Fresh meat
- From: Matthew <UseNet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 08 Sep 2007 17:27:16 -0700
Hello everyone. I just wanted to pop in and introduce myself, although you may have seen me unload a couple of posts on your resident author of children's books yesterday. A man can only read so many bald-faced lies and exaggerations in one day and I guess I just blew a valve.
I really did intend on saying hello before posting any rants - I promise. My handle is conveniently the same as my name, but if it collides with another's, I can change it.
I was watching CSPAN a couple of weeks ago and saw Behe do his ID shtick. Needless to say, I was not persuaded (rotten fish always seems to smell the same no matter what kind of fish). However, being a software engineer by trade, the biology part was over my head (no doubt because Behe was building strawmen and slinging BS everywhere). Anyway, I felt ill-prepared to make a *proper* determination or refutation so I thought I'd hit the web and do some research. (what a concept huh?)
Eventually I ran across Panda's Thumb and then caught a link to http://www.talkorigins.org/ and figured out that this news group existed. I busted out a real news reader (I can't stand the Google groups browser-based kludge) and I pulled all the threads off my news server. I've spent the last week or two reading these posts for 8-10 hours each day (I have no life and you guys have got a LOT of posts).
The most important thing I learned is that there are some very well-educated people here and all one needs to do is read a few tens of thousands of posts and apply some critical thinking and one can gain a huge amount of knowledge in a very short time. I sincerely thank everyone for their past contributions, they did NOT fall on deaf ears today.
I think I've spotted the more obvious quacks like Don and McClueless, but I have to tell you that Ray just scares the hell out of me. That man needs professional help and I hope he gets it soon. The really odd thing is that after seeing a few thousand posts of the ID / Creationist clan, I seem to have developed a "sense" for detecting the same "logic" in other posts. Perhaps it's that [talk-in-circles while pointing at everything that *wasn't* the question I just asked you] sorta thing? Maybe it's just hard to hide the smell of rotting fish.
I can't say how long I'll poke around, but I'll probably start posting if I do hang out. I must admit that my short introduction to paleo anthropology [I think that's the name of field] was far more interesting than I remembered from high school. I am still a bit woozie trying to keep the species, timelines, and fossil evidence in my head, let alone trying to remember the chronology of when the fossils were discovered. Then there's the flora and other fauna as well. I think my head will explode soon.
One striking feature of all the hominid [is that the right word?] fossil evidence is that I didn't realize how many "holes" have been plugged since the old days. The other thing that struck me was that we found hominid (homo?) fossils that are 3 or 4 million years old (correct me if I got that wrong). That was really amazing to me - it boggles the mind. Another thing I learned so far was just how difficult it is to slap a label on a species when individuals (of a group) can be so different and sometimes local populations seem to contain more than one sub-species living together or near each other.
It doesn't seem to take very much education or a huge amount of effort to see that you can't draw a line in the sand and say black/white or man/ape or reptile/bird. Our history truly is a melting pot of slow adaptation from one species to the next (evolution if you will).
Back in the old days, there were huge gaps in fossils and dating was not very accurate. It left the impression that there might be a place where you could say man/ape and then argue how to get from one to the other with a theist. It just doesn't seem possible anymore. The criteria of what is manlike or apelike is found in unlikely combinations and not just in one key period, but over vast periods of time. Brain size, bipedal, arm/leg ratios and any other objective criteria seems wholly inadequate to be applied as a measuring stick in the man/ape determination that was supposed to be so clear cut. I loved the chart showing several fossils and what the various creationist / ID folk had to say in the man/ape determination of each - very telling!
I'm down with Darwin, Dawkins, and Hitchins (though he's a *bit* extreme for me), and Hawking (genius and way over my head). Paint me severely agnostic I guess. I don't disbelieve in *everything*, but religion has done some really bad things to otherwise good sheeple. Mostly, people need to use their critical thinking and anything that impedes that process gets a big thumbs-down from me. That should give you a rough idea of where I'm coming from.
So, I'm kinda excited by all this new knowledge and it's pretty much as a direct result of the people here in past and present. I thank you for that.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Fresh meat
- From: Tom McDonald
- Re: Fresh meat
- Prev by Date: Re: Naturedunnit
- Next by Date: Re: An idle question (Paging Mark Isaak)
- Previous by thread: Are some people an insult to evolution?
- Next by thread: Re: Fresh meat
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
Loading
