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Merged Icebear's Evolution Thread

CriticalSock said:
The key part of your post is "valid". :)
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Yes. Yes, it is. There's been a truly incredible amount of invalid criticism provided by creationists, and then provided again and again and again, despite being shown to be invalid every time. Certainly, there ARE valid criticisms, though, which tend to be provided by those who aren't ideologically blinded and then considered and dealt with in a reasonable fashion.

CriticalSock said:
There's loads of criticism which is why it's so good that science refines its theories and if something is a bit shaky it smashes it with hammers far more aggressively than the woolly headed attacks from creationists until the end result is as close to true as we can get.
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The Peer Review Process can be really, really harsh, I hear. It's fallible, obviously, but it does get rid of a lot of bad science.

CriticalSock said:
Remember Piltdown man? It wasn't creationists who found that hoax out...
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I certainly do. It's one of the most famous hoaxes done in an attempt to support evolutionary theory... of the notably few, no less. It was scientists who exposed it as such, made that knowledge quite public in the interest of promoting truth, and have collectively treated it like a hoax since it was shown to be one. If only Creationists were as honest when it comes to their treatment of their arguments.
 
icebear said:
Raw meat is easy enough to discern from stones and petrified materials...
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If that find was of actual dinosaur soft tissue--a conclusion that is by no means widely agreed upon--it's not meat. Meat is muscle. The soft tissue is speculated to have been connective tissue, a completely different type of organ. There's still the very real possibility that what was found was mere microbial matter bearing no relation to dinosaurs.

I'm aware that stegosaurs did not have horns... Indians were always in the habit of touching those glyphs up every few years, and the horns were added long after the animal himself became extinct by an artist who simply figured an animal that size needed them.
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So you accept that these glyphs were altered. How do you know that they weren't altered to make them more similar to stegosaurus? Seems to me that it'd be easy enough to alter the glyphs ("touching those glyphs up") to make them look more like some new and exciting dinosaur find.

Also, stegos didn't have "cat-like faces" or red fur. Their faces were more similar to horses than cats (though there are enormous differences between them), and as best we can tell they had rough skin similar to that of lizards. I'm not aware of any finds among the Ornithiscians that included feathers.

I mean, you've got an ideological doctrine which needs quadrillions of years
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We have millions of years to work with. Whether evolution is true or not the Earth has clearly been here for millions of years.

and only has a few thousand or a few tens of thousands, tops:
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I've explained why your argument is wrong. You assume 1 beneficial mutation per generation. If beneficial mutations arise at the rate of 1 per 1,000 mutations (0.1%), you'd still expect 1 or 2 beneficial mutations for every 10 people. This rather dramatically reduces the time necessary to produce a new species. Furthermore, you've mistakenly assumed that a cousin is our ancestor, which erroneously doubles the time your incorrect calculations yield for speciation.

Aridas said:
The Peer Review Process can be really, really harsh, I hear. It's fallible, obviously, but it does get rid of a lot of bad science.
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The peer review process isn't the end, though. Once the paper's been reviewed and published, the REAL trial for the idea begins. At that point, every scientist in the world can read it, pick it apart, and find exactly where it stops working. Peer review merely makes sure that the paper is good enough to be published; it's the analysis by the larger scientific community that serves as the true test for a new idea.
 
Dinwar said:
The peer review process isn't the end, though. Once the paper's been reviewed and published, the REAL trial for the idea begins. At that point, every scientist in the world can read it, pick it apart, and find exactly where it stops working. Peer review merely makes sure that the paper is good enough to be published; it's the analysis by the larger scientific community that serves as the true test for a new idea.
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Thank you for that addition to my statement, as that part really, really does matter.
 
It occurs to me that the sort of questions Creationists ask would be welcome from students in a beginning class on evolution. If they actually listened to the answers, they'd get one heck of an education.
 
marplots said:
It occurs to me that the sort of questions Creationists ask would be welcome from students in a beginning class on evolution. If they actually listened to the answers, they'd get one heck of an education.
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Creationism was, until very recently, a valid scientific theory. Much of what we know about evolution comes from disproving Creationism. For example, the Principles of Stratigraphy and Angular Unconformities, which I linked to above, both are vital to understanding the rock record. They were what put the final nail in the Young Earth coffin. One reason we explored the Americas so energetically was that scientists thought ancient organisms may be found in this New World (the idea is sound in principle--new species do drive out the old in many cases). Creationists even had good arguments against evolution itself, including pointing out the importance of the then-unknown genetic molecule. Modern Creationism is only a sad shadow of that former glory.
 
Dinwar said:
Creationism was, until very recently, a valid scientific theory. Much of what we know about evolution comes from disproving Creationism. For example, the Principles of Stratigraphy and Angular Unconformities, which I linked to above, both are vital to understanding the rock record. They were what put the final nail in the Young Earth coffin. One reason we explored the Americas so energetically was that scientists thought ancient organisms may be found in this New World (the idea is sound in principle--new species do drive out the old in many cases). Creationists even had good arguments against evolution itself, including pointing out the importance of the then-unknown genetic molecule. Modern Creationism is only a sad shadow of that former glory.
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So called "creation science" is alive and well unfortunately. It won,t go away this century.
 
Icebear, you still have not given a satisfactory answer on why you felt it appropriate to cite the research of a person you have, from the start, declared not only to be engaged in a field you consider a worthless dead end, but have said is utterly devoid of intelligence. This is quite apart from the other question of whether you have misread it or misinterpreted it.

If you were right in your assessment, would it not be reasonable to assume that the research is faulty at best, fake at worst? If I were in agreement with your assessment, I would have to consider your citation spurious and your credibility worthless even if I were stupid enough to share your misreading of it.
 
DuvalHMFIC said:
I've read through 5 pages of this thread, and I still don't know:

Do I get to eat a dinosaur or what?
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Of course you can. Emu tastes like steak, I'm told (I was out of town when my uncle butchered his). Chicken is pretty tasty as well. The best way to cook turkey is to bury it (you can ignore it for a few hours, and there's only a slight risk of explosion).

Eating a non-therapod dinosaur is a tad more difficult. ;)
 
icebear said:
Simple ignorance is one thing, but I really hate seeing people totally in BONDAGE to ignorance, and jref seems to have a problem which is a bit worse than usual...
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Don't worry--you, personally, can free yourself from the ignorance to whihc you are in thrall.

The first step would be to actually read the sources of the debunked quote-mines you depend upon...

It will not be easy, but you can, in fact, do it. The sooner you start, the better.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html
 
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Slowvehicle said:
Dn't worry--you, personally, can free yourself from the ignorance to whihc you are in thrall.

The first step would be to actually read the sources of the debunked quote-mines you depend upon...

It will not be easy, but you can, in fact, do it. The sooner you start, the better.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part1-3.html
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I'm going to have to second this. It likely won't be easy to see how very dishonest the people who assembled these quotes were, but, for the sake of an honest look at the quality of what you're putting your faith in, it's more than worth it.
 
Aridas said:
It likely won't be easy to see how very dishonest the people who assembled these quotes were,
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I'll save everyone at least some of the effort:

http://ncse.com/cej/2/4/misquoted-scientists-respond

Here's one that's particularly relevant, since icebear cited him:

Dr. Stephen Jay Gould said:
It is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level but are abundant between larger groups. The evolution from reptiles to mammals . . . is well documented. Yet a pamphlet entitled "Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax" states: "The facts of punctuated equilibrium, which Gould and Eldredge . . . are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that [William Jennings] Bryan insisted on and which God has revealed to us in the Bible."
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To quote Gould as support for Creationism is a lie. There is no other way to interpret it. He explicitly rejected Creationism his whole academic career. The rest of the quotes are no more honest.
 
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