Comments

  1. cartomancer says

    There is a special circle of Tartarus put aside for people who misspell Latin terms in a feeble attempt to look educated and sophisticated. If you can’t write “non sequitur” properly then get in the queue for a whole slew of ironic grammar-based punishments when you do finally go to Pluto’s halls.

    (Technically the plural should be non sequuntur, but the gods have to be really angry to pull you up on that one).

  2. says

    If I were to complain about his Latin grammar and comprehensively cover all of his errors, the video would have been 20 hours long. I completely skipped over his claim that there are no transitional fossils and that all the fossils discovered would have fit on a tabletop!

  3. wzrd1 says

    I’ve long said, the most unkind thing to do to a fool is to allow them to speak their mind.

    I’ll not even go into my “perfect” shoulders stretched AC ligament.
    Dude obviously had a double helping of moron milk on top of his stupid flakes.

    Easy target? More like the lowest, lying on the ground, low hanging fruit.
    As sharp as a bag of wet mice.

  4. mnb0 says

    “How ignorant can a creationist be?”
    As ignorant as dishonest and both always more than we can imagine.

  5. robert79 says

    ” all the fossils discovered would have fit on a tabletop!”

    Wait… whut?!? News around here has all been about how the most famous T-Rex skeleton, (the original version, not one of the replicas you see all over) has just been sold to an undisclosed buyer for an INSANE amount of $$$, and he claims this big boy fits on his dinner table… not to mention everything else?!?

    Go visit a museum…

  6. raven says

    I completely skipped over his claim that there are no transitional fossils and that all the fossils discovered would have fit on a tabletop!

    To be sure, if the tabletop is about the size of the surface of the earth.

    I’ve got way more fossils than enough to cover a tabletop on my deck, in my garage, and lying around the house.
    And, I don’t even actually collect fossils, just pick up the odd one here and there when I see them.

    This guy should look at the pictures of the various petrified forests scattered all over the USA. The national park in Arizona would be a good start. The fossil tree trunks are big enough to make nice table tops.

  7. bodach says

    This is all well and good but the most important question here is: where did you get that great scally cap? Never really thought of you as a fashion icon but you continue to impress.
    The pin looks very cool, too.

  8. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    It is always hilariously ironic when the idiot complains about scientists looking at evolution “superficially”. Of course I’d like to tell him to look in the mirror at someone who is looking at things superficially. Thinking that there is no reasonable explanation for the design of the shoulder, other than his lack of ability to imagine one.
    In the pinned list. I am always distracted by how people always misunderstand how to pluralize words. Apostrophes get thrown in always, superfluously. It is okay to pluralize a Latin word anglicized (so to speak) IE @2 pointed out the latin plural of non sequiter I think it is okay to accept non=sequiter as an English word and plualize it by adding an s without the (apostrophe) connector
    complaining about rude comments on YouTube is like complaining how wet the ocean is. I think it is quite common recommendation to never read the comments under a YouTube video.
    Like PZ pointed out, to complaing some of the comments were wrong, without describing their errors is a whole lotta pufferrey.
    I guess the closing ~blessing~ of his pinned article is expected from a so-called Pastor.

  9. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re @6:
    correction, I meant @1 when I said @2 did the latin pluralization of non-sequitur.
    Seems I misspelled it frequently in mine. All Hail glorious Goddess Tpyo!

  10. PaulBC says

    @1

    Technically the plural should be non sequuntur

    That’s one I need to hold onto for just the right occasion.

  11. René says

    @Raven

    To be sure, if the tabletop is about the size of the surface of the earth.

    What’s the height of a table leg? 78 cm? Some homework: calculate the area of the tabletop divided by the (idialized) area of the earth’s surface. O = 40.000 km.

    The answer may greatly surprise you.

    @Everybody else. (Pet peeve.) No need for fossils to conclude to evolution being fact. A few visits to a Zoo with enough species (who{m?} I pity) suffices.

  12. says

    It ought to be possible to establish the floor-level of ignorance beyond which a creationist cannot operate. They need to be able to communicate with language and, um… Using a computer is nearly a requirement, but there are doubtless some who have people who use computers for them. So, I guess the floor-level is enough language to string together some words and “god did it!”

  13. Artor says

    “That’s one I need to hold onto for just the right occasion.”

    Ideally, you’d pull it out in the wrong occasion, when it is itself a non-sequitur.

  14. PaulBC says

    I’m not sure I really agree with “non sequuntur” though. In the sense of “they do not follow” it could apply to a series of conclusions that do not follow from some premise. But what we are more likely to mean is a series of premise-conclusion pairings that are unsupported.

    I guess it’s still true to say “none of those things follow from any of the things you think they do” but it’s problematic to use the plural form of a verb when we really want the plural form of a noun derived from the verb. My view is that “non sequitur” is a noun in English referring to a fallacy. Though it happens to be derived from a Latin verb, it makes just as much (if not more) sense to use an English plural for this noun.

    But it’s still pretty cool. Is it weird (or maybe low class) to admit that my favorite part of reading Shakespeare is “Exeunt”?

  15. zaledalen says

    The shoulder is a socket? Say what? So the first words out of his mouth are pure ignorance. You have to really stretch the definition of socket to claim that the shoulder joint has one. This is ignorance on steroids. Don’t know how you could stand to watch past a couple of minutes.

  16. nomdeplume says

    I agree PZ, I had seen this before (someone else did a detailed debunking), and it has to be the worst (best?) example of creationist stupidity in the world. And yet, there are people who send their children to the “Indiana Bible College” where they will be taught “science” by this fool. And all over America it seems there are children being “educated” in the same way.

  17. bcwebb says

    All the fossils would fit on a tabletop if he is only talking about humanoid fossils and it’s a pretty big table. His description is consistent with his believing that each species had an evolutionary path from “sludge” to final form that is completely separate and independent of all other species. So there was the human sludge and the monkey sludge and the fish sludge which separately became their current forms. Like some of the other commenters my “perfect” shoulders seem to be de-evolving to their flopping around ancestral forms as I get older. It is pretty frightening that this teacher of biology at a bible school has an understanding of biology and evolution below that of a C-student in a high school biology course.

  18. david says

    The neuroanatomy of the tetrapod upper extremity (including the shoulder) is really complicated. See Hirasawa, 2018 Evolution of the muscular system in tetrapod limbs. Zoological Lett 4, 27. It carries its evolutionary history, all twisted up in the brachial plexus. No “intelligent designer” would come up with such a crazy scheme.

  19. raven says

    All the fossils would fit on a tabletop if he is only talking about humanoid fossils and it’s a pretty big table.

    More than that.
    That may have been true long ago but we have much larger numbers of hominin fossils now.

    “17 fossil skulls (from Spain’s pit of bones
    Scientists on Thursday described an astonishing collection of 17 fossil skulls unearthed in the cave dating from about 430,000 years ago of an extinct human species closely related to the Neanderthals who later prospered across Europe and Asia from roughly 250,000 to 40,000 years ago.”
    and
    The age of Homo naledi and associated sediments in the …www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › pmc › articles › PMC5423772
    May 9, 2017 — More than 1500 fossils representing at least 15 individuals of this species were unearthed from the Rising Star cave system in South Africa …

    We generate new data about our evolution every day.
    Creationists recycle the same old lies, some so old they date back to the pre-xian era.

  20. Ridana says

    “He thinks there was a time when humans didn’t have eyes…”

    It’s not that he believes that humans walked around blind for generations until eyes one day popped out, or that we carried on with useless limbs until suddenly they became useful. That’s what he’s saying we believe. He knows those scenarios are absurd. He’s assigning the premise he wants to argue against to evolutionists so that he can show how absurd (his false idea of) the theory of evolution is.

  21. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    re @21:
    I was surprised at how stupid his eye argument was. The eye was one of the first arguments against evolution, and has been so repeatedly debunked with more and more explanation of how all the intricate details could evolve naturally. That to fall back on “we once were without eyes and they suddenly pooped into existence is what the evolution science tells us” is absurd beyond question.
    The shoulder, too,is stupid, IE look at just about every animal, and they all have equivalent joints. Pretty easy to see how minor modifications can change them into our specific shoulder joint.
    He also settled on a million years for evolution. Only off by orders of magnitude, when it is closer to a Billion years. Humans alone around 3 million, not the 1.4 he mentioned.

  22. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    amazing how people often think that because they can’t figure out how something works, every explanation of how it works must be wrong.
    That experts make up their own answers, and assert their answer as correct when there is no solution.
    Why can’t people accept lack of knowledge as a way to learn and cooperate with someone who does know, rather than as a personal defect.