so i was in walmart, and i happen to see this video "Incredible Creatures That Defy Evolution". i was like "no way".
http://www.christiananswers.net/catalog/incredible.html [christiananswers.net]

***note if you look at the box***

they are very tricky, they put the words "that defy" so small that people might think this was about evolution and not about proving evolution wrong. thou shall not trick the customers!

yup it's a creationist video answering questions or trying to say that evolution is wrong by asking questions such as:

-How does a giraffe get a drink without causing lethal blood pressure to his brain?
-How can geckos walk upside down, even on glass and not fall?
-How can certain birds navigate over thousands of miles of ocean and never get lost?
-How do great whales dive to the bottom of the ocean without pressure causing them to implode?
-How can some creatures be cut in half and still regenerate themselves, even grow a new head?
-How can some dogs know a storm is brewing before it appears? Or how can they sense when their masters are about to experience a seizure?

i got a good laugh reading the back of these videos. so i'm guessing most of the answers would probably be "God wills it" "cause God says so" "don't question God"

man, if only science was that easy, we wouldn't have to find evidence. just learn by "hearsay" and if you don't believe in it, you've just practiced "heresy"

lol thank God for utube. and bad research...this guy wants nature to be mysterious...he doesn't even put any evidence to why things are happening

this is 40 min

Oh God...

Well, I'm sure they've all been explained scientifically, more or less. I know for a fact that a giraffe doesn't shoot itself in the head with blood because it has valves in its Neck arteries that close when it bends over, stopping the flow of blood long enough to get a drink.

Edit: The got a fuckin' DENTIST to substantiate this???

Edit again: Well, having watched this, I can comfortably say that these people are idiots. One thing our friendly neighborhood dentist blatantly ignores is that these animals don't "start out" as what they are now. A giraffe didn't start out as a creature that would blow out its own brains with its blood. It started out as essentially a horse with an unusually long neck. The ones that developed new traits could grow their necks longer, reach nutrients that others couldn't, and thrive. Gradually the necks could grow longer, and gradually the safeguards against its own heart keep it alive.

The problem this jackoff has is that his assumption is that, if something is complex, then it's impossible for it to have occured "by chance". The idea that the woodpecker was created specifically to eat bugs is stupid. What would have happened was another, earlier bird had an unusually hard beak, and by coincidence he could use it to eat bugs in wood. The ones that could eat bugs better thrived, and that's how you get the woodpecker of today.

Wow. I'm writing this down...Perfect stuff for a comic. Thanks for the topic. But back on the issue.

When they stoop so low to use a DENTIST to talk about evolution....they should be shot.

future wars will be based on evolution and creationist hahaha

they pick on creatures that not a lot of research is done because of lack of data. not all creature that were alive are alive right now. just like how we are slowly linking our ancestors from fossil findings, it's a slow process.

piss me off about creationist is they only have one argument "god made it" but they don't answer why. and if they do answer why they assume it.

finally... a video that addresses my concerns and lays them all to rest!

Phew, I'd thought I'd die before I found the truth. Woot for DVDs!

i'm sick of hearing about the bombardier beetle. i tried looking up SCIENTIFIC DATA about it, but i gave up after pages of creationist propaganda. damn thing is thier mascot now. "YAY! the beatle that proved evolution wrong!". they find some creature that not a lot of scientist research on and they make an "ASS of U and ME"

I love how his proof is always "well how would evolution do that". lol...

Because he has to ask how, God must is exist. Classicly awesome!

I also love that a f@$king BEE knows how to get a plant preggers and make vanilla, but it blows his mind that it knows how to do that. Hey einstein, I know how to get something preggers... I must be god.

btw, we are able to see evolution of simpler organism because they reproduce quicker. such as why we have bacterias that become immune to antibiotics because most people don't finish thier dosages, so a bacteria that doesn't die will become stronger and learn from its dead comrades.

MRSA, (XDR-TB, SARS to name a few. so how do creationist explain that?

every few millenium some stupid group of people throws science off its course. it does nothing but delay total human achievement.

I particularly love how it seems liek he got all his information from Wikipedia and anything he couldn't find on there, he assumed the scientific community couldn't explain. The bombadier beetle is a classic example. I remember covering that in my Biology class in high school as an example of evolution. Scientists DO know how a beetle can evolve to have those traits. The glands which create the chemicals the beetle uses as a defense mechanism evolved from organs present in other insects. There areseveral other beetles with similar defense mechanisms, only they use different chemical compounds. Odds are, they all evolved from the same ancestors.

Woodpeckers are similarly laughable since most of the traits that simply couldn't have evolved naturally also exist in other species of bird. Not ot mention that there are several species of woodpecker, as well. Obviously those traits aren't unique to one species.

I didn't get much further than that. The bird after that reminded me of a few other species of birds, most of which can be found in the same general geographic area of the world.

This guy makes the classic creationist mistake. Evolution typically is not a sudden spontaneous change. It CAN be caused by a random mutation, but is most often caused by selective breeding. Hell, some species are even man made, like the domestic cat and most farm animals.

Bananas.
That's my favourite argument. You've never heard anything as crazy as that... Apparently they were "designed" for us as a perfect food source?

Inkmonkey
A giraffe didn't start out as a creature that would blow out its own brains with its blood.

I find this visual... oddly hilarious. o_O

Subcultured
MRSA, (XDR-TB, SARS to name a few. so how do creationist explain that?

One argument I've seen being made is that small variations within a species is not the same thing as one species changing into another.

This completely missing the point, of course, that it IS the same thing, just in a slow, bit-by-bit process. *Headdesk*

Eviltwinpixie
This completely missing the point, of course, that it IS the same thing, just in a slow, bit-by-bit process. *Headdesk*

SO true. Hah! And any times actually a small breeding community might become isolated due to various reasons and then of course that smaller genetic pool accelerates the change from one species to another. ;)

Most of the time I think ID and creationists really only exist inside the loopholes of bad evolutionary arguments and not off of their own their own theories all.

Man they don't even do the research to find the cool animals that have crap that seems more difficult to evolve.

Like theres this crab that can lock his claw back and then snap is shut so fast that it creates an air bubble that momentarily heats up TO THE TEMPERATURE OF THE SUN shoots away from the crab and stuns it's prey long enough for the crab to kill and eat it.

And then theres the platypus.

Why do they go after the giraffe? The giraffe is one of the better examples of something that clearly WAS a product of evolution.

Man, Creationists are stupid.

edit: wikipedia has a short article on that beetle, that includes the response from the evolutionary commuinity. I'm not one to take anything wikipedia says as fact, but it does usually do a good job in giving you the rough idea of things

This whole video has 2 arguements: 1) the scientific community currently doesn't know, therefore it must be God or 2) That dentist doesn't know, therefore it must be God.

*sigh* There's actually much better anti-evolution videos out there. Here's a series that makes this "evolution is wrong" arguement much better than this lame ass dentist. (but these are clearly wrong about most things too) They do make a few interesting points... moistly, this makes a case against evolution and not so much a case for creationism.

Mostly it's Argumentum ad ignorantiam.

This series uses a lot of half-truths, logical fallacies, and lame techniques like name calling, straw man, red herrings, exaggeration, trickery, etc, etc. I'm only posting it to show that this dentist video isn't the "standard" for anti-evoltuion, pro-creation videos.

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Some of the points in those 11 videos are compelling ... I wish they would substantiate the claims by SHOWING evidence instead of describing it.

Like the man with tools and dinosaur prints together... they say it, but they don't show it. *ugh* At least scientists and atheists make their points logically; just calling someone an expert and then letting them talk proves nothing.

Watched the first of the eleven videos. It's a clever attempt to spin things in the Creationists favor, but really they overlook a lot of things and word things in ways that are misleading.

Dr. Hovind's Offer:

If anyone took the time to check Hovind's website on his offer of $250,000, you'd see the criteria for earning that money is completely ridiculous. He's purposely made it impossible to collect that money in an attempt to "disprove" evolution. Simply put, you need to do more than just prove evolution exists. Your evidence must also disprove the existance of God. This is the exact quote of what you must prove: "The universe came into being by itself by purely natural processes (known as evolution) so that no appeal to the supernatural is needed." That's a bit more than just evolution.

Observation of Evolution at Work:

She claims no scientists have observed evolution. This is in fact not true, evolution has been observed and documented both on the microscopic and on the larger scale. Most forms of cattle were created through cross breeding and cannot in fact breed with wild varieties of cattle. Rather than back up such a claim, she quickly side tracks into how scientists have never been able to create life from non-living matter. That's abiogenesis, however, not evolution. The fact that scientists have not yet figured out how life began does not disprove that lifeforms can change over time into new species.

The Peppered Moth:

Creationists love to attack the peppered moth. Typically, the peppered moth does not rest on trees, but there is one moment when the moth is at its most vulnerable when they ARE found on the sides of trees. Peppered moths lay their eggs in the crevaces of tree bark. This leaves the female completely out in the open for a fairly lengthy period of time. This would also explain why it takes a few decades for populations to drop off. If it were simply a case of the moth routinely resting on trees, a major change in the population would only take two or three generations, certainly not more than a dozen. An environmental shift which causes a hazard for a species limits what members of the species can procreate. If most of the pale moths were eaten, then both male and female would be passing on darker genes, so a shift in darker population size would happen rapidly.

With the peppered moth, that isn't the problem. Only the mothers are targetted, which means they can still reproduce with grey or pale moths, but the mothers will mostly be black. This creates a genetic tendency towards black moths, since only the black females are safe when laying their eggs. The actual change in the population would be slow, however, since the existance of pale males would still offer some variety in the gene pool.

I could probably keep going, but I'm not sure I want to waste that much more of my life on this crap.

reconjsh
*sigh* There's actually much better anti-evolution videos out there. Here's a series that makes this "evolution is wrong" arguement much better than this lame ass dentist. (but these are clearly wrong about most things too) They do make a few interesting points... moistly, this makes a case against evolution and not so much a case for creationism.

Heh. you gotta love an "instructional" video that threatens right at the very beginning. ;)

"You should watch this video with an open mind. Because if you don't believe it, you burn in the fires of hell for all eternity."

(paraphrasing)

so proving the existance of god is only worth 250 grand? hahaha

You would think if he's so sure of himself, he'd bet it all.

ozoneocean
Bananas.
That's my favourite argument. You've never heard anything as crazy as that... Apparently they were "designed" for us as a perfect food source?

The banana argument comes directly from Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron's "Way Of The Master" video set. The funny thing about that is that if they did any research at all, they would know that the banana is actually the product of aggriculture and that the original fruit itself was not "perfect food source" at all.

Oh, the banana was designed for humans, alright. It was designed by human beings themselves!

And what the hell is it with creationists and bananas anyway? No wait, I don't even want to know.

Inkmonkey
The problem this jackoff has is that his assumption is that, if something is complex, then it's impossible for it to have occured "by chance".

And the creationist "chance" argument is a strawman anyway. Evolution does not posit that chance alone creates complex structures, such as the infamous tornado in a junkyard analogy.

Creationist version of Evolution: Random mutation cause increasingly complex structures.
Actual Theory of Evolution: The non-random selection of randomly varying replicators.

Creationists always omit environmental pressure as a guiding force. It's not even a major tenate of evolution that things must diversify in an increasingly complex manner. The only thing that matters in evolution is survivability, which means that sometimes simplicity does work better.

Of course, the reason the creationists think this is because they keep looking at the macro world with their arrogant human bias. They see the human species as the top of the food chain, as if there's nothing that preys on us. Little do they realize that the apex of biology is the humble microbe.

Neilsama
Little do they realize that the apex of biology is the humble microbe.

No, that would be me. :)

Lame, lame lame I know, but I just couldn't help it.

Speaking of fruit, how would they explain the pineapple? Delicious, yummy, thirst quenching, and sugary, but not very easily accessible... It's just plain astounding to me that we even bother discussing "creationism" in a serious way, as if anyone should bother explaining why it's false! Why do people need to be told for goodness sake? This is the 21st century, not the dark ages! Jeebus... WHO are the freaking MORONS who take this stuff seriously?

does it really matter where the hell we came from anyway? does it?

WHO are the freaking MORONS who take this stuff seriously?

Americans!

Why else do you think they would be so adament about pushing their ideals on others?

isukun

WHO are the freaking MORONS who take this stuff seriously?

Americans!

Why else do you think they would be so adament about pushing their ideals on others?

You can't be serious?!

First off, Americans are certainly neither the pushiest nor the most radical. So, I'll assume you didn't mean that.

And secondly, coming up with crazy crap like this is a product of freedom and liberty. People should be so lucky to live in a country where they can pretty much say whatever they want.

Iraqies, for example, can get tattooes for the first time now without the fear of they and their whole families getting shot and decapitated - maybe not in that order.

And thirdly... if you're right, you're right. ;)

First off, Americans are certainly neither the pushiest nor the most radical. So, I'll assume you didn't mean that.

Who are you trying to kid. America has been extremely pushy ever since the end of WWII. Forcing our ideals, both social and political, on other countries has become a pretty common thing for us. You don't play by our rules, we bomb you and make you change.

The comment was more about the individual mentality of the average right wing Bible-thumping conservative, though. I mean, look at what they've already managed to accomplish in this country. The whole creationism thing is such a major contraversy that schools are starting to cave in and reintroduce it into the science class. If we're going to teach ID in the classroom, why not a theory more friendly to the Hindus or the Buddhists? Why not start teaching Greek Mythology in the science class? That's what it substituted for.

Beyond the creationism agenda, they also try to force all of their moral beliefs on every American. In addition to their typical scare tactics (threats of fire and brimstone) they also lobby the government and try to sway opinion to their side with public campaigns to mislead people.

BigFishComic
does it really matter where the hell we came from anyway? does it?

Ultimately, no, but that's not entirely the point of evolution anyway. Creationists frame it in that way so that it's an alleged "controversy of origins", but tracing human origins is just one small piece of evolution. The theory of evolution is about understanding the mechanism of biological survivability.

to understand where we are going, we have to understand where we come from.

humans are very curious creatures...that's why we have evolved an intellegent brain that questions everything. creationist view point is not to question...and that's why I think they are poisoning the journey of knowledge

isukun - I personally think all that is upsurd. Certainly there are groups of americans trying to push their beliefs on others here and abroad, but they don't represent the average american... nor do they represent even close to a majority... nor does that represent our governmental policy since WWII. Of course, if someone's major reference for understanding america and american policy was the media, I could understand how someone has come to those conclusions.

Neilsama

BigFishComic
does it really matter where the hell we came from anyway? does it?

Ultimately, no, but that's not entirely the point of evolution anyway. Creationists frame it in that way so that it's an alleged "controversy of origins", but tracing human origins is just one small piece of evolution. The theory of evolution is about understanding the mechanism of biological survivability.

I think it matters where we came from for 2 reasons:
1) The pursuit of understanding where we came from is an excercise for your mind and our collective intelligence as a species. For this single point, the pursuit is more important than the conclusion. The more delve, the more we may perhaps discover about ourselves and life itself beyond simply "where we started".
2) The final conclusion/truth of "where we came from" can have a significant impact on our society regarding the importance of life on Earth and how people on the opposite side of the truth live. If there is a God, I'm guessing alot of atheists would like to know. If there isn't, alot of religiouis folks would probably rethink some of the things they do as well.

So, I think where we come from is important. But, I also think that knowing where we come from isn't important if truth has not yet been uncovered. God or no god... coacervate or no... it shouldn't really change how you live (but as in point 2, it would change how alot of people live). Treat others as you'd want to be treated. Do that and you're probably going to be just fine.