There are limits to even my capacity to cope with The Stupid, and this video reaches them. It’s interesting in a historical sense, in that it seems to be an old recording — familiar faces look so young, and the whole thing has the clumsy style of a bad 1970s documentary—but it’s a whole half-hour of badly concatenated mish-mashes of creationist arguments. Who knew that Charles Darwin was responsible for the Big Bang theory, or that evolution was the foundation of astronomy? (Don’t tell Phil, his inferiority complex is bad enough.).
It’s rather weird to see old faces that most of you have forgotten or never knew, like Ian Taylor and Luther Sunderland and John Morris, all sitting there mired in the most awful ignorance and propagating lies about Lucy’s knee joint and Neandertal just being an arthritic old man and so forth, and realize that they or their successors are still spouting the same old lies today. Ignorance builds more ignorance, unfortunately.
The incoherence of the whole production is amazing, too. It starts of with this weird set of New Age rationalizations before wallowing in the reactionary pronouncements of fundamentalist kooks like D. James Kennedy … and then at the end it includes a five minute music video with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.
There’s a brief discussion of the video here, brought up by a guy who thought it made good points and made him question his acceptance of evolution. Among the issues he had was that the movie claims that “cro-magnon and other pre-humans were determined to be transitional species from as little as a tooth or a rib,” which is actually an excellent example of an outright lie from the movie. Nope, not true. Cro-magnon refers to a variety of Homo sapiens, so calling them transitional is stretching the word. Transitional forms are far better established than as extrapolations from a single tooth — but the creationists sure milk their mangled story of Nebraska Man for all it is worth, and use it to falsely cast doubt on other explanations.
I’m not even going to try to address the details of that mess. It’s the Gish Gallop on video; if anyone has any specific questions, OK, but the shorter summary is that all the creationists in it are lying out of ignorance and all the scientists are taken out of context.
By the way, if the stupidity in that video doesn’t make your cortex disintegrate into slime, try this one — it’s the intellectual equivalent of huffing a hydrofluoric acid/osmium tetroxide cocktail.
it’s the intellectual equivalent of huffing a hydrofluoric acid/osmium tetroxide cocktail.
Which would make us want to do it why? I have both of those in my lab, and I’ve never been tempted to make them into a delicious drink before. Dude, that’s why you get paid the big Scienceblogs bucks and get the neat President of the World title, because you look at those things for us so we don’t have to.
Oh no! I see that RaptureAlert has added a video response that video in the main post, as well.
I’m glad to see he’s found his personal windmill. Probably ought to tilt with caution, though, after that whole turbine explosion thing…
I scooted forward to the part where Charles Darwin came up with the big bang theory and had to stop watching, immediately! Teh stupid doesn’t just burn–it kicks like a mule!
… and then at the end it includes a five minute music video with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.
Let me guess: Lithium?
I’m so happy ’cause today
I’ve found my friends, they’re in my head
I’m so ugly, that’s OK
‘Cause so are you, broke our mirrors
Sunday mornin’ is every day
For all I care and I’m not scared
Light my candles in a daze
‘Cause I’ve found God
Which is one reason I think we shouldn’t include abiogenesis with purely biological evolution when we speak of “evolution.” We should try to make it clear which sciences address which questions, and that some questions belong in a philosophy class and not a science class. Keep the goalposts clear, because the creationists will keep moving them until they are literally out of the universe.
To paraphrase Sir Isaac: If they fail to see any further, it is because they stand on the shoulders of Midgets.
If you expand the amount of time, a ridiculous idea seems credible. And that’s the key to evolution! Cuckoo!
I watched the video — it is a late-1980s creation science/proto-ID video. They had Denton’s 1985 Evolution: A Theory in Crisis and a 1987 Bible-Science Newsletter in the video. Norman Geisler seems to be the guiding spirit behind it — and ironically enough he is an old-earth creationist, yet they have a bunch of young-earthers in there also. But this sort of cooperation is exactly what produced the ID movement in the first place. “Explosion in a print shop” is a phrase Geisler used to describe evolution at least back to his testimony in the 1981 McLean v. Arkansas case.
It is a great example of how the “creation scientists” used what we now think of as “ID” arguments about improbability and design in biology, and of how the ID movement’s claims about transitional fossils etc. are just sucked up from the older creation science movement.
The last 5 minutes with the Kurt Cobain video, along with the weird Babylonian technology stuff etc at the end, were obviously spliced on much later — there is a 2006 date, probably this part was the work of “desuit productions” which uploaded the video to the web. Desuit productions seems to just be a weird all-purpose crank science enthusiast who will mix creationism stuff in with all the other wacky stuff he believes without realizing how all these kooks contradict each other.
The other New Age stuff, at the beginning, is authentic. It appears to be an attempt to tie evolutionary science to New Age wackiness. The New Age stuff was/is a big concern for fundamentalists even though it is almost completely off the radar screen for academics who are barely aware of its existence.
Oh, I didn’t even watch that older video posted. I guess while some Christians were watching videos like this, my parents and I were watching A Thief in the Night, which is freakin’ terrifying if you’re really young or actually believe this stuff.
That’s nice, but not quite right b/c it implies that the intellectual midgets are boosting them up, rather than holding them down. Perhaps, “If they fail to see farther than others, it is because they have tripped over the shoulders of midgets”?
… and fallen head-first into an open manhole. A deep open manhole. There was no, ah, “water” at the bottom. Just concrete. Hard concrete. The fall was head-first …
Doesn’t make a pithy phrase unfortunately.
Didn’t watch any of the anti-evolution video (I don’t like banging my head against a wall, most of the time), but I had to load it all to see what the deal with Nirvana was at the end. Just some stuff from deep in the well of crazy, it turned out. As has been said above, Kurt wasn’t exactly a crusader for the faith (“Lithium” was at least in part written about his experience living with a born-again Christian), and “Sappy” (AKA “Verse Chorus Verse”) could easily be seen as an anti-religious song (“And if you fool yourself, you will make him happy”, etc.).
And why was Condoleeza Rice’s picture in that one graphic with the stages of man’s evolution?
And whoever did that Image Comics-style drawing of Kurt with bloody angel wings should be struck about the face with a mackerel.
If they have failed to see as far as others, it is because they have their heads up the bungholes of midgets.
Aww, PZ, do I hafta watch the whole thing? (As in — Aww, ma, do I hafta eat all my broccoli?) I’ll throw up if I do.
YetAnotherKevin (#14): I think you captured it!
I reject the cruel slagging of
midgetslittle people going on here.“If they have failed to see as far as others, it is because they are head down in a deep hole, and claim that this provides a ‘different way’ of seeing farther.”
“And if you doubt this is true, WHY ARE THERE
PYGMIES + DWARVESLITTLE PEOPLE?”Pollute my Osmium tetroxide with fluoric acid? are you mad sir? It has been too many years since I last smelled OsO4. My life used to be full of the stuff, along with uranium and lead salts of course, and more solvents than could make your lips numb (during the end of my honours year they were refurbing the EM suite and we had to embed in an airless cupboard, so the numb lips thing is real).
The National Geographic skull hologram cover, however, did give rise to a little nostalgia. I looked it up…it was over 22 years ago. I wonder if I still have it somewhere….
Just watched a show last night one Discovery about experiments with birds, in which they could artificially induce chicken embryos to “keep” long tails, like the transitional form had, instead of loosing the larger number they started with and ending up with only 5 when hatched, not to mention other cases of getting them to produce teeth, etc. Its *almost* as though a few minor regulatory genes mutated to produce modern birds… lol Of course, these morons, even if they acknowledged such studies, would probably insist it was proof of the “master program” which is aimed at producing the final forms, or some stupid BS…
Ugh! eww.
One of the eternal riddles is:
If the Earth is only 6 thousand years old, I should be able to bury a truckload of dead lizards in my back yard and pump gas in a few mere decades!
http://www.google.com/search?q=the+age+of+earth+is+*+years
I made the mistake of following one of the links thrown up by Richard’s search (#21), how do creationists explain light years? Oh my brain…
An excerpt:
Another (punctuation as in the original):
And:
In response, someone said:
And:
And news to me:
No references of course.
Geesh!
So sorry, blf!
Donning my tin foil hat for a moment, it becomes clear that there is a shadowy neo-eugenics movement afoot whose endgame is to breed utter gullibility into the species quickly.
No google search for that one, hmm?
#22
I smell a peer-reviewed publication in the Answers Research Journal!
thanks, James, I was wondering what that odor was
Since readers of this thread already have their ‘deflector sheilds fully charged and set for ignorance repulsion’, here are some article titles from the Jan-March 2008 issue of Answers in Genesis:
A billion problems with the big bang.
Canadians warm towards Creationism.
Getting a Loch on Nessie.
Europe fights to keep creation out of schools [yay]
The Big Bang, Gods chosen method of Creation?
The Heavens declare a young Solar System.
The Gospel Messege written in the Stars.
Straight answers to common questions.*
What went wrong at NASA.
Do I believe in UFO’s? Absolutely.
Black Holes, the evidence of things unseen.
High and dry sea creatures.
Penquins, designed by god.
*Where the author [Jason Lesle] writes in response to the question, What about distant starlight?:
“Another model, which I am currently working on, uses alternate synchrony conversion, much the way time zones work on earth. So some scientists think light can leave a star on day 4 of creation and arrive on earth the same day, just as a plane can leave London at 4:00 p.m. and arrive in Toronto at 4:00 p.m.
Also, since stars were created during the creation week (when God was working ‘outside’ of today’s ‘natural laws’) we must leave open the possibility that God got the starlight here using means that are not accessible today.”
This is the special Astronomyy issue (Welcome to the snake pit Phil}. There, I’ve subjected everyone to a near lethal dose of teh stuped, and before anyone asks, I was given the magazine by a friend whose poor wife is lost to the farces of lightness.
This is so 80’s. I was especially amused by the appeal to communism – all that stuff about Evolution being the scientific infrastructure for communism.
Beware, PZ, all this work on evolution might contaminate your mind with Bolshevistic memes!!!
But at the end they got me confused:
Is communism an evolutionary conspiracy, or is evolution a communist plot?
Wouldn’t you just wind up with water and osmium fluoride?
If you expand the amount of time, a ridiculous idea seems credible. And that’s the key to evolution! Cuckoo!
The same could be said of the bible.
ROTFL!
That’s a good question. On the one hand, fluorine has a higher affinity to hydrogen than oxygen has — you can burn finely dispersed water in fluorine. On the other hand, I bet fluorine also has a higher affinity to osmium than oxygen has…
ROTFL!
That’s a good question. On the one hand, fluorine has a higher affinity to hydrogen than oxygen has — you can burn finely dispersed water in fluorine. On the other hand, I bet fluorine also has a higher affinity to osmium than oxygen has…
Cogs. Dats. STFU.
I love the captions: “Creationist”… Very casual, like if this was some credential.
And that RaptureRetard guy? Thanks, but no thanks, that’s way too much for me to stomach.
Who knew that Charles Darwin was responsible for the Big Bang theory, or that evolution was the foundation of astronomy?
Well, yes; because evolution produced (among other things) astronomers.