Bodie Hodge, one of the dimmer bulbs flickering at Answers in Genesis, has an argument against the existence of transitional fossils. Basically, transitional fossils can’t exist, even if you show them to him, because the dates are all wrong. And he has a list of geological eras to prove it!

You see, our dates are all wrong. Everything we claim occurred between the beginning of the Cambrian (about 540 million years ago) and the beginning of the Pliocene (about 5 million years ago) actually occurred in a single Flood year which took place about 4400 years ago. Keep that in mind: everything listed as “Flood” took place in a brief period of 40 days and nights of rain, followed by about a year when the waters subsided and before Noah could beach his boat on Mt Ararat.

So when evolutionists say they found a transitional form between an ape and a human in Pliocene rock, creationists hardly flinch. Evolutionists are looking at the rock strata and the age of the earth incorrectly because humans were around long before that rock was ever laid down! Furthermore, humans existed when the Cambrian rock was laid down during the Flood. To go one more step, mankind had dominated the earth for over 1,600 years before the Cambrian rock was laid down!

When someone says that they found a transitional form between a dinosaur and a bird in the Paleocene, again, creationists hardly think twice. Both specimens died the same year in the same Flood and are not related. This is why finding feathers in the rock layers “before the dinosaurs” is not a problem for creationists. Nor is it a problem when we find theropod dinosaurs (which supposedly evolved into birds in the evolutionary story) that had eaten birds in lower Cretaceous rock.

Unfortunately, no traces of the organisms he claims had to have existed in the Precambrian — which includes all contemporary forms as well as a few others, like dragons — have ever been found, and the complex faunal assemblages that have been found in the “Flood” layers are surprisingly well-ordered by strata, with no significant mixing.

And yet this cataclysmic single year of the Flood was so energetically intense that essentially all of the geology we observe was laid down practically instantaneously in a geological eyeblink: tens of thousands of meters of sediments were generated, whole mountain ranges erupted upwards, great canyons were gouged out of the landscape, whole oceans surged into existence and then drained away, all life on earth was eradicated — and a single family of Bronze Age goat farmers rode out this spectacular, world-shaking catastrophe in a boat made of gopher wood and pitch, along with their livestock.

None of this is a problem for creationists, because they can just invent a story in contradiction to all of the known facts and use that to prop up their other story that is in contradiction to all known facts.

Use the principle of Kook Neutralization. Confront them with a hollow-earther.

Cluff is against the claim made by the flat-Earthers. I don’t know how the flat-Earthers can be so confused. They are obviously wrong. The world is not flat – it’s hollow. They reject all the evidence, he said. Unlike, the flat-Earthers, the hollow-Earthers believe that our Earth is spherical but with a hollow body. Their conspiracy theories also suggest that the moon, the stars, the Sun, and other planets are all hollow bodies.

Taylor Pearson is this fellow who clearly knows nothing about evolutionary theory, has missed the point of the most basic concepts, but has no problem with appropriating evolution to justify his simplistic versions of business. No, really, he’s got this article titled Cambrian Leaps: One Way to Apply the Genius of Warren Buffett to Your Life which doesn’t actually have anything to do with Warren Buffett, dispenses useless, vague advice, and along the way trashes punctuated equilibrium while praising his flawed understanding of it.

He starts off by praising Darwin and evolution, because his insight helps us understand…marketing.

More than that, it provided a metaphor for many other systems in the world around us. We talk about people, marketing, and ideas evolving in the same way species do.
However, Darwin got one thing wrong in On the Origin of Species, which has an important implication on how you think about evolution as a metaphor for how to change your life.
He believed species evolved gradually and linearly.

Wrong. We could argue about “gradually” — Darwin was necessarily vague about the rate of evolution, and what seems slow and gradual from a human perspective might actually be rapid from a geological perspective — he definitely did not argue for linearity. The most famous illustration from his notebooks says otherwise!

He clearly had branching cladogenesis in mind. What does Pearson have in his ill-informed mind? Apparently Gould and Eldredge’s punctuated equilibrium. But he doesn’t understand that, either!

This phenomenon, called punctuated equilibrium, is the way that most natural systems evolve. Understanding punctuated equilibrium is essential to understanding how to change your life.

The left image is a gradual, linear view of Darwin’s theory of evolution where species emerge gradually and consistently over time. The right image is a “punctuated equilibrium” view of evolution where there are long periods of very little change and short periods of “explosions” with huge amounts of evolutionary activity.

No, that’s not a good model of punctuated equilibrium. All he’s got in his head are two versions of anagenesis, or gradual evolution within a single lineage in the absence of branching. In his left cartoon version, he’s got everything involving continuously at the same rate. His species 1, 2, and 3 are simply chronospecies that blend insensibly into one another. In the right cartoon, there are variations in the rate of evolution, nothing more, but you’ve still got a single lineage progressing into a couple of different species over time. That’s a poor and uninteresting model for punctuated equilibrium.

As well as not understanding the theory, he doesn’t get the facts right.

The Cambrian explosion is the most well-known example of the rapid growth stage of punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary history.

Over a period of only 20 million years (a short period in evolutionary time representing only 0.5 percent of Earth’s 4-billion-year evolutionary history), almost all present animal classes appeared.
Before the Cambrian explosion, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells. By the end of that time period, the world was populated by a huge variety of complex organisms.

The Cambrian explosion was an adaptive radiation. That’s different from punctuated equilibrium. Multicellular animals preceded that Cambrian by about a billion years. There was a long period of soft-bodied complex animals that were evolving before the Cambrian. “Class” has a specific taxonomic meaning; most animal phyla arose before or during the Cambrian, but not most extant classes — there was no class Aves or Mammalia anywhere near the Cambrian. This is just a horrible mish-mash of mangled concepts. I’d give it an “F” if it were an undergraduate essay I was grading (grading is on my mind right now, as finals week ends).

But his gravest, most fundamental error is that he doesn’t grasp that evolution is a property of populations, not individuals. It means that all of his analogies make no sense at all, or even suggest models that contradict what he’d like to be true.

This is revealing. He gives all this pseudoscientific background to justify his picture of how people’s progress in a career works. He’s trapped in a mode of thinking that is narrow and linear.

So, because people’s individual lives are not a constant monotonic rise to ascendancy, but have stops and starts, he thinks it’s useful to use punctuated equilibrium as a model.

Gah. This isn’t how it works. Think instead about peripatric speciation.

Here’s a better analogy. Taylor Pearson starts a company to sell polka-dotted widgets. He’s doing fine, there’s a stable demand, he’s got a 100 people staffing the phones, pushing those widgets. Some of those salespeople are doing great, hitting their quote, making their bonuses, but others are lackluster and uninspired and just flopping…so he lets them go, hires fresh people, he’s still got a hundred employees and is keeping up with demand.

But a couple of those fired employees get together and resolve to try something new — they start working for themselves, selling paisley widgets. The market is thrilled. They were tired of those boring polka dots, and soon the paisley widget sellers overwhelm everyone, Taylor Pearson is out of business, reduced to peddling polka dot widgets out of a tin can on a street corner. Maybe with his free time he can hang out in the library more, actually reading up on evolution.

That’s punctuated equilibrium. All the observer from the outside sees as they’re digging through the rubbish heaps left by this civilization is that polka dot widgets were the default widgets for years and years, and then fairly abruptly there was a shift, and almost all the widgets in higher strata were paisley. You could decide that all the individuals in the widget population underwent a simultaneous, gradual transition, or you could argue that an emergent novelty in a small subpopulation led to a sweeping expansion of that group and replacement of the prior dominant group. The latter is more likely.

I have to ask, though, about a more substantial criticism than the fact that he’s got the facts and theory all wrong. What do these marketing people gain by slapping an inappropriate label on an observation about variable rates of success? When Pearson says, How To Change Your Life with Cambrian Leaps, what does that mean? He’s attached a buzzword to a phenomenon, but naming it doesn’t suddenly give insight into how to take advantage of it, even if there were some relevancy to the phrase. It’s all empty noise.

And then I read the comments, which were all full of praise for his brilliant insight. I realized that this isn’t about providing useful knowledge — it was about self-promotion. It’s about selling Taylor Pearson as the marketing guy who knows about Science! Unfortunately, he’s only going to fool the people who know even less science than he does, and to the rest of us, he’s just the half-assed bullshit artist who is cultivating an audience of wanna-bes. I guess it’s a living.

Pope Danny Ray Johnson was a blustery, cocky, unpleasant dude: a racist, Confederate-flag-wavin’, Bible-thumpin’, struttin’ caricature of a certain kind of toxic Southern masculinity. Of course he had a church — the kind of church centered around a cult of personality, where the pastor could call himself Pope (and have a hat that spelled out “POPE” on it), where the choir would pose with their guns on display, where Rebel flags hung from the walls, a church with a bar (which isn’t a bad idea…) but no liquor license, but they’d try to get away with selling alcohol with the excuse that it was for communion. Johnson was happy to post memes to Facebook calling the Obamas “monkeys”. That’s just the kind of good ol’ boy he was. He also got elected to the state congress of Kentucky, because that’s the kind of horrible person who can get elected in the benighted counties of the regressive South.

Oh, and he was also a child molester. I’ve put the 17 year old victim’s account below the fold, because it’s a bit detailed and unpleasant, and the story just gets worse and worse.

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