’s doing it poorly. If he’s arguing honestly I’d give him an F because he’s a fucking idiot delusional/or utterly insane. (He’s too cogent and syntactically sound to be an idiot but he could be self-convinced delusional; if so he is the *most* extreme case I’ve ever seen and I’m seriously concerned for his sanity.) If he’s arguing con I five him D+/F. A D+ because he’s got that one skill but only the one. And an F cause arguing con *here* is a fucking waste of everyone’s time.
297 (blf) & 298 (woozy): exactly. Others playing Devil’s advocate can be very useful. Medico is the opposite of useful – if DA is what he’s attempting, he’s sucking at it.
If he’s not, he’s a garden variety idiot and his lack of responses (let alone substantive ones) is leading me to dismiss him entirely.
translation: “I can’t math, but my gut tells me that doesn’t feel right.”
I don’t think he’s a “garden variety” idiot insomuch as a “weapons grade” incurious ignoramus (all assuming, as Hank_Says, he isn’t deliberately being contrarian, arguing the con, attempting to be a devil’s advocate, … whatever (I realize those are all somewhat different things at some level)).
35. PZ:
Bullocks…Other than that, I’m not even sure what to say to someone who can see and hear for himself, and still deny that she said what she said. At 3:38, the exact words that came out of her mouth were…
“Steve, your article doesn’t mention Intelligent Design…”
Even Abrams, who clearly isn’t taking Meyer’s side, heard the lie too saying at 4:02, “She could be more honest about what is in the paper”.
I’m not sure why you’d put your own integrity on the line by saying something that is so easily shown to be false.
Stop the presses…”History in the making!! First time ever: Scientist argues against explanation that fails to explain scientific data!!” Seriously PZ??
Have you even bothered to read the paper?? Not only did he do that, but he also explained why the current theory doesn’t adequately explain the evidence that we all know exists.
By “scientific” I guess you actually mean “materialistic, but that’s where we differ. You require any explanation for origins to be materialistic, because that’s all you’ll consider scientific, and for you the answer has to be “scientific”, in the way that you define science. However, I see the “scientific” answer as the one that is true, and consistent with nature. I have no other requirements and don’t define explanations out of existence. You can say what you want about me and creationists/ ID supporters, but it’s actually your side that, in spite of your credentials, are anti-science and dogmatically pushing ideology under the guise of “science”.
So now with that much out of the way, we can move on to your comment about creation being “scientifically indefensible”. Can you explain how something that successfully predicts exactly what we should see in the natural world, and those successful predictions can be observed by every living person, is either unscientific or indefensible??
*We don’t see universes creating themselves.
*Life only comes from life.
*Organisms don’t morph into different organisms.
That is what nature and science shows us. That you believe there is more to the story that can be added if you throw in billions of years, is neither materialistic nor scientific. Your faith takes you out of the realm of science and puts you on exactly the same level that creationists are on, since we both believe in theories that we can’t prove, in their entirety, through materialistic science.
Observational science tells us that an effect requires a cause, spontaneous generation was disproved long ago. Natural processes can’t explain the origin of nature itself, and that means that materialistic causes can’t account for the material world. So it is your dogmatic, faith-based adherence to materialism that is scientifically and logically indefensible.
Funny ideas you have about science, mediczero506. What is light, again? A magic ray emanating from the eye? A measurable particle stream coming from a source and being received by an eye?
Kook.
Nope, what is scientifically indefensible is your imaginary deity and book of mythology/fiction. Nothing there happened as is says, and you have no evidence whatsoever for your phantasm. Or you would lead with it. Since you don’t, it is dismissed as a delusion in your mind.
medic0506 @ 303
We don’t see magic invisible people creating universes either. This also has nothing to do with the theory of evolution [1].
Neither does this.
Caterpillars to butterflies. Tadpoles to frogs. Glass eel larvae to elvers. Planulae to polyps. Organisms morph into quite radically physiologically different forms all the time.
In any rate, the theory of evolution [1] is not a theory of metamorphosis. Evolution takes place over generations, not within the lifetime of an individual (no matter what Pokémon tells you) and if you weren’t deliberately ignoring things people tell you then you wouldn’t make such a stupid argument. And to explicate: it’s stupid because it’s both wrong, and has nothing to do with the correctness of the theory of evolution [1].
[1] And since you’re near-terminally dense, I’m referring to the theory of biological evolution, not anything like stellar evolution, which has nothing to do with biological evolution except using the word, which simply means “change over time”.
Scientific evidence presented by Medico to back their idea:
.
.
.
Crickets chirring
Medico doesn’t understand science sufficiently to know they have to present, not hint at, a full fledged theory to supplant the solidly supported theory of evolution, and their theory must explain ALL the evidence better than the ToE, which explains ALL the evidence. So, Medico has a hard slog which they should start on, first by showing their theory from the peer reviewed scientific literature. If they can’t, it hurts them saying it is scientific.
Still waiting for that evidence, and I will die waiting for that evidence….
I must disagree with the arguments that medic0506 is arguing as a Devil’s Advocate or a contrarian. It appears to me that xe’s really ignorant about basic science and is a biblical literalist creationist.
Notice @303 xe’s listening to Dr. Scott’s statement and completely misconstruing it to claim that she’s lying about Meyers’ paper. I haven’t read the paper but Scott has and, based on my previous experience, I have no doubt that most if not all of the paper is an attempt to poke holes in evolution rather than support
creationismintelligent design. We’ve all seencreationistsID advocates do this time after time (I talked about this @53).Later @303 medic0506 gives us the usual creationist arguments “Life only comes from life” etc. Xe’s doing the arguments from incredulity and ignorance that even AIG warns creationists not to use.
medic0506 is a not very bright and profoundly ignorant creationist without a speck of originality in hir arguments.
@ medic0506
Time, distance, velocity …
I have a business proposal for you. If you really know what you are talking about, we could get rich: Linky
medic0506
It’s like you’ve shown up at a hockey rink sporting tennis gear. You think you’re winning the game because you’re lobbing tennis balls over the net while everyone around you is playing a completely different game.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls @ 307
See, I’m not sure medic0506 actually believes the scientific method to generate valid or usable knowledge. Not compared to divine revelation, gut feeling or unexemined assumptions, anyway. If that’s true, then they (and anyone who has to deal with them) has a much larger problem than “they refuse to cite scientific sources”.
Medic0506, any chance you’re going to let us know whether a whale is a fish (and if not, what kind of animal is it?) and whether a bat is a bird (and if not, what kind of animal is it?). Looking forward to your answer. Ta ever so!
medic0506 #303
Creationism/ID makes one huge and obvious prediction: that there’s a creator. Show me that creator, and I’ll change my mind.
Simple, ain’t it.
Hey Medic0506 what definition do you have for “Scientific”? Because it sure as hell sounds like it has nothing to do with actual science. Also to reiterate what Snoof said @306 we don’t see your god creating universes or life, so how can you dismiss science for the same reason? Incidentally Science is working on a functional model of Abiogenesis (which incidentally has nothing to do with evolution thanks), quite unlike Religion which plugs its ears and shouts “GODITIT” as loud as it can.
Sounds like medic0506 is arguing from the idea that photons are propelled by kinetic energy. A brief moment of consideration should make it clear why that’s unworkable, which is probably why that’s not what scientists are saying.
Either medic0506 is building a strawman or, more likely, he just doesn’t have a clue what the hell he’s talking about.
You seem to be implying that you care a whit about what nature and science shows us.
If so, your implication is clearly a lie.
@medic0506
That is how the scientific community defines science, and for a reason. Let us take a non-material cause as an explanation, e.g. God. How do we make a testable prediction based on that cause? We can’t.
– If God made the universe 6000 years ago, why can we see more than 6000 light years away?
— Well, maybe God made it look that way to test our faith
– If God is all powerful and loves us, why did he let this disaster/war/mass shooting/…. happen?
— Well, maybe he wants us to learn to handle it
The problem with non-material causes is that they are inherently untestable. There is no way to differentiate “God made it look that way to test our faith” from “We live in the Matrix; we see what the AIs show us”. Both equally untestable, and unprovable. This is why science, real science, has no interest in non-material causes. They have no explanatory power.
As for why the Bible appears (to you) to perfectly explain reality, it is because it was written by people who lived in that reality. They were trying to explain to themselves, in their limited way based on the knowledge and mythologies available, why the universe works the way it does. Those limitations in their knowledge are evident to anyone capable of critical thought and a willingness to question.
Wow, i knew he was scientifically illiterate but i wasn’t quite prepared to discover to what degree. He doesn’t even know what science is O_o We have here someone who not only thinks he knows better than thousands of actual scientists what science even is, but also someone who fancies himself qualified to make criticisms of the state of scientific knowledge….and he doesn’t even know what science is! This is just remarkable….
Bwaahahahahahaaaaahahahaaaaaaaa…haaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaa….
Oh medic0506…i really wish you could, for one moment, be aware of how outrageously stupid that bit was, you would have such a good laugh…
Just as a minor point, the speed of light is usually given in kps or mps, not mph. If you’re going to argue with people, it’s preferable to use the same terms they do.
mykroft @ 317
I think science (by which I mean “the scientific community, which is made up of humans with finite intellects, finite time and and finite resources”) is totally interested in non-material causes.
It just hasn’t found any yet. And it’s looked long, and hard. Every time it thinks it’s got a non-material cause (the workings of the mind! where light comes from! why the seasons change! where babies come from!) it looks harder and find, once again, it’s just dumb old atoms doing their thing.
It’s not that non-material causes are inherently unscientific. It’s that time and time again they fail the basic test: “whether they are in any way distinguishable from things that don’t exist”.
(Science is solely interested in things that do exist, because there’s an uncountable infinity of things which don’t exist, and as such, are a waste of time and resources.)
@Snoof
True enough, and a good distinction. I remember all the scientific interest in ESP. I even thought I was fairly talented in that area when I was younger. Then I learned about confirmation bias, and how as the experimental controls improved the statistical evidence for ESP became weaker and weaker until it disappeared.
How do you know these things? What’s your evidence that universes don’t create themselves (or are you just arguing that we don’t see that happening)? What’s your evidence that life doesn’t come from non-life? What’s your evidence that organisms don’t morph into different organisms?
Actually this last I’ve even seen. I’ve seen caterpillars morph into butterflies.
“*We don’t see universes creating themselves.” — Actually we DO see universes creating themselves. We see “black holes” all over the place. SCIENCE now says that black holes are just how other universes appear to us, in our universe. And we have seen at least once, a black hole, come into being. [lookin at U: Orion X-1]
.
“*Organisms don’t morph into different organisms.” — Yes. SCIENCE never said they could. Morphing is an old D&D magic spell. But…, but…, but…; caterpillars morph into butterflies. Are butterflies a different “kind” than caterpillars? One has wings, the other has lots of legs… baffling.
.
“*Life only comes from life.” — unless God gets involved? Science has no “theoreez”? Oh, yeah, forgot, theoreez don’t count; only what we have actually seen actually happen counts. Science never saw life spontaneously come from non-life [thanks, Pasteur] so it can’t happen unless God gets involved?
chris61 @310:
Knowing that hockey doesn’t use one, medic even brought his own net. How thoughtful.
Al Dente @308:
I agree and was musing over the possibility of a DA/contrarian/straight-up Poe; I think medic really might be that stupid. Like the infamous Robert Byers but with 10th grade English skills instead of 5th.
Sorry. I’ve had far too much to drink at the moment (a hazard of living in France with good food, good vin, …), but did the daily fruitcake show up again? Any updates on light / vision, or is it still all some sort of magic ?
I think that may be it. He confuses verbal adeptness with knowledge. It has always fooled his friends into thinking he’s smart, so he believes it too.
A lot like many politicians….
OK, this is uniquely stupid. The arithmetic isn’t hard. E = hν. The frequency (ν) is kind of hard to measure, so using the wavelength instead, E = hc/λ.
Let’s take a nice photon of green visible light at 500 nm wavelength. So that’s (6.63 x 10^-34) x (299,792,458) ÷ (500 x 10^-9) = 3.98 x 10^-19 Joules. That is an “absolutely tiny amount”. Even in ergs (“flea push-ups”) that’s about 4 trillonths of an erg. 250,000,000,000 of these photons to add up to one erg of energy!
And remember, these kind of measurements have been made to exquisite precision. They are extremely accurate. Mediczero, your ignorance is really beyond the bounds of credibility. If you’re just taking the piss, you really need to fuck right off.
With the caveat that I’m not completely sober at the moment, I’m not convinced. I suspect it it a confusion of being able to write almost coherent sentences with Pew! Pew! — shooting fictional ray guns at imaginary demons.
Has he said anything more about light / vision ?
You require any explanation for origins to be materialistic, because that’s all you’ll consider scientific, and for you the answer has to be “scientific”, in the way that you define science.
No, the requirement is only that the observable material consequences of the explanation is compatible with the material observation of reality. Thousands of immaterial spontaneous generations within a 24 hour period during the first six days of a universe immaterially formed roughly 6 to 10 thousand years ago has a few material consequences. One is that the universe is at most 10 thousand years old. This does not conform with any material observations thus it can be scientifically tossed out.
The only reason we concern with material vs. immaterial is that material, by definition is all that can be observed. Once we observe something, we classify it as material.
And yet you don’t believe in light.
Snoof:
Agreed, but more basic than that, every time we study something and understand it we stop considering it non-material because … well, we understand it now… it’s part of the common world. “Material” is just the word for the common world. Had we discovered celestial spheres or angels or gods– it just so happens that we didn’t but we found equally abstract and previously unknown and supernatural seeming (what? you don’t think ancient people would consider DNA to be supernatural?) — we’d study these celestial spheres, angels and gods and then proceed to call them “material”.
=====
@301 jadehawk: “translation: “I can’t math, but my gut tells me that doesn’t feel right.””
Maybe we should ask medic0 how many angels can dance on a head of a pin. Seriously. it’s a very simple mathematical concept. Or “if each of the 7 billion people on earth brought one seven-billionth of a teaspoon of water and they all dumped them in one spot, how deep a flood of water would result”.
++++++
I perhaps went too far in my discussion of medic0 maybe being an online persona. I didn’t mean to defend him. Even if the several pounds of meat who sit at a computer typing under is name doesn’t believe the stuff it types, it’s the online persona (fictional or real) that is here and the persona is …. bizarre. Unique actually in my experience. People that stupid just don’t have 10th grade English skills.
However if it is fictional he weakens the effect (the creationist who questions all scientific precepts but forms logically coherent sentences) in my opinion, by refusing to listen to basic math. That counters the “forms logically coherent sentence”. You aren’t debating fairly (his raison d’etre; if he’s fictional) if you refuse to consider the other side’s argument.
Argh… the one time I didn’t preview…
No, the requirement is only that the observable material consequences of the explanation is compatible with the material observation of reality….
Greetings,
medic0506, you’ve making a number of errors in what you’ve posted.
The paper mentions the phrase “intelligent design” once, and once only, in the last paragraph:
Citing ID sources in the references doesn’t count.
Other than that, the paper is not about ID – only an attack on the theory of evolution: as both Scott and PZ point out.
I’m sure he has read Meyer’s paper, as did the authors of the critique of Meyer’s paper – Meyer’s Hopeless Monster – as have I.
Meyer didn’t once mention ID during his questioning of the theory of evolution – nor did he give any alternative scientific explanation. As PZ notes, positing some vague possibility is not a scientific theory, only an hypothesis. In order to turn it into a scientific theory, you need to cite evidence and show how/why this evidence supports the hypothesis better than another explanation.
Meyer did not do this.
Actually, by “scientific” we mean naturalistic, rather than materialistic.
On the contrary, it is you who – like other creationists/ID supporters – are redefining terms to mean what you want them to mean so that you can then disprove a strawman.
Since “creation” isn’t naturalistic, which is what “scientific explanation” means, it is “scientifically indefensible”.
How does creation explain “exactly what we should see in the natural world”?
As Popper noted, a explanation which explains everything explains nothing, and is therefore useless.
That’s because we’re inside one. Science explains why we don’t see that happening just as well as creationism – and, as it’s the simpler of two explananations,…
This is actually a case of special pleading from causality.
In general, it is more correct to say that every observed effect in Nature has a cause.
This does not mean that life has to have come from life.
There is another example of special pleading of this nature where theists/creationists posit a First Cause so that they can interpose “God” as the start of everything.
There is nothing to prevent causes/effects going back ad infinitum.
The “Big Bang” only implies a pre-existing state of Nature – a unintentional naturalistic cause, not a intentional supernatural one.
They do – as Snoof already pointed out.
Perhaps you’re trying to dismiss abiogenesis/evolution in favour of discrete “kinds”, yet no creationist has ever managed to draw the line(s) between these. Science can explain the existence of various species and how new species come into being – something which creationism cannot do.
The evidence for billions of years is indisputable – based on naturalistic, scientific evidence. Scientists’ “belief” is based on the evidence in Nature – not on a book, where they then go looking for something to support the particular religious book’s claims.
As typical of creationists, you are confusing spontaneous generation with abiogenesis. I suggest you read Abiogenesis is not spontaneous generation. Period..
And, also typical of creationists, you accuse others of what you yourself are guilty – the Tu Quoque fallacy.
Kindest regards,
James
According to my sister, there is a saying in the jungles of Colombia: “En las selvas, dicen los sabios, hay más ojos que hojas.”
It makes sense then, that our subliminal concerns revolve around “being seen” as opposed to “seeing”. Being eaten lies a step behind eating in one’s concerns, surely. Perceiving oneself as an emitter is a safer option than the alternative.
.
Even architects (they should know better!) constantly make this “error”. (On the other hand, which is more important: “view” or “visual ingress”?)
Ooops:
FTFM:
behind—> before35. PZ, Part 2:
You argue that kinds is “vague” so does that mean that, as a biologist, you think that “species” is cut and dry, black and white, and that there aren’t situations that present problems in determining which species an organism is?? You even admit later in this post that, “In reality, the lines aren’t sharp, they’re blurry…”. So if you’re knowledgeable about “biological reality” and are going to fairly critique a potential explanation of diversity, shouldn’t you recognize that ANY attempt at classification of organisms is going to run into situations that present difficulty?? You’re allowing for difficulties in the explanation that you like, and criticizing another explanation for having difficulties, while also admitting that in reality the lines are blurry, not sharp. That’s bias and use of double standards, which should be a no-no for a scientist.
Secondly, as a scientist, do you believe that “biological reality” shows organisms reproducing offspring that are the same, in form and function, as the parent organism?? Obviously two monkeys don’t mate and produce something different like an iguana, right?? So how, as a biologist, can you deny that at least observationally, organisms reproduce “after their kind”?? How can you legitimately argue that my belief is not consistent with the observable, empirical “biological reality”, that exists in nature.
How do you see that as a “continuum” of variation, when it ends exactly where we say it should end, a discontinuity between groups of like organisms.
I struck the part of your statement that is extrapolation and speculation. To use another of David Berlinski’s statements, what we actually see is “highly bounded variations”, and discontinuities between groups. No matter what we do to them, bacteria stay bugs, fruitflies stay fruitflies. Your comment is false because there is no “gradation of forms”, that can be shown. All we see is bounded variation and discontinuity between groups, thus your comment reflects what you believe, not what science actually shows.
Again, you’ve ventured outside what can be shown empirically. Common sense tells you that since life forms are formed by a recombination of the parental DNA, there is going to be a reflection of “descent with modification” to some degree, within any group that shares a reproductive pathway and therein lies the problem. Those reproductive paths between groups do not cross because of those “discontinuities”. So just because you can detect “descent” to some degree, does not mean that you can extrapolate that into universal descent.
Secondly, your extrapolation of similarity of genes, into universal descent, is nothing more than an argument from homology, which is quite easily debunked. Similarity in genes, or their expression, is not an indicator of descent or relatedness.
If you follow the history of an organism in reverse, you find that as long as that reproductive path continues, a lineage, you can find similarity because of descent. Eventually though, you come to points where new traits and genes have to appear de novo. Homology or similarity can no longer explain that gene or trait because, although the organism is obviously related to its ancestor, they do not share those genes or traits. They exist in the offspring but not the ancestor, meaning that they are not homologous, even using the evolutionary definition of the word.
Further, “biological reality” shows us that homologous traits can appear in vastly different organisms, even when the alleged common ancestor did not have those traits, echolocation in bats and whales being a prime example. A common ancestor still does not explain the similarity when that ancestor doesn’t also have echolocation. So you have homology without descent, and descent without homology. Homology does not reflect descent, and descent is not needed to explain homology or similarity between organisms.
One would think that would be enough to falsify homology as an excuse for evolutionism, but not so in the mind of a strict materialist, to whom evidence against their belief means little. Enter yet another rescue device…Convergent evolution, where descent explains similarities, even when it doesn’t. Now we have divergent/convergent/parallel/preadaptive/reductive and even no-evolution, being used as rescue devices, aka excuses, to explain away contradictory evidence.
First, anyone with a brain knows that no one “worships” the bible any more so than an evolutionary biologist worships his propaganda-filled textbook.
Secondly, in over-looking those discontinuities and asserting that they are unimportant, you are the one who is missing the big picture, and denying the observable reality that nature and real science reveal. Sadly, you are not only deceiving yourself, but also sending future generations of bright minds on a snipe hunt, chasing something that doesn’t exist.
No, medic0, that much is NOT out of the way.
You are not entitled to dishonestly redefine terms to whatever you want them to be to suit your side of the argument, and then blithely move on without being challenged, you lying weasel.
You have dishonestly redefined the words “organism”, “morph”, and “different” in making this argument, you lying sack of shit.
Populations of organisms morph into populations of different organisms all the time. We have observed many instances happening in real time.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/04/29/the-evolution-of-the-country-mouse-and-the-city-mouse/
E pur si evolves.
It’s pretty obvious that you are the one that has not read that paper, medic0, or else, as with before, you are simply flat out lying again. “Explaining why the current theory doesn’t adequately explain the evidence” precisely IS attacking evolution without supplying any positive argument in favor of ID. Or at least trying to, since the arguments presented in that paper fail utterly.
Only for shorter periods of time. There is solid and conclusive evidence for evolution with ring species to show speciation over both distance and time. Science wins, your uneducated testament loses, as always.
Whereas, there is no solid and conclusive evidence your imaginary creator exists, as you have not presented one iota of evidence for that conclusion. And that is orthogonal to proving evolution is wrong. They are two separate concepts, and you can’t demonstrate your creator one iota by trashing evolution, only by showing the equivalent of an eternally burning bush that can be studied.
There you go again, you dishonest fapwit, unilaterally redefining the meaning of term “vague” to make it better suit your argument, when PZ’s use of the term is nothing at all like what you are attempting to shoehorn it into.
And now you redefine the term “same”. Since you know that if you used the actual accurate word for what you are implying, “identical”, in that argument, your statement with be self-evidently non-sensical.
As a matter of fact, organisms reproduce offspring that are DIFFERENT, in form and function, from the parents.
EVERY generation is slightly DIFFERENT, in form and function, from the previous ones.
One need only look a photographs of parents and children, side by side, to see that OBVIOUS truth.
@ medic0506
Jesus Fucking Christ, medic0. I was agreeing with you about extramission theory. I agree that it makes perfect sense! .
AND: You did not even respond to my business proposal at # 309
My mum’s 5-foot seven. My dad was six-foot two. I’m five-foot eight.
Does this answer your question?
And NOW you have dishonestly redefined “prime example”, seeing as how echolocation in bats are whales are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT traits, achieving the same superficial end by COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MECHANISMS, with everything from the generation of the sound, the reception of the sound, the frequencies and patterns used, all being DIFFERENT.
Such differences, of course, being exactly as the theory of evolution would predict them to be, as independently evolved traits, whereas, of course, creationism fails to explain their features at all.
You have also dishonestly redefined “homologous” to make this argument, since if the common ancestor did not possess the trait, it is by the PROPER definition of the terms, not homologous. If you wanted to dispute that the traits evolved at all, then the HONEST way to go about it is to not use the term homologous at all.
But of course you are not honest enough an individual to do that.
And you have also dishonestly redefined the term “vastly different”, seeing as how bats and whales, both being mammals, share more similarities than they have differences.
If you want to make this argument, then you have to concede that “Life NEVER comes from god”, since just as we have so far only observed living things being reproduced from living things, we have never, EVER observed anything remotely resembling a god creating any living thing either.
And here is an example of our pitiful liar redefining the term “propelled”, since the term applies to objects moving with kinetic energy after being accelerated from rest, so if used properly cannot apply to photons, which, being massless, do not possess kinetic energy in the same way as things with mass do).
36. Amphiox:
Who told you that, and why did you believe them?? Sure they can. Horses, donkeys, and zebras can all interbreed. So can lions and tigers, whales and dolphins, sheep and goats, and I’m sure there are more.
http://www.izzza.com/IZZZAZorsesForSale.htm
Because there is no known mechanism that would allow for such a thing.
No I do not acknowledge that. There is a mechanism, a reproductive pathway, that explains the relationship between horses and zebras. No such pathway exists between a human and a chimp.
Why should we believe you, a proven liar and bullshitter. You haven’t backed up anything you said. So it is dismissed as lies and bullshit.
Yes there is, it is called evolution, and the overlapping genomes of the species. Science, not fatuous lies and bullshit from an uneducated fool.
Your imaginary creator causes you to be very stupid and ignore solid and conclusive physical evidence. Whereas you present NO conclusive physical evidence for your imaginary deity.
You don’t prove your deity by trashing evolution. You show solid and conclusive physical evidence for it, or you have nothing. Your whole argument is theological and philosophical sophistry without evidence, and since your deity is imaginary, it is meaningless
Hey! Fruitcake, you’ve been ignoring a number of questions about light / vision:
● What is starlight ?
● How do cameras and film (or thesedays, CCDs) record (“photograph”) the stuff ?
● Is starlight related to what you see (or can photograph) when a hand-torch (“flashlight”) is turned on ?
● And, Why does a wall prevent one from seeing the stars, or hand-torch, on the other side of the wall ?
@ medic
This statement is a perfect demonstration of how little you understand about what science even is. The fact is that there is no clear, bright line between species. Evolution doesn’t claim there is one, therefor the lack thereof is not a problem. Your asinine “discontinuity between kinds” theory, on the other hand, requires sharp lines, therefor the lack thereof IS a problem.
You’re trying to criticize evolution for doing a better job than your theory of explaining the available evidence.
re @344;
Note medico0’s latest dishonest and cowardly debate tactic. See how he’s only answering posts WAAAY back at the beginning of this thread, posts which we have all already gone over multiple times already?
All the while ignoring all the more recent posts that are harder for him to reply to.
Disgusting intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
And of course, still ignoring the even OLDER questions that he can’t answer.
Hey, medic0liar: HOW MANY WINTERS DOES GREENLAND EXPERIENCE IN ONE YEAR?
And here we see medic0liar attempting to dishonestly redefine the meaning of “difficulty”, “having”, “bias”, and “double standard”.
Dishonestly trying to imply that there is equivalency between the blurrinness at the edges of the definition of “species” and the utter incoherence all the way to the core of the creationist idea of “kinds”, when in reality it is all about the RELATIVE MAGNITUDE of the difficulties in each of the rival explanations. What difficulties there are with evolutionary theory and its associated concepts are minor and only found at the extreme cutting edges of observation. But the difficulties with young earth creationism can be found at a glance in the very core of its conceptualization.
In a post not too far away from the one medic0liar was replying to, I directly described the known mechanism that would allow for a frog and a horse to gradually, over time, have arisen from a common ancestor through the same mechanism of gradual changes that slowly separated horses and zebras.
So once again, the fapwit lies.
And here I should point out yet another one of medic0liar’s dishonest debate tactics. His deliberate redefinition of the term “discontinuity”.
His example being a continuity between horse and zebra and a discontinuity between horse and frog.
This is like claiming that there is continuity between red and orange on the visible spectrum, but a discontinuity between red and blue, and therefore red light and blue light must be distinctly different, unrelated “kinds” of light.
It is like claiming that you can get from 1 to 2 with addition, but you can never turn 1 into 100 with addition.
To create his “discontinuity” he DELIBERATELY IGNORES all the known intermediates and already actually exist, both among living creatures and fossil ones.
In other words, he creates FALSE discontinuities.
Evolution predicts that all discontinuities in life are apparent rather than real, an artifact of time, location, and incomplete sampling, of certain forms having gone extinct, or not present in the current location. Evolution thus predicts that which every apparent discontinuity, if we look within the gap closely, we will find an intermediate.
And that is exactly what we find. Look in the gap between horse and frog, and we see a lizard, intermediate between the two. Look in the gap beween lizard and frog, and we see a salamander, intermediate in form between the two. Look in the gap between salamander and lizard, and we see fossil reptiliomorphs intermediate between the two.
This is how Shubin predicted the existence of Tiktaalik using evolutionary theory, and then went and found it.
EVERYWHERE we have tried to look, we have found an intermediate. Not once have we ever failed to find an intermediate when we have actually looked.
This is exactly as evolutionary theory predicts.
Perhaps somewhere there really IS a barrier, a true discontinuity, and perhaps evolutionary theory really is wrong. But the onus is on the creationists like medicliar to FIND the discontinuity and DEMONSTRATE that it is real, not artifactual. And they can’t do it. Instead they make up discontinuities like horse/frog, bat/whale and so forth, that are only discontinuities when one deliberately ignores the (millions!) of already known intermediates.
Hey, medic0506, you’re back! How about letting us know whether a whale is a fish (and if not, what kind of animal is it?) and whether a bat is a bird (and if not, what kind of animal is it?). Come on, why are you wasting this great opportunity to bring enlightenment to the heathen masses by refusing to actually give us any facts? So far, the only fact (as you believe) that you have given us is the age of the world, at 6-10k years. You must have more than that, surely!?
Was there ever a flood that covered the whole world at the same time? How many legs do insects have?
I’d love to know what you actually do believe, as opposed to what you don’t.
Is a whale a fish or a mammal? Is a bat a bird or a mammal? Make some effort, medic0506!
Is god “life”? No, really, is god a biological being with the same kind of biochemistry all life we know shares? It has to, because otherwise and without some obvious special pleading your argument can be used against creationism too. So, tell me, does god have cells? DNA? Uses ATP? Has a functioning glycolysis pathway? Will god die without a source of carbon, a source of energy and a source of reducing equivalents? ‘Cause, you know, life only comes from life, and life is all about these things. I have never seen life coming from something that didn’t have this features, have you?
Hm. Do all bacteria belong to same kind?
Nightjar @353
Let’s make it more complicated for medic0506.
Are bacteria and fungi different kinds? How about bacteria and algae? How do we separate protista kinds? Are slime molds and water molds the same kind or not? Are oomycetes in the same kind as fungi? Which kinds are prokaryotes and eukaryotes? Explain what the divisions are between each kind and how the dividing lines are drawn.
medico @ 334 vomited forth :
No, he hasn’t. The FACT that you refuse to understand or accept reality does not make him wrong.
NAME one of these ‘discontinuities’.
SHOW how you determined that they could NOT arise via known mechanisms.
SHOW how you determined these ‘discontinuities’ COULD NEVER BE CROSSED.
Discontinuities are like a river – it may be too wide to cross where you are now, but go upstream far enough, you may find it is narrow enough to step across. Just because two groups show ‘discontinuities’ now does not mean they were always that way. Look far enough back and those ‘unbridgeable chasms’ disappear.
Sane and rational folk that study and UNDERSTAND real world biology know just how far they can extrapolate data; your ignorance trumps nothing.
Then what, EXACTLY, is it ? Pure chance ? The odds of many different genes showing EXACTLY the same tree of relatedness is slim; the odds they would all be wrong is even smaller than standard IDiot ‘calculations’ against the odds of abiogenesis.
Many different genes can be used to DEMONSTRATE common descent – the most useful ones are housekeeping genes (perform the same function in all organisms, so there is no magical pressure to be identical as per the ‘if da critters LOOK the same, then their genes MUST be da same too !!!!’ evasion.)
Care to give an EXAMPLE of one of these traits or genes that have appeared de novo ?
And SHOW that they could not have arisen via known mechanisms ?
If one HONESTLY follows a lineage backward, there are no discontinuities that cannot be explained by known biological processes.
There are very few truly novel features in nature – examination of REALITY shows that most traits and features are merely modifications of something that came before. And those few ‘novel’ features can be explained by reality-based mechanisms; no need to invoke the unknowable whim of
Magical Sky Pixies‘Intelligent Designers’.That is known as convergent evolution – two disparate groups evolve a similar feature due to similar selective pressures. The wings of bats, birds and pterosaurs were all modified arms, but are different solutions to the same problem of flight. The flippers of penguins (modified wings) and the flippers of dolphins (modified hands) are convergent, as is body shape of fish and dolphins (streamlining in water is quite useful).
Funny thing about your example – if you generate a phylogenetic tree using the PROTEIN responsible for hearing high frequency sounds, echolocating bats group with dolphins; if you use the DNA encoding the gene, the tree has dolphins closely related to bovines and bats with rodents – as they ARE actually related. The reason you get two different trees is the FACT that the expressed protein is ‘visible’ to selection, while the DNA isn’t.
And all echolocation is is just very modified hearing. Where, EXACTLY, are the ‘novel de novo’ features that are beyond the reach of known biological mechanisms again ?
Actual homology requires descent; IIRC, convergent evolution isn’t homology but analogy.
Good thing that sane and rational people that actually study and UNDERSTAND real world biology actually know what they are doing, and don’t try to make reality conform to their peculiar ‘interpretation’ of ancient super hero stories.
If being able to echolocate is useful, there are a very limited number of ways to get it, so OF COURSE there would be convergence !
Actually, for convergent evolution, descent doesn’t explain the similarities – SELECTION DOES.
If the organisms were closely related, common descent can explain the features; if they are NOT closely related, sane and rational folk find other TESTABLE explanations.
But, being a willfully ignorant nanowit, you’ll wave your hand and dismiss REALITY by calling them ‘excuses’ or something equally as silly.
Your ‘contradictory evidence’ is no such thing, since it can all be explained by known processes.
But since you’ve deluded yourself into believing that you know more about real world biology than actual BIOLOGISTS who have spent years actually studying living things. you are immune to learning and refutation.
Hey, medicliar, did your god create the bacteria before or after he created the chloroplasts?
If I shot every horse and zebra that could interbreed, leaving only horses and zebras that couldn’t anymore, are horses and zebras still the same kind?
By the way, medicliar, there are features of human DNA that suggest that human and chimpanzee ancestors did interbreed. Not only that, they produced fertile offspring, over a period of millions of years.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/humans-chimps_2.html
Or wait for the dry season….
Incidentally, medicliar’s attempt to dispute homology between individual examples of two organisms as evidence for common descent is just yet another attempt at dishonestly evading the real issue.
The actual evidence for common descent is not just individual homologies but the *pattern of all the homologies* falling into nested hierarchies. Only common descent can produce that kind of pattern. Creationist concepts utterly fail to account for this pattern.
medic0506 #334
It’s not a double standard, because you’re actually arguing that the lines are clear, distinct and impossible to cross, remember?
We can point out that the lines between species are blurry, because we accept that the lines are blurry. However, you say that the lines between “kinds” are crystal clear and absolute. That means you don’t then get to also argue that they’re blurry.
You can argue whichever you like, but you can’t argue two contradictory points at the same time. Not if you’re hoping to be taken seriously. So, are the lines between kinds clear and absolute? If they are, what are the objective measures that we can use to distinguish different kinds?
How do you determine if two organisms are “the same in form and function”? What objective measure do you use to check?
I’m different from both my parents. So, presumably are you. Why doesn’t that count? Objective criteria, please.
That’s nonsense. By the definition you’ve established so far, any offspring produced by an organism would be the same kind, no matter how different in form and function. Obviously accepting that definition, organisms reproduce “after their kind”, but that’s only because you’ve defined any kind of reproduction at all as being “after its kind”, so it’s not saying much. It would literally be impossible not to “reproduce after your kind”, even if a monkey did give birth to an iguana.
For this question to be honest and relevant, you need to explain how we can, observationally, determine whether two organism are of the same kind or not. It’s what we started out asking for and you still haven’t provided it.
Therein lies the rub, medic. Those boundaries you speak of? We haven’t been able to pin them down, and the more we dig, the less we see. It’s not just that DNA of related critters is similar – it’s that they’re MORE similar the closer they are, with unerring consistency. There are similar threads going through all life forms that we can trace back, and fossil evidence keeps confirming them.
They said there was no way a fish could be related to land-dwelling animals. Meanwhile, we were able to pinpoint where to look for a specific transitional in that lineage – and found it!
Just rewatched Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish first episode that was on PBS. At the moment, it doesn’t appear to be on the web site. Hopefully, it will appear on the archived PBS videos in the near future.
Medicofuckwit should be required to watch it, then critique it using something other than his belief in his imaginary deity, namely scientific evidence from a source that doesn’t presuppose his imaginary deity and that his mythical/fictional babble is inerrant. In other words, require the idjit to take the argument outside of his beliefs and test them against reality. The reality of Sonic Hedgehog, etc.
Bah. What a waste. Medic’s been given his own thread (a rare privilege for creobots, especially these days) and he can barely be arsed responding more than once a day. When he does, it’s usually a soundbite of idiocy. When he responds with something longer than a sentence, it’s assertion-riddled parades of ignorance and deliberate evasions of questions both recent and distant. Such a masterdebater™!
What is light, medico? If not something physical that my eyes can detect, then what? Are my eyes magic detectors?
Meh. That’s it. I won’t wait for an answer as I could be here until Thursday and I’m sure I’d be completely underwhelmed. For all his ability to construct sentences, we’re dealing with an intellect who would probably find it inconceivable that something as complex and clever as a human could be 70% water.
definitions of “species” are very precise, unlike your definition fir “kinds”; don’t confuse the precision of a definition with the issues that arise from putting a discrete label on a continuum.
actually, a creationist classification shouldn’t, because a creationist classification would be one of using a discrete label onto discrete phenomena. If “kinds” are discontinuous, there should be a clear, precise way to describe where the discontinuity is.
Of course, since in reality there is no such discontinuity, you’re also applying a discrete label to a continuum, but in your case that actively refutes the very existence of biblical “kinds”.
nope. no double standard. If creationism were true, “kinds” would have very clearly defined discontinuities.
not always. That’s observable, btw.
the theory of evolution doesn’t predict any such thing, so this is ignorant waffling on your part.
with a definition of “kind” that involves “shares a common ancestor”, a monkey giving birth to an iguana would be “reproducing after their own kind”, since iguanas and monkeys have a common ancestor (synapsids).
because it’s not consistent with what can be observed. Speciation is observable. Has been observed.
except there isn’t such a discontinuity. That is literally not something we can observe in nature. Rather, we observe a gradient of dissimilarity analogous to the gradient of dissimilarity in a family-tree.
Incorrect; you struck out the part you dislike.
no, we actually don’t. Now that is “extrapolation and speculation”. What we see is variation from parent to daughter generation which either spreads through the population or (in separated populations) makes the populations less-and-less able to interbreed, until they become infertile with each other (and thus become definitively separate species). That’s observable; it’s been observed.
literally, bacteria are never bugs. Aside from that, the differences between different species of bacteria is greater than between a monkey and a human, which brings us back to your shitty definition of “kind”. If things as dissimilar in appearance, function, and genetics as M. aeruginosa (a “blue-green alga”), D. radiodurans (a polyextremophile), and M. pneumoniae can be one “kind”, but things as similar in appearance, function, and genetics as monkeys and humans can’t be, you’ve basically got a definition that’s at odds with actual observation (but nicely conforms to the particular form of ignorance where people recognize the small differences in familiar things, but lump unfamiliar things as the same despite huge differences).
except that it can.
and again, no, that’s just the part of what can be shown empirically that you don’t like.
given that there’s no difference between the type of evidence that shows relation between e.g. a zebra and a horse, and the type of evidence between species that are more distantly related, it’s not an extrapolation.
actually, yes it is; especially similarity that is non-functional.
which they do. Observably. Via mutations. All the time.
well, that’s nonsense. A newly evolved trait bears some similarity to the thing it evolved out of; and for completely new traits, you can pinpoint the gene that mutated which was also present in an ancestor, just un-mutated. Homology exists between species with different evolved traits.
lolwut.
1)echolocation is making & hearing sound & locating its direction. the common ancestor of bats and whales was capable of producing sound, and of hearing, and of telling where it came from.
2)there’s no structural homology between bat echolocation and whale echolocation, since they happen in completely different ways using different structures to produce sound. The bat emits sound through the larynx, and receives it via the tragus; the whale sends through something called “phonic lips”, which are not the same thing as the larynx, and receive via fatty structures in the lower jaw. Echolocation is at best analogous; it’s certainly not homologous.
so far, the only thing you’ve shown evidence for is your own ignorance of the things you’re talking about.
except of course there is, you just don’t like it.
except of course there’s no difference in the vast majority of the evidence showing the relationship between a horse and a zebra and the relationship between a human and a chimpanzee.
And now, back to the important part: what is light; how does it heat things if light is not energy; how does nearsightedness work if light doesn’t travel?
If you’re not going to answer that, it’ll make a liar out of you since you said you would answer all questions you hadn’t answered yet.
“All we see is bounded variation!” says the creationist.
And as always, the creationist fails to specify WHAT this supposed boundary is and what the mechanisms are behind it. Can’t be arsed to. The “boundary” in question is simply the boundary of incredulity. The boundary of a creationist’s unwillingness to use logic or inference. The boundary of a creationist’s willful ignorance and deliberate misunderstandings of what evolution actually entails. A boundary entirely in the heads of the idiotic dogmatists.
And when you’ve finished telling us exactly what light is and how it has the effects it has, you can tell us whether a whale is a fish and whether a bat is a bird! Should be easy enough for a person of your intellectual capacity, right?
anteprepro @366
Exactly. More or less all of creationists’ alleged points against evolution* exist only in their heads**, which is why you so frequently hear differing (sometimes contradictory) arguments and definitions from individual creationists, e.g. why “kind” can mean “species” to one and “family” to another (and not too rarely, both to the same person, often in the same conversation).
Creationism as a whole doesn’t require, much less demand, consistency from its adherents. A major tactic, intentional or otherwise, of creationist argumentation is to make it virtually impossible to argue against by employing malleability and embracing personal subjectivity; allowing or even requiring the adherent to change a definition or argument the moment it’s countered. It’s why creationism is such a Big Tent™: whether you’re Young-Earth, Old-Earth, ID-lite or ID-goddidit, you’re welcome if you’re wielding your incredulity and ignorance to spread the Word by belting chinks into evolution. Your creationism doesn’t necessarily have to jibe with someone else’s; all you have to do is defend Jesus by assaulting Darwin.
___________________________________________
*As opposed to, say, points for creation
**Because they obviously don’t exist in reality
Indeed, it is precisely because the definitions are precise that they are fuzzy at the boundaries. Because they do not cover all the border cases, thank to their narrow precision. Whereas medico’s attempt to define “kind” is vague in exactly the opposite manner. It is so nebulously broad that it covers all life on earth, and can only differentiate categories because medico creates arbitrary and wholly imaginary additional restrictions.
ONLY in an evolved system without continuous variation would classification run into difficulty. In a created model with real discontinuity, attempts at classification should NOT, in fact, run into any problems at all. Especially one wherein it is claimed that creator himself has already dictated an accurate description of his creation in a book.
The very existence of difficulties in classification is consistent with a evolved biosphere and not consistent with a created one.
Exactly so. It is in fact the application of the SAME standard. The most basic standard of all. That theories should make testable predictions. In this case, the evolutionary model, with its continuum of change, PREDICTS that attempts at discrete classification would run into problems precisely because in the evolutionary model there are no real discontinuities, only apparent ones. But in the special creation model, discontinuities are real, and therefore a perfect classification system that reflects each discontinuity should be possible to construct.
While one can claim that a perfect classification system does exist (perhaps in the mind of god), and it is simply that humans have not figured it out yet, each and every attempt to make one that fails is a point of evidence in favor of the evolutionary model, which explicitly predicts that all classification systems will fail at some point, and a problem for the creationist model, which will have to ad hoc it away with babbling about the mysterious ways of god.
With that definition of kind, a monkey giving birth to an iguana would make the monkey the common ancestor, and the iguana WOULD be the same kind as the monkey automatically. We wouldn’t even need to mention synapsids in the equation at all.
(Iguanas are diapsids, not synapsids, in real life)
Now in THIS example of medico ongoing intellectual dishonesty, we see the liar trying to dissemble with the definitions of “reflect” and “empirically”.
The degrees of similarity in the genes form a nested hierarchy, and a nested hierarchy is a hierarchy of common descent.
Thus the empirical observation DOES exactly REFLECT a hierarchy of descent.
Now one could try to argue that the reflection is a mirage, an illusion, that the nested hierarchy, which is a hierarchy of descent, is the result of a process that either deliberately or coincidentally resembled (almost exactly!) common descent, but was not actually common descent.
That would be an honest and logically coherent argument to make, though one without any actual evidence in its favor.
But of course medico is not honest enough to make such an argument.
1) muove; 2) as mentioned above, he’s medic zero five zero six.
…Now I’m thoroughly confused.
Wikipedia says Escherichia coli has an enzyme that makes hydroxylysine…
The thing about Nerd of Redhead is that he practically never reads for understanding, let alone context. He reads for keywords he has automatic reactions to.
AFAIK it’s the other way around: he proposed the project several times, spending years trying to get funding, but never got it. And then he was declared ungoodthinkful.
There’s nothing borderline about it.
I think what’s going on here is that medic0506 believes photons need to be pushed to reach the speed of light and keep going all the way to here. He doesn’t know that photons have no rest mass, meaning they have no inertia and no kinetic energy (E = mv²/2) – the speed of light isn’t something light reaches, it’s something light inherently has. It may well be that medic0506 also doesn’t know objects in steady motion don’t become slower unless drag, friction or some other interaction with matter slows them down; having slept through Newton, he would then believe in Aristotelian/Star Trek physics.
Organisms do, however, have descendants that aren’t identical to themselves.
I’ve seen evolution happen in bacteria in a petri dish – overnight. So did everyone else in Molecular Biology Lab Course 1B (that would be something like “102” by American conventions).
If you go to that length, however, you should know that the symbol for “meter(s) per second” is m/s and that for “kilometer(s) per second” is km/s.
Uh, that’s just one hypothesis that hasn’t been tested much.
But why does every attempt at classification result into such difficulties? If were created separately, represented separate origins of life, there should be no intermediates between them.
Furthermore, why aren’t there intermediates between every species and every other species? Why, instead, do the intermediates fill in the gaps in a tree shape – exactly as the theory of evolution predicts?!?
Think about it.
Why are you so ridiculously impatient?
You have 100 to 200 mutations that both of your parents lack. Your genome, including all junk, is about 3 billion basepairs long. In about 15 to 30 million generations, then, every basepair in your genome will have mutated once on average.
Define “like”, and define “end”. I am not being sarcastic. I’m serious.
Eusthenopteron, Platycephalichthys, Tinirau, Panderichthys, Tiktaalik, Elpistostege, Elginerpeton, Ichthyostega, Ventastega, Acanthostega, Hynerpeton, Tulerpeton, Ossinodus, Crassigyrinus, Eucritta, Silvanerpeton, Eoherpeton, Balanerpeton, Gephyrostegus, Bruktererpeton, Chroniosaurus, Solenodonsaurus, Seymouria, Westlothiana, Limnoscelis, Eocasea, Archaeovenator. And that’s simplified, and arbitrarily cut off at both ends.
Want more?
As I’ve said before: tell me a transition in vertebrate evolution, and I’ll present it to you.
So you flat-out deny that mutations ever happen. Wonderful.
Good thing it’s not an extrapolation, then.
No, these aren’t either-or things. Nothing is ever really new in evolution.
For example, you can learn how to echolocate. You won’t be as good at it as the average non-fruit-bat or toothed whale, but you can get good enough to find your way around your apartment in complete darkness without having to touch the walls.
New genes don’t appear out of nowhere. They form by mutation – one basepair at a time – from other genes, or from duplicates of other genes. Compare their sequences, and you’ll see.
That you don’t know there’s such a mechanism doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
I have been re-reading Shubin’s book, (lost my copy by loaning it to the Redhead for reading on the train to/back from the opera, and got the Kindle version downloaded to my iPad). Richard Owen, a contemporary of Darwin, first notice the one bone-two bone-blob of bones-digits/claws/talons/hoofs motif in the fossil record. Shubin, et al. discovered Tiktallik in the Candian arctic, in the expected age (375 million years ago), and type of sediments (shallow river/flood plain) expected for a creature transitioning from water to land, with a forelimb structure as expected: one bone-two bone-blob of bones-digits/claws/talons/hoofs.
Now Medico, use something other than your immediately dismissed incredulity to explain why such a fossil proves your imaginary deity, rather than a common ancestor to all terrestrial life predicted by the Theory of Evolution….Don’t commit perjury in doing so, which is why ID lost in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the ID lied and bullshat, and the judge noticed….
don’t forget that creationists generally think bacteria are all one kind. So “kind” can be anything from a species to an entire domain. It’s based entirely on the degree of ignorance in relation to the life-forms to be distinguished, not on anything about the life-forms themselves. (IOW: the less a creationist knows about a life-form, the larger and more diverse the “kind” into which that life-form will be stuffed)
Marjanovic 371
If you had any generosity, you’d say who you’re replying to and also give the comment number. Otherwise, it’s impossible or more time consuming than it’s worth to read you.
Monkeys are synapsids, iguanas are not; we’re all amniotes, though.
It’s bad form to abbreviate genus names the first time you use them. That’s because genus names are unique*, while species names are not.`** D. radiodurans is Deinococcus; M. pneumoniae is probably Mycobacterium; but what is M. aeruginosa?
* …within “prokaryotes”, “plants” and “animals” separately, unfortunately. Ever since Linnaeus, AFAIK, Prunella has been the name of a bird and the name of a flower.
** Case in point: there’s a Pseudomonas aeruginosa that’s far from a cyanobacterium (“blue-green alga”).
Specifically, they’re in the nose. The larynx is in the throat. Bats scream, whales snort really loud.
And not just any nested hierarchy, but an almost perfectly dichotomous one – almost every branching point is the origin of two branches.
In other words, it’s a tree.
That doesn’t make sense. I don’t replying to people, I reply to claims – which I quote, so you don’t need to scroll back up to find out what I’m talking about. (If you do want more context than I provide, copy what I quote, press Ctrl+F, paste and hit Enter.)
Seriously, this is not social interaction what I’m doing here. Whether something is wrong doesn’t depend on who said it!
Looks like I don’t grammaring either. *sigh*
Oh, and medicocreobot, if you don’t like the age the fossils are date to, you can always show that radiometric dating doesn’t work, by showing the simulations of nucleotide breakdown as the strong and weak nuclear forces vary , which varies the nuclear binding energy, and the amount of radiation given off, Meanwhile, you need to also show that sufficient heat wasn’t generated to melt the surface of the Earth in the last 10,000 years. Just one of the major problems with your inane and fuckwitted
theory[religious presupposition].Still no evidence for your imaginary creator/designer, or that your babble isn’t a book of mythology/fiction. You aren’t helping your arguments by ignoring the fatal flaws in your bullshit.
The boundary and common ancestry that medic0506 talks about are related to Noah’s ark, I think. “Kind” is certainly ark language, though he hasn’t mentioned baramins.
Depending on which creationist you talk to, the breeding pairs of animals that came off the ark each gave rise to many species of similar animals. So all equids are descendants of the horse-like couple. (Noah listed the sire as Arkmaster Thunderhoof of Nimrod, but he didn’t give a dam.)
The chimp-ish couple were obviously aboard, and obviously not related to us humans. Whether the gorillas and orang-orang utan had their own ancestors, or rode with the chimps, is yet to be determined.
This doubling up was done to save space for the dinosaurs, although God knew they were going to go extinct. The rapid speciation after disembarkation somehow stopped before anybody noticed it, as Bill Nye pointed out in the recent debate.
So medic0 is talking Arkish, some of the time. It really is fascinating to see how poorly he communicates, despite his seeming coherence.
. Sorry. It’s this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcystis_aeruginosa
not that it matters, considering medic thinks they’re all “bugs”.
also, I fail at Permian. I managed to remember that Dimetrodons aren’t dinosaurs, but not that they aren’t reptile-ancestors. My 4th grade self would be so disappointed. :-p
Re. Ilya Ivanov:
FWIW, the Pffft! links to this, which suggests otherwise:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19926701.000-blasts-from-the-past-the-soviet-apeman-scandal.html?full=true&print=true
The speedometer on my old Renault had “kmph” and if the French, who invented the metric system and have over 200 types of cheese, don’t use km/h then why should I use km/s? :^p
Marjanovic 376
Things are said in context and also by people. Things are said for a reason. Sentences follow one on another. Sentences are parts of arguments. Often to get the full import, it is most informative to read the sentence in context.
Also, comment number and name is not just a courtesy (and courtesy is important), it is a way of signalling what you are doing. It is like starting a new paragraph, using subtitles, etc. For example above at 371, the first three statements you react to: e puor si muove…. collagen… wut…, I can not tell at a glance what you’ve done there, if you are reacting to three different people or to the same person or whether these statements are part of the same or different arguments, or if these statements were made a hundred comments earlier or just above yours.
I am not the first person to point this out to you.
Bicarbonate is back @#374:
One, David M’s contributions to this and so many other threads are testament to extreme generosity.
Two, that’s never been my experience. If you got with that it will be your loss. Seriously. :-/
And three, fending off an appeal to The Rules.
;-)
‘got’ -> ‘go’, obvs.
[OT]
Bicarbonate is back @#383:
… and when what you’re doing is responding to the content of a comment without necessarily impugning (or imputing anything about) the author of a comment, omitting the attribution signals what you’re doing.
HTH.
how is it relevant to anything how many different people said these things? (FTR, the answer is “none of the above”. He’s not reacting to people, but to bits of information.)
again, what’s the relevance?
(OTOH, I would prefer if the quotes included at least the relevant context, i.e. whatever an “it” refers to should also be quoted (or substituted in the quote))
in any case, if it bugs you so much, don’t read the long comments.
Same here. But again, if it’s so bothersome, it’s easy to skip, since David’s name is right on top of the comment and so one can know that it’s going to be a very long comment with a lot of individual quotes being responded to.
blockquote fail.
Same here. But again, if it’s so bothersome, it’s easy to skip, since David’s name is right on top of the comment and so one can know that it’s going to be a very long comment with a lot of individual quotes being responded to.
37. Amphiox:
No I don’t.
Why would you presume that a list, found on a wiki page, presents your only possible options or that ANY of the options listed are the actual ancestor?? The fossil record seems to show as much variation as we see today in living examples, so I’m not convinced that the common ancestor isn’t what we know as the modern horse/donkey/zebra.
that literally makes no sense. those are three different things, they can’t be a common ancestor, because they can’t be all the same animal.
hey medic, are you going to prove yourself a liar about the whole “answering questions” thing, or are you actually going to tell us what you think light is and how it works?
medic0506, the list as presented on the wiki page isn’t just some made-up online bullshit, such as you deal in. It is a copy of the information presented in the best scientific literature, about the best-understood evolutionary sequence, as derived from the evidence.
Your snarky question is another example of your difficulties in dealing with reality and with people. You may just dismiss as crap everything you see, and manage your information as little unrelated bits (like you do your animal kinds), but the reality-based people check their sources, cross reference, and remember things.
medic0, you are messed up.
—
David Marjanović, your commenting style is great by me.
medic0506 @#390:
Are you kidding me? Hyacotherium, whose fossils are found in the rocks directly under where I live is at most a foot tall. Or in metric, 0.3m. ;-)
I’ve seen horses (even Shetland ponies) and donkeys and zebras, and not one of them has been that small.
Yet more dishonesty from medico here. In earlier posts he was clearly suggesting that horses and zebras are DIFFERENT creatures sharing a common ancestor.
Now he is implying they are the same creature.
medic0506 #390
First, I see no sign in what Amphiox wrote of these supposed presumptions. You were given a list of animals and asked which were ancestors of horses and zebras. There’s nothing to imply that this is necessarily an exhaustive list or that you wouldn’t be allowed to answer “none”.
Second, noticeably absent from your answer is any indication of your reasoning. You’ve once again failed to give us any objective criteria for your evaluations. That was, frankly, the most important part. Why are you so consistently avoiding answering this?
More empirical evidence for medico of starlight moving at a finite speed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhwGkFM5_jo
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/03/light-echoes-cosmic-time-capsule/
Light echoes such as these would not be seen at all if light behaved the way medico claims it does.
And yet we see it so.
E pur si mouve.
It is obvious from medico’s reply that he doesn’t actually even comprehend the math of population genetics behind common ancestry. For example he demonstrates in his use of the singular for “actual ancestor” a complete failure to grasp the concept of most recent common ancestor versus common ancestors in general.
medic0506, the present-day horse, donkey and zebras cannot produce fertile offspring between each other. How can that mob of non-fertile beasts be the anscestor of anything? They don’t have grandchildren!
Yes, there are mules and zonkers and dobras, but they are dead ends. The two times that a mule gave birth, it made the papers. There is no way that your slashfic can be ancestral.
You don’t even put any thought into this, do you? You just pop out an idea, type it out, and damn the world for not accepting it. It’s what my grandma used to call diarrhea of the mouth.
Stop doing the diarrhea of the keyboard, and start doing the stop and think thing, instead. You claim you like to learn. Well, learn to be a lot more scientific. Stop and consider what you are doing, then write very carefully.
For everyone’s edification (except for medico who is likely too intellectually dishonest to care), here is T. rex, the leech.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrannobdella
medic0506, I haven’t been able to find your answer one way or the other, but should I just take it as a given that you don’t accept DNA testing, such as paternity or identity testing?
It’s the same technique used to determine evolutionary trees, you know.
Your view of fossil record presented without third party evidence is automatically dismissed as fuckwittery. Until you never evidence your views, they will be dismissed. This is a scientific argument, where views are far less important than the evidence presented, and since you present no third party evidence, your views are treated as they should be…..
Whale song/chatter.. I have no idea what any of them are saying, even in frequencies I can hear. But I’m a mammal. medic, on the other hand, seems quite fearful of acknowledging that he’s a mammal. Why is that, medic?
:-D
Since medico is perseverating on the old comments on this thread, here’s another question:
Since you acknowledge that horses and zebras are both directly descended from a single common ancestor which, naturally, could interbreed with itself and produce fertile offspring, what is the mechanism that has caused horses and zebras after their most recent common ancestor to CHANGE so that now the offspring they produce when they interbreed are sterile?
Given time in the future, do you or do you not accept that this same mechanism can cause horses and zebras to CHANGE SOME MORE so that eventually they STOP being able to mate and produce any offspring at all? If not, then what is the mechanism that stops such change from happening?
In the Gish Gallop, the Creationist spews out many questions, and when the scientist can’t answer all of them the Creationist declares victory.
With medic0506 it seems he puts out a few assertions, and lets the scientists generate many questions. Most of these he ignores, makes a few more assertions and restarts the process. I assume at the end of this he will also declare victory.
Dishonest fuckwits, all of them.
In light of your earlier assertion that light does not travel through space, this statement by you can be taken as every good evidence that Hyracotherium is indeed an ancestor of both the horse and the zebra.
Thank you for helping us continue educating future generations on the reality of evolution, medicoliar.
medic0506 isn’t a mammal.
medic0506 is a snowflake (possibly indigo) (if that’s possible).
Jesus ♥ medic0506.
Thank you, medico, for admitting to the world that when you look at scientific evidence, you see only what you wish to see, and dishonestly ignore the rest of the evidence if it does not suit your preconceptions.
Equids in the fossil record can have 5 toes, 3 toes, or 1 toe. Modern equids all have 1 toe. And that to you is “as much variation as we see today in living examples”?
Do you think we’re stupid that we wouldn’t notice such an obvious lie?
Or can you not count to 5?
Silly evolutionist. “kind” only refers to animals! No one gives a crap about plants and germs.
So why do creationists care about “kind”? Is it solely the fitting on the ark problem? Or is it that they suddenly noticed that we *have* demonstrated evolution on relatively short time scale and they have to back the goalposts? No creationist cared about the “kind” label 20 years ago and even 10 years ago conservapedia claimed it was equivalent to species and their only quarrel was that taxonomy conventions presume evolution.
FWIW, considering David M’s comments are so frequently insightful it seems a nit pick to pester him about his citations. I admit I’d like to back-track the context but I also know it’s a huge pain in the ass to cut paste and I can always search so… I’m good.
@ Menyambal
There is a rather pleasant town in Namibia, with the rather unpleasant name of “Diarrhea Mouth”: Swakopmund
The name looks so innocent to the non-Afrikaans speaker.
I think medic0506’s fundamental problem is with deep time. Having flung this at the immortal dh666, let me re-fling it here:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/geohist.html
Once you grok that, evolution makes enormous sense.
Oh, and light. (Feynman, rambling but brilliant [pun intended].)
45. Amphiox:
De nada, and thank you for admitting that variation within kinds is empirically true. So then I guess our new agreed upon definition of “evolution” is…variations within kinds. Correct?? I’m ok with that, but I suspect the old bait-and-switch is about to rear its ugly head again, as it always does when arguing with evolutionists.
Seriously though, where do you get the notion that creation teaches “fixity”, where variation doesn’t occur?? I’ve run into several people who appear to believe that creation means that all organisms were created exactly as we find them today, and that no adaptation or variation is allowed to take place. I find that an absurd notion, and one that is egregiously false.
That is an extremely leading question, so trying to turn it into a yes or no question, is to present a false dilemma, since there are more possibilities available. I acknowledge that minor changes CAN happen, but there is no guarantee that ANY change will happen, or that the organism that exhibits such a minor change will survive. For all we know, these organisms may forever remain just as we see them now.
Living fossils show very little if any change over thousands of years, or millions if one accepts deep time, so to speculate on what changes might occur, in the future, is to leave science and venture into prophecy.
Can you show that anything even remotely horse-like resulted from the breeding of two hyracotheria, or that hyracotherium can, in any way, be conclusively linked to either the horse, zebra, or donkey lineages?? If not then you’re just lining up sets of bones that you think exhibit some similarities, and declaring it to be an “evolutionary transitional sequence”. While you’re certainly free to believe that if you wish, such speculation is not the least bit scientific, in any meaningful sense of the word.
Secondly, different sized bones do not necessarily mean that two similar skeletons are from different organisms. Almost all organisms exhibit skeletal changes throughout their lifespan as they grow bigger and stronger, then get older and start the aging process where they lose bone mass in some areas of the body while gaining it in others such as the brow ridge. Many physiological problems such as osteoarthritis can also effect the size and shape of bones, and can easily mislead. Many reptiles continue to grow throughout their entire lifespan, so I would expect to see numerous changes within one individual
Many of the changes that you listed can be observed within one lifespan of an individual, so it is extremely difficult to put much stock in anyone’s ability to make statements of certainty about extinct organisms that they know absolutely nothing about, by looking at nothing more than a partial skeleton found in the dirt.
See above about prophecy and speculation being unscientific. Given that there are numerous examples of living fossils which exhibit very little change over, what evolutionists allege to be hundreds of millions of years, your claim that “it has already happened in the past”, is quite specious and is not an empirical finding.
Where might one find two bones just lying side by side, able to grow indefinitely?? In reality, when you find a bone in a living organism, it is in a functional position, allowing it to work together with the other bones to perform its function. Barring disease processes, normal bones grow to the size they need to be for that organism, and are proportional to the size of other bones. The size of each individual bone, and the overall size of the organism, is regulated within each individual. Even with the help of artificial selection, the capacity for unlimited, unregulated bone growth doesn’t exist, although farmers everywhere wish that it did.
In reality the only time you actually see bone to bone is in some type of disease process, and that person is in great pain, which certainly isn’t going to give the sufferers any type of selective advantage, over multiple generations. At the ends of bones we find cartilage which is avascular and not innervated, acting as a shock absorber, but also doesn’t allow fusion, as we age. So unless you know of a mechanism by which that cartilaginous tissue and synovial fluid just disappears, then I’d have to argue that your scenario is not a plausible one.
BTW, do you know of any organisms that have fewer bones than its parents?? I can’t think of any.
I can’t think of any known examples of that happening, can you?? The appearance of “shrinking bones” is illusory since, in the smaller individual, the bone was never as big as it is in the larger one. As I stated earlier, the size of each individual bone and the size of each individual is regulated at the individual level. Either the entire individual gets smaller, or you have a skeletal deformity.
Again, can you provide any known examples of offspring with more bones than its parents?? Obviously, if this were to happen the bone would be extremely fragile and the animal would be at a disadvantage in the wild.
Additionally, there is no mechanism for adding a new epiphyseal plate in each end of the newly separated bones, or that cartilaginous tissue, synovial fluid, etc., that I mentioned earlier. The body does not have the ability to replace that once it is gone, as any sufferer of arthritis will attest to. So no, this wouldn’t seem to be a terribly likely scenario either.
We get that from the metric fuckton of creationists that believe every single plant and animal species was created exactly as they appear, that there were two of every single animal species to ever live on the ark, that dinosaurs lived side by side with humans in the garden of eden, that humans cannot possibly damage the earth’s biosphere because god would not permit the planet to become inhospitable to humanity, etc.
srsly?
Are you even trying, or are you actually that bad at thinking?
You ask:
and just previously you spouted out this wonderful line:
For the past couple days, your arguments have rarely been more then very wordy “Nuh-uh!!” responses.
Start providing some explanations. Some frameworks of how you think the world works, not just claiming it can’t work the way we’ve observed it to work.
medic0506 @ 415
All humans. We’re born with 270 bones. By the time we’re adults, they’ve usually fused to the commonly quoted number of 206.
Many, many other mammals also exhibit this form of development.
Just looking at a single species, humans, and going with the number of bones in the adult skeleton, so we disregard bone number differences in growth and development, we directly observe:
Additional cervical ribs. About 1% of the population in humans.
A lumbarized S1 segment of the sacrum, which is about 2% of the population.
The sesamoid bones can also vary, with children having either more or fewer than their parents.
Seriously, do you even bother to check before spouting off in your pathetic ignorance?
HUMANS don’t have the ability to replace that. (And most mammals too).
Are you so ignorant as to think that the special case with humans and other mammals applies to all vertebrates?
Wrong.
And since in your egregiously stupid and ignorant and dishonest spiel in @415 you seem to have completely missed, or deliberately ignored, the main point of that sequence of questions, I will ask it again in plain language.
As you agree that variation can occur, within kinds, WHAT IS THE MECHANISM THAT PREVENTS THESE VARIATIONS FROM STEADILY ADDING UP OVER TIME UNTIL IT IS ENOUGH TO CREATE A NEW KIND?
We WERE NOT TALKING ABOUT LIVING FOSSILS, you dishonest fapwit. My question was SPECIFICALLY ABOUT HORSES AND ZEBRAS, which YOU BROUGHT UP.
YOU acknowledged that horses and zebras had a common ancestors. But the bones in horses ARE DIFFERENT IN SIZE than the bones in zebras. Thus we KNOW it has already happened in the past. The bones of horses and zebras CHANGED SIZE in the past.
But since you now choose to bring up “living fossils”, the modern coelacanth, a living fossil, is nevertheless a DIFFERENT SHAPE AND SIZE than all fossil coelacanths, and has bones of DIFFERENT SHAPES. So, once again, we KNOW the bones have changed shape in the past.
Modern sharks, also living fossils, are all DIFFERENT SIZES and DIFFERENT SHAPES than fossil shark. The teeth in particular have changed wildly in shape and number. So, once again, we KNOW the bones have changed shape in the past.
You can go down the ENTIRE LIST OF KNOWN “living fossils”, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAS A DIFFERENT SIZE AND SHAPE than its fossil ancestor. ALL OF THEM have changed in a variety of ways from its ancestor.
And, of course, there a LOTS MORE ORGANISMS THAT ARE NOT LIVING FOSSILS than there are organisms that are. So the MAJORITY of living things have CHANGED EVEN MORE in the past than these living fossils have.
Once more you reveal your dishonesty and ignorance.
More dishonest ludicrosity from you I see.
I will give you just one famous example. Michael Phelps has longer arm and leg bones than his parents, and they are longer relative to the rest of his body. This of course is one of the things that makes him a better swimmer than his parents.
But his entire body did not getter larger, just the bones of his arms and legs.
Are you calling Michael Phelps a skeletal deformity?
For poor lying ignorant medico:
http://gardenofeaden.blogspot.ca/2011/07/what-is-difference-between-zebra-and.html
Number one in that citation is bone structure. The tail bones are different between horses and zebras. In other words, those bones changed over time from the common ancestor of horses and zebras.
So what, in medico’s creationist model, is the mechanism that prevents this process of change from continuing into the future and adding up until the descendent of the horse and the descendent of the zebra are as different from one another as a frog is to a donkey?
Amphiox
The end of the earth, of course. This is really the whole of the problem. Isn’t there always a prophecy (or 100) of the end of the world coming soon? The phrase “millions of years” is always uttered with a desperate little giggle, it can’t possibly be true.
Another example of speciation empirically observed in real time.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/speciation-observed-again/
In this example, two closely related species can interbreed to produce a sterile hybrid, just like the horses and zebras. So, per medico they would be the same kind.
But then a genome duplication mutation occurs in the hybrid, rendering it no longer sterile, but also unable to interbreed with either of the parent species. It is also morphologically different from either of the two parent species.
Thus by medico’s definition, this new species should be a different kind. Unless medico wants to try that dishonest turnabout on the common descent. Of course if we had observed this species in the wild without having had the opportunity to observe the lineage of descent directly, medico would have insisted that there was no empirical evidence for common descent, DNA, etc, notwithstanding.
And BOOM, poor medico’s concept of “kinds” falls to pieces.
And this, as most of us know, is a common mechanism of speciation in plants that happens all the time and has been observed happening in real time in multiple instances for multiple species.
E pur si evolves, medico.
It’s just a tiny nitpick, but as I like what you have to say, Amphiox, and because it is cogent and substantial, I want it not to have this little glitch that gets under my skin – I hope you don’t mind: 1) eppur si muove (OR e pur si muove) and 2) eppur si evolve (OR e pur si evolve).
Also, David M‘s responses are so useful and informative (which makes them pretty damn generous, imo) that I think it’s worth the bother of searching or scrolling if necessary. It would be nice sometimes if he’d add a name or number as well, but tbh I read him more for the wealth of information he brings to the table and I’m glad to do so.
As for medic0506, all he’s good for now is continuing to demonstrate dishonesty. Anyone reading here can see how he ducks and dives and wriggles and refuses to answer even the simplest of questions – such as, what is light? Is a whale a fish, and if not, what is it? Is a bat a bird, and if not, what is it? All he’s got is the pathetic attempt to gish-gallop with a sprinkling of sciency-sounding words and move goalposts, which I’m sure works wonderfully well with a poorly-informed or misinformed audience but not so well with an audience that includes a considerable number of people who actually specialise in the various different sciences he’s trying to bullshit about. Tough shit, medic0506, you can’t bullshit an audience that includes physicists about the nature of light; you can’t bullshit an audience that includes paleontologists about the fossil record; you can’t bullshit an audience that includes geneticists about genetic variation and inheritance. Bald assertions are not enough – you have to give your definitions, propose mechanisms and offer evidence.
And since your obfuscatory techniques don’t work here and you actually get called on each lie and each attempt to move the goalposts, what you actually accomplish is to demonstrate your dishonesty. So … carry on, I guess.
Still waiting for you to offer any actual information, any at all. If only you had any.
well, given that your definition of “kind” would include everything that ever lived in one “kind” if you were honest about what it means to include everything that had a common ancestor… yeah, pretty much.
OTOH, if you gonna insist again that only things that can interbreed are a “kind”, I’m gonna remind you that you already contradicted that. (but no, variation doesn’t just happen within animals that can interbreed; there’s no mechanism to stop it once two populations can’t interbreed anymore (quite the opposite, since no interbreeding = no spread of mutations to both populations), so it just keeps going.
Actually, it is guaranteed that they happen; each act of reproduction introduces new variations, also known as mutations.
well again, given that each organism has novel mutations not present in its parent, unless everything alive dies, there’s indeed a guarantee that new mutations (and therefore new variations) will survive.
that’s actually not correct. Despite stabilizing selection being present, there are great differences between modern “fossil species” and their ancestors.
stop using words you don’t understand. prediction is essential to science. Only a religious dolt would try to exuate that with “prophecy.
Nonetheless, you really need to answer the question: what mechanism exists that prevents the accumulation of variations that happen with each act of reproduction? What mechanism prevents the continuation of the development that increases the difference that makes horses breed easily with horses, but only with great difficulty with zebras & donkeys? what mechanism is there that prevents those lizards from earlier, the ones you said were the same kind even if they can’t interbreed, to become increasingly different from each other, as mutations accumulate and no longer spread between the two populations?
Without that mechanism, mutations create variation with every generation, making two non-interbreeding populations more and more dissimilar. If you want to claim that this process stops so that variation is bounded, you have to present that mechanism.
again, that’s not correct. “Living fossils” are quite different from their predecessors from the past.
in a rodent, actually.
but you’re once again bullshitting, since the point is not a bone that grows indefinitely in one organism; the point is a bone that, because of variation, may becoe longer and occasionally fuse (which you also occasionally see as a new mutation)
and sometimes, you don’t. And other times, a bit of change makes that work even better, or better in a suddenly changed environment.
“proportional” is a weasel-word, since proportionality is highly relative, variable, and dependent on environment.
yes. also a few that have more.
once again though, you’re insisting on large jumps from parent to offspring, when what we’re talking about is accumulation over generations. And unless you provide a mechanism that prevents this increase in variation, it can indeed spread a bone-fusing mutation if that’s more advantageous than not.
sure. it’s called the island effect.
that’s an assumption. as it happens, in some cases more flexibility is preferable.
of course there is. same one as is responsible for the thinning in the first place: genes and genetic regulation.
medic0506 @415
No, we are not agreed. You’re the one doing the bait and switch since you haven’t given us a consistent definition of “kinds”.
Biology Online defines evolution as:
But let’s not talk about evolution. I keep asking you to tell us what’s so great about creationism? What questions does it answer that evolution doesn’t? What predictions does creationism make? Stop flabbling about your strawman misunderstanding of evolution and start telling us about the glories of GODDIDIT.
303 medic0506
Wow, creationism has predictive power? That would come as a shock to the entire world. Care to give some examples of the predictive power of creationism? One is enough.
Actually, we do, see the research peering into the moment of the big bang.
Creationism predicts that? Strange, then creationism predicts that there is no god and that life exists already for an eternity. Which seems incongruous with you belief in a god, and your belief in a 6000-10000 year old earth. Care to explain?
Wrong, organisms evolve over time into other organisms, for which a metric tonne of evidence exists. They in fact don’t ‘morph’ over one generation or something like that, something evolution doesn’t claim at all. You seem to have ‘theory of evolution’ confused with Pokemon (granted a great line of games). You might look into that.
No they really don’t.
So you don’t actually understand the concept of deep time. Or evolution for that matter.
Pure weapon-grade projection. And not a speck of evidence.
and at 415
Actually, this is a lie proclaimed by most creationist, but in reality, most living fossils differ greatly from their ancestors, only on the outside they have more or less the same form. But for scientific-illiterate creationists, having the same outside form means they are the same. Hence the stupid concept of kinds, which makes absolutely no sense unless you are on the first grade level of scientific understanding a la “look here, horsie looks look zebra, so they must be the same!”
Most mammals, including humans, regularly produce offspring with missing bones. You really have never heard of people born without a leg, or with fewer fingers, or fewer toes? Either you are incredibly dishonest here, or you have lead an extremely sheltered life.
I can. Snakes. Never saw them in a zoo? You should. They are beautiful.
Again, most mammals, including humans, regularly produce offspring with more bones. You really have never heard of people born with extra fingers or toes? I personally know people who had this. Again, incredibly dishonest or incredibly sheltered.
CM 386 & Marjanovic generally
Marjanovic is not doing what you say he is doing. You, CM, say:
Et j’en veux pour preuve his impugning of Nerd of Redhead here @ 371 :
Now how you get from Hydroxylysine to wut to Nerd I haven’t the slightest idea but the point is that Marjanovic is not just reacting to a statement of fact, he is not just declaring true or false here by any means. He is clearly impugning someone. So, he is unaware of what he’s doing (charitable version)? What’s his claim, “No, no I’m just running things through my truth table here and making pronouncements of fact and truth”? What is the claim here about hydroxylysine and why the fuck does it matter anyway? Context totally absent. Also content totally absent. He is just responding to content? What content? Nerd’s mind, is that the content? Or is the content something about Escherichia coli? Or is the content layers of stupid somewhere, and if so, where, and by who, and why should we care? What exactly is being claimed and argued here? Names and comment numbers would do a great deal to clarify that.
So, let’s continue looking at marjanovic’s 371. The next layer in his stack of supposed responses strictly to content that are totally clear and understandable in themselves and in isolation is:
What is the “it” that Ivanovich Ivanov tried? Name and comment number would make it easy to go back and see if the reader wants to. Otherwise you have to type the phrase in the search box. Spend time typing phrases in the search box before you even know if the content is of any interest. Or google or wikipedia it (which I very often do here on Pharyngula). And it does matter who is making a claim about what Ivanovich Ivanov did. Was it the troll or the creationist of the moment or some regular commenter who has some knowledge in this field or was it someone new or unknown? That is an indication –if only an indication– of the value or inherent interest of the content.
I reiterate, if Marjanovic had any generosity, if he had any respect for his readers, if he valued their time, he would make it easier to read his lasagne of layers and layers of phrases out of context. This has been pointed out to him more than once. He poo-poos it. Why? Is he just being lazy or arrogant or both?
And this is not about following rules. This is not just about courtesy either. When you write something it has a form and that form is informative, is this a personal letter, a newspaper article, a blog, an academic paper? Why do paper’s have titles? Is that just some stupid rule? Why do scientific articles have sections? Another stupid rule? No, it’s to make it easier for the reader to locate the information they are looking for. The same is true here for name and comment number.
Medic0506, i’m seriously starting to wonder if you are in fact a dishonesty golem sent to annoy us from the depths of Ignoria’s sewers. How can someone lie so much, contradict themselves so much, all in one place, and not realise just how full of shit they are? I think the preponderance of the evidence points to dishonesty golem and since your magic book says golems are real i guess this is conclusive evidence that you are indeed a golem made of fucking ignorance and lies.
@430 zenlike
It really is the level at which he is, which is why i find it so infuriating that he pretends to know anything about biology… It’s trully astonishing how all-encompasing these creationist’s arrogance is. Not only are they arrogant enough to pretend the universe is about them and that they are so special a magical being had to purposefully want to invent them, but it’s such huge arrogance that they will assume they know more about the natural world from their armchairs, than the thousands of people who dedicate their lives to doing so. Meanwhile i have to sit here and read something as diabolically stupid and ignorant as this:
Medic0506…no, a monkey giving birth to an iguana would’t be “reproducing after their own kind”, it would be fucking magic, you know, the kind of preposterous infantile bullshit you believe in. I just wanted to point out that just because you have used the word “synapsid” and oh my, it’s such a fancy word, isn’t it? It doesn’t mean you have a fucking clue what that means or how it is apropriately used. It’s really pathetic for someone like you to pretend to have knowledge you don’t have….it’s really fun for us to watch you fail so spectacularly at it. Please keep it up, i really enjoy when you venture out of your armchair, farm animal “horses look like donkeys”, level of understanding of biological reality. Holy fucking christ is your world tiny…
Others have already done a great job of dissecting your fecal pellets so i won’t waste my time in adding to it…i just showered, too….
Hm. I knew, and had forgotten, that he did get funding for the expedition and actually carried that part out – thanks for reminding me.
My source was in this comment on Tet Zoo. Turns out I had plainly forgotten that Ivanov had actually tried “to artificially inseminate at least two female chimpanzees in 1926-1927”, probably because “these experiments failed (unsurprisingly, considering the crude methods that were used)” – if that’s true, we don’t know if less “crude methods” would have a different outcome.
So I should quote more context? OK, I’m trying to do this here. I’ve avoided it because my comments tend to be long enough already – you probably know what forums with a reply button look like! – and because Ctrl+F is always an option. (Cmd+F on a Mac, obviously.)
Why is it a courtesy? It seems like a completely arbitrarily made-up rule to me.
I respond to one quote at a time, in chronological order; I don’t group them by topic, let alone by author; I don’t use quotes as parts of an overarching argument like I might in a scientific paper, I reply to them directly. (…Composing a paper would take way too long. Pharyngula is already an enormous timesink.)
I don’t care how many people wrote what I respond to, and I truly, honestly do not understand why anyone else would care. What does it change? If you’re really curious, which I find hard to imagine, Ctrl+F is the obvious option.
Similarly, I don’t care how far above in the thread the quotes I reply to come from, and I truly, honestly do not understand why anyone would care. What does it change? If you’re really curious, which I find hard to imagine, Ctrl+F is the obvious option.
Yes, I know. I still don’t understand where the problem is. I’m honestly at a loss here. Please explain.
Just to repeat: nothing in the above is snark. I’m honest. You take things for granted which I cannot see or imagine. If people don’t explain them, I’ll never figure them out.
Wrong. The definition is descent with heritable modification.
You know, this is very easy to exaggerate. Coelacanths have changed plenty in the last 380 million years. Tuataras have changed even more in the last 230 million years. Ginkgos have been growing less divided leaves, and fewer but bigger fruits, for some 260 million years now. Lingula today is similar to but different from the 530-to-450-million-year-old Lingulella. And so on.
Wow, what a clusterfuck of ignorance.
First of all, there are fifty million years between modern horses/donkeys/zebras (Equus) and the diversity that used to be called Hyracotherium. There’s a whole treeful of diversity in between! The last direct ancestor of Equus apparently belonged to Dinohippus – go look it up.
The similarities are real, not imagined. Go to a museum and see them for yourself.
All these problems are real – but they’re pretty well understood nowadays. How old a mammal (in particular) was when it died, in relative terms, is quite easy to figure out: the long bones of mammals ossify in three parts (the shaft and the ends) that later form a suture (so, two sutures per bone) and then fuse, at which point growth more or less stops. In the absence of such information, you can take a thin-section of a bone (or instead put it in a synchrotron if you can) and check what it looks like on the inside: the fast-growing bone of a baby with its chaotic arrangement of fibers looks quite different from the more ordered, remodeled bone of an adult. There’s also the fact that the surfaces of young bones are rough, and are later covered by deposition of thin, smooth, hard layers of bone.
Paleopathology is a thing; osteoarthritis is easy to recognize. Look it up.
That you know absolutely nothing about them doesn’t mean everyone else does, too!
And does rock count as “dirt” now? It’s not like all skeletons are partial, either.
So, first of all, you keep confusing evolution with metamorphosis. You’re trying to derive the adult condition of one species from the adult condition of another, finding problems with that, and declaring that evolution can’t work. In the real world most of us live in, the adult condition of each individual is derived from a single cell. Mutations in genes that are active during development lead to adults that differ from their parents. Duh.
But anyway: you don’t know a mechanism by which cartilage can disappear? Chondroclasts come and destroy it, then osteoblasts come and deposite bone instead. That’s called endochondral ossification, and it’s how all of your bones except the outside of the skull, most of the lower jaw, a bit of the middle ear, and parts of the collarbones have formed: they all started as pure cartilage in the embryo, then bone appeared in the middle (and, in long bones, at the ends) and grew at the expense of the cartilage till only the articular cartilage was left.
Cartilage being avascular is a peculiarity of mammals. It makes sense when you consider how tiny the earliest mammals were.
Joints that never move are eventually replaced by bone; and not all joints are true synovial joints.
People with different numbers of bones than their parents? That happens. In some people, the centrale 3 in the wrist fuses to the 3rd distal carpal, while in others it does not. (I can’t be bothered to look up the human nomenclature for wrist bones.) – That’s without counting all the fusions that happen in development: your forehead consists of two bones that probably fused soon after you were born (plenty of people retain the suture as long all others, though); your sacral vertebrae have fused; each vertebra consists of four parts to begin with (left and right neural arch, left and right pleurocentrum) that fuse; around the age of 40, the skull bones (many of them already composite) begin to fuse so that the skull of an 80-year-old is a single bone – like that of a 1-year-old crow.
Remember thalidomide? It messed with the expression of Hox genes and switched off the formation of various parts of the limbs. A disadvantage for a human – an advantage for a snake…
That’s not how it works. Look around yourself, and you’ll find that some people have a longer vertebral column than usual, while others have longer arms. There are people who are shorter than me when we’re standing, but the same height when we’re sitting. My arms reach halfway down my thighs when I stand straight – that’s usually limited to early teenagers; the arms of most adults reach only to their hips!
You know how the Neandertalers had shorter forearms than people today? Add that difference again to the average living person, and you get my forearms.
Or compare the relative lengths of the middle 3 fingers of various people. You’ll find yourself in a world of surprise and wonder.
Uh, actually… the pterygoid bone in the palate (both left and right) of the caecilian Epicriniops subdivides just like that during metamorphosis. However, the two parts the adult has (on each side) aren’t connected by a synovial joint, but by a ligament instead (a syndesmotic “joint”).
Also, check out the Wikipedia article on pseudarthrosis. (BTW, the X-ray photo in there shows a human hand where the centrale and distal carpal 3 have fused.)
That’s not a new bone, it’s a bone looking different than in other people – instead of contacting the ilia and fusing with the other sacrals, it stays free and ends up looking like a lumbar.
46. Amphiox:
You’re trying to project what you THINK you see, into an empirical finding, which it is not. That is not at all what “we” see, it is your interpretation of what you think. This is nothing more than an argument from homology, which I addressed in post 334 to PZ.
Secondly, your interpretation of this genetic similarity is not based on comparative data, and is not falsifiable. If you think I’m wrong on that, then show me an example of a genetic comparison of two completely unrelated organisms. You can’t do that because you believe everything is related to everything else. Because of that a priori belief that you have, you could be looking at scientific falsification of universal common ancestry, and not even know it. You have to cherry-pick evo-friendly data while ignoring conflicting data. In doing so, you remove the possibility of falsifying the hypothesis if it is indeed false. So again, your belief is not scientific in any meaningful sense of the word.
Because horses and zebras share a reproductive pathway and are variations of the same basic body plan. The differences between them are relatively minor, and do not require the organisms to change into something else, such is not the case with the hippo-to-whale hypothesis.
What you guys refuse to accept is that all organisms HAVE to have the same basic molecular structure, in order to have an available food source. Look at the examples of citrate and nylonase, to get some idea of what, even a very simple organism, has to go through to adapt to a different food source. If differing organisms didn’t share the same molecular structure, our bodies would not have the ability to metabolize the only things we have available as energy sources. Because of that, molecular similarity is the only scientifically plausible scenario that would allow for the diversity of life forms that we see.
With that in mind, and with the knowledge that organisms have to share a reproductive pathway in order to be related by ancestry, it is very easy to explain the similarity in organisms without having to resort to the unfalsifiable and simple-minded belief that all organisms descended from one “LUCA”.
Form is informative it gives information
Jadehawk @ 387
I said to D.M. about the way he stacks comments without refering to author and comment number:
You, Jadehawk, answered:
It’s relevant to know if the subject is being changed or not, if these three bits are part of the same or a different argument, if they are related. That is relevant information.
I added:
And you, J., asked again how that was relevant. It’s an indication of whether or not you have to scroll up just a bit to find the original quote or use the search box. Big deal? Well, seconds add up. It is also an indication of whether or not the subject is a major one being discussed in many comments or just a local reaction to a local detail. It is relevant information.
You admit D.M.’s comments could be clearer:
Substituting the “it” in the quote is probably usually more work than just giving the name and comment number.
Then you add at 388
Point taken.
I screwed up the html.
@434 medic0506
Like I think I said before, you’re missing the point of science. Science uses what it knows to make testable predictions about what it doesn’t. Any good creation myth can explain the world we see around us. As far as I can tell from the parts of this thread I’ve read the only prediction your particular creation myth makes is that anything science discovers you can come up with an explanation. But what has yours predicted prior to discovery?
D.M. @ 433
That’s a lot more work than just giving the fucking name and comment number.
Yes, Pharyngula is a timesink and that’s why helping your reader to understand what you are doing and saying is a good thing to do.
And, it’s a beautiful day outside. I’m outa here.
Re: predictions of science versus presupposition.
Take something as simple as antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. Predicted by the Theory of Evolution. Not at all predicted by creationism. Don’t even have to go for the harder stuff to refute creationism.
Uh, yeah. One part of the reason is that you’ve lost blockquote tags here. The first line you quote is part of the reply to the quote above it, not the one below it. I thought that was obvious. Here it is again:
So, first, Chas Peterson pointed out in comment 282 that I was talking nonsense about collagen: instead of being limited to vertebrates, it’s common to all multicellular animals (Metazoa). I quoted this and replied that I was now “thoroughly confused”, and added that, while trying to look this up, I found that hydroxylysine is even more widespread than collagen is; I had thought it only occurs in collagen. (Hydroxylysine is an amino acid that is not coded for by the genome, but made “on site”, in the finished protein, by an enzyme that reacts with lysine residues.)
Then, in the same comment, Chas tried to point out that Nerd’s “explanation” of what energy is was completely misleading, especially in context. I replied that that’s normal.
I’ve been telling Nerd for at least seven years now that he keeps having automated reactions to keywords, reactions that are sometimes totally tangential to the context. (Sometimes he misses blatant sarcasm, to pick another example, and replies with his “liar & bullshitter” routine.) He never replies…
Check out Nerd’s 277, a reply to Jadehawk’s 273.
medic0506 said nonsense about energy while talking about photons and eyes; Jadehawk wondered if he knew what energy was; Nerd tried to answer the question of what energy was – as follows: “Energy = glucose plus oxygen going to carbon dioxide and water plus ATP.” Well. “[G]lucose plus oxygen going to carbon dioxide and water plus ATP” is the most common source of energy in, uh, animals and some others; it isn’t itself energy. It is also rather painfully irrelevant to the energy a photon carries, as obviously a photon doesn’t eat glucose or breathe oxygen.
What Jadehawk was wondering if medic0506 knew was the basic meaning of “energy” in general: what’s described in this Wikipedia article.
Again you’ve lost a blockquote tag. Only the second paragraph you quote is mine; the first, the one that begins with “Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov tried it”, is quoted.
Turns out it’s from comment 295 by Dalillama and doesn’t explain it either, replying to a quote from me – “Actually… I don’t think anyone has tried in the last 5 million years.” – which doesn’t even contain an “it”. Searching for that lands me near the beginning of my comment 255, where I wrote that sentence to reply to “As a human, I can’t interbreed with chimps”.
Am I perhaps systematically underestimating people’s memories here? Or is it unusual to read 150 comments in one sitting? Please, everyone, tell me. Projecting myself into everyone has gone wrong before.
Hardly. I still need to meet the same standard of evidence in my reply, no matter who said it.
I do try to mark particularly stupid quotes by (the <q> tag) or by adding that figure (apparently called Gumby) in the background (that’s the <blockquote class=”creationist”> tag).
Because I’m honestly not getting it. For example, I would never have guessed that you thought I’d put a reply above a quote. :-|
…You’ve already read the information you were looking for. Or do you start reading a thread in the middle?
Almost no scientific paper is a pure reply. I’m not sure what you hope to get out of a blog comment.
I’m not even going to say anything here, just: go back to #61 in this thread and read it for comprehension. Your argument makes no sense in the face of pseudogenes and ERVs, for instance. Even Behe gets that much right, FFS.
A brief summary of this ongoing discussion.
38. Nightjar:
No, but it’s apparently a version that you’d prefer to argue against with someone, so…carry on.
I have defined a biblical kind as a group of organisms that can inter-breed, and/or share a common ancestor. That you don’t like that definition is irrelevant. It is no more vague than trying to use the species concept.
This appears to be a relatively common tactic that you guys use here to try and shift the BoP. Ok, well your answer is…discontinuities in the reproductive pathways between groups and the lack of a mechanism that allows those to be overcome by natural processes.
@440 David Marjanović
I honestly don’t understand why you need more than “lots of people find it helpful” in order to do something that is explicitly listed as a courtesy expected of commenters on the rules page. It’s there to begin with precisely because lots of people find it helpful for keeping track of the conversation. It’s fine if you want to better understand where people are coming from but what the hell is so objectionable about just bloody doing it that makes it worthwhile to actually argue about it?
So, mediczero, that “old book” explains things so much better than modern science ’cause it’s all “inerrant” and shit….
When the priesthood of the Wind God YHWH came back from the so-called “Babylonian Captivity” and cobbled together that inerrant text you’re following, along with killing off all the other gods as they had done with their priesthoods while away, they left in the “fact” that insects have four legs.
By Aristotle’s time (And say what you will about him, he did create biology—unfortunately, physics “looked like a nail” too, and his biologization of physics had baleful effects we’re not over yet.) insects had six legs. So the insect “kind” went from having four legs (the bible being all inerrant and shit) to having six legs in just 200 years!
Now wouldn’t four-legged insects and two-legged insects be two different “kinds”? If not, why not? If six-legged horses started appearing, wouldn’t they be a different “kind” from four-legged horses? If not, why not?
Since your babble is a book of mythology/fiction, it is a meaningless unscientific definition. Until you stick with science and leave religion, your argument will forever be stuck in presupposition land.
We answer your bullshit. You ignore the refutations in the most unscientific manner, since you know you can’t answer them. Like where the fuck is your evidence for your imaginary deity, and that your holy book is inerrant. You avoid those pertinent questions like the plague.
@434 medic0506
Once again you try to sound like you know what you are talking about and you fail..misserably…
If you knew anything about biology you would know that it is entirely possible to have different metabolic pathways to process a single mollecular substrate. So, no, there is no requirement in your “animals were magicked into existence in discrete kinds” pseudo-model to share most metabolic routes.
In addition, this god of yours that is supossed to be able to create entire universes, let alone magic animals into being, should be able to create individual biologies that nevertheless would permit one animal to process the matter of another animal, even if this other animal (or plant, or whatever) had a radically different biochemistry. You DON’T have to be made of the exact same mollecules or even families of mollecules as another organism to be able to metabolise it.
So it turns out that you are once again full of shit, and not only that, that in reality, when people who aren’t dishonest arseholes who believe in magic, put the time and effort to observe nature and learn about it, what we find is that animals do share metabolic pathways, even though there is no requirement that they do, that they share mollecular characteristics even though the same functions could be accomplished by other mollecules, and that this similarities between organisms consistently follow a pattern that they would have absolutely no business following in your “model”. That pattern is common ancestry and this is extremely clear to anyone who studies biology.
And this is where it is confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt that medic0506’s concept of “kind” is “looks pretty much the same”. Unfortunately for you, real biologists go much, much further than superficial looks and that allows them to know that the reasons why a zebra and a horse are unequivocally related (which is so much more than “they look horsy”) are the EXACT SAME REASONS why hippos and whales are unequivocally related.
Tell us, are birds a single kind? If not, how many kinds of birds are there?
Greetings,
#434 medic0506,
Here’s your answer.
No other explanation comes close – certainly not creationism/ID.
Kindest regards,
James
41. LykeX:
Creationists don’t have any different methods for determining ancestry than evolutionists do. The only difference is that we don’t assume that all organisms are related, just because we can observe some similarities. Biology is what it is and it’s the same for both of us, even though we believe in a different explanation for life and diversity of life forms.
meta suggestion for bicarbonate:
1. grasp stick
2. yank from ass
Inability to follow the discussion is your problem. You don’t get to impose your preferences for format on everybody else.
I don’t know where my fingers got “two-legged insects” in 445—call it a mutation.
Anybody want to bet mediczero won’t even try to answer how insect-“kind” grew two extra legs in just two centuries? They should have 28 legs by now!
David,
Speaking only for myself, the bits you quote are usually more than enough to remind me of the comment/discussion/topic you are responding to. On the rare occasions that I read something and don’t remember where it comes from I use Ctrl-F, but frankly knowing the comment number and the author wouldn’t help me at all in those cases. If I don’t remember reading it, the context in which it was said is not likely to suddenly dawn on me with a number and a ‘nym, and it’s always easier to Crtl-F an unique sentence than a number or the ‘nym of a commenter that has commented several times.
People who respond to a comment way upthread indicating only ‘nym and number bother me a lot more because 1) I do not memorize who said what in which comment and 2) if I need a reminder I actually have to scroll up or Ctrl-F my way through all the comments made by that person on the thread or Ctrl-F the comment number and hope it doesn’t appear too many times on the page. It’s a lot more bothersome* than just selecting a quote and hitting Ctrl-F and there I go, with the added benefit of having the quoted sentence show up highlighted right there in the middle of where it was originally said.
*But note that while more bothersome than David’s commenting style, it still ranks pretty low in the list of things that bother me and is filed under “minor nuisances I can live with and not worth pestering anyone about”.
***
medic0506,
You say that organisms that belong to different kinds can’t share a common ancestor and when we ask you to define what a “kind” is you say it is a group of organisms that share a common ancestor. Well, sure. How can it not be true that organisms that don’t share a common ancestor (i.e., belong to different kinds) don’t… share a common ancestor? I certainly don’t want to argue against such a thing.
The question is… how do you know there’s more than one “kind”?
It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s that it is useless.
This has been addressed already, multiple times. See, for example, Jadehawk’s #364. Things kind of moved on since comment fucking #38, you know.
Again, things have moved on. You have questions to answer and points to address about “discontinuities”. See Prof Weird’s #355 for an example.
medic0506, why don’t you catch up with this thread? Why don’t you read it all before making it even longer?
Problem is, your comment 334 doesn’t in fact invalidate decades of biology. It tries to handwave a big, important concept away.
Do you have a simpler explanation for what we see? A more parsimonious explanation – one that requires fewer assumptions than the theory of evolution does?
You just need to spend more than ten seconds on your arguments.
Really, did you honestly believe that thousands of scientists over so many decades haven’t considered this argument of yours?
The trick is the fact that all known life shares lots and lots of features it doesn’t need to share for any functional reason. That’s why people have brought up all the different amino acids and nucleobases and so on (I could go on with the sugars and the lipids, I suppose, but that would take me hours to look up). Even beyond this, lots of basic enzymes that all known life shares have much more in common than they’d need to; beyond that, several such families of enzymes for different functions have more in common with each other than there’s any functional reason for, strongly suggesting that they have common ancestors in organisms before LUCA.
All this is falsifiable. I predict that life from outside this solar system – quite possibly also inside it, if it exists there: Europa is a good candidate – will have radically different biochemistry.
What do you mean by ? How are hippos and whales not variations of the same basic body plan?
You seem to have no idea of the different food sources different organisms use, eh?
There are those that eat hydrogen and breathe carbon dioxide. There are those that eat the resulting methane and breathe sulfate, nitrate or nitrite. This is unconnected to the rest of life on Earth – and yet, the organisms that do these things are ordinary bacteria and archaea, not some new kind of organism.
Quite the contrary. Quoting a longer passage just means I need to highlight more before hitting Ctrl+C; there’s zero additional work involved. Indeed, if this way I end up quoting one longer passage instead of two shorter ones, I end up doing less work than before. Copying & pasting names & numbers, on the other hand, means I need to scroll up & down one extra time (per comment to any part of which I reply), if not two; remembering them instead, as you do*, invites typos or worse, and gives me one more thing to do with my memory at the same time as I’m thinking about a reply.
* I can tell because of the missing accent in my name.
There isn’t one species concept. There’s about 150. They’re not different ways to describe the same thing, but ways to describe different things: according to two different species concepts, there are 101 or 249 endemic bird species in Mexico, and the regions of greatest endemism shift around.
You . Well. So organisms that cannot interbreed but share a common ancestor are the same kind, and organisms that can interbreed but (by some miracle) do not share a common ancestor are also the same kind? Aren’t these opposite conditions?
Don’t you notice that you merely repeated the question instead of answering it?
How can you tell there are discontinuities? What do you even mean by “reproductive pathway”? How can you tell a mechanism is really lacking?
1) So far it’s been three people (chigau, bicarbonate and you) who have said anything, perhaps four (Ináji often reminds other people, but not me so far); 2) I quote what I reply to – some people don’t do that and use name & number instead, which I find counterproductive because it means I must scroll up to get any idea what they’re talking about in the vast majority of cases (I don’t remember the names of so many people well enough to be able to pay attention to who says what, especially when they aren’t regulars); 3) it would, as explained above, mean extra work for me, for questionable benefits at best; 4) it would, as explained farther above, be actively misleading, because who says stuff is irrelevant in the first place! I don’t want to encourage arguments from authority or ad hominem, neither in myself nor in my readers.
Of course I cite my sources when I write a scientific paper. But there, people don’t have Ctrl+F at their disposal, and I’m not supposed to quote at length in the first place.
I’m intrigued. What do you mean? :-)
Wonderful, I had managed to forget that this paper exists. :-)
But why link to that forum thread when you can link directly to the open-access paper?
Creationists have no methods at all. Pointing and saying “goddidit” is not a method. :-)
Seriously, so often creationists claim they’re looking at all the same data and just interpret them differently… when five seconds later it’s obvious they don’t even know most of the data exist!
If you believe in a scientific theory, you’re doing it wrong.
Faith isn’t science. Doubt and testing is science.
Same for me.
Hey, arsehole, just because you are an intelectually vapid moron that likes to assume things (like the existence of gods) it doesn’t mean that the rest of us are assuming shit. The reality of common ancestry is not an assumption and it’s not based on the observation of some similarities you dishonest fucking bottomless sack of ignorance. It is a conclussion that is reached after observing the overwhelming amount of individual pieces of evidence that makes it as clear as day. You may be used to the bottom up aproach of assuming a god and then trying to fit everything into that shoe, but the rest of us are doing it right, the other way around. We make observations and we derive the conclussions that best fit ALL the observable data. We don’t begin assuming the conclussion because that’s not a path to knowledge.
Biology is indeed what it is, but it’s not the same for both of us, because you are so vastly ignorant of biological reality that you only see a tiny fraction of the picture. Furthermore, your “explanation” explains fucking nothing. You don’t have a competing model…you don’t have an alternative explanation..all you have is magic and ignorance. No observations, no mechanisms, no theoretical model, no predictive power, no explanatory power…just fucking magic and bronze-age simplistic tales.
David Marjanovic at 453:
Aristotle’s […] biologization of physics had baleful effects we’re not over yet
I’m intrigued. What do you mean? :-)
Remember I’m old—I’m from the book-reading generation. I really got that from Ernst Mayr’s The Growth of Biological Thought. His main argument was decrying Plato’s baneful effects on biology: The perception of species as Platonic ideals, of which given organisms were more or less imperfect realizations. This is the main source of mediczero’s fetishization of “kinds” that can’t “morph” into each other, because “ideals” are always separate and always the same.
He had a little time left over for Aristotle’s biology and how it lapped over into his physics. Objects have to be energized all the time they’re moving, and when the pushing stops, they do; and all the other things that make the “cosmos” into a living organism. If you examine “folk physics” today, or as you (I think) called it “Aristotelian/Star Trek physics”, it’s still alive and well. Hence medic0 thinking any “object” like a photon “propelled” from the sun at the speed of light will “blow your head off.”
(How com “Aristotelian” is -ian but “Euclidean” is -ean? Well, at least my spell-checker caught it.)
TL;DR: Plato’s mathematicization of biology and Aristotle’s biologization of physics still effect the mindsets of Creationists in particular, and they can hold both misconceptions in their brain at the same time!
Blockquote fail on aisle 455!
By the way, DM: I apologize for the lack of accent on your name: ordinarily I just hit alt + e, and that creates an acute accent with a blinking space below it for the next letter to go. The comment box on this website is unique in that that won’t work with Javascript disabled, and since I don’t want the page to take 15 minutes to load, I have it disabled. Sorry!
Ah! So that’s what the fruitcake meant. And that also explains his hilarious assertion that there is nothing “physical”, since, by the above “logic”, if there was, it would “blow your head off” as it entered the eye.
Hmm…Checks the babble, and sees no mention of Moses firing up his solar powered laptop, and checking Google Earth to find the fastest way across the Sinai to avoid wandering about for 40 years without leaving any evidence. Guess GPS, the internet, men on the moon, don’t exist for true Godbots, who haven’t advanced their thinking beyond about 100 AD. Pitiful delusional fools.
medic0506 @449
Oh this old lie again huh? Wasn’t this in the creation “Museum”? This idea that the differences between reality and creationism are merely that creationism “interprets the facts differently”? Ignoring the actual fact that the facts directly refute creation over and over again?
I think it gets back to the tarring biology and evolution as a religion, hence why one of medic’s opening salvos was to define what he called “Evolutionism” and try to stupid argument of “You also have faith, ergo you can’t object to my faith!” By trying to turn the disagreements between reality and creationism into a religious conflict they don’t have to be wrong because, that’s like man, just what you BELIEVE!
However Medic0506 remains dishonest. If he truly, truly considered evolution to be a religion he’d come in here to try and argue a religious case instead of the usual dishonest creationist science-mangling. I have more respect for the religionists who obviously try witness and give misguided arguments for their religion than I have for the religionists who try and wear a lab coat and spew bullshit disguised as science.
They were mainframe abaci powered by slaves in those days.
The things were BIG, heavy, and sloooooooooowww. Moses, et al., didn’t spend those 40 years moving in circles, most of the time was spent waiting for the slaves to unpack the mainframe, run the next computation, pack it up again, and transport it to the next camp. Which was rarely more than about 3 inches further, since the calculations were hopelessly out-of-date by that time.
Hence the little-known eleventh commandant, “Get Thee a Faster Computer!”
(The real bugger was the internet connection…)
So all of Earth life is the same kind. That’s what we’ve been saying and providing evidence for and you’ve been denying without bothering to even attempt to show any evidence.
blf:
Be careful what you wish for. From Fredric Brown: Answer.
David Marjanović
The Mellow Monkey said plenty about your not including nyms in two responses in the latest dome with Tony and Beatrice also chiming in. Any mention of even the truncated ‘nym of the writer of each series of blockquotes is all we ask when quoting multiple sources in a single comment. If you take the time to read and respond to two or more commenters in a single comment, why are you bothering to scroll through that chunk of the thread more than once? Just copy-paste any bothersome comment and nym into an external editor as you read it the first time. Scrolling problem solved and person wrong on the internet explicitly made aware of their wrongness.
Another lie from medico. The genetic and morphological biological evidence that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor is exactly the same and of the same quality as the genetic and morphological evidence that horses and zebras share a common ancestor, but medico explicitly rejects the first and accepts the second.
When pressed, he claimed there was a “reproductive pathway” from horse to zebra, but not human to chimpanzee.
In other words, his “evidence” for common descent was their ability to interbreed.
Which brings us to this:
Which is exposed as yet another lie, an attempt to hide the utter intellectual bankruptcy of his position by waffling. It is clear when pressed that he only accepts the ability to interbreed as evidence a common ancestor, so adding that “and/or” in there is just an attempt to make his argument look more reasonable, when it isn’t.
And of course “the only difference we don’t assume” is ALSO another lie, since evolutionary theorists never assumed that either. Darwin, who first proposed common ancestry, explicitly wrote “from one form OR A FEW.” In other words he did not assume common descent from a single ancestor. Common descent was demonstrated BY EVIDENCE later.
You are truly pathetic in your dishonesty.
I THINK I see that because they are the EXACT SAME KIND OF CHANGES as seen in horses and zebras. THAT IS THE EMPIRICAL FINDING.
THEY ARE THE SAME.
THAT IS THE EMPIRICAL FINDING.
THEY ARE THE SAME.
WHAT I SEE IS THEY ARE THE SAME.
THAT IS THE EMPIRICAL FINDING.
EMPIRICAL, as in WHAT WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK.
SO WE LOOK AND WE SEE THAT THEY ARE THE SAME.
When two things are the same, when WE LOOK AND SEE that they are the same, when they are EMPIRICALLY the same, the reasonable interpretation is that they ARE the same.
YOU, however, claim them to be DIFFERENT. YOU must are the one who is inserting an unsupportable interpretation on the EMPIRICAL evidence.
Hey medic0506, did your god create tapeworms? Or did they “microevolve” from something else since the fall or the flood?
Any and EVERY genetic comparison ever done includes within the analysis the possibility that the organisms are completely unrelated. For you to even say this piece of drivel shows that you don’t even know how genetic comparisons are even done.
There are a set of findings that, if present, would show that the two organisms are completely unrelated. This set of findings have never been found in testing of any life on earth.
Scientists are very eager to find something with this set of findings. That is why they are so excited about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and there is a healthy field of research looking for “aliens on earth”, organisms that arose on earth from a different biogenesis event. That is why the arsenic bacteria were such an interesting claim when it was made, even though it ultimately did not pan out.
In other words, are they a “kind” or are they part of another “kind”?
Here, medico, is some of the genetic evidence that horses and zebras share a common ancestor:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14970709
Humans and chimpanzees also share a tandem fusion of two chromosomes.
So why do you accept this as evidence that horses and zebras share a common ancestor, while you reject the EXACT SAME EVIDENCE when found in humans and chimpanzees?
And why do you reject this:
which again is the EXACT SAME TYPE OF EVIDENCE as an indication that humans and equids, along with all eutherian mammals, share a common ancestor?
What is so special about the horse/zebra case that does not apply to the human/chimpanzee case, or the case of all the placental mammals?
Endogenous retroviruses are parasitic infectious agents that randomly insert their DNA into their host. This has been observed empirically in real time.
Humans and chimpanzees share certain endogenous retroviruses IN THE SAME PLACES in their DNA. This too is directly observed empirically in genetic sequences.
Those particular endogenous retroviruses are not in the same places in the DNA of any other organisms EXCEPT for humans and chimpanzees.
Using genetic clocks, we also find that the TIME at which the insertion occurred in both humans and chimpanzees is THE SAME.
We “interpret” this evidence to mean that a retrovirus infected the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, and the inserted sequence was then inherited by both chimpanzees and humans.
What is YOUR explanation for this similarity, medico, if you reject the common ancestry of humans and chimpanzees? That your god inserted the wholly useless parasitic sequence into both humans and chimpanzees at the moment of their creation, just for kicks? That by pure random chance, the retrovirus infected both humans and chimpanzees AT THE SAME TIME, and just happened to insert IN THE SAME PLACE in both of them, out of all the billions and billions of other places it could have inserted in the genome?
Has medic0506 explained how light is shot from guns or flung out of the Sun by catapults or blown out of peashooters by angels or whatever excuse there is for photons to have kinetic energy?
David Marjanović (#433)
Did you ignore my explanation here? It’s courteous to make your comment accessible for people who have difficulty with your preferred style, especially if you’re responding to something they wrote.
Why are you acting like the fact that people do care doesn’t matter until they can explain this to you in a way that you understand? Sometimes one’s own understanding needs to take second place to accommodating other people. (And I wrote this before seeing Seven of Mine making the same point in #444.)
~*~*~*~*~*~
azhael (#466)
Wow, I misread that as “did your god create tampons?” And was thinking maybe the need for inventing tampons was meant to highlight god’s terrible design strategy where the female human reproductive system is concerned. Especially terrible given how, according to the Bible, he considers periods really, really gross.
Back in reality, though, menstruation is a great example of something that shows how closely we’re related to chimps, gorillas and orangutans.
you don’t. they’re not connected. why would you even think they are?
actually, yes he is. He’s explaining why a statement “has several interacting layers of stupid”.
actually, the context is right there, in the part you for some reason didn’t quote:
“Collagen is a synapomorphy of the entire Metazoa (even the stuff we used to call ‘spongin’ is now considered a collagen afaik)”.
yes, content; that content being the statement “That comment has several interacting layers of stupid”, which he explains.
why are you combining responses from two different quotes?
you really don’t need to care. really.
that one I already addressed. Such “it” phrases should have their referent quoted or inserted.
it’s a Marjanovic comment, which had that form for ~7 years, and only recently people decided to start throwing fits over it.
it is. every quote is separate. every quote is its own subject.
nope; since the “it” would be known, being what’s under discussion, why the commenter’s name would have to be looked up & copied first.
Hippos and whales are variations of the same basic body plan, as do all tetrapods. The differences between them are relatively minor, and did not require the organisms to change into something else, as whales and hippos both remained mammals. There is for example a one to one correspondence of all the bones in a whale with those in a hippo.
The body plan of the whale is MORE SIMILAR to that of the hippo than it is to the shark.
Hippos and whales also have a shared reproductive pathway, clearly demonstrated within their DNA, exactly as it is with horses and zebras.
So I ask again, why do you accept the common ancestry of horses and zebras, but reject that of hippos and whales?
How does the presence and location of a silent endogenous retroviral sequence, shared by humans and chimpanzees, have anything to do with their ability to consume an available food source, when gorillas, baboons, mice, rats, horses, zebras, bears and dogs happily consume the same food resource and don’t have that shared silent endogenous retroviral sequence?
Citrate and nylon are both carbon compounds, so this *might* be true for organisms that obtain energy from breaking down carbon compounds by oxidizing them. And while that is the most successful of all the metabolic strategies used by life on earth, it only accounts for perhaps 10% of all the different ways that organisms on earth metabolize energy sources.
Why should an organism that breathes iron need to share the same molecular structures in the molecules that make up its outer membrane (including ones which are not even involved in energy metabolism)?
This only seems plausible to you because you, in your ignorance and dishonesty, have ignored 90% of the known diversity in life forms on this planet.
There is also no plausible reason why the needs of metabolism should constrain the genetic code. Even if two organisms need phenylalanine in their protein to serve a specific function, there is absolutely nothing that constrains them both to use UUU to encode for phenylalanine in their genetic code. ANYTHING could have been used to code for phenylalanine, since the only functional significance is the phenylalanine in the completed protein. Indeed, sharing the same genetic code is a DISADVANTAGE, as it makes both organisms vulnerable to the same viruses, whereas if they had different codes, the viruses of one would not be able to infect the other.
And yet THEY DO have the same code. There is no coherent explanation for this except for common ancestry.
stop projecting your own behavior on others, medic.
you didn’t “address” it, you bungled it. You made a very large number of mistakes in that comment, and you don’t even know which structures are homologous and which are analogous.
again, stop projecting. It is you who comes to this with the a priori belief in biblical creation; common descent is a conclusion based on evidence.
you really have no idea what you’re talking about. Something that is explainable by common descent is by definition not able to falsify it; and people have shown you examples of what falsification would look like.
because they don’t have to have any such thing. Certainly plants don’t need to have the same structure as each other, and plenty of animals would benefit from being inedible as well.
oh, you mean the mutation for a new trait? you mean evolution?
AND that code is a degenerate one that uses 64 triplets to code for 20 amino acids (and has been unable to adapt to the necessity for more than that—even the hydroxylysine and hydroxythreonine critical for plants and animals). Turns out that if you throw out any of the 64 triplets that allow “frame-shift mutations” to achieve a comma-free code, you get exactly 20 possible amino acids! Oh my, how brilliant the Intelligent Designer™ was to come up with such an elegant scheme!
Well, sadly…no. That was Francis Crick that came up with it. The Intelligent Designer™ came up with the inelegant kludge that is universal in life on earth. He’s not even as smart as Francis Crick. Admittedly, that means he could be smarter than me, but that’s not that big a task.
the one time I forget to preview…
again, from the spot I blockquotefailed
except we don’t eat the majority of live in existence anyway; no animal does. If separate creation was a thing, there’d be no need for things that are inedible to be made of compatible molecular structure.
Aside from that, proteins are taken apart into AAs and then put back together; sugars come in a great variety of forms that are accessible to humans; etc. A much greater variation would be entirely possible even within things that we eat (and aside from that, humans evolve the ability to digest stuff they couldn’t digest, too. Adult lactose intolerance has evolved out of some human populations. If food plants and animals contained a greater diversity of sugars and proteins, humans would be able to digest a greater variety thereof.
actually, it’s impossible to explain without the (very much falsifiable) idea of common descent, as I just demonstrated. There’s no reason for all life, even life that doesn’t eat other life and would benefit from being inedible, to be made in exactly the same way; there’s no reason for lack of variation that doesn’t affect edibility; etc.
Plus, a lot of similarity in DNA has no functional basis; they’re the corpses of viruses.
that it’s a definition that either includes only species of sexually reproducing animals, or everything that’s ever been alive is relevant and the reason why your definition is garbage. Try again.
um. two different populations not being able to reproduce anymore would accelerate the accumulation of diversity past the “kind” level, actually. Because the mechanism for continued accumulation of difference between two groups is the exactly same one as that to accumulate diversity within one group, and you’ve still not demonstrated why this accumulation of mutational changes would stop.
Jadehawk
hence people “Marjanovićing a thread” :-)
I have no trouble following a Marjanović comment. Usually his comments are specific enough to the quotes for me to know what he’s talking about and if I need more information then Ctrl-F takes me to the original comment.
What I’d like to hear from medic0506, is how Creationists go about deciding what ‘kind’ any arbitrary critter belongs to. It’s certainly true that real biologists don’t have a 100% reliable, universally applicable methodology by which one can always, without exception determine which species any arbitrary critter belongs to… but that’s just a long-winded way of acknowledging that real biologists don’t have a perfect methodology for determining what species Critter X is. Rather than the One Absolutely True And Perfect species-determination methodology, real biologists have however-many imperfect species-determination methodologies. But Creationists? As best I can tell, Creationists don’t have any “kind”-determination methodology whatsoever. So it’s kind of amusing, if you take your humor black, that a Creationist schmuck like medic0506 can ignore all of real biology’s imperfect species-determination methodologies, and sneer at real biology for its lack of the One Absolutely True And Perfect species-determination methodology… while, at the same time, stumping for Creationism, which comes complete with absolutely no “kind”-determination methodology whatsoever.
Of course, it’s entirely possible (however unlikely) that some Creationist or other might have come up with a methodology by which it’s possible to determine which ‘kind’ an arbitrary critter belongs to; but as far as I know, it ain’t happened yet.
So.
How do you determine what ‘kind’ an arbitrary critter belongs to, medic0506? Given two arbitrary critters, how do you determine whether they both belong to the same ‘kind’?
Jadehawk @ 473
Concerning how to read David Marjonovic, thanks for the exegesis. It helps, no, really, it does.
But I can’t say the same for cute assy petersen with his huffposty listicule of things I can do to dissuade myself from crimes of lèse-majesté and -magisterium. Ni dieu ni maître. And, Petersen @ 450, suck my dick too.
What the hell is a “reproductive pathway”?
I Googled “sharing a reproductive pathway”, and all I got was jokes about two sailors and my mom.
If the term is supposed to reflect the microevolution of the descendants of an Ark passenger pair, it needs to be stated clearly. Just repeating the same damned term, when Google yields nothing and everybody here keeps asking what it means, is just stupid.
As for whales and hippos, I caught some hippo video today, and dogged if it didn’t look like they could just tuck their legs up and turn whale. They have the water-tight nostrils, the under-water eating, and the aquatic eyes, already, and some sort of taper at the base of the tail. And that’s just from looking.
medic0506, you just like to look at animals and decide they look alike, or not. Well, the people with the microscopes look at detail that you can’t see, and find similarities, and the DNA analysts find even more similarities. That’s not just the same principle, by the way—the DNA comparison is practically digital, and can be delivered as math, and the DNA drives all the visual differences that the casual observer sees.
Phil Plait said this:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/05/02/saturn_s_rings_to_scale_thinner_than_paper.html
The arguments against evolution often say that something is impossible, when it is actually inevitable.
Jadehawk:
In fairness, only recently did the comment policy change so that comments are expected to fit a certain format. Also in fairness: I like his style of commenting anyway, so….
I would like medico to tell us if he thinks all snakes represent one kind.
Most of the different species of snakes cannot interbreed with one another, so if he acknowledges them to be a kind, then he must accept that they have common ancestry.
Different species of snake have a unique number of vertebrae.
If they are one kind, and share a single common ancestor, then somewhere along the line, the number of bones increased between a parent and a child.
Yet in a previous post, medico took great pains to try to claim that such an increase in bones (a whole vertebrae, with spinous and transverse processes and rib attachments and cartilage and epiphyses and discs!) is impossible.
While he’s at it, he can also answer why boas have vestigial bones, uselessly embedded in the body wall, exactly where we would expect leg bones would have been if boas had descended from an ancestor that once had legs.
He can try the same thing with the vestigial pelvic bones of several whale species, too.
If kinds are separate and vary only within themselves, then the pattern of variation between kinds should be independent of one another. Each kind will vary within itself without relation to the variation in any other kind. We should see a random distribution of variations between kinds.
But that is not what we empirically see. We see that the AMOUNT of variation correlates between kinds. Certain “kinds” share more similarities between each other than with other “kinds”, and the pattern of the amount of similarities and differences is not random. Instead it sorts into a perfectly nested tree-shaped heirarchy, which is exactly what you’d expect to see if universal common descent was true.
And exactly what you would NOT expect to see if kinds were independently created and allowed to vary only within limits.
It isn’t just the fact that there are similarities and differences between organisms. It is the QUANTIFIABLE distribution of the AMOUNTS of differences and DEGREES of similarity. The pattern produced, EMPIRICALLY observed, is perfectly explained by universal common descent. It cannot be explained at all with a creationist framework.
You know, I was >this< close to saying I’d write a Greasemonkey script which would annotate quotations with links to their originals (thereby ending this whole fucking stupid argument) and then Bicarbonate shat #483.
Now, for some unfathomable reason, my motivation is gone.
Also, other pharyngulists may want to pick apart problematic elements of the quoted text. I’ll demur.
—
Anyway, we were talking about biology, right? *said brightly*
yup
As I have said, the creationists have three sources of information, which should put them far ahead of the reality-based scientists.
First, they have the Bible, which is inerrant and infallible, if not exhaustive. It is the first-person account by the most reliable of witnesses. It is literally the word of God, and God was there.
Second, they have God his ownself to guide them in their/His work, and they have prayer to communicate with the source of all wisdom.
Third, they have reality itself to work from, and a lot less of it to account for. I mean, there’s only 6-to-10 thousand years of it, and anything off the Earth can be shrugged off as non-Biblical.
The godless contingent, meanwhile, has no script to follow, no divine assistance, and has billions of years, the entire universe, all the worlds, life’s beginning, life’s evolution, and life’s definition to deal with, all while being condemned by the Christly crowd.
Oh, and the creationists have people giving them money, regardless of results.
Science has the age of the earth *and* the age of the universe figured out to several significant figures in the billions of years, each, and that is a consensus. Creationists will say “6,000 to 10,000 years” … well, some of them will.
Not only why they have vestigial bones but why early limb bud development in boas is normal and then stops and why studying gene expression and assuming evolution is true can reveal why limb bud development stops.
47. Amphiox:
Over the half-dozen years I’ve been reading Pharyngula, one of the main things which keeps me coming back is the continuing tradition of David Marjanović’s comments in exactly their previous-and-still current form.
I hate references to comment #s (and not just because they are sometimes inaccurate); I find calling out multiple commenters’ names in a long reply to be distracting (and not just because they encourage adhom reactions to commenters). I have enough to intake in following those actual words written and replied to; I don’t want more (extraneous and problematical) data to either process or skip over.
But that’s just me. It’s not as if I actually get a vote in DM’s style. It’s not appropriate for me to ask, much less demand, that he continue posting in a way that I enjoy, any more than it’s appropriate to ask that he change it if I don’t enjoy it.
I don’t understand the complaints of the new group of whiners who think DM should start replying in ways that they personally approve of. Don’t like him, don’t read him. Easy. Like him, read him. Easy.
P.S. Thanks, DM for many great years and millions of interesting words so far.
55. Parasiteboy:
In actuality, there is only one version. Chapter 1 tells the highlights of creation week. Chapter 2 focuses on day 6, and events in the Garden of Eden.
From the article Medic0506 casually dismissed at 495
Man, it’s ALMOST as though the article addresses why scientists would posit a new species, what they would base the existence of this species on, and what would lead them to believe this new species would have existed. It’s ALMOST as though you’re lying and disingenuous as usual Medic0506. It’s ALMOST as though you read that article looking for nothing more than a cherry-picked quote to misrepresent it and evolutionary biologists. It’s ALMOST as though you’re bearing deliberate false witness.
Lemme provide a relevant quote from someone you surely respect medic0506: Christian Apologist medic0506 @495 wrote
Awwww. Medico thinks they have a point.
Here’s the actual journal article in question: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC547867/
Here are the methods:
And medico will continue to just bleat “just a proposal hurr hurr hurr”.
False. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 have a radically different order of creation. You cannot have humans created both on the sixth day and on the first day. You cannot have man created before plants and after plants. You cannot have water to start with and then god creating water. You cannot have woman created after man and woman created alongside man. You cannot tell the highlights of a thing by contradicting it directly. Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 tell different creation myths. If you take the bible to be “literally true” you are hamstrung at the first hurdle.