Lies, damned lies and statistics
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota. He has a big chip on his shoulder about religion and Creationism. He has a popular blog where he writes articles that can whip some of his regular readers into a frenzy of blasphemy and hatred.
Recently, he stated that “Finally, a good use of the Bible” is using its pages to make a joint out of.
Now, you would think that a professor with such strong opinions would take facts and figures very seriously. The other day there was a poll on CNN’s website:
Do you believe in God?
Yes 69%
No 31%
Myers encouraged his people to vote and the figures rapidly went the other way to a whopping 67% ‘No’.
What this clever clogs did was to totally skew the poll and produce almost the complete opposite of the truth.
I can’t say I’m surprised because the Theory of Evolution depends upon fabrications, distortions and downright lies.
If he was half as clever as he thinks he is, Myers would stick to educating people, if that’s what he believes he’s doing. Maybe he’s not so sure. That would explain his continual ad hominem attacks.
“I can’t say I’m surprised because the Theory of Evolution depends upon fabrications, distortions and downright lies.”
No, it doesn’t. THAT would be a lie.
Looks like an interesting blog. Thanks for the link Stewart. For the benefit, if that’s the word, of new readers, or anybody who gives a damn, I have two principal problems with Stewart’s view on the origins of everything. Firstly – evolution, and its close mate natural selection, work. You can make them happen in the lab.. Secondly, one look at a clear night sky negates, to my satisfaction, any idea that one species on this one planet is of any cosmic or supernatural significance whatsoever.
That said, I share Stewart’s view that there is no reason to insult or denigrate the views of those who disagree on this particualar question, much less the holders of those views personally, whatever your beliefs or argument. It’s odd that so many atheists obviously think it is appropriate to do so. But then many are academics and have concomitant and well-known personal problems to deal with. I don’t mean that as an insult to them – merely as a compassionate observation based on experience.
Recently, he stated that “Finally, a good use of the Bible” is using its pages to make a joint out of.
Taha, I like it. By the way, you’re post on alcoholism has inspired me constantly refer to my close friends and family’s faith as their schizophrenia. For example, upon their return from church on Sunday, I inquired, “How was the schizophrenia support group?” It’s going to be a tough transition for them, but I’m sure they’ll cope. I do hope you approve.
In any case, the poll was already biased in favour of the CNN website’s reader demographics. I’m sure you’d get a much higher percentage “Yes” on a FOX website and probably a higher percentage “No” on MSNBC.
Jonathan – If the TofE were true then you would be able to prove it with evidence, like fossils of intermediate forms. Because you believe what cannot be proven, yours is a belief system; a faith; a religion, hence Myers’ and Dawkins’(et al) religious fervour.
It seems to me that evolutionists just don’t comprehend the import of the lack of evidence.
Jim – What can you make happen in the lab? Experiments involving bacteria and fruit flies. Swapping genes around. That sort of thing. Perfectly understandable. This is a world away – a universe away – from what needs to happen to turn molecules into microbiologists.
Because life is not the given thing that some people think it is, the rest of the universe may be barren – unless perhaps a comet strike on earth knocked rock containing bacteria into space and it landed on Mars and survived.
Even if it had, it wouldn’t turn into anything other than different kinds of bacteria, even after billions of years.
It is indeed odd that so many atheists obviously think it is appropriate to be disrespectful. I suppose that if you live your life thinking that your future consists of growing old and maybe contracting a horrid disease, then dying and be no more, then you’ll be a bit screwed up. They also have this fake pride. They are proud because they think they are superior being able to live without the ‘crutch’ of the Creator. If they realised they are pathetic weaklings, they’d hopefully appreciate their need of the Almighty too.
But the pride gets in the way. And pride leads to destruction.
A person needs more faith to believe that everything came from nothing without outside direction, than to believe that everything was created by someone, deliberately. Evolution, Big-Bang, Natural Selection, whatever you want to call it, is nothing more than a belief system that requires its devotees to ignore facts and evidence that point in a contrary direction. It’s followers are guilty of the very same thing they accuse Christians of, believing in something they cannot see and with next to no evidence to prove it.
I wonder if this guy would like to suggest making joints out of pages of the Koran? Nah, didn’t think so.
Jim – What can you make happen in the lab? Experiments involving bacteria and fruit flies. Swapping genes around. That sort of thing. Perfectly understandable. This is a world away – a universe away – from what needs to happen to turn molecules into microbiologists.
Stewart, it’s certainly a long time away. But a long time is what there has been.
But Jim, the thing is that they are the wrong kind of mutations that we see happening – either neutral or downhill. They don’t add the information to the genome that is required to produce more complex life forms.
The evidence shows decay. This fits in with Creationism. In Eden, the genome was perfect – no death or disease – now it’s not. More cancers and mental conditions as time goes on. Genetic entropy.
This means we didn’t start from scratch and go uphill (there are hardly any uphill mutations), but we started from perfect and are going downhill due to living in a fallen world, post-Eden.
Evolution has no sense of direction Stewart, as you must know from your researches. It doesn’t move towards better or worse. It merely favours whatever can survive best in whatever the circumstances happen to be.
We think we are the most ‘highly evolved’ beings. Well, some of us think that way. Not me. As I’ve said elsewhere, the social insects are evolution at its finest. We are a tempoary sideshow who have evolved more consciousness than is good for us. It will take us out, that consciousness, in due course. I don’t even think we are sentient beings. I think we are insensible to most of what really makes up the universe. We are just mealy bugs really.
Oh dear, Jim. Mealy bugs? Our consciousness comes from our Creator. That’s why we are creators also and not just concerned with survival.
The point I was making about evolution was that, because mutations are almost exclusively downhill, no amount of time could make intelligent beings out of primitive cells.
Mealy bugs Stewart, I tells ya. The planet has come out in a bit of a rash. We are that rash. OK. I will except Joanna Lumley. She is a transcendental being, especially around the dental-work. But she’s the only one.
What we think of as intelligence is a property arising out of interactions between single cells. Fot that reason termite mounds are intelligent too. It’s intelligence, er, Stewart, but not as we know it. Maybe galaxies are intelligent too.
Did you watch Armand Leroi’s prgramme on BBC4 the other night, ‘What Darwin Didn’t Know’? Quite a good state of the art summary. It’s on again tonight I see. No doubt available on IPlayer too.
Describing humanity as a ‘cancer on the face of the planet’ and such like is what eugenicists would like us to think of ourselves as. Then it will be easier for them to bump us off in their imminent cull to ’save the planet’.
I would have watched that programme had I not cancelled my licence in 2005.
Well, I don’t advocate bumping anything off for the sake of saving the planet or for anything else. We are a fact of nature, for the time being, as are our oil refineries and nuclear waste. Glorious things, especially at night, oil refineries, from my lowly perspective. I wouldn’t sing the praises of nuclear waste – even I draw the line there.
But, let’s remember what we are. Cosmic dust is what we are, the by-products of long gone stars.
Stewart Cowan-
“If the TofE were true then you would be able to prove it with evidence, like fossils of intermediate forms”
Please define for me what you mean when you say intermediate form, or transitional fossil. Just to make sure we’re on the same page definition-wise. If you could also give an example of something that you would consider to be an intermediate form, that would be very helpful.
Jonathan,
I don’t know of any definite cases. Do you?
Intermediate forms? How about walking whales?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/09/0919_walkingwhale.html
Stewart-
I asked you for a definition. And I didn’t want specific examples. What I meant was, what, if found would a fossil have to look like for you to consider it a transitional form.
Please define what you mean by intermediate/transitional form.
Jim – The key part of that article is in the first sentence: “Scientists have found fossil skeletons of two new species of primitive whales with *well-developed* limbs, fingers, and toes…”
I don’t know if Jonathan can tell us anything about chimeras.
Jonathan – Come on now, just show me a definite transitional form that I cannot possibly doubt. You want me to say something and then you’ll say, “a-ha, look at this…”.
You’re the evolutionist – you’ve got the evidence to prove it – you have, haven’t you?
Oh, this is interesting:
Bird breathing anatomy breaks dino-to-bird dogma
Stewart-
Why do you think I’m asking you to define what transitional/intermediate means to you? The reason is simple. All too often in these discussions, the opposing parties simply talk past each other because they ascribe different meanings to key things. I’m trying to avoid that.
I will happily provide more information, but before we get started I would like you to define what you mean by transitional/intermediate form, with an example, if possible, of what would constitute one in your opinion.
Once you’ve done that, I’l see if we agree on the definition, and we can go from there. The discussion will be much more productive that way.
Jonathan,
It’s actually not an easy question for me to answer, because I don’t believe in the Theory. What do you think of Jim’s walking whales? Maybe if you use this or give us another example then I’ll know what you consider to be transitional.
I’m not trying to be awkward.
Then there’s the human brain. What a ramshackle, Heath Robinson affair. Bits added on, higgeldy piggeldy, like a shanty in old shanty town. Bits that act only to shut other bits down. Two visual pathways, only one of which works properly. What’s that about? It’s like a computer that started out with a roomful of valves, then, instead of scrapping the valves, it had transistors added to control the valves, then, instead of scrapping the valves and the transistors, had integrated circuits added to control the transistors which still, along with the valves, send signals that confuse the ICs. Strange, I mean mysterious, way to design something.
It’s the world’s most complex computer, Jim, ergo, a very good design. Lasts a lot longer than any other computer, too. Wouldn’t want one on my desktop, mind you.
Maybe so far Stewart, thanks to the structure which allows parallel processing, but it’s haywire in other ways – contradictory signals all the time from different systems, excitatory systems that have to have inhibitory systems to shut them down, new systems built on old with which they then have to compete, language shuffled in to the left temporal lobe in most right-handers just at the last minute instead of being evenly distributed between the hemispheres, a sitting duck for any left-hemispheric cva…
Nah. It’s a shanty, a mouse on a frog riding a beetle. Keeps blowing fuses too – well – mine does. Blind watchmaker nothing. Blind, yes, I’ll say that about evolution.
As time goes on, it seems more people are blowing fuses. Me included. Perhaps this is a sign of genetic entropy?
It’s a sign of this government.
That as well, Jim, that as well.
There are two basic ways of defining transitional fossils: either a sequence of similar genera linking an older group of species to a younger group, or a set of individual fossils showing changes between one species and another.
A good example is Tiktaalik Roseae, not only a transitional fossil but one that demonstrates the predictive power of evolutionary theory. Essentially it fills a “gap” between Pandericthys (an amphibian-like fish) and Acanthostega (a fish-like amphibian). Based on the age of the rocks in which they had been found, scientists calculated the age of the rocks in which an intermediate would likely exist, and went to the Canadian Arctic, which has rocks of that age. There they found it, just as they had predicted that they would.
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for that. Like much of the Theory, this looks feasible; on the surface (like archaepteryx). When one delves deeper, one finds it’s not as simple as it seems.
From Tiktaalik roseae—a fishy ‘missing link’
“Indeed, the evolution of land limbs and life on land in general requires many changes, and the fossil record has no evidence of such changes. Geologist Paul Garner writes:
‘[T]here are functional challenges to Darwinian interpretations. For instance, in fish the head, shoulder girdle, and circulatory systems constitute a single mechanical unit. The shoulder girdle is firmly connected to the vertebral column and is an anchor for the muscles involved in lateral undulation of the body, mouth opening, heart contractions, and timing of the blood circulation through the gills.6 However, in amphibians the head is not connected to the shoulder girdle, in order to allow effective terrestrial feeding and locomotion. Evolutionists must suppose that the head became incrementally detached from the shoulder girdle, in a step-wise fashion, with functional intermediates at every stage. However, a satisfactory account of how this might have happened has never been given.’
“Indeed, Tiktaalik’s fin was not connected to the main skeleton, so could not have supported its weight on land. The discoverers claim that this could have helped to prop up the body as the fish moved along a water bottom,3 but evolutionists had similar high hopes for the coelacanth fin. However, when a living coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) was discovered in 1938, the fins turned out not to be used for walking but for deft manœuvering when swimming.
“Thus all the claims about Tiktaalik are mere smokescreens, exaggerating mere tinkering around the edges while huge gaps remain unbridged by evolution. Similarly, all the hype about Archaeopteryx and alleged feathered dinosaurs is beside the point while feathers, the avian lung and flight are still an evolutionary enigma. See also Does a ‘Transitional Form’ Replace One Gap with Two Gaps?”
Stewart-
You really must stop using creation.com.
A few points:
“Indeed, Tiktaalik’s fin was not connected to the main skeleton, so could not have supported its weight on land.”
Nobody claims that it walked on land. However it had a pelvic girdle that was probably strong enough to enable it to hold itself out of water for short periods.
“The discoverers claim that this could have helped to prop up the body as the fish moved along a water bottom,3 but evolutionists had similar high hopes for the coelacanth fin. However, when a living coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae) was discovered in 1938, the fins turned out not to be used for walking but for deft manœuvering when swimming.”
A deliberate distortion. The coelacanths that live now are fundamentally different from the ones that went extinct in the past. Latimeria chalumnae is actually of a separate genus to those that went extinct.
Coelacanth fin structure is also completely different to that of Tiktaalik.
Jonathan,
“You really must stop using creation.com.”
No.
What do you trust for your information on Tiktaalik Roseae?
Analyses of the reports of the scientists who have studied it, by people who know what they’re talking about. That’s how I was able to discover that the claims you cited have been refuted.
Jonathan, Creation scientists study the same reports.
And ignore them, apparently, or else they wouldn’t have claimed that Tiktaalik walked on land, when nobody said it did, or made a false comparison with coelacanths.
Evolution based on lies? Fine, If you’d rather follow a 2000+ yr. old text no problem. The bible (and similar books) were written by un-educated people who at a time of no understanding of how the world works, wrote texts so their villages and tribes and whatever you might want to call them had a guide as to how to live their lives.
The bible was not written by god. It was written by man. Whenever someone threatens the power religion holds over people, they unleash the dogs. Example: Galileo… He states that earth revolves around the sun (Gasp! The earth is not the center of the earth! Blasphemy!), which by the way is a fact but still called the “Heliocentric Theory”.
Evolution is a fact. But it is still called the Theory of Evolution.
Religion should be reserved to the privacy of your home. The world has around
7 BILLION people. You think everyone believes in myths?
Hello alopiasmag,
Uneducated people don’t write, especially beautifully constructed poetry, prose and historical accounts.
The Bible says that the world is round – many centuries before Galileo was silenced by the Church of Rome. Yes, that was about earthly power – you’re right.
Evolution is indeed a fact, but the difference is that I believe it has restrictions. This is why I think PZ Myers et al are wrong for failing to appreciate this.
I believe you are believing a myth. Should I insist that you keep it in the privacy of your home?
The fossil record is irrelevant compared to the evidence provided by DNA. We share a common ancestor (note that we are not descended from) the gorilla. This common ancestor had 24 pairs of chromosomes. We know that because all of its descendants do, except one, Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, while chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have 24. What is very interesting to note is that if we analyse Human chromosome 2 we find it is a fusion between two chromosomes that remained separate in the other primates. You can actually see the join in the sequence. You see a broken code for “end chromosome” and “start chromosome” right in the middle of a perfectly ordinary chromosome. No providence or designer would have put that code there unless it was formed by sticking together two other chromosomes.
If you look at the DNA of all the animals and plants and bacteria and fungi in the world, and focus on one gene in the sequence we see: firstly in very close species that the kind of tinkering you talk about, very small changes that happen all the time in labs, is common, that species who are cousins as it were of each other have almost exactly the same gene with some small chain. Species who are a little further apart, whose most recent common ancestor was further in the past, have the same gene with small changes added onto small changes. The further you go the more small changes you get.
From this we can make a prediction. If all species are indeed cousins more or less distantly of each other then we can draw a family tree. But all genes will have evolved along the branches of this tree. If one species in the past now extinct was the ancestor of two other species we should expect these two to have a closely related form of the same gene and other species to have a distantly related form.
So, you get a good computer and you feed into it the DNA of a large number of creatures. You ask the computer to consider one gene, and make a family tree from that. You then ask it to make a family tree for another gene, and another and another. And as evolution predicts and creationism does not, all the trees are the same. Almost exactly like there was some reason why a dolphin shares most of its DNA with a wale or even and elephant, but much much less with a shark or any other fish. If the DNA is just designed to make a dolphin be like a dolphin, wouldn’t it be more rational to make it very much like a fish? Isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that the design tricks that elephants use are mostly copied in the dolphin, but very few copied in the shark or other fish?
Just to reassure you that there is not simply one block of evidence (though i would think one was enough) we do have many many many fossils that are clearly of one form but with aspects of another, that are probably of one form by very similar to another, that are very like both forms, that are more like the second form, that are totally of the second kind and all ranges in between. We have by shear good luck and almost perfect record for one species of diatom Stephanodiscus yellowstonensis that clearly goes from one species to a totally different one by very gradual steps of this kind, at what point you say it became the second species is completely arbitrary.