mind numbing masses

Best Bill Hicks bit ever.

 

Which bones are you referring to?

Lucy which experts agree was just a 3 foot tall chimp?

Heidelberg man, built from a single jawbone which many conceded to be quite human?

Nebraska man, "scientifically" built up from one tooth, later found to be the tooth of the extinct pig?

Piltdown man, found to be the jawbone of an ape?

Peking man, supposed to be 500,000 years old, but all evidence has disappeared?

Neanderthal man, a man in France suffering from arthritis?

I could continue . . . How many of these fakes are still in the textbooks?

You guys seem pretty smart. Want to make a quick quarter mil? Here's the link: http://www.drdino.com/cse.asp?pg=250k

 

Since when is Pat Robertson an "expert" in paleobiology?

This is the wonderful thing about science. Unlike religion, it's self-correcting. Sooner or later (usually sooner) any frauds get named and shamed. New knowledge is uncovered the sharpens our view and either imprioves or discards old theories. As opposed to most religion where "Because this old book says so" is the only authority and there is no possible check on those who prey on the desperate and the gullible.

I can't wait for you to post your sources for these, especially the second one. I need a good laugh today

I also see that you gave up on the "thermodynamics" argument pretty damn fast. Do yourself a favor and do likewise on your pseudobiology too.

 

Speciation happens all the time. One example:

You can find plenty more at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/speciation.html and http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html.

The $250,000 offer by Dr. Hovind is totally fake, as it he. Take a look at this site: http://www.geocities.com/kenthovind/

 

While true (despite the efforts of fundies to treat it that way), this was not the point I was making.

Ultimately, even if you aren't a fundie your authority is an old book that tells you what to do and what to think. There is no countervailing authority to provide a check on it the way new theories and observations put a check on existing theories. Either you buy into the old book and its truths on their own authority or you don't because they don't ever change. This static state leaves the door wide open for errors and abuses that cannot be corrected "from within".

 

That's brilliant. A flower turning into a flower. Creationists don't deny microevolution.


As far as Neanderthal man, I pulled that off the top of my head. Upon researching further, it is said he had rickets, not arthritis. My apologies.
http://www.icr.org/pubs/btg-b/btg-105b.htm

 

From the Institute for Creationist Research website http://www.icr.org/pubs/btg-b/btg-105b.htm:

"From a creationist perspective, the Neanderthals were descendants of Noah—a language group that migrated away from Babel and found themselves in harsh "Ice Age" conditions with a meager lifestyle."

Thanks for the laugh. This is pesudoscience at its most hilarious.

Evolution does produce dead ends. The human ancestral family tree is not a straight line. It has branches that end. Current thinking is that the Neanderthals represent one such dead end. This does nothing to the theory of evolution in general and only rules out Neanderthals as a human ancestor. It does not support any contention that evolution does not happen or that a god created everything as is.

Of course, this whole discussion wouldn't be happening if Creationists had had their way back in the day and the study of evolution had been outlawed.

 

And while you're at it, it would be nice if women found male *** to be delicious and nutritious.

 

much appreciated

 

Well, yes to a point. Science doesn't try to answer the question of whether or not I should go bang some woman other than my wife whereas religion usually states that this is probably not my best course of action (our legal system merely reinforces that religious predeliction). So far so good.

The point I was making is that, unlike science, religion is faith-based. The ultimate authority comes from a book in which one either has faith or does not. Jefferson's editing of it notwithstanding, the Bible is not rewritten periodically to take into account new social conditions or technologies. Jesus still rides around Jerusalem on a donkey, not in a 2001 Nissan Pathfinder.

Religious disputes are settled based on who can convince the most people that "the Bible says this, which is the most relevant passage pertaining to this new phenomenon". For example, a scientific dispute on cloning is argued by the latest observations and theories that are periodically updated whereas a religious debate on the ethics of cloning is argued by passages from an old book that hasn't appreciably changed in almost 2,000 years.

An individual may choose to interperet the old book in a new way but the ultimate source of is still the old book, not a new one.

In that sense, there is no truly self-correcting methodology in religion as there is in science.

 

Post of the day

 

has 3 letters, rhymes with "yum"

 

> That's brilliant. A flower turning into a flower.
> Creationists don't deny microevolution.

Of course a flower turns into a flower. What do you want it to turn into, a chicken dinner? For the longest time, creationists were saying that the dividing line of the psudo-biblical "kind" is the species. When scientists show that speciation happens, creationists move the target. When scientists show a series of fossil remains that demonstrate the evolution from land walking animals to whales, creationsist move the target. Why don't you tell us beforehand exactly what it will take to convince you (not that anything will, being so certain of the bible).

I'll tell you what would make every person involved with the creation-evolution debate very very happy - tell us the scientific theory of creationism. Give everyone an explanation that fits the current data and that provides predictions of the future that can be tested in controlled experiments.

 

Indeed.

 

I'll step in for Segroves here and point out that what they are "certain of" is only their own interpretation of the Bible. You don't have to be a Creationist to be a Christian. Some Christians recognize that the Bible is full of poetic or allegorical truths and that Genesis was never intended to be read as strict scientific history.

 

Homo Sapiens (sp?) are primates, and we evolved from primates. So a primate turning into a primate is microevolution. Therefore you should believe that humans evolved from an earlier species.

 

Rack him.

 

> I'll step in for Segroves here and point out that
> what they are "certain of" is only their own
> interpretation of the Bible.

I wasn't talking to Segroves, I was talking to the Daksims guy.

 

Yeah, I know. But I knew Segroves would chime in with that observation. Part of the reason fundies cling so desperately to creationism in spite of all evidence ot the contrary is that they believe that any readign other than a literalist one somehow renders the Bible totally devoid of value. They're wrong, of course, but maybe they'd loosen up and stop pestering our public schools if they realized that the Bible contains some worthwhile wisdom even if it isn't literally historically accurate.

 

From the drdino.com FAQ:

"Is man evolving bigger and smarter?"

Uh...I guess not.

Funny, I know lots of women who like the taste of gum.

 

The Bible is full of blood and war!

 

So Mike, either the Bible is lying when it says God created the heavens and the earth in six days or it isn't. And to all you dayage-ists, the Bible says the evening and the morning are the first day. When, Mike, do you suppose the Bible starts in on the truth? Either you believe the whole thing or you take bits and pieces. Which bits and pieces do you take and how do you know they aren't lies, too? By saying you're a christian that doesn't believe in Genesis, you maul yourself. Many of the promises that Christ fulfilled were found in Genesis. I believe that the Bible is literal and inspired (meaning GOD-breathed).

Hey Joe, what ya doing with that gun in your hand?

I said what I had to say 'bout thermodynamics and unlike you I did bother reading the opposing viewpoint. Everything I needed to refute, I had already covered in the previous post, which, unfortunately, you apparently did not have time to read. Just to correct an earlier post, Joe, Creationists hold the earth to be around 10,000 years old, not 3,000.

 

One important point could be that science and religeon are compatible.

'God' could have started the big bang and the process of evolution just as a programmer creates a program, and clicks. "run" The universe would continue evolving itself, just as the programmer goes and makes a cup of tea while his program executes.

Evolution does not contradict religeon unless you take every word of the bible or Koran literally.

Afterall, if you read the first words of the bible, Heaven is infact Space.

 

Lambasting science teachers for teaching about theories is like lambasting math teachers for teaching about numbers. Theories are what scientists do. They observe, and then they generalize in such a way that future events can be predicted. Those generalizations are theories. Anyone who regards a proposition as suspect because it's "just a theory" is making a very basic error of vocabulary.

Likewise, there is no distinction between "laws" and "theories" worth mentioning. Laws are theories and theories are laws; to a scientist, they are one and the same. Every theory (or law) is falsifiable--Newtonian mechanics had the force of "law" for hundreds of years before Einstein showed that things are quite a bit more complicated. Or to take a more pertinent example, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a way of generalizing from the observation that heat does not spontaneously flow from cold bodies to hot bodies. Entropy is a precisely defined mathematical property of a physical system--it's the quantity of unusable energy in that system. It often but not always manifests itself as what appears to be disorder, but that's not the same thing as saying that entropy is disorder, and disorder tends towards a maximum, and that's that.

It's even more absurd to say that the Second Law says that biological complexity tends towards a minimum, especially since biologists aren't even sure of how to quantify complexity.

The operative phrase is "garbage in, garbage out." If you start from faulty premises (e.g. a poor understanding of thermodynamics based on the metaphors people use to explain subjects rather than the subjects themselves), you will invariably reach faulty conclusions.