I’m pretty much done with Kas Thomas and his dissing of modern evolutionary theory. All that’s left is to document the final stage in his loss of credibility: his siding with sympathetic creationists and his accusations that his critics are “bullies.”
As Hitchens pointed out, playing the “tone” card is the last refuge of those who have no good arguments. Thomas has yet to address the substantive scientific arguments of his critics. He is recalcitrant, unwilling to admit error and distortion, and therefore no longer worth spending time on. In many respects his behavior resembles that of Deepak Chopra.
Ergo, the final stage of Thomas’s meltdown, from the Big Think comments section. Andre, in whose words Thomas finds solace, is an ignorant creationist, whose argument against me includes the accusation that I like cats!
Curiously, after nearly all of the 500-odd comments at the Big Think site take Thomas to task for his ignorance and distortion of evolutionary biology, he’s tw**ted as if he were victorious:
h/t: JJE
It’s clear Kas Thomas measures his success, not on reputation but on popularity, which is pretty ironic since he sneers so much at the regular populus.
The contradiction between disdaining consensus science and yet pimping the number of facebook likes seems to have eluded him.
I feel the end is neigh for civilization
Not with a bang but a whicker?
*Quickly Googles ‘whicker’*
Oh! Hey that’s good!
Why, thank you.
That’s enough horsing around.
(Ok, I admit it, that was obvious and not particularly clever. So sue me.)
Good one! 😀
Sub
//
Whaaat?
Leaving a single (provocative) comment and then moving on is not considered polite. It’s considered rude. The person who does it is usually called a “Seagull.” Fly in, leave a (mess), then fly off. Answer no questions, explain no more, deal with no one. Leave people to type out elaborate rebuttals and answers to a hostile remark while you …. go elsewhere. Like Jonathon Livingston, flying off into the sunset …
People arguing and debating in comments is what comments are for.
Yes, but the translation into normal-person-speak reads:
All you bullies keep pointing out the many flaws in my arguments! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
I have to admit that sometimes I have been a seagull, having sometimes left a small splatter in a comment section here and there. I hereby apologize to the internet for any messes that I have made. My reasons, though, were not to be intentionally rude. I am just really really busy. And a little absent minded.
Oh, look! A penny!
People who leave a “small spatter” (mild disagreement) in a comment section usually aren’t considered Seagulls. Seagulls generally leave either a long, focused post they’ve clearly spent time on OR a long, rambling rant dashed off with spittle. Either way, they’ve made a big splash in a forum where they intensely disagree, drawing immediate notice and dispute.
It’s actually a form of trolling, I think. If the person sticks around to argue and support a sincerely held view, ok, probably not a troll. But causing a ruckus and deliberately ignoring any replies: troll. Seagull troll.
Kas Thomas seems to have it backwards.
It would be ironic if I never responded.
Ok, glad to hear I am not a seagull.
The bigger the mess the bigger the bird. A ‘long focussed post’ (mess) I would characterize as a ‘Pelican’. 🙂
I like that. That also allows an image of a bunch of stuff spilling out of either end.
Isn’t the paradigm ‘Great Blue Heron’?
It would appear that Kas Thomas is going full martyr realizing his flashing of credentials didn’t do the trick.
A few ID’ers and Creationists got a scent of the rotten stench and are now chewing away at the bones.
I’m sure the big think folks and Thomas are relishing the traffic though, regardless of their supposed acceptance of evolution and rejection of Creationism.
Bullies, the whole lot of you!
Oh well, can’t win ’em all…
In relation to Kaz it seems two rather axiomatic states come into play here; in reference to his unused degrees – “use it or lose it”, and although he does not have a PhD, the following equally applies – ‘A turkey with a PhD is still a turkey.’
Hey, my linking to TalkOrigins got a shout out. Um…yay? Though I resent the implication that I’m a bully. My entire TalkOrigins reference post consisted of a one sentence remark that basically said (paraphrasing): “Mr. Thomas, here is a link to site that lists 20-30 instances of observed speciation.”
If that’s what he considers bullying, then I’m at a loss for words.
It actually bothered me the way he hijacked the word “bullying” like that. At best, he’s talked about whiners (people who complain because they don’t get their way), and in your case and many others it’s not even that. It’s just people who disagree with him.
Bullies are real things. They set up games where there is no winning play and berate the players for failing. They threaten explicitly or implicitly and physically or emotionally. They do real damage, whether they are kids on the playground or religious leaders behind pulpits.
It bugs me to see the word trivialized like that.
“includes the accusation that I like cats!”
Preposterous – I thought you loved them!
Argumentum ad Ailurophilium.
Abiostupidness has its origins in belligerent ignorance. The insurrectional paradigm maverick has lost his way.
still disappointed with the Big Think site for publishing his dumb article in the first place. Have they published any scientific rejoinder at all?
What is seen as bullying here is actually an uncompromising adherence to speaking truth as best as we know it. When we stick to the truth and when we require it of others we are simply taking the higher ground. It is moral to require accuracy and evidence for fact claims.
What I (and others) see from K.T. is an attraction for taking the lower ground. He only wanted to be a provocateur. A contrarian. Now he is butt-hurt b/c he did not get away with it.
” It is moral to require accuracy and evidence for fact claims.”
Not according to Ken Ham and other godswallowers.
I think in this case the bullying charge has more to do with volume than ‘speaking truth’ content. Some bloggers (Mr. Thomas being the example here) seem to believe that if they receive more than N comments disagreeing with them, they have been bullied. Where N is “a number I don’t like or can’t internally shrug off.”
Butt-hurt for getting his ass kicked is more like it.
I so wish Ken Ham had come on & told him how much he liked his post. 🙂
What are these creationists going to do when the evidence continues to mount so high that it forces the scientific community to form a consensus. Probably retreat into the big bang.
I thought that happened already.
The creationists will continue to argue, no matter how much evidence is found.
Dave Lerner
gophergold.wordpress.com
They will do what they have always done: ignore it and continue to repeat the same old debunked claims.
“Probably retreat into the big bang.”
Where they’ll bump into liberal christians squeezing into the last gap their science reveals
“A bully has to get the last word.
…
Now please, move on.”
Hmm…
/@
Dear Jerry,
I used to be in the ‘i’m an atheist but… lets be kind, loving liberals’ camp, until i witnessed first hand the deadly harmful effects of pseudoscience (serious, nothing new – but less serious and obvious than the snake handling death). People like you and other Gnu atheists are now my heroes, taking idiots to task. Like R.D. said, at some point around 9-11, he realised religion is not harmless nonsense, its deadly, harmful nonsense.
Andre needs to be careful about his abiogenesis claims, as I’d lay even odds that in 10 years we’ll have a lab produce a primitive organism out of self-organizing non-living material.
That would be so very cool!
I agree, there has been a lot of recent work into the chemical origins of RNA.
The work being done by John Sutherland’s team at Manchester Uni is particularly interesting. They are able to synthesise ribonucleoutides from simple precursor chemicals just subjected to hydration/dehydration cycles whilst exposed to UV Radiation (sounds like early Earth conditions)
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090513/full/news.2009.471.html
Even if the RNA World hypothesis is incorrect, this work shows that there is no real chemical barrier to the spontaneous formation of the fundamental building blocks of life.
Yet another ‘gap’ in our knowledge that is closed by science.
But if it’s done in a lab, that just proves it was intelligently designed.
</sarcasm>
Clearly someone (*cough*Kas*cough*) need to learn what it means to be open-minded.
Here’s a clue: open-minded does not mean “willing to accept anything as fact”.
Great video: Open-mindedness by QualiaSoup http://youtu.be/T69TOuqaqXI
How does someone who is ostensibly well educated, become such an empty windbag?
His argument has been ripped to shreds many times over by now, yet he still won’t engage his critics at all.
He just keeps going on about “dogma” and “bullies”, and uses that as an excuse to completely sidestep everything else that has been said about his pitiful piece.
If I were the Dean of a school that gave this guy a diploma – particularly in science – I’d be mighty embarrassed this week.
Kas Thomas reminds me of Scott Adams. They both assumed their qualification in one field (drawing a comic strip/not getting a PhD, respectively) would make their idiotic comments about evolution acceptable to those who do it for, you know, a living. Of course Adams resorted to sock-puppeting his status as a “certified genius”. Let’s see if “Andre” starts to extol the unimpeachable authority of Kas’s Masters degree.
While Bruce Tinsley demonstrates that a cartoonist can be an ignorant blowhard, I think Adams’ background as an MBA in the tech industry has more to do with his overestimate of his own intellectual abilities.
True, his ability to have brilliant business insights is another of his bragging rights. But I wonder how many companies would have been interested in his opinions if it weren’t for the success of Dilbert.
Well, I guess I need to become more familiar with Adams and his apparent foibles.
His zingers at corporate MBA/JD – “Organization Man” (Wm. H. Whyte) types nevertheless seem to ring true. MBA/JD types (like Mitt Romney), and economists are apparently experts at anything they claim to be experts at.
I’ve enjoyed many Dilbert cartoons too.
What I was trying to get at with Adams is that he’s been immersed in two cultures (MBA culture and techie culture) that are plagued with people who feel confident in stepping well outside their areas of expertise and making opinionated pronouncements that are nonsense to the better informed.
The cartoon made him famous, but his background may be what makes him so prone to foolishness on other matters.
“two cultures (MBA culture and techie culture) that are plagued with people who feel confident in stepping well outside their areas of expertise ”
This is a characteristic of many people in all fields of endeavor. Nothing at all special about techie or MBA culture in this respect.
I respectfully disagree based on admittedly subjective personal experience.
There are plenty of wonderful people in both fields, but one of the pitfalls of being handsomely rewarded for brain work is a certain susceptibility to overconfidence or even arrogance about one’s analytical prowess.
Yes, let’s be done with Thomas, he is a boring whiny by now.
It is more interesting to see how creationist trolls have adopted the paraphernalia of skeptics: “strawmen”, “no True Scotsman” and “goddiddit”. They don’t demonstrate which they apply to of course, what fun would a claim with evidence be for a troll, except for the last part where they point to a creationist strawman.
I have the feeling that Andre has mistakenly accepted the creationist propaganda that evolution attempts to predict ‘everything’ instead of biology. And the point is that evolution as opposed to goddiddits is testable, it predicts phylogenies instead of every possible outcome such as creationism.
[Creationism, ironically, can ‘predict’ phylogenies as a true open “goddiddit” and is so used by evolutionary creationists. But not the YEC sort like Andre that have reasons to claim what is not seen.]
LOL! Despite that it has nothing to do with well testing of evolution, so much creationist goalpost moving has already been observed?
Besides, it doesn’t pass the smell test. ‘If it can be demonstrated in the laboratory that star formation and ignition is a completely natural process, I would instantaneously lose my skepticism [of stars and their properties]’.
We already know it is a product of natural processes: we know the universe started out without life, but now nature contains at least one biosphere. Q(O.o)d Erat Demonstrandum.
Anyway, there have been abiogenesis experiments in laboratories in decades now, and while it may have helped creationists deconvert it isn’t a panacea. Even now that pathways such as pure and dirty RNA worlds are specifically tested (nucleotide formation; hydrothermal vent chemical garden formation; protocell formation), the deconversion rate isn’t exploding.
And it seems mundane phylogenies may shortcircuit the lab tests anyway, placing abiogenesis squarely within earlier science areas. [E.g. Lane, Russell et al.]
LOL again! Talk origins was devised to save effort rather than be a how-to place, since creationists always repeat their mistaken ‘arguments’ against evolution (and seldom for creationism).
As Andre does with his abiogenesis fantasy. “Claim CB090:
Evolution is baseless without a good theory of abiogenesis, which it does not have.”
[ http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB090.html ; I note that the pity responses are along what I already wrote.]
‘If it can be demonstrated in the laboratory that star formation and ignition is a completely natural process, I would instantaneously lose my skepticism [of stars and their properties]‘.
Bravo!
The Large Hardon Collider sadly didn’t produce a black hole supernovae as suggested by some worried citizens of the world.
I never understood why those concerns were taken seriously, they are so easily debunked:
“The Universe as a whole conducts more than 10 million million LHC-like experiments per second. The possibility of any dangerous consequences contradicts what astronomers see – stars and galaxies still exist.” from
http://press.web.cern.ch/backgrounders/safety-lhc
Now, some black hole creation would be very interesting, but theory predicts such tiny black holes would decay quickly, and if not, surely the universe would be full of black holes as the above argument says.
I also got a chuckle at Andre using Ham’s historical vs. observational science bit. Since the Nye/Ham debate got quite a lot of attention I suspect we will see this creationist meme poping up more frequently.
Surely all forensic science is “historical”. Perhaps prosecutors should routinely exclude creationists from juries; they may have a propensity to let murderers walk due to “lack of observational evidence”.
In the off chance Andre is reading this…
Evolution explains abiogenesis like geology explains planet formation.
So let’s put the horse and the cart in the proper order.
1200 Facebook likes, consensus!
I’ve long wondered why Facebook doesn’t install a “dislike” button…
Pretty obvious, I think. It would start wars.
As Hitchens pointed out, playing the “tone” card is the last refuge of those who have no good arguments.
Well said. Trouble is that most people don’t realize that that’s what they’re doing.
Yep, and they always seem to play it immediately after insulting people and judging their “motivations”.
So, first some terrible misconceptions about evolution, then some whining about “haters”, then some credential-touting, then an argument from popularity with a BONUS omitting of inconvenient data (i.e. the hundreds of comments taking him to task at BT), capped off with a flat refusal to answer any of the objections to his post – if he’s not a creationist, there’s some spooky convergent evolution going on here.
1200 likes and 150 comments later ?
Who among us doesn’t slow down to see, and later tell others about, that car wreck on the expressway ?
It reminds me of the days of VenomFangX who bragged in an interview that he, at the time, had some 20,000+ subscribers on YouTube. It never dawns on guys like this* that a good number of those people are really just waiting and watching to see the next train wreck.
* or alternatively, the lack of intellectual honesty allows then to ignore reality and turn it into dishonest but useful rhetoric.
People watch ignorant know-it-alls for the same reason they watch NASCAR on TV: high probability of flaming wreckage, improbability of spectator injury.
Science created hedgehogs that can type.
Science 1 God 0
Well, Joe G has jumped into the comments. There goes the neighborhood.
Yikes. Kas Thomas was miffed about comparisons to creationists before, but now he’s got actual, confirmed, one-note creationist dumbasses on his side. The curtain’s slipped a bit!
I find it very interesting that several comments I have made get immediately published, but when I try this one, it goes to moderation, and never appears:
“A great example [of a mechanism for the increase in genetic information] is the spontaneous creation of a novel mitochondrial gene in maize,TURF-13, which arose via recombination of several non-coding sequences of DNA.
Molecular biologist Art Hunt did a great job describing it over on the Panda’s Thumb. A novel gene coding for a previously unknown protein, asembled from non-codimng DNA sequences qualifies as an increase in genetic information.
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/05/on-the-evolutio-1.html”
I have included links before and not had a problem.
The moderation is occurring on Big Think’s site
Bunch of haters, them pandas.