At 7pm tonight (Central time) I’ll be joining Jackson Wheat to laugh at a book from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. You can laugh too.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
At 7pm tonight (Central time) I’ll be joining Jackson Wheat to laugh at a book from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. You can laugh too.
Nilsson D., Pelger S. A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B 1994; 256:53-58.
Great reference, John.
If amoebas evolved, then why are there still amoebas? /s
Clearly, those more complex organisms were created by visitors from Zeta Reticuli (snark).
PZ, Jackson Wheat et all should hang out with Noah Lugeons, Heath Enwright and Eli Bosnick* if the latter manage to dig up another “documentary” about- for instance- a creationist take on embryology.
PZ et al would add their biology knowledge to the very wide knowledge base of the other three, spotting every flawed argument.
.
Warning: their “colorful” language might set PZs beard on fire.
*from Scathing Atheist & God Awful Movies.
Oh geez, the old JW creationist blue book.
About 20 years ago I did a “study” with a JW over that book. It was one big collection of half truths and quote mining. You can tell they basically just cribbed arguments from other creationist apologetics and smashed it together into their own little book.
It ended when I started pointing out how the patterns of misrepresentation of science and evolution in that book indicated that the writers of it had to be intentionally dishonest. Once you start calling the Watchtower society “dishonest”, JWs will just stop any further discussion at that point. They can’t countenance any badmouthing of the society.
That book is one of the worst, most dishonest collections of creationist arguments I’ve ever read.
The JWs replaced that book with a newer, much shorter pamphlet, “The Origin Of Life – 5 Questions Worth Asking” a number of years ago. The best thing I can say about it is that it’s slightly less dishonest, but that might be because it’s much shorter, and so has less space for lies.
I remember seeing a Dutch translation of these as a teen many decades ago. I was flabbergasted by its stupidity. I especially remember them comparing several artists’ impressions of “Pithecanthropus” and trying to undermine these by pointing out how different these were.