Well, the dope pastor who couldn’t even get an accurate citation of Richard Dawkins straight (he gave only about one sentence of what was a multi-paragraph quote to do with nonrandom survival in natural selection, to hump his supernatural bunkum) now purports to call atheists, evolutionists’ “idiots” and “fools” as he seeks in vain to redeem himself. Well, forget about it, bro, ain’t gonna happen! You’ve merely proven you’re an even bigger dummy than you were before. Maybe you ought to put your skills to work for Conservapedia!
But as I said, we have to try to be kind (up to a point) with this character, who’s still working on his online bible degree and also still working (after over a WEEK!) on trying to get out ten simple answers to a basic evolution test. E.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/01/test-on-evolution-for-fundie-critics.html
Of course, we already know that any dumbo that begins any rejoinder to evolution by citing "Genesis" has already lost, since he's: 1) committed the fallacy of appeal to authority, and 2) not specifically addressed the false nonsense he cited for Dawkins - re: nonrandom selection and its role in evolution.
But it gets much worse than this, folks! It gets into the league of 100% confounded, total abysmal ignorance being promoted as part of some pre-ordained, supernatural bull pockey. Don't take my word for it but look at his recent quotes from his blog, claiming "evidence" from gibberish that any freshman who's taken a basic evolution course knows to be false.
He blabbers:
"Let's start at the beginning of the book of Genesis . Chapter 1 first briefly describes the creation of the heavens and earth along with the appearance of light and dry land . The Bible next records the creation of biological life on our planet ."
Let's skewer this horse manure first. Reading Gen.:1: 1-5 we see:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day”
Now, it is clear that the “light” referred to in the last three sentences is none other than the SUN. However, it is clear from reading each line through that the Earth was supposedly made BEFORE the Sun. (E.g. Earth without form, darkness upon face of the deep).
However, this is physically impossible. We know from modern astrophysics that the solar proto-nebula had to collapse first to yield the SUN. (No planets, since they had yet to spin off the collapsing nebular cloud – it hadn’t cooled enough to allow it). As the proto-solar nebula collapsed it also began spinning and gained angular momentum. This angular momentum was then transferred to regions of the nebula that cooled and separated from the whole, and these regions became separate clouds of dust and gas that aggregated into the planets.
Under a combination of electrostatic attraction (between larger charged particles) and gravity (attracting the whole mass from the center of the cloud) each planet was formed as what we call a “planetesimal”.
As more angular momentum was transferred – the planetesimal’s (each one) acquired their own spin (in a period of revolution) and specific shapes. The giant planets (e.g. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus) garnered more spin momentum than the more dense, terrestrial planets. Thus Jupiter’s planetesimal ended up as an oblate spheroid with diameter of about 88,000 mile and rotating rapidly with a day of ~ 10 hours. Earth meanwhile ended up as a relatively spherical orb with diameter of ~ 8,000 miles and day approaching approach 24 hrs. Mars ended up in a similar shape to that of Earth and a diameter of 4200 miles and day ~ 24 hours.
Thus, the Earth spun off about 1.1 billion years after the solar nebula fully collapsed, and it could not have come BEFORE the Sun. Indeed, the absence of the pivoting central mass of the Sun, or ~ 2 x 10 ^30 kilograms, would have meant the Earth- with no Sun present- would instantly have been hurled into a direction toward the constellation Hercules at 12 miles per second with no central mass to keep it in check. We can compute this exactly using the basic principles of celestial mechanics.
It is clear from this that Gen.1:1-5 has stated a patent impossibility which violates all known laws of physics and dynamics and is therefore WRONG! It is clear from this that the Bible must be in error, certainly in this one passage – and if here then likely in many other places too. If this is so then it must have been written by flawed humans using limited conceptions of space, time and astrophysics which accounts are not even correct in their most general form. Why on Earth would any intelligent person invoke it then, as anything other than an elaborate fable? Well, because some humans have muted their intelligence by surrendering it to belief without evidence.
Conclusion: it cannot be a “divinely inspired” book. Rather it is a HUMAN-inspired work with all the errors we expect to see from a work of humans. And even moreso, it certainly isn't any substitute for science. Hell, does anyone - including this pretend pastor even see the scantest reference to genes? To DNA? Hell no!
Not content, to hoist himself on this petard, always the last refuge of scientific ignoramuses (since they lack the background to refute the natural selection basis I showed in the previous blog), he continues:
"From the beginning , living things were divided into broad classifications , each reproducing according to its own KIND ( or , broadly speaking , species ) , with reproductive potential ONLY within ITS KIND ! Here we see a scientific FACT that scientists acknowledge : Animals reproduce ONLY within their own species , or kind . Species , in fact , are defined by whether the animals can successfully interbreed with each other . According to the Bible , the major species were all created after their OWN KIND ! They did NOT "evolve" one into another"
One wonders here if this moron ever heard of the Liger? The product of inbreeding between a Lion and Tiger. If not, maybe he needs to catch up over here:
http://www.messybeast.com/genetics/hyb-liger.htm
The preceding article, complete with photographs (not merely drawings) shows that Ligers are not only real- but have successfully survived even in captivity! In other words, it shows once more this bombastic twit is either ill read, can't keep up with information, or believes his stupid archaic, non-scientific "good book" even when concrete evidence shows otherwise.
So, again, we see his Bible is either lying, wrong or misconstrued. In any case, it can't be much use to a literal minded idiot who interprets every single word at face value. Now, we know he couldn't address Dawkins' extended, corrected quotation to do with actual nonrandom selection, so we wonder if this lamebrain can maybe explain to us how Ligers can exist (the product of two separate species, lion and tiger) if his bible author says they can't. (Beware of word reframing here: like he did earlier when he said "killing" and "murder" are two different things. Maybe in this case he'll argue that lions and tigers "are really the same species"!)
But wait, that's not all. New evidence in the Neandertal and Homo Sapiens genome, uncovered by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, shows that up to 4% of human DNA (that is, derived from H. Sapiens) is Neandertal DNA. (And we know that the Neandertal strain and H. Sapiens were two distinct hominid species which overlapped - with the last Neandertals dying out about 30,000 years ago).Paabo and his team at Leipzig did used the DNA from three Neandertal bones excavated from Vindija, near Croatia, to compare to the existing human genome. What they identified were no less than 10 of 12 variant genome regions associated with Neandertals.
This has led the research team to conclude Neandertals interbred with modern humans sometime in the recent past - again exploding the daffy pastor's rubbish.
As noted in the relevant article ('Our Inner Neandertal', Scientific American, p. 18):
"Intermixing does not surprise paleo-anthropologists who have long argued that on the basis of fossils, archaic hominids such as Neandertals in Eurasia and Homo Erectus in East Asia, mated with modern humans."
On another level, this pastor perplex often trots out rubbish about "Darwin's problem" to do with "transitional layers with missing fossils" or "missing links", seemingly unaware that train long since left the station. While all these creationist bloviators continue to rail against evolution on the basis of "missing fossils", they seem to have missed that it is now the microscopic, genetic evidence that matters most. For example, the astounding finding that the cytochrome-c sequence in chimps and humans is an exact match. The odds of which are about 1 in 10^93!
Indeed, this genetic evidence is so overpowering and compelling, that if we didn't find another hominid fossil it wouldn't really matter- at least in terms of nailing the issue of common descent- the most critical part of Darwin's theory pertaining to hominid origins. And let's not forget here the other powerful earlier work by Yunis and Prakash, 1982, Science, Vol. 215, p. 1525, 'The Origin of Man: A Chromosomal Pictorial Legacy.
They showed that the human chromosome designated '2' was the result of the telomeric fusion of the two ape chromosomes, 2p and 2q. The effect also saw the reduction from 24 chromosome pairs in apes, to 23 pairs in humans. Again, their findings made a coherent and powerful case for common descent.
What the fossil record can provide is a complementary framework within which to morphologically confirm results at the genetic level. Thus, it would be neat to locate and assemble a much more direct link from the early hominids to humans - but given how much labor had to be put into merely assembling the "Ardi" hominid, this is doubtful. Age alone- in conjunction with tectonic plate activity - causes wear on the extant bones, often fracturing them, and leaving precious few fragments to assemble. The fact so much of the hominid find "Ardi" was assembled, is a testament to the sheer dedication and ingenuity of the workers. (As noted in a previous blog, the research that went into the composition of Ardi's fossil structure took nearly 15 years before it could be published.)
As for "Missing link" , that is a common erroneous term. It implies there is one and only one transitional species leading from a common ape-human ancestor to humans. This is the wrong end of the stick. In fact, what we are dealing with is a series or sequence of transitional links that have occurred over the past 6-8 million years. Also, since evolution is an algorithmic process, it means there are many adaptative trial species before a final successful selection outcome. This can easily be seen in the reconstructed history from Fig. 2 which discloses multiple hominid tracks en route to Man, not just one! Why important? Because a true "missing link" only really makes sense if there is one and only one track to humans, not multiple ones. I mean, in the latter case, one would technically look for dozens of "missing links" that might have emerged simultaneously before a final specific bifurcation (resulting from a "punctuated" equilibrium).
All of this in tandem discloses that the theory of evolution by natural selection is so powerful that it has stood the test of time - and has shown from multiple empirical standpoints the linkage between all life forms. Whereas creationists are forced to consider each special creation separately, more than 50 billion total species in all - including bacteria, insects, and many others.
As also noted before, it is evolution by which we can make sense of the "stupid" design faults which thread their way through the human anatomy - from the three-tiered brain (neocortex, mesocortex, paleocortex) with parts warring against each other, to a useless appendix (that often ruptures creating great cost in medical expense as well as threat to life) to a buccal cavity too small to accommodate wisdom teeth.
All of this points to a putative "perfect deity" who "blew it" bigtime with his crown of creation! (If one buys into the Genesis fairy tale.) I mean, why did he, she or It invert the retina and give humans a blind spot but not the octopus (where one would think it less critical to survival for a lower species?) Why, in making us upright, did this "creator" render us so liable to spinal -back problems?
From the viewpoint of a faulty, "trial by error" process - like evolution via natural selection - all the preceding make eminent sense. They don't if assumed to issue from some "designer" who is supposedly the most intelligent thing in the universe, and alleged to even have created it (though we still haven't heard from the fundie why he'd make it with 93% dark matter and dark energy).
Again, I guess the cautionary tale here is that certain pastors still 48 credits short of an online bible degree - and TEN questions short of completing a basic evolution test- should avoid going out on limbs and sticking their foolish heads out where they don't belong!
But as I said, we have to try to be kind (up to a point) with this character, who’s still working on his online bible degree and also still working (after over a WEEK!) on trying to get out ten simple answers to a basic evolution test. E.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/01/test-on-evolution-for-fundie-critics.html
Of course, we already know that any dumbo that begins any rejoinder to evolution by citing "Genesis" has already lost, since he's: 1) committed the fallacy of appeal to authority, and 2) not specifically addressed the false nonsense he cited for Dawkins - re: nonrandom selection and its role in evolution.
But it gets much worse than this, folks! It gets into the league of 100% confounded, total abysmal ignorance being promoted as part of some pre-ordained, supernatural bull pockey. Don't take my word for it but look at his recent quotes from his blog, claiming "evidence" from gibberish that any freshman who's taken a basic evolution course knows to be false.
He blabbers:
"Let's start at the beginning of the book of Genesis . Chapter 1 first briefly describes the creation of the heavens and earth along with the appearance of light and dry land . The Bible next records the creation of biological life on our planet ."
Let's skewer this horse manure first. Reading Gen.:1: 1-5 we see:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day”
Now, it is clear that the “light” referred to in the last three sentences is none other than the SUN. However, it is clear from reading each line through that the Earth was supposedly made BEFORE the Sun. (E.g. Earth without form, darkness upon face of the deep).
However, this is physically impossible. We know from modern astrophysics that the solar proto-nebula had to collapse first to yield the SUN. (No planets, since they had yet to spin off the collapsing nebular cloud – it hadn’t cooled enough to allow it). As the proto-solar nebula collapsed it also began spinning and gained angular momentum. This angular momentum was then transferred to regions of the nebula that cooled and separated from the whole, and these regions became separate clouds of dust and gas that aggregated into the planets.
Under a combination of electrostatic attraction (between larger charged particles) and gravity (attracting the whole mass from the center of the cloud) each planet was formed as what we call a “planetesimal”.
As more angular momentum was transferred – the planetesimal’s (each one) acquired their own spin (in a period of revolution) and specific shapes. The giant planets (e.g. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus) garnered more spin momentum than the more dense, terrestrial planets. Thus Jupiter’s planetesimal ended up as an oblate spheroid with diameter of about 88,000 mile and rotating rapidly with a day of ~ 10 hours. Earth meanwhile ended up as a relatively spherical orb with diameter of ~ 8,000 miles and day approaching approach 24 hrs. Mars ended up in a similar shape to that of Earth and a diameter of 4200 miles and day ~ 24 hours.
Thus, the Earth spun off about 1.1 billion years after the solar nebula fully collapsed, and it could not have come BEFORE the Sun. Indeed, the absence of the pivoting central mass of the Sun, or ~ 2 x 10 ^30 kilograms, would have meant the Earth- with no Sun present- would instantly have been hurled into a direction toward the constellation Hercules at 12 miles per second with no central mass to keep it in check. We can compute this exactly using the basic principles of celestial mechanics.
It is clear from this that Gen.1:1-5 has stated a patent impossibility which violates all known laws of physics and dynamics and is therefore WRONG! It is clear from this that the Bible must be in error, certainly in this one passage – and if here then likely in many other places too. If this is so then it must have been written by flawed humans using limited conceptions of space, time and astrophysics which accounts are not even correct in their most general form. Why on Earth would any intelligent person invoke it then, as anything other than an elaborate fable? Well, because some humans have muted their intelligence by surrendering it to belief without evidence.
Conclusion: it cannot be a “divinely inspired” book. Rather it is a HUMAN-inspired work with all the errors we expect to see from a work of humans. And even moreso, it certainly isn't any substitute for science. Hell, does anyone - including this pretend pastor even see the scantest reference to genes? To DNA? Hell no!
Not content, to hoist himself on this petard, always the last refuge of scientific ignoramuses (since they lack the background to refute the natural selection basis I showed in the previous blog), he continues:
"From the beginning , living things were divided into broad classifications , each reproducing according to its own KIND ( or , broadly speaking , species ) , with reproductive potential ONLY within ITS KIND ! Here we see a scientific FACT that scientists acknowledge : Animals reproduce ONLY within their own species , or kind . Species , in fact , are defined by whether the animals can successfully interbreed with each other . According to the Bible , the major species were all created after their OWN KIND ! They did NOT "evolve" one into another"
One wonders here if this moron ever heard of the Liger? The product of inbreeding between a Lion and Tiger. If not, maybe he needs to catch up over here:
http://www.messybeast.com/genetics/hyb-liger.htm
The preceding article, complete with photographs (not merely drawings) shows that Ligers are not only real- but have successfully survived even in captivity! In other words, it shows once more this bombastic twit is either ill read, can't keep up with information, or believes his stupid archaic, non-scientific "good book" even when concrete evidence shows otherwise.
So, again, we see his Bible is either lying, wrong or misconstrued. In any case, it can't be much use to a literal minded idiot who interprets every single word at face value. Now, we know he couldn't address Dawkins' extended, corrected quotation to do with actual nonrandom selection, so we wonder if this lamebrain can maybe explain to us how Ligers can exist (the product of two separate species, lion and tiger) if his bible author says they can't. (Beware of word reframing here: like he did earlier when he said "killing" and "murder" are two different things. Maybe in this case he'll argue that lions and tigers "are really the same species"!)
But wait, that's not all. New evidence in the Neandertal and Homo Sapiens genome, uncovered by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, shows that up to 4% of human DNA (that is, derived from H. Sapiens) is Neandertal DNA. (And we know that the Neandertal strain and H. Sapiens were two distinct hominid species which overlapped - with the last Neandertals dying out about 30,000 years ago).Paabo and his team at Leipzig did used the DNA from three Neandertal bones excavated from Vindija, near Croatia, to compare to the existing human genome. What they identified were no less than 10 of 12 variant genome regions associated with Neandertals.
This has led the research team to conclude Neandertals interbred with modern humans sometime in the recent past - again exploding the daffy pastor's rubbish.
As noted in the relevant article ('Our Inner Neandertal', Scientific American, p. 18):
"Intermixing does not surprise paleo-anthropologists who have long argued that on the basis of fossils, archaic hominids such as Neandertals in Eurasia and Homo Erectus in East Asia, mated with modern humans."
On another level, this pastor perplex often trots out rubbish about "Darwin's problem" to do with "transitional layers with missing fossils" or "missing links", seemingly unaware that train long since left the station. While all these creationist bloviators continue to rail against evolution on the basis of "missing fossils", they seem to have missed that it is now the microscopic, genetic evidence that matters most. For example, the astounding finding that the cytochrome-c sequence in chimps and humans is an exact match. The odds of which are about 1 in 10^93!
Indeed, this genetic evidence is so overpowering and compelling, that if we didn't find another hominid fossil it wouldn't really matter- at least in terms of nailing the issue of common descent- the most critical part of Darwin's theory pertaining to hominid origins. And let's not forget here the other powerful earlier work by Yunis and Prakash, 1982, Science, Vol. 215, p. 1525, 'The Origin of Man: A Chromosomal Pictorial Legacy.
They showed that the human chromosome designated '2' was the result of the telomeric fusion of the two ape chromosomes, 2p and 2q. The effect also saw the reduction from 24 chromosome pairs in apes, to 23 pairs in humans. Again, their findings made a coherent and powerful case for common descent.
What the fossil record can provide is a complementary framework within which to morphologically confirm results at the genetic level. Thus, it would be neat to locate and assemble a much more direct link from the early hominids to humans - but given how much labor had to be put into merely assembling the "Ardi" hominid, this is doubtful. Age alone- in conjunction with tectonic plate activity - causes wear on the extant bones, often fracturing them, and leaving precious few fragments to assemble. The fact so much of the hominid find "Ardi" was assembled, is a testament to the sheer dedication and ingenuity of the workers. (As noted in a previous blog, the research that went into the composition of Ardi's fossil structure took nearly 15 years before it could be published.)
As for "Missing link" , that is a common erroneous term. It implies there is one and only one transitional species leading from a common ape-human ancestor to humans. This is the wrong end of the stick. In fact, what we are dealing with is a series or sequence of transitional links that have occurred over the past 6-8 million years. Also, since evolution is an algorithmic process, it means there are many adaptative trial species before a final successful selection outcome. This can easily be seen in the reconstructed history from Fig. 2 which discloses multiple hominid tracks en route to Man, not just one! Why important? Because a true "missing link" only really makes sense if there is one and only one track to humans, not multiple ones. I mean, in the latter case, one would technically look for dozens of "missing links" that might have emerged simultaneously before a final specific bifurcation (resulting from a "punctuated" equilibrium).
All of this in tandem discloses that the theory of evolution by natural selection is so powerful that it has stood the test of time - and has shown from multiple empirical standpoints the linkage between all life forms. Whereas creationists are forced to consider each special creation separately, more than 50 billion total species in all - including bacteria, insects, and many others.
As also noted before, it is evolution by which we can make sense of the "stupid" design faults which thread their way through the human anatomy - from the three-tiered brain (neocortex, mesocortex, paleocortex) with parts warring against each other, to a useless appendix (that often ruptures creating great cost in medical expense as well as threat to life) to a buccal cavity too small to accommodate wisdom teeth.
All of this points to a putative "perfect deity" who "blew it" bigtime with his crown of creation! (If one buys into the Genesis fairy tale.) I mean, why did he, she or It invert the retina and give humans a blind spot but not the octopus (where one would think it less critical to survival for a lower species?) Why, in making us upright, did this "creator" render us so liable to spinal -back problems?
From the viewpoint of a faulty, "trial by error" process - like evolution via natural selection - all the preceding make eminent sense. They don't if assumed to issue from some "designer" who is supposedly the most intelligent thing in the universe, and alleged to even have created it (though we still haven't heard from the fundie why he'd make it with 93% dark matter and dark energy).
Again, I guess the cautionary tale here is that certain pastors still 48 credits short of an online bible degree - and TEN questions short of completing a basic evolution test- should avoid going out on limbs and sticking their foolish heads out where they don't belong!
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