> Karma: Good (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)
Since Taco insists on progressively obfuscating karma, I suggest that he go one step further and simply show you an icon of what animal you will be reincarnated as if you continue with your current karmic habits.
And of course, he should support a user preference that allows you to display your destiny with a roguelike symbol, in case you want to turn off image downloads, or brag about your karma in your.sig
> I don't agree with you. I think it was important that he stick as much as possible to the story, but not all of the story would translate well into a movie.
I've pretty much decided that I don't like to see movies based on good books, nor to read books based on good movies. They are different mediums, different genres even, and they don't generally translate very well.
Anecdote... I went to see Harry Potter with my brother and his kids, and afterward he asked if I liked it. I said it was a good idea, and very well done in terms of sets, props, cinematography, etc., but overall it was really boring because they stretched it out with tedius, trivial, irrelevant details. It turns out that they originally edited it to work as a movie, but in test screenings the kiddies revolted with an anal retentive "That's not like the book!", so they turned it into a cinematographic instantiation of the book, with predictable results.
So the choice seems to be: be faithful to the book and bore your audiences, or be faithful to the medium and offend the fans of the book. I liked LotR->book, but I'm not precisely a fan of it, so I only found the changes mildly annoying. But for a book that I was really crazy about, I don't think I'd want to see the movie. Nor vice versa.
> All in all, PJ made the right decisions about what to keep, what to change, and what to discard entirely
Except of course for the silly fight between Gandalf and Saruman, which looked like a some unused Xena footage got spliced in to save people from having to exercise their imaginations.
> And anyway, nowhere in the Bible does it mention ET life. If there really were "aliens" then Jesus would have had to come and die for THEIR sins too. No alien-Jesus, no aliens.
> It sounds like this guy is just some crackpot...
> Maybe you can do better than Black Parrot, who appears to have flown away - unless you are him, hiding under "Anonymous Coward" so you don't have to answer the problems I posed to you.
Act III, Scene 12
A man lies bleeding his life out, pinned beneath the rubble at the bottom of a smoking crater where his bunker once stood. With his left hand he gropes for his musket, with his right he gropes for his legs. Both seem to be AWOL for some reason that he can't quite put his finger on right now.
Man: Well now, it'll be a while before those cowardly weaklings work up the nerve to launch another cruise missle at the likes of us, won't it Jake?
> You cannot believe how incredibly frustrated I am by your posts.
It's hardly a surprise that you're frustrated, since when you're out of touch with reality the universe rarely conforms to your expectations - pretty much by definition.
> Whether or not you agreed with the evidence, I cited at least three pieces for creation: > * Evolution of language > * Dust on the moon > * mitochondrial Eve > Read carefully again - You said I quote no evidence. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, but I did give some evidence.
See? Even after having it pointed out to you, you insist on offering three arguments which (a) are factually incorrect, and (b) two of which don't follow from the creation story at all, and the third of which is neutral between creation and evolution (until you get the correct version, at which point it roundly refutes creationism).
If you're tired of being frustrated, give up on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and creationism. The world will start making more sense immediately.
After thinking things over a bit, it occurs to me that my earlier post was too focused on your factual errors. While it is important to point out the errors of fact and logic that riddle creationist argument, so we won't end up with yet another generation of citizens who belief this guff, sometimes it's worth stepping back and pointing out a more basic problem that plagues creationist rhetoric, and which your post illustrates very nicely.
> Creation arguments are very well founded in evidence. Creationism makes some predictions about what should be observed, as does evolution.... So, I hope you understand now. This is stuff that is observed and verified. It is not the realm of guesswork but on solid, verifiable observances.... Just so you know, I've barely touched on the surface of overwhelming evidence for creation... As you may or may not guess, I get very tired of idiots pretending that there is no evidence for creation.... Because it's all out there, you've just closed your mind off to understanding it
Sadly, in spite of the big talk, you did not actually present any evidence for creation. As with virtually every other creationist argument you spend most of your time trying to explain away the evidence for evolution rather than trying to present evidence for creation.
For example -
> fact: Language in it's earliest form is it's most complex form. It has a much larger vocabulary, better formed grammar, and many more nuances in the language. The most recent forms of language have the least complexity, the smallest vocabulary. So, language is sufferring from entropy, it's getting simpler.
Beyond the fact that this simply isn't true, it wouldn't be evidence for creation even if it were true. The creation story offered in Genesis I doesn't give the slightest hint about how language should change over time. It portrays Adam and Eve created as adults - at least that's the traditional interpretation - and portrays them as using language when we first meet them. Other than Adam's role in naming the species, we aren't given any hint as to whether they were created already capable of speech, or taught speech by god, or made it up themselves. We certainly aren't given any model of language that would predict how it changes over time.
Unless of course you want to substitute a more general "biblical literalism" for "creationism per se", in which case your model for language change must come from the Babel story, from which you would predict that -
language change is catastropic
language change is the result of direct divine intervention
all languages are mutually unintelligible
all languages stand in random relationships to each other
Unfortunately, everything but the divine intervention is very clearly refuted by the evidence, which is readily accessible. (A single book or a single semester in historical linguistics will easily suffice.)
So you haven't actually presented any evidence for creation here - let alone for biblical literalism - however much you may have fooled yourself to the contrary.
Moving right along...
> prediction of evolution: mutations should occasionally produce beneficial changes.
Ah, this is an even better illustration of the "creationist evidence syndrome". Here you aren't even pretending to give any evidence for creation; you're simply trying to refute evolution.
> Let's look at some creationist assumptions
Ah, at least you're going to try to give some evidence for creation this time...
> Looking at the difference between the mtdna between two women, you can calculate how far back they came from the same woman... Using these mutation rates, all women on the earth have a common ancestor around 6000 years ago.
Other than the factual error with that claim, you're doing much better, i.e. you're actually talking about creationism for a change.
However, even your "facts" were true it would not be the blow to the theory of evolution that you think it would. We look at mDNA to see how recent the most recent common female ancestor of all humans was. The theory of evolution doesn't say that it has to be ancient; if it turned out to be recent, that's just one constraint on our model of poplation turnover and dispersion. FYI, mDNA can fall out of the gene pool, just a surnames fall out of populations that use them. Basic genetics tells us that the most recent common ancestor is merely an ante quem for the origin of a species - you don't even need to invoke evolution to figure that out.
Unfortunately for you, dating mDNA isn't going to select between creation and the theory of evolution - unless the date is too old for the creationist claims. And the actual facts about the so-called "mitochondrial Eve" are completely at odds with the creationist model of the universe, so this rare foray into evidence that actually has a bearing on creation (instead of just another attempt to refute the theory of evolution) is an unmitigated disaster for creationists. (Which is why, as I mentioned in my other reply, the savvy creationists have quit trying to support their beliefs with actual evidence, since it has turned out to be easily refuted in every instance.)
Then what?
> Ooh, here's a good evolutionary assumption: prediction: since the moon is millions of years old...
Whoops - you're supposed to be offering evidence for creation, not evidence against evolution... or the age of the moon.
And BTW, I've read Genesis many times, and never saw a word about what the moon's surface should be like. Again, this isn't evidence for creation, because there's nothing in the creation story that gives the slightest hint about what the moon should be like. A moon made of green cheese would be perfectly congruent with creation. (Indeed, it would be perfectly congruent with the theory of evolution too, since the ToE doesn't say any more about the moon that Genesis I does.)
> Example: Creationists also believe natural selection occurs.
Again, nothing you can say about natural selection is evidence for creation, because there's not the slightest hint in the creation story that natural selection occurs. Saying that creationism is compatible with natural selection is every bit as meaningful as saying that astronomy is compatible with the fact that beans make you toot. They're compatible for the simple reason that they don't place any constraints on each other.
And again, if you want to look at a more general "biblical literalism" rather than "creationism per se", it appears that whoever wrote the bible didn't have the faintest clue about basic genetics. The notion of erecting stripped staves in front of your flock while they bonk is not the kind of story invented by someone who understands genetics, let alone the more subtle operation of natural selection. (Lurkers: please take the time to read Genesis XXX:31-43 to see what the biblical model of genetics is.)
> Now, this kind of stuff is what creationist arguments predict, and it is what they observe.
Alas, out of your five arguments only one made any attempt to actually provide evidence for creation, and it was egregiously wrong - the evidence actually refutes the traditional creation model.
> As you may or may not guess, I get very tired of idiots pretending that there is no evidence for creation.
If there is any evidence for creation, the world's biggest mystery is why creationists can't produce it
> This displays your complete ignorance of creationist arguments. I'm sure you are quite aware of the arguments made by people who don't have a clue what they are talking about. But tell me, do you really, genuinely, understand the creationist arguments? I don't think so, because if you did you could not make the above statement without deliberately lying.
I, like others, was raised in a cult similar to your own. I know darn well what their arguments are.
I also know that the sustaining force of creationism is that members of these cults learn their biology in sundayschool, hearing the "facts" and "arguments" over and over in a context where no one challenges the purportedly divine authority of the teacher.
And apparently some of them learn their linguistics in sundayschool too, as the following indicates -
> fact: Language in it's earliest form is it's most complex form. It has a much larger vocabulary, better formed grammar, and many more nuances in the language. The most recent forms of language have the least complexity, the smallest vocabulary. So, language is sufferring from entropy, it's getting simpler.
Now you're revealing that you're as ignorant about linguistics as you are about biology.
The oldest recorded languages are indeed fully complete languages. They're also only about 5000 years old, less than 1/1000th the age of this new skull. And the roots of linguistic behavior apparently go far back beyond this skull, as witnessed by the rudimentary linguistic capabilities displayed by the various other apes.
Also, languages emphatically have not gotten simpler over the course of their recorded history. You're making the simple anglophone mistake of assuming that languages with complex inflectional rules (e.g., Sanskrit) are more complex than languages with complex word-order rules (e.g., English). There's no evidence whatsoever that one is easier or harder for a child to learn than another, nor that one is more or less capable of expressing ideas than another.
As as always, "complexity" is an undefined, unmeasurable quantity in creationist arguments - yet they make very absolutist claims about "complexity" comparisons all the same. (Lurkers take note of this; it's an omnipresent feature of creationism. But ask for some numbers and see what happens.)
Tyreth, if you ever get tired of making a fool of yourself in public forums, give up the creationist tracts and learn something about a topic before invoking it as evidence that your mythology is true.
> Just so you know, I've barely touched on the surface of overwhelming evidence for creation and overwhelming evidence for the complete irrational nature of evolution.
Yeah, sure. And I'm King of the West, and you owe me $2034 in back taxes.
> Slashdot is suited to snippets only, not in depth discussions. If you want further details, feel free to peruse the excellent resource website I linked to a couple of times:
Creation itself is built on "snippets" - usually in the form of quotations "snippeted" out of context.
It's no coincidence that creationism is based on a zillion Web sites that simply regurgitate the misinformation and logical fallacies they cut and paste from each other, instead of a zillion museums and libraries packed with the facts and analyses that the theory of evolution is built on.
Visit talk.origins from time to time and you'll see regular demonstrations that creationists can't even quote an article correctly. And yet a google search will reveal that the same misquote shows up on hundreds of creationist Web sites.
> http://www.creationscience.com - don't be afraid of it's name.
FYI, "creation science" was so soundly drubbed during the '80s that most creationists don't even bother with it anymore. Most have moved on to the suave new pseudoscience, "intelligent design", which is creation science with all the refutable claims removed. Others have given up altogether, and simply content themselves with whingeing about the ills of "naturalism" in science, or else try to redefine science as "a religion" so they can claim equal status.
Invoking "creation science" makes you backward even by creationist standards, about 20 years out of date. Or about 320 years out of date by the standards of science.
> Tell me of examples of rates of mutation where a beneficial mutation occurs compared to harmful/harmless mutations. Cite an example where such beneficial mutations are shown to take place on enough of a regular basis to be useful.
The merest moment's thought would have told you that the more "fit" a species is, the less likely any given mutation is going to be beneficial. However, as the climate changes, or meteors strike, or a new predator moves into your stomping grounds, you suddenly find that your species is less fit than before. The result is that for purely external reasons, the rate of "good" mutations is suddenly higher.
This is a simple optimization problem, and like all optimization problems, there is a law of diminishing returns.
It's also the mechanism of punctuated equilibrium, q.v..
> Also, take note of this: most mutations are recessive.
Even if that is true (and I've certainly never heard it before), "most" isn't sufficient to disrupt evolution. At worst it would slow things down, but no one says evolution is in any hurry.
In fact this may help evolution along since it increases diversity in the population by sheilding some "bad" mutations from being selected out. Because what's "bad" today might suddenly be "good" after the big meteor strikes next week.
>...Consider also that for two parents to possess the same beneficial mutation, they must have obtained it from a common ancestor - meaning that they likely inherited a number of other harmful recessive mutations - of which there is a much greater chance of the child inheriting them and expressing them. So if a child has both recessive genes of a harmful mutation, he likely has inherited a number of other, harmful recessive genes.
Who's making up all these rules requiring "a number of other harmful recessive mutations"?
> Face facts: genetic diversity decreases under normal circumstances.
No, it's extraordinary circumstances that decrease genetic diversity, such as the genetic bottleneck that reduced the population of cheetahs to something like 17 in the not too distant past, almost eliminating their genetic diversity in the process.
> The history of genetic traits points all creatures to a common ancestor merely 6000 years ago.
That statement smells exactly like you would expect it to smell, considering where it came from.
<Snip silly probability argument based on a parody of the theory of evolution and made-up numbers; see last week's thread if you are interested in such guff. The surest sign that creationism is a pseudoscience is that its proponents keep offering arguments long after they have been refuted.>
> It's depressing to see these combinations of ignorance, lack of understanding and poor spelling which goes to make the average creationist response to a statement about evolution. [...snip...]
Good response. To elaborate on one point -
> > Its always amazed me that way too many people who are adament about evolution refuse to believe that large parts of it may be wrong.
> Any proper scientist will be ready to admit the theory of evolution might be wrong. What they aren't prepared to accept is that creationists have the correct alternative. And that is for the simple reason that creationism is not founded on any factual basis.
Creationists are almost universally unaware that a theory is just a model that explains some collection of facts. As such, a model can always be wrong. (This is as true for atomic theory as it is for the theory of evolution.)
But the none-too-subtle between science and creationism is that science is trying to explain the facts, whereas creationism is in the business of avoiding the facts.
It's no coincidence that creationism manifests itself as an attack on evolution rather than as a program of research. It's no coincidence that creationism relies on armchair "science", such as probability arguments, to make that attack. It's no coincidence that Intelligent Design "Theory" starts with the claim that certain things are unknowable, thus sheltering itself from the most obvious and basic sort of questions. For creationists, evidence is something to be avoided, not something to be explained.
For example, some creationist asks in another branch of this thread, "where is the paper that predicted this new find?" He completely ignores the fact that biblical literalism doesn't give any reason to expect fossils of extinct species to begin with - let alone that they would all fit into a huge tree of intermediate and dead-end forms.
If creationism were a competing theory, as its proponents like to claim, it would be in the business of explaining all these observations, not in the business of explaining them away.
And that, dear lurkers, is why scientists reject creationism. (Or, in the more common case, simply ignore it.)
> > When I hear a scientist talking about science, I expect that he will confine his remarks to science.
> Yes, but its the very personal attack on the very idea that creationalist evolution might have happend. I understand that fact that scientist can't ever study such a hypothesis until they have eliminated every other possibility. But I don't see it as right for either group to attack each other, instead of saying, sure its possible, but I personally am not inclined to believe it.
Do you also expect scientists to say that about physics and chemistry too?
Like every other branch of science, all the evidence in biology indicates that the observed phenomena are the result of natural processes. There's no need for a footnote saying "maybe some god or gods are micromanaging it and going through an enormous amount of trouble to hide his/their involvement in it, and are also falsifying the evidence to make everything look thousands of times older than it really is".
That sort of special pleading isn't part of biology, any more than it's part of any other field of study.
> I'm not an expert in the area but it is my understanding that we are decended from apes, just not modern apes. Infact I wonder if we still may even be considered one of the great apes by some standards.
Yes, we are considered apes by any reasonable standard.
That is, it's impossible to draw the primate family tree such that every species below some chosen fork is called 'ape' and these two constraints hold true for the chosen sub-tree:
everything we think of as an ape is in the sub-tree
humans are not in the sub-tree
To get a conventional meaning for 'ape' requires special pleading, a definition to the tune of "all the species in this sub-tree except humans".
That can be done, of course, and in fact that's how the traditional list of 'apes' works out now that we know the cladistic relationships, but the result is a definiton that obscures rather than reveals. Best just to call ourselves apes and let the creationist snivel.
> > Also, creation isn't much good as a theory because it's a wildcard explanation.
> Oh right, and "The Theory of Evolution" isn't? When was the last time you read of someone using "The Theory of Evolution" to make a valid, provable prediction on the evolution of a species?
As a matter of fact, I read that kind of stuff quite regularly. The ToE predicts intermediate forms; we find intermediate forms. A new one was announced today, if you happened to read the story at the top of this thread.
The ToE also makes interesting predictions about how DNA comparisons will turn out, what age of rock certain fossils will appear in, etc. And the DNA and rocks serve it up, as expected, regularly.
Learn a bit about the facts before you try your hand at evaluating the theory.
> Hell, in 1862 Lord Kelvin (absolute zero guy) deducedthe world was only 400 million years old, so evolution couldn't possibly happen [his math was valid, but was based on assumptions that were later discovered to be wrong].
I don't think it's fair to call it "assumptions". The fact is, radioactive decay hadn't been discovered yet, so he can hardly be faulted for leaving its effects out of his equations. (Lurkers: he calculated the earth's age based on how long it would take to radiate off the heat of gravitational collapse, down to how hot the earth was at that time. Unaware that the core is still generating heat, he vastly undercalculated how long the earth could have been around and still be so hot.)
> Anyhow, the dawn of humans/humanoids has consistently been pushed back and assumptions proven wrong as more artifacts are discovered.
Yes, creationists like to crow whenever new evidence requires scientists to revise their models. What they neglect is that the consistent trend of those required revisions over the last several hundred years has been to relocate the beginnings of {humanity, the earth, the universe} to vastly earlier epochs, i.e. further from what you can squeeze out of the biblical story. I.e., the more evidence we get, the more egregiously wrong creationism is shown to be.
> > Evolution is one theory that explains it, creation is another.
> The difference is that we have overwhelming evidence for evolution, as well as actual observation. For creation, we have zero evidence and no possibility of ever having evidence.
Also, creation isn't much good as a theory because it's a wildcard explanation. Two species are similar? God re-used a good design! Two species are different? God used a different design! The predator is well equiped to ravish the prey? God didn't want it to go hungry! The prey is well equiped to escape from or defend against the predator? God didn't want it to be eaten!
It's a wildcard explanation, and because it can "explain" anything, it explains nothing.
The only thing the "theory" of creation is incompatible with is the theory of evolution. And that's only because creationists don't want it to be.
> of the jury, I am just a simple caveman. Your "scientists" found me frozen in an ice flow and unthawed me.... But there is one thing I do know, that picture of the skull is my dead brother!
Is that you, Cain? Most other people never get a chance to see what their brother's skull looks like.
> The greatest point he makes is that, although there are plenty of gurus willing to help newbies with simple questions, there are even more elitests that will either flame your question or give you a "RTFM!"
I agree that the RTFMers often come across as arses, though I'm not sure it's really true that there are "even more" of them than there are people willing to help. Over the years I've had a lot of luck getting help on Usenet.
Also, what kind of free help do you get for MS products? Perhaps things have changed since I've had a peek, but it used to be the case that the prevailing mentality in Windowsland was that help was a marketable commodity, and shouldn't be given away for free. What is the newbie experience like in Windows-oriented newsgroups these days?
Slashdot Mirror
> Karma: Good (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)
.sig
Since Taco insists on progressively obfuscating karma, I suggest that he go one step further and simply show you an icon of what animal you will be reincarnated as if you continue with your current karmic habits.
And of course, he should support a user preference that allows you to display your destiny with a roguelike symbol, in case you want to turn off image downloads, or brag about your karma in your
> i fuck your fat porky mother in her bloated ass.
Yes, brother, I know you do that.
> And let me know when they figure out how to be lower-priced than free.
Easy: pay people to use it, like they're doing in Peru.
> Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
So... what exactly do you do at Microsoft?
> The devil is not nicer, he is just trying to improve his appearence to seduce people easier.
Next thing you know, he'll be brushing his teeth and using deodorant.
> I don't agree with you. I think it was important that he stick as much as possible to the story, but not all of the story would translate well into a movie.
I've pretty much decided that I don't like to see movies based on good books, nor to read books based on good movies. They are different mediums, different genres even, and they don't generally translate very well.
Anecdote... I went to see Harry Potter with my brother and his kids, and afterward he asked if I liked it. I said it was a good idea, and very well done in terms of sets, props, cinematography, etc., but overall it was really boring because they stretched it out with tedius, trivial, irrelevant details. It turns out that they originally edited it to work as a movie, but in test screenings the kiddies revolted with an anal retentive "That's not like the book!", so they turned it into a cinematographic instantiation of the book, with predictable results.
So the choice seems to be: be faithful to the book and bore your audiences, or be faithful to the medium and offend the fans of the book. I liked LotR->book, but I'm not precisely a fan of it, so I only found the changes mildly annoying. But for a book that I was really crazy about, I don't think I'd want to see the movie. Nor vice versa.
> All in all, PJ made the right decisions about what to keep, what to change, and what to discard entirely
Except of course for the silly fight between Gandalf and Saruman, which looked like a some unused Xena footage got spliced in to save people from having to exercise their imaginations.
> It will be nice to have the relationship between elves and dwarves fleshed out a bit.
d00d! I don't think that's the kind of cut scenes they're talking about!
> And anyway, nowhere in the Bible does it mention ET life. If there really were "aliens" then Jesus would have had to come and die for THEIR sins too. No alien-Jesus, no aliens.
> It sounds like this guy is just some crackpot...
Oh, the irony.
> Occam's Razor, that 'The simplest answer is most often the correct one.' has no actual logical value behind it.
The value of Ockham's Razor isn't "logical". The value of Ockham's Razor is that it keeps special pleading from getting a free pass.
> Maybe you can do better than Black Parrot, who appears to have flown away - unless you are him, hiding under "Anonymous Coward" so you don't have to answer the problems I posed to you.
> You cannot believe how incredibly frustrated I am by your posts.
It's hardly a surprise that you're frustrated, since when you're out of touch with reality the universe rarely conforms to your expectations - pretty much by definition.
> Whether or not you agreed with the evidence, I cited at least three pieces for creation:
> * Evolution of language
> * Dust on the moon
> * mitochondrial Eve
> Read carefully again - You said I quote no evidence. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong, but I did give some evidence.
See? Even after having it pointed out to you, you insist on offering three arguments which (a) are factually incorrect, and (b) two of which don't follow from the creation story at all, and the third of which is neutral between creation and evolution (until you get the correct version, at which point it roundly refutes creationism).
If you're tired of being frustrated, give up on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and creationism. The world will start making more sense immediately.
After thinking things over a bit, it occurs to me that my earlier post was too focused on your factual errors. While it is important to point out the errors of fact and logic that riddle creationist argument, so we won't end up with yet another generation of citizens who belief this guff, sometimes it's worth stepping back and pointing out a more basic problem that plagues creationist rhetoric, and which your post illustrates very nicely.
... So, I hope you understand now. This is stuff that is observed and verified. It is not the realm of guesswork but on solid, verifiable observances. ... Just so you know, I've barely touched on the surface of overwhelming evidence for creation ... As you may or may not guess, I get very tired of idiots pretending that there is no evidence for creation. ... Because it's all out there, you've just closed your mind off to understanding it
> Creation arguments are very well founded in evidence. Creationism makes some predictions about what should be observed, as does evolution.
Sadly, in spite of the big talk, you did not actually present any evidence for creation. As with virtually every other creationist argument you spend most of your time trying to explain away the evidence for evolution rather than trying to present evidence for creation.
For example -
> fact: Language in it's earliest form is it's most complex form. It has a much larger vocabulary, better formed grammar, and many more nuances in the language. The most recent forms of language have the least complexity, the smallest vocabulary. So, language is sufferring from entropy, it's getting simpler.
Beyond the fact that this simply isn't true, it wouldn't be evidence for creation even if it were true. The creation story offered in Genesis I doesn't give the slightest hint about how language should change over time. It portrays Adam and Eve created as adults - at least that's the traditional interpretation - and portrays them as using language when we first meet them. Other than Adam's role in naming the species, we aren't given any hint as to whether they were created already capable of speech, or taught speech by god, or made it up themselves. We certainly aren't given any model of language that would predict how it changes over time.
Unless of course you want to substitute a more general "biblical literalism" for "creationism per se", in which case your model for language change must come from the Babel story, from which you would predict that -
- language change is catastropic
- language change is the result of direct divine intervention
- all languages are mutually unintelligible
- all languages stand in random relationships to each other
Unfortunately, everything but the divine intervention is very clearly refuted by the evidence, which is readily accessible. (A single book or a single semester in historical linguistics will easily suffice.)So you haven't actually presented any evidence for creation here - let alone for biblical literalism - however much you may have fooled yourself to the contrary.
Moving right along...
> prediction of evolution: mutations should occasionally produce beneficial changes.
Ah, this is an even better illustration of the "creationist evidence syndrome". Here you aren't even pretending to give any evidence for creation; you're simply trying to refute evolution.
> Let's look at some creationist assumptions
Ah, at least you're going to try to give some evidence for creation this time...
> Looking at the difference between the mtdna between two women, you can calculate how far back they came from the same woman
Other than the factual error with that claim, you're doing much better, i.e. you're actually talking about creationism for a change.
However, even your "facts" were true it would not be the blow to the theory of evolution that you think it would. We look at mDNA to see how recent the most recent common female ancestor of all humans was. The theory of evolution doesn't say that it has to be ancient; if it turned out to be recent, that's just one constraint on our model of poplation turnover and dispersion. FYI, mDNA can fall out of the gene pool, just a surnames fall out of populations that use them. Basic genetics tells us that the most recent common ancestor is merely an ante quem for the origin of a species - you don't even need to invoke evolution to figure that out.
Unfortunately for you, dating mDNA isn't going to select between creation and the theory of evolution - unless the date is too old for the creationist claims. And the actual facts about the so-called "mitochondrial Eve" are completely at odds with the creationist model of the universe, so this rare foray into evidence that actually has a bearing on creation (instead of just another attempt to refute the theory of evolution) is an unmitigated disaster for creationists. (Which is why, as I mentioned in my other reply, the savvy creationists have quit trying to support their beliefs with actual evidence, since it has turned out to be easily refuted in every instance.)
Then what?
> Ooh, here's a good evolutionary assumption: prediction: since the moon is millions of years old...
Whoops - you're supposed to be offering evidence for creation, not evidence against evolution... or the age of the moon.
And BTW, I've read Genesis many times, and never saw a word about what the moon's surface should be like. Again, this isn't evidence for creation, because there's nothing in the creation story that gives the slightest hint about what the moon should be like. A moon made of green cheese would be perfectly congruent with creation. (Indeed, it would be perfectly congruent with the theory of evolution too, since the ToE doesn't say any more about the moon that Genesis I does.)
> Example: Creationists also believe natural selection occurs.
Again, nothing you can say about natural selection is evidence for creation, because there's not the slightest hint in the creation story that natural selection occurs. Saying that creationism is compatible with natural selection is every bit as meaningful as saying that astronomy is compatible with the fact that beans make you toot. They're compatible for the simple reason that they don't place any constraints on each other.
And again, if you want to look at a more general "biblical literalism" rather than "creationism per se", it appears that whoever wrote the bible didn't have the faintest clue about basic genetics. The notion of erecting stripped staves in front of your flock while they bonk is not the kind of story invented by someone who understands genetics, let alone the more subtle operation of natural selection. (Lurkers: please take the time to read Genesis XXX:31-43 to see what the biblical model of genetics is.)
> Now, this kind of stuff is what creationist arguments predict, and it is what they observe.
Alas, out of your five arguments only one made any attempt to actually provide evidence for creation, and it was egregiously wrong - the evidence actually refutes the traditional creation model.
> As you may or may not guess, I get very tired of idiots pretending that there is no evidence for creation.
If there is any evidence for creation, the world's biggest mystery is why creationists can't produce it
> An IP lawyer says that Microsoft could make things difficult for OpenGL if they feel like it, basically.
When you've got billions of dollars in the bank, you can make things difficult for anybody if you feel like it, basically.
> This displays your complete ignorance of creationist arguments. I'm sure you are quite aware of the arguments made by people who don't have a clue what they are talking about. But tell me, do you really, genuinely, understand the creationist arguments? I don't think so, because if you did you could not make the above statement without deliberately lying.
I, like others, was raised in a cult similar to your own. I know darn well what their arguments are.
I also know that the sustaining force of creationism is that members of these cults learn their biology in sundayschool, hearing the "facts" and "arguments" over and over in a context where no one challenges the purportedly divine authority of the teacher.
And apparently some of them learn their linguistics in sundayschool too, as the following indicates -
> fact: Language in it's earliest form is it's most complex form. It has a much larger vocabulary, better formed grammar, and many more nuances in the language. The most recent forms of language have the least complexity, the smallest vocabulary.
So, language is sufferring from entropy, it's getting simpler.
Now you're revealing that you're as ignorant about linguistics as you are about biology.
The oldest recorded languages are indeed fully complete languages. They're also only about 5000 years old, less than 1/1000th the age of this new skull. And the roots of linguistic behavior apparently go far back beyond this skull, as witnessed by the rudimentary linguistic capabilities displayed by the various other apes.
Also, languages emphatically have not gotten simpler over the course of their recorded history. You're making the simple anglophone mistake of assuming that languages with complex inflectional rules (e.g., Sanskrit) are more complex than languages with complex word-order rules (e.g., English). There's no evidence whatsoever that one is easier or harder for a child to learn than another, nor that one is more or less capable of expressing ideas than another.
As as always, "complexity" is an undefined, unmeasurable quantity in creationist arguments - yet they make very absolutist claims about "complexity" comparisons all the same. (Lurkers take note of this; it's an omnipresent feature of creationism. But ask for some numbers and see what happens.)
Tyreth, if you ever get tired of making a fool of yourself in public forums, give up the creationist tracts and learn something about a topic before invoking it as evidence that your mythology is true.
> Just so you know, I've barely touched on the surface of overwhelming evidence for creation and overwhelming evidence for the complete irrational nature of evolution.
Yeah, sure. And I'm King of the West, and you owe me $2034 in back taxes.
> Slashdot is suited to snippets only, not in depth discussions. If you want further details, feel free to peruse the excellent resource website I linked to a couple of times:
Creation itself is built on "snippets" - usually in the form of quotations "snippeted" out of context.
It's no coincidence that creationism is based on a zillion Web sites that simply regurgitate the misinformation and logical fallacies they cut and paste from each other, instead of a zillion museums and libraries packed with the facts and analyses that the theory of evolution is built on.
Visit talk.origins from time to time and you'll see regular demonstrations that creationists can't even quote an article correctly. And yet a google search will reveal that the same misquote shows up on hundreds of creationist Web sites.
> http://www.creationscience.com - don't be afraid of it's name.
FYI, "creation science" was so soundly drubbed during the '80s that most creationists don't even bother with it anymore. Most have moved on to the suave new pseudoscience, "intelligent design", which is creation science with all the refutable claims removed. Others have given up altogether, and simply content themselves with whingeing about the ills of "naturalism" in science, or else try to redefine science as "a religion" so they can claim equal status.
Invoking "creation science" makes you backward even by creationist standards, about 20 years out of date. Or about 320 years out of date by the standards of science.
> Tell me of examples of rates of mutation where a beneficial mutation occurs compared to harmful/harmless mutations. Cite an example where such beneficial mutations are shown to take place on enough of a regular basis to be useful.
...Consider also that for two parents to possess the same beneficial mutation, they must have obtained it from a common ancestor - meaning that they likely inherited a number of other harmful recessive mutations - of which there is a much greater chance of the child inheriting them and expressing them. So if a child has both recessive genes of a harmful mutation, he likely has inherited a number of other, harmful recessive genes.
The merest moment's thought would have told you that the more "fit" a species is, the less likely any given mutation is going to be beneficial. However, as the climate changes, or meteors strike, or a new predator moves into your stomping grounds, you suddenly find that your species is less fit than before. The result is that for purely external reasons, the rate of "good" mutations is suddenly higher.
This is a simple optimization problem, and like all optimization problems, there is a law of diminishing returns.
It's also the mechanism of punctuated equilibrium, q.v..
> Also, take note of this: most mutations are recessive.
Even if that is true (and I've certainly never heard it before), "most" isn't sufficient to disrupt evolution. At worst it would slow things down, but no one says evolution is in any hurry.
In fact this may help evolution along since it increases diversity in the population by sheilding some "bad" mutations from being selected out. Because what's "bad" today might suddenly be "good" after the big meteor strikes next week.
>
Who's making up all these rules requiring "a number of other harmful recessive mutations"?
> Face facts: genetic diversity decreases under normal circumstances.
No, it's extraordinary circumstances that decrease genetic diversity, such as the genetic bottleneck that reduced the population of cheetahs to something like 17 in the not too distant past, almost eliminating their genetic diversity in the process.
> The history of genetic traits points all creatures to a common ancestor merely 6000 years ago.
That statement smells exactly like you would expect it to smell, considering where it came from.
<Snip silly probability argument based on a parody of the theory of evolution and made-up numbers; see last week's thread if you are interested in such guff. The surest sign that creationism is a pseudoscience is that its proponents keep offering arguments long after they have been refuted.>
> It's depressing to see these combinations of ignorance, lack of understanding and poor spelling which goes to make the average creationist response to a statement about evolution. [...snip...]
.
Good response. To elaborate on one point -
> > Its always amazed me that way too many people who are adament about evolution refuse to believe that large parts of it may be wrong.
> Any proper scientist will be ready to admit the theory of evolution might be wrong. What they aren't prepared to accept is that creationists have the correct alternative. And that is for the simple reason that creationism is not founded on any factual basis.
Creationists are almost universally unaware that a theory is just a model that explains some collection of facts. As such, a model can always be wrong. (This is as true for atomic theory as it is for the theory of evolution.)
But the none-too-subtle between science and creationism is that science is trying to explain the facts, whereas creationism is in the business of avoiding the facts.
It's no coincidence that creationism manifests itself as an attack on evolution rather than as a program of research. It's no coincidence that creationism relies on armchair "science", such as probability arguments, to make that attack. It's no coincidence that Intelligent Design "Theory" starts with the claim that certain things are unknowable, thus sheltering itself from the most obvious and basic sort of questions. For creationists, evidence is something to be avoided, not something to be explained.
For example, some creationist asks in another branch of this thread, "where is the paper that predicted this new find?" He completely ignores the fact that biblical literalism doesn't give any reason to expect fossils of extinct species to begin with - let alone that they would all fit into a huge tree of intermediate and dead-end forms.
If creationism were a competing theory, as its proponents like to claim, it would be in the business of explaining all these observations, not in the business of explaining them away
And that, dear lurkers, is why scientists reject creationism. (Or, in the more common case, simply ignore it.)
> > When I hear a scientist talking about science, I expect that he will confine his remarks to science.
> Yes, but its the very personal attack on the very idea that creationalist evolution might have happend. I understand that fact that scientist can't ever study such a hypothesis until they have eliminated every other possibility. But I don't see it as right for either group to attack each other, instead of saying, sure its possible, but I personally am not inclined to believe it.
Do you also expect scientists to say that about physics and chemistry too?
Like every other branch of science, all the evidence in biology indicates that the observed phenomena are the result of natural processes. There's no need for a footnote saying "maybe some god or gods are micromanaging it and going through an enormous amount of trouble to hide his/their involvement in it, and are also falsifying the evidence to make everything look thousands of times older than it really is".
That sort of special pleading isn't part of biology, any more than it's part of any other field of study.
> I'm not an expert in the area but it is my understanding that we are decended from apes, just not modern apes. Infact I wonder if we still may even be considered one of the great apes by some standards.
Yes, we are considered apes by any reasonable standard.
That is, it's impossible to draw the primate family tree such that every species below some chosen fork is called 'ape' and these two constraints hold true for the chosen sub-tree:
- everything we think of as an ape is in the sub-tree
- humans are not in the sub-tree
To get a conventional meaning for 'ape' requires special pleading, a definition to the tune of "all the species in this sub-tree except humans".That can be done, of course, and in fact that's how the traditional list of 'apes' works out now that we know the cladistic relationships, but the result is a definiton that obscures rather than reveals. Best just to call ourselves apes and let the creationist snivel.
> > Also, creation isn't much good as a theory because it's a wildcard explanation.
> Oh right, and "The Theory of Evolution" isn't? When was the last time you read of someone using "The Theory of Evolution" to make a valid, provable prediction on the evolution of a species?
As a matter of fact, I read that kind of stuff quite regularly. The ToE predicts intermediate forms; we find intermediate forms. A new one was announced today, if you happened to read the story at the top of this thread.
The ToE also makes interesting predictions about how DNA comparisons will turn out, what age of rock certain fossils will appear in, etc. And the DNA and rocks serve it up, as expected, regularly.
Learn a bit about the facts before you try your hand at evaluating the theory.
> Spoken like a true idiot, my friend.
Surely a troll, IMO.
> The UML is NOT a fad.
Yeah, I'm usually pretty cynical about this kind of stuff, but I've found UML useful for documenting the basic structure of very complex programs.
> Hell, in 1862 Lord Kelvin (absolute zero guy) deducedthe world was only 400 million years old, so evolution couldn't possibly happen [his math was valid, but was based on assumptions that were later discovered to be wrong].
I don't think it's fair to call it "assumptions". The fact is, radioactive decay hadn't been discovered yet, so he can hardly be faulted for leaving its effects out of his equations. (Lurkers: he calculated the earth's age based on how long it would take to radiate off the heat of gravitational collapse, down to how hot the earth was at that time. Unaware that the core is still generating heat, he vastly undercalculated how long the earth could have been around and still be so hot.)
> Anyhow, the dawn of humans/humanoids has consistently been pushed back and assumptions proven wrong as more artifacts are discovered.
Yes, creationists like to crow whenever new evidence requires scientists to revise their models. What they neglect is that the consistent trend of those required revisions over the last several hundred years has been to relocate the beginnings of {humanity, the earth, the universe} to vastly earlier epochs, i.e. further from what you can squeeze out of the biblical story. I.e., the more evidence we get, the more egregiously wrong creationism is shown to be.
> > Evolution is one theory that explains it, creation is another.
> The difference is that we have overwhelming evidence for evolution, as well as actual observation. For creation, we have zero evidence and no possibility of ever having evidence.
Also, creation isn't much good as a theory because it's a wildcard explanation. Two species are similar? God re-used a good design! Two species are different? God used a different design! The predator is well equiped to ravish the prey? God didn't want it to go hungry! The prey is well equiped to escape from or defend against the predator? God didn't want it to be eaten!
It's a wildcard explanation, and because it can "explain" anything, it explains nothing.
The only thing the "theory" of creation is incompatible with is the theory of evolution. And that's only because creationists don't want it to be.
> of the jury, I am just a simple caveman. Your "scientists" found me frozen in an ice flow and unthawed me. ... But there is one thing I do know, that picture of the skull is my dead brother!
Is that you, Cain? Most other people never get a chance to see what their brother's skull looks like.
> The greatest point he makes is that, although there are plenty of gurus willing to help newbies with simple questions, there are even more elitests that will either flame your question or give you a "RTFM!"
I agree that the RTFMers often come across as arses, though I'm not sure it's really true that there are "even more" of them than there are people willing to help. Over the years I've had a lot of luck getting help on Usenet.
Also, what kind of free help do you get for MS products? Perhaps things have changed since I've had a peek, but it used to be the case that the prevailing mentality in Windowsland was that help was a marketable commodity, and shouldn't be given away for free. What is the newbie experience like in Windows-oriented newsgroups these days?