Religion, Creationism, evolution, science and politics from a centre-left atheist humanist. The blog religious frauds tell lies about.
Showing posts with label Oceanography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oceanography. Show all posts
Friday 8 March 2024
Unintelligent Design - New Species Of Deep-Ocean Worm - But What Is It For, Exactly?
New Deep-Sea Worm Discovered at Methane Seep off Costa Rica | Scripps Institution of Oceanography
One of the hallmarks of good intelligent design is that the designed object must be designed for a purpose. No intelligent designer is going to waste time making something that doesn't have any use. Even a decorative use is a function. As the designer William Morris said, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.", but creationism's designer seems to just design things for the sake of it - half a million different beetles, for example. And now we have the example of a deep-ocean worm that appears to have no other purpose than to make more deep-ocean worms.
It's almost exactly like these different organisms are being designed by a mindless, natural process without a plan and no sense of purpose!
According to creationist superstitions in Genesis, every living thing on Earth was created for the benefit of mankind, and, incidentally, named by Adam (as though Adam would have had enough time to name every living species!). So, a challenge to creationists is to tell us what these deep-ocean worms are for in terms of their utility value for humans, and how did Adam dive that deep to name them?
Its discovery if the subject of an open access paper in PLOS ONE and is described in a Scripps Institute for Oceanography news release:
Labels:
Biology
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Creationism in Crisis
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Evolution
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Oceanography
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Science
Saturday 9 December 2023
Unintelligent Design - The Late Devonian Mass-Extinction Or How Earth Is Badly Designed For Life
Artist’s impression of a Late Devonian landscape
Nicolas Primola
Study reshapes understanding of mass extinction in Late Devonian era: IU News
Way back 370 million years before the mythical 'Creation Week' the seas were full of life and angiosperm plants were rapidly replacing the tree ferns and other Tracheophytes and life was looking good, despite the fact that the single large landmass, Pangea, was on the point of breaking up.
Then something happened to cause another of those periodic mass extinctions that have punctuated Earth's long 'pre-Creation' history. What exactly it was has been the subject of ongoing debate by geologists, biologists and climatologists ever since evidence of it was found in the fossil record, particularly in Devonian rocks like those in Greenland.
But whatever the cause, it's not good news for creationists who have been duped by their cult leaders into believing Earth is fine-tuned for life by a designer god, and, by the circular reasoning that characterises creationism, therefore this fine-tuning 'proves' their designer god exists. A cynic might wonder, if faith is any good, why creationists are so desperate to find scientific 'proof' of their god that they perform all manner of ludicrous mental gymnastics and commit just about every logical fallacy in the book, to tell themselves and their target dupes that they have discovered it - and will be producing it any day now, real soon!
But that's by the by.
Sadly for creationists the evidence is that Earth is anything but finely tuned and perfect for life. The simple truth is that an Earth that was perfectly designed for life would never have extinctions, let alone mass extinctions like the ones that ended the Devonian and Cretaceous eras, and the one that's in progress right now. In fact, there would not even be biodiversity on such a planet because there would be no reason to adapt to adverse conditions because since these would not exist on a perfectly designed Earth, so life would not have progressed beyond the simplest of self-replicating molecules.
So, just for any creationists still under the delusion that Earth is finely tuned for life, here is a brief description of the Devonian and the mass extinction at the end of it:
Labels:
Biodiversity
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Biology
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Creationism in Crisis
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Evolution
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Geology
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Oceanography
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Science
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Unintelligent Design
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