Yeah, it’s the stupidity of the Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron bad-faith argument about the “evolutionist’s nightmare” and the croco-duck or whatever dumb animal hybrid they’ve come up with most recently. It’s only the biologists’ nightmare if the thing actually existed, and I’m pretty sure Comfort and Cameron know that, but have a habit of deliberately misrepresenting the science to make their own non-arguments seem reasonable. Unlike this guy, who seems genuinely confused.
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This has all gone downhill since Bill Nye said we should debate Creationists.
No, we shouldn’t. As much of an ass as Richard Dawkins is, Creationists are acting in bad faith from the start, and debating with them is always a waste of time.
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Creationists set a pretty low-bar for intelligence, but this guy… this guy doesn’t just take the cake, he eats it too then comes back for the whole bakery.
Aaron Ra was a lot more patient with him than I’d be capable of.
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And yet, so many people are profoundly offended, even those who generally accept science and evolution, when I mention that “we’re all just apes”. They want to make some special claim that humanity is somehow apart. I counter “no, we’re in the ‘great ape’ clade, and we share the common trait of being a tailless primate with the rest of the apes”. It does nothing to convince them. Then I piss them off royally when I mention that mature Caledonian crows are more clever, mechanically, than most 5 year-old humans 
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Creationists will always bring the bad faith arguments. Always. They are never interested in having a reasoned debate. They dont want to hear it. They want to hammer away with childish BS. Period. If you’re going on a show like this prepare yourself with succinct points that are easy to understand, and lots of jokes to put them in their place. Or dont bother.
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“Yeah, I saw a bonobo on a mini-bike make an illegal left through a stop sign and turned bang-smack right into a pedestrian. A HUMAN PEDESTRIAN!”
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Besides the arguing in bad faith thing, the other reason I think it’s a bad idea to debate a Creationist is that they are starting from the premise that there is a supernatural being that created everything and can do absolutely anything he wants to do, including creating the laws of physics and breaking them anytime he wants. There isn’t an argument you can make in favor of evolution or the big bang or anything at all really that they can’t refute by invoking their omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient deity. You literally can never win that argument.
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I brew my humanity at a slow drip and turn human during my second cup each morning. I do remain an ape after turning into a human, though
Only ~1% of land animals have a spine, four legs, and a tail. And same for heads having 2 eyes, 2 ears, a nose and a mouth. Both only apply to a subset of terrestrial vertebrates. Most animals have way more variability than that
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Except all of this is wrong.
Evolution doesn’t predict these things. Evolution isn’t forward looking or predicting, it’s backward looking and forthright. It says we have a common ancestor. That’s it. That’s the part that pisses off creationists.
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I have experienced this exact same phenomenon in some discussions with conservatives, and no conversations I can recall with non-conservatives.
It appears to be a very specific difficulty in processing what analogies mean. It’s not even consciously refusing to accept the particular analogy put forth - it’s more like a difficulty or with or resistance to analogies themselves. To the kind of thinking that analogies call for.
I sometimes wonder if it’s at least partially due to the compartmentalization that sincere US conservatism requires. Government should stay out of people’s lives unless it’s abortion or gay marriage; we need to reduce the government’s amount of debt but we also need to cut taxes but we also need to have a gigantic military; we need to have less abortions but we can’t have more birth control and we shouldn’t encourage sex education; and so on.
To keep believing in all those different contradictory things and more, you can’t let yourself think in ways that make comparisons across different sets of ideas. You’ve got to keep every concept small and by itself, so the whole worldview won’t fall apart like the bucket of mushed-together stuff it is.
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I have seldom seen a clearer representation of the religious mindset.
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So evolution does predict something…that living things will look like they can be arranged in a pattern of descent, where things are more or less similar based on that ancestry. You would be extremely unlikely to get a pegasus, with characters just like horses and birds yet absent in other mammals. At best you would get a platypus, whose egg-laying is common to most vertebrates and bill has only a superficial resemblance to that of a bird.
It is a truly wonderful fact – the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity – that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group, in the manner which we everywhere behold – namely, varieties of the same species most closely related together, species of the same genus less closely and unequally related together, forming sections and sub-genera, species of distinct genera much less closely related, and genera related in different degrees, forming sub-families, families, orders, sub-classes, and classes. The several subordinate groups in any class cannot be ranked in single file, but seem rather to be clustered round points, and these round other points, and so on in almost endless cycles. On the view that each species has been independently created, I can see no explanation of this great fact in the classification of all organic beings; but, to the best of my judgment, it is explained through inheritance and the complex action of natural selection, entailing extinction and divergence of character, as we have seen illustrated in the diagram.
-Charles Darwin
MagicFox overstated the case – there are snakes and kiwis out there, and it’s not at all unusual for groups ro have exceptions to their rules – but I imagine that’s what they were going for.
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Sometimes sapiens doesn’t mean wise.
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I rather prefer to think that sapiens does mean “wise”, but sometimes it’s used sarcastically.
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Off topic, but I saw them sometime after The reality of my surroundings was released. Fuck me, it was the most high energy, bonkers shit I’ve ever seen.
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I’m jealous. I’d always heard they had amazing live shows. I bought my first bass and my first Fishbone album around the same time. It gave me something to aspire to. Never got close, but had a lot of fun trying.
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All the weird animals were put in Australia where we weren’t supposed to find them. That’s why there are so many venomous animals there too, it was a failed attempt to kill them off.
/s
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I realize this, but nuanced points are not what creationists are going for. In fact, their bad faith argument relies on “science” to get bogged down in the nuanced details.
Also, even among that wonderful variety there is repetitive underlying structure. Insects have six legs, and segmented bodies, spiders eight legs, etc. This is the beauty of evolution — we can trace progression of species to common ancestors, and we can make reasonable predictions on where evolution can go.
Indeed; you summed it up better than I did. Sure, evolution doesn’t “predict” what new species will come from horses, but based on our understanding of how it works, we can be relatively certain it won’t be a Pegasus, nor will they have four “fingers” again.
I think biologists would be excited to find a crocoduck. Describing it, studying it, trying to find its antecedents. It would be a field day for biology. I don’t know if creationists understand it or not, but biology is the study of living things. Even if creationism was how life originated, biologists would study, categorize, and try to make sense of it. The true “nightmare” would be if there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to living beings, and no fossil record. Every species was wholly unique with no unifying, overlapping, or similar traits, and no passing of traits to offspring, sort of a real life medieval manuscript menagerie. Studded with spontaneous generation every so often.
The irony is, from the perspective of our current reality, this would be proof of creationism and a creationist god. But from the perspective of such a reality, it wouldn’t be proof, since that is how the underlying principles of that reality work. To prove a supernatural being shaping a working system, you need something from outside the system, or something that wholly violates the laws of that system for that proof, and which defies rational explanation from within that system.
In short, in a system where all life is a random collection of parts and traits and progeny, evolution would be proof of a creationist god.
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There is a place halfway between Los Angeles and California, but to get there you need to travel in a direction called Gardwitz.
