Melbourne-based, Sydney affiliated historian and philosopher of science, especially biology. Apple tragic. Pratchett fan. Curmudgeon. Punster. Fatso.
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Okay. here’s the situation. A pouting young child comes into the room, urinates on the floor, and says “I dare you to ban me from this living room!” Okay then. I ban him. Davison can now feed his martyr complex, but only on his own site (which he continually tried to promote by putting it in the comment body, rather than the header field where it should be. I deleted the comment “links”).
The only other person who had previously been banned was actually an “evolutionista”, so Davison is my first creationist (not counting the mabus spammer). GHitch, you may stay, as you have not yet descended into personal invective. I will keep an eye on you.
There is no party line one must adhere to on this blog, but I absolutely insist upon polite behaviour. If you come here, evacuate your bladder and then act all surprised when you get treated like a toddler, tough. Go play elsewhere; it’s no loss to my readers.
So John, does this spike in readership work for you?
I’d be interested in reading how JAD thinks it’s beyond doubt that evolution has stopped. The basic argument, as I’m not that smart nor do I have a long attention span.
Something like:
P1) Evolution is undeniable due to the fossil record.
P2) One day, zapp, an undeniable event stopped natural selection in its tracks.
C) Therefore, evolution by natural selection (and genetic drift to keep Larry Moran happy and upset Richard Dawkins) has stopped in its tracks.
I think P2 will be the tricky one.
Oh, you’ve banned him. Now I’ll never find out how evolution has been stopped.
I think he needed to be more explicit in step 2, and that he never would be…
It’s a Darwinista (nice word, I can imagine you in your garish military regalia, self-awarded medals and dark sunglasses, convening la Junta Darwinista with Comandante Dawkins and, Capitán Myers . Screeming Darwin hasta la muerte! Arriba Darwin! Bajo diseño inteligente! Viva la revolución Darwinista!, but I digresss) conspiracy I tell you Generalisimo Wilkins.
I think I found a photo of you enjoying your despotic spoils:
http://www.pen-dragon.de/jpg/table/brett-junta-g.jpg
I would never wear that moustache.
To satisfy all our curiosities, why don’t you invite him to explain (briefly, and without invective) his theory and the evidence for it. If, as I suspect, he’s incapable of doing anything briefly, or without invective, the you don’t allow the post.
I too would like to know the evidence that evolution has stopped. Is it something more than “for billions of years, all manner of new groups appeared, but there haven’t been any major new innovations in the past thousand years”, as I suspect, it won’t take long.
Oh, and by the way, plate tectonics has nearly ground to a halt too. In the past 180 million years, the Atlantic ocean has expanded by thousands of miles, but now it’s only expanding by a few centimeters per year.
Tell you what, John. You do that for your blog… or go visit his.
But I don’t have one. I parasitize yours. And his doesn’t have that requirement of brevity and politeness.
Yes, but I am disinclined to allow him any more air than he already grasps for himself, and not on my blog at any rate.
JAD has written a couple of papers – I’m sure you can find the links on his blog. Experiments with giving JAD space to explain his stuff tend to end poorly.
I would but I am obviusly banned, because I challenged nonsense of “natural selection” – which is obviously the most revered idol here.
Obviously not.
bob koepp | February 1, 2011 at 7:32 am | Reply
Are you completely incapable of reading or what?
Your response amounts to this – “I didn’t understand a word you or Abel said, but I did catch a couple of words that I think I may latch on to to whine over”.
Great tactic there.
Maybe you should go learn something about hand waving since that’s what you just did rather than responding to a valid argument that you obviously don’t understand.
First and only warning for tone. Keep it polite.
VMartin,
You’re right of course about selection.
It is Darwin magic wand.
But in reality its just a simple filter that weeds things out. Selection is a garbage disposal. Garbage disposals don’t engineer anything.
David Berlinski said, concerning the current crowd of materialist Darwinians, that “there is not a first class intellect among them” and as we see here this is still more than obvious.
No less than Frederick Hoyle wrote the following:
–Sir F. Hoyle, Mathematics of Evolution
And,
Nonsense of a high order is ubiquitous in Darwinian circles, and in circles they continue to run.
Anything but the truth for that they cannot endure.
Yes, yes, we’re all ignorant sluts. Fred Hoyle said so, David Berlinski said so, you say so, and what I tell you three times is true. But can you present a coherent argument for or against some idea? Can you do so without calling anyone an ignorant slut? If the answer is “yes”, please demonstrate. If the answer is “no”, just go away.
If I were you I would be embarrassed if I had to base my arguments on a quotation from an ignorant, pompous fool like Berlinski but you seem to match his intellectual level perfectly.
Wasn’t Fred Hoyle an astronomer? I think I’d prefer a dentist to work on my pearly whites than a veterinarian, though I’m sure the vet would be familiar with mammalian dentition. Why should I prefer an astronomer to an expert biologist?
Hoyle supported a form of panspermia i.e. that live originates in outer space and was brought to earth by meteorites etc. As such he was an outspoken opponent of the theory of evolution and is thus a hero for bunny brain and his friends above.
I’ve seen people do this before. Something like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But consider, if Hoyle is correct, then life still is natural and originated in the universe. No creation required. So, it’s a Pyrrhic victory at best.
IDevotees love Hoyle because he “shows something is wrong with Darwinism” where Darwinism is supposed to include terrestrial origins. Ultimately we will settle on a mix: the elements (monomers and possibly even polymers of life) came from space, but life evolved here. How this undercuts Darwinism, is unclear.
Don’t forget, they also love Hoyle for a) declaring that Archaeopteryx is a fake, and for b) reinventing some equations of population genetics (apparently without ever having heard of population genetics) and then declaring that there was some kind of problem with natural selection.