Ever wonder why the evos like to talk about the little freak-show items like the archaeopteryx and platypus the way they do? Basically, it's because so little is known about those things that they can talk about them all day long and not look or sound anywhere near as STUPID as they do when talking about ordinary things like flying birds (which I have explained) or modern man. In the case of modern man, there is not only zero evidence of our evolving, there is provably nothing on the planet we could have conceivably evolved FROM. Neanderthal DNA has been shown to be "about halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee" thus eliminating him altogether as a plausible ancestor of ours, and all other hominids are much further removed from us THAN the neanderthal. You'd need some other hominid closer to us both in time and morphology, and the works and remains of such a thing would be all over the place if he had ever existed; they aren't, and he didn't.

Logically, you only have to think about it a little bit to realize how stupid it really is.

You are starting out with apes ten million years ago, in a world of fang and claw with 1000+ lb. carnivores running amok all over the place, and trying to evolve your way towards a more refined creature in modern man. Like:

HEY! Ya know, I'll betcha if I put on these lace sleeves and this powdered wig, them dire-wolves an sabertooth cats'll start to show me a little bitta RESPECT!!!"

What's wrong with that?

The problem gets worse when you try to imagine known human behavorial constants interacting with the requirements of having the extremely rare to imaginary beneficial mutation always prevail:

Let's start from about ten million years back and assume we have our ape ancestor, and two platonic ideals towards which this ape ancestor (call him "Oop") can evolve: One is a sort of a composite of Mozart, Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare, i.e. your archetypal dead white man, and the other platonic ideal, or evolutionary target, is going to be a sort of an "apier" ape, fuzzier, smellier, meaner, bigger Johnson, smaller brain, chews tobacco, drinks, gambles, gets into knife fights...

Further, let's be generous and assume that for every one chance mutation which is beneficial and leads towards the gentleman, you only have 1000 adverse mutations which lead towards the other guy. None of these mutations are going to be instantly fatal or anything like that at all; Darwinism posits change by insensible degree, hence all of these 1000 guys are fully functional.

The assumption which is being made is that these 1000 guys (with the bad mutation) are going to get together and decide something like:

"Hey, you know, the more I look at this thing, we're really messed-up, so what we need to do is to all get on our motorcycles and pack all our ole-ladies over to Dr. Jeckyll over there (the guy with the beneficial mutation), and try to arrange for the next generation of our kids to be in better genetic shape than we are..."

Now, it would be amazing enough if that were ever to happen once; Darwinism, however, requires that this happen EVERY GENERATION from Oop to us. What could possibly be stupider than that?

The big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that there is some sort of a dialectic between evolution and religion.

That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion which operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the only two possible candidates would be Rastifari and Voodoo. The debate would be between the evolutionists, and the voodoo doctors: Dick Dawkins vs Jr. Doc Duvalier.

The real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.

Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some expect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...

To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:

God hates IDIOTS, too!

The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.

Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.

For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.

In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.

All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.

And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.

Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.

Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.

And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:

Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.

But it gets even stupider.

Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.

Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).

Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:

1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) That sort of logic is less limiting than the ordinary logic which used to be taught in American schools. For instance, I could claim that the fact that the fact that nobody has ever seen me with Tina Turner was all the evidence anybody could want that I was sleeping with her.....
2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.

The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.

And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:

The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek"

They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:

ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!

Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.

I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?

American Association for the Advancement of Science,
Boston, February 2002

Early humans dressed for dinner

Sophisticated jewellery appeared with social events.
18 February 2002

HELEN PEARSON

Jewellery appears in different places at similar times.

Our early ancestors glammed-up for a get-together. Humans worldwide began wearing jewellery at the same time as groups started meeting up, say US researchers. The finding counters the idea that 'modern' behaviour swept the globe when modern humans migrated out of Africa.

Residents of Kenya around 40,000 years ago wore beads and pendants made from ostrich eggshell; those in Turkey and Lebanon preferred seashell chic. The ancient beads and necklaces were unearthed by Mary Stiner and her colleagues in Turkey¹ and by other teams at sites in Lebanon, Africa and Europe.

Such ornaments are seen as a sign of sophisticated behaviour. "We think it typifies modern humans," says Stiner, of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Like today's wedding rings and medallions, jewellery says a lot about availability, wealth and religion. "These trinkets really do matter," she says.

Adornments appeared when growing populations made groups more likely to encounter each other, she told the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Suffering artists

Animal remains around the Mediterranean suggest that human diet changed 40,000-50,000 years ago. People switched from easy-to-catch shellfish and tortoises to fast-moving birds and rabbits, the team also found.

Rising population density probably made food scarce. The expansion of glaciers, forcing people south, could have worsened the crush.

These findings suggest that modern human behaviour appeared simultaneously on different continents. This counters the theory that sophisticated behaviour emerged when anatomically modern humans spread out of Africa around 40,000-50,000 years ago, replacing culturally primitive Neanderthals.

"There are many signs of modernity before then," agrees archaeologist Lawrence Straus of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Cultured behaviour was an adaptation to changing conditions, he argues. Other archaeological evidence - such as sophisticated tools and art -appear in the fossil record before anatomically modern humans.

References

Kuhn, S.L. et al. Ornaments of the earliest upper Paleolithic: New insights from the Levant. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98, 7641 - 7646, (2001).