A young lad who goes by the alias of GreenSlugg (he also notes that his name is Greg) has put up a YouTube video, “Biogeography and Creation—a response to Jerry Coyne” that claims to be a decisive refutation of the evidence for evolution from biogeography that I summarized in my book WEIT and in subsequent lectures. He is, of course, a Christian, and has a website that tells you how to bring Jesus into your life. (This is additional evidence that virtually all opposition to evolution is based on religion.)
Greg apparently hasn’t read my book, for he cites only one lecture in which I mention biogeography in passing. But, as I note in WEIT—where I devote a whole chapter to the topic—I consider the data from biogeography some of the strongest and most irrefutable evidence for evolution. No form of creationism, especially Biblical literalism that invokes Noah’s Ark, can begin to explain the multifarious data from both continents and islands. Creationists often go after the fossil record, evidence from vestigial organs, and imperfections of “design”, but they almost never tackle biogeography.
I can’t say this is even a game try, but rather than refute it myself, I thought I’d let the readers have a try. Leave a comment pointing out one mistake in Greg’s presentation (let the other readers have a try, too!) If you’ve read my book, or studied biogeography, you’ll know how to do it.
Here is nine and a half minutes of confusion and ignorance. This guy really buys the Noah’s Ark thing, which is the absolute worst way to explain the distribution of species on earth. Given his love of Jesus, I doubt that he’s capable of being convinced by data, but perhaps a reader can link to this post (after there are comments) on the YouTube site. Perhaps that would prompt yet another video!
A few comments. He says that the data from biogeography are explained solely by migration. Oh, and by mutation and natural selection and evolution as well (8:10). What is he talking about? It can’t be the creationist “microevolution but not macroevolution” canard, since the biogeographic data clearly explain macroevolution as well.
His invocation of the Australian fauna reminds me of Darwin’s complaint to his mentor, the geologist Lyell, about how naturalists tried to explain island fauna by positing huge land bridges between continents, bridges for which there was no evidence. As I say in WEIT, “Darwin grumbled to Lyell that these bridges were conjured up ‘as easily as a cook does pancakes’”).
This dude is cooking a lot of pancakes. It’s a stunning display of ignorance, and certainly willful ignorance since a simple reading of one chapter of my book would make the video irrelevant. He says that I, too, am ignorant since I apparently don’t know the totally convincing story of Noah’s Ark, but of course I’ve read that part of the Bible innumerable times. It clearly tells us that Noah didn’t need fish or whales on the ark because all marine and freshwater creatures could surely have survived the mixture of salt and fresh water, combined with a thick slurry of silt and boiling temperatures, that constituted the seas during Noah’s voyage!
I’ll try later… youtube not cooperating.
It doesn’t seem fair that all but two of every species gets deleted because God realizes, once again, that his perfect creation is not to His liking – but fish get let off scott free!
Nine minutes on You Tube! would be better spent watching George Carlin’s take on God and religion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPOfurmrjxo&feature=related
Hydro-Hamartiology explains everything. We can haz sins washed away.
Okay, botany refutes a Noahic flood.
Lets start with a few lessons about what happens when you submerge plants for over a 150 days. Firstly they drown, I know seems a little bit weird but plants need oxygen, plants that are adapted to flooding have different mechanisms to survive but all need oxygen. So all terrestrial plant life is dead, the floating mat idea that some cretionists use has never been tested nor do all plants exhibit the abilty to regrow vegetatively. It also means these floating mats just happen to form and deposit in the exact location the plant needed to be otherwise there would evidence of plant migration across the world.
Then we’ve the issue of blue green algae which really wouldn’t react well to a change in the osmotic potential of seawater. So oxygen producing organisms left after a flood!
Seed bank would be destroyed as all the sediments involved in building the geologic column have been disturbed. So this means any plant life surving would have to migrate to were we find it today
Serotinous plants like the giant redwood rely on fire events to shed their seed. So in a post flood world no serotiny.
I could go on and on but the present distrbution of plants clearly refutes any notion of a recent global flood.
“So oxygen producing organisms left after a flood!”
Should So no oxygen producing organisms left after a flood!”
I like it the first way you said it. 🙂
Oh, lordy. Young earth creationists came up with natural selection?
Ignorance like this makes me sad.
I had just a glance at the website—the usual Christian drivel. This gem is interesting, though: “God lead [sic] me to put up ads on this web site.”
The research is quite clear.
God agrees with every decision a theist makes. Even if a different theist comes to a different decision.
Correct me if I’m wrong, b/c I haven’t read Jerry’s book either (sorry).
This guy thinks that biogeography implies migration rather than evolution. So he takes cases where you have finches on island X and finches on mainland Y, and the explanation is supposed to be the migrated from Y to X. End of story.
I take it that the real argument from biogeography contains premises from genetics, morphological similarity, the fossil record, and so on. The argument goes: here’s two things that creationists DENY are ancestrally realted, despite their genetic and morphological similarity, and despite the fossil record connecting them. Lemurs and galagos, for instance. If two distinct species can’t really be related, because evolution is false, then you have no expectation of finding lemurs near galagos, or lemurs + galagos near monkeys, or whatever. If God is just doling out phenotypes and genotypes on a whim, then you expect what creationists claim to be unrelated species to be in unrelated places.
But the morphological and genetic similarities, as well as the fossil record, suggest that these distinct species are related. If evolution is true, then that explains why they’re “adjacent” as it were.
The principal mistake in this guy’s argument is in taking biogeography only to be the observation that “there are finches here and finches there” and not the observation that “when two species are morphologically, genetically, and fossil-record-connectedly related, but distinct enough that no creationist will say they’re ancestrally related, they are physically near one another (at least early on).” The creationists need to explain why similar things are proximally distributed.
Of course, one would have to find the “baramin” fossils of kangaroos and koalas (and darn near everything else in Australia) along the route from Mt. Ararat to Vietnam.
There’s a job for a creationist paleontologist. Calling Ian Juby (one of the dimmest of the dim bulbs)!
And also explain how flightless kakapoos and kiwis were able to make it to far-off New Zealand but faster moving mammals like rats and foxes didn’t.
Or why anteaters went to South America and aardvarks went to Africa.
Methinks the boy is just looking for attention.
Sad. Sad. Sad. Aggressive ignorance is what I call it.
This is just dim – if all animals descended from what supposedly lived on a fictional boat, they would be VERY INBRED! And VERY HUNGRY! What did the tigers eat while the deer were busy breeding? What did the deer graze on while the plants were regrowing? Whence did the water come & whither did it go? Why land on Ararat (5,137 m) when this is a tiny mountain compared with most others? Why do you need to invoke this nonsense when we now have the answer to biogeography’s conundrums – plate tectonics? Why is it OK for him to accept one bit of science but not another? You cannot cherry pick what you want to be true & what you do not want to be true!
Why not? These guys cherry-pick their own holy book all the time. Their reserve of reliable information and knowledge is miniscule. Wilful ignorance is unforgiveable.
“Ignorance can’t be pardoned, only cured”–Robert Silverberg
Coconuts. They float, don’t you know.
Or Carried by an African Swallow, gripping it by the husk.
Or coconuts delivered by swallows.
Would that be the Afican or the European swallow?
You, sir ask too many questions! Just believe, OK? How hard is that to do?
Very!
“You, sir ask too many questions!”
– Imagine Jesus saying that to Nicodemus.
I do believe, really and truly believe!
I believe the overwhelming body of scientific evidence that the man-written Bible, along with the religious texts, myths and legends of all the 3,500 to 4,000 religions practiced on earth, that we know about, are just that, myths and legends.
I am happy to say that I believe nothing without peer reviewed, empirical evidence.
I have the advantage over religionists in that I am able to both read and understand scientific books, albeit sometimes with the aid of a dictionary. I have also read the Bible.
The thing is, I didn’t stop at reading the Bible, I went on to study its contents against proven scientific theories. (Please look up the definition of “theory”, as it relates to scientific research, it may surprise you.)
That is why I do believe. I believe the highly contradictory Bible is myth and legend written before any semblance of scientific study was available.
By the way, on a point of information, how long did the mythical flood, of Noah’s Ark fame, actually last? I ask only in search of the revealed truth of your god. It’s just that, in Genesis 7:17 it says “forty days” and seven verses later, Genesis 7:24, it says “an hundred and fifty days”.
You might also want to check out Genesis 8:13 (the earth was dry in the first month) and the next verse, 8:14, when the earth was dry in the second month.
Also, in Genesis 7:20, God apparently told whoever wrote down His word, “Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered”. Now, an Egyptian Cubit is 524mm. 15 cubits is 7.86 metres. So, either the flood managed to rise above mean sea level by 7.86 metres – and cover Mt. Everest (8,848 metres) – OR Mt. Everest (8,848 metres) was covered by 7.86 metres of water. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s the latter. That makes my earlier calculation of how much additional water would have to suddenly appear and disappear (search for ‘1,090,056,166,483,950,000,000 litres of water’ in this blog) wildly inaccurate. With the new coverage, of 7.86 metres, the volume of water required, in addition to that already there, would have been 3,227,780,540,313,370,000,000 litres.
The estimated volume of water on earth is 1,386,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres.
So, this god of yours would have had to magic into existence 2.33 times the amount of water on earth for the Noah myth to be true.
Now comes the hard part – for you – where did it come from and, where is it now?
You have blind faith and belief in something written by men, a few thousand years ago, to explain what was then inexplicable. Thanks to the development of man – and massive advances in science – huge strides forward in understanding the origins of the universe, earth and man have been made.
I can’t help you lift the shutters on your brain to see the truth, only you can do that by harnessing the power of your own brain to read the books. And I don’t mean religious books, I mean real science books.
By the way, just a couple more points of clarification; did your god make “the earth and the heavens” in one day (Genesis 2:4) or did it take him the full six (Genesis 1:3-2:3)? Also, how many of each “clean” animal did Noah take into the Ark? Was it the two mentioned in Genesis 6:19 and 7:8, 9 & 15 or the full seven mentioned in Genesis 7:2?
Maybe your god just suffers from Alzheimer’s and was just rambling when he dictated His word. For me, though, the massive number of contradiction (well over 400) and absurdities clearly indicate that the claim that this book is the revealed truth of one all-knowing being is nonsense.
To help with your first 439 contradictions, take a look at http://www.project-reason.org/bibleContra_big.pdf. For more, go to http://www.1001biblecontradictions.com/. For some absurdities (over 2,000 of them), go to http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/abs/long.htm.
If you are brave enough to put down your Bible and read some truth with your mind open, start off with ‘The Magic of Reality’ [http://www.amazon.com/The-Magic-of-Reality-ebook/dp/B007MC0IAG/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343657033&sr=1-1&keywords=the+magic+of+reality], follow this with ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ [http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Show-Earth-ebook/dp/B0031RDV0A/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343656847&sr=1-1&keywords=the+greatest+show+on+earth] and then work through the ‘Bibliography and Further Reading’ list at the back of it. Really and truly, it’s better for you, in so many ways, to read lots of difficult books – even if you need a dictionary to help – than it is to read the Bible over and over and over again.
You sound just like the nuns who taught at the RC infants scool I attended. I just hope, for those around you, that you aren’t as spiteful as they were.
Was it spite, or “just” a sociopathic hatred of anything human, or anything that even remotely made them think of sex?
As a 7-year-old (we then moved house and I went to a new, secular school), I don’t recall ever appreciating a sexual nuance to anything. I do, however, recall being caned for asking “How can that be true?” about something or other in the Holy Babble.
In a way, I am grateful for their attitude, which helped me to consign their god to the same box as Santa and the Tooth Fairy.
Ahem: school!
“What did the deer graze on while the plants were regrowing?”
That would be even worst for beings living on very specific diets like koalas. Perhaps the (two) koalas* were cultivating their own eucalyptus during the journey from Mt Ararat to Australia?
After all, they have pouch for the seeds.
Desnes Diev
* I do not think the koala is a “clean” species… especially because the bible’s authors certainly never have seen any koalas.
So for you there is no problem for evolve Koalas but ut is impossible to Koalas change his diet?
Assuming this is a real question, it reveals a lack of appreciation for either logic or humour.
IF Koalas had been created in their present form, they would have been obligate folivores with an almost exclusive preference for toxic, barely digestible eucalypts, and an upside down pouch that makes very little sense in an arboreal marsupial.
In fact, the evidence of dentition, gut anatomy and the fossil record implies that koalas have evolved quite a bit (never more than 2 or 3 species at a time as far as we know, but over tens of millions of years) and have probably been obligate folivores all that time. How dependent the extinct species were on eucalypts is not known yet, but potentially knowable.
All of them lived in Australia (none have ever turned up in the vicinity of Ararat, a typical fact of biogeography that cretinism is unable to explain), and the backward opening pouch is a derived character shared with their nearest living relatives, the three burrowing, grazing species of wombats, for whom it is obviously better adapted than one that opens forward like possums or kangaroos.
Well said!
Well said, indeed. There are, no doubt, thousands of species for whom the amazingly crowded ark would have been unsurvivable.
I still think the story of Noah takes the top prize for literalist stupidity. Bartholomew and the Oobleck is more credible.
Thank you very much for your great comment, you spare me a lot of work.
Just one point, about backward-drected pouch: You may have added that if is a good design for burrowers, it is not so for arboreal animals.
It may even count as an example of IDiotic design.
Desnes Diev
In less than a few months and less than a few generations, I don’t think koalas fully formed as we know them can change their diet. They would be dead before eating bananas (not a specially God-designed one, perhaps).
What is worst is that after a Flood of biblical proportions, the entire world would have been a desert.
This notwistanding, the fact that koalas cannot change their diet in a few months does not preclude the possibilty that some mutations appearing in some newborn koalas give them some advantages in the digestion department. If these advantages help the young koalas to survive and reproduce, you will have more and more mutated koalas in the population with time. And if these advantages permit them to exploit other sources of food, and if this food is available in the environment of the koalas, the mutated koalas may interact less with the “original” koalas and, thus, diverge more and more from those original koalas. Then, with lot of time, over lot of generations, you will have evolution of a new kind of koalas with a diet different from ther ancestors.
Desnes Diev
Shit. You didn’t spot any mention of koalas in the Bible either? I was just keeping quiet about that because I thought there was an ‘interpretation’ that would explain it.
To be honest, I’ve been wanting to say something about this for years. I just don’t understand how the only animals mentioned in the Bible just happen to be indigenous to the Middle East.
I mean, I think there are around 10 mentions of unicorns and quite a few mentions of dragons, sea monsters and leviathans in the Bible but not a single word about dinosaurs, penguins, polar bears, three-toed sloths or, as we are on the subject, koalas.
No, I can only think that there’s an ‘interpretation’ somewhere. It’s such a shame the god character was too thick to know what he was writing about. That’s the trouble with using ghost writers.
Or kangaroos. Don’t forget kangaroos! You’d think Noah would have noticed if there were huge rat-like creatures bouncing around the Ark at 60mph, wouldn’t ya? 😉
Don’t forget God’s “inordinate fondness for beetles”!
Not if they were hiding behind the armadillos…
As you said, he is deeply confused.
But I think is is going for the “microevolution but not macroevolution” idea, with his fixation on migration.
Of course he “forgets” that finches in the Galapagos are not the same species of finches we find elsewhere. Because they evolved. Biological similarity is not equality.
Unless in his tangled little mind, migration=evolution by a different name.
” It clearly tells us that Noah didn’t need fish or whales on the ark because all marine and freshwater creatures could surely have survived the mixture of salt and fresh water, combined with a thick slurry of silt and boiling temperatures, that constituted the seas during Noah’s voyage!”
Actually, it states that all animals that “breathe with their nostrils” were on the ark, so the whales were on board. Not sure how he got the room, but that’s just another nail in the coffin.
Shamu!!!
One of the most comprehensive explanations of why the Ark story doesn’t float is on talkorigins:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
Also I have a very detailed text covering everything from animal husbandry to marine engineering; I’d leave a link, but don’t recall where I got it.
Greg, if you read this, be brave and follow that link. You’ll learn things that your everyday circle wouldn’t share with you.
Bob
… and here’s that other link; it’s to Robert A. Moore’s ‘The Impossible Voyage of Noah’s Ark’ at the National Center for Science Education. Best Ark resource I know of.
http://ncse.com/cej/4/1/impossible-voyage-noahs-ark/
Take courage Greg
Bob(Big)
I don’t understand how anyone today can believe in the Noah’s Ark story when there is so much information clearly debunking it as myth and just another borrowed legend.
One of my favorite arguments from TalkOrigins that “proves” god is a dick:
Now apply that logic beyond humans…
Diseases are caused by demons.
Simple. Irrefutable. You’ve never seen a disease that wasn’t caused by a demon, but all those “virus” and “bacteria” and “parasite” thingies are just benign commensals.
Cancer, too. Tumors are just the body’s response to demons.
They’re everywhere, those demons.
/snark
According to christians the christian gods created everything that there is, which would include demons. The christian gods are still responsible for the disease. The christian gods did it.
Diawl! (Welsh for ‘the Devil’) What pitiful stuff.
Living in Australia just for the radiation of animals we have here is wonderful. I used to count the different species of birds where I lived between the short walk from my house to the local shops. Must have seen 30 different species of birds, including some beautiful parrots. I remember walking out of the house one morning on my way to work and there were 2 gang gang cockatoos (one male, one female) in the trees in my front yard. Amazing sight! Also, there’s nothing quite like a sulphur-crested cockatoo squawking loudly as it flies overhead. And in my new place, we had a kangaroo hopping down the street when it was Easter and there were no cars on the road. Australia’s fauna is just amazing!
How anyone could think that some ancient astrological* allegory could give an accurate account of the antipodean animals is abjectly absurd! It’s not meant to be taken literally, and to do so only does a disservice to the source material – as well as a disservice to the pursuit of knowledge itself.
*For an account of this, see When They Severed Earth From Sky by Elizabeth and Paul Barber
Listened to his argument. When he said: “biogeography makes perfect sense in light of creation: Noah” you know that perfect sense is merely that they have an ad hoc invocation that doesn’t need to seriously tackle the problems that such a view would create. It’s too vague to say that it makes sense at all – let alone perfect sense. Might as well as say that God created marsupials in Australia and that’s creation being able to explain biogeography, then all the absurdities of invoking land-bridges would be waved away under ad hoc omnipotence.
Even if his argument is plausible (it isn’t), there’s simply no evidence for (and plenty of evidence against) a single point of migration.
When the ONLY animals mentioned in the Bible are indigenous (still) to the Middle East, where, ahem, god dictated both the Bible and the Qur’an, your helpful suggestion (which I realise is actually taking the piss) that god created marsupials in Australia, does not explain how Noah managed to cram two of each species on to a boat 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. Taking a very conservative estimate of, say, 20,000,000 plants and animals on earth, that’s 40,000,000 different specimens, on a fairly small ship.
In todays terms, using the maximum length of the Egyptian Cubit (524mm) the Ark would have been 157.2 metres long, 26.2 metres wide and 15.72 metres high. It looks like the largest ships in service today are a fleet of Maersk E class container ships, 397.71 metres long, 56 metres wide and 30 metres high [deck to keel].
So, 40,000,000 species of plants and animals, along with food supplies (which would have to include even more animals for the carnivores and plants for the herbivores) sufficient for either 40 or 150 days, depending on which verses of Genesis you pick, on a boat about twice the size of a modern container ship.
How could I have been so stupid as to not believe this story for so long?
It’s an omnipotent deity. If the deity wanted, the deity could make all the animals fit and be well fed without it needing to fit into the confines of physical law. Just as an omnipotent deity could make all the animals migrate wherever it wanted them to, as well as get them there without any incident. Heck, if an omnipotent deity wanted to, it would make a global flood where all the animals survived.
It’s interesting that Greg is invoking a supernatural event at the same time as trying to naturalise the surrounding events and say it’s not a problem. Yet in his attempt to naturalise the surrounding events, he’s creating more and more plausible things that don’t have any evidential backing as well as have no reasons for them. If one is going to try and marry the supernatural with the natural, then make anything that seems absurd supernatural. There’s no sense in trying to make a miracle reasonable in all other ways than the miracle itself.
Umm, the dimensions you quote for the Ark are under half that of the Maersk E ship (therefore, one-eigth the volume), not twice the size. Sorry to nitpick, though it makes your point stronger I think.
The Ark may well have been half the size of the Maersk E, but, at 157m, was still far longer than the largest wooden ships built in the modern era. Around the turn of the last century, 10 wooden 6-masted schooners were built in the US, the largest of which was the Wyoming at 100.4m (140m overall).
These ships had to be reinforced with steel beams to prevent them breaking apart and even then, had to be constantly pumped out to prevent them sinking and would ‘snake’ visibly in a heavy swell. Most of the 6-masters sank in heavy seas.
It is worth noting that, while these vessels had sails, and could, therefore, be steered, there in no mention of the Ark having masts or oars. That being the case, the Ark would have been impossible to steer and to bring about bow-on to the huge waves that it would have been subject to during its 300+ day voyage, thus being subject to a very considerable risk of capsize or being swamped.
I take your point. It’s too small to hold all the species but still humongously big for a wooden boat. I wouldn’t wanna sail in the thing.
Incidentally, I just see on the news that some crazy Dutchman has built a replica Ark. Using huge amounts of timber, but he started by welding together *steel* barges. Wtf? Not sure what he’s trying to prove but doesn’t he realise that invlidates the whole project…
It’s just possible that the Dutchman with Noah’s welding machine may have been beaten to it… http://www.noahsark.com.hk/eng/index.php
@jon0001
I followed that link. It appears to be some sort of theme park. It’s not entirely clear from the website what their Ark is made of (could be fibreglass or something), or whether it is in fact complete or floatable. It could be a true ‘boat’ or it could be a boat-shaped building.
I’m pretty sure it’s not an exact replica:
“The Ark also boasts less authentic Biblical touches such as double-glazed windows and a fine dining restaurant”
A crazy Dutchman has, indeed built a full-sized replica Ark, which floats, but, the builder admits, would not save anyone from a global flood:
http://inhabitat.com/dutchman-johan-huibers-opens-his-life-size-noahs-ark-to-the-public/
Additionally, an even more unhinged Australian is planning to land-based structure in Cincinnati, similar to the one on Hong Kong:
http://arkencounter.com/ They are looking for volunteers to help with construction:)
All three seem to be designed, not to sail on the high seas, but to free visitors from the burden of their hard-earned cash while loading them down with some heavy-duty indoctrination.
As if this little armada wasn’t enough, there is also a new Hollywood movie planned: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1117392/
I really hope that the producers and director of the film do some in-depth research. They should definitely start by watching:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_BzWUuZN5w
After that, they should be able to use a line from ‘Jaws; “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”.
Yes, my mathematics gene was temporarily busy working out how many angels can dance on a pinhead when I wrote that.
To be honest, I’m just pissed off with this whole thing. The whole flood myth is not improbable, it is impossible on any level.
Anyone with any speck of intelligence would not even be looking at how you get everything into such a small boat but where did all the water come from?
The mean radius of the earth is 6,378.1 kilometres and is an approximate sphere (and not flat, as it says in the Bible and was known to be in Noah’s time).
The volume of the whole planet, V, then, is:
V = 4/3 πr^3
V= 1,086,832,411,937.63 cubic kilometres
The point on earth furthest from its centre is Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador at 6,384.4 km.
“God” is supposed to have covered the whole planet. To what depth? Let’s say two metres.
So, the volume of the planet when it is completely flooded to a depth of 2m above its highest point is:
1,090,056,166,483.95 cubic kilometers
Thus, an additional 3,223,754,546.31995 cubic kilometres was required to flood the planet. Assuming that the water was pure (i.e. not salt water), that’s:
1,090,056,166,483,950,000,000 litres of water just happening. From nowhere. In an instant.
But, of course, that’s not the end of it. Where did all the water go afterwards?
And, what’s with the whole Ark idea anyway? Why didn’t this omnipotent being just smite everything he wanted dead and have done with it? It’s not like God doesn’t have form for smiting.
jon0001, so many questions! All you need is a swallow of faith-juice and all will be clear.
We have a product called Dettol in the UK and Ireland. It’s a disinfectant that claims that it, “Kills 99.9% of germs… dead”!
I assume that faith-juice, to which you refer, is somehow related as it must kill 99.9% of all rationality and logic cells… dead. One would have to allow the 0.1% to continue for all the religionists to realise that it is rational to eat.
@jon0001
“Kills 99% of germs – dead”. Well, how else would it kill them? I visualise legions of undead zombie germs floating around.
Incidentally, any time I see one of these ‘99%’ claims I reflect that raw sewage, the stuff that flows down all sewers, like, is about 99% pure water. (Well, it would be pure if one strained the impuritiies out of it). Kinda puts the advertising puffery in perspective…
“And, what’s with the whole Ark idea anyway? Why didn’t this omnipotent being just smite everything he wanted dead and have done with it? It’s not like God doesn’t have form for smiting.”
Ooh, I think I know this one! I think it was to make sure Noah had faith. I think the real question is why does an omniscient God need to test people’s faith with activities designed to make them look stupid (Noah) or downright evil (Abraham)? Surely, it would know whether its follower had faith or not? (So, actually – surprise, surprise – that doesn’t really answer the question after all. I think it is “the” answer, though!)
Just a technical note, I seem to recall that you can’t post links in YT comments.
It’s a pain but possible to present a representation, not a link.
Remove the http:, space com to c o m and do (dot) instead of .
And no slashes, either. YouTube hates slashes.
He’s a natural performer, isn’t he? From what I can parse from this extremely confused brabble, he does not acknowledge the fact that most island species are *endemic*, i.e. they are only found on the respective island(s). E.g. Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos islands or the honeycreepers on Hawaii. Yes, there is often one closely related species on the mainland, but all the other species are only found on the islands. So, if they all had migrated there, they would have at the same time all have had to go extinct on the mainland, which is just not a parsimonious explanation of the pattern at all…
Okay, I didn’t watch the video, but your comment at the end made me actually laugh out loud. I hadn’t actually thought about the freshwater/marine problem before in relation to the ark story. As an ichthyologist-in-training I certainly should have.
So I guess I’ll make my 1 comment on errors an elaboration of that (if it’s not mentioned in the video at all, I apologize):
Some species can switch from fresh to salt water (catadromous/anadromous). Some fish can tolerate “fresh” water that is varying levels of brackish or low-oxygen. Most aquatic species can’t, because the necessary physiology is so complex, and the processes are basically opposite in different environments to maintain the correct balance of sugars and salts in the body.
If you’re in freshwater, you’re desperately pumping OUT as much water as you can from your body. If you’re in saltwater, you’re doing everything you can to retain all your water. For most species, if you move outside the narrow range of salinity you can tolerate then you die. Period.
It’s even worse with insects I think, a lot of the cool aquatic juveniles (mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies) need EXTREMELY clean/clear/swift water to survive.
Speaking of which, what’s the official story on freshwater crayfish/mussels/insects re: the ark? Mayflies, for example – the juveniles would all die in the flood, and the adults wouldn’t live long enough to breed when everything got back to normal.
Well, if you’re a freshwater fish, you’re pumping Na+ out (not water) in an ATP-coupled reaction in exchange for K+ to maintain an osmotic balance. Otherwise water would flood in. The K+ is roughly equimolar, as I learned it anyway, so it’s a wash from that standpoint.
In saltwater, you pump Na+ in, in exchange for K+ (I think NH4+ can substitute for K+), to keep water from leaving osmotically (in an attempt to dilute the ocean to your otherwise lower concentration).
I’m pretty sure that you’ve got that wrong. I know intuitively that you’d want to attempt to keep the osmotic pressure neutral. But iirc, freshwater fish have special modifications in gills and kidneys to maintain salt concentrations that are higher than the surrounding environment and other modifications to keep too much water from osmosing in. They’re also constantly expelling the water that does come in through urine, which is (mostly) depleted of salts prior to expulsion by the modifications in the kidneys.
When you put said fish into salt water the result is that the fish gets dehydrated because it still tries to pump out water and increase internal salt concentrations.
The opposite is true of saltwater fish, which maintain lower concentrations of salt, internally, than their surrounding environments. They do this, again, by physiological adaptations which cause the fish to excrete much larger salt concentrations, through urine for example.
I know it seems counter-intuitive. Lower internal salt than the environment, should mean the fish will lose too much water through osmosis, but they’re able to minimize such loss through body adaptations and counteract what they do lose by extracting and eliminating (through bodily excretions) the salt from the sea-water they’re constantly drinking.
Looks like you’re right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmoregulation
(Not sure if I remembered this backwards or the concept has reversed itself over the past several decades.)
Anyway, sorry!
So this is my attempt:
Like Michael Johnson, I haven’t read your book and like him, I like to write some words about Greg’s boiling down of bioeography to “some finches on some islands”.
When we have a look at the distribution of the different taxa on our planet and investigate this with molecular methods, we can reconstruct these “migration routes” (which might, in some cases, be no migration routes at all) and even make an educated guess at the time, when the different lines diverged.
Yet this doesn’t point to a single point in history, when all the creationist’s kinds began to divide into the current species, nor does this point to a single location, from which all kinds did migrate.
Instead, we have vastly divergent times and places for all the different taxa, which is in tune with the TOE.
First, thanks for the shout-out.
Second, I phrased things in terms of species. You’re right to put them into species + higher taxa. The creationists have to explain why morphologically/ genetically similar species are geographically close to one another, and why m/g similar orders are geographically close, and why m/g similar classes are geographically close, etc. There’s a lot of explaining, and very little explanation.
Third, you bring up something I never did, which is that biogeography suggest a temporal order of species (or other taxa), and this conflicts with the postdeluvian “it all happened at once” timeline. I’m inclined to think that (a) this is true but (b) it’s not really a biogeographical point– as you say “molecular studies” show it to be true. But again, as I wanted to press, biogeographical points are really morphological, genetic, fossil-record points, so maybe it’s relevant after all.
Anyway, thanks, your comment changed my thinking for the better!
True.
Now you mentioned it, my argument might have been more complementary to biogeography, but not really about biogeography.
I was thinking about the line “we got taxon a in South America and Taxon b in Africa, we know they split around the time, when Gondwana tore apart and therefore, we assume both taxa originated from a precursor on Gandwana”.
Now that I think about it, I’m not longer sure, if this really is an argument from biogeography as it heavily relies on evidence from molecular biology.
Molecular data is an integral part of the modern version of biogeography, and I think your argument is very appropriate here.
Never mind biodiversity.
There are living Bristlecone Pine trees that are older than the Flood. These trees live in an extremely arid environment and will die if watered excessively, let alone with salt water, let alone submerged thousands of feet below the sea for weeks on end.
It is so painfully obvious that the Bible is a collection of faery tales, of really bad faery tales, that it’s just sad to encounter somebody who needs to take off his shoes to count his age who still believes in that nonsense. And it doesn’t even pretend otherwise. Hell, it goes out of its way to scream in your face that it’s make-believe.
I mean, it opens with a story about an enchanted garden with talking animals and an angry wizard. As if that weren’t enough, a bit later we have a talking plant, fer chrissakes, that gives magic wand lessons to the reluctant hero. And the grand finale is this bizarre zombie snuff pr0n fantasy, topped off with the king of the undead commanding one of his thralls to give hime a hand job by going through his gaping chest wound.
Grow up, already, Greg. You’re waaaaaay too old to still think that Superman really will swoop down and save Gotham City from Godzilla. Sure, go ahead and have some fun doing a bit of costumed role playing if you’re into that sort of thing, but this obsession of yours, thinking it’s actually really real? It’s sick, it makes you stupid, and you’re only embarrassing yourself.
Cheers,
b&
Wow. It’s amazing and scary how many Creationist sites you hit when googling “Bristlecone pines”. Get some good insights into their “science”, though, in case anyone was ever in doubt. From Tree ring dating (dendrochronology):
No big deal.
There are living plants that are far older than the fundie xian universe!!!
An oak clone in California that is left over from the ice age, ca. 11,000 years old.
A spruce clone in Scandinavia that is ca. 8,000 years old.
A creosote bush clone in California that is ca. 12,000 years old.
A holly clone in Tasmania that is the only individual and species in its genus that is around 42,000 years old.
Probably there are many more such examples. It isn’t like there is a lot of funding to go out and find living plants older than the universe.
PS Dates are from memory and these examples are all clones that keep sending out new shoots for thousands of years.
Greg accuses you of being all over the place? It is difficult to understand what he is trying to convey because his delivery is so disjointed.
He is correct that both evolutionists and creationists can explain biogeography. The differences are that the evolutionary explanations are a result of investigative processes following many different lines that all agree. Evolutionary scientists start with gathering and testing evidence which leads them to conclusions, which are again tested.
Creationist explanations are post hoc rationalizations arrived at by starting with the conclusion, and then devising an explanation that force fits the data to the conclusion. No need for testing, it just makes perfect sense. The problem with this is that when the data just does not make a good fit to their desired conclusion they have no choice but to fall back to a god that intentionally tries to mislead humans about reality, and does such a poor job of it that many humans are able to see right through their gods best efforts.
+1
‘All over the place’ could be a mental translation error for ‘omnipresent’.
Bah. I wrote a long comment about marine and freshwater fishes, but I wasn’t logged in and then the comment was gone.
Summary: lol, wut? all the fish in weird salinity! most die! Also, freshwater crayfish, mussels, insects (esp. mayflies)!
Oops nevermind, it was just delayed. My bad.
“to explain island fauna by positing huge land bridges between continents, bridges for which there was no evidence.”
There many if CD is true. At least one for monkeys between Africa and South America.
No land bridge required in that case, and geology shows that there was none at the time. Trans-oceanic dispersal is quite common (given plenty of time, which we have because the Earth is old), as Mr CD inferred and supported with numerous experiments (with plants, mostly). Several African mammal lineages (monkeys, rodents) reached South America in the mid-Caenozoic, and the most likely explanation involves rafts of vegetation, i.e. ‘floating islands’. Unlike Noah’s Ark or most of the land bridges ever invented, they actually exist.
“Several African mammal lineages (monkeys, rodents) reached South America in the mid-Caenozoic, and the most likely explanation involves rafts of vegetation, i.e. ‘floating islands’.”
Ok not bridges neither Noa´s ark, but far continents an islands could be reached by animals and plants. Now why biogeography proves evolution?
The actual observed geographical distribution of biological organisms on planet earth matches the results of modeling the system with a model based on the modern theory of biological evolution (often referred to as the Modern Synthesis). Note that this relationship has been used fruitfully in both directions, to determine how evolution works, and also to make accurate predictions about biogeography using the theory of evolution.
Also, you seem to think that if migration then biogeography is wrong. That is a not even wrong comparison. Migration of species is one of many factors important in biogeography.
At some point in the past some members of a species of finch migrated to a moderately distant island, perhaps due to a storm. At that point there are now two groups of the same species in different separate environments. An evolutionary significant amount of time passes. You now have two different species of finches that are similar, but with significant differences. That is a very common example of one small aspect of biogeography, that includes a type of migration. The modern theory of evolution explains and predicts the relationship between the two different but related species of finch, including how they became different. Nothing else we have come up with can do that. Certainly not creationism.
“Note that this relationship has been used fruitfully in both directions, to determine how evolution works, and also to make accurate predictions about biogeography using the theory of evolution.”
I would appreciat examples.
“Also, you seem to think that if migration then biogeography is wrong.”
No what I think is , as any migration is possible biogeography it is not evidence for evolution.
“At some point in the past some members of a species of finch migrated to a moderately distant island, perhaps due to a storm. At that point there are now two groups of the same species in different separate environments.”
According to evolution that could happened at any place, you just need reproductive isolation. What adds biogeography to that?
This makes no sense.
1. Any and all migrations are not possible.
If it was the entire earth would have the same flora and fauna. In fact, it is very different from place to place.
Seen any kangaroos in Europe or North American lately?
Some migrations are possible, some are not. Some happen often, some happen every 100 million years or so.
To take just one example, the old and new world monkeys are very different, all of them. There was one chance migration tens of millions of years ago followed by separate evolution.
Evolution and the old earth predict that land masses isolated from each other should have different biospheres. Which they do.
Don’t forget that Africa and South America were once joined long ago. And when the founding monkeys of the New World arrived, Africa and South America were once closer. They are moving apart due to Plate Tectonics, which also falsifies creationism.
You are saying that crossing the atlantic was possible when fits to evolution (“Trans-oceanic dispersal is quite common (given plenty of time, which we have because the Earth is old), as Mr CD inferred and supported with numerous experiments (with plants, mostly). Several African mammal lineages (monkeys, rodents) reached South America in the mid-Caenozoic, and the most likely explanation involves rafts of vegetation, i.e. ‘floating islands’.”) and it is not possible when do not fit to evolution?
Okay, so you don’t understand what biogeography is. Learning that is the first thing you should do before continuing to discuss this with anyone here.
Try this Wikipedia entry on biogeography for a quick start. If your local library has a copy of “Why Evolution Is True” you can check it out and read the chapter on biogeography. There will be plenty of other resources there as well. There is no use wasting our time or yours discussing this if you don’t understand it.
What’s CD? Charles Darwin [guess]? I don’t understand your post
The boy completely misses the point that the animals change as one goes from one place to the next. If migration was the explanation, the animals would be the same.
Creationism can explain anything but the details so its useful to the ignorant.
Jerry, you’re well-known for having a challenge to proponents of gods of requiring them to present evidence of the existence of their gods before you’ll let them continue to post.
May I suggest something similar for those who are proponents of the Noahic Flood? Simply, that they provide a list of the “kinds” present on the Ark, and how those “kinds” map to the (as of this writing) 1,355,846 species accounted for by Dr. Sullivan.
And, of course, the evidence they have that the Noahic “kind” “micro-“evolved into its present modern form. If the claim is that there were but one pair of proto-finches on the Ark, I want to see the evidence that said pair “micro-“evolved into all the finches not only on the Galapagos but everywhere else on the planet, as well. And we’d need an explanation for how those species managed to “micro-“evolve so rapidly beginning a mere four thousand years ago yet show no evidence of such rapid evolution today.
Cheers,
b&
About that rapid post-flood evolution which some creationists posit:
The Egyptians mummified untold thousands of birds, mammals (especially cats), and other things. These must have been approximately contemporaneous with the Flood, if there had really been one. Yet, as we can see by looking at the excellent drawings made by the Egyptians, these animals were virtually identical with those of today. The creationists could go and look at those bird mummies themselves and show that they are not modern species, if they wanted to prove their fast post-Flood radiation theory, but of course they never seem to care about actually testing their theories.
Given that the birds of ancient Egypt look just like the birds of modern Egypt, the ancestral “kinds” must have diverged into today’s species almost instantaneously after the Flood. Yet these same creationists who believe in this kind of super-fast “micro”-evolution gawk at the idea that after billions of years, this same process could make a dog and a cat from a common ancestor (even when they can go and actually look at the fossil intermediates!)
Aw, Dr. Sullivan cheats! [my emphasis]:
But seriously, that’s impressive.
/@
As he points out in the introduction, he’s only catalogued about 11% of known extant species. The remaining 89% he either lists as he did for primates or he has placeholders such as “Frobnotzica illustria 42 for when there are dozens of species of F. illustria but he doesn’t have particulars on any of them.
And he indicates that help in fleshing out the project is appreciated….
Cheers,
b&
Yikes! That was some of the most painful few minutes I have endured in a long time. I will have to ask him whether the penguins commandeered a ship to get to the Antarctic as they did in the cartoon Madagascar.
I do NOT want video pain. I don’t need to watch this kind of predictable garbage. Nothing, not a thing that is useful.
This video (from the description provided by others, incl. Jerry) is simply willful ignorance.
Willful ignorance, based on cowardice. This kid is afraid of death, afraid he won’t live forever. That fear of death and disappearing into nothing is the motivation behind all this tripe:
Cowardice.
Embrace life. Because when death comes, you’ll suddenly be gone, and become the same nothingness we are were in 1812 C.E. So live in this natural world, and embrace what is.
What young Mr. Slugg is forgetting is that, in his model, there would be TWO epicenters of migration — an original one in Eden, and another at Ararat. Even accepting the usual assertion that the Flood eroded all fossil-containing rock layers and re-deposited the fossils, then those fossils would have had to have been conveniently re-distributed exactly as we see them — in the places and at the depths where they would fit given an evolutionary model. Ergo, “Flood Geology” works if and only if God is more akin to Loki than to Odin — a guy who is simply out to fool us into thinking the wrong thing out of sheer maliciousness and spite — and that’s hard to square with the whole “omnibenevolence” thing.
Ooo, oooo, I got this one.
All of the animals on the ark came from Eden. Kangaroos, tigers, possum, and dung beetles.
They all walked to the ark together, and then when they landed on Ararat, instead of going back to Eden, they went for a longer stroll.
Cuz god only kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden. That’s why it was guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. (Although one wonders why the concept of modern weaponry never appears in the bible. No Uzis or guided missiles. Only swords — flaming swords at that.)
God knew he was going to flood everything and therefore needed an ark and therefore needed a place to store the animals before they left on their cruise.
How’d I do? I’m starting to get really good at this post hoc rationalization thingy.
You poor fools speculating on how the Ark worked. Of course, it was a TARDIS.
You’ve got it! That would solve the lack-of-room problem nicely. Of course, it would also solve the food and disposal-of-waste problem too, if it just time-jumped from start-of-flood to end-of-flood the animals would only need to be on board for a few hours. Come to that, it wouldn’t even need to hold all the animals at once, it could do half-a-dozen trips and ferry them.
Nice!
You just don’t get it, do you? “Flaming sword” is clearly a description of an Uzi.
Vis-a-vis posting etiquette, I would presume to say that respondents to the young gentleman should be nice – except that I gather that he himself, having initiated name-calling by calling Dr. Coyne “ignorant,” effectively inviting a bit of invective riposte. (There is no one more confident of his opinions than an adolescent/young adult male.)
I suppose that “ignorant” and “ignoramus” are technically not terms of invective, at least in the past. However, it seems that nowadays it is considered by many people something of a term of abuse. Of course, there’s a difference between being “innocently” and “willfully” ignorant.
So, presuming that that opinion is worthy of respect and giving it the benefit of the doubt, and in a good faith effort to be civil, what are alternative, acceptable words/phrases which will pass the scrutiny of and avoid offending the delicate sensibility (assuming that it’s worth the trouble)?
“Uninformed”? “Misinformed”? “Uncurious”? I don’t think “naive” will fly with the delicate sensibility.
My internal thesaurus fails me.
This morning’s Dilbert: He punctuates his ignorance with certainty.
It certainly seem apropos here.
Credulous.
Incredibly so! 😉
/@
My Mac OS X New Oxford American Dictionary (2e) provides these usage notes (inter alia) under “ignorant”:
However, nether seems to properly capture creationsists’ woeful lack (or denial) of knowledge about evolution as “ignorant” does.
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Darwin’s choice of words was ignorance:
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”
“Dunning-Kruger example” also seems to work (the ignorant people are too ignorant to recognize themselves as the ignorant people).
Religion seems to encourage people to be proud of the unbelievable things they can make themselves believe in. What else can we expect from those who imagine themselves saved for what they believe (and damned for doubt)?
I suppose saying so-and-so is “ignorant,” and leaving it at that, would be a general comment about the person, kind of like saying someone is “stupid.” So long as one specifies what the person in question is ignorant of—like “The lad is woefully ignorant of these particular aspects of biogeography…”—I don’t think it can’t fairly be called invective since it doesn’t characterize the person in a generalized way, is more or less easily demonstrable, and is “productive” to the discussion (because pointing out that the other person doesn’t have his facts straight can only be productive).
But the lad, and others like him, are not just ignorant of the particular aspects of (for example) biogeography. Their ignorance is far more profound. The degree of credulity that is required to makes them ignorant of basic tools of critical thinking. They are ignorant of how to think clearly.
The more general comment is entirely appropriate. And in many cases the word “stoooopyd” applies.
Yeah, can’t argue with tha.. There is a level of willful ignorance that kind of becomes something else entirely. And look, invective has its place in certain situations and when employed by a rhetorically skilled person (Hitchens’ televised comments in the wake of Jerry Falwell’s death were, frankly, entirely warranted; the news coverage tended to label the good reverend as merely “controversial,” which really did not capture it at all; it needed to be said, and it needed to be said that way).
I’m not trained as a biologist, but I AM trained as a historian, including some background of history of science, and I have BIG BIG issues with this guy’s discussion of Edward Blyth, a precursor to Darwin!! Blyth is a pre-Darwin guy who anticipated the concept of “natural selection” (he called it “artificial selection”). (This is near the very end of the video)
First of all, Blyth did not “originate” natural selection!! He advanced specifics of the idea, but it had been worked on by a lot of fellows, Malthus, and even CD’s grandfather Erasmus D, and had even been thought of in ancient Greece.
But 2ndly while Blyth was a kinda sorta creationist, he was NOT NOT NOT a young earth creationist . (Quote: ““It is needless to add, that a prodigious lapse of time is required here;and,to judge from data which past history of the globe abundantly furnishes, in legible records, wherever we turn our eyes…””
3rdly/finally, Blyth abandoned what little creationist beliefs he had after….reading Darwin.
That’s three big historical errors this guy has given in one sentence!!!!!
For further reading,
http://ncse.com/rncse/29/5/edward-blyth-creationist-just-another-misinterpreted-scienti
(One of the less-appreciated virtues of the National Center for Science Education is the excellent work they do in refuting creationist’s falsification of the !*history of*! science!!!)
Cosby on Noah:
Sinner!
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PS. Jerry, does it eat up bandwidth if someone embeds videos in the comments, or only if we watch them? (The latter, I think.)
PPS. @ MAUCH: Tempter!!
If that is the case I will not hesitate to stop. I am not trying to be annoying.
I’m no internet expert but I’m sure that it is just a link and a still frame that’s passed. I believe that what confirms this is the fact that by clicking on the link, the normal YouTube delays are encountered.
More general reaction remarks
Sam Harris accuses liberal Christians of cherry-picking the Bible (because it’s in their favorite parts are where God is hiding- they ignore the nasty bits). Clearly, the conservatives are cherry-picking !*scientific evidence*! and employing confirmation-bias to an even greater degree. (And employing circular reasoning)
It’s a bit disturbing when the Templeton foundation (Jerry’s post in early July) thinks that theologians can work out the implications of science better than scientists can, but this seems to be a case of willful ignorance that is really jarring. Templeton’s stuff is a complex mix of the real and imaginary, but this stuff just negates reality.
I agree with those who argue we need to figure out how have a sense of “transcendent” meaning that remains rooted in the real. When love (of a person or God) is blind, it’s not real love.
What rambling nonsense! Still, I needed a good laugh.
I viewed this risible diatribe on YouTube and my eye was drawn to this link, labelled “Post-Flood Animals, the Size of the Ark, and Creation Evangelism” and I thought, “oh, what the hell”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=HDh5orNpXbo&NR=1
One of the presenters speaks of sub-species “developing” from a single kind or type. He goes on to say that development is not evolution, “That’s just natural selection, which is not evolution…” Perhaps he should read the cover of Darwins’ work, the full title of which is ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”.
They also manage to be very selective of bible passages to fit their belief, quoting Genesis 6.19 “And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou
bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.”, whereas Genesis 7 2-3 says “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female : and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female.” Great respect, there, for a book that such people tell us is The Ultimate Truth.
Of course, the latter text would have solved the problem of the in-breeding (of which they also manage to display a monumental misunderstanding), but that wouldn’t have provided a good fit for their central argument about the size of the supposed Noah’s Ark.
There is more, so much more, so if you need a good Friday laugh, have a view.
Except for the inconvenient truth that “unclean” animals still exist, and therefore must have existed at the hypothetical Noah’s hypothetical time, you gotta wonder why the hypothetical omnipotent deity ordered any to be saved. There was the chance to be done with them, and they blew it!
More than that, he’d only created them a few centuries before. Why’d he need to stick them on a big boat, was he suddenly unable to create more animals?
But … But … Look at all that great stuff they have displayed on the desk that you can buy !
Yeshua, being a stalwart capitalist, loves you best when you buy more stuff.
I can’t say that I’ve followed the creationist Noahic arguments all that closely. But my impression is that they go to extraordinary “scientific” lengths to “explain” cubits, number of critters, food stores, waste disposal, etc. But as to penguins and kangaroos making the trek to the Ark in the first place or genetic bottlenecking from the eight human survivors, these are all answered by appeals to god’s magic powers. Now if you had the unbeatable “magic” card in your hand all along, what was the point of all those calculations about how many T. Rex’s can fit in a cubit?
Baby T Rex. Much smaller than the adults.
Oh yes, that’s their argument.
The possessiveness and defensiveness the fundies show toward their religion lead one to an inescapable conclusion: there are an awful lot of badly educated, downright stupid, people in the world.
It’s willful ignorance. If you don’t accept all this fantasy, then there is only one conclusion: You aren’t going to heaven, you aren’t going to live forever, you aren’t going to be re-united with Grandma and Grandpa and that twelve-year-old kid (somebody’s son or daughter) who got killed riding a bike into traffic…
…it’s all too awful to contemplate. Gone forever…everyone!!! Not “at rest”, not “to the Lord”…utter finality. Gone, like some squashed bug, who was here crawling around until I flattened it, and now it’s an inert pancake of protoplasm. “You mean, NO MEANING to MY existence???!!!””
So you willfully grasp and grab at anything to keep you afloat.
If the truth is too painful, then I act “stupid”.
There’s an addictive quality to religion that causes intelligent people to persist in it.
Many of Slugg’s videos garner less than 10 views. The “…response to Jerry Coyne” video will get hundreds
I predict Slugg will go the way of nearly all attention-hungry internet Creationists & faith heads:
1] This will be the beginning of a series of “…response to [famous atheist]” videos
2] Comments will disappear
3] Eventually comments & “Likes” will be disabled
I have news for the creationists: no, your babble of parroted catch phrases and endless appeals to the bible do not make your point of view as valid as that of Professor Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago.
Go back to school, follow the career path Prof. Coyne has followed, become an authority in the field of evolutionary biology, then come back in thirty years and we’ll discuss the matter further.
To contradict Shirley MacLaine, your reality is not as valid as Professor Coyne’s reality.
Footnote: if evolution contradicts religion, that’s religion’s problem, not evolution’s.
Sorry to take such an aggressive tone, but I am sick to the teeth of these uneducated yokels thinking their thoughts are of equal merit with Jerry’s.
Not to beat a drum so often (the neighbors they complain) but it’s not about education. As the guy Jerry quotes in his book WEIT says:
“I found your evidence for evolution very convincing–but I still don’t believe it.”
It’s all about willful ignorance, because people want escape from this harsh world, to be taken care of in an eternal world by an all-knowing superdaddy, and eternally re-united with deceased friends and family.
To admit, to absorb education, means to declare the fantasy null and void. Ignorance embraced.
Ah, speaking of the problems creationist have with science and hoping I’m not going to far OT, I saw this yesterday, on how entropy can create order. Published in Science, turns out under crowded conditions (the cell, maybe?) entropy forces has to pick ordered states as the most available ones.
I think it can be good to know, as is the biogeography science of evolution.
Besides throwing a monkey wrench into the creationist machinery for disfiguring entropy, it neatly answers my pet peeve when people equates entropy, whether macrostate or microstate, with some loose form of “disorder”:
“Left to their own devices, drifting particles find the arrangements with the highest entropy. That arrangement matches the idea that entropy is a disorder if the particles have enough space: they disperse, pointed in random directions. But crowded tightly, the particles began forming crystal structures like atoms do — even though they couldn’t make bonds. These ordered crystals had to be the high-entropy arrangements, too.
Glotzer explains that this isn’t really disorder creating order — entropy needs its image updated. Instead, she describes it as a measure of possibilities.”
[That is what I use: “Entropy (as a microstate fine-grained parameter) is a measure of the availability of states.” Over time the tendency for more available energy states, a higher entropy, would ratchet up if it can, purely for probabilistic reasons.
As this physics tells us, whether those states are more ordered or disordered depends on the details of the system.]
TL; DR: Entropy =/= disorder.
Entropy may have helped the first cells to form, entropy forces is a (small, IIRC) part of what makes micelles and later membrane protocells assemble. It may even today be part of what constitutes the cell construction.
And creationists wonder why we laugh at them and their ‘science’ especially!?
Exactly right. Entropy is most emphatically not a synonym for chaos. Similarly, randomness is full of patterns. Indeed, only a non-random source could even hypothetically create something free of patterns — and, even then, I’m not sure it’d be possible.
And let’s not forget that the Earth is as far from a closed entropic system as you can get. There’s this giant energy source up there in the sky….
Cheers,
b&
My high school math students are always surprised when I introduce them to “clustering”. Toss a coin 6 times in a row, the chances are actually close to 50% that you got three consecutive tosses the same.
When customers complained that the Ipod on random play often played songs by the same artist twice in a row, Steve Jobs put in a bias against this saying “We’re making the selection less random in order to make it seem more random.”
For bonus points, toss enough coins and do some statistical analyses on the results, and watch some very lovely and well-ordered Bell curves magically emerge.
And, the best part? The more random and unpredictable the individual toss, the more you do of them, the more predictable the result (in the aggregate).
But, in contrast, start with something perfectly predictable and deterministic at the individual level, and you get the exact opposite in the aggregate: literal chaos.
The Universe is not without a sense of irony, it would seem….
Cheers,
b&
I wrote a stock-ordering program for a friend and included a subroutine that would display a random silly tagline if an invalid selection was made. I found the ‘repetition’ problem too, so now it actually flags each tagline when used and selects the next tagline randomly from the remaining unused ones. When all are used up it unflags the lot and starts again.
I like thw Steve Jobs paradoxical quote though.
Torbjörn, sorry if this is even more OT but your comment has my abacus really clicking away. It reminds me of a land art installation I did last year which provided me with an interesting experience:
I set up about 200 head-high blackened poles in the Fibonacci pattern formed by, eg, the seeds on a sunflower. The installation was about 50m across and quite a challenge to apply the maths to the setting up. Its a lovely pattern to look at on a flower and the poles looked lovely from above. Also, if one moved into the installation from the outside, the lovely arcs of the spiral curves became apparent. But what was really interesting, and a complete surprise to me, was when one stood in the centre and looked around at the poles, they were uncannily random. No two poles lined up radially.
What your comment helps see me is that this is by no means a matter of chance. If pure, random chance were at play, there’d surely be some poles which happened to line up radially, but there weren’t.
We know from the plants that the Fibonacci spiral arrangement is the most ergonomic, structurally efficient way for the plant to arrange itself and any radial lines in the arrangement would be a weakness in the structure. So, the apparent chaos is in fact the very strong order of the head seen from that unique angle – the plant’s angle.
I ended up calling my piece Inside Fobonacci because of this experience. It feels significant but as hard as I think about it, I just can’t see why. I feel like there’s an epiphany just beyond my grasp.
Could it be that there is no such thing as chaos, only order seen from a different angle?
I dislike lectures on YouTube, so I haven’t watched. I have a question though. How does Greg Greenslugg assume that the South-American sloth, who walks on the ground with 150 meter per hour and as far as I know can’t survive outside the tropical forest, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and survived the North-African deserts on his trip?
Cute animal, the sloth. Cuter than say kittens, as most Surinamese will agree with me.
Ah, but sloths can swim! Let’s assume that they can swim at the same speed that they can cover the ground. This would mean that they could get from Suriname to Mt Ararat in no more than little over 9 years. Easy!
“I dislike lectures on YouTube, so I haven’t watched.”
If your definition of “lecture” includes such as the young gentleman’s I this instance, I understand. I’m not inclined to watch him; I get the gist from Dr. C and other commenters who’ve run that video gauntlet.
Or, does your dislike have to do with some aspect of YouTube itself? If you like to visit this site, then I reasonably assume that you would like to catch Professor Coyne’s lectures on YouTube and elsewhere online.
There’s nothing like a live lecture by an interesting and engaging presenter; that’s certainly my preference. I was fortunate to get to hear Hitchens; had to be content with overflow seating for Dawkins. But I’ll certainly take YouTube or other sources so as to be able to hear, e.g., Bertrand Russell and others deliver their Reith lectures. It’s like a kid in a candy shop, an embarrassment of riches. There was a time when it was either live or one had to call/write the source and buy a recording, eh? 😉
Cheers!
No. I prefer reading to listening, especially in a foreign language like English.
Ok here’s a dumb question. If the entire earth “flooded” where did the extra water come from? And where did it go when the flood “receded”.
I recall that cretinism claims that it rained a lot, (40 days), but rain is all terrestrial is it not?
It’s all just applied magic.
Or stuff Iron Age shepards stole from the Babylonian’s mythology.
In fact, I have sometimes the argument that since flood myths are so common in different cultures, this must be evidence for a real global flood. Of course, the argument does not go further to explain why the flood myths differ so much in the specifics then (one of the Indian ones, for example, has only one man, two women, and few animals surviving).
Or multiple humongous local floods.
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Not multiple local floods, just one global flood resulting from several metres of increase in sea-levels originating from melt-water at the end of the last ice age, which would have inundated coastal settlements. In the cases of the Bosporus and the Hellespont, flood waters would have built up and then very quickly burst through. Global floods = global local myths.
Rising sea levels don’t result in the kind of inundation that would result in a flood myth. Instead, they result in coastal erosion, and every year the storm surges push that much farther inland. It’s the sort of thing where grandpa would reminisce about how, as a young lad, he built his hut several hundred paces from where the highest tides used to come, and now look at how the tides are just a stone’s throw away — and the children smile and nod and wonder at the crazy old fool.
It doesn’t take any sort of global catastrophe to create a global tradition of flood myths, any more than it takes a global uprise in volcanic activity to create a global tradition of angry mountain gods. Heavy rains followed by local flooding, including flash floods in dry beds and rivers overflowing their banks and all that sort of thing, happen all the time no matter what. And, frankly, it’s quite insulting to suggest that ancient storytellers weren’t smart enough to extrapolate from those sorts things into the myths we know today. It’s like suggesting that Roddenberry couldn’t have come up with Star Trek unless he got the idea from actual Vulcans.
Oh — and rising sea levels are a significant threat to humanity today, because we have massive metropolitan areas situated along coastal areas, oftentimes already below today’s sea levels, and storm surges and coastal erosion is already a huge problem even without rising sea levels. Look at what hurricane-driven storm surges already do — and now move those surges that much farther inland with however much of a rise is forecast. Much of Florida, for example, will be significantly destroyed and depopulated over the coming century, not by any single disaster movie cataclysm, but by a series of regular seasonal storms, each of which claims a bit more for the sea. Beachfront houses will be gone before long, their foundations underwater…leaving the next street inland as the new beachfront houses. Then those will go in another storm, and so on and so on.
Cheers,
b&
As I said, in the cases of the Bosporus and the Hellespont, flood waters would have built up and then very quickly burst through.
The same is also true of the Straits of Gibraltar.
If these has burst at the same time, or nearly the same time, this would have resulted in a relatively rapid flooding of the Mediterranean basin, inundating any coastal settlements.
The Mediterranean was likely formed in a matter of months by a breach of the Strait of Gibraltar and subsequent inflow from the Atlantic, yes…but that was over five million years ago. I can assure you that no mythical record survives from that event.
Other natural dams build up and break, too. The Colorado has been dammed multiple times in history by eruptions that left lava dams that put even the Three Gorges to shame, and none of those dams remain today. Some of those dams would have burst quite spectacularly.
But not in human history, or even close to it.
But so what? We already know that significant local flood events are commonplace and more than ample to explain the myths.
Your thesis is as silly as insisting that the last eruption of the Yellowstone super-caldera is required to explain the prevalence of angry volcano god myths, or that the Chicxulub impact is the original source of the myth of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
b&
I can’t reply to you directly, Ben, but would draw your attention to this:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/noahs-flood/
Sadly, the Horizon documentary does not seem to be available, but if, as you suggest, my thesis is silly, then Professor John Dewey of Oxford University is also silly.
I was just putting the idea forward as one plausible explanation for the global prevalence of flood myths.
Perhaps there are so many flood myths because humanity has witnessed floods for it’s entire history on Planet Earth and human experience gets incorporated into human myth. Maybe?
Hell, I’m still telling about the floods here in Wisconsin a couple of years ago. It was so bad we had to build this big boat…
I have a video where Finnish creationist professor Puolimatka “debunks” your biogeography argument in his public lecture. I will try to translate it and upload it to YouTube.
What the Noah’s Ark story really is about, is the story of when god invented genocide.
That is one lesson we’ve managed not to forget.
The timeline is cuckoo as well.
4500 BP The Egyptian third dynasty is building pyramids.
4400 BP God floods the world, killing all but 8 people.
4300 BP The Egyptian third dynasty is still building pyramids, apparently not realizing there had been a worldwide flood, and that, in fact, they were dead.
Looking at it (not to be confused with watching it) at the YT site, there are currently 144 views. 36 dislikes and ZERO likes. And no favorable comments either. At least Sluggo can’t be accused of sockpuppetry. There, I said something nice about him.
I really don’t think that it’s worth expending the effort to argue against Creationist’s Nutty Notions™. They really are just so unbelievably thick. Unlike scientists, who are completely open to new ideas and actually welcome their theories being tested and disproved in the face of evidence that advances humanities understanding, creationists have a book – and we all know which one – and have swallowed its entire contents, without batting an eye, as the only truth anywhere.
As I believe George Carlin said, ‘Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure’.
Actually, scientists really prefer it when their theories are tested and NOT disproved.
“This is additional evidence that virtually all opposition to evolution is based on religion”
That is right. An anecdotal “young lad who goes by the alias of GreenSlugg” is “evidence” of that generalization.
I believe you missed the following sentences about his operation of a Christian website, and his support of religious “alternatives” to evolution?
The most suitable response to Greg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_BzWUuZN5w&feature=share
(I haven’t read all other comments to see if this has been addressed, though I’m sure it has.)
After a bit of babbling, he brings up Darwin’s finches (though doesn’t explicitly identify them as such) and proposes that the reason they exist in the Galapagos (and only the Galapagos, mind you) is because individuals from the mainland migrate to these islands. In a way, he’s dead on, but he’s just missing the most important part of the story (do I need to say it?).
Indeed, on the mainland of Ecuador, there exists the (apparent) closet living relative to Darwin’s 14 species of finches, the Dull-coloured Grassquit. However, this species and its close mainland relatives are most definitely NOT the same species as Darwin’s finches, which this lad seems to assume. The fact that the closest relatives of the Darwin’s finch clade exist on the nearby mainland is exactly what it is predicted under a peripatric model of speciation in which a few individuals of either the Dull-coloured Grassquit or a closely related ancestral species dispersed to the Galapagos and subsequently underwent an adaptive radiation, evolving to exploit the different, uncolonized niches present in the archipelago. Under creationism, we do not expect such a spatial distribution of closely related species, which, by the way, is not at all restricted to Darwin’s finches. There is also no reason to expect (under creationism) that Darwin’s finches would comprise a monophyletic group, meaning, among other things, that they are each other’s closest relatives. However, this is exactly what is expected under a model of adaptive radiation following colonization. For similar examples, see the impressive radiation of Anolis lizards in the Caribbean and the Hawaiian Drosophila, just to name a few.
The young man also asserts that God didn’t put mammals on oceanic islands because he wouldn’t have been so cruel as to do something that would destroy the ecosystems present on these islands. Ignoring the glaring inconsistencies in this argument afforded by the colonization of these islands by humans (the most destructive of all mammals) and the mammals we introduce (presumably an omniscient, omnibenevolent creator must have realized that by not placing rats and weasels on these islands during Genesis, he was only delaying the inevitable), I’d like to have the following question answered: why no woodpeckers?
Woodpeckers are poor long-distant fliers, making migration to oceanic islands exceedingly imporbable, but why would God consistently opt to not place them on oceanic islands in the first place? If this dude were to ever see this question, I expect that he’d regurgitate some bullshit (sorry for the language, Jerry) response claiming that woodpeckers, like mammals, would also inflict ecological mayhem on these islands. Fair enough, but why would God then consistently go out of his way to create species of birds that, ecologically, are the functional equivalent of woodpeckers? We see this pattern across distantly related taxa in distant parts of the globe, from the Common Amakihi of Hawaii to the Woodpecker Finch of the Galapagos. This dramatic parallel in ecomorphology across distant taxa is extremely strong evidence for natural selection favoring the colonization of niches that are made available by the absence of woodpeckers on these islands.
Oh, and how can this guy have obtained a microbiology degree (assuming he successfully completed it, which is perhaps too unparsimonious an assumption) without hearing of Rich Lenski?
You have really made me think. Why did humanity allow whoever decided to call us “human beings” let them get away with it? I’m not necessarily suggesting we should have been called Dull-coloured Grassquits but, hey, it’s got more going for it than “human beings”.
“Human beings” has more going for it than “human resources” and “human capital.”
Are those two latter terms bandied about much in the Emerald Isle? They’re almost a religious creed among private corporate tyrannies here in Amuricuh.
“Human Capital” is a new one one me. I always thought “Human Resources” was bollocks; along with having to hear crap like “our people are the most important asset of our organisation”, usually shortly before “rationalisation” when “our people” suddenly become “our ex-people on social security”.
To be honest, I stopped calling HR “Human Resources” years ago. It seems somehow more fitting to call it “Human Remains”.
If you are from the United States, I imagine you won’t want to hear what the real thinkers are saying over here; like the shadow of real communism that was practised in the Eastern Bloc, capitalism is a failed experiment that makes the already super-wealthy even wealthier at the expense of everyone else, especially the poorest in the developing world. No great shock, then, that the militant disadvantaged (religious or otherwise) want to destroy the west.
What oceanic island ecosystems???
He has contradicted his own mythology.
During the Great Flood, everything was destroyed including….oceanic island ecosystems. There was nothing to destroy because it had all been…destroyed by the benovolent genocidal Sky Monster.
I think creationists exist solely to wreck the head of anyone with even a Higgs boson sized particle of logic in their brain.
My advice is try to give them up. I know it’s hard, I was a 20-a-day man and then I realised they were affecting my mental health. I’m down to only sticking it to 5-a-day now and I hope to be off them altogether soon. At the end of the day, they’re just not worth it.
It’s OK if you’re outside, just not, you know, on the internet, it’s just too easy to get hooked.
Well said Cody Porter. This is where his evidence for migration not evolution argument falls down. Your post should be at the top of the list.
I feel like this is relevant and needs to be shared:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=j_BzWUuZN5w
Brilliant.
Well, this fella is my front-runner for Creationist of the Year. He meets all my requirements: 1) He remains straight-faced even while uttering the most laughable statements (like when he says something like A little common sense, c’mon people—Noah didn’t have to bring the whales on the ark…); 2) He seems to really believe this stuff despite also seeming to be somewhat well-educated and over the age of 7; and 3) He understands just enough science to be able to misrepresent science in the most devious of ways. So he has my vote.
Plus, it doesn’t hurt that he’s dedicated a whole page on his website to Jerry. (I mean, tell me that’s not just the most adorable thing you’ve ever seen…) I guess he’s leaving it up to the good sense of his readers, who must be thinking, “Hmm, let’s see, should I go with the respected biologist whose assertions are empirically verifiable and reflect a widespread, non-controversial scientific consensus, OR, should I throw in with some kid who has a webcam?
Are you confusing ‘straight faced’ with ‘vacant’?
Yes, he does have that vacant glare of person who’s just staggered out of a two-week stint in Ludovico therapy.
“It clearly tells us that Noah didn’t need fish or whales on the ark because all marine and freshwater creatures could surely have survived the mixture of salt and fresh water, combined with a thick slurry of silt and boiling temperatures, that constituted the seas during Noah’s voyage!”
Boiling? How?
Okay, I just followed BigBob’s link:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html
which explains why the water, whether it came from high in the atmosphere or underground, would be boiling. (It also lists most of the other impossibilities).
On reflection, I think the apologists who try to account for the flood by pysical means are missing the point. They might as well invoke Velikovsky.
The real answer is Goddidit. God can do anything. Problem solved.
And if you don’t accept Goddididit, then it’s a fairy story and there’s nothing to explain.
I could only listen for 3:55 minutes. Happy to be living in “Jerry’s World”
Just my opinion of course, but I think that for many creationists, it is not death that frightens them, but life. They adhere to the simplistic patriarchal sky daddy concept taking care of his own through thick and thin–that is, the ‘good’ people who blindly follow what he dictates including not sinning–even if such ‘care’ necessitates genocide, because they find life choices and decisions challenging.
The moral majority way back when embraced black and white approaches because modernity is heating up here, and in more ways than one, as in global warming. These people are lost as it seems perhaps adequate prefrontal development has not happened with these folks. Plasticity of the brain allows such development until the age of 20ish, and if your educational environment sucks like it does for many young people in the Bible belt, then you got to wonder how many of them will remain children to their death bed, unable to decide on their feet, evaluating evidence like many of us do.
Well, I’m completely uneducated but wound up with a question. First I’m thinking how would monkeys migrate from Mr Ararat to South America because they travel on trees and there has been no land bridge that was a jungle. How did sloth’s make it to South America for the same reason–they need trees. Then I thought well, how do you account for similar seeds? Oh, yes, the birds could have brought them. What about coconut sized seeds? Something that a large animal would deposit. He’d have to walk a long time w/o going to the bathroom to get them to S.A. But then, my question. How did large-seeded plants/trees get to the islands?
“What about coconut sized seeds? ”
Large African swallows?
Don’t be ridiculous.
African swallows are non-migratory.
Oh, but you’re thinking only of seasonal migrations, not biogeographic migrations!
And it might’ve been finches rather than swallows in any case…
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Well it would certainly take something special to swallow this Noah’s Ark crap.
Sorry. I’m English. That was a sort of pun. People were talking about swallows and I, hopefully comedically, used the word swallow in its other meaning.
“I’m English.” But are you a Monty Python fan?
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Oh yes! I was 16 when it started on BBC and watched them all.
Umm, I think coconuts float. As do mangrove seeds, IIRC. It’s one method of distribution.
But your point is still valid I think, many varieties of plants could not have spread across ocean barriers. (Though I’m not a botanist, I’m sure someone else here could answer that much more definitely).
It don’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.