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WHY CREATIONISM WILL NEVER WIN

 
 
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 01:20 pm
@Setanta,
Kanzi the Bonobo understands over 2,000 English language words -- here's a link to all the info about the series including watching it online (I don't believe it's available right now as it's being re-broadcast by PBS).

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/overviews/3504_apegeniu.html
0 Replies
 
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 01:41 pm
http://evolutionspace.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/538136200_6b96a3f7f9.jpg

An Adam and Eve straight out of a corny Hollywood Biblical epic -- it's the Kentucky Wax Museum


Creationist Museum: Darwin Got Something Right
New exhibit at Bible-based creationist museum says Darwin's natural selection valid _ sort of

By DYLAN T. LOVAN Associated Press Writer
LOUISVILLE, Ky. March 17, 2009 (AP)
The Associated Press

A controversial Kentucky museum that trumpets the Bible story of creation and rejects evolution is making room for an odd guest: Charles Darwin.

A new exhibit at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum argues that natural selection " Darwin's explanation for how species develop new traits over time " can coexist with the creationist assertion that all living things were created by God just a few thousand years ago.

"We wanted to show people that creationists believe in natural selection," said Ken Ham, founder of the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis and frequent Darwin critic.

The exhibit might seem peculiar to many who have watched the decades-long battle between evolution scientists and creationists, who take the Bible's Genesis account as literal truth.

But the idea that creationists can accept natural selection "isn't really new in creationism, though it's interesting that Answers in Genesis would have an exhibit on it," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif.

The $27 million museum has drawn international attention " and, the ministry says, more than 650,000 visitors " since its opening in Petersburg, Ky., just south of Cincinnati in 2007. Its exhibits match the high production value of popular natural history museums. But in its version of history, Adam and Eve are considered the first humans, Noah rescues humanity from a worldwide flood and early man frolics with dinosaurs.

Ham said the new exhibit features live blind cave fish, models of bacteria and recreations of Darwin's famous finches, whose variant beaks helped inspire the British naturalist's theories on natural selection.

Darwin proposed in 1859 that new species appear through the process of evolution. He attributed evolution to natural selection, when randomly occurring traits " like the change in body color of a beetle " give a species a survival advantage over competitors.

Ham said he agrees that natural selection can give an organism an advantage in its environment, but creationists do not believe that the process can lead to new species, such as fish evolving into amphibians.

Visitors to the exhibit are greeted by a large sign that reads: "Natural Selection is not Evolution."

"The exhibit is to clearly show that natural selection is not a mechanism to change one kind of animal into a totally different kind," Ham said. For example, he said, dogs can develop new traits from one generation to the next, but they remain dogs.

Ham isn't the only creationist who holds that view. A Web site, CreationWiki, developed by the Northwest Creation Network, says natural selection "explains the mechanism by which traits are selected and organisms adapt to their environment." Like Ham, the Mountlake Terrace, Wash., group argues that natural selection is only responsible for "small adaptations."

But Scott, whose organization advocates evolution education, said the fossil record proves that one type of body plan can give rise to another through evolution. She said the recently discovered fossil Tiktaalik " a prehistoric fish with some traits like those of four-legged animals " shows an adaptation toward a life on land.

"We have a gradual transition of vertebrate fossils from those who swim to those who have stumpy fins to those who can function well on land," Scott said.

Ham acknowledged that creationists share only a limited common ground with Darwin, and he remains a staunch critic of evolution.

"In regard to Darwin's overall idea, that there's no supernatural involved in formation of life, and that there's a mechanistic, materialistic mechanism to evolve creatures " he's totally wrong," Ham said.
Setanta
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 01:57 pm
Thin end of the wedge . . . they'll have opened Pandora's box before they know it . . .
MontereyJack
 
  2  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 02:15 pm
I wonder how they determined Adam and Eve were Caucasian. Why is Eve feeling him up? Who married them? No one to do the rites. Extramarital sex. No wonder they were thrown out of the garden. Loons.
Setanta
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 02:16 pm
@MontereyJack,
Good point, Boss . . . it's like that line from Shaw's St. Joan when they ask the prosecutor, who has objected to the notion that the saints speak to Joan in French, whether he expected them to speak Latin, and he says, no, English of course . . .
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 02:21 pm
@Setanta,
I warn you Set--do not try that. You have led a sheltered life so far and it is best, at your age, to keep it that way.

It looks like LW, like effemm, is at a bit of a loose end without some Creationism to chew on. They seem to need enemies very desperately. It keeps their mind off science I suppose.
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 02:25 pm
@Setanta,
And when the Divine Sarah played Joan at the age of forty the prosecutor asked her how old she was. And Sarah, turned to the audience, bold as brass, and replied "Eighteen!!".

It brought the house down.
0 Replies
 
farmerman
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 04:06 pm
@Lightwizard,
Quote:
But the idea that creationists can accept natural selection "isn't really new in creationism, though it's interesting that Answers in Genesis would have an exhibit on it," said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif.
they are closer to the edge than they know.The trivializing of nat selection and "micro evolution" begins to erode their core arguments. Since many families differ in genetic complement from their "rootstock species", this means that new genetic information IS INDEED beig produced. I can hear gunga tightening his noose.
rosborne979
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 04:21 pm
@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:
they are closer to the edge than they know.The trivializing of nat selection and "micro evolution" begins to erode their core arguments. Since many families differ in genetic complement from their "rootstock species", this means that new genetic information IS INDEED beig produced. I can hear gunga tightening his noose.

They are blurring the distinctions between their own beliefs and science, but they are the only ones giving up ground. Science keeps making its case stronger and stronger while the creationists are forced to erode their own position in order to adopt the facade of scientific terminology.
Quote:
"In regard to Darwin's overall idea, that there's no supernatural involved in formation of life, and that there's a mechanistic, materialistic mechanism to evolve creatures " he's totally wrong," Ham said.

But they're not willing to give up their basic premise yet.
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 05:09 pm
@farmerman,
They're basically trying to fit a square peg into a round hole -- kindergarten stuff.

Anyone ever see the infamously bad John Huston's "The Bible" which really ended his career. His Adam and Eve scenes are so ridiculous, they made me start laughing.

http://www.thefoxmoviechannel.com/images/movie_details/66L0002_lg_1_Adam-and-Eve.jpg

Seems the glamed up versions hit the Creationist Museum nut cases right in the old bean.

Nobody has done a more fantastic job on it than Shirley MacClain in the movie "Can-Can." Couldn't find a pic of that but I think some will remember it.

Instead, I found this piece in The New Yorker:

June 28, 2007
Dystopia in Kentucky
by George Packer

A few miles west of Cincinnati, near the northern Kentucky town of Petersburg, there’s a gleaming new monument to Christianist ideology called the Creation Museum. It was built by an Australian Biblical literalist named Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars, raised mostly in small donations. It opened over Memorial Day weekend with a blast of media attention (Edward Rothstein wrote two pieces about it for the New York Times), and since then ten thousand people a week have been flocking to its exhibits. Last Sunday, on a visit to my in-laws in Lexington, I joined them.

The sixty-thousand-square-foot museum mimics the language, layout, and technical effects of state-of-the-art science museums: mastodon fossils and mineral crystals, soaring dioramas of life-size animatronic dinosaurs, several movie theatres, conference rooms, cafés, even a planetarium, and an echoing soundtrack of bird calls. But, as you pay your $19.95 and walk through the entry hall, there are clues that this is all a sophisticated sham.

The simulation serves a primitive ideology known as “young-earth creationism,” which promotes the idea that the earth is just over six thousand years old and that the fossil record appeared after the Flood, around 4300 B.C. The first rooms ease you into this mental scenery with a soft sell: the Grand Canyon is discussed in pseudo-scientific terms as possible evidence of the Flood. But as you get into the farther chambers of the museum"which, like the Holocaust Museum in Washington, forces you along a single channel, so that one overwhelming narrative is imposed on every visitor"the message is didactic and clear: Voltaire was “an infidel philosopher.” The Scopes trial was the beginning of the end. “Scripture abandoned in the culture” has led to porn addiction, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, divorce, religious relativism, child neglect, and genocide. “Human reason” has replaced “God’s Word,” with horrific consequences. Just when the displays are depicting total despair in the modern world, you come out into the Garden of Eden and a soothing diorama of an attractive and prelapsarian Adam and Eve lounging in a waterfall pool surrounded by lilies.

The Creation Museum takes the usual trajectory of science education and turns it upside down: the Enlightenment initiated the dark ages, and only the discovery of Biblical truth can lead us out of it. There’s very little attempt to persuade visitors with even spurious scientific argument. The truth is asserted within a hermetically closed system of belief. For example, the explanation of the fossil record:

Views about fossils have come and gone. But fossils themselves do not tell us where these creatures come from or how they died. Fortunately we have another source of factual data"the first book of the Bible, Genesis. This book makes it obvious that carnivory, disease, and death, as seen in the fossil record, came after sin. So the fossil record had to be formed after sin entered the world.

It hardly matters that the Creation Museum is bound to appall secular visitors. They are not its audience. It exists to tell Christianist families that they are right and the future is theirs. I spoke with a family from Columbus, Ohio, who had driven two and a half hours to the museum “out of sheer curiosity.” The mother, a chemist, told me that she was disappointed in the museum’s closed-mindedness, as when an introductory film spoke of “atheistic evolution.” She believed in evolution, she said, but she also had “a religious background,” and wanted to hear “other points of view.” Her teen-age son found the film’s portrayal of an autocratic high-school science teacher ridiculous.

As far as I could tell, the family from Columbus was in the minority. Most of the families"overwhelmingly white, mainly blond, and about the most pleasant, cheerful collection of tourists imaginable"seemed to accept what they heard and read as they were coaxed along the explanatory trail, with the children delighted by the cleverly designed animal displays. This expensive frolic through a sinister fairy tale was made for the young.

Many of the quarter of a million people expected to visit the Creation Museum by the end of the year will be children. They will be indoctrinated into an ideology that systematically warps their understanding of the physical world and fills them with hostility toward the facts and concepts of modernity. As we have learned over the past few years, this doesn’t mean that they’ll be outcasts and failures. A great political party has largely abased itself before their world view and offered them unprecedented access to government power. The Creation Museum, a combination of a natural-history museum and a Communist Party propaganda center, will help to arm and arouse the next generation of Christianists in the ongoing war against secular and scientific America.

It’s tempting to treat the museum as an interesting cultural diversion, rather like a guided tour through Colonial Williamsburg, which is how Rothstein, at the the Times, took it. But the museum’s creators are more serious than that, and in a sense they have it right: the family from Columbus came looking for a middle ground that doesn’t exist. Either you accept the claims of science, or you might as well believe that dinosaurs made it onto Noah’s Ark. This disagreement is the size of the Grand Canyon. The mass of ordinary visitors were every bit as alien to me as the few Mennonite families in their nineteenth-century bonnets and long beards. We might speak the same contemporary American dialect, wear the same T-shirts, and eat the same fatty foods, but our basic beliefs are so incompatible that it’s hard to know what political arrangement could ever satisfy us both. Rothstein ended one of his reviews by saying that a visitor “leaves feeling a bit like Adam emerging from Eden, all the world before him, freshly amazed at its strangeness and extravagant peculiarities.” My experience was different: I had the sense of being a dissident surrounded by the lies of a totalitarian state, and I kept my reactions to myself. As I was driving away, I realized what the barrage of falsehoods written on slick signboards reminded me of. It was the telescreens in “1984.”
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 05:09 pm
@rosborne979,
Quote:
But they're not willing to give up their basic premise yet.


And they never will while blokes like ros represent the other side. The idea of handing the world over to blokes like him is the stuff of their worst nightmares.
0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 05:39 pm
@Lightwizard,
Quote:
It was the telescreens in “1984.”


Oh no it wasn't. The telescreens in 1984 were compulsory. There is nothing compulsory in the Creation Museum. It is entirely, 100%, voluntary.

If you argue that it is not voluntary for the kids whose parents take them there you are really in deep water. You are then attacking the institution of the family. Which Big Brother was all in favour of.

Your Mr Packer is caught in the worst sort of slimiest lie. He probably has it in for Christians because he demanded some girl he knocked up had an abortion. Or he's objecting to the democratic result of Prop 8. Or he wants easy divorce. Or his girl to poison herself with the pill. Or somesuch. Something self-indulgent at somebody else's expense.

He's blown away. He's caught red-handed.

He never read 1984. He probably wouldn't dare.

He is relying on the ignorance of his readers. How ******* horrible can a bloke get who tells lies of that nature and assumes his audience is stupid as well. And just to get his end away cheaply.

Your post is obscene LW and it shows clearly that you do not understand the issues involved.






0 Replies
 
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 05:43 pm
And what is truly amazing is that there are no Americans who can see the point or are too gutless to say so.

Fancy being cowed by this pile of shite.
0 Replies
 
edgarblythe
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 06:00 pm
Anybody else see this?


Morning Edition, July 3, 2009 · Even scarcer than hen's teeth would be...dinosaur skin.

Dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago, and skin isn't quite that long-lived. But on very rare occasions, skin or other soft tissue from extinct animals gets fossilized. And that's what happened to a hadrosaur that died about 66 million years ago in what is now North Dakota.

Phillip Manning and the young man who found the fossil, Tyler Lyson, spent years digging up the hadrosaur, funded in part by the National Geographic Society. Paleontologist Manning, from the University of Manchester in England, says he was "gobsmacked" by what they found.

"The tail is three dimensional, intact. The skin is like a cone of skin slipped over the skeleton, it's beautiful. The arm is just ... it's like shaking hands with a dinosaur, the three-dimensional skin envelope runs all the way around from the hand all the way up to its armpit. It's quite remarkable."

A Remarkable Set of Circumstances

Writing in the science journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Manning says the skin isn't actually skin any more " it was mineralized in a rare confluence of circumstances.

The hadrosaur, a 25-foot-long, duck-billed plant eater, died and was quickly covered by water and silt. The mix of chemicals in the water and the dinosaur's own body allowed the quick build-up of calcium carbonate, which enveloped and invaded the skin. Essentially, the skin turned to stone, but kept its form and texture, like a freeze-dried glove.

"You slice through the skin," says Manning, "and you can see original cell boundaries that have been locked in the calcium carbonate cement of this remarkable fossil." From the outside, the skin looks segmented into geometric shapes, like the outside of a soccer ball.

There's More Than One Way To Skin A Dinosaur

Paleontologists have been pushing the boundaries of their science lately, borrowing technology from chemistry and medical laboratories to tease out molecular information from fossilized dinosaurs.

"Our analytical and imaging facilities are becoming much more sophisticated at a very rapid rate," says Derek Briggs, a paleontologist at Yale University. "And that's yielding all sorts of exciting new results about the chemistry and appearance of these kinds of animals."

For example, researchers have recently extracted what they claim are blood vessels and proteins from the inside of a Tyrannosaurus rex bone.


spendius
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 06:06 pm
@edgarblythe,
Somebody from the University of Manchester has been "gobsmacked".

That's truly remarkable I must admit. No wonder they posted him to North Dakota.
0 Replies
 
Foofie
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 07:30 pm
@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:


Humans have only scratched the surface of the information that dogs (and by analogy, a great many other animals) obtain by scent--it is a world of incredible complexity and probably beauty to which we are forever blind.



Yes, it would be nice to know how dogs categorize humans by differing genital, anal, and body odors. By taking a daily shower, are we depriving dogs of a richer existence?

0 Replies
 
MontereyJack
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 08:28 pm
Now what I want to know, looking at that movie still and thinking back to the diorama in the Creation Museum, is: WHO DID ADAM AND EVE'S HAIR? WHO TRIMMED HIS BEARD? WHO GAVE THEM THE FULL-BODY BIKINI WAXING? Did someone edit out the line about "On the fifth day god created beauticians, barbers, razors, and scissors, and the Nautilus machine"?
edgarblythe
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 08:31 pm
Anyone ever see the infamously bad John Huston's "The Bible" which really ended his career. His Adam and Eve scenes are so ridiculous, they made me start laughing.

It was a ridiculous movie, but I sort of enjoyed Noah.
farmerman
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 08:38 pm
@edgarblythe,
Im gonna have Mrs F put that movie on our Netflix que. I love the sappy religious movies . Is Huston in the movie? cause He has the most pompous sounding voice ever. I remember him calling John Wayne an AAKKTOOOOR.

New tech dept: We just bought a new LG TV and, on the remote is a direct link to Netflix so we can DOWNLOAD the movies from our Netflix que and pump them right onto the big screen TV.

I may never leave the house .
edgarblythe
 
  1  
Reply Thu 2 Jul, 2009 09:11 pm
@farmerman,
Huston was Noah, as I recall.
 

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