Survey about creationism
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Ruby said:
Ruby,
that site is a classic example of mis-information, inaccuarcies and down right lies. This is, unfortunately, almost always the case with creationist properganda. It is terrible how people can blatently lie to people like that. I dont have time atm to go through all the points on the website (perhaps some other people here will) but I'll explain a few of the points that site mentions, and why they are incorrect.
Ok so far...
This is completely wrong. Evolution no more violates the 2nd Law than does a baby. You were once a baby, you have grown, and you did it all without violating the 2nd law. Evolutionary changes are in no way 'more ordered' than their ancestors.
A common point given, and again, all it is wrong and merely shows the ignorance of thr writter. For the fulle explanation of the evolution of the eye I would suggest Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable" which as a whole chapter devoted to this.
This shows ignorance of the Predator/Prey relationship. They are assuming that the anemone has always had the spines and strength of poison that it has today. An arms race between the predator/prey would lead to extremely effective defenses (i.e. deadly to almost everything else) but also an extremely resiliant predator.
This is a truly stupid point the author is making. The wreckage of a plane crash contains information, none of which was intentionally put their by an intelligent mind. This know as the 'blind watcher maker' argument. Richard Dawkins' book, also called "The Blindwatch Maker" addresses this point in depth.
If there are any specific points that site makes that you would like to know more about post them here and people will give you some guidance.
Kashyapa
Unregistered
K
That website is absolute rubbish, most of it taken out of context and interspersed with exaggerations and outright lies. Heed its scientific "information" at your peril. Case in point: the Leakey quote that had him "admitting" that humans' ancestors were "a big question mark." The quote is actually referring to the actual common ancestor we shared with chimps, NOT the entirety of the hominid fossil record. They denigrate being able to tell bipedality from "just a few leg and hip bones". If you know what to look for, there are very significant and unmistakable signs that point to bipedal locomotion, such as the shape of the femoral condyle (the ball of the femur). It's not bad science; it's absolute anatomical fact. I have personally examined many of these skeletons and absolutely accurate casts made of them; they are absolutely different species, and morphologically distinct from each other, from apes, and from modern Homo sapiens. This is easily discernable in cranial vault volume, shape and size of various skull and skeleton features, and joint anatomy. The creationists' insistence on trotting out the Piltdown Man and Nebraska Man fakes is tiresome; they were long since accepted by the scientific community as fakes, and we disregard them as such. If they're going to argue with the facts, at least they could argue with facts, not hysterically point to long-discarded suppositions.
The most egregious claim on the site was the Martin Luther quote that babbled on about cows only having cows and the like. Newsflash: Martin Luther was a German village preacher, a total Puritan, and completely unqualified to make any sort of statement about science. It's roughly analogous to me asking my trashman to put in a good word for evolution. It's made especially preposterous by the admitted fact that ML lived 350 years ago. That's right, back when we still thought the sun orbited Earth, the Earth was flat, and Earth was the center of the Universe. And we know what happened to those ideas, and in what disdain we hold those religious nutjobs that perpetuated them. Eventually this Creation ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ will die the death it richly deserves to.
Ruby, I know you hold your faith very dear, and I have no problem with that. But there are ways to integrate your religious beliefs with reality in ways other than clinging to a fable that's over 4,000 years old. Evolution and cosmology can be integrated with Christian beliefs more readily than the fanatics and fundamentalists would like you to believe.
The most egregious claim on the site was the Martin Luther quote that babbled on about cows only having cows and the like. Newsflash: Martin Luther was a German village preacher, a total Puritan, and completely unqualified to make any sort of statement about science. It's roughly analogous to me asking my trashman to put in a good word for evolution. It's made especially preposterous by the admitted fact that ML lived 350 years ago. That's right, back when we still thought the sun orbited Earth, the Earth was flat, and Earth was the center of the Universe. And we know what happened to those ideas, and in what disdain we hold those religious nutjobs that perpetuated them. Eventually this Creation ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ will die the death it richly deserves to.
Ruby, I know you hold your faith very dear, and I have no problem with that. But there are ways to integrate your religious beliefs with reality in ways other than clinging to a fable that's over 4,000 years old. Evolution and cosmology can be integrated with Christian beliefs more readily than the fanatics and fundamentalists would like you to believe.
UnrepentantSinner
A post by Alan Smithee
Martinm said:
Make sure to give Schliemann props whenever you use this argument.
A very simplistic and, when you get right down to the nitty-gritty, incorrect, interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Tsk, tsk, tsk! Didn't I just tell you about information-theoretic arguments? This is one of them. The problem here is that the creationists get to define the "code book" (or in this case, determine what is complex and what is organized) after the fact. You see, evolution makes no claim about an ecosystem having to contain more information or be more "orderly" as time goes on. That's a creationist invention.
Disproof by counterexample:
http://www.chemsoc.org/chembytes/ezine/2002/gross1_aug02.htm
Is this a law of thermodynamics? Is this a scientific statement at all?
Evolution does not require that the entropy of the entire universe decrease. This person obviously does not understand what entropy is. The earth radiating heat into space would reduce the entropy of the earth while increasing the entropy of the rest of the universe. The total net entropy change for the entire universe would still be positive.
Notice:
1. The deliberate confusion of scale: The entire universe has obviously not transformed itself into a brain. The purpose of this misdirection is obviously to get us to forget that...
2. The human brain is not a closed system, and therefore the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't require its entropy to increase.
Sure the gods exist. I just got back from dating grey-eyed Athena. She really got upset when the waiter forgot to put an olive in her martini, so she hurled a javelin through his chest for insulting the gods. If you think that's overdoing it, you should have met her dad. He's the kind of guy who'll start a war to destroy your whole country if he thinks you're being a bad guest. The last guy to cross him was a member of his own family, and he kicked him off the tallest mountain in the world for it!
Peter Soderqvist
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Humans are not animals!
TO KASHYAPA
Soderqvist1: cultural development in time is the difference between humans, and animals! Of course, we share our ancestors with them, and some properties like, eating, sleeping, breeding, and similar zoological behaviors, but they don't share with us our intergenerational informational activity! A beaver is an excellent builder of dams, but these dams are quite similar in their features as they was 50 thousand years ago, compare that with a mud hut from the stone age in some forest, with a modern skyscraper in New York city today? Chimps has lived their lives in a similar fashion today as they have always done, but not so with humans.
This cultural development stems from our abilities to store our knowledge, in extra-neural means, like books, and historical records in general. We have the wheel and fire on record and we don't need to invent them again through trial and error. Humans are thus a symbolic, or a linguistic class of life! A cube has both deep and surface properties, but is not a surface, because a cube
has three dimensions, but a surface has only two dimensions,
analogically; a human has animal properties but is not animal anyway, or conversely; if humans are animals, a cube is a surface too! Extended phenotypes like beaver dams can be described in ecological, or zoological terms, but an artifact (extended phenotype) say; a computer cannot be described in zoological terms, therefore; humans are higher in dimensionality than animals!
Quote of the Day:
What distinguishes us from all other creatures?
- "A quarter inch of cortex."
- Alfred Korzybski
http://www.thisisnotthat.com/gs/otb.html
TO KASHYAPA
Soderqvist1: cultural development in time is the difference between humans, and animals! Of course, we share our ancestors with them, and some properties like, eating, sleeping, breeding, and similar zoological behaviors, but they don't share with us our intergenerational informational activity! A beaver is an excellent builder of dams, but these dams are quite similar in their features as they was 50 thousand years ago, compare that with a mud hut from the stone age in some forest, with a modern skyscraper in New York city today? Chimps has lived their lives in a similar fashion today as they have always done, but not so with humans.
This cultural development stems from our abilities to store our knowledge, in extra-neural means, like books, and historical records in general. We have the wheel and fire on record and we don't need to invent them again through trial and error. Humans are thus a symbolic, or a linguistic class of life! A cube has both deep and surface properties, but is not a surface, because a cube
has three dimensions, but a surface has only two dimensions,
analogically; a human has animal properties but is not animal anyway, or conversely; if humans are animals, a cube is a surface too! Extended phenotypes like beaver dams can be described in ecological, or zoological terms, but an artifact (extended phenotype) say; a computer cannot be described in zoological terms, therefore; humans are higher in dimensionality than animals!
Quote of the Day:
What distinguishes us from all other creatures?
- "A quarter inch of cortex."
- Alfred Korzybski
http://www.thisisnotthat.com/gs/otb.html
Peter Soderqvist
Critical Thinker
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Evolution and Information technology!
Mutations increase informational entropy in the gene pool, because it raises the question about which animals shall survive? But natural selection decreases this uncertainty in the system, by removing the unfit!
The Information Challenge By Richard Dawkins
http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/dawkins1.htm
Mutations increase informational entropy in the gene pool, because it raises the question about which animals shall survive? But natural selection decreases this uncertainty in the system, by removing the unfit!
The Information Challenge By Richard Dawkins
http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/dawkins1.htm
Brian the Snail
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Ruby said:
Well, even the first paragraph of the site is ridiculous:
Er...hello? Most of the scientists on the list were around back in the 17th and 18th centuries (or even earlier), while Charles Darwin published the Origin of the Species in the mid-19th century. Of course the scientists on the list were Creationists- everybody was then. The biblical creation story was pretty much taken for granted back then.
It was only with the growth of geology and the palaentology in the late 18th and 19th centuries that evidence arose of an old earth, and of the evolution of species. It was only with the discovery of radioactivity at the end of the 19th century that allowed us to date the earth with a degree of accuracy. It was only with the development of more powerful telescopes at the start of the 20th century that allowed us to measure the vastness of space and to infer the expansion of the universe, and so gain insight into the vast antiquity of the cosmos.
It was only through the tools of modern science that we could gain evidence of all these things, tools and evidence that the scientists mentioned did not have. So of course they had a different concept of these things than us. After all, they were great scientists but they weren't prophets- they couldn't have anticipated what we know today. And yet this simple point seems to have escaped the author of this site...
More later, when I have time...
[Edited to correct grammatical mistake]
Brian the Snail
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Regarding the stuff about Neanderthals on the site:
http://evolutionlie.faithweb.com/neanderthal.html
It's difficult to understand the point that the author is trying to make here. He certainly doesn't claim that the skeletons are fakes. He seems to be saying that because Neanderthals had larger brain capacities than modern humans, then that somehow present a challenge to evolution. I don't see how, though. In particular, the larger brains of Neanderthals is thought to be linked to their larger bulk. Also, brain size is only one indicator of intelligence- brain structure is important too. And finally, even if Neanderthals were more intelligent than modern humans, so what? Evolution doesn't claim to be a "constant upward progression" as he claims. The only thing that evolution cares about is how well adapted to the environment a particular species is- not how intelligent it is. So, his entire tirade seems to be based on some strange strawman version of evolution.
The other baffling thing about the article is when he starts talking about the "London Artifact." You can read an interesting article about it here. Basically, it is a hammer found in Texas, which is claimed by some creationists to be a "pre-flood" artifact. The article pretty much debunks this idea. But even if we accept its validity it is difficult to see any connection with Neanderthals, since Neanderthal skeletons have only been found in Europe and Asia, and there is no evidence that Neanderthals ever lived in North America. So to claim that the London artifact was work of Neanderthals seems like a very strange claim, even for a creationist.
http://evolutionlie.faithweb.com/neanderthal.html
It's difficult to understand the point that the author is trying to make here. He certainly doesn't claim that the skeletons are fakes. He seems to be saying that because Neanderthals had larger brain capacities than modern humans, then that somehow present a challenge to evolution. I don't see how, though. In particular, the larger brains of Neanderthals is thought to be linked to their larger bulk. Also, brain size is only one indicator of intelligence- brain structure is important too. And finally, even if Neanderthals were more intelligent than modern humans, so what? Evolution doesn't claim to be a "constant upward progression" as he claims. The only thing that evolution cares about is how well adapted to the environment a particular species is- not how intelligent it is. So, his entire tirade seems to be based on some strange strawman version of evolution.
The other baffling thing about the article is when he starts talking about the "London Artifact." You can read an interesting article about it here. Basically, it is a hammer found in Texas, which is claimed by some creationists to be a "pre-flood" artifact. The article pretty much debunks this idea. But even if we accept its validity it is difficult to see any connection with Neanderthals, since Neanderthal skeletons have only been found in Europe and Asia, and there is no evidence that Neanderthals ever lived in North America. So to claim that the London artifact was work of Neanderthals seems like a very strange claim, even for a creationist.
And even if this was true, which it isn't, so what? Doesn't matter who it is, or how many, believing something false is true doesn't make it so.
Evidence against Ruby mounts
Ruby has now posted two links to completely fallacious cites (ICR and this 'evolutionlie' nonsense).
Methinks she believes the garbage they post because it is in her comfort zone.
Ruby - if Xians will go so far as to post blatant lies for their position on evolution (a minor topic), what do you think they'd do for major theological points?
(psst: Answer: throw people out of windows - research the Defenestration of Prague)
Ruby has now posted two links to completely fallacious cites (ICR and this 'evolutionlie' nonsense).
Methinks she believes the garbage they post because it is in her comfort zone.
Ruby - if Xians will go so far as to post blatant lies for their position on evolution (a minor topic), what do you think they'd do for major theological points?
(psst: Answer: throw people out of windows - research the Defenestration of Prague)
RichardR
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This is a logical fallacy called Argument From Authority.
Brian the Snail
Muse
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RichardR said:
And a really, really pathetic argument from authority, as well.
I mean, if you're going to make a logical fallacy, you could at least try to do it well
Tricky
Briefly immortal
Re: Evidence against Ruby mounts
The fact that she is here on a skeptic website, behaving nicely in the face of scathing criticism shows that she is not just a blind follower. You really should wish that more people showed this kind of curiosity. Or is it your intention to confirm any suspicions she might have had about how non-believers behave?
Guys, give Ruby a break. She looks at the information that others have told her about.Gregor said:
The fact that she is here on a skeptic website, behaving nicely in the face of scathing criticism shows that she is not just a blind follower. You really should wish that more people showed this kind of curiosity. Or is it your intention to confirm any suspicions she might have had about how non-believers behave?
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
Arrgh The Second law of Thermodynamics Argument
As I live and breath I take in structured components and reduce them to more unstructured components. the law applies to the general state of the system, not to an inherent piece of the system
Take the phone system, is is ordered so it violates entropy right, unless you look at the fact that we have taken a concentration of mineral elements and spread it over the face of the earth, that it entropy.
Peace and Joy to you Ruby, you are brave and show great honor in this discussion in the sceptics forum, may all use decorum and respect.
Peace
dancing david
As I live and breath I take in structured components and reduce them to more unstructured components. the law applies to the general state of the system, not to an inherent piece of the system
Take the phone system, is is ordered so it violates entropy right, unless you look at the fact that we have taken a concentration of mineral elements and spread it over the face of the earth, that it entropy.
Peace and Joy to you Ruby, you are brave and show great honor in this discussion in the sceptics forum, may all use decorum and respect.
Peace
dancing david