From the history presented, we must conclude this is also a lie. There are literally millions of data points that evidence evolution on a macro scale. Your lie that we do not have or understand this data is your religious intransigence against actual knowledge. Knowledge that calls your god a fantasy. Your presence here is your continued attempt to subvert reality to foster the Big Lie that your god exists. It doesn’t. And you cannot show otherwise. We can show evolution as defined by the ToE. We can show micro to macro in the fossil record as well as in the lab. We know how whales evolved from pakicetus over 50 million years. We have the data. We have the fossils. And those that study these things all agree the evidence is conclusive. Whales evolved from the 4-legged land animal pakicetus and we know each step along the way and we have lots of fossils of the intermediate forms like ambulocetus, remingtoncetus and basilsaurus. And we can chart the same for millions of organism. Your contention that we do not know these things is a ridiculous fabrication borne of your catholic-centered stupidity and a deep need for you to lie your god back into contention as affective in this universe. The ToE is real. Your god is not.
He maintains that he is not a YEC solely on the point that he claims to not believe in a young earth. He is most certainly identical to YECs except for that one very minor point. Though that doesn't mean that he isn't lying about that too, since many YECs pretend not to be since the young earth position is completely indefensible and leaves them very vulnerable.
He reminds me of that scene in I, Claudius where Augustus Caesar (in the first role I had seen Brian Blessed in) in the midst of his morality campaign finally learns of his daughter Julia's rampant promiscuity (to put it very mildly). He gathers her lovers to confront them:
Caesar (enraged): Who here has slept with my daughter? (No one responds but rather they all hang their heads in shame and fear) Caesar (confronting one individual in particular): What about you? Did you sleep with my daughter? Individual: We didn't exactly sleep. Caesar: "Didn't exactly sleep" (then bores a hole through the man with his enraged glare)
Dredge will insist that he's not a YEC solely because he allegedly doesn't follow the young-earth party line, but he's pure creationist in all other ways.
How did the two hind-legs of a land animal evolve into the tail of a whale?
From one of many sources all saying the same thing (this from Whale Flukes - Enchanted Learning -- item of particular interest in bold):
quote
A whale's tail is composed of two lobes, each of which is called a fluke. There is a notch, a v-shaped indentation where the flukes (or lobes) of a whale's tail meet.
Flukes move up and down to propel the whale through the water. (This is unlike fish tails which move left and right.)
Flukes have no bones in them. They are made of muscles and dense fibrous tissue.
The arteries that supply the flukes with blood are surrounded by veins to maintain the whale's temperature.
That "dense fibrous tissue" is also called "connective tissue". The vertebrae of the spine end before getting to the flukes, so they are not directly attached to the spine.
Whales' vestigial pelvic bones are located well forward of the flukes, by a foot or more in porpoises and proportionally farther forward in larger cetaceans. The hind legs of the ancestral species would have attached to the pelvis, since that is what hind legs do, after all. Hence it is no surprise that, when vestigial limb buds are expressed in rare individuals, those limb buds appear where the hind limbs used to be, the same distance forward of the flukes as the pelvic bones.
Your "How did the two hind-legs of a land animal evolve into the tail of a whale?" is therefore complete and utterly stupid bullshit nonsense.
Given its gross ignorance and stupidity, we are within our rights to request where you had gotten the nonsense from? Which creationist source?
And also, given that creationists will lie about everything and anything they can, consider that all your creationist sources are lying to you!
Even you cannot trust a single word a creationist tells you, just as we know full well that we cannot trust any creationist claim.
Unlike you, I have a functioning brain. I know you have no experience in this, but a functioning brain wants to exercise itself, to think about things, to work things out, and to figure how to communicate with others.
Of course, I already knew that you are too willfully stupid of a self-admitted mid-grade idiot (you report having an IQ around 10) to be able to understand what I had written. Pearls cast before you, swine. But I figured: "However, others may find this discussion interesting or even useful."
Re: Dredge thinks not knowing everything is not knowing anything
And you completely ignore the topic of my reply to your false statement (Message 359):
Dredged Sludge writes:
Please be advised that ToE is a product of atheism and is the religion of atheists.
Furthermore, my Message 370 to which you failed to respond developed a sound case for my assessment that your statement is completely false. Something that you could never do for your false statement.
The reason for that is that we know what we are talking about, whereas you creationists have absolutely no clue. Because we know what we are talking about, we can work with those ideas and explain them and defend them. You creationists can do none of that, because you do not know what you are talking about.
In about 35 years of trying to discuss with creationists, I cannot think of even a single creationist who could even try to begin to support or defend or even explain his own position -- notable exception was Merle on CompuServe, the only honest creationist I can remember, but he left creationism within a year out of disgust for it.
For example, there are the questions that I asked you in Message 304:
DWise1 writes:
Of course, it's biological evolution. That's what we have been talking about all this time and have been explaining to you over and over again.
So what are you talking about?
What do you think evolution is? Please describe it as completely as you can.
How to you think that evolution works or is supposed to work? Please include what you would consider to be the results or consequences of evolution and explain completely why those would be the results or consequences.
What do you think is the evolutionary explanation of how speciation (the formation of a new species) works and happens? Do try to be as specific as you can be.
And my assessment of that was:
DWise1 writes:
Of course, you will never answer any of those questions. In the past four decades I have never seen any creationist even attempt it, but rather all they ever do is avoid those questions.
Why won't any creationist ever answer those basic questions? In part because they have no clue what they are talking about, but rather just mindlessly repeat creationist claims and "arguments" (read "cheap rhetorical tricks") they have heard but do not understand. Although that is obviously true, there's also the simple fact that actual discussion, exchanging of ideas, and learning would be directly counter-productive to their mission:
For most creationists, their mission is to be nothing more than bottom-feeding trolls.
Try answering those questions. Demonstrate that you can keep up.
Of course I expect nothing of you except more bullshit. You are very severely underpowered and outgunned. Basically, you're trying to fight against gunboats with a punt in 10 fathom water (a punt is a small river boat that you propel with a pole shoved against the river bottom; a 16-foot pole would be useless in 60 feet of water (somebody with more patience please explain that to Dredge since he won't get it) ). Return to drydock for upgrades (ie, learn something!).
Re: Dredge thinks not knowing everything is not knowing anything
Please stop repeating this stupid falsehood. You're making a fool of yourself.
Didn't your mommy ever warn you to not look in the mirror when you're projecting your own failings on others?
Also, does your mommy know that, despite being a middle-grade idiot who's also willfully stupid, you have somehow figured out how to defeat the child-proofing locks on the computer room door?
And I strongly suspect that you are padding your resume. Your IQ cannot possibly be as high as 10. You keep proving that it must be much lower.
Your particular pathology makes me wonder: is a negative IQ score possible? In case that big word, "negative", confuses you, it means "less than zero."
You don't know that whales evolved according to ToE.
Yes, we do. Again, you're just too stupid to see it.
Make that willfully stupid. Which, along with gross dishonesty and lying, is an occupational hazard for creationists. Creationism corrupts them into it and they need it to remain a creationist.
But even if you had the intellect you could not look upon the brilliant glare of reality that leads to the end of your god. It would burn your eyes. So you ignore any facts and any reasoning and just knee-jerk "you can't prove". Must maintain the fantasy at all costs.
Certainly, that would be the case if he knew what he was doing. But he doesn't.
Another powerful factor is his near-total ignorance! He literally has no clue what he is talking about.
He doesn't understand anything about the actual science nor about how anything actually works. Instead, creationism has replaced all that with nonsensical misrepresentations and redefinitions. In that way, creationism has deceived him and perverted him.
But he not only doesn't understand anything about the science, he also doesn't understand anything about his own claims! No creationist understands the claims and "arguments" that he presents and it shows! We have witnessed that just about every single time we try to discuss a creationist's own claim with him.
He simply cannot discuss his own claim, nor support it in any way, nor defend it. All he knows is how to repeat it, and nothing else. All he knows is the wording, but he has no clue what the claim/argument means, what it is based on, what its assumptions are, anything at all except for how to repeat it!
I remember how the new Jesus Freaks were being trained at the beginning of that movement circa 1970. They read scripts of proselytizing "conversations", often in cartoon form, and memorized them. Then when they had found a victim, they would use the script. Well, I had eyes to see and ears to hear (Matthew 13:9-17 -- which is quite different from Sludge's misunderstanding of his purportedly own Scripture (he could be lying about that too) ) having seen that training, so I developed a fool-proof defense against their subterfuge: I would routinely go off-script with them and confuse the hell out of them. They don't understand their own scripts -- all they know is that they were taught those scripts worked every time, that there was no defense against them.
Well, yes there is a defense against their scripts: address them directly and elicit honest discussion. No proselytizer has any response to that except to either change the subject or become increasingly hostile, even to the point of becoming a sludge-dwelling troll. As we have seen creationists do repeatedly -- for me, I've seen it as typical creationist behavior for the past 35 years.
They do not even know their own claims and arguments enough to be able to reword them. Any deviation from the exact wording that they had memorized is far above their pay-grade. They cannot do it!
That is why they find themselves reduced to just repeating the exact same wording over and over again. Mindlessly regurgitating the BS they had been taught.
That's a creationist lie. First, I don't give a flying fuck about "Darwinists". I have never met a "Darwinist".
For the most part, "Darwinists" went extinct by the middle of the 20th Century having been replaced by neo-Darwinists via the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis of Darwinism and Mendelian genetics (et alia) -- it's a bit more involved than that summary, so follow the link. Darwin was never able to solve the problem of inheritance, which was solved by Mendel -- ironically (and perhaps anecdotally) a copy of Mendel's monograph was in Darwin's library, but he had apparently never gotten around to reading it. Darwin had tried to solve that problem with his pangenetic theory which basically amounted to a revival of Lamarckian ideas of acquired traits. When biologists rediscovered Mendelian genetics and started to study and experiment with mutation around 1900, they considered Darwinism as having been disproven. In reality, it was Darwin's pangenetics that had been disproven, but not the other aspects of his theory of evolution such as natural selection. One outcome of that early period of genetics is a wealth of quotes from actual scientists stating that "Darwin had been disproven" because just that one of his ideas (ie, pangenetics) was wrong. Of course, that source has been thoroughly quote-mined by creationists. So in the first half of the 20th Century scientists developed a synthesis of Darwinism and Mendelian genetics which resulted in neo-Darwinism which employs population genetics, a rigorous mathematical study of the genetics of populations (for Dredge's edification, populations evolve, not individuals). So anyone who is not a neo-Darwinist but rather instead a Darwinist is several decades out of date (rapidly approaching a century out of date). Yet again, we see creationists failing to keep up as they remain mired in old ideas and superseded sources.
For a Darwinist, you're rather out of touch with the correct terminolgy.
There you go projecting your own willful stupidity and ignorance yet again. You are the one who is out of touch with the correct terminology (and unable to even spell the word). And by nearly a century at that!
But what else can we expect from a self-professed mid-grade idiot (self-revealed IQ of 9 (nine)), and a willfully stupid one at that? By definition, an idiot possesses the mental capacity of a three-year-old, but that would be for the high end of being an idiot, whereas you are self-professedly considerably below that mark. And your persistent demonstrations of your vast mental incompetence still leads me to suspect that you are padding your résumé shamelessly by grossly inflating your IQ -- yet again I wonder if there is such a thing as a negative IQ score; if not, then your particular pathology would require its invention.
My elder grandson is three years old, so I was reminded of my experience with both my sons when they were that age. Like his father and uncle before him, my three-year-old grandson is very smart and is a fast learner. Despite that, it is difficult to have a meaningful conversation about a serious subject with him or to explain even simple science to him (eg, to him and his younger brother atoms and planets are both "balls"). And he has very little to contribute to a meaningful discussion about a serious subject. And yet, what contributions he would make would be far more constructive and of far better quality than anything you have ever uttered here.
So then your three-year-old's mental capacity is far inferior to my grandson's. And a very big reason for that is your own willful stupidity.
I am not a Darwinist, but rather a neo-Darwinist. For that matter, I very much doubt that any member of this forum (especially among the ones who do accept evolution) who would be a Darwinist.
There are very big differences between Darwinists and neo-Darwinists. Several of us have already gone to great pains to inform you of those differences which include genetics and population genetics. All of which you have ignored out of sheer willful stupidity.
You are indeed one of the stupidest creationists we have ever encountered. We would like to think that nobody is irredeemable, yet you continually prove that you are.
Organian: Yes, please leave us. The mere presence of beings like yourselves is intensely painful to us.
You don't know that whales evolved according to ToE.
YOU don't know what knowledge means.
More importantly, does he even know what the Theory of Evolution (ToE) is?
He keeps harping about the ToE and how it doesn't explain anything, etc, but how would he know that if he doesn't even know what the ToE is?
In that grave ignorance, he is the same as all the other creationists we encounter: none of them know what evolution is nor how it works. The surest way to drive them off is to ask them what they think evolution is and how they think it is supposed to work. Works better than garlic and crucifixes do on vampires (though in the novel of a vampire epidemic, I am Legend (1954), the protagonist found that crucifixes don't work on Jewish vampires, though a Magen David does).
For example, I notice he has harped on one particular misconception (bolding added for emphasis):
That paper discusses some of the alleged evolutionary steps involved, but doesn't discuss what caused those steps (which is the crux of my argument). The closest it gets is a wild guess about what may have given rise to the development of a double jaw joint. The paper proposes an evolutionary pathway, not what caused that evolution pathway. In other words, it doesn't demonstrate a knowledge of how evolution works.
That's sad for you but science doesn't need what you insist on having to know that the middle ear evolved - we have the fossils to prove it.
I'm not arguing that there is a lack of evidence for evolution - I'm arguing that it's impossible to know what caused it. The article you linked doesn't explain what caused the evolution of the middle-ear ... because no one knows.
It looks like he thinks that there's some mysterious unknown force that causes and probably also directs those changes. If that is what he is thinking (to use the term loosely in his case), then he truly is a willfully ignorant and willfully stupid idiot! That is not how evolution works, not even close! As we all know.
Trying to answer Sludge's demands to his satisfaction, which requires us to show him that mysterious external force, would be like proving evolution to candle2 by showing him a dog giving birth to kittens. Or explaining how a thermos bottle (which keeps hot things hot and cold things cold) can know which you want it to do. Impossible for us to do because that is not how any of it works.
I would suggest that we demand that Sludge tell us what he thinks the Theory of Evolution is and to explain to us how he thinks that it is supposed to work.
We could also point him to UC Berkeley's Evolution 101. Especially the Mechanisms: the processes of evolution section. Of course, Sludge, being such a typical creationist, would never dare go near it since he must carefully shield and guard his precious false beliefs through ever vigilant willful ignorance and willful stupidity. But those visitors who are willing to learn may benefit by those links.
Actually, Sludge is not representative of all Catholics, nor of "The Church" as a whole.
There are many Catholic examples of serious scholarship and rigorous thinking (eg, in logic and theology), though that is usually more the purview of priests and monks albeit not restricted to them. For example, there are videos by a Dominican monk and physicist which get into issues of religion, science, and evolution. While we would not agree on everything, at least he demonstrates that his thinking is clear and that he asks the right questions. Entirely different from Sludge whose head is filled with raw sewage.
There are about 23 or 24 sects within the Roman Catholic Church, not counting the general and national churches. Some are considered to be fringe and undoubtedly there are sub-sects and cults that go beyond the fringe.
We don't know what perverted cult within what fringe sect Sludge belongs. But in the meantime, yes, he does give the entire Roman Catholic Church and its god(s) a very bad name.
Edited by dwise1, : added the existence of serious scholarship
{usual nonsensical twaddle about the ToE that have nothing whatsoever to do with evolution}
What the f**k are you talking about?
Here ¡yet again! are the questions that I asked you in Message 304:
DWise1 writes:
Of course, it's biological evolution. That's what we have been talking about all this time and have been explaining to you over and over again.
So what are you talking about?
What do you think evolution is? Please describe it as completely as you can.
How to you think that evolution works or is supposed to work? Please include what you would consider to be the results or consequences of evolution and explain completely why those would be the results or consequences.
What do you think is the evolutionary explanation of how speciation (the formation of a new species) works and happens? Do try to be as specific as you can be.
And my assessment of that was:
DWise1 writes:
Of course, you will never answer any of those questions. In the past four decades I have never seen any creationist even attempt it, but rather all they ever do is avoid those questions.
Why won't any creationist ever answer those basic questions? In part because they have no clue what they are talking about, but rather just mindlessly repeat creationist claims and "arguments" (read "cheap rhetorical tricks") they have heard but do not understand. Although that is obviously true, there's also the simple fact that actual discussion, exchanging of ideas, and learning would be directly counter-productive to their mission:
For most creationists, their mission is to be nothing more than bottom-feeding trolls.
Try answering those questions. Demonstrate that you are not so devastatingly stupid that you cannot keep up.
Whales' vestigial pelvic bones are located well forward of the flukes, by a foot or more in porpoises and proportionally farther forward in larger cetaceans.
The whales' "vestigial pelvic bones" aren't even attached to the spine!
What a completely stupid idiot you are!
The whales' vestigial pelvic bones have nothing whatsoever to do with your entire case of (from your own Message 321):
Sluge writes:
How did the two hind-legs of a land animal evolve into the tail of a whale?
My answer to your incredibly stupid "argument" was that that never did happen. Because the hind legs had nothing whatsoever to do with cetacean flukes. However, they had everything to do with the ancestral pelvis -- have you never ever noticed how in alltetrapods the hind legs attach to the pelvis? Or are you simply just too incredibly stupid to have ever noticed that? And how in those with a tail the vertebrae of that tail extend aft well beyond the pelvic girdle?
Listen! They're singing your song yet again!
Now for the sake of others (since, being such a totally stupid idiot you are a lost cause), I will correct your dishonest act of lifting what I had said out of context (typical creationist dishonesty) by posting what I had written in my Message 399 (here I've added bolding for the paragraph that you quoted out of context):
DWise1 writes:
From one of many sources all saying the same thing (this from Whale Flukes - Enchanted Learning -- item of particular interest in bold):
quote
A whale's tail is composed of two lobes, each of which is called a fluke. There is a notch, a v-shaped indentation where the flukes (or lobes) of a whale's tail meet.
Flukes move up and down to propel the whale through the water. (This is unlike fish tails which move left and right.)
Flukes have no bones in them. They are made of muscles and dense fibrous tissue.
The arteries that supply the flukes with blood are surrounded by veins to maintain the whale's temperature.
That "dense fibrous tissue" is also called "connective tissue". The vertebrae of the spine end before getting to the flukes, so they are not directly attached to the spine.
Whales' vestigial pelvic bones are located well forward of the flukes, by a foot or more in porpoises and proportionally farther forward in larger cetaceans. The hind legs of the ancestral species would have attached to the pelvis, since that is what hind legs do, after all. Hence it is no surprise that, when vestigial limb buds are expressed in rare individuals, those limb buds appear where the hind limbs used to be, the same distance forward of the flukes as the pelvic bones.
Your "How did the two hind-legs of a land animal evolve into the tail of a whale?" is therefore complete and utterly stupid bullshit nonsense. Given its gross ignorance and stupidity, we are within our rights to request where you had gotten the nonsense from? Which creationist source? And also, given that creationists will lie about everything and anything they can, consider that all your creationist sources are lying to you! Even you cannot trust a single word a creationist tells you, just as we know full well that we cannot trust any creationist claim.
So the ancestral hind legs had nothing whatsoever to do with the present-day flukes in direct contradiction of your own claim. And we see that when present-day cetaceans get a mutation that enables their genes for expressing the formation of hind legs -- like the suppressed genes for teeth in chickens, cetaceans would not have genes for hind legs if their ancestors had not had hind legs -- those limb buds are directly associated with the vestigial pelvic bones, just as we would expect in any tetrapod.
Dredge is still a willfully stupid lying evil creationist.
I agree with "stupid" and "creationist" ... but as for the other descriptives, not so much.
No, they apply fully:
"evil":
You yourself admitted in your Message 341 that creationists are evil, therefore since you admit to being a creationist you also admit to being evil:
Dredge writes:
Yes, I agree ... All creationists are evil.
Then you go on to state a reason for creationists being evil:
Dredge writes:
Good people are products of evolution, whereas evil people - such as creationists - are products of evilution.
Please note that "evilution" is a common creationist pejorative, but since what they present as "evolution" isn't (not even in the same galactic quadrant), it certain seems like a good term for creationist caricatures of evolution. As I replied in my Message 368:
DWise1 writes:
But what, oh what, is "evilution" supposed to be? Definitely not evolution. Instead, in my experience that term, a standard puerile creationist pejorative, is more appropriate as a label for creationist misrepresentations (AKA "lies") about evolution and the other sciences. Or more simply, that "evilution" is everything that creationists mean by "evolution" even though it is entirely different from evolution. Again, creationists' "evilution" is nothing more than a pack of lies. And that is where creationist evil comes from. Creationists aren't born evil. Nor were they already evil when they first became creationists. OK, I'm giving creationists the benefit of the doubt, but maybe too much. Maybe some creationists did start out evil, but that is neither here nor there. It is not the initial levels of evil that are important, but rather the far greater levels of evil as they were inevitably corrupted by the false theologies in their religion. False theologies such as "creation science", "Intelligent Design", and really stupid ideas about Divine Creation (which end up telling you that if the Creation is really as it actually is, then that would disprove God, that being an incredibly stupid teaching which is why we cannot understand how creationists could fall for it. Oh, and also that stupid one that if something (like life) were produced by natural processes, the exact same natural processes that a Divine Creator would have created, then that somehow would disprove God. What is wrong with you people?).
So the term, "evil creationist", is redundant. As you yourself agreed to!
"lying":
Lying is another innate characteristic of a creationist. Their position is contrary to reality, so they can never tell the truth, but rather must always lie.
And it gets ever worse as a creationist encounters those who espouse reality and who inform the creationist of the truth. Repeatedly. After that, the creationist knows better and can no longer claim ignorance of the truth. At that point, he must resort to deliberate lying.
As you, Dredge, do every time you repeat the same old claims that have been soundly refuted time after time.
So "lying" most definitely applies.
"willfully stupid":
While you freely admit to being stupid, I cannot tell if you are trying to deny "willfully stupid".
Just being naturally stupid is one thing and I can accept your confession of being stupid considering your self-professed low IQ (9, which is a mid-grade idiot, which is defined as having the mental age of a three-year-old).
However, willful stupidity is another matter. It is the deliberate and willful effort to remain stupid, usually by refusing to learn anything and to willfully ignore any new information, again for fear of accidentally learning something. That is most decidedly what you keep doing.
Therefore, both "stupid" and "willfully stupid" most definitely apply.
So then all the cited descriptives do most definitely apply to you.
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