F Rosa Rubicondior: Unintelligently Designed Creationists

Sunday 14 October 2012

Unintelligently Designed Creationists

You have to pity Creationists. If only they would (or should that be 'could'?) think things through!

I blame the leaders of this money-making industry and right-wing political control cult; people like Ken Ham, Duane Gish, Kent Hovind, Michael Behe and William Dembski who feed off these unfortunate victims in return for worthless pseudo-scientific pap, and so release them ill-prepared in terms of reasoning ability and facts, onto the Internet to try to push their lost cause to people who actually understand biological science, as though that was ever going to be remotely possible. It almost constitutes child abuse, even for the chronologically adult Creationist children.

I can understand that there is little money to be made trying to educate Creationists - indeed it is to avoid the need to bother with learning science that attracts so many of them to the cult in the mistaken belief that saying 'God did it!' is going to put them on an equal footing with real scientists who have even passed exams and things - but surely they have a moral duty of care not to make their hapless victims look quite so infantile and uneducated in full view of the world, don't they?

But then, which right-wing Creationist parasite is interested in morality? Isn't morality for softies? Does money in the bank have morals?

Take for example the incessant clamour from Creationist for a complete set of human fossils showing every evolutionary step in detail, as though the absence of this complete series utterly refutes Darwinian Evolution by Natural Selection, just like the parasites who took their money told them. In fact, of course, even if no fossil had ever been found, Darwinian Evolution would still be irrefutably supported by genetic, biochemical and anatomical evidence, as well as by geology, cosmology, physics and mathematics.

But why should they expect to see a complete series of fossils from any evolutionary history of any species? This would be quite extraordinary, especially for terrestrial species like the ape family and it's post-aquatic ancestors. Fossilisation is an extremely rare and unusual event outside an anoxic marine sediment environment where it's still not very common, otherwise we would be quite literally climbing over mountains of pure fossils, as a moment of intelligently designed thought would have told them.

In practice of course almost all dead bodies are eaten either by micro-organisms or larger scavengers (that smell of a road kill that's been a couple of days in the sun is not a fossil being formed) and even the rare piece of surviving bone or teeth will usually be dissolved and will disappear in a few years.

In fact, so unlikely is it that a fossil would be laid down for every generation (the only complete series that would satisfy Creationists) for the whole of human and pre-human evolution, in conditions in which it would have been discovered since we started actively looking for them about 150 years ago, that it would be very hard for science to explain.

The discovery of such a complete series of human and pre-human fossils, the series that Creationism, and its under-cover wing the Intelligent Design industry, demands, would itself be evidence of intelligent design. It would be so unlikely that the probability of it occurring would be vanishingly small. It would be so highly unlikely that some sort of intelligent intervention would need to be seriously considered as an explanation - which is why we can be as near certain as makes no difference that such a complete series of human fossils will never be found.

You see, what any decent Creation 'scientists' who cared about the reputation of those whom he was priming to make fools of themselves on the Internet would do would be to tell them not to be so stupid as to keep pointing out that there is an incomplete, gap-ridden fossil record of human evolution, which is exactly what science expects and which is evidence against intelligent design.

Maybe they over-estimated the intellectual abilities of their credulous victims and expected them to work out these simple pieces of logic for themselves. Or maybe they just hoped intelligently designed flying pigs would tell them.







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13 comments :

  1. I see your counter is reset as well. Any ideas what is going on? How did we both go from 6 digit hits to 0? Who reset it?

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    1. I've no idea what you're talking about, Manuel. Have you no other way of getting attention these days?

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    2. I read elsewhere on the web that the Blogger platform got his by a Google glitch that zeroed all the hit counts - maybe it was transient - I can see big numbers on your hit counter!

      Robert

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  2. You say "This would be quite extraordinary, especially for terrestrial species like the ape family and it's pre-aquatic ancestors."
    Not sure what you mean by "pre-aquatic"...

    Robert

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    1. My mistake. I meant post-aquatic. Good series of fossils of aquatic species are not that unusual as some aquatic environments lend themselves to fossil formation unlike terrestrial environments.

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    2. Heh! Was wondering if you were about to promote the aquatic ape!
      Robert

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  3. Some of the creationists that argue on twitter make Elaine Morgan's book sound perfectly plausible haha

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    1. I must admit I've always had an open mind on the Aquatic Ape Theory but I've come up against some proponents who argue like fanatical cultists.

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  4. I protest at your categorisation of creationists as parasites! Parasites are absolute proof of evolution, and besides, they have a very hard life, trying to survive inside their hosts' bodies, dodging their immune systems, and finding a way to reproduce. It's libel, slander and worse against parasites to compare them to ...creationists. Feh.

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    Replies
    1. You're right of course. I was too hard on parasites.

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  5. Hmmmm, Fossil Records...

    Can we please have a record showing 6,000 years worth of uninterrupted modern [i] Homo-Sapiens [/i] laid end-to-end with no gaps, showing identical perfection of design at both ends?

    Glacial ice records too, like Lucy, as well as peat-bog finds...

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  6. Maybe we should take the long approach and start artificially preserving an example specimen from each generation now. Then, in a few million years, we might just be able to convince the creationists.

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    1. They'd argue that we had intelligently designed the fossil record. :-)

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