Ad Hoc = Fantasy explanations mistaken for science shown again on thread about lack of hominid transitionals

A new creationist at EvC called CrytoGod is now trying his hand at getting them to acknowledge that all they have is speculation /conjecture/ fantasy /imaginative constructs /ad hoc explanations / just-so stories, all stuff made up off the top of the head / off the cuff, whatever synonymous expression you prefer, to explain anything the theory of evolution requires. Are they going to acknowledge that? Of course not.

The subject is why there aren't any intermediate ape-human types wandering around.

Why should there be? was somebody's disingenuous answer. Well, because Darwin for one realized that there had to be for the theory to hold water. LOTS of transitionals with many small gradations as a matter of fact, not just the occasional specimen of a creature that has characteristics of a couple of other species. OK, he was talking about FOSSILS, but the same reasoning implies that there ought to be LOTS of living transitionals as well if the theory were correct. Darwin was clear: you gotta have LOTS of them and LOTS of gradations between them. He tried to get away with explaining their lack by the imperfection of the "fossil record" (one of HIS ad hoc explanations that can't be proved or disproved) but if that fossil record were really a record of evolution down the millions of years you'd nevertheless have to see some evidence of what he had in mind and you don't. ALL we see are complete forms, forms with variations such as occur all the time in living nature too, but not the transitionals the theory requires. And that's just the fossil record. LIVING transitionals are an even more reasonable expectation from the theory as you can't argue "imperfection" of the living record. As CtG says, it's just too too convenient that there aren't any.

What can they do but assert that there aren't any intermediate ape-human types wandering around just because there aren't, because they went extinct, and make up explanations why that might possibly be the case, although CrytoGod specifically asked them to avoid ad hoc explanations and give only scientific explanations. Well, CtG knows as well as I do that there AREN'T any scientific explanations, ONLY made-up stuff that they nevertheless call fact or science. ALL the evos can do is posture and expostulate, insinuate that the creationist's evidence is flawed somehow or other [it's "old"], and denounce him as stupid and ignorant, and aggressively declare whatever they can invent to support the theory as if it were fact, because that's all they ever do and all they CAN do because there IS no science that supports this stuff.

He who has eyes to see...

I cry to God also, that He would open the eyes of these blind.

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Much later. I keep wanting to get back to this post but never quite make it, too much else going on, but will at least say here, in case I can never get back to it, that the thread I'm talking about above goes on with plenty of examples of this kind of ad hoc / make-it-up-as-you-go thinking, which is really THE "methodology" of The Sciences of the Past, both evolutionism or biology of the past, and Old Earthism or geology of the past. Anybody's guess will do to explain whatever the theory tells them must be true. That's the Fantasy of Evolution for ya right there.

"Sea Monsters" -- antediluvian life forms or creatures evolved over millions of years?

Watching a film at Netflix by National Geographic titled Sea Monsters. (I tried but couldn't get the "embed" function to work for the trailer.)

The film shows some geologists on a fossil hunt in Kansas, finding bones of prehistoric reptilian dinosaurian type sea creatures. They also find the more common ammonite fossil -- and it's interesting to see this as I had no idea what size to picture those creatures, and the fossil is a lot larger than I had visualized, about the diameter of a good sized serving platter I'd say.

It's the ammonite fossils they say tell them when all these creatures in the same vicinity lived, which is of course based on their Geologic Time Table that layers the physical world in time periods, just as Dr. A does as quoted in the post below. They always speak of the time element as fact although it is nothing but an imaginative construct that they impose on the sedimentary and fossil phenomena.

Speaking of it as fact is what I call "word magic." They don't need the actual processes of science to reify an imaginative construct into Reality and enforce it with indignant denunciations as "anti-science" of anyone who isn't convinced. "The poetry of reality" as Dr. A says, although it's just the poetry of fantasy.

Most of the film is animation of the creatures reconstructed from their fossils and shown swimming in the seas that supposedly covered the area for some huge length of time in the "Cretaceous" period, and the "Triassic" and "Jurassic." They do show the sea that bisected the continent of North America at one time, and I have no doubt there is evidence in shorelines that identify such a body of water that stood long enough for such markers to be evident, but of course I don't buy the millions of years explanation for anything.

No, I'm watching this as an interesting imaginative reconstruction of life forms that lived before the Noachian Flood and that were no doubt transported by that Flood to their resting places where they were buried and fossilized and where these geologists now find them.

The "sea" that bisected the continent was of course a temporary stage of the Flood after it had receded or at least begun to recede, as were all the ancient extinct large lakes of western North America such as Missoula and Lahontan and Bonneville. Simply large lakes that stood for some time after the Flood and then finally drained away, in some cases suddenly and catastrophically, probably due to the tectonic forces that occurred after the Flood and also built the Rockies. The catastrophic draining of one such great standing body of water is one very plausible explanation for the carving out of the Grand Canyon. Not a feat any ordinary river could have accomplished.

One funny thing: A few large fossils were found with food in their stomachs, one rather "stuffed to the gills" as it were, which prompted the speculation that it must have died of gluttony. Of another the narrator wondered why it would have died so suddenly after a good meal. Of course they conjured an explanation out of a hat as usual, but duh, folks, obviously the most reasonable explanation is that they were all caught in the same catastrophic event at the same time, some having just filled their stomachs.

Same phenomena, different interpretation, just as reasonable, no, really, more reasonable than the establishment interpretation.

Anonymous Comment insists on definitional word magic

Got an Anonymous Comment on an older blog post and thought I'd bring it up front:

Anonymous Poster quotes me:

"THIS IS NOT EVOLUTION, THIS IS NORMAL BUILT-IN VARIATION, OTHERWISE SOMETIMES IRRITATINGLY KNOWN AS "MICROEVOLUTION." MICROEVOLUTION SAYS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION!"

And answers me:

You can't just go around redefining the word "evolution". That normal variation is exactly what evolution is. That is ALL evolution is. There is variation, and some of the variants survive better than others, and that's natural selection. I'm sorry, but that's.. just the definition.

And I answer Anonymous there, and here with a few differences:

Dear Anonymous, thanks for your comment. I appreciate your being polite.

What you are saying illustrates another point I try to make here, which is that a great deal of the evolution side of this dispute is definitional, or to put it another way, it's "word magic" which asserts as fact something that is really contrary to reality: If you simply DEFINE evolution as normal variation then you blind yourself to what is really going on.

As I've argued over and over here, there is a NATURAL end point to normal variation that is the TRUE definition of it, beyond which no further evolution is possible. In reality. In fantasy it is assumed without warrant that the observed variations that are called "microevolution" simply continue indefinitely. They cannot. There is a natural end point which is the true boundary line that separates the Kinds, the end point brought about by the ACTUAL FACT that genetic variability must decrease as new phenotypic forms emerge.

Every time you get a new variant, it has emerged because some genetic variability has been lost in the process of bringing to phenotypic expression the particular genetic codes underlying the new variant. It can't happen any other way, as I've argued here in many posts. You have to lose competing genetic variations in order for a particular phenotypic variation to become established in a population. The more refined, or distinctive, a variant, the more specific the genetic code for it and therefore the greater the loss of genetic competitors. Eventually a point is reached where further variants are no longer possible at all, and evolution has come to an end for that line of variation. The very processes of evolution that bring about new variants naturally lead to a point beyond which evolution is impossible. That's the outer boundary of "microevolution." Microevolution is how Kinds vary within themselves. There is no macroevolution possible at all. Evolution defeats evolution, as I like to say.

There is also the ACTUAL FACT that there is no such thing as "beneficial" mutations capable of driving evolution, which is what is usually posited as the remedy for the situation I describe. If mutations did in fact occur as supposed, you could never have an identifiable variant at all, as mutations would constantly interfere with the specific coding for such a variant. The whole idea of beneficial mutations is just another huge piece of word magic, an assumption or belief for which there is no evidence, while there is very good reason to believe they can't happen, as I just said. In reality, known mutations only interfere with normal genetic processes and there is absolutely no evidence that they do anything at all beneficial. Evolutionism simply invents mutations to fuel the continuing changes required by the theory, nothing but invention, nothing but fantasy.

So, I recommend to you that you stop believing in definitional word magic and join creationists in recognizing reality.

Evolution has been killed dead a zillion times but they keep following its ghost around pretending it's alive

Oh BROTHER. This would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. Now they are accusing ICANT and other creationists on the thread "Can I disprove Macro-evolution" of being off topic. Hoo boy, what will they think of next? But then it turns out it's not that they're off topic, it's that they haven't disproved Macroevolution, which is what the title of the thread supposedly demands of them, which of course the evos wouldn't recognize if it bit them, and they have teeth marks all over them but don't seem to notice. Case of genetic entropy perhaps -- nerve degeneration radiating out from the gluteus maximus?

The problem is that Dawn Bertot and JRTjr and ICANT are happily leading you and others down those oh so attractive rabbit holes.

The topic is NOT whether Macro-Evolution happened, it is an assertion that they can disprove Macro-evolution.

It is their assertion that it did not happen, and until they provide a model that better explains what is seen than the current model, they have failed.

Stop letting them change the subject and lead you guys astray.

It is up to them to provide convincing evidence that Macro-Evolution did not happen.

Nothing would qualify as convincing evidence for them, obviously. They are just wilfully blind to the good evidence that HAS been provided. There's nothing wrong with ICANT's evidence.

And the latest in this string of nonsense posts on that thread:

i know i would poste the latin name of that new mouse and the house mouse but he would still say they are still mice

Of course he would because that IS the evidence against Macroevolution and he has fulfilled the requirement of the title of the thread with a resounding Yes he CAN disprove Macroevolution and he did. Because you can't just redefine reality and call it science, folks, if mice are still mice no matter what new Latinized characteristics a particular strain of them may have you have not achieved Macroevolution. AND again, they will have reduced genetic diversity TOO, which is THE real-world actual-fact killer of evolution.

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I guess this is a place to tack on a reaction to a later post by ICANT: This is a post where he and I disagree:

I also understand that there will be sub-species that will arise due to malfunctions in errors in DNA information resulting in mutations.

Sub-species arise from the simple shuffling of the genetic possibilities that God built into the DNA, a very abundant array of possible variations, far MORE abundant in past generations and extravagantly abundant in the pre-Flood world, losing diversity over time thanks to the Fall and the Flood.

The reason offspring are different from parents is not mutations, it's the shuffling of the alleles for the various characteristics in the parents' DNA and this is how new varieties get formed too, as limited populations become isolated from the greater population and their smaller gene pool is the source of their own characteristics.

I'm sure science is right that we do all have mutations, even our own unique mutations, but I can't think that is a good thing since there are thousands of genetic diseases in the human genome, no doubt caused by mutations, and I'm also convinced that "junk DNA" is -- mostly -- the result of mutations, basically a killing off of formerly functioning genes.

Evolutionsts ASSUME that all the DNA was the result of mutations but that's just an article of faith; there is no evidence that that is so. Mutations are errors in the DNA and must be a consequence of the Fall. Of course evolutionists aren't going to do the necessary tests to really pin it down and I don't know how many creationists are looking in this direction either.

Mutations are not necessary, and I personally doubt that they ever contribute anything positive to the development of varieties or sub-species.

Word Magic, Definitional Abracadabra is how evolutionism wins the Micro/Macro-evolution Debate

This is HILARIOUS. Oh Crashie, you've outdone yourself. Post of the Month material here.

Creationist ICANT (whose posts I have to admit to not being able to follow much of the time, and I think he and I disagree on some major points as well, but I've lost track) has been hitting the theme of microevolution as the limit of evolution pretty well lately in my opinion, emphasizing how inability to interbreed is an arbitrary definition of Species, with some good examples from his own experience with animals. He's been holding up tenaciously (he doesn't lose his temper the way I do, forgive me Lord), against the evos for some time at EvC.

So here's crashfrog showing how evolutionists think , and it ain't pretty:

[ICANT} You can call it anything you want to call it. But if you start with two mice and a billion years later you got trillions of mice and billions of them can not breed with each other because of changes or habits you still got trillions of mice, whether they can breed with each other or not.

[crash] Right. And again - macroevolution is not the prediction that mice will ever stop being mice; it's that the group called "mice" will come to refer to more and more different species.

"Ape" referred, once, to only a single species. Now it refers to dozens, including hominids like us. "Hominid" once referred to a single species; now, it refers to dozens, including Homo hablis, Homo neandertalis, and Homo sapiens.

Do you understand, yet? Mice will still be mice, apes will still be apes, tetrapods will still be tetrapods, birds will still be birds - yet, macroevolution will still be occurring, species will still be changing, and new species will still be emerging from old ones. Mice will never turn into birds - but evolution doesn't say that they ever did.

Do you understand that?

So what he's doing here is trying to pull the rug out from under all attempts to make the point ICANT has been making by simply redefining his point out of the contest. Definitional abracadabra. WORD MAGIC. I dunno, what's the very best analogy? Shell and pea game maybe?

Oh yes macroevolution IS exactly what he says it is not: ...macroevolution is not the prediction that mice will ever stop being mice. It most certainly IS, Crash, and that should be the definition of macroevolution.

What crash is saying amounts to total denial that the Theory of Evolution says all living things came from OTHER living things with OTHER NAMES. We don't dispute that microeveolution occurs, many varieties of the same species, some of which cannot interbreed with one another, which is ICANT's point. But MACROevolution begins where the NAMES CHANGE. Come ON crash, this is word games you are playing here. Or really it's Evolutionism that's playing the word games. You are FORCING your view of things on us this way rather than making a rational case for it.

We know the difference between a mouse and a marmot, between a lizard and a bird, crash, AND SO DO YOU! The words clearly designate an objective reality that all recognize, so don't tell us about 5000 species of mice or lizards when the question at hand is whether the processes of variation could ever produce something that we would no longer CALL by the name of its originating species, something we'd no longer call a mouse or a lizard. THAT's WHAT THE QUESTION IS, CRASH, AND YOU KNOW IT.

We even concede the term "species" to you all, and why not? since all those words are synonyms -- Kind, Species, Class, Variety, etc. Clarity depends on having a fixed meaning for their specific uses but unfortunately Evolutionism has co-opted the terms to their own meanings, which they designate as Correct of course, leaving Creationists to make awkward convoluted efforts to distinguish one meaning from another, which evos can then pounce on with their trimphalist denunciations. We try to use the terms to convey the reality we have in mind and it's hard under the best of circumstances to be clear in that effort, but you and your evo friends seem to want to go out of your way to be as unclear as possible. There is no honest effort at debate here. Or, to be fairer than is warranted, at the very least you are so completely bamboozled by your own paradigm you can't think any other way and won't give the benefit of the doubt to so many who are trying to make the opposite case, just because it doesn't fit into your terminological and conceptual system. Of course it doesn't, it is a DIFFERENT MODEL COMPLETELY from evolution's. PARADIGM conflict, Crash.

Yes, WORD MAGIC. That's most of what Evolutionism is and Crashie has demonstrated it here. The Geology wing labels the strata in ways guaranteed to mystify anyone just starting out trying to understand some of these things, and more knowledgeable people as well who memorize it all as if it meant something. The labels serve only to obscure the reality the inquirer is looking for. What we have is slabs of rock but since they've been given fancy names to designate them as Time Periods it's very hard even to remember that they are just slabs of rock. This bit of word magic prevails despite the fact that over the decades since these labels came into fashion their boundaries have been pushed around quite a bit, mostly back and back -- as if nobody has a clue what they're talking about, which they don't.

Then the Biology wing pulls this kind of trick described by crashfrog. And the Paleontology wing does it by making sure the latest fossil discovery is carefully defined by supposed age and supposed evolutionary lineage so you can't get a clear picture of exactly what it is they found, thus begging the very question creationists are trying to address, co-opting the facts for the ToE, making it as hard as possible to think outside their carefully constructed theoretical box.

Yeah, shell and pea game, you can't lose if you keep shifting the definitions -- surreptitiously moving the pea from one shell to another. If you get all the definitions completely blurred together in the service of Evolution eventually we won't be able to think at all and we'll all just nod and smile and lockstep along with whatever you say.

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Postscript: The thread continues:

[ICANT] At no time did the piney-woods-rooter cease to be the same creature that I started with.

Well, it's not the same creature you started with. The creature you started with, presumably, died long ago, and the piney-woods rooters you have now are his descendants.

And, again - if "piney-woods rooter", as a term, can now encompass two species where before it encompassed one, why can't that be happening in nature? Why can't that have happened in the past?

Why can't "mammal", for instance, at one time have encompassed only a single kind of creature, and then over time come to have encompassed a large number of related creatures?

At least you need to begin to become aware of something you are just blithely skipping over here, Crashfrog, which is that there is a real problem with thinking you can prove evolution by definitional changes.

Consider this: Children are all different from their parents and from each other in describable ways. Are they separate species from their parents?

This is what you are implying when you say that the descendants of wild hogs selected by ICANT are a different species because they weigh much more than their ancestors, which he described here in Message 136 :

I am a farm raised person who has taken wild hogs we called piney-woods rooters that could survive on little food and water who weighed less than a hundred pounds. Through selective, breeding produced animals that weighed over 700 pounds that could survive on small amounts of food and water.

Where are you going to draw the line? Or are you going to refuse to draw one at all, and make every individual human or ape or horse into a separate species? Perhaps you want to eliminate the entire concept of Species altogether so that we'll have no names for anything any more and can go back to living in caves.

I know, you draw the line at inability to interbreed any more. But again, sorry, I've already shown that that one is just as arbitrary and meaningless. "Species" always meant creatures with different names. That's what it meant in Darwin's day and up until recently, at least until all this definitional hooha started taking over.

Let's stick to that definition. We'll have macroevolution when ALL SANE PEOPLE AGREE to call ICANT's new hog something other than a hog or a pig, not until. Meanwhile the changes within a species that lead to differentiating a new population from an old population, including inability to interbreed, are still only microevolution. Otherwise the debate is meaningless, words mean nothing, and we might as well all check into the loony bin.

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Yet later:
And now Dr. Adequate chimes in.

[ICANT] I don't see how the big stallion and the little mare in my avatar can breed and produce an offspring.

They are both classified as horses.

So where is the difference other than size?

[Dr. A] The difference other than the very obvious difference? Well, if they can't breed, the other difference is species.

WRONG! You've just shown your adherence to the definitional destruction of truth, the Word Magic corruption of Reality, to mystification, to obfuscation. It's only macroevolution because you say it is, not because it is.

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Friday note:
Can't believe I left out the usual word on what the real reality actually IS. It's the fact that all new "species" that are highly specialized -- of mice, of hogs, of horses -- OUGHT to have the ability to further "evolve" into new varieties and "species" IF EVOLUTION IS TRUE, but the FACT is that in order to get such variations or "species" their genetic potentials must be REDUCED as those for their peculiar characteristics are refined and elaborated. It's what MUST happen when you (or Nature) isolate a small number from the greater population in order to develop a new variety, and you MUST reduce the numbers to get such new species so there's no way to avoid the genetic reduction. It does not happen any other way. I've made this point over and over and over. You can't get from any new highly "evolved" or specialized species to further species, whether this is brought about by domestic breeding or by the various forms of selection and isolation that operate in the wild, and that is the end of Evolution right there.

Ta-DA!!!
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Yeah, you CAN wait around until Judgment Day if you MUST to find this out if you don't want to acknowledge it now.