I have linked to this post from my blog, but I’m not sure if I have gotten the trackback thing to work correctly (it isn’t showing up here). I just wanted you to know in case I have fudged it. Anyway, I have been a fan of your blog for a while and hope you keep up the great work. Thanks.
A little off-topic here, but I thought RSR and his minions would be interested in reading an article about a big creationist-oriented conference that was hosted by a megachurch about an hour up the road from my place here in San Diego.
I just finished reading the article, and I swear, I'll never, *ever* laugh at Kansas again. Many of the religious fundamentalists over here on the left coast would make the Kansas school board look positively sane! These people are $#@*! nuts!!
Here's a convienient short URL link to the article: http://tinyurl.com/noj4q
They ARE nuts, fortunate enough to be allowed to live in a society that provides them with a standard of living and security that, on their own, they could never imagine (of course, their ability to imagine is of the most limited nature).
America now has brought the English aristocracy's love of crackpot-ism into the grasp of the middle-class.
When the levees that allow these sleeperss their childish phantasies break, the floodwaters of reality are going to feel very, very cold, and the Ark they are building is unlikely to be seaworthy.
Of course, they will shake their mean little fists in anger, but not at their own folly, or the silence of the heavens, but at the very people who have tried every means to allow them to live, learn, prosper, and be humble, whom they have vilified and scorned out of vanity and fear.
Don't get too happy. I'm sure "they" will find some way to spin this for their adherents. They always do. It's so damn easy for them, they just have to make up some lies about how this "fundamentally shatters the theory of evolution".
They don't even know what they're missing. Stuff like this is why science is so damn cool. Swimming beaver-platypuses in the Jurassic? That's just... neat.
This is one of my favorite ways to pick on people who say "science is wrong all the time!" as though it were some indictment of science. I simply ask them, "Who told you science was wrong?"
The answer, of course, is "science." We're *always* wrong, and the single coolest thing about science is that it's got a built-in error-detection system.
We *like* to find out when we were wrong. That's what makes us sure we're still learning.
Scientists "like" to find out when they are wrong.
Nonsense; they have their agendas just like anyone else.
Come on, quit kidding around.
You should see the glee among the science wonks I work with whenever someone comes up with a better explanantion for the things they study. "Man, is that neat!" frequently accompanied with a slap to the forhead and "why didn't I think of that!" There are a few who get dogmatic when faced with change it is true, but they very soon find themselves in the dustbin of history. Any agenda will be about power, authority, reputation, and above all funding, not about the consequences of the science.
The only falsification test for the theory of evolution that I've ever heard goes something like this ... "Well, if someone found a rabbit in the Cambrian, that would falsify evolution." I'm assuming a beaver in the Cambrian would qualify also ... What about a beaver in the Ordovician, or Silurian, or Devonian? I'd like to get some more defined boundaries on this falsification test ...
Don't sweat it folks ... this is just a beaver-LIKE animal, not an ACTUAL BEAVER ... so it doesn't count.
You left off a little bit. It shares characteristics with beavers, otters and the platypus. Hmm, common descent much?
BTW, it dates to the Jurassic period(150ish million years ago), not the Cambrian(500+million). Moron.
The "surprise" was that it is larger then most mammals at that time. Not huge or anything, just a little bigger then average. Leave it to a half witted creationist to completely mis-understand the whole thing.
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