Summations Only

OK, let us say this verrrrrry sssssssllllloooooooowly for you. Every topic (the software calls them "topics" here; minor point) is a discussion. And this is a debate site. Oh, I'm sure that you've spent some time on creationist fora where you can spout any amount of nonsense you want while anyone who would dare to ask you to support any of it will be banished immediately, but you're no longer in Kansas (meant metaphorically, though that state's history over the past decade or two might indicate otherwise).How long have you been involved in this "issue"? Dr. Adequate and Theodoric have been here for more than half a decade and I have no idea how much time they've put in elsewhere. I've been involved since 1981, on-line since circa 1987.The point is that you are nothing new; we have all seen these new creationists come and go ... and they usually leave very abruptly never to be seen again. They have all been fed with creationist bullshit that they think is the greatest thing since sliced silicon and they're all fired up to "just blow those evolutionists away" with all this "new and unrefuted scientific evidences". Well, it's not new and it's not unrefuted. Most of the standard YEC claims have been around since before 1980 were refuted soundly around that time, only that's something that your creationist handlers will never tell you. You are nothing but yet another pathetic member of a long pathetic parade. Oh, sure, you say that you're not a "creationist" but rather an "IDist". Please don't try to bullshit us. We already know what you're doing. After Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987, the courts knew that creationism is nothing but religion (albeit a very narrow, false religion) so immediately creationists seized upon "intelligent design". After Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968 had found the 40+-year-old "monkey laws" to be unconstitutional and after a few more religious-based attempts, the anti-evolution movement, mainly through the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), came up with "creation science" which they falsely claimed to be "purely scientific and not the least bit religious." In reality, the ICR (the primary source of creationist materials for "balanced-treatment" public school curricula) just simply took their overtly and blatantly religious books and other materials and gave them a very superficial face-lift by removing Bible quotations and replacing "God" with reference to some "unnamed Creator". That approach had been aptly named "The Game of Hiding the Bible." Once that game had been exposed in 1987, the game then changed to "Hide the Creationism" by adopting the deceptive guise of "intelligent design." Well, more than half a decade ago, that deception was also exposed in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 2005 in which the "smoking gun" was the book, Of Pandas and People, which had started out pre-Edwards.v.Aguillard as a creationist textbook that used the term "creationist" and was then re-edited to be an "intelligent design" book with the same kind of superficial rewording that had "turned" overtly and blatantly religious education materials to "public school editions." The smoking gun was one instance of "creationists" in the text that was incorrectly changed to "design proponents" to produce "cdesign proponentsists" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/..._and_.22cdesign_proponentsists.22).In other words, you are not fooling anybody. Except maybe yourself. But then a primary concern of creationists has always been to keep themselves deceived. I had a friend at church who had gone through that. He once told me how he had been a fundamentalist Christian and how he had to live each and every day in deep, deep denial of and in self-deception about the obvious truths he would encounter in every-day life just because they contradicted his fundamentalist beliefs. Finally one day, he could no longer maintain the self-deception so he applied the Matthew 7:20 test on Christianity and it failed! Now he is, self-described, "an atheist and thorough humanist" and is so very much more happy and spiritually fulfilled and is a very active contributor to our church. Unitarian-Universalist, BTW.Another typical creationist ploy is to re-define terms; that is how they can get scientists' quote-mined quotes to say things that are completely contrary to what those scientists were actually saying. So when you want us to provide evidence for "macro-evolution", then you do really need to provide us with a definition for that term. Especially since it is not a very common term among scientists.And, despite repeated requests that you do please provide us with that requisite definition, you have ducked and dodged and avoided providing that really necessary definition. Typical dishonest creationist trickery.Remember, we've seen the same nonsensical crap pulled for decades. Gee, why are we not the least bit surprised?

**Cough!** **Cough!** **Cough!** **Cough!**If I had been drinking something just then, I would have had to replace both my keyboard and possibly my monitor!Do you really expect evolution to accommodate such transitions? Seriously! What you just described is complete and utter nonsense. And if such a thing were to happen, it would seriously challenge evolution.So just why exactly do you expect that to be in accordance with evolution?Let's put it a bit differently. Design would allow for inventions elsewhere to be adapted to entirely different applications. That's the way engineers do work, isn't it? I am a professional software engineer, so I've seen this unfold far too many times. You have one product and you want to market another product and your (the marketer's) thought is that this new product is very much like an existing product and all it would take is a "minor" change in the software. As I had heard far too many hardware engineers say, "It's simply a matter of software." -- HINT: No it isn't! But we software engineers still are the ones left with making it work. OK, we do our job. We had something that did one thing, but now we've rewritten it to do something else.OK, I will let you into my world for a moment. In that kind of situation, we take what had previously been done by the code and rewrite it to work a bit differently, perhaps a bit more generally, or perhaps by detecting a few special cases that it had to deal with. The thing is that when confronted with an entirely new requirement for our software, we can respond in one of two ways:
1. write something completely different, or
2. somehow modify what we already have to be able to handle the new requirements.And at some point, it no longer becomes feasible to try to modify old implementations and we just plain have to use an entirely new and different design.You want to argue for design. What do you see? Novel new designs when it no longer becomes feasible to modify old implementations? No, that is not what you see. What you see is old designs being stretched to their limits in order to do what must be done.Here's a classic example, from Steven J. Gould. The panda has no thumb. A thumb would work really well in stripping a piece of bamboo, the panda's food source. The panda's sesamoid bone has become enlarged to enable it to use it as "a thumb" in handling its food source, bamboo. But it is not a "thumb".The point here is that design is design. If you want to bring some other piece of tech into a different design, then you are perfectly free to do so. But if you are trying to do it through evolution, then you cannot. In that case, you need to take something that's already there and put it to a different usage. In design, you are free to bring in anything you want to, but in evolution you are stuck with whatever is already there. So what do we see? Foreign tech being infused into new designs? Or existing features being put to different use? It is the latter, not the former, that we see.But I have still not addressed your initial bizarre misconstruance of evolution. Do you really believe that evolution requires that lice become gophers, or that gophers become lice? Really? That is not a rhetorical question! I am dead serious! Is that really what you think evolution is? Because what you are demanding is complete and utter bullshit!Because if that is what you really believe evolution is, then you have absoluti-fuck-ily no idea what you are talking about.And if that is the case, then why should we be wasting our time with a nimrod clueless pecker-wood like you?Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

Uh, what the frackin' frik? That was my first one! Read it! Think about it!You're just yet another clueless stupid creationist that we have dealt with so too many times before. You have absolutely no idea what's going on. You are completely and utterly clueless and will be blown completely away by the truth. Unless you are able to insulate yourself from the truth, in which case we should never ever hear from you again.Here's something I witnessed. Circa 1990 in Orange, Calif, at The City (a mall in Orange, Calif, which since then has been razed and converted into "The Block") there was a creationist-run fossil store, "In The Beginning", owned by Alex Scott. Alex Scott organized some "creation/evolution amateur nights" in the mall's community center. I participated in those, though I also made that fact available to other "evolutionists". In one of those open debates, a young creationist got up and announced that he had some "very recent scientific evidence" that would "blow the evolutionists away". The speed of light has been slowing down! Immediately, half the audience burst out in laughter and all at once tried to explain to that poor witless creationist why that claim was completely and utterly false. That young creationist stood there clearly in complete shock.OK, here's the situation. P.J. Barnum formulated Barnum's Law: There's a sucker born every minute. That is what the creationist movement operates on. All creationist claims have been proposed. They have all been refuted. New creationists are never informed of those simple facts.Edited by dwise1, : "evolutionists", not "creationists"

No, of course you haven't bothered to read. The gods forbid you should attempt to think! Typical creationist! Expending all that energy to avoid answering a very simple and pertinent question. You're nothing new at all.