And you would do well to speak for yourself, instead of trying to speak for "almost everyone".
if you didn’t let that enormous ego,
I actually don't have much of an ego, enormous or otherwise. I do, however, know what I know, and know when I know more about a subject than the many folks who pass through here arrogantly trying to tell all of us science-literate Freepers (and nearly all biologists over the past 100 years) that we're complete fools and charlatans because Dr. Dino told them that evolution was impossible or is based on no research or somesuch. And no, I'm not saying that you're in that category (nor in general descriptions I make later in this post), I'm just pointing out that 1) there's far more arrogance and "ego" on the anti-evolution side, and 2) if I and others sometimes have to play the "look, you don't know what in the hell you're talking about and we do" card, that's why. I can see how it could be mistaken for "ego", but that's not where it comes from.
coupled with an excessive anti-creationist hatred get in the way.
I have no "anti-creationist hatred". Some of my best friends are creationists. Heck, my brother and niece are creationists. There are a lot of creationists here on FreeRepublic I get along fine with and never have a harsh word for. In fact, I can't think of any human being I actually "hate". Not even Osama Bin Laden -- although I think he needs to be exterminated without mercy like a plague-carrying cockroach, the word "hate" is not an accurate description for what I feel. Getting back to creationists, I have no antipathy for them. If you want to see *real* antipathy, check out the virulent bitter invective spewed at "Darwinists" on a regular basis around here, based not on what any particular person has said, but on vicious revulsion for them as a group.
What I do have a problem with, however, is dishonesty, arrogant incompetence, belligerent ignorance, or spreaders of disinformation. And unfortunately, all too many anti-evolutionists suffer from one or more of those afflictions. In short, the main thing I have against some (and only some) creationists is the way they lie about evolutionary biology (or often, about science or scientists as a whole) -- and I don't much care if the lies are their own, or someone else's lies that they mindlessly parrot and fling around with misguided certainty. I have a high regard for honesty and truth and hard-won human knowledge, and it really annoys me to see them damaged by anti-evolution propaganda strewn about by endless waves of folks who know almost nothing about biology except that they think it's anti-God in some way, so anything goes when making war on "enemies of the faith" like those devil-worshipping evolutionists, etc.
Your fact-correcting would certainly go over a lot better.
Quite frankly, in over thirty years of trying to educate people beyond their erroneous belligerent preconceptions on this subject, I've found that the vast majority of them barely even take a clue if you hit them with a two-by-four. It takes a lot to get through the skull of the average anti-evolutionist. I say that not as an insult, but as a dispassionate observation. Consequently, the standard tactic when trying to get through to them is to use an anti-tank weapon to the forehead, for starters. Even that has a limited success rate.
One can usually tell who is going to be actually receptive to a kind word, and who's going to need stronger measures, based on the degree of belligerence and cocksureness they use when informing us that despite their lack of any education on the topic of biology (formal or informal), they're here to inform us that something they read in a creationist pamphlet or thought up during their lunchbreak is sufficient to shatter everything that biologists have spent lifetimes studying and researching and testing and gathering evidence to ascertain. You see, the average anti-evolution creationist (and again, I'm not saying *all*) thinks he holds, through his one nugget of wisdom acquired from seeing a "Dr. Dino" tape and his contempt for anyone who holds a different view than himself, a "killer" argument against evolutionary biology that those egghead scientists have managed to completely overlook for the past 140 years. Whatever did we do before Mr. Anti-evolutionist came along to enlighten us ignorant folks who have spent decades of our lives waist-deep in research findings? Clearly everything biology has discovered from hundreds of millions of man-hours of scientific exploration must be all wrong because, for example, the first member of a new species wouldn't have anything to mate with. *Gasp*! How could we have overlooked something so elementary! Oh, wait -- or maybe the anti-evolutionist doesn't understand how >speciation actually occurs, biologists have covered this already in thousands of studies, and the anti-evolutionist is just being an obnoxious snot. *Those* are the folks who generally need a sharp smack to the head, and even that usually doesn't penetrate their thick skulls -- they'll go away, then come back next week making the VERY SAME CLAIM all over again, having learned absolutely nothing from the experience.
On rare occasion, however, there will be an anti-evolutionist (or "evolution agnostic") who is a lot more tempered in his statements, who doesn't reveal by his attitude that he thinks he knows it all already and that all those ridiculous biologists are blithering dolts before his shining brilliance. This kind will not automatically start out by trying to ridicule those who accept the validity of evolutionary biology. In those cases, I am more than glad to talk to them politely and help guide them to understand their misconceptions.
But then we have the borderline cases, which are harder to immediately assign into the "hardcore" or "reasonable person" category. And that's where we come to yourself. You are more capable of speaking reasonably than most anti-evolutionists, yet have made your share of intemperate broadsides (such as on your Freeper homepage). You appear as if you might be open to considering that you could be mistaken, but several times in the past you've also shown a willingness to fire back with bluster instead of accepting that you had been caught making a false claim.
My first post ever to you was this one. Note that while you made a number of false claims about evolution, I didn't attack you with both barrels (or a machine-gun). While I was clearly amused, I wasn't overly obnoxious or aggressive. Certainly you've seen me come on a whole lot stronger. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt, and even invited you to discuss the topics you had raised. You didn't respond, though.
The next time I responded to one of your posts, here, you made a ridiculously overstated incorrect claim about the amount of evidence for evolution, of the exact same sort the usual empty-headed skull-too-thick-to-reconsider anti-evolutionist would make. My reply was short and exasperated, but not "hateful" or anything. But it was at this point I started losing my willingness to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Here you issued another common boilerplate misconception about evolutionary biology, I just corrected you and left it at that. But again, you seemed more interested in parroting the usual anti-evolution platitudes than in looking for a deeper understanding.
Here you showed a penchant for quoting AiG as if they were gospel without spending any time thinking about whether what the page you linked made sense or not. I pointed out the ludicrousness of the AiG claim, rolled my eyes at their general lack of reliability, and didn't take any swipes at you at all, no matter how mild. You on the other hand wrote, "(Warning! Frevolutionists! Do not click! Semi-technical!)". I know you meant this as a "joke", but it was a somewhat insulting one nonetheless.
Here, in response to a lengthy post of mine, you just blew it off with, "More spam?? Really now!", giving the strong impression that you were among those who had no interest in discussing the material I post, but instead wanted to try to denigrate it with a hand-wave. Not encouraging.
Here you made a rather unbelievable claim, and I (very nicely) asked you to document it if you could, even though I admitted my skepticism that you would be able to. You didn't reply.
Then the major item that convinced me you weren't likely to respond to the kinder "word to the wise" approach: this post. (You pinged me as the first person on the ping list for that post, I still have no idea why, you weren't responding to something I'd written.) In that post you tried to rehash a disagreement you had had with Right Wing Professor on a prior thread. He had caught you making a blatantly false claim about Dr. Feduccia's opinion about Archaeopteryx -- you claimed that he "disputes that Archaeopteryx is an intermediate form". You even tried to ridicule RWP for disputing it, by telling him:
You are predisposed to assume Dr. Gish is lying, because you are predisposed to oppose Creationism in any form. You show your bias even as you type, to the ruin of your credibility as unprejudiced.This behavior doesn't reflect well on you, Dave, and you were generally obnoxious towards evolutionists and made multiple broadsides against them all throughout the post in which you said that.
And ironically in the context of the current discussion, you had made this mistake by believing something dishonestly implied in (but not actually explicitly stated in) an AiG webpage... RWP quoted Feduccia quite clearly stating that he *did*, indeed, consider Archaeopteryx to be a transitional form. Rather than just say "oops" and retract your error, you waffled and dodged and blustered and ridiculed and laughed and so on. I summarized the highlights of that exchange here, while providing even more evidence from Feduccia's writings that RWP was quite correct and you were dead wrong in your claims about Feduccia's views on Archaeopteryx. It was at this point I decided that you were just another one of the most typical know-nothing anti-evolutionists, who for some reason are unable to admit even the tiniest error if they think it undercuts their attacks on evolutionary biology.
Thus my "pile-driver" approach when you yet again got cocky and combative on this thread due to your misguided habit of relying way too trustingly on AiG.
As it is, you’re lucky you’re getting this much of a response.
Actually, you're doing yourself more favors with this response than me. But thanks for keeping the lines of communication open.
[That creationist link you direct us to describes ANOTHER SPECIMEN ENTIRELY, not the "Turkana Boy" skull designated KNM-WT 15000. The very title of your link should have tipped you off, since it clearly mentions specimen number KNM ER 1470, which even those with really poor reading comprehension should have been able to note is different than KNM-WT 15000.]
Faux pax! I went back to read through the article, because I was quite sure that I remembered that this was the specimen, and that it was later “updated” or something like that, to a different name. Thanks for pointing that out; I wouldn’t want any misinformation to be spread around.
Thank you.
[You're talking about an entirely different fossil!!]
Would everyone please kindly laugh at how absurd that was. Thank you. Hey, mistakes happen. PatrickHenry recently wrote something similar. Mistakes happen, it hurts, we own up to it, we move on. Something tells me there are a few who aren’t going to be keen on that “moving on” bit, but I’m used to it. Frankly, it makes me happy just to know I’m worth your time.
Look, I wouldn't have found it so funny if you hadn't already stepped in it previously due to the exact same mistake: Trusting too much in AiG's material and not taking the time to engage your own critical thinking abilities first. It also wouldn't have been as big a deal if you had just offered the material as a counterpoint, and not done it so dismissively and, it seems, arrogantly and with such overconfidence. It also wouldn't have been so smack-worthy if you hadn't included the *second* link in conjunction (more on that below).
[You also include the link: Homo erectus 'to' modern man: evolution or human variability? That's nice, but it doesn't do anything to undercut Coyoteman's point, nor to dispute the material he quoted.]
The link mentioned the particular specimen that he was referencing. Turns out it goes into a deeper web of fossils this versus fossil that. I’ve never made any pretense of being a scientist.
That's fine -- by itself, without the prior "oops, wrong fossil" link, that too wouldn't have been too worthy of much comment. Although as I point out, it's not like it really undercuts the material Coyoteman posted or the point he was making, even though you seemed to be trying to imply that it did.
For that matter, I'm not sure why you felt the need to "refute" Coyoteman's post in the first place. He was just responding to one of the standard tired anti-evolutionist misrepresentations (in this case, P-Marlowe had said that "cheap shots" were "all they [evolutionists] have"), so Coyoteman just corrected the falsehood by saying "We have data and well-supported theory on our side", and posted a semi-random piece of data (the Turkana skull). He wasn't even making a particular argument about this skull, he just wanted to show that evolutionists have fossils and other kinds of evidence, not just "cheap shots" -- so why did you feel the need to run around and "refute" it in some way? I'm still baffled by that.
[It does, however, contain material that CONTRADICTS THE CLAIM YOU JUST MADE, and SHOWS THAT YOU DIDN'T EVEN BOTHER TO FREAKING READ THE LINK before you included it in your post in an attempt to "dismiss" Coyoteman's post.]
We already established that I sourced a link about a different fossil. It stands to reason that the data in the article wouldn’t apply to WT-15000. Does…this surprise you?
I think you miss my point. The point is that if you had read the second link you provided, you should have noticed that the material it contained should have raised red flags in your mind that your first link was, indeed, not about the same fossil. You posted that WT-15000 was less human than previously thought, but then your second link quite clearly states that it is fully human. The "funny" part is that you didn't even notice that your second link contradicted what you had presumed about the first link, and *should* have alerted you to your first mistake.
It was a comedy of errors. You stepped into it once by not reading the first link carefully enough, then you stepped in it again by not reading the second link carefully enough to extricate yourself from the first hole. Okay, maybe I'm weird, but I find that pretty funny.
Or is your further brash rant the result of a desire to grind your opponent into the dirt and make it personal, instead of behaving in some manner that would be considered halfway decent, to say nothing about professional.
See above -- both the part where I explain why it's funny, and why my considered opinion (due to your prior posts) was that a sledgehammer might be a more necessary tool. And as for "behaving in some manner that would be considered halfway decent", your behavior in that prior exchange was quite over the top. This recent post of mine was mild compared to the invective you were flinging on *that* thread.
[The answer becomes obvious when we Google for any reference to "Turkana Boy" within the popular creationist website "AnswersInGenesis.org": That search turns up ONLY TWO PAGES -- the two you linked. Obviously, you just Googled your favorite creationist site for the name of the skull Coyoteman mentioned, pasted in the links without bothering to see if they were actually relevant or helped "rebut" Coyoteman's post, then you smugly declared victory against evolutionary biology...]
Duh. So I consult websites to answer critics.
I believe you are missing the point. It's not that you "consult websites". Heck, I may do that more than anyone. The point was that you consult websites a) that have already bitten you on the butt before with unreliable material, b) without actually *reading* the material (or reading it well enough) to see how actually relevant it is, and c) without knowing enough about the subject to be able to personally judge whether the material you link is reliable, or if instead you're just parroting someone's spin and propaganda.
This is nothing new in the crevo debate. Coyoteman consulted a website for the “evidence” in the first place. Nobody came along and mocked him for that.
No, because the material he posted was relevant, and because he is capable of assessing its validity before he includes it.
Too many anti-evolutionists, meanwhile, just Google up an anti-evolution web page and fling it at us with a "so there!" attitude as if it completely demolishes everything the anti-evolutionist doesn't want to have to consider.
Certainly not you, and certainly not me. Unlike some, I do not make a pretense to having the wealth of knowledge necessary to debate and refute ideas that reach beyond the scope of my scientific knowledge. As Donald Rumsfeld once said, be honest and say if you don't know. If you are honest, it will be often.
I have no problem with that. But from past exchanges, I've not gotten a good impression of your ability to say that. I could be mistaken, of course, but all I have to go on is what I've seen so far. And in general, anti-evolutionists on the whole have a *huge* problem in that regard. They'd rather declare "there is no evidence" than "I'm not aware of any", etc, not to mention how frequently they'll post their presumptions as if they were facts then refuse to back down when caught at it and shown facts to the contrary, etc.
However, there is no need to claim I didn’t read them, because I certainly did.
Then why didn't you notice the blatant contradiction between what the second link said about "Turkana Boy", and what you (thought) the first one was saying?
I was only reading about the wrong specimen, and thus I was trying to fit the proverbial square peg into the round hole. That it doesn’t fit at all seems to surprise you.
No, it surprises me that you didn't *notice* that it didn't fit (or didn't care), and then went ahead and waved it around triumphantly.
[Now, do the honorable thing and ping to this post the ping list you used on your flawed post #512, in order to correct the false information you wrote and pinged them to. I'd do it myself, but I can't read the entirety of the ping list you used, it trails off to "..."]
You should be glad for your sake that you did not. I believe the mods would consider that abuse of a ping list, given that it is not yours.
Oh, puh-leaze... When replying to a post, there's no rule, not even a custom, against pinging the original recipients of the original post so that they can see the reply too. And it's not "your" ping list, as if it has been assigned to you through some ownership program overseen by the moderators. Ping lists in general are not even a FreeRepublic-enforced or instituted mechanism, they're just the informal way that groups of people stay in touch. If I wish to alert recipients of a post to what I consider an important correction to that post, it is entirely my prerogative to ping them as well.
[And speaking of honorable things, on your Freeper homepage you provide an out-of-context quote from one of my posts -- why don't you go ahead and turn that quote into a link to the original post, so that readers can see for themselves why I was saying what I did about you in that quote snippet, and that I documented my reasons for saying it?]
I’m happy to learn you were reading my profile!
It turned up rather by accident in a Google, actually. But then I did read it.
But no, I’m sorry, I don’t see the need to source exactly why you said what you said.
I do.
Everyone in the creation ping list will be reading this thread and see that, while you are correct and I made an error, your attitude means you would bash me and my creationist compatriots if you had no reason other than that we disliked your brand of chewing gum.
Say what? Even leaving aside the ludicrousness and falseness of that outburst, what does that have to do with whether the honorable thing to do would be to link to the post of mine you quote out of context?
It’s also interesting to note that, you wish for me to show the context so people can see why your quote is justified. I honestly wouldn’t find any such quote justified (from creationist or evolutionist) regardless of the background.
Leave that decision up to the readers of your homepage. I am less interested in your opinion on that matter than theirs. And if you feel you are correct, you would have no reason not to link to the original post, since it would not change anyone's opinion of that out-of-context quote, right? So go for it.
I find it interesting that you are trying to justify the remark at all. This means you are adhering to a standard, a Universal Law as Lewis called it, that if that background hasn’t been in place, you would not have been justified to be trashing me like you did.
Look, the point is that negative comments about someone are unjustified if they're not true, justified if they are an accurate description. In short, the truth is a valid defense against accusations of slander. Your inclusion of just that one snippet gives the false impression that I was slandering you, when in fact I was summarizing an assessment I had spent a long post documenting.
Link it to the original post, or feel free to remove it from your "list o' invective". I would find either acceptable.
Also, judging from your Freeper homepage, you seem to have an unhealthy fascination with the number of people who have formed bad opinions of you strong enough to tell you about them. Most people are dismayed if large numbers of people arrive at bad conclusions about them. You seem oddly proud of it. Ponder the wisdom of the old saying: "If everything seems to be coming your way, perhaps you're in the wrong lane." Maybe you're doing something to justify the invective aimed in your direction.
[Do the right thing for a change and alert your ping list to this post, and turn the quote in your Freeper homepage into a link to the post from which it comes.]
And here you go again. Just what is it that you mean by “the right thing”? ['eating crow' cartoon here] And I know this will make you happy…
Actually, yes it does, but maybe not for the reasons you think. I'm not the "bully" you think I am, and I'm not trying to "win" or "beat you into submission" or whatever. It somewhat upsets me that we had to have this tiff in the first place. The reason it does make me happy is because it's rare that I find any anti-evolutionist willing to concede a point at all. You have done so with grace and a degree of humor (even after I've admittedly gone after you without much restraint), and it greatly raises my opinion of you. My hat's off to you, and I thank you for your rare (from anyone on *any* side) ability to bite the bullet, acknowledge a point even from someone who was coming after you with a shotgun, and attempt to employ the olive branch. For my part, I was apparently wrong in my overall impression of you, and for that I apologize.
I hope we can have more civil, more fruitful, and more mutually respectful conversations in the future.
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