Let us begin with this definition of "quote mining" from Wikipedia: The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.

Thank you, shinyblurry, for your cut&paste, thought-free, research-absent, quote mining wall of nonsense. The only part you got right is that you should google each and every one of these quotes to find out the context, something you actually didn't do.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University and the leading spokesman for evolutionary theory prior to his recent death, confessed "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology..."


This Steven J. Gould quote is discussed in talk.origin's Quote Mine Project. Gould was a proponent of Punctuated Equilibria, which proposes a "jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change" in evolution. The quotes that are taken out of context are arguing that the fossil record does not indicate a gradual change over time as Darwin suggested. The specifc quote above is discussed in section #3.2 of Part 3. Far from an argument against evolution, Gould was arguing for a specific refinement of the theory.

More to the point, your own quote says "extreme rarity", contradicting your primary claim that transitional fossils do not exist.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal... ...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book... ...there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.


Dr. Patterson is discussed on a page dedicated to this quote in the Quote Mine Project. This page touches on the nature of scientific skepticism. As Dr. Patterson goes on to say, "... Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else." This is the nature of pure science. We can say that a piece of evidence "indicates" or "suggests" something, but there is nothing that may be held up as "proof" unless it is testable. As a man of principle, Dr. Patterson would not indicate one species evolving into another simply because there is no way to be absolutely sure that one fossil is the direct descendant of another. We can describe the similarities and differences, showing how one might have traits of an earlier fossil and different traits similar to a later fossil, but that is not absolute proof.

Incidentally, this is probably where the main thrust of the creationist argument eventually lands. At this level of specificity, there is no known way of proving one fossil's relation to another. DNA does not survive the fossilization process, so we can only make generalizations about how fossils are related through physical appearance. This will be where the creationist claims "faith" is required. Of course, you might also say that if I had a picture of a potted plant on a shelf, and another picture of the potted plant broken on the floor, it would require "faith" to claim that the plant fell off the shelf, because I did not have video proof. The creationist argument would be that the plant broken on the ground was created that way by God.



>> ^shinyblurry:
David B. Kitts. PhD (Zoology) ... Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of "gaps" in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them...


This quote is from 1974. Think maybe some of those gaps might have gotten smaller since then? Doesn't really matter, because the scientist in question goes on to explicitly state that this does not disprove evolution. He then discusses hypotheses which might explain his perceived gaps, such as Punctuated Equilibrium. A brief mention of this quote is found in the Quote Mine Project at Quote #54.


>> ^shinyblurry:

N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden, continues:
My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.


First of all, Nilsson is only famous to creationists. To scientists, he's a bit of a wack-job. But that neither proves nor disproves his findings, it only goes to show that creationsists will frequently embellish a scientist's reputation if it will increase the size of the straw man argument. His writings would naturally include his opinions on the weaknesses of what was evolutionary theory at the time (1953!) in order to make his own hypothesis more appealing. He came up with Emication, which is panned as fantasy by the scientific critics. Perfect fodder for the creationists.


>> ^shinyblurry:

Even the popular press is catching on. This is from an article in Newsweek magazine:
The missing link between man and apes, whose absence has comforted religious fundamentalists since the days of Darwin, is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures … The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated.

The popular press. Newsweek Magazine. 1980!!! What year are you living in, shiny???


>> ^shinyblurry:
Wake up people..your belief in evolution is purely metaphysical and requires faith. I suppose if you don't think about it too hard it makes sense. It's the same thing with abiogenesis..pure metaphysics.
Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species.
The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us?… The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. 2


Well, now you're just quoting some anonymous creationist. Any evidence whatsoever that the gaps between major groups are growing wider? No? Can't find anything to cut and paste in reply to that question?

>> ^shinyblurry:
You've been had..be intellectually honest enough to admit it and seek out the truth. Science does not support evolution.


I wonder, shiny, if in your "intellectually honest search for the truth" if you ever left the creationist circle jerk? Your quotes are nothing but out of context and out of date.

Heres my live-comment on the video

"New knowledge has shaken the foundations of Darwins theory"

No. In fact, everything in biology, especially the discovery of DNA in 1953 have confirmed, and established once and for all that the foundation of Darwins theory based on the Natural selection of hereditery properties (Darwin called them traits, we now call them genes) is true.

"When Darwin was alive, they thought the cell was a simple blob"

Wow, that was only like 3 seconds between lie #1 and lie #2! Impressive, Behe. Lets drag up Darwins corpse, and see what he had to say, even if its largely irrelevant to the fact of evolution and the practice of modern biology:
http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2007/07/16/darwin_and_the_cell_not_just_p/

"Like a car factory where everything has to fit together"


Not really, cells are messy things, and the processes inside is based on chemical reactions and physical laws (such as entropy) They look nothing like these tidy animations meant for illustration purposes. The production of proteins, for instance,is a process where the amino acids float around and bind themselves chemically to rna, not in an orderly "wait my turn"-style, but they latch on naturally to the RNA because they are chemically attracted to the 5 different nucleic acids on the RNA chain. It would be more similar to a redox reaction you can do with electrodes in water where the iron rod attracts the oxygen molecules, forming rust.(in the sense that theres nothing intelligent going on, just chemistry.)

"Darwinism was a lot more plausible when we thought the cell was a blob"

No.

"Flagellum"

A , Behes flagship of his idiot argument, he always pulls it out, all debunking be damned, he cant even hear how people have destroyed this silliness over and over:

http://youtu.be/a_5FToP_mMY

Utter bullshit.

You mean they cover The Four Lads' song Istanbul (not Constantinople). TMBG version was a cover, the original is a 1953 recording.

2 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/History-of-Iran-US-political-relations?fromdupe=History-of-U-S-Intervention-in-Iran-1953-Until-Present

5 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

Your video, Mechanical Computer - 1953, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Actually, the fire control rooms had more than 20 people all operating in a room the size of a small McDonald's dining area. I looked for pictures, but in the USS North Carolina, they have silhouettes of the operators huddles around the computers and it's mind-boggling how they got it all done. Ah, here it is: https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/_KuYLyRjiSR8/SfXkK4QJYEI/AAAAAAAAFbQ/egYSw3kQhfo/DSC_2338.JPG

>> ^spawnflagger:

Really fascinating videos, I watched all 7 parts. I wonder how much the whole computer weighed?
Seems like it would be a reliable device, as long as it's well greased, and the 3+ operators are well trained.
Of course nowadays a single chip smaller than a fingernail could achieve equal results with 0 operators, but an electronic computer in 1953 would have been much larger and much less reliable (transistor tubes tend to burn out) and required more energy than equivalent to feeding a few humans.

Really fascinating videos, I watched all 7 parts. I wonder how much the whole computer weighed?
Seems like it would be a reliable device, as long as it's well greased, and the 3+ operators are well trained.

Of course nowadays a single chip smaller than a fingernail could achieve equal results with 0 operators, but an electronic computer in 1953 would have been much larger and much less reliable (transistor tubes tend to burn out) and required more energy than equivalent to feeding a few humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein

Norman Gary Finkelstein (born December 8, 1953) is an American political scientist and author, whose primary fields of research are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. A graduate of Binghamton University, he received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and, most recently, DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007.

Finkelstein is credited by Avi Shlaim, Adam Shatz, Noam Chomsky and others with exposing Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial as a "fraud" and "a monumental hoax". Amidst considerable public debate, Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul in June 2007, and placed on administrative leave for the 2007-2008 academic year. Among the controversial aspects of this decision were attempts by Alan Dershowitz, a notable opponent of Finkelstein's, to derail Finkelstein's tenure bid.[1] On September 5, 2007 Finkelstein announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on generally undisclosed terms.[2][3] An official statement from DePaul strongly defended the decision to deny Finkelstein tenure, and asserted that outside influence played no role in their decision. The statement also praised Finkelstein "as a prolific scholar and outstanding teacher."[4]

awesome sauce sister!! Cheers!

In reply to this comment by NicoleBee:
*doublepromote!

P.I.T. (Precision Immobilization Technique) Maneuver


NASCAR's been doing it since 1953.

I explained the 1953 overthrow to my friend, after reading All the Shah's Men, but he thought it was a far-fetched conspiracy theory.

I explained the 1953 overthrow to my friend, after reading All the Shah's Men, but he thought it was a far-fetched conspiracy theory.

Everyone in Iran is certainly hoping that the CIA/US would leave the movement alone[1]. This is an internal soul searching, and if US deploys its old tactics, it would only serve to reinforce and prove that the current regime's mentality against the west is correct.

In 1953, US overthrew the democratic government of Iran and replaced it with the Shah. Then US supported Saddam to wage a 9 year war with Iran, which led to lose of over a million Iranian lives.

The current paranoid and oppressive regime is a reaction to past foreign policy choices of US, and as an average Iranian we hope that it won't repeat mistakes of the past.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy3KDYE5KQE

[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6964530.ece