Darwin’s embryo drawings flawed?

I’m moving this up from comments because it involves a particular interest of mine, embryology as it relates to evolution and the controversies over various embryo illustrations. Here is the comment by “1wmcaw” in full:

Glazius – I may be a lay person. I am not, however, ill-informed.

Darwin disproved: Take a look at his drawings of in utero creatures. He constantly compared the early embryo and fetus’ of human beings to that of pigs and other animals.

I’m here to tell you that medical science has roundly disproved those drawings/pictures/whatever you want to call them. I’ve seen them with my own eyes, as a lay person. Medical professionals, biologists, anthropologists, abortionists, all of them will concede that the embryo and early human fetus looks absolutely nothing like Darwin’s crude drawing and compares nothing to a fetal pig. We were able to distinguish my son’s genitalia at 13 weeks in utero. He did not possess any “tail” as so classically drawn. Many scientists will admit that human beings do not develop a tail at all in the womb, but that it fits the theory of evolution nicely and so it is still promoted in popular scientific literature.

Oh, and plenty of people understand how God’s creation works. Simply because you do not does not make it untrue.

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And the award for most hysterical antievolutionist nonsense of the week goes to…

This bit of wackiness which comes from a site called California Catholic Daily (which is odd since most Catholics don’t have a problem with evolution):

Now that Darwinists rule academia, they will brook no contradiction, and they will happily commit employment assassination even against tenured professors who dare even to mention intelligent design. The Darwinists even have their own Gestapo in the National Center for Science Education led by a modern day Heinrich Himmler named Eugenie Scott.

The NCSE is like the Gestapo and Genie Scott is comparable to Himmler, really?

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The more the merrier…

RationalWiki has a point by point critique of the Expelled “Leader’s Guide”. I wasn’t aware of the RationalWiki or their article until after I had written mine, so any similarities are due to great minds thinking alike. :)

Check it out.

Expelled’s intelligent design theory – this IS your daddy’s creationism (Part II)

Part 2 of 2 (click here for part 1)

L.G.Modern high-speed supercomputers have now used large-scale number crunching to calculate the eons of time and probabilities that are required to develop a cell through chance and mutation. The result? The odds are essentially zero, no matter how many millions or billions of years pass. (p.6)

I flat out call bullshit on this one. I want to see references. First I doubt the claim that anyone has wasted the time on a supercomputer. Second I am unaware of anyone arguing that the first cell developed simply through “chance and mutation”. No one knows the process by which the first cell formed, therefore no probabilities can be attached its likelihood.

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Expelled’s intelligent design theory – this IS your daddy’s creationism (Part I)

While doing research for an earlier post I ran across a document called a “Leader’s Guide” on one of the official Expelled web-sites. This little bit of propaganda which was created “to assist you with promoting the issues surrounding the film Expelled“. It is filled to the brim with rhetoric, misinformation, out of context quotations, and half-truths that have been staples in antievolutionist literature, since long before the latest version, “intelligent design” evolved from its parent species “creation science” in the late 1980’s. To demonstrate the evolutionary link between these ideologies I will often follow quotes from the Guide (in blue for clarity) with quotes from pre-ID movement, “creation science” sources making identical, or nearly identical, statements.

The “creation science” material I am referencing is mostly from well known young Earth creationists dated prior to 1991, the year Phillip Johnson published Darwin On Trial, which is often said to have launched the ID movement. The use of pre-1991 material ensures that there was no chance of backwards contamination from ID creationists back to “creation science” advocates. Something common in later YEC literature.

leaders guide

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Sorry for the absence

I have been working on a lengthy two part post on an Expelled related subject and unlike creationists l try and do my homework before I publish something, which takes time. I should have it ready by tonight (April 21). Sorry for the delay, and thank you for your patience.

Comb jellies and sponges and creationists, oh my!

Denyse O’Leary of Post-Darwinist is giddy over some evidence reported in the latest issue of Nature that the lineage leading to living comb jellies may have diverged from common ancestors of later animal life before that of the lineage leading to living sponges. She believes that this is somehow problematic for evolutionary theory since it was previously thought based on their morphology that sponges would have diverged earlier.

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Scientific American reviews Expelled Flunked

Scientific American has put up a special section on it’s web site dealing with Expelled, including two new reviews. One by Michael Shermer of the Skeptics Society, and the other by Scientific American’s editor in chief, John Rennie. They also have a couple pod-casts on Expelled to check out. So go check it out

And via The Austringer we find that even Fox News is panning this flic:

After seeing a new non-fiction film starring Comedy Central’s Ben Stein, you may not only be able to win his money, but also his career.

It goes down hill from there. See: “Ben Stien: Win His Career” for the rest.

Remember the NCSE has set up…

exposed

 

 

 

…for all your exposing Expelled needs.

Dealing with a YouTube antievolutionist

Here is a blast from my not too distant past for your entertainment and edification. About a year ago (I hadn’t stated blogging yet) I ran across a video on YouTube by an evolution denier who goes by the handle Philos71. In that video he bashes the fossil evidence for evolution and acts like he is reading a quote from a popular field-guide type book on fossils, and I felt compelled to respond. First is his video and then below the fold are my two response videos (which he blocked on YouTube), enjoy…

“Unfortunately” the author of the original video removed it from YouTube.  However my response videos remain below:

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McDonald’s + the gays = we are all going to die!

As Ed Brayton reported the other day on Dispatches from the Culture Wars, the “conservatives” over at Worldnutdaily have been “throwing a fit” because one of McDonald’s executives (Richard Ellis, vice president of communications) was elected to the board of the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, and because McDonald’s is a corporate partner with the NGLCC. Oh the horror!

But “throwing a fit” is not a strong enough term for what is going on over at Pro-Existence the blog of Rick and Nancy Pearcey (Nancy is one of the top brass in the intelligent design crowd). Here is Rick’s “measured” reaction to McDonald’s actions:

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