dwise1
Member Posts: 6076 Joined: 05-02-2006 Member Rating: 7.0
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Re: Not one fossil
Firstly I don't represent evolution or religion ok. ... Wake up evos. This is not science. This is philosophy. Anti religious philosophy You appear to have fallen into a false dichotomy, an either-or mentality. You appear to think that there is conflict between science and religion and between evolution and creation (as is evidenced by your last sentence there). That false mentality is central to creationist rhetoric along with being a common misconception among non-creationists, mostly stemming from taking creationist false statements at face value (eg, "If evolution is true then the Bible is false and God does not exist." and a legion of similar statements). If you believe that there is conflict between evolution and creation, then please explain to us why you would think that. A new topic would be appropriate if an actual discussion were to emerge from this question, but I somehow doubt that you will respond. There is no inherent conflict between evolution and creation by supernatural means. The only conflict that can arise is if one's claims of creation include contrary-to-fact claims as they mere mortal fallible humans dare to dictate to God how He can and cannot have Created. Similarly, there is no inherent conflict between science and religion unless religion chooses to create conflict with statements about the real world that are contrary to fact. In both cases, it is religion that would create any conflict, not science. According to actual creationists, God created the natural universe (AKA "the physical universe", AKA "the real world") -- please note that my reference to "actual creationists" is appropriate since one of our most rabid creationists here, Faith, rejected that idea altogether for no reason that I can remember her having given. Science is the study of the physical universe, AKA "the real world", and how it works. When done correctly (as science always strives to do in order to avoid invalid results), science cannot contradict the Creation, regardless of how It actually got here (ie, regardless of which of countless Creator Gods had actually done the deed, if any). Science only deals with how the real world works and does not get involved with the supernatural, which it cannot deal with. Now, there is a theology far too often adopted by creationists (and which is fundamental to Intelligent Design) called " The God of the Gaps", which basically posits that God exists within the gaps of human knowledge. That this leads to viewing God as weak and hiding frightened in perpetual fear of Man's increasing knowledge should be obvious even to the most pious of observers. Its application among IDists and many creationists is to argue: "Oh look how complex this is! We in our ignorance cannot imagine how it could have evolved, therefore God!" Besides diminishing God even further with each new discovery by humans, it also establishes a metric by which to disprove God: any naturalistic explanation for something disproves God. That is utterly false, yet that is the implicit creationist and IDist position. Thus "creation science" accomplishes what no anti-God atheist ever could, disproving the existence of God. The irony it burns! By the same token, however life appeared, once it came into existence it started evolving. Stated very basically, evolution is the cumulative results and effects of life doing what life naturally does, of populations of organisms surviving and reproducing and surviving and reproducing. That would have happened regardless of how life had gotten there in the first place. Therefore, evolution does not contradict creation ... unless "creation" is arbitrarily redefined to contradict the real world, such as YEC does. Even abiogenesis does not inherently contradict creation. In opposition to "The God of the Gaps" stands God as "The Sovereign over Nature". Instead of hiding impotent terrified in the shadows of the gaps, the Sovereign over Nature is omnipotent and able to use all the forces and processes of Nature, which It had created in the first place. For example, from Genesis 1 of the King James Version:
quote:
1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, [and] the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed [is] in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the
moving creature that hath life, and fowl [that] may fly above
the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
1) God is not being described as having created all that life directly, but rather had used the earth and the waters as intermediate agents which then performed all that work. 2) For those apologists who want to try to match up actual earth history with Genesis, Genesis has land life appearing two full days before sea life, completely opposite of what we actually know. Sorry, but that's how the matzah crumbles. So then, did the Creator magically poof life into existence (again, please note that our most rabid creationist here, Faith, strongly opposes any mention of God having done anything magically, though that context is mainly geological) or did the Creator use natural processes to bring life into existence? What difference would it make? Well, for actual creationists it would make no difference. For YECs who want to dictate to God how He did and could not have created (never a good idea!), God using the natural processes He had Himself created would end up disproving God. What idiocy!
Many of them just automatically dismiss the facts presented by the op and others are just outright rude and offensive. You don't know the players yet. Mike the Wiz is basically a YEC troll who spends most of his time in creationist forums enraptured in their massive circle jerk in the sky and where no one can dare ever question any of their unsupported and false claims. On occasion, he will return here to try to stir up trouble with his outrageously false posts. Such as the OP ( Message 1), which does nothing more than to repost a long refuted claim. As I responded in Message 8:
DWise1 writes: This nonsense again? I first read it in 1970 in the original version of Chick Pubs' "Big Daddy?". That was 46 years ago, nearly half a century! And I'm sure that it was being kicked around for decades before that. And despite it being refuted time after time the same old creationist lies just keep coming back. A few decades ago, a local creationist created his own poor man's cheap knock-off of the Chick Pubs' "Big Daddy?" (BTW, now all you can find is an inferior second edition purportedly written by that convicted fraud, Kent Hovind, whereas I had read the original back circa 1970, but unfortunately never kept a copy, a lament sung by so many comic book readers). The original included that parody of Time's March of Human Evolution (my name just now made up), of which Mike the Wiz' list is a copy and which my local creationist reproduced in his own Chick Pub knock-off. Here is my response to that creationist (G.S. is the high school teacher with a PhD, Dr. Gee I'm Smart, while Stu is the "true Christian student -- gee, isn't this guy oh so subtle?):
quote:
Page 3: Frame 1: G.S.: Sure! We evolutionists are very proud of it. Stu : Isn't it true that Heidelberg man was built from one jawbone claimed to be human? That Nebraska man was built from one tooth later found to be a pig's? That Piltdown man was built by one jawbone which was later revealed to be an ape's jaw? That there is no evidence to merit Peking man? That Neanderthal, New Guinea and Cro-Magnon are as human as any human today? Oh, no. Not this nonsense again. Instead of trying to deal with the current list of hominid fossils, you put together a parade of straw men just so you can blow them away. Your techniques vary a bit from one to the other. Some of these (Nebraska and Piltdown) were discredited long ago and would never be included in a legitimate chart. Then you try to isolate two others (Heidelberg and Peking) as being individual hominids based on questionable or nonexistent evidence when they actually are examples of Homo erectus, which is well-documented and widespread. Let's get down to some specifics: Heidelberg Man:
The remains of Heidelberg Man indeed consist solely of a single massive lower jaw found in a sand pit near Heidelberg, Germany. This jaw is large and heavy and lacks a chin, unlike modern man. The teeth are of moderate size and are generally like modern man's. In many respects, it resembles Neanderthal, which some scientists consider it to be ancestral to. The consensus is that it is a later grade of Homo erectus, whose remains have been found in Africa, Asia, and Europe and whose later examples are found to grade into Neanderthal forms. Homo erectus is well-documented and widespread, so the Heidelberg remains are hardly an isolated case. I have not heard of anybody having claimed that it was human. Could you please provide more information on this point? Nebraska Man:
"Nebraska Man" (Hesperopithecus) was a mistaken, though not undisputed, "reconstruction" from a human-looking tooth. Hesperopithecus only lasted a few years before it was refuted by the same team that had found it. Even though it was laid to rest over half a century ago, creationists continue to misrepresent it as part of current evolutionary thought. Harold Cook found the tooth in Nebraska in 1917 and sent it to vertebrate paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, President of the American Museum of Natural History, in March 1922 to determine the tooth's affinities. Osborn determined that the tooth appeared to be "one hundred per cent anthropoid," announced Hesperopithecus haroldcookii as the first anthropoid ape from America, and sent casts of the tooth out to 26 institutions in Europe and America. As would be expected, Hesperopithecus was largely met with skepticism, but a few scientists did acknowledge Osborn's claim. One of them, British anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, helped an artist, Amedee Forestier, come up with an imaginative artistic reconstruction, which appeared in the Illustrated London News. Osborn and his colleagues were unimpressed with the drawing, feeling that "such a drawing or 'reconstruction' would doubtless be only a figment of the imagination of no scientific value, and undoubtedly inaccurate." This "reconstruction" did not appear in any other publication until it was "rediscovered" by creationists and reprinted in their own books. Rather, Osborn chose to interpret the fossil as that of an anthropoid ape and put a colleague, William King Gregory, in charge of defending it. At first, Gregory concluded that the tooth "combines characters seen in the molars of the chimpanzee, of Pithecanthropus, and of man, but ... it is hardly safe to affirm more than that Hesperopithecus was structurally related to all three." Then later in 1923, Gregory backed off a bit and suggested that it was of the gorilla-chimpanzee group. Indeed, it was Elliot Smith who had made the overzealous extrapolations from the tooth; most other scientists, including its discoverer and defender, were much more cautious. Which is as it should have been. Starting with further field work at the original site in 1925, doubt began to spread about the tooth's owner. By 1927, Gregory became aware that Hesperopithecus was an extinct peccary (pig) and he printed a retraction in the journal, _Science_. As far as science was concerned, that was the end of "Nebraska Man." Misidentification of incomplete fossil specimens is not uncommon; the self-correcting nature of science normally takes care of them as it did for Hesperopithecus. Nor was the misidentification of the tooth totally unwarranted. It does bear a compelling resemblance to hominid molar teeth in terms of size, shape, and wear patterns. However, the tooth is not an upper molar, but a rotated upper premolar (or bicuspid) which had undergone abnormal wear. Ironically, 13 years prior Harold Cook and W.D. Matthews, a colleague of Osborn, had observed a startling resemblance between the premolars and molars of Miocene peccaries and anthropoid apes, so that they "might well be mistaken for them by anyone not familiar with the dentition of Miocene peccaries." A mistake was made and it was corrected, as it should be in science. And in this case, it only took five years to go from "discovery" to refutation -- by its very discoverers! When a creationist makes a mistake, he simply denies it and continues to use the mistake. Now, given all this, why did you misrepresent "Nebraska Man" as being current? Piltdown Man:
Like "Nebraska Man," Piltdown Man (Eoanthropus dawsonii) was a mistake that has been corrected. The main differences are in how long that correction took and that it had been a deliberate hoax. It is still not known "who dun it" and the finger has been pointed at the discoverer Charles Dawson, his digging partner Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Piltdown proponent Arthur Smith Woodward, and, more recently, even at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Dawson had discovered the first skull fragments in a gravel pit at Piltdown in 1908. After collecting fossils there until mid 1912, he took them to Woodward for evaluation. When the three (Dawson, Woodward, and Teilhard) continued digging later in 1912, the first jaw was found. Woodward published in December. The find instantly attracted much criticism. The skull was thick but otherwise indistinguishable from modern humans and the jaw was identified as "chimpanzee" (actually it was from an orangutan) except for the wear on the teeth which appeared human (those wear patterns had been filed in). The critics, who were many, clearly saw that the combination was a monstrosity and argued that the remains were of two different animals that had been mixed together. Since it fit the current ideas of human evolution that a large brain would have developed first, Woodward stoutly defended Piltdown Man until his death at the end of the 1940's. Then in 1914 a second find associating a human skull and apish jaw with human wear patterns tipped the scales in favor of Woodward and most critics were effectively silenced. It was finally in 1953 that Piltdown was exposed by Kenneth Oakley, J.S. Weiner, and W.E. le Gros Clark. When the bones failed an fluoride age test, further examination showed that they had been chemically stained to simulate great age and that the teeth had been filed down. Furthermore, the mammal fossils that had been found at Piltdown had been planted there and the flint tools found there had been recently carved. Just as the critics had said, the skull was human and the jaw was ape. The whole thing was a hoax. True to the corrective nature of science, Piltdown Man was publically exposed as a hoax and he was "evicted" from the family tree, never to be used again -- except by creationists. When scientists construct any kind of chart or tree of human descent, Piltdown NEVER appears on it. Why then did you include him and misrepresent him as a currently accepted human ancestor? Are you deliberately trying to deceive your readers? Creationists parade Nebraska and Piltdown Man to show the folly of science, yet both cases actually illustrate the greatest strength of science: through continual testing and re-evaluation, mistakes can be detected and corrected. Both Nebraska and Piltdown were mistakes, they were discovered and immediately revealed to the public for the mistakes they were, and neither received any further consideration from science. Contrast this with many creationist claims, such as the Paluxy "man-prints" and the self-exploding bombardier beetle, which creationists of the ICR have admitted as being mistakes and yet they continued to use the same claims. They proclaim loudly about the dust motes in science's eye, yet they cannot see the boulders in their own eye. Peking Man:
Here is another case of creationists trying to discredit science by concentrating on a few specific details about one specific fossil and forgetting the entire story. In 1927 while digging in cave deposits at Choukoutien, about 50 km southwest of Beijing (then Peking), Dr. Davidson Black discovered a few hominid molar teeth and named them Sinanthropus pekinensis ("Peking Man"). Two years later, his team discovered a complete and undistorted skull of the same species. While Black felt that his naming was justified, anthropologists at the time felt that the find was another example of Dubois' Pithecanthropus ("Java Man"), which we now call Homo erectus. After the discovery, Black sent photographs, measurements, and a preliminary descriptive account to Marcellin Boule at the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris. When Black died in 1934, he was replaced by Franz Weidenreich, who produced the definitive monographs on the fossils. He made further photographs, note, measurements, and a set of excellent casts, which he took with him as he fled the oncoming Japanese invasion. He had left the original fossils in China to be evacuated with a Marine detachment, but when they arrived at the port on 7 Dec 1941, their ship was sunk and they were captured. The original fossils disappeared. Now Dr. Gish of the ICR freely admits that if we can trust Weidenreich's work then Peking Man would indeed "occup[y] a position intermediate between anthropoid apes and man." So of course Gish and other creationists do everything they can to discredit Weidenreich's work and to claim that the only evidence for Peking Man are the casts and a few teeth. Gish even goes so far as to cast doubt on the very existence of the caves at Choukoutien. After World War II, especially after China opened to the West again, further digging at those "nonexistent" caves has yielded many more finds, so that the evidence for Peking Man is massive. Interestingly, the back part of a skull found in 1934 fits perfectly with a front portion found in 1966. On top of all this evidence, Peking Man is no isolated case, but is only one of many examples of Homo erectus remains which have been found in Africa, Asia, and Europe, with late examples grading into Neanderthal forms. Homo erectus is well-documented and widespread. "No evidence"? Neanderthal:
"That Neanderthal, ... [is] as human as any human today?" This brings to mind the following comment: "Indeed, W. L. Duckworth [British professor at the turn of the century] once exuberantly exclaimed that if Neandertal man entered a bar in modern dress the majority would not notice him. One marvels at the sort of person Duckworth drank with." (_The Piltdown Men_, Ronald Millar, p. 148) A good part of the disagreement over Neanderthal does lie in how to classify him. This ranges from treating him as part of our genus and species (Homo sapiens neandertalensis) to classifying him as a late form of Homo erectus. Indeed, late examples of Homo erectus are found to grade into early Neanderthal forms. One thing they do all agree on is that Neanderthal predates modern man. Even if we do group him within our own genus and species, the fact remains that Neanderthal morphology is very distinctive and different from that of modern man. Even though creationists try to explain their morphology away as having been caused by disease, none of those claims stand up to examination. In a systematic study of multiple Neanderthal crania, G. M. Morant found certain characteristics of all the skulls to lie either well outside or entirely outside the interracial distributions for modern man. New Guinea:
What the hell is "New Guinea Man"? I've never heard of this one before and I have been unable to find any mention of it anywhere, not even in creationist books. Is there another name used for it and what is the story supposed to be? Cro-Magnon:
Cro-Magnon remains date back about 40,000 years and are indeed very similar to modern man. There are a number of small skeletal differences between Cro-Magnon and modern man, but only about as much as between the modern races. Cro-Magnon is clearly an earlier form of modern man which is very closely related to us and I know of no scientist who claims differently. What claims were you thinking about? This does raise an interesting problem about "missing links." In their "no transitional forms" complaint, creationists often demand to know where the "missing links" are: i.e. given two different forms, come up with one that is intermediate between them. The practical problem with this is that once you do that, you no longer have a single to gap to account for, but two gaps for which you must now find two more intermediates! Accomplish that and you will have four gaps requiring four more "missing links." And so on, with the quantity of demands doubling each time! It'll never end until a continuous spectrum is achieved, which is impossible since there isn't even a continuous spectrum from one generation to the next; in strict terms, you cannot be considered as being a transitional form between your own parents and your own children, even though you are definitely related. Furthermore, Richard Dawkins has suggested that if the fossil record were entirely complete, if every single "missing link" were present and accounted for, that the patterns of evolution would be extremely difficult to see. We wouldn't know where to draw the lines. We already see this happening with species of frogs ranging across the Eastern Seaboard of which neighboring species are related closely enough to interbreed and yet the more distant species are too different to be able to. Where can we draw the line between them? The same thing has happened to herring gulls that ring the Arctic Sea; by the time the gradations make it around the pole, you have an entirely different species. Just where along that continuum do you draw the lines? So then, if you would not accept a "missing link" that is different from us nor one that is very similar, what kind of "missing link" would you accept?
It was on this forum that I encountered an acronym: PRATT -- "Point Refuted A Thousand Times".
But out of all these one eyed evolutionists ... Are you calling us all penises? Is he calling us all penises? Is he having a laugh?
Robin Williams writes: It's Willie, the One-Eyed Wonder Weasel! (in Death to Smoochy, the scene of a live children's TV show he tried to sabotage with a penis cookie) Also, on Drew Carey's comedy improve show (whose name I forget), they were supposed to portray a penis and one commedienne (that's the feminine form in case you are so grammatically deprived) made sure to maintain that one-eyed stare. So fuck you too, you hypocritical "true Christian" asshole!
| Replies to this message: | | | Message 164 by JonF, posted 08-27-2017 4:16 PM | | dwise1 has replied |
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