He’s still pestering me. Kent Hovind asks:
Can you, as a committed BELIEVER in the evolution religion please explain why;
1. ALL live forms from bacteria to whales “evolved” the myriad of complex processes to reproduce offspring.
You’ve got it backwards. Replication is a prerequisite for creatures to evolve, so they all inherited the capacity from their parent(s), all the way back to the first replicator about 4 billion years ago. At first it was just the crude expansion and division of a pool of metabolites, and gradually became more elaborate (and weird!), because this is an essential process for producing the next generation.
Do you think every new species has to re-evolve the entire reproductive apparatus from scratch?
2. Doesn’t this use lots of the individual’s resources and energy and obviously create more competition for food, air, water, housing etc?
Yes. Since, from the perspective of evolution, reproduction is the key process for populations to maintain themselves, it’s worth the investment. Your line goes extinct without it.
It takes a lot of work to keep yourself healthy and well-fed, so why do you bother? Just stop eating. You’d save yourself so much effort.
3. How does that benefit the individual?
Some of us find value and joy in our children and grandchildren, so obviously it’s a benefit to us. Others do not, and choose not to reproduce. That’s OK, they can contribute to society in other ways.
If you’re questioning the benefit of reproduction, then you must understand why some people use birth control, or choose to limit their investment in offspring with abortion.
4. Why didn’t any life forms “evolve” the ability to live forever instead?
Because it’s a physical impossibility. Life is fragile, any one individual is inevitably going to die, whether by accident or the actions of another individual. If your hypothetical Immortal falls into a volcano or is buried in a mudslide or pisses off another Immortal with a spear or gets eaten by a carnivore (all inevitable, given a long enough life, and none that you could acquire a resistance to), you’re done, no successor, if you don’t also have the ability to reproduce.
It’s a race between living fast, having lots of children, and burning out early, vs. longevity, a slow cautious life, and risking a death before you have a chance to have children.
5. Your offer to come visit Dinosaur adventure land in Lenox Alabama and learn REAL SCIENCE is still on the table.
In case readers were unaware, Hovind has offered to pay FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($500) for my travel expenses to go to his plywood fantasy land and hang out with his culties.
PZ, would you like to come to Dinosaur adventure land in Lenox Alabama for our Creation Bootcamp July 24-27? We will let you share the best three evidences for why you believe in evolutionism and take questions from the audience. We will pay your expenses to get here up to $500. Call 855-big-dino ext 3 if you want to come.
I’ve told him no. I’ve told him FUCK, NO! I’m especially not going to get entangled in that waste of time for a pittance.
My fee for creationist debates is $6000. For his 4-day conference, that would be $24,000. If he insults me again with such a ridiculous low-ball offer, the price is going up to $7K.
Make him pay off your legal expenses AND give you $6000/day.
back when, I think it was New Jersey, was looking for “volunteers” to fix their unemployment systems, some of us said, “Sure..the rate is $300 per hour, plus expenses, with a guarantee of 1000 hours on the contract.” Your $6K per day flat rate is undervaluing your time. At least double it.
Not worried about the rate — it’s sufficient that nobody has invited me to a debate since.
I assume the fee has to be prepaid.
You should also get lunch (of your choosing). I always put that in the contract.
Why do species reproduce is one of the most bizarre questions yet from a creationist. Leaving aside the difference between reproduction by cell division and reproduction by sex between two organisms, it should be obvious even to someone as thick as Hovind that evolution couldn’t happen without reproduction. The question about living forever is also odd. Is he trying to somehow relate this to the obviously mistaken long lifespans in the old testament? Natural selection can’t work on longevity as such, only on the duration of reproductive ability (which may have a link to overall longevity, but not necessarily), and here species evolve different trade-offs between number of offspring and survivability of individual offspring (which may or may not evolve into aspects such as live-bearing and parental care). Really odd questions.
“As a believer in the…” right off you need to use a Janet-like “not a robot” aside, and he hasn’t even gotten through the first sentence.
Does he have ANY challenges to evolution that can’t be refuted by a middle school student?
I used to find Hovind laughable but my feelings have slid through irritated to plain apathy about him.
the questions are bate so is the little bit of money
the whole thing is a publicity stunt any way.
If the big boys in the amusement parks racket have had to close down for some indefinite time because of the pandemic and they were already in a much better financial situation before just think what state he and his f’n park must be in now a tornado would probably save his whole endeavor that is he is insured against it.,
other wise by by
uncle frogy
500 hypothetical dollars says he’s only offering that $500 so he can claim you’re afraid of debating him when it gets turned down.
On the question of “immortality,” this gets into the question of the Ship of Theseus and what exactly constitutes a living organism.
It’s an old question: When a cell divides, what happened to the original cell? There’s now two cells, each made up of stuff that was originally in the mother cell, but is the mother cell “dead”? If so, where’s its corpse? If it’s alive, where is it? Which of the daughter cells is the “mother”? Before the cell divided, it had to take up materials so that it could have enough cellular machinery to split into two such that the two cells would be able to survive. At what point in this building up and removal of cellular “stuff” does this cell stop being the cell that it was before and start being something new. I personally think that trying to define this in terms of “dying” is thinking about it the wrong way and missing the point, but I would say that it’s conceivable that the “first life” is still with us, depending upon how one defines it.
$500? Dinoland must be on hard times. Didn’t Hovind use to have a $100,000 challenge?
Actions that benefit the individual aren’t necessarily those that benefit the population as a whole. Greedy little grifters definitely aren’t a benefit to society.
larpar@13, It was a $250,000 Challenge: . As the cited RationalWiki article notes, “The challenge was designed to be unwinnable. Using Hovind’s rules, you could offer $250,000 for empirical evidence of the sun rising in the East, and your money would be safe. Eric Hovind has since discontinued the offer and no longer mentions it on any Hovind-related website” (details at that, and also at many other, links).
Greedy little grifters definitely aren’t a benefit to society.
Not to society as a whole, but for those present after the bastards have been up against the wall, they can be quite tasty, if somewhat pulverized. (Professional Hint: Avoid poisoning yourself with lead by not using lead bullets.)
@12: What matters is the existence of the pattern that is the organism, not the atoms/cell that make it up. Most of the cells in your body die and are replaced every decade or so, with some turnover rates being a matter of days. The atoms in the food we eat and defecate and the air we brethe in and out become part of and leave our bodies. It’s mind-boggling.
rrhain @12, since Hovind is just plain boring, I’ll address your facile cerebrations, for argument’s sake:
It no longer exists.
It no longer exists, so it cannot be said to be alive any more.
Its constituents are in the two cells, each made up of stuff that was originally in the “mother” cell.
Well, sure, if you define any and all life as “the first life” — otherwise, not-so-much — but then, there is nothing other than “the first life”, is there?
Which means ‘first’ is an otiose qualifier, so you end up with ‘the life is life’, which is vapid.
(You conflate the concept of life with that of living entities)
ORigel:
Mileage varies. For me, it’s quotidian.
Questions for Kent
Did God order you to beat up that secretary?
If your income belonged to God why didn’t God declare bankruptcy to avoid paying taxes? Could’t God have simply sent a flood to the IRS offices to destroy his tax returns? I know his plans are infallable but this seems like a huge oversight to me
Can you still recite your prisoner number? Do you remember God’s prisoner number?
What was your favorite prison lunch? Is it true God was fond of the macaroni?
Which font is best for committing mail fraud?
Biologically immortal lifeforms which do not age do exist, such as lobsters, certain species of jellyfish, arguably naked mole-rats… Lobsters never stop growing though and if they aren’t eaten by a predator or die of an illness, they’ll eventually grow so big that molting will consume too much energy for their body. Some jellyfish have cyclic immortality, where they periodically go back to their larval form, which theoretically enables them to live for millions of years. And naked mole-rats’ bodies do not experience any decrease in performance as they age, though they do have some sort of biological kill-switch which will cause them to die past a certain age in order to make room for the new generation.
there is no time in the past where any life form does not have a direct concrete physical connection to the previous life form. It is as was described above with simple cell division on up through sexual reproduction a living continuous thread to the first life so unless and when the earth is completely absorbed in the expanding sun an eternal life with myriad constituents of endless forms ever changing and interdependent.
uncle frogy
@rogos #21: Plants are perhaps even better examples. Many (if not most) trees appears to be biologically immortal, there are many individuals that are more than 2000years old with the oldest possibly exceeding 5000 years. And that’s not counting clonal colonies that can be more than 100’000y old.
As far as Hovind is concerned, all I hear is “SOMEONE PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!!”. And this “I know you are but what am I” routine is getting staler by the second. Blind faith is your shtick, not ours. Also, we don’t really deal with the “why’s”, that infers intention. Good science focuses on the “how’s”.
Hm.
That which can die is not immortal, but merely ageless.
So Kent believes evolution should produce immortal dogs the size of Texas?
“4. Why didn’t any life forms “evolve” the ability to live forever instead?”
What a dumbass. Um, Kent, if you devoted 14 milliseconds of thought to this question, you would see that evolution can’t happen if individuals are immortal.
Really, Ken, your example makes me think Xtianity causes brain damage.
“committed BELIEVER in the evolution religion ”
I want to join this religion, where can I find the nearest church?
@27, not sure about where to find the church of evolution, but given that reproduction is necessary for evolution, I’ve got a pretty good idea about the religious practices. And just like going to church you should be observant even when you don’t currently need any miracles. And feel free to transubstantiate all you want.
@27 & @28, The authorities have not granted any tax exemption so there are no physical premises.
You forgot to refer to the video you did recently, which makes any debate with Kent superfluous.
“We will let you share the best three evidences”
This is a rhetorical cheapo. He’s gonna “refute” them, claim that the rest is even easier to refute and “conclude” that evolution theory wrong. So in addition to $24,000 you should demand to share the best 3000 evidences. The point of course is that in this case quantity is also a quality.
It cracks me up that when the religious want to mock science, they call it a “religion”. The lack of self-awareness is astounding.
Or in other words, they’ll pay for bus/plane/train tickets. They won’t pay you a dime.
Feh. Grifters gonna grift. Make sure that any payment any creationist offers is in advance, and clears completely.
Maybe I’m taking it too seriously, but aren’t points about the ‘intention’ of reproduction – whether to ‘enable’ evolution, or ‘because’ life is fragile – largely irrelevant?
Isn’t it more like the goldfish bowl analogy? Life replicates because that’s what life is? If there had never been replication, there wouldn’t be life at all. There’s no intent, metaphorical or not, life is a bunch of molecules that happened to get caught up replicating, so they’ve carried on replicating, in more and more complicated ways…?
@26 Is this perhaps what he is on about? Some mad-brained reference to the crazy proposition that nothing died before the “Fall”?
nomdeplume@34, Is, perhaps, a hyperlink missing there…?
@35 No I was responding to Dilbert’s comment at 26.
$6,000/hour seems pretty reasonable to me …..
Wha…???
Ignoring the nonsense about immortality, does Hovind actually think that evolution is supposed to be a conscious decision on the part of the organism?
Look, I’m a dummy who likes shiny things. I even have a Journalism degree to prove it. But even a illiterate product of America’s underfunded and neglected public education system knows THAT‘S NOT HOW EVOLUTION IS SUPPOSED TO WORK!!!
Honestly, P. Z.., you’ve been intellectually fencing with this unarmed fool for nearly two decades. Setup your email client to send Hovind’s (and his miserable spawn’s) rambling missives to the spam/trash file and forget he exists.
Hovind sounds really, really lonely these days.
Not that he doesn’t deserve it, and not that you can do anything for him. I just wish he could learn to surrender his authority and ask others for help before it’s too late,
Wait, you mean it’s not? So when I’m dealt a poker hand the cards aren’t trying to form a royal flush? Hmm, this explains so much….
Hovind will be able to pay your fee after the United States settles in his lawsuit. He is looking for over half a billion but based on previous comments he might settle for as little as thirty million, but that would still be plenty.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterjreilly/2020/06/05/kent-hovind-sues-us-government-for-over-half-a-billion-dollars/#384f2e2e2562
I’m not defending Hovind. He lost any remaining credibility many years ago. But I do find what seems to be a pretty consistent attitude here that troubles me. You folks call yourselves free-thinkers but you reject any free-thinking that disagrees with your thinking. That’s not free-thinking. That’s enforced orthodoxy. If I’m wrong, please correct me.
Glenn:
Sure. Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought
Do you think that every single thought that pops into every single human mind deserves to be taken equally seriously? Just as one example, do you think that the idea that the moon is made of green cheese should be rejected, or accepted?
Do you think that “wrong” and “correct” actually mean anything?
Yes indeed. PZ has had several hundred people executed for disagreeing with him.
And he turned me into a spider!