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Brian, as usual, leaves out some inconvenient facts and blurs a bunch of others. He would have us believe, first of all, that "radiated" is the same thing as "evolved." The idea that spiders "spread into new habitats and thereby diverged or diversified" (the definition of "radiate" in ecology) is hardly contradicted by the discovery that spiders were around long before that radiation happened. Calling the new discovery a "reversal" of the radiation theory is therefore a mischaracterization.

Then he writes, "For Brasier and his colleagues to maintain that even a single generation of these spiders evolved prior to insects..." But Brasier gave the web an age of 140 million years, and "the oldest identifiable insect fossil is a 390-million year old bristletail." And "the oldest known fossils of winged insects are about 320 million years old." Brasier's even quoted in the story Brian footnotes, saying "it was at this time [the time the web was made] flies, butterflies and moths were beginning to evolve!" So the idea that Brasier said the spiders evolved before insects is just something Brian made up.

So Brian's question, "With no lunch as a payoff, wouldn't that generation of spiders have gone extinct?" is based on a false premise: there was plenty of lunch around.

I stayed out of the "are creationists liars?" thread. But this one certainly is, unless you think Brian just doesn't understand what he reads. His patterns of distortion and deception are too consistent for me to believe that, though. He's a very good propagandist.