This is how creationists think evolution actually works...

Ok, I'll explain it.

It's a comedic piece, not a lecture on reproductive health.

It doesn't matter if condoms are 97, 80 or 50% effective. They are being used as a stand-in for something that HAS a 97% consensus on its accuracy.

Granted, it's not a completely perfect analogy (they are comparing efficacy to consensus), but it's poetic licence. In other words.....

it's a fucking joke.

As for writing people off, everyone is entitled to make mistakes, but really at this point climate deniers are up there with creationists, homeopaths, and flat earthers. There's only so much slack we can cut them, before we move the fuck on and say "If you believe that shit, you're an idiot"

you're posting this while they're now saying that climate change is accelerating way faster than anyone had ever predicted. this guy is a fucking creationist for christ sake.

Do NOT send this to a creationist

We'll start with the "youtube comments are toxic".

We're in agreement. Even youtube agrees.

While it's unfortunate that the comment cream doesn't rise on youtube..

This still doesn't eliminate that fact that tons of valid criticism is being censored by Sark & plenty of other unscrupulous agenda-pushers.

It's a perfect opportunity to squash any dissent, under the guise of -

"there is no real debate here. only insults & threats. I had to disable comments to spare my audience the vitriol"

However, imagine if the youtuber was an outspoken Scientologist or Creationist..

Snowball's chance in hell you aren't viewing that as a deceitful tactic to avoid scrutiny.

"Everyone knows creationism is easily debunked/scientology is a cult. Clearly they've disabled comments because they want to squash dissent/valid arguments"

Rarely, if ever, would you think -

"Disabled comments? I get it. They probably just got too many death threats. Scientologists have feelings too yuh know"

Nonetheless, when the EXACT SAME scenario is put in front of you..

..with regard to topics that tug at your liberal, tree-huggy sympathies..

You lose all skepticism. Why is that?

Literally all it takes is a 30 second google search to discover the inconsistencies in Sarkeesian's statements & actions.

From the first article -
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the words of Tumblr user robbiebaldwin:

“She says she wants to ‘create a dialogue’ or ‘force video games into open debate,’ except she turns off both comments and even ratings on her videos. Wanting to hear your own voice in an echo chamber is the total opposite of ‘open debate.’”

Leading the charge against Sarkeesian’s decision is Tumblr user amazingatheist, who posted a ten-minute video entitled "Who’s The Damsel Now?"

Arguing that Sarkeesian’s “censorship” of YouTube comments counteracts her message about strong women
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Are you seeing the larger picture now @newtboy @Babymech etc.?

This self-described - "critic of sexism in pop culture" - is espousing a set of ideas & strong statements..

Then completely cowering, juking, and being absolutely non-responsive when called on her shit.

She disabled the RATINGS for FSM's sake!
The neutral, objective, non-threatening, non-absuive RATINGS!

That's the way you stand strong for your cause, right!
By disallowing even your supporters from showing their approval!

And before you even mention that cancel lecture of hers.

WHAM!

BAM!

Straight from Utah State -

"Throughout the day, Tuesday, Oct. 14, USU police and administrators worked with state and federal law enforcement agencies to assess the threat to our USU community and Ms. Sarkeesian. Together, we determined that there was no credible threat to students, staff or the speaker, and that this letter was intended to frighten the university into cancelling the event."

They were all "Please don't cancel. We love con-artists! We're Mormons, remember!"

*TooLong,Don'tGiveaFuck*

Anita Sarkeesian is a self-proclaimed pop-culture critic..

Who claims that she wants to 'create a dialogue' & 'force video games into open debate'..

She then proceeds to disallow any & all discourse or scrutiny of her work - positive or negative - going so far as to disable like & dislike ratings on her videos.

Oh and I forgot to add..

She conveniently forgot to disable the vitriol 'whining' on her Kickstarter page until AFTER those comments boosted her campaign to over $150,000 in donations.

[i'll search for the video while you whine about citing sources]

BUT AGAIN! THIS ISN"T JUST ABOUT HER!
It's the overall debacle & all the stupid articles surrounding it.

Tho first I have to slog thru this shitstorm because you're easily distracted by syntax & word choice.

Shit, this is pointless.

Oh well. Done for now.

Hey Enoch,

The premise of the video is wrong. Christians, if you include Catholics, make up around 1/3 of the worlds population. By 2050 it is predicted there will be over 3 billion Christians in the world. Christianity in many places in the world, especially Asia and Africa, is exploding. Even in the west, it is isn't exactly stagnating. 42 percent of the population of the United States believes in young earth creationism, for example:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx

It is simply not true to say people no longer believe; believers are increasing, not decreasing, in the world.

Paul Mason's reporting on this entire farce has been sublime, just like AEP's over at the Telegraph and YS's at NakedCapitalism.

And yes, that guy is representative of the views of our government as well as of significant parts of parliament. Pacta sunt servanda, there's a moral obligation to pay for your sins (debt = sin), and expansionary austerity works.

Economic creationists, loads and loads of 'em. And that's not even the worst of it. There are also plenty of folks who are eager to use debt as a means to extract resources and to subjugate entire countries -- colonialism redux.

I couldn't even make it to the full minute mark. I think the video posted and related where Sean Carroll responds to the idea of a fine tuned universe is a good response.

This video is likely made by the same sort of people who once argued that "just a few feet in either direction and life on Earth couldn't exist". Of course the Earth doesn't have a circular orbit, and our Sun's Goldilocks zone extends from just past Venus (Earth side) to past Mars. Leaving both Earth and Mars well within the habitable zone.

My bigger problem with the video is you are trying to get to point Z, and saying it had to go through A-Y first in specific order. This is an argument used frequently against Evolution. The huge odds you'd have to go through to get to a modern human in the time allowed is greatly against modern humans forming when they did. Problem is you are working from the end result back, rather than the starting point and going forward, and it you are also discounting some other forces of nature. I used to quote the mathematical problem myself when I was a Creationist, though an Old Earth one as I was long of the opinion that Young Earth Creationist make Christians look stupid.

I may be an atheist, but I have no problem with a God of the Gaps if people want to believe that. I however don't believe that Jehovah is that God (there's too much evidence against Him, such as the fact He couldn't or wouldn't reveal himself beyond a tiny little backwater tribe, not to people in the Americas or Asia or Europe, but to one tiny group of people, either He's a Racist, which makes Him unworthy of serving, or He's not any more real than any of the other so called Gods). Whatever, or Whomever may have kick-started the Universe into existence didn't do it for some divine plan for mankind. The arrogance that it takes to assume the Universe in all it's glory was created just to awe man, or for whatever other reasons related to man and our involvement with Jehovah is arrogance beyond belief.

EDIT: Perhaps the better related video would have been http://videosift.com/video/Pure-Imagination-1

Hi Poolcleaner,

I think you're arguing from a false premise, that a belief in Creation science does not contribute to what you call true science. Some of the greatest scientists who ever lived were creationists. Here is a list of a few of them:

http://creationsafaris.com/wgcs_toc.htm

Their belief that God created an orderly Universe based on laws (which is the reason we call them laws) highly influenced and inspired their exploration of the cosmos. Here are a couple of quotes:

When with bold telescopes I survey the old and newly discovered stars and planets when with excellent microscopes I discern the unimitable subtility of nature’s curious workmanship; and when, in a word, by the help of anatomical knives, and the light of chemical furnaces, I study the book of nature I find myself oftentimes reduced to exclaim with the Psalmist, How manifold are Thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast Thou made them all!

-Robert Boyle, Chemistry

The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.

-Louis Pasteur, Medicine

Creation science is a collection of data which supports the idea that the Earth is young. Some of the theories within creation science are testable and predictive, but as a whole you cannot put it in a lab and perform a measurement any more than you could do so for macroevolution, because they both concern what happened in the past. You cannot observe macroevolution happening anywhere nor can you subject it to empirical testing. You can make observations and inferences based on a theory, but that is subject to interpretation.

Take a look in the mirror, shiny.

My position is backed up by mountains (both methaphorically and literally) of evidence. You have nothing. I've looked at the so-called evidence for a young earth or creationism and I dismissed it almost instantly.

It fails almost every conceivable test of reliable evidence almost instantly. I am not obliged to consider nonsense. The burden of proof is not on me, it is on you.

If I tell you the sky is pink and green with a giant picture of Steve Carell on it, I'd want some pretty decent evidence to back that up.

I don't have to "seek out someone who agreed" with me, that is the default position. It is the accepted scientific reality.

Part of the reason, I don't have to continually reassess my acceptance of it is because it makes sense. I don't go around thinking "man, evolution is a cool idea, but I wonder why it doesn't explain X", because it does explain X (where X is any silly creationist nonsense like irreduceable complexity, etc).

So, on one hand we have evolution, which has:
- an elegant, sensible theory
- millions and millions of man hours of study
- ginormous swathes of evidence

and on the other we have creationism, which has:
- some old book said it's true and the same book said the book is true (despite the fact that said book has been wrong time and time again)

Anyway, I'm done here.
Have fun on the wrong side of history; you can take a seat over there beside the flat earthers, the slave-owners and the people that thought non-whites were genetically inferior.

If I have to be an expert to dismiss the evidence, why don't you also have to be an expert to accept the evidence?

Because experts have already examined the evidence and found it sufficient. That evidence has been used in the development of medicines, and has used to make predictions later shown to be true.

You, on the other hand, want to overthrow the accepted worldview. So you better have some pretty extraordinary evidence as well as the understanding to back it up. I see neither from you.

Why do you have macro and micro evolution in quotations? Do you realize they are scientific terms?

You should read your own links.

Within the Modern Synthesis school of thought, macroevolution is thought of as the compounded effects of microevolution. Thus, the distinction between micro- and macroevolution is not a fundamental one – the only difference between them is of time and scale. As Ernst W. Mayr observes, "transspecific evolution is nothing but an extrapolation and magnification of the events that take place within populations and species...it is misleading to make a distinction between the causes of micro- and macroevolution".

And there is tonnes of evidence of macroevolution. You and your ilk just misuse the term and ask to see a monkey to give birth to a human.

But that's just your lack of understanding.

You could say that, but why should it be taken seriously? The flying spaghetti monster, or the flying teapot, have no explanatory power.

Of course it does. They're magic, they exist outside of time and space and can do whatever they feel like. It's the exact same "explanatory power" that god has, i.e. none whatsoever.

There are good reasons, philosophically and otherwise, to believe an all powerful being created this Universe. The idea of whether the Universe was designed is not a ridiculous question, and I think it is pretty odd that anyone would rule that explanation out apriori.

Yes, and there were good reasons to think thunder was gods fighting and rain happened when you danced. And now we know those are nonsense.

Besides, you are conflating the origin of the universe with evolution. We have a pretty good idea about the origins of the universe, but it's kinda by definition a difficult question to ask. But we know that evolution is true to a ridiculously high certainty.

It may be that in the future that someone disproves evolution. But if they do, it will be through science, not creationist bollocks.

Again, have you ever studied the subject? If you have, what evidences have you looked at?

I really don't have to study it. You have to provide some evidence to back up your assertion, which I will then trivially disprove with 5 seconds on google.

I also don't study astrology, homeopathy, tarot cards, voodoo or crystal therapy because they are all long since proven to be complete bollocks.

You're not just wrong, you're fractally wrong. You're like a kitten who can't work out why he can't eat the fish on the tv. You would require significant education to even understand why you're so wrong.

Since this coward has disabled YouTube comments, I'll say this to her here: calling the appearance of early life "magic" is hypocritical in the extreme, given that's exactly what creationists think happened.

Please don't call them skeptics. They're not. Skepicism is the questioning of ideas or beliefs until presented with evidence that supports them, and it's a Good Thing(tm).

With climate change, there is overwhelming evidence to show that it's real, it's happening now and it's man made.

The people that don't accept it aren't skpetics, they're in denial. We don't call creationists "evolution skeptics", don't give AGW deniers a more elevated position.

Oh, and @A-Winston, you won't believe Nye because he's "only a mechanical engineer" (ignoring the 97% of actual climate scientists that agree with him) but you're perfectly happy to believe an author (someone who makes up stories for a living!) and whose book is full of

flawed or misleading presentations of Global Warming science exist in the book, including those on Arctic sea ice thinning, correction of land-based temperature measurements for the urban heat island effect, satellite vs. ground-based measurements of Earth's warming, and controversies over sea level rise estimates

source