Cruel, cruel readers. Everyone is sending me links to this recent episode of The View, in which four women babble inanely about something or other. In this case, it’s evolution. Do you people like to see me suffer? This was horrible.
OK, Whoopi Goldberg is wishy-washy, rather than stupid: she argues for some vague kind of deistic intervention at the big bang, then evolution is the mechanism for creating life. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, though…allow me to paraphrase. ‘Really cool handbags and shoes have, like, designers, so really cool people must have a designer, too, even greater than Gucci and Prada.’
Oh, wait…that’s not new. That’s the same old argument the ID creationists have made all along.
Here. The rest of you can suffer and despair of humanity now, too.
No, thank you.
Nope. Not gonna watch. I think my eyes might melt like guy who looked in the Ark…
Hasselbeck, no thanks. Intelligence isn’t her forte. Being the conservative shill on the show is. Now where is the mental floss for just thinking about that show….
Ouch! You’re hurting my brain. It just goes to show intelligence is not a prerequisite for being on mass media…sigh
“We were born to suffer, it’s our lot in life.” Cee3PO.
Watching videos like this undermines my faith in natural selection.
Agreed. Will not watch, no matter how much you beg.
Hey, wasn’t this the same show where they claimed the earth was flat and Jesus lived before the ancient Greeks?
Wow, maybe Elisabeth should design a really cool person to show us how it’s done.
No?
The analogy doesn’t hold, doofus, mainly because people aren’t like manufactured goods. And why do you morons always want to reduce us to artificial status anyhow?
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
I’ll only watch for a million dollar sum, in cash!
But to be fair, the View was the only show during election season that actually asked McCain tough questions.
I tried. I really did. I couldn’t make it past Hasselback’s first mention of the ‘designer bag’. I can’t even imagine what they filled the rest of the time with.
How does the audience just sit there and listen to that? Even if the tickets are free, it’s not worth it.
I made it until she mentioned the human eye. I tried, I really did. :[
We really need to teach the metric system better so that the people using the complexity fallacy aren’y so dead giveaway stupid sounding. Oh wait, I guess it wouldn’t matter.
I’ve never watched the show – who’s the woman sitting next to Whoopi? She, at least, has enough intelligence to have doubts about creationism; Hasselbeck, on the other hand, is just parroting the usual dogmatic tripe.
The great/horrifying thing is, someone(more likely, many someones) watched this video and thought:
“Yeah, that makes sense. I hadn’t thought of it like that before.”
Whoppi,
Being on that show I could easily see how you can mistake this for hell.
I love arguments for a creator that are basically “well I don’t understand how it could have happened and I have bothered to learn anything about it so it must have been god”.
OT (sorry) but I was wondering if the Pharyngula hordes can help me. I have Firefox and Greasemonkey with killfile but ever since the format change, from name on the bottom to name on the top, when I try to use killfile it doesn’t hide the killfiled persons post. It just puts a gumby background on it. With recent godboting and trolling problems I would love for it to work correctly. Does anyone have any ideas how to fix it? Thanks in advance for any help.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
Cheers,
Ray
I watched it; I made it all the way through and wow! That person is stupid beyond belief. If the common ancestor of us and apes somehow witnessed this video they would very likely have eaten their young.
I don’t expect Sherri Shepherd to understand evolution. She still hasn’t figured out whether the world is flat or not.
Exactly – and it explains the success of Xinanity. When a religion admits you without you having to actually learn or achieve anything then you’re almost guaranteed to have the higher numbers, because being lazy and stupid is much easier than being hardworking and intelligent.
If we required every person who identified as christian to pass a simple ten question test in order to qualify for their religious affiliations I have a sneaking suspicion that the proportion would drop significantly.
No, don’t want to have nightmares. Again..
PZ, you are a cool guy and I appreciate what you do here.
It’s my fault that I have given up IQ points to beer, but it’s your fault I just gave up 15 IQ points watching that video. Damn you.
I have to say, The View is intolerable no matter what they are discussing. For some reason, whenever I take my car into the garage to get it serviced, they’re watching it there. That’s all I’ve seen of it, and I’m a girl.
Designer handbags can be well designed though, that’s for sure! It’s too bad that god didn’t design poor people to be better wage earners, then they could have great handbags and see the wonderful design, gaining a more complete understanding of this argument. ;)
My girlfriend makes me watch this show and I’m glad that I caught it this. My girl is pretty ambivalent about religion as well as atheism yet even she was appalled by that vapid airhead’s statements. I believe that Whoopi bites her tongue more than others and her and Joy are far more openminded than Faithhead 1 & 2. Also bear in mind that this is a mainstream show thusly they can only be intellectually honest to a point. “Shakes head”
Forgive her, she has her mind on handbags.
And this is where a lot of Americans get their information and opinions.
Sigh.
The View, eh? Isn’t that same show that said, shortly after 9/11, that ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon should be banned from the radio? That was around the same time I stopped watching TV.
Anybody who has a clue on how poorly the human body works knows that if we were designed, our designer fucking sucks.
Um This is the show that brought you: “I don’t know if the world is round or not, I never even thought about it.”
Seriously, The research that found that people who watch PBS and the Daily Show are smarter than people who watch Fox News has found that that people who watch shows like The View are the dumbest idiots out there.
“That was around the same time I stopped watching TV.”
So you admit you used to watch TV?
I didn’t quite get it here (@1:04)
@1:04: What about things that are not perfect – who designed the things that are bad?
“They’re natural…”
I got the point, I got the point!
“… maybe someone else didn’t I didn’t quite get it here (@1:04)
@1:04: What about things that are not perfect – who designed the things that are bad?
“They’re natural…”
I got the point, I got the point!
“… maybe someone else didn’t <?>” [cheat?]
I like it there was a skeptic, and I like it Whoopi said “God in its infinite wisdom […]” as a nod to patriarchal thought.
But yeah, it was fluff, and Elisabeth sounds like a typical pleb who’s not considered these matters, but has rather accepted them from authority and is extemporaneously trying to reconcile and justify her vague opinions.?>” [cheat?]
I like it there was a skeptic, and I like it Whoopi said “God in _its_ infinite wisdom […]” as a nod to patriarchal thought.
But yeah, it was typical fluff TV filler, and Elisabeth sounds like a typical pleb who’s not considered these matters, but has rather accepted them from authority and is extemporaneously trying to reconcile and justify her vague opinions.
Top marks to Bette Midler for injecting some healthy skepticism into what was otherwise a very disappointing discussion.
I think what you see on ‘The View’ is a fair representation of what you would see among general public. Everyone will have their own definition of God and how She fits into their world view. They will accomodate their own definition of Big bang, evolution along with Her. For some She’s some mystical universal energy, for some She’s divine consciousness, whatever… so no matter what science says, God and Her followers are here to stay!!!
Yikes! Sorry about the editing error @31.
Wikipedia is wonderful.
Bette Midler and Barry Manilow met while doing regular gigs in a gay bath house in New York City.
I didn’t like her “divine clap” argument or whatever it was, but I’m glad to see Whoopi Goldberg is still going strong as the greatest entertainer the history of mankind has ever known. You go, Whoopi.
“one hair, of a pico inch”
What is that in rch’s?
…and close italics.
Weird. It should not be doing that.
Wikipedia is wonderful.
Bette Midler and Barry Manilow met while doing regular gigs in a gay bath house in New York City.
I didn’t know that they are gay! I wish them much happiness together.
Why? Why? Why can’t I un-watch that? I need to go rinse out my noggin. I feel violated.
Seriously, a frightening number of women take their daily marching orders from these dust-orbs, and from Oprah.
Bill Maher gets the same treatment from these pinheads in his interview to plug “Religulous”, and again Whoopie is the smartest banana in the bunch (which is not saying a lot). For those who can’t help rubbernecking at a bloody road accident:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euafWnqidko
I’m off to crack open the Guinness and attempt to isolate and murder any brain cells that have been exposed to that video.
She is a Troll.
And one of the fun things to consider, when considering all the hairs of pico-inches that had to be aligned just right for the big bang to occur in exactly the way that it did was that there might very well be an infinite number of hairs across an infinite span of pico-inches in an infinite amount of time. In other words, as improbable as this universe seems, it might still be inevitable.
But I guess some people would rather think about hand bags.
I was home Friday, flipping through the channels, and caught the tail end of the discussion. Though, not shown in the video, it appeared to me that Joy Behar tried to goad Flat Earth Sherry into one of her profound statements.
Ok, who broke the joint? Damn italics.
Wow, please kill me if I ever begin caring about what any of the dipsh!ts on “The View” ‘think’. 4 minutes of my life I won’t get back.
I got through Whoppi saying “President Bu…” and had to turn it off. PAINFUL
Hmm, let’s see:
Better?
Eh. I’d rather not. Got some recorded episodes of “House” to watch with the spouse.
This italics thing is very strange.
Why do i feel like leaning to the right…..
That’s not Bette, it is Joy Behar. The only way I know this is Google sent me to IMDB. :) That said, the two women on the right are… Stupid? Ignorant? Um… Oh, yeah, psychotic! At least Ms. Behar had some semblance of a working lump of gray matter.
Hassleback stating that a magical sky daddy is a more likely explanation for people than random chance and positive feedback loops (genetic mutations and natural selection) boggles the mind. No, it is well beyond boggling, it is like sticking a small electric stick blender in your ear and whipping your brain to stiff peaks.
And Hasselbeck was one of the staunchest supporters of Sarah Palin.
It all fits, when you look at it along the gradient of dumb and dumber.
Wow, people like Hasselbeck are why we have so many dumb blonde jokes.
Handbags? Shoes? Geez, how shallow can she get?
This thread is possessed by Hasselbeck’s retarded ghost!!
THNAKS MY BRAIN AM HURT NOW
I think they need a scientist lady / atheist lady to actually make that show watchable…
Some of those comments sound like the sidebars and margin notes the “science” textbooks printed especially for Bob Jones University have added to them – “if this pair of shoes has a wonderful designer, just think how much care God took in designing a perfect human being!”. (as a reader for Recording for the Blind I’ve read a few pages, when I can suppress the giggles(reading religious books) or the outrage(reading Bob Jones U. science books)).
My money is on humans as an evolutionary dead end and unicellular organisms as the masters of the planet – we are merely ecosystems and niches for them, in the long view.
Made it to 1:19…
Teh[sic] Stoopid[sic]… it burns…
I actually watched this live on the View yesterday, and I was so angry watching it. Hasselbach is a total idiot. I wanted to throw things at the TV, it was so unbelievable. Did you hear her bring up the whole ‘the human eye is so perfectly designed’ thing too? Ugh, at least think of something unique to try to back up your moronic beyond belief views. Ugh, she’s horrible, and such a damn loud mouth. I was actually telling me husband about this in total disgust over dinner tonight. She has multiple small children too, which makes me really really sad for them.
By the way, what’s with the italics thing all of a sudden?
LisaJ,
I agree about Hasselbeck. Her comment about something perfect “like a child” made me mad. I’d like to stick her in a children’s cancer ward and let her tell all the sick children about god’s wonderful design. I think she wouldn’t have the gall to go through with it. Or send her to Africa to see some starving children. Really, everytime I hear “god’s intelligent design” It’s always from people who are extremely well off.
It’s fluff, as others have said. But Joy and Whoopi did a decent job, considering how loud and obnoxious Hasselbeck got; anyone watching that episode without an adequate science education at least came away with the understanding that even Christian non-scientists concede that evolution happens and not all Christians are biblical literalists.
I think discussion of OEC/ID, outside of public school science classes, may not necessarily be a net negative for us (though of course we have to keep refuting the pseudoscientific arguments for it). Anyone who’s had an adequate science education is inoculated against it. For those who don’t and who were brought up not to question YEC literalism, OEC/ID ideas can be a gateway drug to reality.
Sweet baby Jesus drinking cocktails with JFK, that was egregiously stupid!
Notice how the pious/woo-woos must support their bullshit views with “scientific evidence”. Speak to priest, rabbi, homeopath, psychic, and it’s always the same: Either they detest and fear science for what it stands for and does, or they sloppily and ignorantly try to apologize for their own ignorance. Ungrateful gits…ask them to give up electricity and modern healthcare for a week…
Ouch, such lack of smarts really smarts…
Haha, “pico inch.” Fail.
You’ve gotta watch those tags…Preview is your friend.
The second one on the left at least tried to put up a fight, and I thought it was hilarious how Hasselbeck basically explained natural selection when trying to explain why some animals are extinct.
One of them is a man in drag.
Guess if you tell which one.
I would watch The View, but then I’d have to pull a double Van Gogh and gouge my eyes out.
I think a couple of them endorsed Sarah Palin. I swear the those stupid republicans won’t be happy until a retarded person is president and the vice president has downs syndrome. That’s the only way they’ll look intelligent.
My apologies to our special friends, whom I think have a greater IQ than The View panel.
That woman next to Whoopie is Bette Midler. How does this show exist? Do they give away cars to their audience members?
What a lot of inane babbling.
I loved when Whoppi didn’t define god as a man. Elizabeth has always bugged me though. I work at a museum and see a MILLION of her kind come through. The don’t-think-for-yourselfers, Christian mom’s that will basically put their eggs in the basket that believes in their religion.
*sigh* How I wish that natural selection today was like it was in the past. Her dumb ass would’ve been food for something else a long time ago.
-Erin
that was a mean tease… I was really hoping to see some new and fresh stupidity, instead it’s the Barbie version of the Watchmaker.
And for that analogy to be even remotely appropriate, we’d be cheap Chinese rip-offs: shoddy quality and poor design.
OK, who forgot the close italics?
Is there some reason they replaced one godbot with another? Who runs the show?
Hasselback isn’t stupid, she just won’t think.
So there.
Leave it to a clueless ignorant Christian conservative to use handbags to make an impassioned argument against evolution.
The second from the left, Joy Behar (not Bette Midler), is actually a feminist stand-up comedian and educated skeptic who consistently argues from a point of reason against Hasselback and other idiots they have on the show.
Huh? What are they talking about? The Big Bang is but a Clap from g*d? For foriegners is a bang a bang, and a clap is something to ‘Go see the Doctor’.
I’d rather tear off my own skin and eat it rather than watch that crap, and especially anything that involved looking at or listening to the world’s dumbest person, Elizabeth what’s her face.
I love how angry Hasselbeck looks after Joy Behar (not Bette Middler, btw) ruins her design analogy by asking who makes bad things. It almost looks like she might be thinking about it, but she’s probably just sulking. It’s also hilarious that she almost describes natural selection when they talk about extinction: “if it is efficient and working in our world, then it will continue and develop”. Sadly, she’s been so indoctrinated and poorly educated, she doesn’t even realize what evolution is. But she’s sure it’s wrong.
Why should I spoil my beautiful mind on something like this?
Oh that’s just great. Handbags are proof of gawd. Can we get any stupider America? er, well shoes – maybe. Depends on the leather.
You know PZ, this lovely and charming group of ladies would just LOVE to have you on their show.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the host of the most widely read science blog on the internet, PZ Myers . . .”
Fun!
A handbag!?
/importance of being earnest>
.
And he tries to close the italics…
fail :(
Aw Man!!! I had to go and look now didn’t I. Damn you PZ! I could see Whoopi and Joy really having to bite their tongues (ya pick your battles if you want to stay gainfully employed).
The other two. Holy snapping arseholes! I have not heard anything so bloody inane in my life (well, not on ‘mainstream’ TV).
I could not finish the clip, I value my brainz too much…
Next on the View, these dizzy ditzes discuss string theory and its implications for an expanding universe. Or not.
Does anyone remember when people actually had to know what they were talking about in order to talk about it on television?
“Her comment about something perfect “like a child” made me mad.”
Ugh, sentimental pablum. Children are unfinished humans, no matter how cute they might be at times. They’re born underdeveloped so that their big heads can make it out of that tight birth canal, and even so, it’s still a painful and, until modern times, often deadly process to get the little sprogs out into the world. Perfect like a child, feh.
/i>
italics gone now?
Anyhoo, if this show is of any consequence to public opinion (thereby influencing possible school board members and elections), all pharyngulites should email at leat the moderately rational panel members of the show each time to correct the misinformation. Maybe they’ll pick up on it and do a correction next show. Stranger and more surprising things have happened.
hokay, italics messed up well and good this time. Remember young Padawan, what goes on rdnet does not necessarily go here. Dang.
> another try. do or do not, i know.
Italico Delendi!
I said “ITALICO DELENDI!”
Nice little exposition of the psychology going on with with the type of reasoning that Whoopi is using:
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/quirky-little-things/200812/religious-people-arent-scientifically-naive-we-think
Sorry, everyone. I guess formatting magic doesn’t work on blogs filled with skeptics.
What. Fucking. Idiots.
They need to get some scientists or lady scientists on that show instead of having these women who don’t know what they are talking about blather on about their ill-informed opinions.
I’ll read through the posts later, the italics were getting to be a bit tough to bear. Not as tough as that clip, I lasted 1.5 looooong minutes. That show really is idiotic, but remember that Elisabeth Hasselbeck would eat bugs, if need be, for fame and fortune. ‘Nuff said.
I wonder if Elisabeth Hasselbeck could name one example of a Gucci handbag giving birth to little baby Gucci handbags which were slightly different than their parents?
A more appropriate example that Joy Behar could have introduced into the discussion would have been the question as to who created Cholera, Malaria, and Smallpox.
“You have broken what could not be broken!”
–Merlin in “Excalibur” (1981)
[Here this refers to Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s stupidity breaking the stylesheet on Pharyngula so that all posts are now in italics]
Oh for heaven’ssake.
It’s material like this that the Parental Control features on the cable box are meant for.
My brain just exploded.
Let us see if the dreaded italics plage has been stopped?
Oh, I just can’t watch that.
Teh Stupid. It BURNS!
And now, due to the close proximity of such megadoses of stupidity, even my hitherto undeniable mastery of both spelling and the Dictionary in Mac OS 10.5.5 has been affected.
FSM save us!
My sound card just voluntarily quit due to the nonsense that nearly the entire viewing audience probably didn’t see through. I leave it to the gallery here to decide which fact is worse. I do have to congratulate the pink lady on making the obvious points. But that the points were so obvious, and she was the only one to raise them still makes me shudder.
I am starting my own new syndicated afternoon show.
it will consist of me and a bucket.
every afternoon i will come on stage and just vomit in the bucket.
maybe after several episodes i will vomit on the stage, the audience, maybe buy a table and vomit on that.
i’m sure americans will love it.
#103
I’ll take two tickets.
Dear Pharyngula,
I am now officially too stupid for The View.
A handbag?
The best way to counter these ridiculous design arguments from theists is a point out that they are using an argument that includes multiple designers, not a single one. Shouldnt Gucci, Prada, Versace simply translate as multiple Gods in their argument? Telling a christian that science disproves their arguments usually gets you nowhere. On the other hand telling them that they are actually arguing for Hinduism can be a lot harder for them to ignore.
@ 67,Mike H,
Japanese cars,obviously…..
If Ray Comfort ever goes on The View and PZ shows the clip, then that’s the end of the internet as we know it.
Also, somehow I doubt #105 is really Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
Hasselback is the token rightwing loon, I guess they picked an idiot on purpose, but it is mainstream media, so you’re not going to hear an Ayn Rand debate a Noam Chomsky.
KISS
The italics bug shows up in Mozilla Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. Weird.
I run XP on a windows box
If that helps
Feyn @ 108
The lack of spelling errors is a dead giveaway.
Perhaps I spoke too soon, whoever posted #105 wrote their weblink as
Note the [/org]
Maybe it is her
I would watch this clip, but I, er, have to shampoo my ears. Now. Yeah.
Keep in mind :
-they do get paid for this babble
-this babble might well be the highest level educational programme on Cosmology and Evolution that many of The View’s regular audience have been exposed to in a long long time.
I can’t imagine that Elisabeth Hasselbeck @ # 105 would actually recognize her own stupidity. I know the type.
Why can’t these ignorant fools understand that scientists know more than they do? And why do they put their trust in an old book of Bronze Age (etc.) myths? (Rhetorical questions.)
If I were American, I think the knowledge that this crap is seen overseas (I’ve seen Montel, Oprah, Dr. Phil, Ricki Lake, etc., on UK TV) would make me cringe. By way of reassurance, the analogous local daytime TV (Trisha, Kilroy, etc.) isn’t any better, so although they don’t talk about this particular topic, they’re equally vacuous.
I had to numb the brain pain with Jack D and it only noon where I lived. More stupidity made into an art form
#114
Why ? Because we live in a culture where it seems everyone must have an “opinion” on everything (Science, Economics, etc…) and where saying “I don’t know enough, I don’t understand” is not a sign of intelligence, but a sign of ignorance.
Because colloquial use of SI prefixes with non-SI units hasn’t been authorized by some authority?
May I then inform you that your usage of the word “fail” is incorrect according to conventional grammar.
That’s like a whole new level of dumb. Is the entire show like this, four bimbos who don’t know what they’re yapping about? Every episode? How did this show survive beyond the brainstorming stage?
I tried to be brave and watch, and now I have a headache :(
PZ, this is not suffering, this is comic relief after a day of hard work.
To Miss Gucci Handbag I’d like to say: if the humans are designed, I’d think the designer would sign it as Alan Smithee or pass the blame to some evil competitor (I can just see it ‘I designed this soooo perfectly and then he came and messed it up. That’s it, I’m gone, you do it yourselves’)
What are these women doing WORKING???
Okay, it’s definitely a poe.
I have to quote from on of my favorite podcasts, ‘Mondays! What Sunday Threw Up’:
“When the dumb are in control, you simply cannot see this shit coming”
btw don’t get your hopes up because while Mondays! is a completely insane podcast, it is not concerned with religion per se. Still, it’s hilarious.
Oh bags are designed?
Well I never knew that! I guess that’s the end of our crazy theory. How embarrassing…
29 seconds – that’s enough
OMG, make the stupid stop!
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” H.L. Mencken
I am Satan lord of the underworld.
I sell Gucci bag Knock-offs from the trunk of my car
I am evil
I am the creator of androids, and shape shifters
I am from the ground beneath the Denver airport
Beware, my reptilians walk among you, their handbags and high heels seem human.
They are. Their skins adorn my walls.
You will know me only after it is too late.
…it burns…
…this is very sad…please stop it !!!
teh stupid…it burns! I have to go stick my fingers down my throat now. Must vomit up the stupid. Thx!
You are from Kansas?
Is the italics tag closed now?
Allen N wrote:
not even that will keep Americans from going broke at this point
It’s not quite as inane as ‘Fox and Friends’ but it’s not far behind. I don’t think Elisabeth Hasselbeck is unintelligent just poorly educated. Sherri Shepherd on the other hand, well the less said the better.
ennui @ 132
We’re not in Kansas anymore
#135 A forced daily exposure to 10min of “Fox and Friends” would be equivallent to torture.
If one wanted to show that Darwinian true-believers are a pack of smug dogmatists – a herd of “independent” minds – he’d find that Pharyngula provides “overwhelming evidence” for his case.
Nothing does more to ensure that the Darwinian theory of evolution commands the acceptance of only a tiny minority of the public than the adolescent rhetoric of its defenders.
Keep up the good work, kiddies.
Interesting ! Just got home,no italics at work on IE,but now on Firefox.
Ive watched bits of the View inadvertently in the past,it used to be on after Boston Legal I think on pay TV over here.
Theyre bad,and the Hasselhoff woman and Sherry whats her name are obviously a few cans short of a sixpack,but if you want bad,watch Maury Povich or whatever his name is.
Thats bad.
JS Said
I think that you are discounting Joy Behar’s contribution and just concentrating on Hasslebeck’s gucci bag comment.I am not a fan of the show, but I think some people are being arrogant.
I think that you are discounting Joy Behar’s contribution and just concentrating on Hasslebeck’s gucci bag comment.I am not a fan of the show, but I think some people are being arrogant.
#117
Exactly. I think you nailed a very important issue right there. If only people would have the balls to say ‘I don’t know’ and maybe tack on an ‘I need to learn more’, this world would be a much saner and better place.
nope, not gonna watch, no, no, no, no
Is that a live one or another Poe/pseudo-Poe now? I cant tell anymore…
Jackie @ 138 babbled
Nothing does more to ensure that the Darwinian theory to evolution commands the acceptance(is that proper English btw?)of only a tiny minority of the public than a good education and social security . There ,fixed that right up for you….
The general and overwhelming mistake that seems pervasive through our society is a misapprehension of the cosmos (the order of the universe). The idea that things are either random or made to orderly by some entity is absurd and a phantom rule. Some things are chaotic and other things are orderly. The orderliness of the universe doesn’t need a super intelligent causer. Snowflakes, benard cells, life, and lightning, somethings generally become orderly.
The second law of thermodynamics is misunderstood to mean that everything goes from cosmos to chaotic rather than from higher amounts of useful energy lower amounts of useful energy. A very spherical planet is quite orderly to any human observer but the useful energy thereof is practically nil. You can’t make it do any work.
Likewise this general belief about ordered things needing supernatural creation is an odd sort of modern invention which would perhaps seem exceedingly bizarre to the ancient Greeks and should seem odd to us. As if molecules of different weights won’t settle layers of various density on their own but need some army of angels to sort them out.
And while there certainly is need for an explanation like evolution to explain the useful order of living things the general shallow orderedness of things like planets and the galaxies seems trivial to arise out of the simple interactions of various forces.
So in closing, Elisabeth Hasselbeck is a blistering blowhard, and damn our society for enabling her.
Arrrgh,please add ” lack of” to my last post…..Tiredness at work…
Gee, thanks. More proof that the loonies out there are far more efficient in getting their message and disinformation out there than the rest of us. Great…
Jackie #138,
SIWOTI!
Must…resist….urge….to show them they are wrong….
Must…finish….paper due yesterday….
If “perfect” people are created by God, does that mean that ugly and disabled people are created by Asian child labourers in dark factory halls?
Damn, I always wondered what that “made in China” tag was doing on my big toe!
Poe or no Poe, Jackie’s post @138 is absent of content, just a snark attack that doesn’t deserve any reply.
@138 Jackie
You can’t seriously say that Biblical creationism or all its watered down versions are in any way supported by any evidence. Also, you can’t say that these babbling bimbos on The View actually made any argument in favour of such lunacy and antiscience as creationism.
Neg,
I can tell youre getting tired of it as well….
Negen, your lame riposte to my pointing out your fallacy is unacceptable!!!!
How do you answer to a sci fi comedy drama in your negenWorld?
You compounded your original fallacious argument with another, appealing to authority, and your authority was wiki.
The wiki article was your proof that Comedy and Drama are film genres, which they are not.
Comedy , Drama, and Tragedies predate film genres by thousands of years.
Once again, an Italian or Greek would never blunder into such a tarpit.
Then you ask me to give you back your dignity and pride, as if it were mine to give.
HAH
I spit on your arguments.
I’m an American, and we know that the only way you can get pride is to march in some sort of parade.
The airhead’s argument from ignorance and personal incredulity is very old. Intelligent design actually dates back to the ancient Greeks. PreXian. In the 2,000+ years it has accumulated exactly zero proof and gone nowhere.
The trolls argument is even dumber. Because 15 people it doesn’t like accept evolution, it can’t be true. The reality is that acceptance of evolution is proportional to IQ and education and inversely proportional to fundie death cult indoctrination. In other words, “Darwinists” on average are the best and brightest of our civilization. Fundies are the bottom of the barrel.
Bear with him,he’s in Spain,after all….Theyre more into bullfighting and somesuch..:-)
I have a question. I’m not a biologist and I really don’t know much about this field, and I’m also, as I’ve made clear repeatedly, very much opposed to young-earth creationism, Biblical literalism and other such anti-scientific nonsense.
But I want to ask an honest question. I have heard people make an argument in favour of theistic intervention in the evolutionary process by referring to the size of the human brain – and consequent difficulty of childbirth – and the fact that human babies, unlike those of many other species, remain dependent on their mothers for an extended period. It is argued, apparently, that if this – the large human brain, and consequent difficult childbirth and long-term dependency of babies – had occurred simply as mutations, early humans in the wild would have found it difficult to survive, since these things would, surely, be short-term survival disadvantages? (Though, of course, it is this very trait that has allowed us to develop advanced civilisation.)
As I said, I’m no biologist and I may well be talking absolute nonsense; and I’m certainly not arguing that human beings’ brains were magically enlarged by some sort of divine ray from the heavens! But I just want to know whether this question represents a misconception about biology, and, if not, how atheists/philosophical materialists would respond to it. I’m just trying to educate myself.
He’s in Catalunya. They banned bullfighting there. Then the Spanish accused them of doing so simply because of their dislike of all things Spanish, which may indeed have had something to do with it. :)
@151: I find it an interesting example of what I once read about the conservative mind with regards to arguments; that they will be overly concerned with propriety and the means through which a message is conveyed rather than the message itself.
Walton,
you have this the wrong way around…
If man was designed by god,why would he make our heads too big to fit through the birth canal?
Obviously,that is ignoring such interesting questions as,why would he give us anencephaly,spina bifida,Tetralogy of Fallot,inborn errors of metabolism?
Outsourced the Earth creation thingy to India maybe,god knows you cant rely on those guys…..Transmission error of the divine commands with the whole distance thing?? Just sloppy work?
What do you reckon?
There’s no excuse for a child of Nouvelle Vague, Auguste and Louis Lumière, who birthed cineme in 1895, to Jean Renoir in 1937, La Grande Illusion, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol,in the forties, minimalist films of Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville, the expression of film noir.
It is unacceptable that a Frenchman would be so crude in his analysis of the art of light.
I spit upon this Negen cretin and smoke many cigarettes, and drink wine mourning his american-like ignorance of fine arts and culture
Clearly…..
LOL
scooter on fire,its like truth machine on downers,but still fun…:-)
Walton 157:
Two things come to mind. First, I think you’ll find that the extended dependence of human offspring is not proportionately greater than that of other primates.
Second, is childbirth so difficult that it is a selection factor? Looking at cultures in which there is little or no medical intervention, the birth process itself does not seem that much of a factor. Now – making it to the first birthday – that’s a different issue. I have no numbers at hand, but I suspect birth weight has increased as well as the age of menarch decreasing (younger mothers??) may also play a role.
In any case, a larger birth canal would have been a great improvement – one any intelligent designer would have included.
Them mutherfuckers can kiss my big fat pink shiney ass
Would anyone here like to participate in a little experiment I’m running over at my blog?
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2008/12/why-they-want-to-silence-us.html
What I’m looking for is people to post short questions and comments over at Uncommon Descent, an Intelligent Design site, in order to find out when they censor information.
For example, this is a short question that hasn’t gotten out of moderation over at UD in almost 24 hours:
The reason I want volunteers is because I don’t know if my posts are censored because of the information content or because of me and my history with the site.
I hope all of the talk about conservatives doesn’t include libertarians. I’m going to pretend like it doesn’t.
Anyway, I’m going to call this the Gucci Fallacy, from now on. It’s just fun to say.
Gucci Fallacy… Gucci Fallacy… Gucci Fallacy.
Did someone call me?
ND,
i dont mind going over there and posting,but if the result of your experiment was to be that UD censors comments,would that shock us into stunned silence? Not exactly now,would it….So Im not quite sure what the purpose of the experiment is in the first place….
yeah but negen knows I love him, that truth machine guy is brutal.
I guess Negen just went on vacation
them socialists seem to get permanent siestas, while we have to do all the work.
When will the world wake up and see that our economic model is the salvation of the primates.
hold on
wait a minute.
ummm
where the hell is Scott from Oregon when you need him?
I think that you are discounting Joy Behar’s contribution and just concentrating on Hasslebeck’s gucci bag comment.I am not a fan of the show, but I think some people are being arrogant.
We’re “discounting” it because it’s not really that hard to shoot down Hasselback’s argument. “Smartest woman on The View” isn’t exactly high praise.
That just ruined my day. I’m reminded why I don’t watch tv.
clinteas wrote:
If you’d read my blog post it might become clear. The idea is to determine how conscious they are of the kind of information they want to censor. If they’re very conscious of, if its consistent, then there is a higher probability they are conscious liars. When do they know they’ve got an argument they can’t counter? When do you ask a question that takes them down a path they refuse to go? How consistently do they block this?
That would be like, “Best Cricketer in France” i guess LOL…
Ehm,no,sorry,busy getting as drunk as scooter…
I dont need experiments to show that creationists are conscious liars mate,Ive been on this blog and others for too long.
Scooter,
can you pass me a cigarette, I’m out and too lazy to go and fetch some. And what wine are you drinking, hope it’s not French, caus’ I can turn any good bottle of French wine into water by sending the right code over the internet, as long as your computer screen is within 10 feet from the bottle.
Well, that’s not completely true. Humans are highly altricial compared to other animals because of neoteny. If you take only gestation and lactation periods, this would be true but if you include post-weaning cost, dependence of human offspring IS much greater than that of other primates. Other primates offspring care is sequential and human care are ofter simultaneous. That means that a human mother can be weaning a child while having another one who is still dependent on her. Of course, this doesn’t call for a designer but for a helper at the nest, whether it be cooperative breeding with the help of the father or the grand-mother (hence longer post-menopausal life in humans).
Yes, childbirth is so difficult that there is a selection factor.
It is not an improvement, it IS necessary.
And as I said, still no need for a designer. Just think of it as little steps taken one at a time. “Help at the nest” allows more neoteny and an increase in offspring costs so mothers who have infants with slightly bigger heads will be able to bring them to sexual maturity without being penalized. Big heads didn’t appear suddenly. The birth canal didn’t change overnight.
Joy Behar say she hasn’t died to her knowledge but Whoopi Goldberg says to her how do you know?
Maybe Whoopi was speculating to herself that they had died and were in their personal hell, stuck chatting for eternity to the rest of those morons on the panel.
Beats the everlasting fires and tripods up my bum as far as I’m concerned.
OK, you got me looking, and I regret it. Some of the people who commented before seem to know the people in the clip, but unfortunately I was not forewarned.
My brain hurts now. What terrible waffle.
John Morales (@#31)!!!!
Get back in here and clean up this mess, young man!
Sorry, that was @163 Allen N
You are correct, Walton, that this could have been a short-term survival disadvantage to many early humans. But it does not necessarily follow that a disadvantage is a show-stopper–only if *everyone* who has that mutation dies immediately will the mutation die out. A short-term disadvantage that confers a long-term benefit can shift the balance, over enough time, toward the long-term benefit.
Are you familiar with the normal or Gaussian distribution, otherwise referred to as the “bell curve”? Since the standard curve is symmetrical, the mean bisects it right through the center. A reasonable heuristic is that around 68% of the population values lie within 1 standard deviation of the mean, about 95% of the values lie within 2 standard deviations of the mean, and about 99.7% lie within 3 standard deviations of the mean.
We’ll make some assumptions for the sake of the example here that we will state explicitly. Let’s assume an initial population of 100,000 with the new mutation to keep the arithmetic fairly simple. Let’s also assume the increased head size is initially such a short-term burden that women who survive those births are 3 SDs away from the mean. I don’t know off the top of my head how many children women had in those days, so let’s say 6 (I think that’s a reasonable figure for the time and culture), 50% male and 50% female. Let’s assume that the first one is the worst one–if you survive the first baby, subsequent ones are not going to traumatize the birth canal in significant, life-threatening ways. Let’s also assume that all female children inherit the mutation, that 50% inherit the increased survivability, and that a generation is 20 years. To keep the arithmetic simple, we’ll make the most problematic assumption here as well–that all babies survive to reproductive age.
If any of these assumptions are not accurate, it does not invalidate the model, it just makes the arithmetic *way* messier than I want to deal with right here and now.
So in the first generation, out of those 100,000 women, 99,700 women die in childbirth, and 300 women survive. Over the next 20 years, those women have 1800 children, 900 of which are female, 450 of whom inherit the increased survivability, and 450 of whom run the 99.7% risk of not surviving the birth. So 1.003% of 450 women in the next generation go on to successfully give birth with the larger head size, for a total of 451.35 women (make it 451).
Between the 2nd and 3rd generation, those 451 women give birth to 2706 children, 1353 of whom are female, and 676.5 of which (make it 676) have the mutation, and 676 of whom run the risk. So 1.003 * 676 women in the next generation = 678 women who will successfully go on to give birth.
So, as you see, several things are going on–even though there is a very high probability of not surviving in a particular generation, the population who survives increases from one generation to the next. Parallel to this, presumably, people are using their bigger brains to figure out cultural practices to increase their chances of survival. And, finally, a profligate number of individuals are, through no fault of their own, *not* surviving, a waste that many compassionate individuals can understand as the cost of doing business with an uncaring Nature, but much harder to reconcile with the concept of a supposedly loving God, who presumably knows about this waste, but does nothing to intervene.
italics away!
italics away! I say
What do the red slashes mean in the page-source code? The never-closed italics tag in #31 has one.
Oh, come now. Why would I watch The View when there’s this perfectly serviceable jagged, rusty piece of rebar handy right here, and I could just dive headfirst onto that from a second floor landing instead?
captain obvious #183
Yes we are all well aware of the italics issue at this point and where it started.
I wasn’t trying to make anybody aware of anything, dude, I was asking a serious question out of ignorance: What’s the significance of the red slashes in the page-source html code?
this is kind of hilarious.
“mutation” here should be “increased survivability”
Sorry came off like a snarky question that wasn’t a question
my bad
looks like those are just part of closing tags that aren’t in comments. If you look up top the meta-tags have them as well as most of the other non-comment tags. No idea why they show up in red though.
Just what happens in Firefox,or any text editor that does html does the same thing,to make the code clearer….Its not some fancy warning sign or anything…..
If I remember my Bible correctly, when Lot saw this video, he turned into a pillar of salt. So I’m not gonna watch it.
I want Morales to tell us how he did that so I can drop the italics bomb on–heh heh–
NisbetUDanother blog.Hypothetically, I mean.
Poor John,
he broke the interwebz !!!
Thats so impressive !
Hey Thalarctos,
yours is kinda the explanation for the Daily Show audience,while mine was meant to be understandable for the folks watching The View…:-)
I wonder if I can reverse the italics just for a single post…
got my answer–no, I can’t.
cap’n delirious — between us, we got it pretty much covered :). Except, maybe, the South Park audience.
I can’t do it… I just cannot watch that stuff. Anything Elizabeth Hasselback (sp?) spews is just awful…
BdN..
You make the statement that childbirth problems are a selection factor but give no support for it. Why is that the case when checking about, I find that the maternal mortality rate is undeveloped countries is 870/100,000 (World Health Org. 2005)- less than 1 percent. It would seem that other factors would mask any effect. Further, even in the worst case I could find (1 in 8 mortality) the mother would have a very good chance of passing on all the problems before selection took her out of the pool.
I am not sure if you argue that the birth canal is already of sufficient size. Should it not have been larger to avoid any problems? While the present design is clearly adequate and developed incrementally, along with brain size, would not any intelligent designer optimized it?
We agree on the complete lack of any need for a designer in any case.
A good counter to this might be:
When I look at a stream, I don’t think its odd to ask: could there have been a beaver at work, here?
From there, gradually leading into questions of the purpose behind biological traits, etc. to show that the order that these people crave is easily created by nature. At least get them there before talking about mutations.
…if I had that kind of patience with them, and they had the patience to learn.
You might get a unique perspective on that from any primigravida.
@192 cap’n devious. DO NOT EVER go to another web blog and pull this italics stunt! Look at the implications of this glitch. If this can be done with italics, it can be done with other html command codes and a blog (such as this one) could be rendered completely illegible.
Clinteas @ # 173, “Best Cricketer in France”
Well, I knew that the French ate frogs legs & snails, but crickets…? Yeah, why not?
The airhead here says “you love Italy.You would never go to the David and say,OMG, that just combusted and came to be”
I might be getting daft with age but that was her arguement AGAINST evolution. Is that not the way that Christians say it WAS done?
This is just a test of disabling the italics:
SEARCH LINKS
Inside new body
Better?
Personally, I am relieved to know that things WERE NOT off by a hair of a pico-inch
*hangs head*
…yes’m.
*sniff*
ACK!
Italics!
Regarding the birth canal size:
I recall reading that women would have trouble walking if the birth canal was much larger than it is today. I couldn’t find any thing via Google tho. Can any of the experts comment on this?
(I tried)
I hate you PZ.
You just ruined my day. And all my intro philosophy students that had to write about Paley’s Watchmaker on their final better have done a good job.
If I see one mention of a designer bag, I’m failing everyone.
And now?
Wow – if you look at the source code for the page, the site (or firefox?) is injecting italics tags for all text. There is no way to stop this.
@Allen 197
Well, sorry, but I think there’s a misunderstanding here : I meant that childbirth HAS BEEN a selective pressure in human history, a few million years ago. I never meant that it was today. You cannot use contemporary data to say that because it isn’t a factor now that it wasn’t before.
Really not sure what you mean by that. What problem ? Canal size ? 1 in 8 doesn’t mean she had 7 other children before… And, again, using data from the last century isn’t really informative. As far as I know, human babies are not getting bigger heads than 50 years ago. And there’s a trade-off between being biped and the shape of the canal birth.
First, it is not only the canal size that is important here : the position of the baby while engaging in the canal is very different from any other species and is primordial here. Second : you could say that about any other structure. The fact that humans began to walk upright could have been “optimized”. Your teeth could have. I don’t see your point. If your point is : “there is no cost” so it could have been optimized, look further. Human pregnancy is known to be one of the hardest, if not the hardest, one throughout the animal kingdom.
Wow, this is a whole new level of stupid. I’ve got undergrad students (and I teach music, not science) who are better informed, more articulate, and capable of putting together more sophisticated arguments than this. These people get paid for this?
Someone noted that those who buy into the “argument from perfection” are almost always well-off themselves, usually from birth.
Three words for anyone who buys the whole “everything is just so perfect it must have a designer” nonsense: impacted wisdom teeth.
Please people, leave the italics alone, they have no intention of hurting anyone and will return to their cage when they have tired of their freedom. Personally, I’m happy drinking the Guinness I stole from my wife (she’s using it to make Irish pudding) and watching the italics romp in the snow.
@207 David Wiener
http://www.livescience.com/culture/081121-hn-pelvis.html
A somewhat similar discussion has already been going on :
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/10/will_the_availability_of_csect.php
For an animation of human birth :
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/10/slitherin_baby.php
Apparently, hyenas might give humans a run for their money.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/060426_hyena_cubs.htmlThis really is so embarrassingly that I can barely watch it. If people read a book on evolution or the history of science they would know that this is a discredited argument and yet people continue to tout it as some kind or argument against evolution. There are a huge number of logical and scientific flaws that underpin the argument that since stuff we ourselves designed looks designed (what a surprise that is) therefore life must be designed too. It is just so incredibly incoherent and represents such fuzzy thinking. Please read a bloody book on the subject and try to learn something.
Walton, and others discussing birth difficulties:
Just call me Mr. Obvious.
I rather like how Harshman describes evolution as a balance of costs and benefits. Evolutionary changes do not occur in a vacuum, there are always many other systems interacting and potentially experiencing their own changes concurrently, so any change can be viewed as a ratio between the costs and benefits of introducing that change into the larger system.
If the overall cost/benefit ratio leans toward benefits then selection will have a harder time removing the change. But of course you knew that.
This is a pretty shallow treatment of the question you asked but I’m hoping it will reinforce the idea that the system is highly complex and viewing increased head size in isolation ignores other contributory systems.
Some of the questions I would ask would be: Did a support system exist at the time that would increase offspring survival if the mother died in child birth? Did the increased brain size mean resources could be shifted from the growing child to younger children earlier than with small brained children. At what rate did head size increase and did pelvis size increase lag a smaller amount or a greater amount? What was the population size? Was there a balance between males and females?
Obviously, in our case, costs were lower than benefits because the fossil record shows an increase in head size and we’re a population of big brained animals 6.7 billion souls strong.
Look, guys, giving birth is hard work but it is not impossible or none of you would be here wittering about it.
The flexibility of the adult female pelvis plus the unfused infant skull facilitate the process. If you’re going to use infant or maternal mortality rates – either now or a couple of million years ago – you’ll need to distinguish between the baby getting totally stuck, which is very, very rare, and all the other things either or both could die of. That data does not exist.
Where problems do occur more frequently they are usually down to the mother not being fully grown at first pregnancy, the mother having experienced long-term malnutrition, social mores preventing women taking enough exercise to develop all those lovely muscles which help the process along and strange medical practices like putting the poor woman’s legs up in stirrups to defeat both the muscles and gravity as the birth proceeds – just ask your mother if you don’t know what I’m on about.
And we all know precisely which sort of society subjects its females to those extra risks. Right? Right.
“And we all know precisely which sort of society subjects its females to those extra risks. Right? Right.”
Yeah, I guess those poor ancestors of ours had the same problem…
BdN,
It’s a long, long time since I did this at university but I seem to remember that patriarchy became dominant – not universal – about four thousand years ago, about the time that religions were formalised into what we would recognise today.
Most of our evolution had happened by then.
maureen,
Well, it’s possible, but I’d think it would be a little bit earlier, with the agriculture (see Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Barbara Smuts).
Anyway, my comment was more about the fact that the costs of childbirth in human (pre)-history does not come down to patriarchy. Of course,it is not impossible (and we could say that about many other traits). That’s not the point. This is :
http://sarpress.sarweb.org/sarpress/index.php?main_page=pubs_product_book_info&products_id=91
Should’ve read : “Look, guys, giving birth is hard work but it is not impossible or none of you would be here wittering about it.” ; Of course,it is not impossible (and we could say that about many other traits). That’s not the point.
I rest my case. Thanks to those who have made it for me since #138.
“A brand new stupid argument…”
You’re projecting, PZ.
This could also be of some interest (I know, the links I give ain’t complete explanations but a way for the curious to begin is inquiry) :
http://www.obgynsurvey.com/pt/re/obgynsurv/abstract.00006254-200711000-00023.htm;jsessionid=JFqDs7VHy900XSy1Q8Gr1y3d3YnRKzSGWyRp5phdln2VTqHdd9Yh!-26702612!181195628!8091!-1
Since apparently we can’t close the italics, I’m sorely tempted to try an unclosed bold tag…
It’s a long, long time since I did this at university but I seem to remember that patriarchy became dominant – not universal – about four thousand years ago, about the time that religions were formalised into what we would recognise today. – maureen
Very, very difficult to tell with preliterate cultures. We can only go on more recent gatherer-hunter and horticultural societies, which range from extreme patriarchy to more-or-less sexual equality – but always with some gender differentiation of tasks, and where there are “leaders” with significant power, they are predominantly men. If you’re relying on Gimbutas’ work, I’d say it’s pretty speculative.
in what way?
Jackie, you fatuous bint…
would you care to join in on a discussion on the role of head size, birth canals, maternal mortality, and the lack of any need for divine intervention/design?
BdZ and I are talking crosswise and may be disagreeing over something we may actually agree upon. Maureen has raised some very good points as well. Why don’t you jump in and give us some of your revealed wisdom?
Jackie@224,225,
You’re either a liar or a fool (that’s an inclusive “or”, incidentally). Your claim@138 was that:
“If one wanted to show that Darwinian true-believers are a pack of smug dogmatists – a herd of “independent” minds – he’d find that Pharyngula provides “overwhelming evidence” for his case.”
The majority of the text since then has been a discussion of a specific issue – the difficulty of human birth because of the large infant head – and its implications for hypotheses about human evolution. It has provided no support for your claim. Produce a real argument or evidence, or get lost.
Aaron @ #93:
I see what you did there.
Thanks, Nick G – happy to admit that I’m seriously out of date in more senses than one!
Relying, though, on my own experience and those of my contemporaries – having our babies in the late 60s and 70s – we all became part of the war between those who sought to facilitate a natural process and those who wanted control in an imaginary emergency. I have the episiotomy scar to prove it.
We were better off than our immediate predecessors. At least we got to argue with the system and, in my case, have a home birth with a midwife in the lead on the technicalities and me making at least some decisions.
I’m going to shut up now before we get into gory details.
I will not watch. The only thing worse than watching a double-digit IQ attack evolution is watching a double-digit IQ “defend” evolution.
And, finally, a profligate number of individuals are, through no fault of their own, *not* surviving, a waste that many compassionate individuals can understand as the cost of doing business with an uncaring Nature, but much harder to reconcile with the concept of a supposedly loving God, who presumably knows about this waste, but does nothing to intervene.
Most Christians I know tend to answer this kind of issue with statements like “God knows that suffering is good/necessary for us, and so lets it happen”; which seems like an inadequate justification to me, but I don’t have a better answer.
Now you know why I don’t watch daytime TV. When I work on my sex toys descriptions or erotic fiction, I like to have bad movies on in the background. “The Killer Shrews” is easier to swallow than ‘The View”.
you’re new to Teh Intertoobs, aren’t you.
oh, and to add a bit of speculation of my own to the “birth and brain-size” discussion:
if a human population carried the genes for growing larger brains, and the genes turned on before birth, the chance of death increased far more than if the genes turned on after birth. thus making that the more likely development. then there’s the negative effect of prolonged dependency, which may to a certain degree be offset by increased “cleverness” and therefore increased later survival. then the principle described in #181 increases the population that carries this particular gene, expressed in this particular way. result: a population of clever apes with significantly prolonged childhoods and difficult births.
Dawkins would really stump them with: “The classic designer must him/herself be even more complex, and necessary of explanation”.
Hasselback is an amazingly blathersome individual.
According to Wikipedia, Bill Donohue says Joy Behar, “is no stranger to Catholic bashing.” That makes her ok in my book.
LOL. Oh lord. Here’s your explanation for the italics:
He accidentally wrote a self-contained italics tag that needs no closing tag by putting the / in the wrong place. A red slash in the source code means the / takes the place of a separate closing tag.
Meaning no amount of closing italics tags will ever close it. PZ will do best to just delete his original post, and the italics will disappear.
whee!! we’ve been de-italicized
I remember Joy Behar from when the show was new and showed promise. Smartest of the bunch back then.
Shorter Creationism
“Deep time scares me.”
Whoops. I goofed on the Bette Midler thing. And I see that the italics tag has been closed.
(I’m almost tempted to open a new one. That was kind of fun.)
thalarctos,
thx very much for your post #181.
I was wondering, do you know if there exists models for population growth for early humans ?
There are estimates of approx. 4 million human by 10,000 bc, doubling within 6500 years, 8 million humans by 3,500 bc then doubling every 1000 years until the 19th century, 1 billion by 1800, then doubling within 130 years, 2 billion by 1930, then doubling within 35 years, 4 billion by 1975, and since then the growth is decreasing as it is forecast that we will reach 8 billion by 2025, so doubling in 50 years (after this let’s hope it never doubles).
So for the first 150,000 years before that, growth must have been extremely low, and almost constant, doubling every 10,000 years or so. And what about the 2 million years before that, when Homo erectus existed ? Do we have population growth models for these periods ? I mean models with the similar kind of reasoning you explained in your post #181 but with more precise assumptions.
I have tried to find this on the net but haven’t been succesful.
That’s…all you have to do to drop that italics bomb?
Bwahahahahahaha…
No, I mean, uh…Huh. How interesting, in a purely intellectual and hypothetical way.
Why must the pretty ones tend to be the dumb ones? I guess evolution hasn’t “figured” that part out yet. *rolls eyes*
oh
dear cosmic muffin
noooooooooooooooooooo~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111
/whistle
._. Sniffle… Blame the developers of XHTML code for allowing such a catastrophe to be inflicted on others. It’s why most blogs won’t let you use HTML in your posts. They limit you to BBcode so that kind of thing won’t happen… ._. *hides under a rock*
Holydust (#250) pointed out,
I was seriously hoping there was a “formatting off” flag in HTML when I ran my test. Afterwards, the only thing I could find was function-based.
Weird that there isn’t such an escape sequence.
Oh yeah, and in case it happens again, a possibility:
http://www.bennadel.com/blog/982-Ask-Ben-Closing-XHTML-Tags-In-A-Truncated-Message.htm
negentropyeater@245,
this may be of interest:
Kremer, M. 1993. Population growth and
technological change: one million B.C. to 1990.
Quarterly Journal of Economics 108(3):681-716.
@Ryan: Oh wow. I didn’t even think about the trouble it would cause in truncated messages, but it’s quite similar.
I hope my pointing it out didn’t encourage anyone to go out and deliberately inflict that crap on someone else, but I figured everyone could spot it quite easily in the source code, anyway. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that there are those that might not have been able to read it. ._. I just hoped to help get rid of the problem. :D
In my old, crappy blogs, I would actually include a batch of closing tags that would eliminate a certain number of each tag set in case someone got overzealous. It was SUPER-ghetto but it usually did the trick. That was before you could add a forward slash to a tag to have it self-enclosed, though.
That was an interesting article. I wish there was just a “halt all HTML” code you could insert to sort of reset the running tree of code. That would have been a solution, too, but it obviously doesn’t exist because it’s not practical.
#138
Nothing does more to ensure that the Darwinian theory of evolution commands the acceptance of only a tiny minority of the public
Public acceptance is irrelevant, science is what is important.
my pleasure :)
I regret to say that I don’t know; it lies outside my area of expertise. I just made up mine in order to step Walton through the reasoning; I don’t have the necessary information to do more than construct a very tentative first pass at a model.
I see that Nick Gotts provided a reference in a later comment; I wish I could add to what he provided, but I got nothin’.
Do people really believe in evolution? That is the wackiest theory I have ever herd. It’s funny how evolutionists like to think the earth is 4.5 billion years old like they can back it up with science because they can’t. Isn’t it curious that the archeological record has never uncovered one fossil of a species in transition. Meaning that every species that God created has never evolved into another species. The fact that God created the earth just like Genesis said he did actually fits quite well with the big bang.
Except rocks being dated with multiple techniques to being over 4 billion years old, same goes for the moon and meteorites, and the dating of the sun as well. Except all those things that fit with the relative dating methods of geology, there’s nothing at all.
Only if you ignore the fossil record. There’s a clear transition between terrestrial mammals and the modern day whales. Between fish and amphibians. Between reptiles and mammals. Between our ancestors and us. Between dinocaurs and birds too. So many transitions, innumerable amount of fossils.
Fully agree, not a single species God has created has ever evolved. God didn’t create any species at all.
Wrong. The genesis accounts go against the big bang theory too, but that’s another story. There was light well before the earth, and there was a sun too. The sun created the earth through gravity. You’d think that the bible would at least get the bit about day and night coming after there was a light source there. Not a very holy book by any means.
Actually the whackiest theory thought up by people is god. Just hilarious. No intellectual content whatsoever, just goddidit.
Hi Pat. You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Do you also go to math blogs and say the stupidest possible shit about calculus? Seriously. If you knew how stupid that comment sounds to anybody with even the slightest bit of education in science, you’d be really, really embarrassed. Genesis is mythology, pure and simple. Every single aspect of the biology of every single organism on Earth is consistent with biological evolution, as is the fossil record of which you’re so ignorant. Why do you buy the “big bang” but not evolution, which is far less speculative?
Pat ignoring the evidence doesn’t make it go away. Shut the fuck up.
“Isn’t it curious that the archeological record has never uncovered one fossil of a species in transition.”
You wouldn’t know “curious” if it bit you. Your post sounds like you’ve never cracked a book in your life.
I wonder if Pat knows about Archaeopteryx. Or Tiktaalik. Or Australopithecus.
Or what “archeological” means.
I presume you mean the paleontological record. The achaeological record is too recent to be of much use in finding transitional species. Just what do you expect to see in a species in transition? I suspect you have some bizarre notion of an organism with various parts from different species. In truth, all transitional species were perfectly good organisms in their own right and hundreds, if not thousands, have been found. Search for ‘transitional species’.
Ah, inadvertent honesty… from a sheep.
Baaah. No-one would think the earth was 4.5 billion years old unless the science arrived at that answer, using multiple methods. Which it does.
Baaah. I guess “paleontological” is too hard a word for a sheep to type, especially one that has no idea what a transitional species is or looks like.
Baah. We would know that species evolved, over time, into other species, even if not a single transitional fossil existed. I realize that “molecular biology” and “genomic analysis” are strange, scary words for a sheep, but those sciences provide the evidence needed to demonstrate the common descent of all life.
We would not know that “God” “created” any species at all, if some Middle-Eastern sheep-herders (with no idea of how biology and science work) had not made up the stories, written them down, and told people that the made-up stories were all true, and those stories had not been passed down to the present day.
Baah. Fractal WRONGNESS.
See this is what the asshole annoying intentional poes have brought us. Inability to tell some bored shithead apart from some dumb shithead.
Transitional species: Not what a sheep thinks they look like.
http://www.csicop.org/intelligentdesignwatch/fishibian.html
Pat smells real to me. I could be wrong. Poe-dar is, by definition, difficult to calibrate.
Why must those who haven’t a clue tend to be the ones who like to share their clueless “observations”?
So we’re like God’s bling?
Yeah, I’ve been using the Internet for more than 20 years, but this “Teh Intertoobs” thing is pretty new to me.
But it seems like you failed to get my point in #118.
Nick #253,
great, I found it. Thx.
-1,000,000 : 125 K growth ca.3 per million
-300,000 : 1 mill. growth ca.4 per million
-25,000 : 3.3 mill. growth ca.3 per 100K
-10,000 : 4 mill. growth ca.4.5 per 100K
Then acceleration
-5,000 : 6 mill. growth ca. 3 per 10K
-2,000 : 27 mill. growth ca. 6 per 10K
-500 : 100 mill. growth ca. 1.5 per thousand
Then growth decreases (no wonder monotheist religions are so obsessed with reproduction)
600 : 200 mill. growth ca. 5 per 10K
Then slow acceleration until 1800, and rapid acceleration until 1970. And now growth is decreasing again.
If you ever had questions about ID all you would have to do is come to my ER one Saturday night. ID is an oxymoron.
Bezoar,
What does that mean?
#103 Actually you take three other people on your show and call it “the spew”… It would probably be of better quality than the view
Hey, what can I say? I aim to please. :)
If humans were designed perfectly then why is the opening of the urethra right on top of the vaginal opening? Oh right, I forgot, God hates women.
I look at good poo, and I think “I made this. There must be some God out there who made me.”
Then I remember I didn’t make it. It was a natural process going on within my body.
Plus, like what they were saying, its just shit.
Hey, you guys are right, the stupid really DOES burn.
Oh my gosh, look at that stupid Christian, all Christians must be stupid cause that one they pay to be on TV is. It’s a conspiracy!
The stupid burns or is contagious?
I used to like Whoopie.
Damn you PZ!!!!
How is this a new argument? It’s the same argument from ignorance that twits like the blond have been regurgitating for decades.
“Isn’t it curious that the archeological record has never uncovered one fossil of a species in transition.”
Dear Pat, all individuals of all species are always in transition. The thing with fossils is that thy are dead. The do tend to perform in a rather static way. Transition occurs in all living organisms all the time.
Remember: Just say NO to empty television calories. They can even lead to television diabetes. They’re not healthy for your mind.
*goes to fetch brain bleach having just watched that video*
yep, i just let the sleeping brain-eating stupid lie on this one as well. Why bother? We can’t Pharyngulize the View can we?