Well, this is from The Onion, and of course it’s a spoof (a great one, by the way), but it’s clearly written by someone familiar not only with evolution, but with the fatuous “non-continuity” arguments for intelligent design (ID). One of them, for instance, is Michael Behe’s self-contradictory claim that he has no problem with the common ancestry of all creatures, but he doesn’t accept macroevolution. Another classic non-ID creationist argument is that microevolution clearly occurs, but macroevolution (whatever that means) must be due to God.
The author of The Onion piece, one “Stephen Jossler,” makes a related argument, accepting all of evolution except for that occurring during the Triassic period (ca. 250-200 million years ago), which was clearly God’s handiwork. Read, share, and tw**t this really great parody, “I believe in evolution, except for the whole Triassic period.”
A few short excerpts:
This so-called Triassic period saw the formation of scleractinian corals and a slight changeover from warm-blooded therapsids to cold-blooded archosauromorphs. Clearly, such breathtakingly subtle modifications could only have been achieved by an active intelligence.
. . . Think about it: I’m supposed to believe that the same process that we know slowly changed us from simple bacteria into highly advanced reptiles over the course of the Paleozoic era is also responsible for turning us into highly advanced reptiles with different body lengths? Do these people ever pause to think how ridiculous they sound as they advance these theories?
And this could have come right out of the Discovery Institute’s playbook:
For a half-dozen million years, life advanced from prokaryotes to primitive fish to mammal-like reptiles via natural selection, and we’re supposed to believe that that just continued happening? I don’t think so. Isn’t it much more likely that a formless, invisible deity intervened, temporarily stopped the course of evolution, and shaped each and every trilobite over a period of six days? Of course it is, at least to any objective observer.
So, if you follow my reasoning to its logical end, the only sound conclusion is that, at some point, God paused evolution and stepped in, made a few modifications, and boom! Pterosaurs. There is simply no way evolution alone could be responsible for the giant leap between archosaurs and other, different archosaurs with better developed hip joints and slightly differently shaped teeth.
Finally, this bit really tickles my ribs:
. . . Now that I’ve inarguably proven the truth, we need to take a stand against these pseudoscientists who are misrepresenting 300-million-year-old fossils as 230-million-year-old fossils and claiming the Earth is 44 million years and 51 weeks older than it really is.
Maybe this is geek humor—an inside joke—but it’s a really good inside joke!
h/t: About half a dozen readers.
It IS amusing an apropos…also, its from 2007.
Yeah, I instantly recognized it as something that cracked me up years ago. I wonder what brought it to light today such that half a dozen people sent it to PCC?
The Onion often reposts articles, regardless of their original posting date. I can tell because, as their follower on Facebook, I regularly (almost dialy) see posts of theirs that I know I have ‘liked’ but appear not ‘liked’; they have been reposted.
You got me. Someone must have posted it on some aggregator site. At any rate, I’d never seen it.
Well, I was certainly pleased to read it again. Here’s another good Onion evolution piece: Kansas Outlaws Practice Of Evolution
You beat me to it, dude!
My first thought was that this piece seemed like a response to Stephen Meyer’s _Darwin’s Doubt_, which says that evolution can’t explain the Cambrian explosion. But I guess it’s not terribly likely that a 2007 piece is a response to a 2013 book 🙂
Well, Henry Morris made a ‘Cambrian explosion’ argument back in 1985, so it was floating around for quite a while before Meyer took a crack at it. The Onion author could very well have been inspired by someone making the Cambrian explosion claim, though at this point who knows.
It’s a fossil rabbit in the pre-Cambrian.
It’s a fossil rabbit in the pre-cambrian.
The Onion is always good for a good laugh. Nerdy paleo humor and dissing creationists? This is comedy gold.
Speaking of paleo-humor, there is this well regarded poster.
Mark’s poster simply highlights the need for more weapons in the hands of more stupid organisms.
Some things have not changed! 😉
Sub
I liked the false ambiguity of a “half dozen million years”.
That line is deliciously sarcastic.
The Onion is great, and this piece is a good example for that.
Oooooh 🙂
Finally, a double post detector. A miracle!
There’s also a John Finnemore sketch on this:
“Everything evolved by natural selection apart from hummingbirds and my grand-daughter. You only have to look at her lovely little face to see that she can’t have come from apes, clearly god made her.”
“Only your grand-daughter, what about your daughter?”
“No, the ape things works fine there.”
“secular Triassicists” LOL
I wonder if one could make a good practical skepticism book by reprinting The Onion articles with commentary and such.
The Onion parody is picking up on a congenital defect of antievolutionists generally, what I dub the “Map of Time” Problem (failing to think through what they think happened). Unlike YECers (who attempt to squash billions of years of history into a ludicrously compressed Flood Geology framework), Intelligent Designers of the Steve Meyers stripe fail to actually relate anything in the past to a chronological “this happened then this happened” framework that otherwise can acknowledge the geologic sequence as a meaningless concession. It’s no coincidence that listings of time sequence or even a full catalog of phyla never show up in “Darwin’s Doubt”. Meyer has no Map of Time in his head and so what few data points he does bring up end up sliding off the blank chart table at each lurch of the ID leaky vessel. Forcing antievolutionists to openly relate data to a Map of Time they do not (and in principle cannot) possess is one way to expose their fundamental methodological defects.