That testimonial is priceless, though. "After reading this comic, I realized that the Spice Girls were a bunch of vapid, talentless bimbos. Now I'm listening to Allyson Krause and my life is so much better!"
I do have to say that this is one of the more rational presentations of this viewpoint. No screaming that we will burn in hell, no saying science is just plain stupid and wrong. It actually sounded saner than most, with arguments that could convince someone that was one the fence.
I haven't read any of the other comics on the webpage, but this one in particular is honestly not that bad. I can't agree with the viewpoint, but I prefer the way they are presenting it.
If by "arguments" you mean "appeals to emotion and lies", and if by "people sitting on the fence" you mean "the ignorant", then yes.
Take page 2, for example. "Evolution is RACIST" - bullshit. "There are racist people who use evolution to support their position" - true, but this is not evolution's problem, as evolution says nothing of the sort. "Still lots of gaps in the historical record" - half-true. There's far more support than for Biblical truth - the problem is that every missing link found just makes the creationist say "Now you've got TWO MORE holes to fill!". Then he dismisses all hominid fossils on the grounds that Piltdown man was a fake, and then argues that Homo Erectus is a modern human and that, since it's the image of God, must have looked like a modern human.
He then dismisses evolution as chance-driven, which is incorrect, and then argues from ignorance - since I don't understand it, IT MUST BE THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER.
This is all on page 2.
There are *no* informed, intellectually honest statements on that page. Every assertion made is either a direct lie or a meaningless statement.
It's a Chick tract, made pretty, but it's still got all the rationality of a Republican push-poll or godhatesfags.com
That is what makes it dangerous though. The majority of people in the world ARE ignorant, and putting something in a pretty package, with statements that sound like they are true (actual veracity aside) is a smart way to get people who don't know any better to believe their side. Once someone believes something, it is that much harder to convince them of anything that goes against that belief. I guess what I should have said is that this example seems like it would be more effective than some of the others you have put on here.
I love (hate) when people use the term "evolved" like it's a straight line. a 1-10 scale where we fall somewhere around an 8. As if evolution is implying that with the right ammount of work a bird come become a real boy.
As if the suposition is that we evolved from ape to rick santorum with jessie jackson in hte middle, rather than the obvious correct point of view, which is that different people are suited to different parts of the world and evolved that way to be the best humans they could be where they were. This sort of argument is actually more racist than the theories that it espouses, because it is working from the fundamental belief that somehow evolution makes people of color seem lower on the evolutionary ladder because they have a closer color similarity to an ape than me (whitey the blue eyes devil). it's inane. It's just as logical to say that white people are less evolved because we can't be out in the sun as long as black people without a burn or because they blend better at night. Or because white people have smaller penises and humans are the only species with disproportionately large sex organs and therefore white people are more like primates, which have small wangs (note: this statment does not refer to any wangs in particular and certainly not to the wang of the author, though he's not trying to say he's hung like a horse, either, because that would be a "lie").
The claim of racism isn't because black people are "coloured closer to apes", but because of the out of Africa hypothesis; according to the misunderstanding in the tract, black people would be less evolved because they were the first humans - since white people came later, they think evolutionists believe white people are more evolved.
It's technically correct - C-14 dating does give wholly innaccurate results when applied to living creatures.
This is because C-14 dating ONLY WORKS on fossils more than 150 years old and less than 50K years old.
It also gives heavily inaccurate results when dealing with "contaminated" subjects - including, say, snails that live in a spring fed though limestone with no C-14.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD011.html
In fact, just bookmark this one: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/
C14 dating doesn't work on living organisms, as weaselking says; only on dead and unfossilised ones, up to an upper range of 50,000 years (give or take a few hundred). The potassium-argon dating that is also referred to is a separate method, which only really works for samples over several hundred thousand years old. I think the comic refers back to a separate creationist canard, a specific volcanic sample where the published date was shown to be about 1.2million years wrong or so - nevermind that it was clearly demonstrated that the faulty date was obtained because of sample contamination by different rock, and that the creationists do a great deal of blatant misinterpretation about it themselves -- the full story is probably on Talkorigins somewhere.
Creationist Claim CD013.1 (http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD013_1.html), in fact.
Claim CD013.1:
The conventional K-Ar dating method was applied to the 1986 dacite flow from the new lava dome at Mount St. Helens, Washington. The whole-rock age was 0.35 +/- 0.05 million years (Mya). Ages for component minerals varied from 0.34 +/- 0.06 Mya to 2.8 +/- 0.6 Mya. These ages show that the K-Ar method is invalid.
Source: Austin, Steven A., 1996. Excess argon within mineral concentrates from the New Dacite Lava Dome at Mount St. Helens volcano. Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 10(3): 335-343. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=research&action=index&page=researchp_sa_r01
Response:
1. Austin sent his samples to a laboratory that clearly states that their equipment cannot accurately measure samples less than two million years old. All of the measured ages but one fall well under the stated limit of accuracy, so the method applied to them is obviously inapplicable. Since Austin misused the measurement technique, he should expect inaccurate results, but the fault is his, not the technique's. Experimental error is a possible explanation for the older date.
2. Austin's samples were not homogeneous, as he himself admitted. Any xenocrysts in the samples would make the samples appear older (because the xenocrysts themselves would be old). A K-Ar analysis of impure fractions of the sample, as Austin's were, is meaningless.
Links: Henke, Kevin R. n.d. Young-earth creationist 'dating' of a Mt. St. Helens dacite: The failure of Austin and Swenson to recognize obviously ancient minerals. http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/mt_st_helens_dacite_kh.htm
I've got an index around here somewhere. A is a modern chimp. N is a modern human. The others are in chronological order, starting at B for most ancient and ending at N.
Every transitional fossil just leads creationist to say "You haven't filled one gap, you've just created TWO MORE GAPS! Fill 'em! Duh, I eat poop!"
Decided to do some quick readin' on the subject since I am always curious...
Technically, the 'poop eaters' are correct that with each discovery of a fossil does create two more gaps. Since a 'missing link' is the link between the two that exist. But I hate semantic games as much as the next person...
After reading this article (http://www.rps.psu.edu/student/missing.html) I have a new outlook on this seperation of when 'man' became man and not ape. When did the critters begin with abstract thought. The researchers in the above article believe that it can be found via the size of nerve canals in the vertebrae.
Now, granted, a creationist could say that God gave them the 'insight' to abstract thought, but, to me, such a statement can never be proven - either way. Can a scientist say for certain that an outside force didn't give the monkey the ability for abstract thought? No. But I'd rather believe in what I can see and feel and reasonably work out instead of taking it in blind faith. Otherwise, the creationists better make room for my "ET with a brain enlarging ray" theory as well.
> Can a scientist say for certain that an outside force didn't give the monkey > the ability for abstract thought? No.
Absolutely - and there's nothing stopping you from adding "and God did it" to the end of every single conclusion in the theory of evolution. None of this changes that evolution *happens* and evolution is a *fact*, and the theory of evolution is currently the only explanation for *how* evolution-the-fact happens that fits all the data without making unjustified assumptions. The theory of evolution also says absolutely nothing about the existence or absence of god.
The theory of evolution also says absolutely nothing about the existence or absence of god.
Nor should it. There's an interesting article by Karen Armstrong (author of History of God, among other books) in a recent issue of New Scientist on this subject. The article is supposed to be a review of Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle, but in fact Armstrong takes the opportunity to blast creationists for mixing up science and religion.
She makes this interesting assertion: "Until the advent of the modern period, nobody would have regarded the six-day creation story as a literal, historical account," and then goes on to discuss the difference between mythos and logos as expostulated by Plato. She winds up thus (and I'm going to paste a long quote here because access to the actual article is limited to subscribers, and I think this is a great point):
Myth could not help you create efficient technology or run your society. But logos had its limits too. If you became a refugee or witnessed a terrible natural catastrophe, you did not simply want a logical explanation; you also wanted myth to show you how to manage your grief. With the advent of our scientific modernity, however, logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited, and now, in popular parlance a myth is something that did not happen, that is untrue. But some religious people also began to read religious myths as though they were logos.
The conflict between science and faith has thus been based on a misunderstanding of the nature of scriptural discourse. Many people, including those who are religious, find it difficult to think mythically, because our education and society is fuelled entirely by logos. This has made religion impossible for many people in the west, and it could be argued that much of the stridency of Christian fundamentalism is based on a buried fear of creeping unbelief.
In the pre-modern world, it was considered dangerous to mix mythos and logos, because each had a different sphere of competence. Much of the heat could be taken out of the evolution versus creation struggle if it were admitted that to read the first chapter of Genesis as though it were an exact account of the origins of life is not only bad science; it is also bad religion.
Now, whether you think mythos is adequate or appropriate for the tasks Armstrong assigns it is up to you, especially since we have things like psychology and grief counseling and so on. But I think she's right about the stridency of Christian fundamentalism, and that the notion of Creationism as valid science is fundamentally flawed.
I find the Biblical creation story interesting for a very different reason, and it's one that Armstrong mentions, too: it's one of the few creation myths I've come across that isn't violent.
Yup. I'm sure that TWKing realizes that and it was just a slip. 8-) Fossils can form very quickly, but since a fossil is an imprint in stone where all organic material has been replaced by inorganic minerals, none of the original carbon remains, thus no dating, regardless of age.
Ahh . . . because evolution is a straight line with slugs at 2, monkeys at five, black epopel at seven and whitey at eight. We're all striving to hit divinity at ten before the game is over.
I love that As if we are somehow "more" evolved than anyhting. Rather than differently evolved. hell, I'm not even "more" evolved than my dog. She can smell everyhting I did all day off my pany leg and she can feel when earthquakes are goign to hit and she can sense illness in my before I get the sniffles. And I think I'm evolved?
What people don't get s that every species is evolved ideally to it's own lifestyle and environment. So when you gain somehting you lose somehting in hte process. It's closer to a zero sum game than they think.
"There are racist people who use evolution to support their position"
and there are a hell of a lot more who have been doing it for a fuck of a lot longer who use the bible as support for their racist views.
I'm talking about the bit where Noah's three sons, Curly, Shemp and, I mean Shem, Ham and Japheth have a little dispute after landing that involves Ham seeing Noah naked and getting himself and his descendants cursed by Noah (actually he curses Ham's son) to be the Slaves of slaves.
White suipremacists have been using that (with the assumption that ham is the father of all colored races) to jusatify poor treatment of people of color for centuries.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 12:16 am (UTC)That testimonial is priceless, though. "After reading this comic, I realized that the Spice Girls were a bunch of vapid, talentless bimbos. Now I'm listening to Allyson Krause and my life is so much better!"
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 12:17 am (UTC)Yeah. It's like a monkey in my peanut butter.
(Which is how they invented Rhesus Peanut Butter Cups, actually - true story!)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 12:25 am (UTC)*snerk*!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 12:35 am (UTC)I haven't read any of the other comics on the webpage, but this one in particular is honestly not that bad. I can't agree with the viewpoint, but I prefer the way they are presenting it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 12:46 am (UTC)Take page 2, for example. "Evolution is RACIST" - bullshit. "There are racist people who use evolution to support their position" - true, but this is not evolution's problem, as evolution says nothing of the sort. "Still lots of gaps in the historical record" - half-true. There's far more support than for Biblical truth - the problem is that every missing link found just makes the creationist say "Now you've got TWO MORE holes to fill!". Then he dismisses all hominid fossils on the grounds that Piltdown man was a fake, and then argues that Homo Erectus is a modern human and that, since it's the image of God, must have looked like a modern human.
He then dismisses evolution as chance-driven, which is incorrect, and then argues from ignorance - since I don't understand it, IT MUST BE THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER.
This is all on page 2.
There are *no* informed, intellectually honest statements on that page. Every assertion made is either a direct lie or a meaningless statement.
It's a Chick tract, made pretty, but it's still got all the rationality of a Republican push-poll or godhatesfags.com
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 01:10 am (UTC)*bangs head on keyboard*
No, really.
There is nothing more I can say.
I need to pick up a straw man, so I have something that I can hit to relieve the tension when I come up against these stupid strawmen.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 01:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 02:16 am (UTC)That's my head, and a wall.
Seriously, folks. 2 hours, a science class, and a rational lecture. It's like innoculating against ignorance.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 05:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 06:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 11:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 01:17 pm (UTC)As if the suposition is that we evolved from ape to rick santorum with jessie jackson in hte middle, rather than the obvious correct point of view, which is that different people are suited to different parts of the world and evolved that way to be the best humans they could be where they were. This sort of argument is actually more racist than the theories that it espouses, because it is working from the fundamental belief that somehow evolution makes people of color seem lower on the evolutionary ladder because they have a closer color similarity to an ape than me (whitey the blue eyes devil). it's inane. It's just as logical to say that white people are less evolved because we can't be out in the sun as long as black people without a burn or because they blend better at night. Or because white people have smaller penises and humans are the only species with disproportionately large sex organs and therefore white people are more like primates, which have small wangs (note: this statment does not refer to any wangs in particular and certainly not to the wang of the author, though he's not trying to say he's hung like a horse, either, because that would be a "lie").
OK, I'm done.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 01:27 pm (UTC)It's nonsense....whadda ya wanna know?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 03:54 pm (UTC)It's also bullshit.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 03:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 04:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 04:20 pm (UTC)This is because C-14 dating ONLY WORKS on fossils more than 150 years old and less than 50K years old.
It also gives heavily inaccurate results when dealing with "contaminated" subjects - including, say, snails that live in a spring fed though limestone with no C-14.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD011.html
In fact, just bookmark this one:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 04:30 pm (UTC)http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html
and their section on how radiometric and stratigraphic dating works:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dating.html
C14 dating doesn't work on living organisms, as weaselking says; only on dead and unfossilised ones, up to an upper range of 50,000 years (give or take a few hundred). The potassium-argon dating that is also referred to is a separate method, which only really works for samples over several hundred thousand years old. I think the comic refers back to a separate creationist canard, a specific volcanic sample where the published date was shown to be about 1.2million years wrong or so - nevermind that it was clearly demonstrated that the faulty date was obtained because of sample contamination by different rock, and that the creationists do a great deal of blatant misinterpretation about it themselves -- the full story is probably on Talkorigins somewhere.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 04:31 pm (UTC)Playing devil's advocate here...
Date: 2005-08-18 05:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 05:15 pm (UTC)Claim CD013.1:
The conventional K-Ar dating method was applied to the 1986 dacite flow from the new lava dome at Mount St. Helens, Washington. The whole-rock age was 0.35 +/- 0.05 million years (Mya). Ages for component minerals varied from 0.34 +/- 0.06 Mya to 2.8 +/- 0.6 Mya. These ages show that the K-Ar method is invalid.
Source:
Austin, Steven A., 1996. Excess argon within mineral concentrates from the New Dacite Lava Dome at Mount St. Helens volcano. Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 10(3): 335-343. http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=research&action=index&page=researchp_sa_r01
Response:
1. Austin sent his samples to a laboratory that clearly states that their equipment cannot accurately measure samples less than two million years old. All of the measured ages but one fall well under the stated limit of accuracy, so the method applied to them is obviously inapplicable. Since Austin misused the measurement technique, he should expect inaccurate results, but the fault is his, not the technique's. Experimental error is a possible explanation for the older date.
2. Austin's samples were not homogeneous, as he himself admitted. Any xenocrysts in the samples would make the samples appear older (because the xenocrysts themselves would be old). A K-Ar analysis of impure fractions of the sample, as Austin's were, is meaningless.
Links:
Henke, Kevin R. n.d. Young-earth creationist 'dating' of a Mt. St. Helens dacite: The failure of Austin and Swenson to recognize obviously ancient minerals. http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/mt_st_helens_dacite_kh.htm
Re: Playing devil's advocate here...
Date: 2005-08-18 05:19 pm (UTC)I've got an index around here somewhere. A is a modern chimp. N is a modern human. The others are in chronological order, starting at B for most ancient and ending at N.
Every transitional fossil just leads creationist to say "You haven't filled one gap, you've just created TWO MORE GAPS! Fill 'em! Duh, I eat poop!"
Re: Playing devil's advocate here...
Date: 2005-08-18 05:41 pm (UTC)Technically, the 'poop eaters' are correct that with each discovery of a fossil does create two more gaps. Since a 'missing link' is the link between the two that exist. But I hate semantic games as much as the next person...
After reading this article (http://www.rps.psu.edu/student/missing.html) I have a new outlook on this seperation of when 'man' became man and not ape. When did the critters begin with abstract thought. The researchers in the above article believe that it can be found via the size of nerve canals in the vertebrae.
Now, granted, a creationist could say that God gave them the 'insight' to abstract thought, but, to me, such a statement can never be proven - either way. Can a scientist say for certain that an outside force didn't give the monkey the ability for abstract thought? No. But I'd rather believe in what I can see and feel and reasonably work out instead of taking it in blind faith. Otherwise, the creationists better make room for my "ET with a brain enlarging ray" theory as well.
Re: Playing devil's advocate here...
Date: 2005-08-18 06:13 pm (UTC)> the ability for abstract thought? No.
Absolutely - and there's nothing stopping you from adding "and God did it" to the end of every single conclusion in the theory of evolution. None of this changes that evolution *happens* and evolution is a *fact*, and the theory of evolution is currently the only explanation for *how* evolution-the-fact happens that fits all the data without making unjustified assumptions. The theory of evolution also says absolutely nothing about the existence or absence of god.
Re: Playing devil's advocate here...
Date: 2005-08-18 06:51 pm (UTC)Nor should it. There's an interesting article by Karen Armstrong (author of History of God, among other books) in a recent issue of New Scientist on this subject. The article is supposed to be a review of Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle, but in fact Armstrong takes the opportunity to blast creationists for mixing up science and religion.
She makes this interesting assertion: "Until the advent of the modern period, nobody would have regarded the six-day creation story as a literal, historical account," and then goes on to discuss the difference between mythos and logos as expostulated by Plato. She winds up thus (and I'm going to paste a long quote here because access to the actual article is limited to subscribers, and I think this is a great point):
Now, whether you think mythos is adequate or appropriate for the tasks Armstrong assigns it is up to you, especially since we have things like psychology and grief counseling and so on. But I think she's right about the stridency of Christian fundamentalism, and that the notion of Creationism as valid science is fundamentally flawed.
I find the Biblical creation story interesting for a very different reason, and it's one that Armstrong mentions, too: it's one of the few creation myths I've come across that isn't violent.
Not fossils.
Date: 2005-08-18 10:46 pm (UTC)Re: Not fossils.
Date: 2005-08-18 10:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-18 10:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 02:49 am (UTC)I love that As if we are somehow "more" evolved than anyhting. Rather than differently evolved. hell, I'm not even "more" evolved than my dog. She can smell everyhting I did all day off my pany leg and she can feel when earthquakes are goign to hit and she can sense illness in my before I get the sniffles. And I think I'm evolved?
What people don't get s that every species is evolved ideally to it's own lifestyle and environment. So when you gain somehting you lose somehting in hte process. It's closer to a zero sum game than they think.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-19 08:44 am (UTC)and there are a hell of a lot more who have been doing it for a fuck of a lot longer who use the bible as support for their racist views.
I'm talking about the bit where Noah's three sons, Curly, Shemp and, I mean Shem, Ham and Japheth have a little dispute after landing that involves Ham seeing Noah naked and getting himself and his descendants cursed by Noah (actually he curses Ham's son) to be the Slaves of slaves.
White suipremacists have been using that (with the assumption that ham is the father of all colored races) to jusatify poor treatment of people of color for centuries.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-22 03:35 pm (UTC)