Tag Archives: evolution

Rush Limbaugh’s clueless rant about evolution

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This last week I had the misfortune to hear Rush Limbaugh flapping his yap attempting to defend Christine O’Donnell’s ignorant comments about evolution. Unsurprisingly his comment were a grab bag of typical creationist nonsense. Here is the audio of the beginning of his diatribe:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Paraphrasing from the audio: “If humans evolved from monkeys then why are there still monkeys?”

This is logically exactly the same thing as asking “if my cousin and I are actually related, then why does my cousin still exist?”

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Epic Horse Exhaust

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OK, it took me a while to get to it but I am, as promised, responding to creationist Arthur Biele’s lengthy comments left in response to my criticisms of his writings on horse evolution. For those interested I suggest you go back and read Mr. Biele’s article and my original critique first. Those that do I think will find that his response didn’t really answer any of my original criticisms. Instead what he did was dump a new load of barely coherent nonsense on me.

A warning though, this goes on for quite a bit (it sure felt like it while I wrote it), which is of course due to the well known fact that accurately and substantially responding to horseshit takes considerably more time and effort than it does to spewing it.

Biele: With regard to Eohippus, If you knew anything about the actual fossil record, Eohippus finds are many and that category has been a dumping ground for certain archaic partial skulls that defy any specific classification, nor are they known to be ancestors of any known ‘evolved’ descendants, and they are mostly from Europe.

While apparently attempting to impugn my knowledge of the “the actual fossil record” Mr. Biele clearly demonstrates his own ignorance of the subject at hand. Let’s break this down in order:

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How CvE debates often seem to go

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Though I doubt there are many evolution defenders who would be that ignorant of basic Judeo/Christian theology.

[Via Pharyngula]

Evolution Rap from the Galápagos

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[Via Why Evolution is True

David Attenborough on his upcomming evolution documentary

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[Via Pharyngula]

Addendum

Here is a clip of the doc:

[Also via Pharyngula]

‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!

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Dr. John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research, just can’t seem to stop himself from saying ignorant things. And saying them about things for which there is no reason to be ignorant about even for a young earth creationist.

In the October issue of Acts & Facts, in yet another of a seemingly endless  parade of snarks about the Cambrian radiation (Morris 2008a) he throws out this little nugget about the famous mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale fossil locality:

Morris: In 1940, fossils of amazing clarity and diversity were found in Canada’s Burgess Shale. The extremely fine-grained shale preserved intricate details of previously unknown invertebrates.

The problem is the Burgess Shale was discovered by Charles Walcott in 1909 and quarried for fossils for decades before 1940. And as far as I know nothing significant regarding the Burgess Shale happened in 1940 either. But why get this wrong? Never mind bothering to crack a book on the subject, if Morris had bothered to Google the Burgess Shale the very first thing to pop up would have been the Wikipedia entry on the fossil locality which in a matter of seconds would have given him the correct date for its discovery.

It’s like he’s not even pretending to care about getting even the most basic and noncontroversial facts straight.

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“Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Roam Free in the Land?”

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Creationist nut-job Tom Willis (Creation Science Association for Mid-America), apparently without a sense of irony, accuses evolutionists of being Nazis/communists (or at least fellow travelers of the Nazis and communists) and concludes from this that it might be a good idea to (amongst other possibilities) round up evolutionists and put them in forced labor camps.

Other options include torturing recantations out of evolutionists, forcing them to wear identifying signs or plaques, or perhaps forced relocations to Antarctica (or Mars).

Poe’s Law is in full effect here, it seems like it should be a parody but it’s not.

Found via Pharyngula.

ORFan genes and intelligent design

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“When you said “ORFan”, did you mean “ORFan” – a gene unique to one species that appear to have no relatives in other species, or “OFTen”, frequently?” *

In a previous post about a Expelled Q & A event held at Biola University, I mentioned that Paul Nelson (of the Discovery Institute), who chaired the event, had said something about “orphan genes” in our after event discussions (I now know it is ‘ORFan’ rather than ‘orphan’) . Well he brought them up again in the comments section of that post and now Ian Musgrave has written up a good post on ORFans over at Pandas Thumb in response. Take a look.

[ * My apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan …and Musgrave.]


Darwin’s embryo drawings flawed?

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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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Responding to questions about “Darwinism” and intelligent design creationism

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I’m moving this up from the comments on an earlier post as I think it will take more that a comment to respond to.

A commenter, Josh Caleb, says that he has “a few honest questions“. I am going to answer him as if that were true even though I am now somewhat suspect that it isn’t due to his having cited trueorigins.org, an antievolution knockoff of talkorigins.org, and because of several of his comments left in response to others.

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