Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

[GuidoHunter]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

Well, to his credit (actually, the credit shouldn't go to him whatsoever, but to those who share his beliefs but haven't researched it too much), on the surface it does appear that there are valid arguments from science against evolution. The only problem, though, is that with a little more exploration it becomes quite evident that there really aren't any sizeable holes in evolutionary theory.

It's really important to understand that you can believe whatever you want; if you choose to think that God created the universe in a matter of earth-days, that's fine, but you must also understand that evolution is a near-perfect scientific theory. ALL the empirical evidence points to its validity, no matter what guys like him can dig up and twist. This is just to be intellectually honest. Saying that mounds of evidence for evolution exist while none for creationism (which by definition really isn't a scientific theory) but still believing in creationism is perfectly okay.

It's guys like this Kent guy who go and ruin everything by trying to apply scientific principles to a construct and searching for evidence to explain an unfounded idea.

--Guido

http://andy.mikee385.com

[Afrobean]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

holy **** rofl

"who bought the gas to run this machine"

All of the matter that ever was and will ever be as well as all of the energy that ever was and ever will be was in a singularity and he can't believe that the singularity could blow out causing the creation of what we know as the Universe?

This is really funny. Good find, Omega.

EDIT: hahaha

he says big bang is stupid because some planets spin backwards. He neglects to mention that they would only maintain spinning in the same direction if in a frictionless environment and if it's not acted upon by another force. Another force, like, for example, THE GRAVITY OF A NEARBY PLANET HAHA

EDIT: holy cow this guy is dumb

He just said that the Grand Canyon wasn't eroded by the Colorado River and was instead blown out quickly by a natural dam breaking. Not only does that not make any sense, but it also has nothing to do with evolution, the big bang, religion or anything. It is just a retarded hypothesis for the creation of a canyon, when a perfectly logical explanation already exists. As far as I can understand, he doesn't believe that water can erode a canyon.

[ffrstar777]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

It's pretty ridiculous how he can call the big bang theory stupid while he believes that some "god" created the entire earth in a matter of days.

True. This guy is some retarded kindergartener. Seriously, anybody will tell you that science can disprove this guy.
Why the quotes on the word "god" anyways? And "god" should be capitalized, just to point out.

[teh7]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

rofl

This guy is an idiot, he doesnt prove anything he just calls it "stupid"

[The_Q]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

I just LOVE the discussion in here.

Q

[Reach]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

There really isn't much to discuss other than how dumb this guy is, because everything is brings up is not worth discussing.

This guy wouldn't pay his taxes because he think God says he doesn't have to and he got arrested. He's a disgrace to academia.

I like to quickly point out to people that having a Ph.D doesn't make you smart, even though most people believe this, and this guy is a perfect example.

[gerbi7]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

Omega, your friend is on crack.

And if you actually believe that guy you must be on crack too.

[Patashu]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

Omega, your friend is on crack.

And if you actually believe that guy you must be on crack too.

And crack is bad. Mmkay.

[T0rajir0u]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

I stopped after that Bible crap in the beginning. If you're going to say "I take everything in this millennia-old document to be the inviolate truth" as the basis of your argument, you can't expect anyone to take you seriously when what you're discussing is science.

[The_Q]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

I stopped after that Bible crap in the beginning. If you're going to say "I take everything in this millennia-old document to be the inviolate truth" as the basis of your argument, you can't expect anyone to take you seriously when what you're discussing is science.

Wealth of Nations is over 200 years old. Does that make it invalid in a debate about social science? Granted, I don't take it as absolute truth ("natural value my ass").

Q

[Afrobean]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

Wealth of Nations is over 200 years old. Does that make it invalid in a debate about social science? Granted, I don't take it as absolute truth ("natural value my ass").

Q

...

This reminds me of the retard in the video's arguement that because there is known to have been a lot of oxygen at the time of dinosaurs, that means there has always been oxygen on Earth.*

In other words, 200 != ~2000.

*Side note on this: He said that an abundance of oxygen a long time ago explains the Bible's claim of select people living for hundreds of years rofl

[T0rajir0u]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

Granted, I don't take it as absolute truth

Exactly. He did. Which is why his argument can't be taken seriously since he's arguing from an unsound premise.

[Cavernio]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

After agonizingly watching the entire thing, I don't think that he's arguing from a completely unsound premise. He's arguing from the premise that evolution has not been proved, and hence that believing in it as the same as believing in any religion.
I have this huge spiel nit-picking many points he makes, but only because I thought the person who wrote the post was saying "he makes a valid point". Well, that person's friend thinks he's made a valid point, and I've recently read that statistics say that only about half of americans believe in evolution anymore. So, if you're in need of a little convincing yourself, especially after watching the video, knock yourself with a long-winded read.



-haven't seen star formation, but we've seen stars die.
The nature of the formation of stars makes them not visible. Supernovae, on the other hand, produce a huge amount of light so that they can even be seen with the naked eye. The argument that we have not seen something is pretty terrible. Much of science is not based on what we've not seen, particularly physics. We use instruments to infer what is actually happening. We haven't seen a ghastly number of supernovae either because they're not friggin' close enough to see with the naked eye, and we're not constantly scanning every single section of the universe. We have not seen God. We haven't seen the battle of 1066. There's no real reason WHY people should be able to see or even perceive all that is in the universe in our own state without using instruments which transfer that information into something we can use. Take radio for example. We learn about a lot of things from inference and then prove them. But we've inferred nothing about God.

Big Bang.
He says he doesn't know how they got this stuff. Hmm, perhaps he'd be better able to critique physics if he actually knew any. (Not like I know any.) To go through the, hehe, 'evolution' of science, and pointing out that we believe different things now from then, is far from odd and should hardly be thought of as bad. On the contrary. Science involves constantly altering and changing our understanding as we find new information and realize that other informatinon we have is old. This is a good thing. Science doesn't say that things like a book, written by people, is actually the Word of God. No, I'm sure some people would still believe that even if the original authors of the bible came out of the wordwork and told them, in person, 'no actually, I wrote that, and it was my interpretation of the events which were happening at the time.' Of course, these authors would also probably be upset by the number of documented edits which the bible has taken.
Pointing out differing opinions of differently knowledgable textbook authors isn't refuting anything. Someone should tell him that textbooks and scientific american aren't primary sources of information. Unfortunately, he probably wouln't understand primary physics papers. Rather, the guy who talks here would rather us believe that God made something from nothing. Well what made God? I understand his point, that something coming from nothing is unbelievable, or even stupid, but the fact is we're here. Can we even fully understand the idea something coming from nothing in the first place? If we could, then 'nothing' would be impossible. Silly paradoxes. But this argument doesn't mean that studying the universe around us and what it indicates and then infering what that data means is stupid. Which is what has been done with the big bang theory.

merryogo round example: someone else nailed this one before me: His logic is like saying, well, that 4th grader who spun off a merry-go-round is now a 90 years old, why aren't they still spinning in the same direction?

What about termites which survive only because bacteria in them exist?
Now this question really takes the cake. Our speaker here is obviously not putting himself in the right state of mind to be able to imagine how 2 organisms which must co-exist, evolve together. It's difficult, but it can be done. And I'm by no means saying that this is how these termites evolved in the first place, its just a possibility. You have a group of termite-esque creatures which eat wood and which can actually digest wood on their own. Living on this wood are bacteria which also eat wood. Most of the time, these bacteria get digested by the termite, and the bacteria die. But some bacteria are resistant to dying in this environment, and they multiply in number. Of course, by becoming resistant/hardy to the intestines of this bug, they can no longer live in the harsh world of outside it. This is the type of evolution which the speaker has coined 'micro-evolution', and clearly happens all the time, especially in bacteria who reproduce much, much faster than, say humans. In the meantime, some termites get sick and die because the bacteria living in them haven't died. But others, whose body can tolerate the bacteria inside them, live on. This again is an example of his micro-evolution. These termite-like things have no reason to change their wood diet, so they don't. However, the bacteria in them still need the wood to survive, and they still digest the wood, but only partially, and they excrete the half-digested wood into the termite. For the bug, they need to fully digest the wood in order to get its nutrients. But it turns out that the bacteria digests its part of the wood much easier and faster than the digestive system of the insect does. Now, pretened there's been a mutation in these insects all along which affects some termites, so that they can no longer digest wood properly. Usually, these ones die at a young age. (This seems very plausible to me, there's a human example of the same type in people who can't digest phenylalanine.) But, in this case, their bodies can still digest the partially digested wood, and by not expending all the energy it takes to digest the wood from it's initial state, they've now got an advantage instead of a disadvantage. And voila, these ones outlive other ones, and they are now the specific termites mentioned, or close to it. The point was the excersise into figuring out how evolution could work.

Beginning's of life:
I've never learned that science or evolution ever determined the step by step process of how life itself was created. Why is he bashing this? All people are giving is a very, very large timeline of the occurence of this event. Yeah, I'll give him that we have to have a little faith if we agree with this version of how life originated, seeing as we've yet to really explain it.
Ozone = O subscript 3. Free oxygen = O. Therefore, ozone can exist without free oxygen, and hence can block out UV light.
98% of stuff Miller made was poisonous to life. What life are you referring to anyways? No one was claiming Miller made life in a testtube. He had to filter it. Ok. So the speaker actually did research beyond highschool textbooks. Either that, or the textbook told him that. He's thinking, I'll grant him that. Again, no one made life in a testtube. He gave an experiment which showed how something would be possible. I agree that some textbooks and people probably go overboard with what was actually found. And I love his toothpick analogy, mainly because it shows just exactly WHY it would take so long for life as we know it to develop.

I'm somewhat happy believing I evolved from a rock, as the speaker so bluntly put it. I'm happy that my physical form has evolved from a rock. I believe that. What I'm not happy with is where my mind, sentience, conciousness, the part of me that is me, came from. However, this is no reason to smite evolution. Firstly, I don't believe conciousness is absolute. It probably lies on a continuum, so evolution makes sense with it in that sense too. Secondly, this conundrum is hardly specific to evolution. I honestly have no proof that anyone who's going to bother reading this long-winded writing of mine is even conscious. But I believe it. Why? Because you perform actions and do things which indicate that you are. I don't believe the bible. Why? Because there isn't anything to suggest it's true.

An old geological book was poorly written. Ok. They didn't have carbon dating and all the other dating methods used then. Alright. They do now. Why does he assume that that hasn't been done with soil and fossil samples and that all knowledge used to date things is circular? I think its common practice to use radioactive dating.
Radioactive dating: The half-life stated for carbon-dating is probably right. I had to know it at one point. But different radioactive materials have different half-lives, carbon has one of the shorter ones.
Theoretically, carbon dating works pefectly fine. I didn't know that there was a huge issue with the validity of it. I'm assuming the only reason it doesn't would be from the tools used to infer it, or poor sampling techniques.

If dinosaurs have really been found recently, it doesn't disprove evolution.

Mutations: Not getting malaria keeps you alive. Sickle cell anemia doesn't kill you.
Mutations change what already exists. Matter already exists. They can change how matter forms. This is a premise for being able to make radical changes. You can get good changes and bad changes. Good mutations aren't generally observed because we often don't perceive them as mutations, firstly. But much more importantly, mutations are indeed random, and there's a million ways mutations could worsen something for an organism, but only a few which could improve it.

Why can't petrified trees either be as old as the soil surrounded it? But that's not a good point. Maybe wood can't last that long, I don't know. But I bet that where this petrified wood is found, and if wood can't possibly last as long as soil, NO one's claiming that that specific soil layer has remained there for longer than the wood. And no one's claiming that fast-acting geological changes don't happen either.
From what I learned in highschool, Darwin's big 'discovery' was not the idea that the finches all came from a common ancestor. What Darwin DID find is the missing link which this speaker keeps talking about. He found that the finches on the one far side of the island couldn't mate and make viable offspring with the finches on the other far side of the island, even though they were both viable with the ones next to each other. Ta da! 2 new species. Not all are the same species, and maybe we could or maybe we couldn't call them all finches, but that's semantics. Now, of course, he also argues that birds don't come from non-birds. The difference here is that 'bird' is of a more general categorization. No one who believes in evolution says that birds came from reptiles in 1 generation. The ENTIRE gist of evolution is that over time, with small changes in each generation, what we would categorize as a bird came about from something which was a slightly different bird, and so forth, until that categorization would be closer to a reptile than a bird. The real issue here is how we categorize things and hence perceive things if we want proof of living intermediates. Obviously we're going to not see 'intermediates' of what exists today because the way we categorize sets things apart from each other. We purposely try to NOT categorize things so that they fit multiple different categories; that's the whole purpose of categorizing! We purposely avoid seeing intermediates. Why on earth do we call a penguin a bird? It's nowhere near our general conception of what a bird is. I think dogs and cats are much more similar to each other than a penguin is to a canary. Also, evolution accounts for why not many living intermediates would be seen anyways. For example, 2 species can come from 1 species. But after you have those 2 species, that 1 species is non-existant now, hence, not living.
Evolution is like that game telephone. Pass the message to 100 different people, and each time, something small changes. By the time you're done, you can have something totally, totally different. Now play telephone for a billion years and observe the changes. It's a great analogy to the diversity of species and how evolution explains them. I don't GET how he doesn't get it. He's obviously an intelligent person. He knows that science in general is good, he's a pretty damned good public speaker, and he knows that in order to spread religion, you've got to get to kids and stop them from seeing differing points of view, and he's also cleverly pointing out where flaws in our school system lie so as to stop people from trusting what school teaches. He's very manipulative, that requires intelligence. You cannot see a new species in a 1 generation. No one says that. But you most definitely CAN see evolution of new species. No, we don't see evolution of completely, utterly, different things within a period of even 10,000 years. In fact, evolution essentially says we won't. If we did, THAT would be a smack in the eye of evolution, and I'd be a lot more skeptical about it. We can't line up the species side by side for millions of years to prove it. Its not possible. But it makes sense. And we have proof from smaller time scales of it. There's no reason to believe that this same process somehow shuts down or differs over time. That would be stupid. Of course, he doesn't believe that all this time existed in the first place, so obviously evolution couldn't have happened.

The speaker shows how science is not perfect, and that we haven't discovered how everything works. He points out flaws in research and general belief. He states things which science/evolution has yet to learn, and calls it stupid because of that. He masks that he is actually putting down science under the ploy of using other science, both accurate and inaccurate, which questions what is currently generally believed, and by saying he believes in science itself. He calls evolution stupid because of this, completely disregarding the science which has led us to believe in it in the first place. He calls evolution a belief just like the bible is belief because there are some skeptical things in it. However, there is no proof that the bible is correct, and plenty of evidence, which again, he fails utterly to bring up, which supports evolution. He gives a healthy dose of skepticism about science, especially about popular sources of science, like textbooks and non-primary source magazines. I applaud him that. You should also be skeptical about what he says as truths though. Where does he get his facts from? Not from primary sources, thats for damned sure.

[T0rajir0u]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

He gives a healthy dose of skepticism about science

Science gives a healthy dose of skepticism about science. It's only people who don't really know science who think that every scientific conclusion currently reached is the absolute truth.

Scientists don't claim to know everything, and science doesn't claim to be perfect (in the sense that it can provide perfect knowledge). The conclusions of science change every time someone comes up with a new reasonable theory and every time new empirical data can be discovered. It's science's willingness to change (something that people who begin an argument by saying "I believe the Bible is the inviolate truth," etc. etc., are very unlikely to do) and accept its own mistakes and move on when confronted by evidence from reality that makes it a sounder premise to argue from than religion, at least dealing with the physical world.

[Cavernio]

Re: Smart Squad, AASSSEE EMMM MMM MBLL LLLLE!

Science
Scientists don't claim to know everything, and science doesn't claim to be perfect (in the sense that it can provide perfect knowledge). The conclusions of science change every time someone comes up with a new reasonable theory and every time new empirical data can be discovered. It's science's willingness to change (something that people who begin an argument by saying "I believe the Bible is the inviolate truth," etc. etc., are very unlikely to do) and accept its own mistakes and move on when confronted by evidence from reality that makes it a sounder premise to argue from than religion, at least dealing with the physical world.

Which is essentially what I said in my post also.