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Author Topic:   Embarrassed Creationist
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
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Message 61 of 69 (596168)
12-13-2010 4:02 PM
Reply to: Message 57 by BarackZero
12-13-2010 1:05 PM


Re: really?
Then explain why there was yet another fraud when archaeologists faked a feathered flying lizard in China perhaps a decade ago. Why all these lies if evolution is so very factual?
At Not Found:
quote:
In 1999, a supposed 'missing link' fossil of an apparently feathered dinosaur named "Archaeoraptor liaoningensis", found in Liaoning Province, northeastern China, turned out to be a forgery. Comparing the photograph of the specimen with another find, Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing came to the conclusion that it was composed of two portions of different fossil animals. His claim made National Geographic review their research and they too came to the same conclusion.[7] The bottom portion of the "Archaeoraptor" composite came from a legitimate feathered dromaeosaurid now known as Microraptor, and the upper portion from a previously-known primitive bird called Yanornis.
If you follow that footnote 7, BBC - 404: Not Found , you will find the transcript of a BBC report, The Dinosaur that Fooled the World, first shown on BBC Two 9.00pm Thursday 21 February 2002. That report details the examination of the fossil and the publishing of the findings (in National Geographic which had exclusive rights having funded the research), the research that led to discovery of the fake (by a Chinese paleontologist who was offered a similar "complete" fossil for sale by a local farmer, a fossil with an identical tail, since it was the counter-slab to the fossil in question), and the scientific community's reaction and corrective actions. It was not paleontologists (not archaeologists as you said -- shouldn't you bother to learn something about science before you start to make false statements about it?) who had created the fake, but rather a Chinese farmer. From the BBC report (link provided above, so do please read it on your own):
quote:
NARRATOR: Xu Xing now began to search the area. . . .
One of the best sources of information is local farmers who are paid by China's geological institutions to spend up to six months of the year digging and sifting rock.
. . .
NARRATOR: Life in the region's villages is harsh and many farmers don't just dig for fossils, they've become amateur dealers. . . .
. . .
NARRATOR: . . . In the aftermath it became clear that the Liaoning region of China is not just famous for its fabulous fossils. It's also home to a highly developed faking industry. Dr Zhonge Zhou, a scientist at Beijing's Institute of Palaeontology, has been monitoring it.
DR ZHONGE ZHOU (Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology, Beijing): Farmers or dealers can make a much bigger profit if they've got the fossil of a complete animal. They take a damaged specimen and add the parts from other animals to make a new one which looks complete. In one place I saw them putting all the bits from a dinosaur's leg into a box, just like a box of machine spare parts so that they could add them to different fossils.
NARRATOR: A whole fossil, even one put together from different creatures, sells for far more than a genuine but damaged specimen.
ZHONGE ZHOU: A damaged fossil might sell for a few hundred yuan, but when broken bits are used to make a complete one it can sell for several thousand.
NARRATOR: It was from these murky origins that the Archaeoraptor had emerged. Somewhere an expert had put together a fake that had fooled the world.
And yet, towards the end of that BBC report:
quote:
NARRATOR: It was a complex and clever fraud, but in his urge to make a quick profit the faker, for all his skill, had completely missed the real value of what he had. In Beijing Xu Xing had begun to examine the counterslab of the National Geographic specimen's tail. He was curious to know what he'd got. It was incomplete and damaged, but he could clearly see the short, rigid tail of a dinosaur, but there was something very surprising. The remains of the pelvis suggested it was the smallest dinosaur ever found. Even more unusually, it showed signs of having the feathers of a bird and the light and spindly legs suggested a creature adapted to climbing and perching rather than running along the ground. To Xu Xing this looked like the first dinosaur ever found that could live in trees.
XU XING: This is the original artist's impression based on the initial research. You can see this was a dinosaur with a very small bird-like body, but there's also something else very important about the skeleton. The hind legs suggests that this may have been a dinosaur that lived in trees.
NARRATOR: This was a new and completely unknown creature and contained within it evolutionary data never found before. Here was an animal that had evolved into something more like a bird than any dinosaur previously known about.
. . .
NARRATOR: . . . In America, something equally astonishing was coming to light. The other half of the fake fossil was throwing up more fascinating and unexpected results. As Tim Rowe studied the head and body he could see that it was clearly the skeleton of a bird.
TIM ROWE: These bones all go together. This is a natural, verifiable new skeleton. It's a unique combination of characters with a big breast bone, a big wishbone, a flight capable wing and yet it retains claws and moving up to the skull up here we find that it still has teeth.
NARRATOR: This was an extraordinary combination of features. Birds don't have teeth or hands, yet this creature had the hands of a dinosaur and the wings of a bird. It also had the teeth of a dinosaur but the beak of a bird. It was another brand new animal scientists had never heard of or seen before.
. . .
NARRATOR: The fake fossil was a commercial fraud but a scientific goldmine. The upper portion was a bird with dinosaur features and the tail was a dinosaur with bird-like characteristics. It was not one, but two creatures showing all the evolutionary characteristics of a missing link.
You ask "Why all these lies if evolution is so very factual?" We find that the lies were not told by the scientific community as you claim, but rather by professional fakers. And just who exposed this lie? Was it creationists? No, it was by scientists. In all human enterprises, both scientific and non-, we cannot keep frauds and fakes from ever occurring. It's impossible since they all involve people. But what we can is to seek out fraud and fakery, expose it, and remove it and correct the damage done by it. That is what science does. And that is what creationism refuses to do. That is why there are so many PRATTs, false creationist claims that have were exposed decades ago and which creationists unscrupulously continue to spread.
If creationists serve the God of Truth, then why all the persistent lies?
BTW, you should visit the Genesis Panthesis site at No webpage found at provided URL: http://genesispanthesis.tripod.com/main.html by D. Jon Scott. Select the The Inspiration for Genesis Panthesis link. Scott was a young (pre-college) young-earth creationist who was so active in arguing for the cause that he set up a site and forum for it. Here is part of his story:
quote:
For a very long time I was content to explain away the mounds of evidence supporting evolutionary biology as well as mainstream geology and cosmology. Particularly the fossil record - which I feel I can safely say that I was much more well-versed in than the majority of prominent creationists (Gish et. al.), was rather easy for me to dispute in my deluded creationist mind.
After a while, I became very aware of the dishonest tactics used by creationists such as Gish and Morris, and developed a growing contempt for the majority of my fellow creationists/Christians. Though I was determined to help give creationism scientific respectability and aid in restoring the good name of the Christian religion.
I kept updating the archive and working on it straight through 1998, the year in which Caudipteryx zouii and Protarchaeopteryx robusta - two creatures which scientists described as obviously non-avian dinosaurs (which means they weren't birds), but which had feathers! I simply emphasized their avian qualities and either explained away or dismissed as unimportant their reptilian characteristics, and went on happily spreading the myth of creationism.
Yes - I had the evidence, the information, and the knowledge of how evolutionary biology works - yet I did not have the intellectual integrity to admit to the truthfulness of evolutionary theory and kept denying that this incredibly intricate law and set of 'trends' in nature could possibly have any validity.
Then, in september of 1999, the bomb dropped. I picked up my issue of the National Geographic and saw what else on a page advertising an upcoming issue; but Sinornithosaurus millenii! It had long steak-knife-shaped teeth like a T. rex, a long, muscular tail, hyper-extendable "switchblade" claws on the hind legs like Velociraptor mongoliensis, a narrow snout that looked almost like a bill, a bird-like pubic structure, and worst of all - feathers!
I simply stared at the page for a few moments, muttered "oh shit!" to myself a few times, and got up to check the N.G.News web site. This wasn't just some artistic depiction of what a reptile/bird might look like - and it was no hoax. It was a small dromaeosaurid ("raptor") with killing claws, razor-sharp teeth, and a pair of wing-like arms complete with plumage. My heart sank, and my gut churned. This was it - the one proof of evolution I had always asked for but never thought would come to light. In my mind, I was betting that even if evolution were true, the chances of finding such a beautiful example of transition would be slim enough to be dismissed as impossible. And yet here it was - proof.
I stepped outside to compose myself, and stood there looking at the world around me.
Weeks later, I began making plans to dismantle to the Talk.Science Archive, all the while researching the Christian religion. I soon came to the conclusion that since much of the first ten or twelve chapters of genesis had been plagiarized from Chaldean fairy tales and mythos, the truthfulness of the Bible must be strictly spiritual rather than spiritual and historical.
It wasn't very long before I began to realize that since the 'historical' sections of the Bible, particularly those stolen from Chaldean mythos, were intended to influence spiritual truth - that the early Israelites must have simply been making up their own "spiritual truths", trying to make the fairy tales of their Hebrew (Chaldean) ancestors match up. I was faced with the realization that the Bible could not even be taken as spiritually true...it was/is nothing more than a book of myths and fables from a time and place in which people had no scientific knowledge, and made up these stories to explain what was going on around them (though the people making up these fables probably thought that they were coming to revelations given by their God(s)).
Then that day in 1999 came back to me. I remembered standing outside on my porch, looking at the natural world of which I had always known myself to be an integral part - albeit created as such. On that day, however, I began to look at the world in a new light.
. . .
{long contemption of everything around him now being considered in that new light}
. . .
"This is it..." I spoke to myself softly, "Welcome to the real world."
That page is a decade old and has been abandoned, I'm sure, for as long. I had found it a few years after it had been written and via Google I found some more pages by and about D. Jon Scott. He had become very strongly anti-Christian. He had also become an atheist, but at some point in college had pedelled back to Wicca, becoming a Red Witch, centered on Odin as I seem to recall, with "Corvus" as part of his Wiccan name. Now 7 or 8 years later, I couldn't conclusively locate him via Google, so I don't know where he is at now.
Please note that what had deconverted him was not evolution or fossils, but rather it was solely creationism. It was creationism that had taught him to base his faith on false claims that are contrary-to-fact and to believe that if those contrary-to-fact claims are not true, then he must abandon his faith.
Creationism did its job of destroying faith and it did it well. And it would have destroyed his faith just as well if D. Jon Scott had seen Archaeoraptor liaoningensis instead of the actual fossil that he did see, Sinornithosaurus millenii.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 57 by BarackZero, posted 12-13-2010 1:05 PM BarackZero has not replied

  
Tupinambis
Junior Member (Idle past 4655 days)
Posts: 18
Joined: 12-12-2010


Message 62 of 69 (596169)
12-13-2010 4:16 PM
Reply to: Message 57 by BarackZero
12-13-2010 1:05 PM


Re: really?
I find your lack of ability to stay on topic rather disappointing BarackZero.
The Cambrian Explosion, feathered lizards and Haeckel's embryology drawings have absolutely no relevance to your attempts to utilize "gaps in the fossil record" as a case against evolution.
Lets focus on these "gaps" first and THEN proceed to the other topics.
Let it be known that there has been no fossil yet discovered that is incompatiable with or otherwise debunks the Theory of Evolution. The fact that we haven't found an intermediate form to please you is absolutely meaningless for a few reasons.
1. We haven't uncovered literally all of the fossilized animal remains ever created in the history of geologic time.
2. As soon as a transitional form between two types of animals is discovered (like Najash) all it really does is create two more gaps to either side of it.
And 3. people like who you already have a pre-conceived notion of what is right and wrong will simply ignore the fact that an intermediate form was found an insist that more intermediates be found in the new gaps that were just formed.
Najash was a basal snake with diminutive limbs, showing an obvious link between lizards and snakes. Talk to the average creationist about it and the'll demand that more transitional forms between monitors and Najash, and Najash and true limbless snakes be found to satisfy the new gaps. I wouldn't put it past you to demand the same thing intentionally or otherwise.
Your lame attempts to simply change the subject are not new to me. Try something else next time.
Edited by Tupinambis, : No reason given.
Edited by Tupinambis, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
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Taq
Member
Posts: 9972
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.6


Message 63 of 69 (596180)
12-13-2010 5:16 PM
Reply to: Message 56 by BarackZero
12-13-2010 1:00 PM


Re: Topic?
You do realize that the post was still carried on this brilliant forum, don't you?
You do realize that there is an opening post and your posts are suposed to be related to it?
From the OP:
quote:
1. I do not think that either side of the issue has definate 100% proof, and reguardless on what side of the fence you are on requires some ever so small amount of faith in your side of the arguement. even if it is just faith that science will find the answer and is on the right path. If I personally am going to pick a side and use faith, my faith goes to God a creationism. I could be wrong (it happens multiple times daily), and then I would have to switch sides.
2. The other probable reason for me is that I am not a positivist. Positivism is not the only philosophy out there when it comes to reasearch, and I believe Positivism is esentially flawed (because it relies on observation and objectivity).
Do you have any comments on this?

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Tupinambis
Junior Member (Idle past 4655 days)
Posts: 18
Joined: 12-12-2010


Message 64 of 69 (596191)
12-13-2010 6:46 PM
Reply to: Message 57 by BarackZero
12-13-2010 1:05 PM


Re: really?
quote:
BarackZero-
Then explain why there was yet another fraud when archaeologists faked a feathered flying lizard in China perhaps a decade ago. Why all these lies if evolution is so very factual?
For someone who's profile pic is a lizard I was very slow to catch this.
Archaeoraptor is NOT a lizard. I repeat, NOT a lizard. Dinosaurs are NOT lizards. Lizards are Lepidosaurs, have a three chambered heart and their legs are slung to the sides of their bodies. The Archaeoraptor is an Archosaur, has a four chambered heart and its legs are held beneath its body. The two are about as closely related as you and a platypus.
Am I nitpicking details? Why yes I am. But hey, its not the same as nit-picking typos.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 57 by BarackZero, posted 12-13-2010 1:05 PM BarackZero has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 65 by arachnophilia, posted 12-13-2010 7:35 PM Tupinambis has not replied

  
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 65 of 69 (596207)
12-13-2010 7:35 PM
Reply to: Message 64 by Tupinambis
12-13-2010 6:46 PM


Re: really?
hi tegu,
Tupinambis writes:
For someone who's profile pic is a lizard I was very slow to catch this.
Archaeoraptor is NOT a lizard. I repeat, NOT a lizard. Dinosaurs are NOT lizards. Lizards are Lepidosaurs, have a three chambered heart and their legs are slung to the sides of their bodies. The Archaeoraptor is an Archosaur, has a four chambered heart and its legs are held beneath its body. The two are about as closely related as you and a platypus.
Am I nitpicking details? Why yes I am. But hey, its not the same as nit-picking typos.
no, that's not really a nitpick. it's a very, very large difference between a flying theropod dinosaur and a lizard. he might as well have confused you with crashfrog.
but while you've briefly covered the important differences, i'd like to cover the often neglected part of this old creationist canard.
"archaeoraptor" is not a faked specimen in the way that a creationist might expect. it is not a dinosaur (or "lizard") that someone has carved feathers onto. rather, it is a chimera, and combined from two genuine specimens. one of those, the rear half, happens to be the earliest discovered specimen of microraptor zhaoianus (or perhaps gui, as they might be synonyms). the front is another genuine specimen of yanornis martini. the forgery was discovered, in part, because of the fact that it wouldn't have fit the evolutionary lineage -- it had a tail very much like a non-avian dromaeosaurid dinosaur, but a beak like a bird?
yes, read that closely barackzero. the whole back half of the forgery was a legitimate flying dinosaur, and it was discovered because of the theory of evolution. why the forgery? well, contrary to what the creationists would like, it wasn't committed by scientists. rather, it was the scientists who quickly discovered it, and yanked publication of the article in all but nat. geo. (which sort of jumped the gun) the forgery itself was committed by an unscrupulous chinese fossil prospector, who was selling such items.

אָרַח

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 Message 64 by Tupinambis, posted 12-13-2010 6:46 PM Tupinambis has not replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 66 of 69 (596229)
12-13-2010 9:39 PM
Reply to: Message 57 by BarackZero
12-13-2010 1:05 PM


Re: really?
Why don't you look up the Cambrian Explosion.
Why don't you say what mistake you want to make about it? We could all use a good laugh.
Then explain why there was yet another fraud when archaeologists faked a feathered flying lizard in China perhaps a decade ago.
They didn't. You are lying.
This is exactly what the OP is about. It must be profoundly embarrassing for any honest creationist to find himself on the same side as liars and frauds like you.
One of the most enduring of frauds was Haeckel's drawings. This fraud was perpetuated for over 100 years.
A more honest man would have said that it was intermittently successful for over 100 years.
Biologists should be ashamed of themselves, but instead, simply come up with flimsy excuses.
Biologists exposed Haeckel's blunders, omissions, and equivocations, and in return ungrateful and dishonest creationist morons who have never contributed anything to science snivel about how "biologists should be ashamed of themselves".
You guys wouldn't know that there was anything wrong with Haeckel's drawings if not for the fact that biologists, who, unlike you, know about biology, had spoonfed this fact to you. And instead of showing gratitude, you whine about them.
Small wonder that Vercingetorix is ashamed to share a religious dogma with people like you.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
 Message 67 by arachnophilia, posted 12-14-2010 12:28 AM Dr Adequate has replied

  
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1344 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 67 of 69 (596248)
12-14-2010 12:28 AM
Reply to: Message 66 by Dr Adequate
12-13-2010 9:39 PM


Re: really?
BarackZero writes:
Then explain why there was yet another fraud when archaeologists faked a feathered flying lizard in China perhaps a decade ago.
man, every time i look at this statement, another error dawns on me.
paleontologists.

אָרַח

This message is a reply to:
 Message 66 by Dr Adequate, posted 12-13-2010 9:39 PM Dr Adequate has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 68 by Dr Adequate, posted 12-14-2010 12:53 AM arachnophilia has not replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 284 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 68 of 69 (596251)
12-14-2010 12:53 AM
Reply to: Message 67 by arachnophilia
12-14-2010 12:28 AM


Re: really?
To call it an error and to suggest a correction is to suppose that there is some sense in which one complete lie can nonetheless be more accurate than another.
It would not actually make that sentence more accurate if he substituted "paleontologists" for "archeologists" than it would if he substituted "a bucketful of tiny lemon-scented anteaters called Gerald".

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 Message 67 by arachnophilia, posted 12-14-2010 12:28 AM arachnophilia has not replied

  
Admin
Director
Posts: 12998
From: EvC Forum
Joined: 06-14-2002
Member Rating: 2.3


Message 69 of 69 (596286)
12-14-2010 9:03 AM


Topic Reminder
This topic is about creationists who accept creationism for reasons that are demonstrably wrong. Please take the off topic discussion to another thread. Perhaps someone could suggest one, or propose a new thread over at Proposed New Topics.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

  
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