(#185)Havoc: No, I didn't misrepresent the ages of anything. I refered to something that is said to be misrepresented by someone else. Apparently, that is equivelent to lying on some planet in this universe - which I guess would make Bush a liar; but, we must compartmentalize and esteem the two differently to save face.. lol. Next question.Note that this doesn't even admit to any error on either his own part, or on Hovind's, as I stated. The most he will "admit" (and this is like Clinton's "non-apology apology" in the Lewinsky matter) is only that it is *said* to be misrepresented "by someone else". He's just using the schoolyard standby, "well that's what *you* say..." He can't even admit that it was well documented that it was blatantly false, by comparing Hovind's claim against THE ACTUAL TEXT OF THE PAPER THAT HOVIND HIMSELF CLAIMED HE GOT HIS CLAIM FROM, and it turns out the paper actually says no such thing. For some reason, Havoc can't even bring himself to admit that *this* establishes the falseness of Hovind's claim. What more would he require, do you suppose? And the problem is that after having ALREADY been informed of and shown all this, he cared do little about the truth that he made the *same* claim a short while later without any shame or sidenote about how the issue was under dispute in any way. *This* is what elevates his act to a lie -- intentionally making a claim he knew to be false, or at least knew full well that its veracity was severely in question. And no, none of his later comments improved the situation any. This kind of behavior from a scientist would, quite frankly, destroy his career. For anti-evolutionists, however, it seems practically a *requirement*.
In fact, I copied you to post #181 (my original question to Havoc) of that same thread, but we're all busy, so it's easy to lose track.
I don't always have time to read even the posts I'm pinged to. In any case, in that thread you praised one of his rants on dating methods, but unfortunately almost everything he said in that post was wrong. Here is some good material on the actual validity of dating methods, and refutations of common creationist propaganda against them:
Radiometeric Dating Does Work!And BTW here's my understanding of the fossil recordAre Radioactive Dating Methods Consistent With Each Other?
Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective
Radiometric Dating and the Geological Time Scale
Breakthrough Made in Dating of the Geological Record
Formation of the Hawaiian Islands
How Old is the Earth: A Response to “Scientific” Creationism
Well, the two biggest problems with that post are 1) incorrect expectations about what transitions should exist, and 2) unrealistic expectations about the rate of fossil formation.
First, you ask for things like "fish with opposable thumbs", but this is silly, because opposable thumbs arose in primates, not in fish, etc.
As for raw numbers of fossils, most people do not appreciate just how rare an event successful fossilization is. Not just for transitional forms, but *any*. Keep in mind that fossil representatives are available for only a very few species out of the several million species which are alive *today*, which we *know* exist, many of them with population figures in the many millions (organisms, not fossils). This gives an indication of just how uncommon fossilization in general is. And some creatures fossilize more readily than others. Animals without bones, for example, are often eroded or decomposed to little or nothing before they can be successfully fossilized. Note that insects, despite their enormously vast numbers while alive, have a very sparse fossil record, except for the few "lucky" ones (from our standpoint) which managed to get trapped in amber, one of the few ways they could be preserved well. So don't get too insistant about being shown "millions" of fossils -- we're lucky to have found the ones we have. For a longer discussion of the factors that affect this, whether the expected density of the fossil record matches evolutionary expectations, and why the honest person looks at the found fossils and not the "gaps", see this older post of mine.