Sigh. For a moment (when you edited your first reply to something less childish and insulting) I thought you didn't want to come off as a closet misogynist with the rhetoric of an angry tweenager... guess I was wrong.


>> ^Yogi:

>> ^hpqp:
@Yogi
Yes, technically a "whore" is "a woman who engages in promiscuous sexual intercourse, usually for money;" but also "a prostitute or promiscuous woman: often a term of abuse" (Collins Engl. dictionary; the part in bold comes up in practically all the online dictionaries google presents when searching "whore dictionary definition", and the Oxford Dictionary classes this word as "derogatory").

But this is not about definitions, it's about use, and your reactionary response seems to betray the fact that you know this full well (which is perhaps why you chose to truncate the M&W definition of "whore").
Your comment that I originally responded to contained truth, and would have probably received a lot more upvotes if it hadn't been for the first phrase. My response, in any case, was not meant as a personal attack, but simply a "heads up" to the negative connotation that term carries.

Fuck Off.

>> ^hpqp:

@Yogi
Yes, technically a "whore" is "a woman who engages in promiscuous sexual intercourse, usually for money;" but also "a prostitute or promiscuous woman: often a term of abuse" (Collins Engl. dictionary; the part in bold comes up in practically all the online dictionaries google presents when searching "whore dictionary definition", and the Oxford Dictionary classes this word as "derogatory").

But this is not about definitions, it's about use, and your reactionary response seems to betray the fact that you know this full well (which is perhaps why you chose to truncate the M&W definition of "whore").
Your comment that I originally responded to contained truth, and would have probably received a lot more upvotes if it hadn't been for the first phrase. My response, in any case, was not meant as a personal attack, but simply a "heads up" to the negative connotation that term carries.


Fuck Off.

@Yogi

Yes, technically a "whore" is "a woman who engages in promiscuous sexual intercourse, usually for money;" but also "a prostitute or promiscuous woman: often a term of abuse" (Collins Engl. dictionary; the part in bold comes up in practically all the online dictionaries google presents when searching "whore dictionary definition", and the Oxford Dictionary classes this word as "derogatory").


But this is not about definitions, it's about use, and your reactionary response seems to betray the fact that you know this full well (which is perhaps why you chose to truncate the M&W definition of "whore").

Your comment that I originally responded to contained truth, and would have probably received a lot more upvotes if it hadn't been for the first phrase. My response, in any case, was not meant as a personal attack, but simply a "heads up" to the negative connotation that term carries.

You can almost hear the ghost of Phil Collins singing.

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video The Postal Service Covers Phil Collins - "Against All Odds". Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

So basically, you cannot provide a refutation to the information itself but instead try to discredit the source. I've got hundreds of these..it's not exactly a secret among palentologists that the evolutionary theory has more holes than swiss cheese. Another issue is just the dating itself..take these quotes out of context:

Curt Teichert of the Geological Society of America, "No coherent picture of the history of the earth could be built on the basis of radioactive datings".

Improved laboratory techniques and improved constants have not reduced the scatter in recent years. Instead, the uncertainty grows as more and more data is accumulated ... " (Waterhouse).

richard mauger phd associate professor of geology east carolina university In general, dates in the “correct ball park” are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are the discrepancies fully explained

... it is usual to obtain a spectrum of discordant dates and to select the concentration of highest values as the correct age." (Armstrong and Besancon)

professor brew: If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it iscompletely out of date we just drop it. Few archaeologists who have concerned themselves with absolute chronology are innocent of having sometimes applied this method.

In the light of what is known about the radiocarbon method and the way it is used, it is truly astonishing that many authors will cite agreeable determinations as 'proof' for their beliefs. The radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually selected dates. "This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read.” Written by Robert E. Lee in his article "Radiocarbon: Ages in Error" in Anthropological Journal Of Canada, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1981 p:9

Radiometric dating of fossil skull 1470 show that the various methods do not give accurate measurements of ages. The first tests gave an age of 221 million years. The second, 2.4 million years. Subsequent tests gave ages which ranged from 290,000 to 19.5 million years. Palaeomagnetic determinations gave an age of 3 million years. All these readings give a 762 fold error in the age calculations. Given that only errors less than 10% (0.1 fold) are acceptable in scientific calculations, these readings show that radiometric assessment should never ever be used. John Reader, "Missing Links", BCA/Collins: London, 1981 p:206-209

A. Hayatsu (Department of Geophysics, University of Western Ontario, Canada), "K-Ar isochron age of the North Mountain Basalt, Nova Scotia",-Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, vol. 16, 1979,-"In conventional interpretation of K-Ar (potassium/argon dating method) age data, it is common to discard ages which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group or with other available data such as the geological time scale. The discrepancies between the rejected and the accepted are arbitrarily-attributed to excess or loss of argon." In other words the potassium/argon (K/Ar) method doesn't support the uranium/lead (U/Pb) method.

"The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years old, based on radio-decay rates of uranium and thorium. Such `confirmation' may be shortlived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily. There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio-decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago, but rather, within the age and memory of man." (“Secular Catastrophism”, Industrial Research and Development, June 1982, p. 21)

“The procession of life was never witnessed, it is inferred. The vertical sequence of fossils is thought to represent a process because the enclosing rocks are interpreted as a process. The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales.” (O’Rourke, J.E., “Pragmatism Versus Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, vol. 276, 1976, p. 53) (emphasis mine)

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning . . because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of science, January 1976.

Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland, asked him: "How do you date fossils?" His reply: "By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found." Sunderland then asked him if this were not circular reasoning, and *Fisher replied, "Of course, how else are you going to do it?" (Bible Science Newsletter, December 1986, p. 6.)

It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology [theory of rock strata] is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology."—*Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record (1973), p. 62.

"The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 48.

"Material bodies are finite, and no rock unit is global in extent, yet stratigraphy aims at a global classification. The particulars have to be stretched into universals somehow. Here ordinary materialism leaves off building up a system of units recognized by physical properties, to follow dialectical materialism, which starts with time units and regards the material bodies as their incomplete representatives. This is where the suspicion of circular reasoning crept in, because it seemed to the layman that the time units were abstracted from the geological column, which has been put together from rock units."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1979, p. 49.

"The prime difficulty with the use of presumed ancestral-descendant sequences to express phylogeny is that biostratigraphic data are often used in conjunction with morphology in the initial evaluation of relationships, which leads to obvious circularity."—*B. Schaeffer, *M.K. Hecht and *N. Eldredge, "Phylogeny and Paleontology," in *Dobzhansky, *Hecht and *Steere (Ed.), Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 6 (1972), p. 39

"The paleontologist's wheel of authority turned full circle when he put this process into reverse and used his fossils to determine tops and bottoms for himself. In the course of time he came to rule upon stratigraphic order, and gaps within it, on a worldwide basis."—*F.K. North, "the Geological Time Scale," in Royal Society of Canada Special Publication, 8:5 (1964). [The order of fossils is determined by the rock strata they are in, and the strata they are in are decided by their tops and bottoms—which are deduced by the fossils in them.]"The geologic ages are identified and dated by the fossils contained in the sedimentary rocks. The fossil record also provides the chief evidence for the theory of evolution, which in turn is the basic philosophy upon which the sequence of geologic ages has been erected. The evolution-fossil-geologic age system is thus a closed circle which comprises one interlocking package. Each goes with the other."—Henry M. Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), pp. 76-77

"It cannot be denied that, from a strictly philosophical standpoint, geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organism as has been determined by a study of theory remains buried in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain."—*R.H. Rastall, article "Geology," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 10 (14th ed.; 1956), p. 168.

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 53.

>> ^MaxWilder:
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.

Thank you for your good will here, I genuinely appreciate it. It's one of the few acts of sincerity I've received on this board. Because of that, you've inspired me to present my defense. I will attempt to show that evolution is every bit as metaphysical as a belief in God. I will also attempt to answer the question you posed about compartmentalization. I should get to it later today. Thank you again.

>> ^shuac:
>> ^shinyblurry:
I had a little rant here..ive erased it for civilities sake..if you want to address me in civilized manner instead of attacking my intellect, which I will assure you is doing just fine, let me know..
You mistake me, sir, for a common internet thug. My comment takes no such attitude. There exist very learned scientists who are among the most pious Christians ever. People like William Jennings Bryan, Freeman Dyson, and the head of the genome sequencing project, Francis Collins.
The younger Behe's answer about compartmentalization would probably, in my estimation, apply to all of them. That's not an attack on their intellect, sir. At least, I don't see it as one and I certainly don't mean it as one. In fact, a very decent argument could be made that such a sophisticated partitioning would require a degree of sophistication beyond that of normal needs.
For instance, I have very achievable compartmentalization requirements when I carry two opposing thoughts in my head. Typically, they are thoughts like "I hate 80s hair metal but I love that one song by Warrant" or the like. That kind of partitioning doesn't require a lot of mental horsepower but then, my needs are modest. You see what I mean?
As far as the second quote by Behe the Younger goes...well, I believe that sums up the entire ID stance and is similarly in no way an attack on your (or anyone else's) intellect. Hey, I get it: creationists feels strongly about this stuff and I'm not surprised they're trying to get around the rules.
Just understand that we also feel strongly.

>> ^shinyblurry:

I had a little rant here..ive erased it for civilities sake..if you want to address me in civilized manner instead of attacking my intellect, which I will assure you is doing just fine, let me know..

You mistake me, sir, for a common internet thug. My comment takes no such attitude. There exist very learned scientists who are among the most pious Christians ever. People like William Jennings Bryan, Freeman Dyson, and the head of the genome sequencing project, Francis Collins.

The younger Behe's answer about compartmentalization would probably, in my estimation, apply to all of them. That's not an attack on their intellect, sir. At least, I don't see it as one and I certainly don't mean it as one. In fact, a very decent argument could be made that such a sophisticated partitioning would require a degree of sophistication beyond that of normal needs.

For instance, I have very achievable compartmentalization requirements when I carry two opposing thoughts in my head. Typically, they are thoughts like "I hate 80s hair metal but I love that one song by Warrant" or the like. That kind of partitioning doesn't require a lot of mental horsepower but then, my needs are modest. You see what I mean?

As far as the second quote by Behe the Younger goes...well, I believe that sums up the entire ID stance and is similarly in no way an attack on your (or anyone else's) intellect. Hey, I get it: creationists feel strongly about this stuff and I'm not surprised they're trying to get around the rules.

Just understand that we also feel strongly.

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by chicchorea. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Mad-TV-Bob-Newhart-Skit-Mo-Collins-Stop-it-1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/29/opinion/29collins.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

Gail Collins did an op ed on Bachmann, referencing this moment.

Excerpt:
History is superimportant to Bachmann, who claims that she left the Democratic Party when she was a college senior, after reading “Burr,” Gore Vidal’s caustic historical novel. “He was kind of mocking the founding fathers, and I just thought ‘what a snot,’ ” Bachmann told The Star Tribune. It was, she said, a transformational moment so critical to her worldview that she can still remember what she was wearing. (“A tan trench coat, blue pin-striped shirt, like a tailored shirt, and dress slacks.”)

It’s not everybody who switches political parties over a historical novel, but Bachmann’s vision of the past is the core to her ideology. The men who created the Constitution were perfect heroes, so infallible that they fully understood the right to bear arms would someday include semiautomatic pistols capable of firing 30 bullets in 10 seconds.

Last week, Bachmann was in Iowa, setting off alarm bells about her possible presidential ambitions and delivering a speech in which she claimed that the founding fathers had “worked tirelessly” to eradicate slavery. She then cited John Quincy Adams, who was not a founding father.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by chicchorea.

*isdupe
>> ^BoneRemake:

dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Mad-TV-Bob-Newhart-Skit-Mo-Collins-Stop-it-1

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Mad-TV-Bob-Newhart-Skit-Mo-Collins-Stop-it-1

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by BoneRemake. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.