It looks like this thread is stagnating through the inability of the creationist camp to refute anything. Neither Williams nor any of his cronies seem able to step up to the bat, so I think it is time to "freshen the glass" and see if anyone will take a sip.
Creationist Fred Williams Web Site Lies - 2
"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups"
- Louis Bounoure, professor of biology at the University of Strasbourg
This is often quoted by creationists (just check the talk.origins news group for a recent citation, and we can see from this quote that even the site name Williams selected is not original with him! Can this guy plagiarize or what? The problem is, this is yet another creationist lie!
Louis Bounoure never said this. It was Jean Rostand, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and even he never said it! What he did say was: "Transformism is a fairy tale for adults." This is just to illustrate another creationist form of lying - misquotation by unnatural selection.
Williams (like all creationists) is very fond of trying to set up evolutionists just so he can knock them down. It never fails to amaze me how passionate these so-called Christians are when it comes to treating others as you would rather not be done by; besmirching, belittling, and berating as much as possible. Some Christian attitude.
Williams (like all creationists) will present you with little "warnings" to watch evolutionist responses closely to make sure the evolutionist doesn't do this, that, or the other thing, to wriggle out of it. This is a huge creationist lie, because the "it" is a carefully constructed creationist straight-jacket that they industriously manufacture out of nothing. They have to do this, because if they went head-to-head on the science, they would be knocked flat on their backs every single time. This is why they do not publish in science journals and it is also why the creationists need to be watched, not the evolutionists. So here is my little "alert": don't let the creationists pull the wool over your eyes by trying to blame evolutionists for their own many failings.
For example, they will insist on defining scientific terms misleadingly and, of course, entirely to their own advantage. They become quite upset when evolutionists try to correct them. This is where Williams will snidely issue one of his "alerts". Essentially, he is saying, "Hey, I set up a bunch of ridiculous rules to hog-tie you so I can have all the advantages in presenting my Swiss Cheese Creationism (SCC - it's full of holes), and now you're trying to educate people and make a level playing field? No fair! No fair!"
A case in point is the creationist addiction to lumping everything but the kitchen sink into their version of the Theory of Evolution, ignoring the fact that what they then call evolution actually breaks out into several different studies, theories, and sciences such as cosmology, abiogenesis, and evolution. It's all the same to them. Woe betide anyone who tries to educate and correct them, explaining that evolution is nothing more than a change in allele frequency (if you like, a change in the gene pool) of a population. They will be rather irate at this, because it clears up some of the mud they have put so much effort into indiscriminately and repeatedly throwing.
They become so passionate about this because if they didn't, you might not be distracted enough and actually get to asking a question no creationist has ever been able to answer: What prevents such changes from turning one "kind" (which creationists have never defined) into another kind? (More on this in another posting).
Here is a good example in Williams' response to a message in his guest book regarding the fossil record:
"It's a shame you would put your faith that we evolved from a pile of mud on fossils so subjective and questionable that several leading evolutionists agree that the Australopithecines, including africanus, are extinct apes."
Lies. Lies. Lies!
Note how he carefully uses the word "faith"? Creationists have to do this. They have to pretend evolution is faith, because they cannot defeat it scientifically. If it can be tarred with the faith brush, maybe they can get it thrown out of schools. It's their warped way of getting what they perceive as a level playing field, but their idea of a level field is confined solely to one which slopes all the way to the opponent's goal. Anything else is completely unacceptable to them because it will cause them to lose.
Even abiogenesis does not talk about mud turning into humans. This is just creationist male Bos taurus feces (MBTF) which they liberally slather over everything to which they have no competent or scientific response. The truth is that there is nothing in the Theory of Evolution regarding our ultimate origins, and this is why evolution is most definitely not an attack on God (another creationist lie).
Williams refers to "several leading evolutionists", but who, exactly, are these people? He offers two names: "The famous anatomist Lord Zuckerman was so frustrated with the bad science of those desperate to turn these monkeys into men that he exclaimed They're bloody apes!"
Go to
TalkOrigins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy, type "Zuckerman" into the search engine and you will find out how pathetic this creationist lie is. Williams talks as though Zuckerman is a leading, modern evolutionist who is calling evolution into question. Here is a refutation of Williams antique position regarding Zuckerman:
Creationist Arguments: Australopithecines
Dredging up antiquated, outmoded, discredited nonsense and presenting it without date or reference, suggesting that maybe it happened just yesterday, is standard creationist practice to which they are forced to adhere because their case is so poor.
In our debate, I made an honest mistake in mis-labeling someone as a creationist, and Williams, true to form, used this as a cheap excuse to completely avoid dealing with a really difficult challenge I used to open the debate. Two years later, he has still not dealt with it.
I acknowledged my error. Williams is not this honest. Instead, he is a hypocrite. After his reference to "several leading evolutionists", he names only one, one is out of date and who retracted his arguments, and then he quickly slips in a creationist, hoping we won't notice and perhaps think this is another evolutionist: "For more, here is a short essay from leading creationist John Woodmorappe:
Revolution Against Evolution – A Revolution of the Love of God"
Go to
TalkOrigins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy, type "Woodmorappe" into their search engine and you will find refutation after refutation of his claims. John Woodmorappe apparently isn't even his real name.
This is another creationist practice. Throw out enough garbage and hopefully some will stick in people's minds. Never, ever, ever do they cite references to material refuting creationist claims. Why? Because most all of their claims have been repeatedly refuted, and they have little else to offer.
The only site I am aware of that comes close to doing this is the Answers in Genesis site which now has a section detailing which creationist arguments *not* to use any more. Why can't they use them? They have been shown, by evolutionists, to be lies or erroneous. Eventually, all creationist claims will be in this category. The only open question is: when will all creationists realize this?
In another response to a guest book message, Williams has this to say regarding radiometric dating: "They have to assume no daughter product at the beginning, a closed system for the age of the dated item, plus a constant decay rate."
This is quite simply a big, fat, patented Williams lie. Williams is basically saying here that all scientists are too stupid to think of these things, therefore they never think of these things, never account for them and never verify anything, therefore all radiometric dates (except for the ones that testify to Biblical events, of course!) are lies, therefore unqualified and untrained creationists have to point out these lies on laughable web sites.
Williams has absolutely no idea whatsoever of what's involved in such dating. Here is an article from someone who does:
Radiometric DatingThe article is called, "Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective." by Dr. Roger C. Wiens who has a PhD in Physics, with a minor in Geology. He will assuage all of your doubts about geologic radiometry. Let's see if Williams has the hypocrisy to spout about this guy being unqualified, when he is a physics PhD *and* is a Christian.
Williams: "Since then evidence has mounted suggesting radioactive decay rates have not always been constant"
Another unsupported claim. Williams seems to think he is God himself. He thinks he can simply spout nonsense, and have everyone take it as gospel. He doesn't quite grasp that in the real world, as opposed to the la-la land he has created for himself, that scientific argument needs to be supported by the evidence and published in a peer-reviewed professional science publication *or it doesn't count*! Creationists have *never* done this: they have not offered positive evidence for creation in such publications, nor have they offered evidence refuting evolution. Never! If they have a case, why aren't they making it where it counts? I challenged Williams on this in our debate almost two years ago and I am still waiting for him to stop doing catatonic goldfish impersonations and actually offer up an answer.
Evidence from supernovae alone signals that this is another Williams lie, since we can check decay rates from the past by looking at electromagnetic emissions just now arriving from supernova events! Unlike the rate of creationist lies appearing on web sites, decay rates haven't changed. If they had, wouldn't there be creationist papers published in refereed science journals demonstrating this?
Williams hypocrisy hits new highs in his blabber on these decay rates. Grab a hold of this: "I trusted fallible man for 35 years, instead of trusting the One who was there", but the only evidence he has that "the One who was there" actually was there is that of fallible man! Can you say blabbering hypocrite?!!
So what Williams is actually saying here is that he trusted fallible man, whose names were on published papers that could be read, tested and verified for 35 years in science. He couldn't understand that, so he now throws all his trust into the fallible, anonymous, primitive, scientifically backward men who wrote the Bible! Does this make any kind of intelligent logical sense? No! It doesn't even make intelligent, common sense.
Now let's look at Williams' alert article:
[I ignore his self-serving and sermonizing introduction]
Williams accompanies his amateur article with a cheesy pie chart. As usual for creationists, this chart has no references appearing on it! It could be a chart of how he divided up the last pizza he ate for all we know.
This is the same Williams who has the hypocrisy to chide others for not doing his work for him by providing page numbers in a book where he already has every other detail and is either too lazy or too Gallus domesticus guano (GDG) to do the work. I could use the same pie chart with regard to Williams entire web site, in which case the massive blue area would be lies and nonsense and the tiny green section would be half-truths.
Williams claims that 95% of the fossil record is marine invertebrate. Where does this number come from? It is the same one creationist John Morris threw out in a debate with Frank Zindler (
The Question of Noah's Flood » Internet Infidels).
Is Williams following the standard creationist practice of simply re-quoting another creationist without checking (and without even rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's)? Are other creationists now spreading this 95% number from Williams' site?
Let's face it, Williams certainly seems to have appropriated his entire invertebrate argument from the Morris family without attribution (and without much thought, if you ask me). He is apparently unaware of the transitional fossil record of reptile-like animals transforming into mammals. In Frank Zindler's words, "These beautifully span the structural continuity from a very primitive type of reptile to a primitive type of mammal".
Williams: "Whenever an evolutionist presents his line of evidence for evolution in the fossil record, he will without fail, virtually every time, present a vertebrate transitional fossil. Why is this important? The evolutionist is failing to mention to his audience that vertebrates constitute less than .01% of the entire fossil record, and of these fossils, most species are represented by a bone or less!"
"Without fail virtually every time"? Isn't "without fail" the same as "every time"? So what's with the little "virtually" he snuck in there? It's so he can feel good about himself by acknowledging that there are instances outside of the scope of his "refutation," but he isn't going to talk about them because they refute his entire "alert"!
Let's take a second to see which particular wool Williams is actually trying to pull over your eyes in this lousy excuse for an argument. Williams is saying (and it is a lie) that 95% of the record is marine invertebrates *and* evolutionists cannot produce any transitionals from that, but they can produce transitionals from the 0.01% of the record that is vertebrates, so this disproves transitionals!
He is not saying that there are no transitionals here (although he does say that, and this is another lie). What he is saying here is that when he claims there are no transitionals and he is shown up for the liar that he is, he can hastily retreat into the marine invertebrate record and say the exact same mantra over again and that this somehow invalidates all the transitionals he has already been shown.
Does he actually try to refute the transitional examples he is shown? No! He runs away from them like a sniveling baby. He takes the classic creationist way out - ignore the evidence that is presented, take two steps back, declare a completely new challenge, and scream triumphantly that "the challenge" still has not been met!
But what is he really admitting to here? He is admitting, quite openly, that scientists can find all the transitionals they ever really need to support of evolution, in only 0.01% of the fossil record! That even that tiny, almost insignificant fraction of the record is more than sufficient to refute creation and throw up a host of transitional forms. In other words, while is is running away from the evidence, frantically flapping his arms in the direction of his beloved marine invertebrates, he is desperately, wildly, tingling-in-the-sphincter hoping that you will not see the massive flaw in his "logic".
He did this with me in debate. I presented many examples of transitionals from the
http://www.talkorigins site and elsewhere. Williams ignored these entirely (he has to, they show that creationists are liars) and essentially said, "Yes, but you never showed *invertebrate* transitionals. So the next time I was near a bookstore, I went in and looked in a couple of evolution books and sure enough, there was info on invertebrate transitionals, which I presented in the debate.
Did Williams admit he lied, or try to refute these examples with papers published in reputable peer-reviewed journals? Nope! he took two steps back *again* (with a whine about page numbers) and essentially said, "Yes, but you never showed *invertebrate* transitionals in salt water! He hopes he can sea-slug it out there, and never have to deal with the real transitional evidence he has been repeatedly shown.
How many steps back will he take before he is so stuffed into a corner on this that he cannot move? How many times is he going to arbitrarily and unilaterally redefine what a transitional is before creationists are comfortable with their own definition?
I recently listed in his message book a reference to a transitional between ants and wasps (
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/jan97.html). He has so far carefully ignored that while gleefully trying to shoot down other things I have mentioned. What will he do now? Will he claim, "Yes, but you never showed a transitional between wasps and octopi"? Will he claim, "Yes, but it's not a *marine* invertebrate"? Will he claim "Yes, but you only showed *one* transitional"? Will he claim "Yes, but ants and wasps are really the same "kind""?
Isn't it convenient that the creationists have no *scientific* definition of "kind"? In this way, they can have it mean whatever they want, whenever they want, to hide the gaping holes in their nonsense claims. Or more likely, will he claim, "Yes, but there's no evidence that the one ever evolved into the other"? We may never now, because, so far, he has studiously ignored it.
Here is detail of one I found on Glenn Morton's web site (
http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk). Glenn Morton is a creationist who is now an evolutionist and has made this *transition* without giving up God.
"Our mapping experiments show that for each of eight-floral traits likely to play a role in reproductive isolation there is at least one major QTL accounting for more than 25% of the phenotypic variance. This finding suggests that the evolution of reproductive isolation may involve genes of large effect and therefore that speciation may occur rapidly."
In other words, here is a evolutionary transition that we can prove, that would never show in the fossil record, not only because plants do not fossilize at all well, but also because this kind of transformation could occur so rapidly that there was not sufficient time to allow for a specimen to be preserved.
It goes on to describe a flower that enjoys hummingbird pollination and is found in 18 families and 39 genera in north America, and in many cases it evolved from bee-pollinated ancestors.
(see H.D. Bradshaw Jr., S. M. Wilbert, K. G. Otto and D. W. Schemske, "Genetic Mapping of Floral Traits Associated with Reproductive Isolation in Monkeyflowers (Mimulus)," Nature, 376 Aug. 31, 1995, p. 765)
Is that enough of a reference to invertebrate transition for Williams, or is he going to whine that I did not give him a line number now? We see species transitions all the time. These are not preserved well in the fossil record because they happen almost by definition in isolated populations and they tend to occur relatively rapidly. However, we know they happen, because we can see them happen. What the fossil record is good a preserving is large-scale transitions, and there is an abundance of these. All you need to demonstrate large-scale "evolution" is one transitional or series. One of these alone refutes creation of special, immutable "kinds"
Let's face it, with creationism, you can claim anything, because all you have to do is back it up with the nearest miracle. You never actually have to nail it down scientifically. This is why I keep hitting them with the request to define "kind" and to elucidate the mechanism they claim exists, which would prevent one "kind" from turning into another. And you know what? They cannot do it. And if they cannot do it, creation is dead. period.
I find it hilarious that even Williams, while decrying the fossil record as showing no transitionals, openly admits to speciation! He examples north American jack rabbits. I want him to find, in the fossil record, a complete transitional record of this, to prove it. Otherwise, how does he know that these jack rabbits were not created as separate kinds? I challenge any creationist to show this.
I also challenge any creationist, anywhere on the planet, no matter what their qualifications, to show the transitional fossil record of the 2 butterfly/moth "kind" that were on the ark into the 150,000 or so species of butterflies and moths that inhabit the earth today. Where is it?
I challenge creationists to show the complete fossil-record transition of the two "dog kind" on the ark into some 14 genera and some 30 plus species that inhabit the planet today, tracing the origin from the mountains of Ararat to the locales where these animals are typically found today.
Where is *this* fossil record? Why can't the creationists find it? Without it, how do they know that each of these species, or that each genus, was not created as a special "kind" on its own? How do they know they are related? And if they can find it, I want it referenced and I want them to explain how it is that a perfect pair of "dog kind" could ever vary into anything. Surely anything that varies indicates that the original was not perfect. Are creationists hereby admitting that their god's creation was so far from perfect that it had to evolve to stay alive?
Williams: "What about the other 99.99% of the fossil record?"
Yes, what about it? Just why is it that the majority of the fossil record is marine invertebrates if the entire fossil record (as creationists insist) was "created" during a catastrophic global flood over a geologically insignificant period? Shouldn't there be a substantially greater proportion of terrestrial organisms? Isn't it odd that the fossil record looks not like a jumbled mess of marine and terrestrial, as you would expect from a year-long global flood, but is carefully layered and graded as though it were lain down over countless eons by slow processes that we can still see occurring today?
One of the creationists' foundation stones is that you cannot get order from disorder, yet here we have Williams insisting that the magnificently ordered and carefully layered fossil record is the result of chaos - the chaos of a flood! How hypocritical can you get? No wonder he was too GDG to debate it!
While he is blowing so hard about "not a single invertebrate transitional" existing, something I have shown to be a lie, let me ask him this - why is there not a single humanoid skeleton (nor that of any primate of any size) in any rock level below the Tertiary?
If there were a global flood and most everyone drowned, why are we not finding human skeletons in the Cambrian and precambrian rocks, which constitute the mass of the geologic column, and where (creationists are repeatedly insisting) can be found every modern group of organisms? In fact, why is everything down at that level of the simplest, most primitive form, and all the advanced (so we pretend) life forms much higher up? Why do we find no humans in Devonian rocks? Why none mixed in with the dinosaurs? None at all, not a single one. Nil! None! Nothing! Zero! Zilch! Zip!
This is a far more serious indictment of creation than purported "missing transitionals" are of evolution, even if there were none! So enough of this farce. Evolutionists have presented many transitionals, whether creationists like them or not. Now it is time for creationists to step up to the bat. I want, from any creationist anywhere, a single, documented, scientifically supported example of a fossil that is so far out of place that it is embarrassing for evolutionists. Just one, any one, anywhere, published in a reputable science journal, that has no reasonable explanation for its place in the fossil record. Let's hear it. If you cannot present one, then it is time to shut your yapping about transitionals and look to your own housekeeping.
Even John Morris, a leading creationist and son of the founder of modern creationism admits it is embarrassing: "It would be nice, for my way of thinking, to find the fossils a little more mixed up than they are." (The Morris Zindler flood debate at
The Question of Noah's Flood » Internet Infidels)
I hit Williams with some of these flood issues in debate and, of course, he ignored them. I actually challenged him to a further debate on this very topic, and he refused. Very wisely so, because I would have flattened him like the rock strata he so poorly understands.
Let me just leave him with this, on the topic of the geologic column, which creationists such as Kent "who's arresting me now" Hovind and John "Who am I now" Woodmorappe insist doesn't even exist (again from Glenn Morton's web site
http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/geo.htm)
Woodmorappe really gets pasted in this article, and he appears to allow that the geologic column is (while incomplete, he claims) some 16 miles thick. If this is the case, and this was laid down by the flood, as creationists pretend, then you know what this means? It means that the flood had to lay down sediment at the rate of 10 feet per hour, every single hour, every single day, for the entire year of the flood. Is this likely? No! Where did the sediment even come from?!
Massive Creationist Lie Alert!! Williams: "If evolution were true, the fossil record should be littered with countless examples showing many different transitions leading up to the millions of species of these complex creatures. YET WE DO NOT HAVE A SINGLE EXAMPLE! NOT EVEN ONE!"
Isn't it amazing how creationists cannot even provide a single positive example in support of their so-called "creation model"? The entire panoply of creationism consists solely of negative argument. That is to say it is lousy, scientifically unsupported argument against evolution, and not a single shred of positive scientifically-based argument *for* creation.
Furthermore, his above statement is a lie! He is saying there are no transitionals, "not a single example, not even one showing many different transitions", yet he has been plastered with them, only to whine that they are not the ones he wants! The only transitional a creationist wants is the one you cannot give them, until you do give it to them, then they want something else, which is why Williams is all at sea.
Williams is like a spoiled brat who wants to have his cake and eat it. Either there are transitionals - *regardless of what types of transitions they show* - in which case his statement above is a flatulent lie, or there are not, in which case Williams needs to point to published science papers in refereed journals that refute all the transitionals that evolutionists have found, many of which I have laid out before him in debate. I don't want Williams blather and opinion on this. He is not a paleontologist, but an electrical engineer, last I heard, as his his bosom buddy Walter ReMine. I want solid scientific evidence that there are no transitionals. The ball is in Williams court.
If he is still insisting there are no transitionals, then I want his answer to this question: Since science cannot find any reason why evolution (that is, real evolution, not Fred Williams' Patented Handy Dandy Evolution (TM) - that is to say, a change in allele frequency in a population) cannot lead to speciation and to the diversity of life we have today, what is the scientific explanation from creationists of the mechanism that prevents evolution forming new "kinds"? The *scientific explanation*, from Williams, not another of his fairytale just-so stories. The *scientific explanation*.
Williams: "The remarkable completeness of this vast portion of the fossil record thwarts evolutionists from cooking up "transitionals" because speculation is not so easy when you have entire specimens. There is not the wild guesswork inherent when dealing with willy-nilly fragments of a tooth here, a leg bone there."
I want Williams to qualify this statement. Where his his evidence that the marine record is substantially more complete than the terrestrial record? How could he tell? I want citations of science papers that support his assertion of the "remarkable completeness of this vast portion of the fossil record ". And I want to know what happened to all the terrestrial species that died in the flood. What is his scientific explanation for why they are so poorly represented (as "proven by his own pizza pie chart) in the fossil record.
Otherwise this is yet another creationist lie.
Budikka
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