True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing

You're at a university, aren't you? Well now, shouldn't that be the most perfect place for you to learn something?There should be a building on your university. I believe that it should be called something like a library. There is so much information to be found within that building. You just could not believe it! You really need to use it! It is the most incredibly useful resource imaginable.How old are you? 18, maybe 19. Creationist claims go back to 1980 and even earlier. Long before you were even born. Their secret is that they continue to feed you the same false claims without ever telling you that their false claims were ever addressed, let alone refuted. BTW, that means that they were lying to you.Circa 1990, I was involved in a local popular "debate". One young man got up and announced a "recent" "scientific discovery" that would "blow you evolutionists away." He was himself blown away as the audience pointed out to him that "recent" "discovery" was at least a decade old and that it discovered nothing besides a misinterpretation of the actual data.Most of the claims date back to around 1980 and were refuted back in the 1980's. Yet they are still being presented to creationists as the latest discoveries.Learning the science that those claims are based on pays for itself. Even just going to the purported source of a creationist claim and reading what it actually says is often enough to refute that claim.Here's a real-life example of what a trip to the university library can do for you. On CompuServe in the 1980's, I encountered several creationists whose dishonesty was unbelievable. Except for one creationist, Merle Hertzler, one of the first and extremely few honest creationists I have encountered in three decades. While every other creationist on CompuServe just regurgitated the creationist crap they had fed on and resorted to highly dishonest actions to avoid discussing their own claims (obviously because they did not understand their own claims), Merle was the shining exception. He engaged in discussion to the best of his ability. And, unlike the transparent lies and broken promises of his creationist brethren, when he said that he would research something, he did research it.Honest creationists are rare and do not last long. In fact, you will find that many of this forum's opponents of creationism used to be creationists themselves. The problem for an honest creationist is that they will also research and verify creationist claims, which opens them up to discovering that those claims are false. Within a year on CompuServe, Merle had learned that YEC was false and found himself on the other side.He tells that story at Did We Evolve? in which a visit to the university library and the research there opened his eyes:

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Years ago I was fighting the good fight of creation on the Internet. I argued that evolution was impossible, for it required that the genetic code had to be changed to make new kinds of animals. It did not seem feasible to me that evolution could do this. I argued in the CompuServe debate forum, basing my arguments on Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crises. My favorite illustration was the difference between mammals and reptiles. The differences between living mammals and reptiles are substantial. Mammals all have hair, mammary glands, a four-chambered heart, and the distinct mammalian ear, with three little bones inside. These features are found in no living reptiles. I argued that this is because there is no viable intermediate between the two, that an animal could have either the reptile genetic code or the mammal code but could not be in the middle.

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An evolutionist disagreed with me. He told me that in the past there had been many intermediates. He said that there were animals that, for instance, had jaw and ear bones that were intermediate between reptiles and mammals. How did he know this? He gave a reference to an essay in Stephen Gould's Ten Little Piggies . I wrote back that since the local library had a large collection of children's book, I should be able to find that book. (I thought I was so funny). I borrowed the book, and found an interesting account of how bones in the reptile jaw evolved and changed through millions of years to become the mammals' ear. That sounded like such a clever tale. How could Gould believe it? Perhaps he made it up. But there was one little footnote, a footnote that would change my life. It said simply, "Allin, E. F. 1975. Evolution of the Mammalian Middle Ear. Journal of Morphology 147:403-38." That's it. That's all it said. But it was soon to have a huge impact on me. You see, I had developed this habit of looking things up, and had been making regular trips to the University of Pennsylvania library. I was getting involved in some serious discussions on the Internet, and was finding the scientific journals to be a reliable source of information. Well, I couldn't believe that a real scientific journal would take such a tale seriously, but, before I would declare victory, I needed to check it out.

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On my next trip to the university, I found my way to the biomedical library and located the journal archives. I retrieved the specified journal, and started to read. I could not believe my eyes. There were detailed descriptions of many intermediate fossils. The article described in detail how the bones evolved from reptiles to mammals through a long series of mammal-like reptiles. I paged through the volume in my hand. There were hundreds of pages, all loaded with information. I looked at other journals. I found page after page describing transitional fossils. More significantly, there were all of those troublesome dates. If one arranged the fossils according to date, he could see how the bones changed with time. Each fossil species was dated at a specific time range. It all fit together. I didn't know what to think. Could all of these fossil drawings be fakes? Could all of these dates be pulled out of a hat? Did these articles consist of thousands of lies? All seemed to indicate that life evolved over many millions of years. Were all of these thousands of "facts" actually guesses? I looked around me. The room was filled with many bookshelves; each was filled with hundreds of bound journals. Were all of these journals drenched with lies? Several medical students were doing research there. Perhaps some day they would need to operate on my heart or fight some disease. Was I to believe that these medical students were in this room filled with misinformation, and that they were diligently sorting out the evolutionist lies while learning medical knowledge? How could so much error have entered this room? It made no sense.

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The impact of that day in the library was truly stunning. I didn't know what to say. I could not argue against the overwhelming evidence for mammal evolution. But neither could I imagine believing it. Something had happened to me. My mind had begun to think. And it was not about to be stopped. Oh no. There is no stopping the mind set free. I went to the library and borrowed a few books on evolution and creation--diligently studying both sides of the argument. I started to read the evolutionist books with amazement. I had thought that evolutionists taught that floating cows had somehow turned into whales; that hopeful monsters had suddenly evolved without transitions; that one must have blind faith since transitional fossils did not exist; that one must simply guess at the dates for the fossils; and that one must ignore all of the evidence for young-earth creation. I was surprised to learn what these scientist actually knew about the Creationist teachings of flood geology, of the proposed young-earth proofs, and of the reported problems of evolution. And I was surprised at the answers that they had for these Creationist arguments. And I was surprised to see all the clear, logical arguments for evolution. I read with enthusiasm. I learned about isochrons, intermediate fossils, the geologic column, and much more.

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I would never see the world in the same light. Several weeks later I found myself staring at the fossil of a large dinosaur in a museum. I stared with amazement. I looked at the details of every bone in the back. And I wondered if a design so marvelous could really have evolved. But I knew that someone could show me another animal that had lived earlier and was a likely predecessor of this dinosaur that I was observing. And I knew that one could trace bones back through the fossil record to illustrate the path through which this creature had evolved. I stared and I pondered. And then I pondered some more.

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Within days, I had lost interest in fighting evolution. I began to read more and speak less. When I did debate, I confined my arguments to the origin of life issue. But I could no longer ignore what I had learned. Several months later I first sent out an email with probing questions to a Creationist who had arrived on the scene. He never responded. I have not stopped questioning.

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That is but a small part of that page and an even smaller part of his site.When I retire at the end of the year I'm enrolling in Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the university I attended over 40 years ago. It's a program at hundreds of colleges and universities that brings seniors back on campus with their own classes as well as allowing its members to audit regular university classes. The main draw for me is having access to the library again. I have a lot of research to do.You should consider spending some time in your university library doing actual research instead of the nonsense you're getting from your creationist sources. in fact, you should take a creationist claim, one that cites a scientific source, and look up that source to see what it actually says. It'll do you good.

Just what the fuck are you babbling on about?Who has ever declared that we know everything?Nobody.So then just exactly whose feathers have been ruffled?Nobody's.So then just exactly what the fuck are you babbling on about?Nothing. Absolutely nothing.So then just exactly why the fuck are you babbling on about something that nobody ever said?Nuh? (sorry, possible cultural disconnect. "Nuh?" is Yiddish which corresponds with the German "Na?" The meaning is "so just exactly why the fuck are you babbling on about?")OK, so you are just now starting your first year at university. Or maybe your second year. That is obvious because you have so far learned so little math as is evidenced by your false statements about math.Here is a cultural reference for you: strawman. In a stage play, you are supposed to beat up and completely destroy another man. So your properties man constructs a figure stuffed with straw, a strawman, that you can beat up and flail about. In some of the old films, many silents, we will see some actual actor dive into a position, the camera stopped, and the actor was replaced by a dummy that could be beaten up. In medieval and Renaissance street theater, those strawmen were often filled with animal guts and blood for the sake of theater.Strawmen have made their way into the list of informal fallacies. Basically, you propose a position that your opposition takes and then attack that position. Of course, one really big problem with that is that the position you say your opposition takes is not true.Yo! Porky! You are making a strawman argument. Your entire argument is false. Are you also deliberately lying to us?

Nobody can remove your confusion, but rather can only try to help you rid yourself of your confusion. If explaining it one way doesn't work, then we try to explain it in another way. That is standing operating procedure (SOP), but now you complain that that only increased your confusion.So far you have been feeding almost exclusively on creationist sources, which has given you a set of false contrary-to-fact expectations and misunderstanding of what science is and how it works. I can only imagine how it feels when an entirely false mind-set and world view is suddenly confronted with reality and the truth. Must feel very confusing.Only you can rid yourself of that confusion. Yet you keep presenting creationist arguments. So just exactly who is it who is presenting you as being a creationist? Look in the mirror.From what you've told us, you have been feeding almost exclusively from creationist sources. You are what you eat.I strongly recommend a change of diet. Start learning from scientific sources, starting with what science is and how it actually works. Also read critiques of your creationist sources to see what's actually in there.For example, you express opposition to religious motives, yet one of the sources you named (by posting a YouTube video by him) is IDist Jonathan Wells. I assume that much of your objections come from his Icons of Evolution. As that article points out: "Several of the scientists whose work is sourced in the book have written rebuttals to Wells, stating that they were quoted out of context, that their work has been misrepresented, or that it does not imply Wells' conclusions." So why does Wells oppose evolution? For purely religious reasons. He's a member of the Unification Church, a "Moonie", who decided that God wanted him to defend Unification Theology from Darwinism. His stated motivation for a PhD in Christian Theology (ie, another religion's theology) and his PhD in molecular and cellular biology was to defeat Darwinism. To do so, he employs the standard creationist approach of misrepresenting evolution and other sciences, by ignoring and misrepresenting the evidence supporting evolution and other sciences, and seeking to replace evolution and other sciences with ideas that support his own religious beliefs.When you use somebody as a source, you need to vet him; ie, you need to find out who he is and what agenda he has.BTW, Icons of Evolution addresses what Wells presents are deliberate deceptions being taught school children. You brought up the same complaint early on, which indicates to me that that book was a likely source of your statement. There is a definite issue in the USA over public school textbooks and the quality of science education, including a very telling incident in the 1980's concerning high school biology textbooks in California.I can tell you more about it, but the basic problem is that most science textbooks are not written by scientists, but rather by professional textbook writers who don't understand the material. In addition, smaller school districts cannot afford to hire teachers schooled in the subjects that they teach, so you end up with the PE teacher teaching high school biology (an actual local case, John Peloza, a creationist who abused his position to proselytize to students and then, when reprimanded for it, sued the school district for violating his freedom of religion), in which case they end up teaching their own misconceptions about science and evolution.So then, you say that you do not want to be a creationist. Well, you have turned yourself into a creationist by accepting their propaganda uncritically. If you really and truly do not want to be a creationist, then you must reverse the process. We cannot do that for you; only you can. ABE (added by edit, not "Anybody But England"):A very wise general wrote millennia ago:

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Therefore I say: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.

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When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal.

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If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."

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You have chosen to declare evolution your enemy, yet you know nothing about it. Worse than nothing, because you have learned falsehoods and misconceptions about it, a strawman. In order to properly fight evolution, then you must learn everything you possibly can about it. Only then can you actually fight evolution itself and have any hope of doing so effectively. If you don't, then you will waste all your efforts fighting a strawman, never coming even close to throwing a punch at evolution. Fight your foe, not a shadow.Ironically, creationist parents are dooming their children to fight shadows. They want their children to be able to fight evolution, yet their method is to campaign for laws that would keep their children from ever learning evolution. You cannot effectively fight an enemy you don't know.You must also know yourself, which you do not. You have turned yourself into a creationist, but deny that you have done so. You have accepted a position without having examined it. You're 19, within the right age range for uncritically accepting and fanatically following some glib talker in a crusade for some cause. We've all been that age before. We've all grown out of it (well, most of us). But since you haven't done due diligence and researched that cause or that crusade or that glib talker (eg, Wells), then you don't know yourself. As already pointed out, you don't even know that you have turned yourself into a creationist.So, you don't know your enemy and you don't know yourself. What are your chances?

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Professional Advice:The most important classes in your engineering curriculum and the English classes, especially the composition classes where you learn to write. Also classes in public speaking. Working professionally as an engineer, the vast majority of your time will be spent communicating.Besides doing a lot of reading, you will mostly be writing. Reports, specifications, technical and maintenance manuals, user manual, etc. In order to do so, you must learn proper writing techniques which include using proper grammar and spelling, using proper sentence and paragraph structure, etc. Your goal in writing must be to express that which you wish to communicate in a manner as clear and unambiguous as possible, so that your receiver will understand you.In university, you are given very simple and usually trivial projects, most of which you simply do on your own. Later, they will give you slightly larger projects and have you form teams of a few people. Professionally, you will be working on enormous projects with much larger teams, many of whom split off to form smaller teams to work on different parts of the project. You will been to be able to communicate effectively with your team members, most commonly by memo or email. Again, written communication skills are of the utmost importance. That becomes far more important when you need to work with customers or sub-contractors or vendors remotely.Plus, there are the many meetings that you will need to sit through and contribute to. That's where the public speaking comes into play.I have talked with so many engineers who had shunned English class in college, thinking that had nothing to do with engineering, only to later express their deep regret for that poor choice.BTW, one really great method for learning English grammar is to learn a foreign language. If nothing else, it will teach you the vital importance of a grammar as the key to using the language. And if you learn German, then you will learn vastly more about English grammar than you ever thought to be possible (English is definitely a Germanic language, albeit with a thick slathering of French vocabulary covering it up).The best time to start learning how to communicate is yesterday. And learning to touch-type will also help greatly.

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Regarding the nature of textbooks, biologist Bill Bennetta ran The Textbook League, where he published reviews of textbooks and other educational material. He closed the human part of the site in 2011 (retiring at age 72), but kept the site up. Two articles about the site that are online are:

• At Mother Jones: One Man’s Crusade Against Fundamentalist Claptrap
  

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  This spring, poor health and scarce funds forced Bennetta to shutter the Textbook League. Yet he’s content to hole up in his clapboard house, far beyond the fray. You have [Glenn] Beck and all those guys saying whatever they’re saying this week. If you look in the textbooks, you see something very similar, he says. What these people do is create a past that never existed and relate it to a present that doesn’t exist. That’s why this erudite, lifelong science buff spent 22 years watchdogging religious groupseven though he was powerless to keep them from hijacking his work. Nature doesn’t lie, he says. Men do.

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• The Textbook League Closes Its Books, Stays Online
  

In the late 1980's when the California School Board was considering new high school biology textbooks, Bill Bennetta recruited a panel of scientists to review the proposed books. None of those books were even remotely acceptable, being full of misconceptions and outright false statements. Only one book came even close, so the scientists drew up a lengthy list of corrections that needed to be made. The publisher made a few of the corrections and then the state school board accepted the book behind the scientists' backs.So if you wish to complain about what's in the textbooks, consider how it got there. Is that acceptable? No! Should it be corrected? Yes! But your creationist idols do not want to correct the problems, but rather they want to make it far worse.Edited by dwise1, : ABE

Yeah, I keep casting pearls before swine and all it does is irritate the swine.Your idol, Jonathan Wells, is a creationist. By accepting his writings uncritically, you are turning yourself into a creationist.If you only read creationist materials which misrepresent evolution and the other sciences, then you will get a false idea of what evolution and science are. How is that supposed to be bullshit? Please be specific.Saying that in order to learn about a subject then you need to study that subject, how is that supposed to be bullshit?Saying that in order to oppose evolution, then you need to oppose it and not some strawman caricature of it, how is that supposed to be bullshit?Saying that you need to critically examine all your sources, including your creationist idol, Jonathan Wells, how is that supposed to be bullshit?Learn what evolution actually is. Learn how evolution is actually supposed to work. Learn what the evidence actually is. Learn how science works (including what a theory actually is). How is that supposed to be bullshit?And BTW. Laws just describe how we observe things to work, not why it is that they work that way. For that deeper question, we need science to build a theory. Theories do not grow up to become laws, but rather theories explain laws. Laws do very little to expand our knowledge, to lead us to new discoveries, rather it is the theories that expand our knowledge and lead us to new discoveries. How is that supposed to be bullshit?Also, engineering is not science; engineers are not scientists. Engineering is just a discipline of applied technology. Many engineers, including engineering professors, are openly contemptuous of scientists and their theories. In those creationist lists of "scientists who believed in creation", many of them are in fact engineers.Just a few more pearls cast before you. And one more, a purported Mark Twain quote:

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When I was 18, I thought my father was the stupidest man who had ever lived. But when I was 21, I was amazed at how much the old boy had learned in only three years.

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See you in a few years.

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Sorry, but that doesn't make sense. Populations evolve over generations, whereas in those examples individuals within a single generation of the population would be spending some time in the water and some time out. The proportions of those times could change over the generations such that they would be more or less land-bound.This is an example where it would help you greatly to learn more about evolution and about how it works. With that better knowledge, you could ask a better question that would give you a more meaningful answer. Yes, biogeography. It also involves what are called ring species or "chain species" (a ring spread out in a straight line), in which you can follow a series of very similar species blending from one to the other along the ring or chain until you reach the ends with two rather different species.You have an interesting feature near you, a number of faunal boundaries in Indonesia while include the Wallace line. As you go from island to island, you find land animals who are very similar to each other, that is until you reach a boundary on the other side of which the land animals are very different, but on that other side of the boundary they are similar among themselves as you go from island to island. The Wallace Line runs between Borneo and Sulawesi and between Bali and Lombok. If we examine the ocean depths, we find that the islands west of Borneo to connect to it by shallow water, about 200 ft, whereas the Wallace Line traces along a deep-water strait of thousands of feet deep -- between Bali and Lombok, the water is about 400 to over 1000 feet deep. During the ice age, sea levels were much lower, nearly 400 feet lower, so what's shallow water now was dry land then -- the Persian Gulf is less than 200 feet deep, so it too was dry land.There are similar biogeographic boundaries to the east of the Wallace Line: Weber's Line and Lydekker's Line. Despite repeated creationist mischaracterizations, birds cannot evolve into mammals, no more than dogs can evolve into cats. They claim that such things not happening disproves evolution, whereas actually evolution would be disproven if things did happen.Rather, there's parallel or convergent evolution in which different unrelated species develop very similar physical characteristics because they live in the same kind of environment. Hence whales and dolphins evolved bodies and life styles very similar to fish while never becoming fish but rather remaining mammals. While they may appear the same superficially, they are very different when you take a closer look. Yes, of course. Hard to say, since civilization isolates us from the environment, or should we say that it creates an artificial environment. I don't think there's much selective pressure to drive us in any particular direction(s), so mainly I foresee ever increasing genetic diversity, including some bad traits that we keep from being selected against. Yes, it can, if it is being selected for. While our knowledge and technology could easily continue to progress, that would not require our own brain power to increase. If anything, we may see a drop in intelligence, especially if we continue to offload ever more of our mental tasks onto our technology for it to perform them. As I pointed out before, with a lower tech level you must work smarter, but with a higher tech level you can afford to work dumb and still get the job done. That question is a bit mangled. Please heed my professional advice to you about learning how to communicate effectively. That is the most important skill you can develop in order to be an engineer and that is what you will be spending the vast majority of your professional time doing.I don't understand what you are asking there:

• Are you questioning claims for a young earth and are asking us how to counter those claims?
• Or despite all your belly-aching about being called a creationist, does it turn out that you are indeed a young-earth creationist (YEC)?

Either way, present one of those claims and we can discuss it. The "shrinking sun"? The rate at which the sun is burning its fuel? The rate at which the earth's rotation is slowing down? The speed of light slowing down? Radiocarbon dating anomalies? Niagara Falls?