ICR has added “annoying” to their repertoire of “stupid”


…yet.

The Institute for Creation Research has a series of videos titled “That’s A Fact”, each one under 2 minutes long, with funky background music and physically painful kinetic transitions. No, really, it hurt my eyes to watch this one — the gimmick is a screen full of words in random orientations, and the camera zooms around to highlight the word the narrator says, and just the esthetics broke me. And then there’s the content…hoo boy.

For instance, here’s one titled “evolving bacteria”. For instance, in a 20 year study of E. coli…scientists looked at 40,000 generations of bacteria, and confirmed that the bacteria did not evolve into anything other than E. coli. That’s it. That’s all. Lenski set up this experiment to see bacteria evolve into a cat, didn’t see any evilution at all, and therefore proved that macroevolution is a myth. Apparently, Lenski writes all these papers that just say “Nope, still not a cat in any test tube”.

Sorry, guys, the Lenski long-term evolution experiment did not propose to evolve something other than E. coli (it would have been surprising if it did, and would have sent everyone scurrying off to rewrite the textbooks, calling evolutionary theory into question), and it did demonstrate evolutionary changes.

Hey, ICR, do you even know what the word “evolve” means?

Comments

  1. StevoR says

    No, no, they don’t seem to know what “evolve” means.

    Or what the word “theory” means either..

    Or “Science.”

    Though they must have been told many times and refused to listen.

    Somaybe tehy do reallyknow they just disingenuously pretend that they don’t and argue in bad faith based on their supposed , self proclaimed “good” faith. Huh.

    Hypocrisy is indeed their sacrament along with willful ignorance and deliberate dull incuriosity.

  2. StevoR says

    ^ Damnit there’s also that one part of one sentence I ttally stuff upthen somehow miss in preview…. Sigh.. That’s :

    So maybe they do really know..

    Oh and :

    “Nope, still not a cat in any test tube”.

    Does he seriously expect one there? How big are those test tubes? 123

  3. submoron says

    Presumably they would insist that where there is a cline, as between herring gull and lesser black backed gull, they are a single ring species.

  4. JoeBuddha says

    If that’s the one I think it is, it’s one of my favorite experiments. Not only are traits preserved, but an adaptation event is REPEATABLE! How cool is that?

  5. says

    It’s no wonder why I get headaches every time I end up listening to or reading any young earth/antievolution crap. Seeing it makes it worse for me. Thankfully I use the uBlock Origin app to block off all necessary images and video screenshots like this one. The ICR folks are as bad as Dumb Idiot Ham and his clown circus brigade.

  6. says

    This is so stupid it’s like a Far Side joke. Two E.Coli meet in a bar and they hook up only to discover they are asexual and reproduce through Binary Division.

  7. says

    Followup: E.coli pickup lines,
    “Hey baby, My second chromosome is almost complete and I’m ready to DIVIDE! Do you like to watch?”
    “Hey baby, I got some spare plasmids in my membrane, how ’bout we head back to my place and exchange some information?
    “OH, that’s not a bacteriophage. It’s a fancy hat I just bought.”

  8. says

    I feel like they’d HAVE to know, to be so consistently wrong in so many ways for so much time. At a certain point, you have to put effort into not accidentally saying something that makes sense.

  9. imaginggeek says

    I’d argue that whether Lenski’s E coli are still E coli, or should be classified as another species, is reasonably debatable.

    Under the classical microbiological rules for classifying species and strains (e.g. in the pre-genome era), the E. coli generated by Lenski would likely have been classified as a different species, and possibly a different genus. Lenski’s E. coli can metabolize citrate – and an inability to metabolize citrate is considered a central defining feature of both E. coli and of the Escherichia genus. There are a lot of other traits which – again, under classical rules – would have led to a new species (and possibly genus) designation including increased cell size and a changes in cell shape.

    The modern (genome-based) definition is generally accepted to be “isolates with genomes that exhibit at least 95% pair-wise ANI”. Which if applied to primates would make all humans, apes, and monkeys a single species.

    I always like Ford Doolittle’s take on bacterial species – the ‘species problem’ is to find a biological process that underwrites and makes ‘natural’ some particular pattern or extent of clustering, telling us what in general a species is and how to recognize one [7]. But if multiple and indeed potentially opposed processes are driving bacterial population genomic evolution with variable intensities and consequences, then there is no reason to expect that all bacteria will belong to clusters at any specified level of cohesiveness, and no non-arbitrary (process-related) criteria for specifying any such level.
    (from Current Biology, Vol 22 #11, which I subject my poor students to each year)

  10. P Munch says

    @:12 ‘Bacteria IS everywhere’? In LOLspeak, they can’t grammar any better than they can science.

  11. StevoR says

    @ ^ PaulBC : Because the species is critically endangered in the wild?

    Thus rare and hard to spot?

  12. birgerjohansson says

    Obviously the camels evolved a Romulan cloaking device. This explains the camel dung I keep trodding into.
    .
    Apropos annoying arguments: Re-re-re-visiting the kalaam cosmoligical argument.
    https://youtu.be/uf69E36ErhA

  13. Walter Solomon says

    “Bactria IS everywhere”

    Greco-Bactria was very influential in the development of Buddhist art and iconography. So, in Asia at least, “Bactria” is everywhere.

  14. PaulBC says

    UnknownEric the Apostate@21 30 Karens probably agree. (Had to look up “30 Helens” but I’ll let my comment stand.)

  15. nomdeplume says

    And yet these morons believe that the experiment should have produced cats, since they purport to be;ieve that a few hundred “kinds” on a boat have produced hundreds of completely new families and millions of species in a couple of thousand years.

  16. wzrd1 says

    @18,

    If Lenski let it go a few more generations, he might get a creationist.

    No, evolution requires increased fitness for survival and reproduction, not reduced fitness.