Not long ago, ended up exchanging a few comments with a YouTube Creationist who laughably brought up Piltdown Man. Seriously, Creationists, when was the last time you ever heard us claim Piltdown was real? Really. You'd think that our unending laughter when you bring it up would clue you in on our opinion. Nowadays, if you want to prove evolution false, you'd have better luck by proving Piltdown Man was real.Shanedk summarizes the whole Piltdown thing well:
This is just one example about Creationists doing things exactly backwards. It often makes me wonder if they're just so desperate, they're knowingly perpetuating the Big Lie.
Another example: The Crocoduck. This is another example Creationists should be desperately trying to find, but try to reverse it so that evolution has to find this critter that, if evolution is accurate, is impossible. Crocodiles and birds are on very different branches on the evolutionary tree. Large organisms never ever make a leap that big. In short, finding a chimera with the head of a crocodilian and the body of an avian (having characteristics that are part of the definition of the branches) would outright falsify evolution. It'd be like a dog giving birth to a cat (another example of Creationist Opposite Day) in outright violation of heredity.
Finding a real Piltdown Man, Crocoduck, or one species bringing forth a grossly different species is precisely what Creationists should be scrambling to do. Most know these things are absurd. But Creationism can happily explain them as "Well, God was in a weird mood that day," while evolutionary biology would be unable to explain any of those things. Of course, Creationism is an absurdity that can explain anything, including impossibilities and absurdities that don't happen. Evolution explains quite reasonably why zoology doesn't look like a D&D Monster Manual. Creationism can't explain why life looks the way it does, except to invoke random, unpredictable whims of a magic man.
8 comments:
Seriously, though, I want to know what kind of mood God was in when he made the platypus. Now that is one messed up animal.
Indeed. Furry, lays eggs, has poisonous barbs on it's... inner thighs?! It's "bill" doesn't even resemble the same tissue a bird's beak or bill uses.
Here's another example of randomness. What creationists expect us to believe is god designed everything and just purely by chance, it all just HAPPENS TO LOOK like very graduated slowly branching trees of evolutionary change, with fossil evidence occuring where one might expect to find them had that actually been the case.
They're expecting a pretty ridiculous leap there, far greater than the leap they claim evolutionists need in luck. The only other explanation is god is a liar intentionally setting up all of reality to appear as though the universe is ancient, life forms evolved, and genesis is a myth.
No, see, this needs to be emphasized some more: God designed a few basic baramin, and then they went through what I call "hyperevolution" after the flood. By the mutations memes they have flying around, hyperevolution was accomplished by dropping several dozen chromosomes in the space of a few centuries.
But remember, macro-evolution is impossible.
I don't often give these out, but you've earned a high five, MW.
*slap*
I really wish I could remember where I saw the point made originally, as it didn't occur to me to check chromosome counts of related species. I know the numbers are pretty impressive for the fox-dog baramin, which is the example that I saw originally.
(By the way, consider this parenthesis my last nagging about GDL stuff. I've got an idea that I'm going to work on with one of my friends. Once things settle down, let me know, I suppose.)
Sadly, I feel like having the parenthesis only slightly shorter than the 'main point' is some kind of personal milestone in curbing digressions. I also feel like my writing style is setting me up for a thesaurus joke, but that's probably paranoia.
Oh, also! This comment thread has barely scratched the surface of the oddness that is the platypus. They've got electrolocation senses, ten sex chromosomes, and no SRY gene. (That's the gene on the Y chromosome that makes everything happen.) The study of how the heck sex determination even happens is apparently an area of active research. (Also, according to Douglas Hofstadter, some monotremes experience no REM sleep, while the remainder have nothing but. REM sleep is associated with the ability to learn, somewhat. Obvious conclusion: some monotremes are plotting world supremacy, and will used the unlearned remainder as grunts and shock troops.)
... Somebody needs to produce that movie.
Checked out that last point on Wiki. I, for one, welcome our new duck-billed overlords.
Shortly after, ripoff movie with the other super-weird critter, the cuttlefish.
Then two decades later they make a cheesy cash-in-on-naustalgia crossover movie.
For some reason, I feel like the cuttlefish movie should be co-written by PZ Myers and Randall Munroe.
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