Thursday, April 21, 2011

ALL the strata and ALL their fossil contents are the product of the Flood of Noah

The idea that the Flood can be seen in the worldwide strata but only in SOME of the strata, above which the strata and their fossil contents were not caused by that event, is just silly. Creationists who entertain such ideas need to rethink them.

Such extensive thick layers of discrete sediments could not have been formed any other way, nor could their fossils have formed either except as a result of the Flood. There is no difference whatever in either the deposition of the layers or the way fossils occur in them at any level -- the same event produced them all.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Science Fantasy calls Antediluvian Spider Fossil Jurassic

Story HERE:

The largest fossil spider uncovered to date once ensnared prey back in the age of dinosaurs, scientists find.
Here we have the scientists spinning their fantasy as usual, of course, since there is no way to falsify it.

OF COURSE it snared prey in the time of the dinosaurs, since it was fossilized as a result of the Flood and the dinosaurs ALSO lived before the Flood and were buried in prodigious numbers during that event.

Too bad the spider fossil wasn't found in a Precambrian layer (not that they couldn't invent some rationalization for that) but the Flood did sort things in a way that put land creatures in the higher levels, so its location isn't enough to jolt anyone out of their illusions, just unusual enough to get it called the "oldest" known specimen.
The spider, named Nephila jurassica, was discovered buried in ancient volcanic ash in Inner Mongolia, China. Tufts of hairlike fibers seen on its legs showed this 165-million-year-old arachnid to be the oldest known species of the largest web-weaving spiders alive today — the golden orb-weavers, or Nephila, which are big enough to catch birds and bats, and use silk that shines like gold in the sunlight.

The fossil was about as large as its modern relatives,
Well, since IN REALITY they're only about 4500 years apart, that isn't surprising.
...with a body one inch (2.5 centimeters) wide and legs that reach up to 2.5 inches (6.3 cm) long. Golden orb-weavers nowadays are mainly tropical creatures, so the ancient environment of Nephila jurassica probably was similarly lush.
Yeah, that is very likely, since that describes the pre-Flood climate in general.

I've pretty much given up on science ever recognizing the truth, though, but the Lord is coming back soon, anyway, VERY VERY soon I hope hope hope.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Another Example of Evolutionist Fantasizing Aggressively Promoted as Science, per Dr. Adequate

Dr. Adequate again:

Opportunely enough, details of a new intermediate form, Liaoconodon hui, have just been published.

Some details here:
The new genus and species described by Meng et al. comes form the exquisitely preserved Jehol biota of Liaoning, and shows the last tenuous connection between the mammalian ear ossicles and the lower jaw, via Meckel’s cartilage, an ancient part of the lower jaw lying along the medial surface of the dentary. They refer to it as a “transitional mammalian middle ear”, the transition being between the mandibular middle ear (i.e. attached to the lower jaw) of the earliest mammals (and most advanced reptiles), and the definitive mammalian middle ear present in the adults of all extant mammals, in which there is no persistent connection between the middle ear and the lower jaw.
Now in modern mammals Meckel's cartilage disappears during embryological development:
Living mammals, including humans, have Meckel's cartilage as embryos, but it disappears as they mature. In the L. hui fossil - an adult - it is ossified and the fossil shows how it supported some of the post-dentary bones as they shifted into the ear.
This is more evidence for the evolution of this irreducibly complex structure.

Meanwhile, creationists continue to attribute this sort of structure to entirely unknown and unevidenced processes; and this they do based only on not being able to see how this sort of thing evolved --- despite the fact that, dammit, we can.
Look, you believe life evolves so something like this is evidence to your mind, although it is only evidence because it fits with your theory, not the kind of evidence that actually proves anything. It's just another of those plausibilities that the whole theory is built of, just an exercise in recognizing structural analogues.

Since I do not believe life evolves, except for variations within a species, such phenomena are simply examples of design similarities that occur everywhere in nature. Its function in the embryo may be quite different than Evo theory makes of it, you're simply smugly content with a facile explanation that fits with the theory, and of course there is no way to falsify such an explanation so you have no fear that anything a creationist might say could unsettle your certainty.

And, we CAN "see how this sort of thing evolved" BASED ON YOUR ASSUMPTION THAT IT DID. We can "see" the same thing you see, we simply recognize that it's nothing but another imaginative construction and not evidence in the true sense at all.

Also, you ask us to take a lot for granted even in the description of the evidence. You ask us to believe that this really is the same cartilage in all the examples you mention though you provide no photographs to demonstrate it, that it occurs in the embryos of mammals and humans -- does it look exactly the same? Are you sure it's the same structure? -- and that it later "disappears," and that its function is as you describe with relation to dental development. Hey, maybe it is, but as I recall, a famous propagator of the "Biogenetic Law," Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, which my generation was raised on, had so fudged the illustrations he offered in proof of his thesis that eventually they were recognized as fraud -- all in the service of proving his belief in that principle and in evolution itself.

Yet we're still only presented with raw descriptions such as the above and not shown anything that would allow us to judge for ourselves whether the researchers are interpreting the phenomena correctly or perhaps imposing their own bias on the data -- fudging a bit here and there.

In any case, the occurrence of any particular structure across many species doesn't prove evolution, merely design similarity.

Oh, and terms like "ancient" and "modern" -- as well as "intermediate" -- are also interpretive bias imposed on the data. A species of word magic.

Evolutionary "science" is really laughable when you take the time to ask the right questions.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Dr. Adequate pulls a silly

Dr. Adequate at EvC forum comes up with this:
Dembski seems to be making the same mistake as Behe. He writes:
We can therefore define the core of a functionally integrated system as those parts that are indispensable to the system’s basic function: remove parts of the core, and you can’t recover the system’s basic function from the other remaining parts. To say that a core is irreducible is then to say that no other systems with substantially simpler cores can perform the system’s basic function.[...] To determine whether a system is irreducibly complex therefore employs two approaches [...] A conceptual analysis of the system, and specifically of those parts whose removal renders the basic function unrecoverable, to demonstrate that no system with (substantially) fewer parts exhibits the basic function. [...] The problem is that for an irreducibly complex system, its basic function is attained only when all components from the irreducible core are in place simultaneously. It follows that if natural selection is going to select for the function of an irreducibly complex system, it has to produce the irreducible core all at once or not at all.
But no, to say that a core is irreducible is not to say that "no other systems with substantially simpler cores can perform the system’s basic function".

What it actually means is that if we tried to simplify the system by completely removing one of its parts and leaving it otherwise the same, then it would no longer fulfill its "basic function".

Let us again consider humans as an example. Remove either the brain or the body, and we are no longer able to perform the evolutionarily essential functions of survival and reproduction.

But that does not mean that no simpler system than a human being can perform these functions, because in fact we know of many such systems, including systems which don't have brains in the slightest.

So he is wrong when he says: "It follows that if natural selection is going to select for the function of an irreducibly complex system, it has to produce the irreducible core all at once or not at all." We do not in fact have to have a brain-body system produced at one stroke at the outset. Instead we can envisage a process in which, as evolutionists actually claim, we begin with an organism that has no brain and end up with an organism to which the brain is indispensable.

There are other problems with his paper, but the most obvious problem is that he's making the same old mistake. Until the IDers correct this, then their argument is flawed --- and if they do correct this, then they won't have an argument.
I dunno. Dr. Adequate is a genius and all but isn't there something - uh - deceptive - about this example? A bit of the old evolutionist flimflam here? "Survival and reproduction" does not merely define the output of MANY living systems, let alone any particular living system, it defines ALL living systems, every last one of them. Isn't this no more than a stupendously extreme case of begging the question?

But Behe's famous example is the bacterial rotator flagellum, whose function is a bit more specific than "survival and reproduction." It is CLAIMED that other simpler systems exist which demonstrate that the whole doesn't need to have come together all at once, a claim based as usual on envisaging hypothetical steps by which it could have evolved, and I'd simply like to point out that telling term "envisage" here with its inevitable couldawoulda entourage.

Envisaging is of course what Evolution is made of. It has no true scientific credentials beyond envisaging -- imagining, inventing, hypothesizing -- Fantasy. They can never get past this level of scientific inquiry as true science can by producing actual evidence for or against their imaginative construct.

Evolutionists are perpetually stuck at the Hypothesis level. They can always ONLY envisage their evidence, make it up out of whole cloth with a bit of pseudologic to hold it together. That's the entire Theory of Evolution from beginning to end. It's the entire debate in fact. The one who wins the debate is the one who is the best at aggressive ridicule.

In this particular case Dr. A has envisaged an exceptionally laughable answer to his debate opponent.