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 And if it iscompletely out of date we just drop it.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.

He's speaking Flemish, which is a dialect of Dutch (and not a separate language), though he's got a pretty thick old dude's accent. This is actually my city, but Flemish isn't my mother tongue so I'm having a little trouble following him. Flemish dialects are so distinct that sometimes people from Gent have trouble understanding someone from Brugge, two Flemish cities which aren't even 25 miles apart.

Fun trivia: The KAA Gent Buffaloes got their name a hundred years ago when Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show came through Gent!>> ^legacy0100:

And what language are they speaking? Obviously needs a tag of that country.

Rhetoric is the art and study of the use of language with persuasive effect. In Aristotle's systematization of rhetoric, one important aspect of rhetoric to study and theorize was the three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos, as well as the five canons of rhetoric: invention or discovery, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Along with grammar and logic or dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. From ancient Greece to the late 19th Century, it was a central part of Western education, filling the need to train public speakers and writers to move audiences to action with arguments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric

it's a bavarian or austrian dialect of german. and it's great

Franzl Lang is German. And "Mei" in this case is bavarian dialect.
But yea damn teh swiss!

damn teh swiss>> ^conan:

>> ^kulpims:
it's "Mein Vatter", not "Mei Vatter"

No, it's performed in dialect. "Mei" is correct. Otherwise it would also be "Vater" instead of "Vatter".

>> ^kulpims:

it's "Mein Vatter", not "Mei Vatter"


No, it's performed in dialect. "Mei" is correct. Otherwise it would also be "Vater" instead of "Vatter".

Hey I just want to say I think this is a fairly healthy conversation.

For example I love Beck but he's a scientologist, and, without wanting to offend more sifters, that's CLEARLY bonkers. Hubbard's on record during his pulp sci-fi days saying 'if you want to make real money start a religion'. Then he did. And Beck's a genius but he was brought up that way and he can't extract it from his self-identity (or doesn't want to, I don't know him so I don't know).

Doesn't mean I don't love Beck and wouldn't want to upset him or make him miserable. Same to the religious sifters. Any vim around here (trying to match braggart..:) is rage against entrenched and abused power, and sorry, any major religion is guilty of that.

I have some problems with Hitchens (IRAQ!) but he's a clear thinking dialectic who will listen and respond logically. He loves to fight which is good and bad (mostly good in my book:) The English Christian establishment tried to force it on him as a kid and he's been firing back ever since.

Here's another clip from the same event that explains his anger (and that of some here I think):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoH5OFzRbRo (sorry sound is screwy)

And, if you want to see what these guys are really about, for better or for worse, have a look at this high profile debate in London when the English establishment tried to get a handle on it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCdnh7G87m4

Peace out.

EDIT: and this one because it just broke my heart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwDYbNIHyN0
>> ^bamdrew:

blech. a nasty board accompanying an interesting video...

I think it is likely that the Australian/Kiwi accents are closer to "British English" because of its (slightly) later divergence and the fact that there is significantly less influence from the United States and quite a bit more influence linguistically from England. Canadian English stems primarily from the language spoken by United Empire Loyalists who migrated to Canada after the American Revolution. Australian English, on the other hand, was based largely on the English spoken by British convicts, military personnel and settlers (a large proportion of which spoke with Cockney or Irish accents).

With a proportionally larger influx of people from British cities, particularly London and Southern England and, with Received Pronunciation being largely a formalized form of the London accent, it is understandable that Australian English has a closer connection to "British English".
>> ^FishBulb:

Skeeve, How do you explain the Australian and New Zealander accents?
It's interesting, as to dialect Australians say rubbish, bin, spanner, etc.

Skeeve, How do you explain the Australian and New Zealander accents?
It's interesting, as to dialect Australians say rubbish, bin, spanner, etc.

Meh.

While certain areas of Canada definitely have their own sound (and we have lots of words that differ from their British counterparts) the whole argument about pronunciation - that the British invented it, so we should speak that way - is a fallacy.

Received Pronunciation (BBC/British English) was invented after North America was colonized. The American/Canadian dialect is probably closer to 17th/18th century English than current British dialects. See this or this for more info.

Ah, thank you! I will give a *quality to you soon, dear sir! Thanks!

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Shit, it's my mistake you couldn't see it. Sorry about that. I forgot to set the playlist as public, so it defaulted to private.
Stupid internet.
In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Did you fix some dead vids? Sorry, to me this looked like a 403 page: http://videosift.com/playlists/kronosposeidon/I-fix-dis-sheet-for-ju

As in http protocol 403 forbidden. Cool, I'll get a quality out to you when my power points regenerate in a bit. Thanks.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Didn't you check the playlist I linked to in my first comment? It has only 4 videos - all yours, fixed by me, only in the last few hours. You must not have understood my Yankee dialect.>> ^blankfist:

@kronosposeidon, yeah, I figure this wouldn't be successful, but I thought I'd try.

Shit, it's my mistake you couldn't see it. Sorry about that. I forgot to set the playlist as public, so it defaulted to private.
Stupid internet.
In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Did you fix some dead vids? Sorry, to me this looked like a 403 page: http://videosift.com/playlists/kronosposeidon/I-fix-dis-sheet-for-ju

As in http protocol 403 forbidden. Cool, I'll get a quality out to you when my power points regenerate in a bit. Thanks.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Didn't you check the playlist I linked to in my first comment? It has only 4 videos - all yours, fixed by me, only in the last few hours. You must not have understood my Yankee dialect.>> ^blankfist:

@kronosposeidon, yeah, I figure this wouldn't be successful, but I thought I'd try.

Did you fix some dead vids? Sorry, to me this looked like a 403 page: http://videosift.com/playlists/kronosposeidon/I-fix-dis-sheet-for-ju

As in http protocol 403 forbidden. Cool, I'll get a quality out to you when my power points regenerate in a bit. Thanks.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
Didn't you check the playlist I linked to in my first comment? It has only 4 videos - all yours, fixed by me, only in the last few hours. You must not have understood my Yankee dialect.>> ^blankfist:

@kronosposeidon, yeah, I figure this wouldn't be successful, but I thought I'd try.

Didn't you check the playlist I linked to in my first comment? It has only 4 videos - all yours, fixed by me, only in the last few hours. You must not have understood my Yankee dialect.>> ^blankfist:

@kronosposeidon, yeah, I figure this wouldn't be successful, but I thought I'd try.