I’m slamming the door shut on yet another thread that will not die, which was in turn the progeny of another enduring thread — as you might guess, this one was fueled by a thickheaded creationist’s refusal to acknowledge the evidence. Alan Clarke, if you start regurgitating creationist BS here again, I will shut you down. Otherwise, if necessary, converse here.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Bacon?
finally
Creationist: one who does not understand the processes of geology, biology, cosmology, or astronomy.
Yuo dirty evilutionests think bakon just came to life naturally?!!!!!11 It was clearly teh HAND OF JEBUS1!!!1 i no u idiots wont understand, so ill just pray for u
well, to repeat my question to Satan from the now dead thread:
anyway… about that Coca-Cola in hell… dare I hope it’s Mexican Coca-Cola, instead of the American stuff…?
Well, if people would just admit that god can do anything, and quit trying to claim that “fulfilled predictions” point to something other than god, then everything would be all right.
And since disagreeing with magic is persecution, then it’s the fault of all those people who want “evidence.” After all, it’s just another viewpoint that evidence points to specific causes, or that those causes become privileged when the evidence “points toward” those causes.
I’m sure that all IDiots/cretinists would be completely happy to be prosecuted under the standards of evidence that they wish to impose upon the schools (after all, that’s what teaching ID could lead to). That they could be burned at the stake for being witches is of no consequence, especially since the atheists would be first in line.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Bacon and beer!
Thanks PZ. I’m curious to see if Alan is going to show up here…
Probably. He doesn’t seem capable of understanding when he’s been defeated.
I stopped following this thread a while back, so I have no idea what this thread is about anymore.
In my opinion, bacon is very, very yummy, and I’m not ashamed to say it.
I don’t know why Bible believers get so hung up on evolution. Their REAL problem is with modern astronomy.
http://circleh.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/the-most-idiotic-verse-in-the-bible/
I dunno…given PZ’s warning
I think Alan is on some rather thin ice.
No. It was clearly the hand of Satan.
*sigh*
#13 was me.
1381 + 1452 + 15 = 2848
every comment is a new record!
It’s apropos of nothing, but I thought I’d post this poem here (it’s my comment on a famous saying of Nietzsche’s).
RECURRENCE
Joy may want deep eternity;
But the sweaty heat of shame–
I’d not unwind its day again,
Though joy in endless cycles came.
I liked the part where the world is actually created twice, but in a slightly different order.
As Mayor of Druggachusetts, I declare this pizza awesome!
“Bacon and beer!”
Seafood and orgy!
It’s whatever the damned can get their ectoplasmic hands on. Sure, they get the quintessence of Coke from bottlers all over the world, including Mexico.
However, the question that plagues damned philosophers is, is it the same thing, given that quintessence is as nonphysical as themselves?
The arguments are all over the place; some say “Aye” and some say “Nay”, and some say that it doesn’t matter anyway.
Humanity would be best advised to not kill themselves off. The dead have become rather fond of their quintessential swag, and given that it is imported rather than manufactured, they would be most displeased if their supply dried up.
“Seafood and orgy!”
Simplify, simplify!
Seafood orgy!
Sven: Erm, I think we have quite a while to go before we reach Crackergate-era records. I seem to remember at least five or six consecutive threads, each of which were over a thousand comments (at which point the Scienceblogs server started crying for mercy).
They’re so much like us:
http://shop.wizardschest.com/browse.cfm/4,4566.html
well, as I’m fairly sure that the quintessence of HFCS is nastiness, I will definitely aim for Mexican Coke. If there’s no Mexican Coke in hell yet, I’ll at least have a niche to fill, business-wise, once I get there :-)
Why ruin a perfectly good orgy with seafood? Yecchh.
Of course, if I decide to tweak that 10km hunk of stone I have out there into an impacting trajectory, what are the damned going to do about it? Whine at Me?
Longest comment threads ever on Pharyngula
[note: where threads were closed and another opened explicitly to continue the closed thread, I combine the original and spillover thread-counts]
Titanoboa! 912 (closed)
I get email (7/26/08) 1003 (still open)
I get email—special cracker edition! 1452 (still open)
The Great Desecration 2353 (single thread! closed)
EXPELLED! 2031
Expelled! open thread 351
total 2381
Priorities 1480
Fresh thread 969
total 2449
Frackin Cracker 1007
Fresh Crackers 1519
total 2526
Current (3-thread) total: 2858
While I realize that You sometimes like crude physical humour, that strikes Me as being very much a one-time sort of joke.
And haven’t You said that humanity itself — in the living state, I presume — is the joke that never stops being funny?
http://friendlyatheist.com/2009/05/18/madeline-neumann-died-because-her-parents-prayed-instead-of-getting-help-heres-the-irony/
update on the Madeline Neumann story.
…except that 2031 + 351 = 2382
If I had to guess, Benjamin Geiger is counting all of the Crackergate threads as one, whether they exist to continue closed threads or not. I think Sven’s makes more sense, though, since those each seem to involve new information popping up. They aren’t a true continuation of the same thread, they just happen to share a general topic.
This is the song that never ends
It just goes on and on my friends
…
Don’t forget Ryan B. in a two month old thread. We should chase him over here too.
I use that quote all the time, and no one ever gets the reference.
“Remember kids, only take what you can handle, and always know your dealer”
Yay Mr.Show
The original I have no idea what this thread is about anymore thread is fun. It’s got everything from Josh’s lessons in geology to Alan Clarke’s strange attempts to warp science into the Noachian Flood to links to bad songs of the 1970s. If you haven’t looked at the thread, it’s worth a wander.
quote from article linked at #29:
makes me want to grind her face into a cheese grater (but then I remember we’re supposed to be nice to other people); it doesn’t surprise me anymore though, at least not after reading the “only my abortion is an ethical abortion” essay. before that, I thought accusations of “denying it to others, but getting it for themselves” was cynical and maybe a straw man. I really did think that people who are “morally” opposed to something don’t think the rules don’t apply to them. wasn’t that adorably naive?
As long as we’re talking about this, that and the other. . . How bout them United States Conference of Catholic Bishops?
UPDATE
Further research has uncovered a few other also-ran threads:
The Confraternity of Catholic Clergy doesn’t like me 919 (open)
*rolls eyes* It’s a cracker, people 1293 (open)
Mail dump 996 (open)
FYI 1159 (open)
Fight back against Bill Donahue! 1227
Internet getting full, here’s a new hole to dump comments into 663
total 1890
other errata solicited
Man, I go out of town for a couple days, and all hell breaks lose.
I was in Tucson, PZ. It was hot.
By the way, paged comments would make it so you don’t have to “close one thread and open another.”
20 comments at a time. Your servers would jump out of their racks and smooch you for it. Perhaps I can sell you some code?
In the immortal words of Neil Finn:
I stand thoroughly corrected. Yes, I was including most of the Crackergate threads as a single entity, as the actual contents of some of the posts, while not explicitly continuing a previous thread, seemed to have little content of their own.
(Frankly, I think the reason this group of threads is so long is that there’s no competition from *other* similar groups of threads. With Crackergate, we had updates every few days, which spawned new threads…)
Hey, who turned the light on?
So, just in case Rodgers and Clark need more time I’ll play the devil,s advo… I mean Gods advocate.I finally got around to looking at the hysteria about 2012 and low and behold the movie portrays a global flood, wow I could have written that one.
A question for Josh…was there ever a time that IS recognized by our academic geology scholars where the earth was in total flood mode.
I’m asking from 4.5 bil to now?
Ewww, 20 comments per page? Yech. How about a nice threaded comment system with moderation like Slashcode, or even the DailyKos’ system?
If we go with paged comments, I’d prefer a much larger number per page. 100, at least. Maybe 300-500.
Wait, you were all still hanging out over on that thread? I miss all the fun. There needs to be a “most active” five list for each blog.
No changes!!!!
In fact, let’s go back to the old days! Pirate Mode! And the “science only” button. In fact, what about an “atheism only” button, too? And a “weirdness only” button…
Sub-blogs!
You forgot the Cuttlefish button.
Aaar, Avast me hearties, where be the creobots? *looks around*. Time for grog then…
Bookmark this one Carlie, it may get very interesting.
Science and Religion= Illusion and delusion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm14NI7AxtU
carlie, it hasn’t been all that active recently actually… we were just all nostalgically returning to it occasionally, waiting for Alan to do his homework and then return
And he only did the latter. Of course, he won’t really read any real science because he might actually learn something…
While there’s a sort of an open thread, I’d like to complain about the Shell ad that is presently at the top and right of my screen, the one that says “You won’t believe what’s about to go into your tank: Algae, tomorrow’s biofuel.”
There is no “algae” in the picture. That frog is sitting in duckweed, the smallest of flowering plants.
Wasn’t FYI the one with Owlmirror’s play and JeffreyD’s great “I’m sorry” post? If so, that’s one of my favorites, along with “Judge Myers Presiding.”
Thanks, PZ!
What? Who? Where?
#51 by: Sven DiMilo:
There are ads at the top of this page? I’ve never seen them.
What I liked the most about the original thread was how often Alan Clarke, in an attempt to defend his position, would cite pages which put the age of the earth at much, much older than the 6,000 years he claims it is.
Much hilarity ensued.
I know of no time period where global marine inundation of all continental landmasses is proposed or evidenced.
But give me a minute to find something and make sure. I can’t find the damn paper I need to properly answer this. Shit. Hold on.
The EXPELLED! thread was totally awesome. *contented sigh*
uh, yeah, I get ads at the top. I downloaded AdBlock once, but I’ve never gotten it to work.
Nope. The sea goes, and the sea comes, but within limits.
Nice, or threaded?
Threaded systems presume that every comment replies to at most one other comment. That’s nothing short of stupid and encourages incredible waste. It also means that, when you want to return to a thread to read the commments that have accumulated since you visited last time, you can’t simply start at a number and read to the bottom – you have to look for new comments all over the page instead. That sucks; I’m talking from experience.
Smug Firefox-with-Adblock user.
So predictable. I knew some idiot would start again with the bacon nonesense. It has gotten old. Thought this was supposed to be a science blog.
What ads, IE7/IEPro user.
And, for the reasons posted by David Marjanović, OM, a very definite no to threading. A page might get a bit slow when the comment count rises but, IMO, that is a small price to pay for an open format. After all, I tend to find that when the comment count rises, most threaded sites are at least as slow to navigate as open format ones. Not forgetting that many comments often encompass replies to more than one original comment. David Marjanović, OM being particularly ‘guilty’ :) of this practise. Though I wouldn’t have a problem with an user selectable ‘# of comments/page’ option.
I knew some idiot would start again with the bacon nonesense. It has gotten old. Thought this was supposed to be a science blog.
It’s both.
AVSN, not as old as your usual content free wingeing.
your failure to understand the concept of a running joke is neither our fault nor our responsibility
Hey! Mayor O.D. McCrack sighting at #18!
A question for Josh…was there ever a time that IS recognized by our academic geology scholars where the earth was in total flood mode.
I’m asking from 4.5 bil to now?
I’m not Josh, but an academic geologist (scholarly is a stretch), and no, the Earth was never in total flood mode like the Noah story.
Although, thinking about it, I suppose it’s possible that in its very earliest history, after the cooling of the initial “scum” crust, and before the formation of continental crust, water from volcanic outgassing and cometary impacts may have resulted in a watery planet. This would have been circa 4.5-4.4 Ga and some billion years before bacterial life developed on the planet.
Did you subscribe to the filters?
Great dog, no!
I’ve never seen a threaded/nested commenting system that didn’t ultimately annoy the ever-loving shite out of me and make me pine for flat comments.
There will be civil war if they are introduced here — I have my pitchfork ready.
A question for Josh…was there ever a time that IS recognized by our academic geology scholars where the earth was in total flood mode.
I’m asking from 4.5 bil to now?
I’m not Josh, but an academic geologist (scholarly is a stretch), and no, the Earth was never in total flood mode like the Noah story.
Although, thinking about it, I suppose it’s possible that in its very earliest history, after the cooling of the initial “scum” crust, and before the formation of continental crust, water from volcanic outgassing and cometary impacts may have resulted in a watery planet. This would have been circa 4.5-4.4 Ga and some billion years before bacterial life developed on the planet.
You thought this was a science blog?????????
Er, excuse me, this is Atheism 101. Move along now.
.
David you seem to know everything about everything, can you tell me, has the earth always had the same proportions of water and solids…since day one?
If not, how have those proportions changed?
Please be specific…peer review is your friend.
Tough question…are you up to it?
RockProf…Thats what I’m looking for… any papers to be had?
Originally it was bacon and lesbians, but the distaff side seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Whenever I read one of AVSN’s posts I think of this song:
Slashdot (and I assume Slashcode) supports flat, sorted by newest-first/oldest-first, for people who prefer that. The idea that a threaded comment system doesn’t support a top-level reply to the general topic or multiple comments is a strawman. Of course, people who don’t care about this sub-thread about comment systems will be annoyed by it in the flat system, but in a threaded system, they could easily ignore it…
David, he just answered. All the tripe Alan threw at us in one fell swoop. I’ll just cite Alan’s closed thread and tell him to come here.
Yeah. I suggest, politely, that advocates of threading go the way of the L-word.
Now, paged comments, there’s an idea. From a purely selfish perspective; whenever a post gets over 100 comments, my mobile browser just refuses to post comments.
Sphere Coupler asks “…has the earth always had the same proportions of water and solids…since day one?”
I’m not sure this makes sense–given that Earth differentiated completely and was a molten mass for the first few hundred million years. I think most of the water on Earth actually dates from subsequent comet impacts. And of course, there have been varying amounts of ice (including “snowball Earth”) at various times.
OK, I’m going out on a very shaky limb here,
If the planet was covered totaly in water in the early years,you know a very long time ago,
and if we evolved from this primordal goo,
and if we retain some sort of primordal memory of catastrofic events that caused fear imprinting, like fear of snakes or fear of falling, you get the idea.
Then couldn’t it be possible that the flood myth actually happened, only way long before man was evolved?
And David, you can’t just say nope, it’s just not fair.
Just a thought, after all, I am at the end of a very long line of evolving goo…I said GOO, not woo nerd.
Dilbert, Day one 100% molten material/ 0% water.
It does make sense, the percentage does change.
@60- Science Blog with bacon on the side. What’s not to like?
Okay, this is going to be extremely brief, and I’m writing it quick, so I apologize for errors. We can get into this more, if you really want to, but I want to emphasize that the Precambrian is not what I work in…
In short, though, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence for any time period on earth where we both have oceans and have no continental landmasses. Is it possible that this continental crust was totally inundated at any time? Perhaps, although we’ve got mountain building going on at the plate boundaries by the time we have oceans, so it doesn’t look like we’d have complete inundation (which is really the question). It looks like a “no” for total flood mode, even with respect to the earliest oceans.
Before about 4.4GA (4400 million years), we think that the Earth was too hot for liquid water to condense, so despite the fact that we think crust was being subducted (and we start seeing evidence of continental crust at that point too(1)), we don’t think that any of the topographic lows were filled with oceans. However, we’ve got evidence of liquid water in some of the earliest known earth materials (~4Ga, 1). By about 3.8Ga, it looks like we’ve got oceans and spreading-centers and crustal differentiation (oceanic crust and continental crust) and whole bit going on (e.g., see 2). But at that same time, we’ve also got evidence of mountain building events that involve continental crust(3). The continents have evolved by this time into distinct oceanic and continental entities. From here on in, it’s the normal pattern of continents moving around, smacking into each other, and crust getting stuffed into subduction zones. We don’t have good paleogeographic reconstructions until about (4)7-800Ma (million years), but I’ve never seen or heard of any indication that there was a time period when all of the continental landmasses were covered in water (again though, I’m trying to think back to TAing structure in grad school for this). And of course, for the last 800 million years or so, we’ve got extremely good evidence that there has always been some dry land exposed on the continents(4-6).
And of course, this whole comment has focused on the rocks that the Delusionists tend to completely overlook and simply dismiss as “preflood(7).”
____________________
References and Notes
1In the form of various kinds of clasts within younger sedimentary rocks and metasediments.
2http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5819/1704
3http://www.ocean.odu.edu/~spars001/historical_geology/lecture_10/lecture_10_slides.ppt
4http://www.scotese.com/pcanima.htm
5http://www.scotese.com/earth.htm
6jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/paleogeographic.html
7You might recall Alan’s lack of interest in answering numerous questions (in Watchmen and “Son of Watchmen” both) related to how his flood model explains the Prospect Mountain Quartzite of Wheeler Peak (the mountain that “Prometheus” grew on).
Hmmm, Bacon and Lesbians…It really depends on how committed the lesbians are to the market stability of Canadian bacon in New Hampshire. Sure, you could extrapolate projected regular bacon consumption on a cost per dollar ratio by determining the average American’s annual bacon purchase, and correlate it with a detailed survey of 5000 individuals throughout various areas of New Hampshire. Yet, attempting the same process with Canadian bacon will result in less accurate results, with significant variables complicating the deterministic statistics required for analysis. Perhaps due to nationalistic trends, or self reporting error, the usage of Canadian bacon can be greatly skewed towards the lesser. Incidentally, the participation of the lesbians may wane when faced with discriminatory practices upon administering the surveys.
Josh…Wow…Thanks!
sphere coupler, you don’t need to look for a global flood for such stories to arise. All you need is one or more large scale local floods. When your world is delineated by how far you can walk in an unit time it doesn’t take that large a flood to appear global, especially when it has been passed down through an oral tradition.
We know from geological evidence (one example in the US: http://www.iafi.org/floods.html ) that we have had some pretty large scale ‘local’ floods near the end of the last ice age, ~11000 years ago. For example, ice ‘dams’ holding back huge quantities of melt water until they finally gave way and in areas where we know that early humans lived. Similar examples to the US ones have been found in Siberia.
It’s my experience that Canadian bacon is quite unresponsive to surveys and other polling techniques.
There will be civil war if they are introduced here — I have my pitchfork ready.
I got your back, Emmet. Nested comments are an abomination.
Tis Himself, be happy i come here for amusement. I don’t have any doubt that in a serious setting you’d fall flat.
Tis Himself, be happy i come here for amusement. I don’t have any doubt that in a serious setting you’d fall flat.
oy hating computers today. Sorry ’bout the double post.
How about at least marking the last read comment? (see fark). Makes it easier to find where you left off at least.
There are small villages in britain today in which people feel their whole world was flooded in the past decade.
It’s another irony to hear flat-earthers insisting that ‘whole world’ = ‘global’.
Does anyone know what it is called when Hollywood puts out a movie that confronts our greatest fears, which, once on the big screen tends to alleviate the masses greatest fears and then we continue with our daily activities, or is this just an attempt to monopolize our fears for monetary gain and the rest is a bonus?
Can’t think of any other organization that would do that can you? I mean…play off the fears of the ignorant.
AVSN wrote:
Why don’t you give it a shot and find out? No-one here is very impressed by big talk.
I would just like to pop in for a moment to say I vote FOR bacon, and AGAINST threaded comments.
I would also like to kick TypeKey’s OpenID compatibility in the head.
OH AWESOME AN INTERNET DICK MEASURING CONTEST!!!
AVSN @ 60:
*bowing with a flourish*
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I would like to point out that bacon is not incompatible with science. Bacon contains carbon, therefore is organic, which involves chemistry. Bacon comes from pigs (or let us instead say swine, so as to be in agreement with the tone set by the bow, see above), which are animals, which implies biology. I’m sure physics could be worked in there, too, by someone with a better knowledge of physics and a real interest in helping me belabor the point.
Possibly to ridiculous lengths.
Meanwhile, d00d, relax. Have some bacon. And I understand there is beer around here, somewhere.
Elsewhere, on the subject of floods, whenever the question comes up I think….say you have a lightly-populated planet, without rapid, long-range communications, and therefore world-wide reaction bringing people in to a disaster-stricken area with aid (and without the need to feed insatiable world-wide news media). A big flooding event, Katrina, say, or the big Christmas tsunami a few years back, could very easily be taken by locals (especially non-literate people with access to only oral history with its imprecisions and outright errors) as a world devastating flood, with only a few spared by the deity of their choice. The reportage ain’t going to get more accurate and objective as it’s passed orally down the generations. Hitch it to the local religious traditions, and we have the Biblical Flood story, straight from “divine inspiration” and into the mythology-based pseudohistories of the future. Not an original notion, I know, but modern-day events give a reference point to use when the subject comes up; I’ve had no luck at all in pointing out that most places anywhere in the world, near water of any kind, get floods from time to time, and that this is no evidence of a Single Catastrophic Event.
Let this be a lesson to us all.
Thank you, cicely.
Are there cultures *without* a flood myth? I’ve heard Japan does not have one.
About eighteen months ago I found out that my cholesterol was sky-high, and since then I’ve only rarely eaten bacon, but when I do. . .
BACON!
so baconey. . .
fat-tastic bacon. . .
There are plenty of cultures without a flood myth Kaessa. Many inuits, and other indigenous people of Arctic/subarctic regions of the world do not have a flood myth. The Saami of Finland also come to mind, in addition to most of the Australian aboriginal groups. I’m sure they have plenty of blizzard myths, myths relating to ice, snow, cold, whales, caribou, fish, etc. Flood myths are common in the world because of the potential for devastation where they do occur. Floods damage crops, can cause potential famine and disease, are often unpredictable, especially if you’re hundreds and thousands of kilometers downstream of inclement weather. Further, a decent tsunami can cause myths to develop and propagate through collective stories for hundreds of generations.
Thanks, Helio!
I knew I’d heard something like that, but I couldn’t find it with a quick Google search. I appreciate the info.
Go Penguins!
Shorter Alan:
blahblahblah Morrison formation blahblahblah strata blahblah Darwin was wrong about cell molecular biology therefore god exists and you are all wrong blahblahblah natural selection is done by the harsh environment blahblah the bible sez there was a flud,therefore there was a flud blahblah
Discuss.
Has Alan Clarke actually been posting all this time? I couldn’t bring myself to wade back into the threads to see if there was any new inanity to mock and deride.
Do I have to?
I’d rather just point and laugh.
And eat bacon.
wowbagger, he posted one long, rambling post about “the age of grasses was moved back 10 million years, therefore god” just before the thread was closed
Ones definition of a “Catastrophic Event” is highly dependent on whether or not one is a big, tasty, pig.
and on a completely unrelated note: Religion explained
Also: Was the flud catastrophic for Cephalopods?
#11
I’m pretty sure the foolishness of that verse is the creation of a lesser ‘light’. The moon may be a mirror, but it doesn’t independently emit any light.
Jadehawk,
That is just awesome. A perfect analogy of religion.
To be fair, it was 2 long, rambling posts: #s 1392 and 1398.
In addition to the grass thing, he also quote-mined some, made a few ridiculous claims including that Tiktaalik is a forgery modeled on Barney and, taking the gap argument to it’s ludicrous extremes, wants to see 2 celled, 3 celled, 4 celled, 5 celled (etc. etc.) organisms as proof of evolution.
Personally, I’m attending a catastrophic event next weekend (memorial day holiday) and we will be sacrificing one of our distant cousins (a pig) no really an actual pig (not cousin harry)at a pig roast with lots of libations, old friends, and auto racing on the tube, tho with all the conversation no one actually will know who won.
And, Autumn | May 18, 2009 10:46 PM
I too suffer from that plague on humanity,fuck it…it’s a holiday.
Rorschach | May 19, 2009 12:05 AM
Also: Was the flud catastrophic for Cephalopods?
I’ll ask them, there’s bound to be a few show up when the alcohol starts flowing.
Wish you all could be there, but then again if your not there’s more pork for me!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rVHbGMwifI
‘Tis wrote:
The thread with the bad songs of the 70s skirmish was Sandwiched between Jodie Foster and Stephen Pinker.
That 812 comment thread also has the many many comments on the “deists are atheists”/multilverse/string theory/QM discussion and the knitting/sewing puns.
Science, religion, bad songs, puns….something for just about everyone. Who could ask for anything more, although I admit I don’t think it discussed either bacon or lesbians.
I never read anything in that thread before, until reading P.Z. post here just now. In scanning through the previous discussion thread, I noticed that in regard to Clarke’s comments about computer programming no one mentioned the field of computer programming called “genetic programming”. A Field Guild to Genetic Programming by Riccardo Poli, William Langdon, and Nicholas McPhee is a good start. There’s also an intere. Note that genetic programming is not the same thing as modeling evolution with artificial life simulations, but it refers to a program itself evolving through selection processes in order to generate a better program in terms of performing specific tasks. These programs are not designed, but are produced by unthinking algorithmic processes mutating and being selected in terms of better performing the desired task.
Bloody hell, that Therion guy was rude. I started reading towards the end, and thought, “Why are you guys bullying this physicist? I must defend my own kind!”, but then I read his early “work”, and it all made sense. Plus, for a Grad student blabbering on about the “Strong Anthropic Principle”, he didn’t seem to know what it was.
Wait….. so does this mean there’s going to be three prequels? Great, so it’s been decided we don’t have enough trouble combating religion, that we now get ones that contain Jah Jah Binks?
And who exactly is the George Lucas in this metaphor? Who do we get to blame?
Whoops, double post, my bad.
Sphere Coupler, prehistoric great floods.
haha, that was quite funny.
SC, OM at #52 – Gads, you still remember that little bit of doggerel of mine? Well, thank you kindly, dear lady.
Ciao bella
I am sorry that your vision of a god is so weak that he cannot protect his cracker form.
was one of the funniest things I read during the whole affair (not that “Pax Nabisco” was any slouch). First, “his cracker form” spelled it all out so plainly that you just had to laugh. Second, people were actually making arguments about the goodness of (the) Jesus (cracker) based on his meek acceptance of his fate at the brutal hands of PZ, while PZ was responding to comments about his cuteness or gentleness with “You wouldn’t say that if you were a cracker, man.” Third, it reminded me of the Wondertwins, which I always found fairly amusing as a concept.
But overall it was pretty powerful.
Shorter Alan:
blahblahblah Morrison formation blahblahblah strata blahblah Darwin was wrong about cell molecular biology therefore god exists and you are all wrong blahblahblah natural selection is done by the harsh environment blahblah the bible sez there was a flud,therefore there was a flud blahblah
Discuss.
Don’t you guys think PZ should just get a forum so we don’t need all these open threads?
#115 SteveG
A couple of people did mention genetic algorithms (somewhere in the region of #150 – #200, I think), but it’s good evidence so someone should keep trying to bludgeon it into Alan’s thick skull if he shows up.
Speaking of which, since Alan seems to be one of those “mutation cannot add information” types, I’ve got something to ask him. I did an experiment as part of a practical class last year; we took some plain old E. coli and grew them up on agar plates. These agar plates contained lactose and an indicator. I can’t remember what exactly it was, but the indicator changed colour in response to lactose fermentation, so clearly marked out colonies of E. coli which were unable to use lactose. In other words, it marked out mutants in the genes for utilising lactose. Fair enough, mutations always cause a loss of information.
Then we took those same bacteria and grew them up again. Once more we looked for mutants – but this time, we were looking for mutants that were able to utilise lactose amongst the bacteria that weren’t. And what do you know, we found them.
Now this poses you a bit of a problem. It clearly happened, because I and about 30 other people saw it with our very own eyes, so it’s not a mistake and it’s not going to just go away. According to you, information would inevitably have been lost in both mutation events, but in that case how could the twice-mutated gene start working properly again? The only solution I see with any whiff of sanity is that you’re a howling moron who doesn’t even begin to understand what he’s talking about. Fix that before you embarrass yourself further.
SC,OM at #123, as always, you are too kind, beautiful brain. I had forgotten about Pax Nabisco, seems a long time ago.
What are you doing up at such an ungodly hour in the US?
Cioa, bella
I’m an ungodly girl. :) Seriously, my sleep patterns are seriously messed up. On the bright side, at least I sometimes overlap with the Australians!
And he never presented Dyson’s deism argument!
Snap. I’m in the UK, and it’s currently 11:06am at the moment of typing. I woke at 7pm yesterday, after going to bed some time yesterday morning. I should say that while this isn’t normal behaviour for me on a Monday/Tuesday, it is normal for me not to go to bed on Monday night during term time and pull an all-nighter.
Extenuating circumstances: I’m a student, and more relevant to my current sleep patterns, I’m ill.
Better not be swine flu.
SC, OM – Well, I am in the UK again for a while, finally got my sleep cycle on Greenwich time. Only problem is that I miss a lot of the hard core troll baiting and cross talk that takes place while I am supposed to be sleeping. Ah well, will be back in summer for the beach, BBQ, boiled peanuts and the blog.
Ciao bella
That’s a great list of stuff–thanks. I usually avoid Wikiblabbia completely, but that page looks to be a good starting point. It ignores the fact that there is disagreement in the literature as to whether tsunamis, despite their rather nasty habit of inundating land and burying cows and chickens and such, should properly be classified as floods, but I don’t think that’s a weakness, as there are probably 15 people who actually care about that disagreement…
I’m trying to be as engaging as possible, but so far, my critique of Richard Dawkins’ computer skills remains unchallenged. See my post #325 on Richard Dawkins’ awesome computer skills baffle Information Theorists of intelligent design
You continually lie and misrepresent the science arguments, you are nothing but another liar for Jesus. Are you that deluded that you think of yourself as engaging?
Alan, you’ve failed to critique anything, so nobody can challenge a nonexistent critique.
FWIW, let’s note that the Weasel code demonstrates one simple thing: variation + selection reaches targets far faster than variation alone; creationist complaints that life can’t have happened “at random” are thus empty.
Bullshit. Of course evolution has a target, its target is “that which is most adapted to its environment”, and “methinks it is a weasle” is just a metaphor for this.
Here’s a pointed poll that will truly affect the future.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1898036,00.html#poll