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Kent & Matt got nothin’

Kent Hovind recycled a video titled Aronra, Professor Dave, & PZ Meyers get OWNED by Kent Hovind’s Assistant, originally posted by Matt Powell as AronRa & his minions vs. Matt Powell (no link, sorry, they’ve received enough attention). It’s the same damn argument he’s been making for months: They said we didn’t come from rocks, but I found an article I don’t understand that says we did come from rocks. Sorry, guy, no phylogeny includes “rocks” in the tree of life. There is no line of descent from “rocks”. We’re all made of carbon, that does not imply that in the distant past there was a Mama Anthracite that spawned a little family of coal lumps that then led to us. I’ve pointed this out to him before, and he paid as much attention to that as he did to the spelling of my name.

What’s depressing about that is how intellectually bankrupt these guys are. Powell has three arguments he makes over and over again, that he thinks are clever: scientists think we evolved from rocks, scientists think squid came from comets, scientists think dinosaurs farted themselves to death. All wrong. I guess that’s better than Hovind, who has one: incredulously stating that you think you’re related to a mosquito. At least Hovind’s assertion is factually correct.

Satan is a natural offensive line coach » « Wind me up and watch me go

Comments

  1. Akira MacKenzie says

    He had a few more oft-repeated lies than just those three:

    1) Pterosaurs were used by the Confederacy to fight in the ACW.
    2) “Evolutionists” claim that monkeys surfed from Africa to South America.
    3) All mass shooters were atheists.

  2. Alt-X says

    I’ve never seen, met or heard of an honest creationist. They all think lying for their religion is virtuous and OK to do.

  4. birgerjohansson says

    As I have listened to Heath, Noah and Eli dissecting numerous “documentaries” at God Awful Mivies I am by now well versed in the standard creationist lies.
    Like, atheist school shooters asking a girl if she was Christian, and murdering her when the said “yes”.
    Lies come as naturally to creationists as breathing.

  5. Rob Grigjanis says

    Alt-X @2:

    I’ve never seen, met or heard of an honest creationist

    I’ve known several. They didn’t flaunt their belief, neither did they try to hide it. And they weren’t remotely interested in defending theirs, or attacking others’. “They all think blah blah” gets rather tiresome.

  6. birgerjohansson says

    BTW
    By 4004 BC I think the first British neolitic monument builders had already gotten started, and the Mesopotamians and the Chinese had already built settlements that would grow to cities.
    Jericho was already ancient at this time, as were the various towns in Anatolia.

  7. birgerjohansson says

    Rob Grigjanis @ 5
    The loud, dishonest ones tend to dominate the religious right social media.
    The meek have little place among activists.

  8. says

    Oh, right, I forget the “monkey surfing” argument. They’re all similar arguments in the sense that they require assigning bad ideas (which they don’t hold) to your opponent.
    I’ve had intelligent creationists in my classes. They’re the ones who hunker down and study the material given and don’t just reject everything the instructor says out of hand.

  11. raven says

    They’re all similar arguments in the sense that they require assigning bad ideas (which they don’t hold) to your opponent.

    Creationists are serial killers. Of strawpeople.

    It is all just obvious fairy tales.
    I’m not even sure that the writers of the bibles even thought they were writing factual accounts.
    The Big Boat Incident is clearly borrowed and repurposed from Babylonian sources taken from even older Sumerian stories, and modified and rewritten in Hebrew.

    The Flood is claimed to have occurred during the Egyption Third Dynasty. At that time the Egyptians were building the pyramids. After the Flood they just continued on building them, not realizing that a worldwide flood had occurred and that they were actually…dead.

  12. muttpupdad says

    Isn’t the surfing animals how they claim the animals of Australia got there after the Ark landed? They really aren’t consistent with their fairy stories.

  13. says

    If you google “civil war pterosaur”, you’ll be flooded with credulous articles about this one faked photo. Unfortunately, most of the skeptical links take you to Skeptoid or Skeptic magazine, and no, I’m not going to link to those assholes.

    There are entire sites dedicated to trumpeting the authenticity of one old photo. It’s like the Loch Ness monster, only with even less evidence.

  14. muttpupdad says

    Go to Dinosaur Kingdom II in Natural Bridge, Virginia and see the Dinos attack Union troops. Went there when I was stationed in Virginia years ago, it was quite a hoot.

  15. Akira MacKenzie says

    10 & 13

    It was a publicity photo for the long-cancelled TV show Freaky Links. The creationists and cryptozoology kooks got a hold of the picture and ran with it.

  16. Oggie: Mathom says

    I have looked for the book and I cannot find it. Damn.

    I recall, from a decade or more ago, a description of long lipid formations facilitated by boundary formations in clays.

    So I Googled it. Apparently clay and lipid formation is fairly well known.

    So I Googled clay and early cell formation and found an article that is close to what I remember:

    Harvard researchers demonstrated how the first living cells may have formed in a series of experiments that indicate that clay can be an important catalyst for life.

    snip

    Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital showed that the presence of clay aids naturally occurring reactions that result in the formation of fatty sacks called vesicles, similar to what scientists expect the first living cells to have looked like.

    Further, the clay helps RNA form. The RNA can stick to the clay and move with it into the vesicles. This provides a method for RNA’s critical genetic information to move inside a primitive cell.

    From here. I was mixing up lipid formation with fatty vesicles. Almost 20 years ago, and I am an historian and liberal arts major, so I have an excuse.

  17. Oggie: Mathom says

    And forgot my point.

    So I guess it is possible we came from clay. Or, at least clay helped. Maybe. Not a rock, though. Though some rock can make life more enjoyable.

  18. Oggie: Mathom says

    “Evolutionists” claim that monkeys surfed from Africa to South America.

    I have been delving into South American mammalian paleontology, paleoecology and paleo biodiversity. The idea that caviomorphs and Platyrrhini ‘colonised’ South America via vegetative rafts from floods in Africa seems well supported. Did I miss something?

  20. says

    The Flood is claimed to have occurred during the Egyption Third Dynasty. At that time the Egyptians were building the pyramids…

    Onion headline: Ancient Peoples Watch in Awe as God Creates Universe

  22. Oggie: Mathom says

    Brony:

    Again, this was remembered from a book I read ten or fifteen years back and I cannot remember title or author. Or even subject. And this was about clay helping to create fatty vesicles, not lipid formation (I do vaguely remember seeing an article/chapter in a book/something regarding long lipid formation being aided by oil boundaries, but that’s all I remember on that one. Sorry.) The link to the Harvard piece is what I was able to find. As far as actual papers, sorry.

  23. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 18

    Not really, just that Matty P. disingenuously presents the theory as “Godless scientists say monkeys surfed to South America. Boy are they sure dumb.”

  24. raven says

    @20 I remember that one.

    The Onion:
    Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World
    12/15/09 12:00PM

    Lord God, Creator of All, caught thousands of Sumerian farmers and mathematicians somewhat off guard.
    Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

    According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

    “I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”

    “Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”

    Historians believe that, immediately following the biblical event, Sumerian witnesses returned to the city of Eridu, a bustling metropolis built 1,500 years before God called for the appearance of dry land, to discuss the new development. According to records, Sumerian farmers, priests, and civic administrators were not only befuddled, but also took issue with the face of God moving across the water, saying that He scared away those who were traveling to Mesopotamia to participate in their vast and intricate trade system.

    Moreover, the Sumerians were taken aback by the creation of the same animals and herb-yielding seeds that they had been domesticating and cultivating for hundreds of generations.

    “The Sumerian people must have found God’s making of heaven and earth in the middle of their well-established society to be more of an annoyance than anything else,” said Paul Helund, ancient history professor at Cornell University. “If what the pictographs indicate are true, His loud voice interrupted their ancient prayer rituals for an entire week.”

    According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God’s most puzzling act to be the creation from dust of the first two human beings.

    “These two people made in his image do not know how to communicate, lack skills in both mathematics and farming, and have the intellectual capacity of an infant,” one Sumerian philosopher wrote. “They must be the creation of a complete idiot.”

    https://www.theonion.com/sumerians-look-on-in-confusion-as-god-creates-world-1819571221

  25. raven says

    This is probably where they got the monkeys surfing to South America.
    The headline is click bait.
    In the article it states clearly the theory of vegetation mats created by storms carrying the monkeys from Africa to South America.
    This is plausible. Such vegetation mats are seen today after major storms and they have a variety of wildlife living on them.

    The teeth from the old South American monkeys look very similar to 36 million year old monkeys from Africa.

    National Geographic

    When Monkeys Surfed to South America
    By Riley Black Published February 5, 2015 edited for length

    Long ago, about 36 million years before today, a raft of monkeys found themselves adrift in the Atlantic. They’d been blown out to sea by an intense storm that had ripped up the African coast, and now a mat of floating vegetation was the closest thing to land for miles in all directions. But luck was with them. Thanks to a favorable current, they were thrown onto the beach of a new continent – South America.

    Teeth tell the tale.

    In the latest issue of Nature, paleontologist Mariano Bond and colleagues describe a handful of fossil teeth found in the rainforest of Peru. Some are mysteries, too incomplete to identify down to genus or species, but a set of three molars are clearly from a new species of early monkey.

    They’ve named it Perupithecus ucayaliensis.

    At about 36 million years old, Perupithecus pushes back the arrival of monkeys on South America 10 million years earlier than previously thought. And even better, the molars of Perupithecus closely resemble those of Talahpithecus – an early monkey that lived around the same time in northern Africa.

  26. raven says

    Back then, during a time known as the Late Eocene, Africa and South America were significantly closer. The span of the Atlantic Ocean between the two continents measured about 930 to 1,300 miles apart compared to the modern expanse of 1,770 miles.Apr 9, 2020

    More Than 30 Million Years Ago, Monkeys Rafted Across the …https://www.smithsonianmag.com › science-nature › mon

    36 million years ago, Africa and South American were closer together.
    They were one continent at one time but plate tectonics has been moving them apart for ca. 110 million years.

    It’s still a long voyage on a vegetation raft but significantly shorter back them.

    “These primates clung to storm debris that formed natural rafts. Currents carried these platforms of vegetation across the ocean. ”
    From this article, the currents must be favorable for these rafts to travel the distance.

    Don’t forget this is a rare event that only has to happen once.
    A whole lot can happen in 30 million or so years.

  27. lochaber says

    Wasn’t there an event some 10-15 years or so ago (maybe longer, I’m getting horrible with keeping track of time as I get older…), where someone documented a bunch of iguanas in the ?Caribbean? float around on a vegetation raft, and eventually end up somewhere that didn’t previously have iguanas?

    Yeah, it seems like it would be an unlikely thing, but with tens-to hundreds of massive storms over millions of years, it seems to me that it would be more unlikely to never happen.

    It’s just fucking wild the amount of stuff that we currently observe actually happening in real time, is categorically dismissed by creationists, while embracing all sorts of nonsense. It would be almost fascinating, in a way, if they weren’t out there also trying to destroy the institutions of education, government, etc. :/

  29. raven says

    Wikipedia: Oceanic dispersal

    Observation
    The first documented example of colonization of a land mass by rafting occurred in the aftermath of hurricanes Luis and Marilyn in the Caribbean in 1995. A raft of uprooted trees carrying fifteen or more green iguanas was observed by fishermen landing on the east side of Anguilla–an island where they had never before been recorded.[24] The iguanas had apparently been caught on the trees and rafted two hundred miles across the ocean from Guadeloupe, where they are indigenous.[25][26]

    Examination of the weather patterns and ocean currents indicated that they had probably spent three weeks at sea before landfall.[26] This colony began breeding on the new island within two years of its arrival.[26]

    We’ve seen iguanas raft on vegetation mats for 200 miles from one island to another in the Caribbean.

  30. nomdeplume says

    Of course monkeys (and other organisms) reached South America from Africa on “rafts”. Also true for the creationist account – as Powell knows.

  31. Oggie: Mathom says

    Don’t forget this is a rare event that only has to happen once.

    Probably more than once. Remember, thousand year floods used to happen about 1,000 times every million years. Now, of course, it is much more often.

  32. PaulBC says

    @18 @23 One difference is that I don’t have distort the phrasing to make the creationist account sound ridiculous. I believe this is their preferred translation:

    2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
    3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
    4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.
    5 And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him.
    6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.

    So much more plausible than monkeys on surfboards.

  33. Atheist Jr. says

    I found the title of that video confusing because I’ve watched the whole thing twice, and I don’t remember him ever mentioning you. Just Aron Ra and this other channel. Did you catch Kent’s racist joke, though?