This was amusing. A graduate of the Lenski lab got into a conversation with a couple of creationists about — would you believe? — the Lenski experiment. They argued with him about the results of the experiment! Of course, the creationists learned nothing.
Gutsick Gibbon provides some commentary, in particular explaining how creationists don’t even understand the concept of fitness.
I watched a bit of this video from Answers in Genesis, but couldn’t take much of it. Daniel Phelps had more stamina, and watched the hacks at AiG spout their BS about the shiny new space telescope. Danny Faulkner is their pet astronomer who rejects most of astronomy.
Their response was by AiG’s astronomer, Dr. Danny Faulkner, and their “rocket scientist,” Rob Webb. Their discussion was a rather weak critique of the JWST’s findings and funny and sad at the same time. Through most of their simulcast, one couldn’t hear what the NASA people were saying, but this may have been a technical difficulty. About 23 minutes in Dr. Faulkner and Webb bizarrely claim that light year distances don’t necessarily equal long time scales (thus not refuting a 6,000 year old universe). Soon after, Dr. Faulkner states his “theory” (not a scientific theory, but he doesn’t seem to know this) that we can see things billions of light years away in a 6,000 year old universe because of a “miracle.” His position is literally “then a miracle occurred.” This is reminiscent of the famous Sidney Harris cartoon found here:. Dr. Faulkner goes on to say that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden saw pretty much what we see today when looking at the night sky.
They do know that the Harris cartoon is not a recommendation, right? As soon as you resort to “miracles”, you’ve left science behind.
Not that that would bother AiG.
Next time a creationist tries to tell you, Oh, no, we’re not anti-science, we love science!
, remind them of this:
They have to redefine science to mean, only what the Bible says
.
I got a challenge from a creationist.
Hello, I am a Muslim.
Recently I have written a small script as a test to see how many attempts would a random mutation require to reach a target DNA Sequence.
The script simply creates a random target DNA Sequence, and keeps generating random DNA Sequences until it matches the target, and then prints the number of attempts needed.
The Result shows a very large number of attempts the longer the Sequence is.
How does evolution explain the results of this script?
The attached files are a C++ and Python versions of the script.
Thank you.
I don’t know why he needed to announce he’s a Muslim, it’s completely irrelevant.
Here’s his code. I don’t think anyone will have much trouble reading it — it’s about the level of a “hello world” program in an introductory office tech class.
In C++:
In Python:
I think you can see the problem. It’s a typing monkeys simulation: there’s no selection, there’s no accumulation of small variations, on every pass it generates a totally random sequence of the desired length and compares it for identity with the search string. Of course it takes a very large number of attempts
to get the desired result!
Here’s what evolution says about it:
Evolution has nothing to say about that script, because a) evolution is not a conscious entity, b) the script has no relationship to the process of evolution, and c) the author is very stupid.
This is a talented bit of work, but I don’t think Kent Hovind will recognize how stupid he looks in it.
Just so you know: Hovind begs people to debate him all the time, but only losers bother. Most of the people he claims to have ‘wacked’ refused to engage with him.
Dan Phelps sent me a few scans from a ‘treasure’ he discovered — a “99 cent Goodwill find that was 98 cents too expensive”. I thought it was interesting to see how creationist dogma has solidified, since this would be a comfortable fit with Answers in Genesis’s silly beliefs…except that it’s from a rival organization, the Institute for Creation Research, and they’d rather peddle their own garbage, thank you very much. Here’s the cover:
Looks good! If you didn’t notice the ICR logo, you might think it’s a real children’s book about science and dinosaurs. Any thought along those lines would quickly evaporate as soon as you opened it, though.
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.
What? By Oglaf? And it’s entirely safe for work? Yep.
You don’t get to postulate a globe-spanning catastrophic flood that demolishes everything on the land and simply assume that fish will be unaffected. Every aquarist knows fish are profoundly affected by things like salinity, pH, elements like phosphates, etc. We don’t usually have to worry about violent churning and silt, fortunately, but in Noah’s flood you would.
I hadn’t thought about the potatoes, and most plants, in fact, but they also wouldn’t tolerate the massive disruption caused by the Christian magic flood story.
Of course, if you accept the metaphor, myth, and poetry theory, all the problems go away.
Do any of you old-timers recall TXPiper, the obnoxious racist creationist I banned in 2013? Would you believe he still occasional pesters me with blindingly stupid email? I must be spectacularly compelling and charismatic, since so many of these bozos never go away. I wish they knew how to quit me.
He threw a whole lot of stupid at me the other day, so I had to respond with a video.
Transcript below the fold.
The rubes will believe anything if you say it while wearing a lab coat and a clerical collar. It’s a law.
(I’ve never worn either while teaching, which explains my relative poverty.)
