It's only been a day since this was promoted.
I'm sure that I've seen him show up a couple times in the "online now" line. Maybe he's waiting for the kind of response he was hoping for.
While we're at it, has anyone ever heard it pronounced "evayution" before this video? Has me wondering about its point of origin.
And then I started wondering whether he has a more direct connection with the video, as in whether he had created it. Its "bug" (a TV network "watermark" in the corner of the screen) is of a salamander, which also figures into his email address.
None of what means anything. Just being curious.
This thread could be more correcting misimpressions than fighting monsters.
Probably not how you meant that, but, yeah.
Anybody who actually knows anything about evolution, including FossilDiscovery, knows that "macroevolution" is just "microevolution" over many more generations -- ie, that they're the same thing on different time scales. Almost all the replies so far have been to that effect, but it's not FossilDiscovery we need to be explaining that to but rather to
creationists, which I take to be the purpose of the video.
The problem is that creationists won't get the message. They have been taught and hence are convinced that "macroevolution" is something completely different from "microevolution", even to the point that it "must operate completely differently". Hence, whenever we try to explain the truth to them, they will reject our explanations outright because "our explanation does not address
macroevolution, but only microevolution
which are two different things!" Their own indoctrination and misinformation and
disinformation about evolution keep them blinded from the facts and the truth.
We have recently witnessed that with candle2's dis-definition of evolution as being "a cat evolving into a dog" blinding him to our many far more accurate explanations, which he basically refuses to even look at because "if they don't address how a cat would evolve into a dog then they aren't talking about evolution".
I saw this in action outside of this forum with Erika "Gutsick Gibbon's" video,
Chatting with YEC Rebekah about Radiometric Dating, in which she dialogues with a YEC, Rebekah -- while Erika does most of the talking, explaining radiometric dating to Rebekah who politely listens, the overall tone is very congenial and not confrontational.
The scene that brings this up is where the subject of how fossils are dated came up (I seem to recall Rebekah asking that) and Erika provides a very good explanation: fossils are not radio-dated directly (since that would require them to have been melted completely whereupon they would no longer be fossils), but rather from the stratigraphic layer they are found in (which itself is dated through other means). Here is my explanation to candle2 in
Message 36 when he tried to invoke the standard "fossils dated through circular reasoning" lie:
DWise1 writes:
candle2 writes:
Also, fossils are dated by the strata that they
are found in, and the strata is dated by the
fossils they contain.
Yes, and? But the way you say that means that you are insinuating circular reasoning. Same dishonest creationist lie, hasn't changed a bit.
Radiometric dating on rock is how long ago it solidified from being molten.
Radiometric dating cannot be performed on sedimentary rock since it is ground down and recycled older rock, so radiometric dating would just get the age of bit of old rock tested. However, we can tell which layers are older than others by the order in which they are stacked. We can also establish dates for layers from
igneous intrusions which bracket them in. Therefore we can determine the age of a particular layer.
Fossils cannot dated directly (excluding organic specimens). For one thing, if you melt the fossil in order to "start its clock", then you have destroyed that fossil -- if it's a fossil, it hasn't been melted, so no radiometrically dating a fossil. Fossils result from burial and so are most commonly found in sedimentary rock, but we can arrive at a date for the layer it's found in as described above (
extremely important that you don't just pull a fossil out of the ground and carry it to a museum).
So how do we identify a layer here to be part of that other layer way over there?
In geology it's done by with identifying characteristics which have been determined empirically, which includes
index fossils. However, many of those index fossils are microscopic, eg diatom shells which evolve over time. Fossils such as the ones that we are interested in (eg, dinos) are not used a index fossils. Thus
the fossils identifying the stratum (from which we know its age) are not the same as the fossils that get their age from which stratum they're in. There is no circular reasoning here.
In Erika's video, after she explained fossil dating to Rebekah, whose countenance revealed some confusion, Rebekah repeated the same question, to which Erika gave a summary of her explanation which Rebekah seemed to accept regardless of whether she was not convinced.
The thing was that Rebekah's YEC indoctrination had taught her to expect to be able to perform radiometric dating
directly on the fossil itself, so when the truth was explained to her, she couldn't understand it for what it was. And the same holds true for a plethora of cases where the YEC's indoctrination prevents them from learning the truth.
So, how can we correct creationists' lies? I started out in the 1980's thinking that all I had to do was to show them that their claims are wrong and why. So I know from bitter personal experience that that does not work. Also helps to explain why I've run out of patience with them and their evil ways.
™ Version 4.1
(1)