I made another Bad Science Sunday video, this one about Matt Powell. He claims to have debunked evolution in 50 seconds, and in that short claim he makes one of the dumbest creationist arguments ever…and he presents it in total seriousness in the style of a high school debate team point. The smug ignorance has to be something he got by aping Hovind.
At the end he claims to have refuted evolution using science and logic, neither of which are on display in his argument.
PZ,
Came across this article from Naked Capitalism about Bad Science:
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
You deserve praise for your patience in listening through the BS.
@2 – I don’t know how he does it. Listening to Aron Ra destroy Kent Hovind on the Non Sequitur show, my wife came in to ask that I please stop shouting obscenities at the computer whenever Hovind opened his mouth.
Fossboxer @ 3
Any video with Kent Hovind, Matt Powell and the like should be legally required to add a masked Mexican wrestler, a sasquatch and a couple of zombies to raise the intellectual level. Also, more entertaining.
Test.
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I stopped at 5 minutes, immediately after “the first human baby would have died”.
Sure, no human ever has raised a kitten or puppy. Also
So obviously a just not yet human parent never coule have successfully raised a just yet human baby (/sarcasm).
That’s how I do it; I stop at the moment I can be be sure beyond reasonable doubt that things only can go further off the rails.
I noticed you used the word “partner.” Knowing this type, If Marty-P ever sees this he’s going to blow his stack.
Who was the first person to speak Modern English? The answer — no one. There was not a distinct boundary between Middle English and Modern English. There was a (relatively) smooth transition from one to the other. The same happens with species transitioning to a later species, with tiny changes accumulating over time. Yet somehow creationists can’t seem to get their heads around this.
I remember hearing this exact same “a monkey gave birth to a human” argument when I was a TA in intro bio in the early 90s. At the time, someone (I forget who it was) suggested an alternative for previously creationist students, which my students and I liked: Imagine you are standing next to your mother, holding her hand. Your mother is holding her mother’s hand, and she is holding her mother’s hand, and so on, back into the mists of time. Most people know what their mother, grandmother, even great-grandmother, look or looked like. Some of those women are still alive, and in many cases there are photographs, so imagining these women standing in a line, one generation, then the next, and the next, and so on, is a fairly easy exercise. Most people know they don’t look exactly like their mothers, and their mother didn’t look exactly like her mother, and so on. The exercise brings home forcefully that (a) there’s diversity within a species, and (b) that primate babies require maternal care once they are born. Anyway, my students and I talked about extending this line of mothers back, and back, and back…They often had trouble getting past the idea of Adam and Eve (and the myth that these mythological people were white), but the mental image of the line of mothers and their children was a good place to start and stays with me to this day. So, as I told my students, there was no “monkey gave birth to a human”, just a line of mothers who differed slightly from their mothers, and they from theirs, and they from theirs, and so on.
You speak of Powell’s “misconception”. I don’t think it would be possible even for someone as stupid as Powell to really have such a misconception, it is simply a device to pander to his dumb audience – “hey, that’s right Matt, who looked after the first human baby? Checkmate evolutionists.”
I have been trying for years to get someone to turn around the burden of proof on creationists and ask them to explain how it would be possible for evolution NOT to occur given the characteristics of living organisms and the planet Earth.
I’d also like to see the question posed to them – how many people have worked on evolution (theory and process) and related fields since Darwin? How many of them have found a rabbit fossil in the Triassic, or evidence that natural selection can not occur? Creationists are locked in a time warp in which they are still in the 1860s going into battle alongside Bishop Wilberforce against Darwin’s Bulldog.
nomdeplume @ 10
Bishop Wilberforce was actually pretty clever, as Stephen Jay Gould explained.
These guys….are just dull, not coming up with original arguments.
They think evolution works like the first part of “2001”. Dumb apes. Monolith zaps dumb apes. Apes no longer dumb.
…Or was it Carl Sagan who explained the arguments used by Wilberforce?
@11 Yes, Slippery Sam was his nickname! But my point really was that clowns like Powell and Hovind and Ham are locked into the 1860s as if Darwin was just one man going against the Bible.