Education

It's going to matter a lot more than your religion ever will.

My wife is performing research that wouldn't be possible if the evolutionary model weren't fundamentally accurate. Almost single-handedly her research proves common decent, at least for one broad family of beetles. Absolutely none of her research is based on Haekel's embryology or any of the other two examples you continually, and inaccurately, harp on as "proof of evolutionist duplicity."Your claims that all evolutionists rely on these three discredited "hoaxes" are unsupportable and ridiculous on their face. Jack Chick has greater intellectual rigor than my wife? You're either being deliberately insulting, which is an abominable offense made doubly abominable by your admin status, or you have no ability to assess intellectual rigor, which makes your admin status an abomination in itself.Either way, Percy and the other admins are derelict to allow you to continue in that capacity. And you are derelict for continuing to repeat these outrageous and disgusting slanders without stepping down from your role as admin. The board deserves far better than you.

I don't understand where you would have gotten the erroneous notion that a complete fossil record is required to substantiate the claims of evolutionists. The fact that there's a fossil record of any kind, and fossils of any number of transitional organisms, is more than enough to substantiate the fundamental accuracy of evolution.

Randman, there's no forum rule that obligates me to "substantiate" claims that I did not make, for instance: This is not a claim that I have made. This is a claim that you have falsely attempted to portray as my own. Since the theory of evolution is a model of organisms, and not of fossilization, it makes no predictions about the number of fossils we should find. If it's predictions of fossils that you're after I suggest you interrogate a geologist. The theory of evolution is the topic, here; I would expect an admin to know better than that. The theory of evolution is not a model of how we uncover fossils, so again, it makes no predictions about what fossils we will or will not find. Models of paleontology and geology are not on topic in this forum, and an admin should know better than to try and send a topic off the rails, as you appear to be doing. I must ask that you desist this behavior at once. Again, I'm under no obligation to substantiate claims not of my own assertion.Moreover, the fact that the presence of even one single transitional form disproves special creation of organisms and lends support to the evolutionary model should be obvious to anyone not motivated by a desperate need to slander honest scientists.

No. The fact that there's a beetle evolution to study in the first place makes your obsession with Heckel et al. irrelevant. Evolution stands on a weight of data that has absolutely nothing to do with your two or three pet outrages. Heckel's drawings are, at best, a historical aside with no relevance whatsoever to the bulk of evolutionary research. Yes, it's quite convenient that the concept of "kind" magically expands so as to include all offered examples of inter-taxon change. I imagine that, as our models of common descent grow in confidence and are supported by more and more data, creationists will eventually be forced to recognize all living organisms as members of the same "kind", and that the entire diversity of living things on Earth decend from a single organism via "microevolution." I suspect it will be quite funny to see.

Fascinating, but relevant only to vertebrates. Do you believe that vertebrates constitute the focus of the bulk of evolutionary research?

You didn't get that memo? That's what it means to be a creationist and an admin here at EvC - open license to promulgate the most base of slanders.

Are you? You seem intent on expanding their import to situations where they cannot possibly apply; such as the bulk of evolutionary research.Answer the question. Is it your apprehension that the bulk of evolutionary research occurs in the context of vertebrate organisms?

I'm sorry? I'm familiar with the casual fiction that admins are different people than their non-admin logins, but that's simply carrying it too far. If we're required to treat that conceit as fact, it should be codified into the rules.

You haven't even come close to establishing that evolutionists have "kept teaching" this material, however.For instance I've just flipped through my wife's literature on insect evolution. No mention of Haekel's diagrams. So too with her textbooks on cell biology. So too with her books on ecology and systematics. I've just asked her, and she doesn't even know who you're talking about.I'm sorry, but the idea that Haekel is still somehow revered as a source, or ever was in any recent period, simply can't be supported by the experience of the evolutionists here and that I'm familiar with. It doesn't matter who you quote; your sources are in a minority compared to the voices arrayed against you. Something you don't seem prepared to face.So, no. The fact that you can dig up references to Haekel's drawings in a historical context in texts written by laypeople does not, to any reasonable person, cast suspicion on a vast and varied field where the bulk of the research is occuring in fields well beyond the relevant context of vertebrate embryology in the first place.

Done.

Progress. How about, say, a discussion of microorganisms? Which evolutionists, exactly? All of them? It's already been proven that you and Richardson are completely wrong in that regard.Will you continue to insist that all evolutionists rely on these drawings in the face of proof that the vast majority of evolutionists never have?

So, now, can you explain how the actions of an unspecificed minority of evolutionists making claims about vertebrate embryology speaks to the veracity of evolutionary claims that have nothing at all to do with vertebrates, embryos or no?That's the part of your logic I'm having the trouble with. Or maybe that you're having trouble with. Is it your assertion, then, that vertebrate embryology forms the basis of evolutionary science? How does that work, exactly? What's the relevance of vertebrate embryology to, say, entomology, or microbiology?

Vertebrate embryology is irrelevant to the bulk of evolutonary evidence, because the majority of species are not vertebrate. So, as proven by the very distribution of life itself, Haekel's drawings could never be one of "the main evidences for evolution."You're obsessed with Haekel because it provides a flimsy, token justification for doing exactly what your insane ideology commands you to do - reject one of the best-supported theory ever developed by science. Haekel's drawings have nothing to do with evolution except perhaps as a historical footnote. I've just proved it.

Right, but they're demonstratably wrong. Why would I need the "complete picture" to know that creationists are hopelessly and terminally wrong? Here's a hint - you don't need every piece of the jigsaw puzzle to know what its a picture of.