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This is a response to creationmuseum’s video, “Bill Nye, Creationism is Highly Appropriate
for Our Children”. Well, as promised, it’s time to roll up
my sleeves and get down to dealing with the intellectual powerhouses of the creationist
cesspool known as Answers in Genesis, and more specifically with what they had to say
about Bill Nye and his Big Think video. But before we begin, I think we should frame
this video with a little context. You see, on his AiG blog, Mr. Ham proudly announced
the excretion of this videographic offering by introducing his marionettes as follows,
and I quote: ‘These two PhD scientists were asked to reply to Mr. Nye, whose academic
credentials do not come close to Drs. Menton and Purdom.’
Well, this was indeed a bold claim by the ***-flinger-in chief, and since he’s quite
used to people unwisely taking his word for all manner of preposterous propositions I’m
sure that he expected everyone reading his blog to do the same. Well, unfortunately for
him, I don’t operate that way so I thought it would be best to investigate the backgrounds
of these two scientific colossi to make everyone fully aware of who we’re dealing with, and
exactly how qualified they are to claim that they know better than the most brilliant minds
in science both past and present. As you’ll shortly discover, my investigation
led to me forming an opinion of these two individuals that’s somewhat less than favorable,
since they’ve apparently been more enthusiastic about spending their lives *** all over
science instead of promoting or doing it. As a result I’m afraid that referring to
them as “Dr.” may lead to me choking on my own words, and since I can’t rely on
any of my viewers knowing the Heimlich Maneuver I’ll instead be using some more appropriate
sobriquets for them. We’ll begin with Georgia Purdom, nee Hickman,
aka Tweedle-dum. Ms. Dum received a PhD in Molecular Genetics from Ohio State in 2000,
and a quick search through the literature reveals that she’s published a grand total
of three peer-reviewed papers, none of which, interestingly, appear from her tenure as a
‘scientist’ at AiG. And while this might en face seem abnormally respectable for a
creationist, unfortunately for Ms. Dum, her contributions apparently only merited third-place
authorship on all three publications. Since established convention dictates that,
other than the principal investigator who’s name appears last, authors are ranked in order
of their relative contributions, coming out of a PhD with only third-authorships really
is a quite pitiful showing and tantamount to nothing short of – and I apologize for
using technical terms here –a dismal and unmitigated *** failure.
And then we have David Menton, aka Tweedle-Dee. Now at the onset I’ll admit that his record
is substantially superior to Ms. Dum’s abysmal qualifications and, in fact, a cursory glance
at his bio on the AiG webshite might even convince the casual observer that it’s impressive.
Mr. Dee received his PhD from Brown, a prestigious Ivy League institution, followed by a forty-year
career, thirty-four of which were at Washington University in St. Louis.
From what I could discover from PubMed and the Web of Science, over those four decades
he produced a grand total of twenty-seven papers. Now, that might seem impressive to
the uninitiated, but let’s back up and put that into context, shall we? I consider myself
at best a middle-of-the-road scientist and have my name on sixteen papers in the eighteen
years since I received my PhD. That’s an average of 0.89 per year compared to Mr. Dum’s
0.68 – but considering that I’ve spent sixteen of those eighteen years working in
industry and so haven’t been able to publish the majority of my research, while Mr. Dum
has spent the bulk of his in a premier research university where publication is practically
compulsory, his contribution begins to shrink even more and suggests that the only reason
he stuck it out there for so long was because of an unfortunate calamity that occurred during
the assignment of tenure, since the record seems to indicate that he was what bona fide
academics affectionately refer to as ‘dead wood’.
In this light it’s interesting to note that while the AiG webshite proudly provides a
link to Mr. Dee’s creationist scribbling, it doesn’t do the same for his legitimate
work, making one wonder whether Mr. Ham also realizes that Mr. Dee’s “wood” could
do with a spot of ***. And if that assessment seems harsh, let’s
compare myself and Mr. Dum to a real scientist. in this case Professor James Rothman at Yale
– someone who’s won the Lasker Medal and is in the running for a Nobel – and who
in 40 years has published two hundred and forty two papers – or over six a year. Furthermore
Jim’s citation index, an average of how often his papers are referenced by others
and so a measure of their importance in the field, is a whopping 165, dwarfing my 76,
but by nowhere near as much as Mr. Dum’s sad and shriveled 25.
Now I’m aware that this protracted introduction may lead to accusations of ad hominem argumentation
and of poisoning the well, so I want to make it clear that my intent isn’t to discredit
their arguments and assertions by proxy because I’ll be dealing with those in turn shortly.
Instead, because of Mr. Ham’s use his blog to imply an argument from authority, I felt
it important to point out exactly how qualified these individuals actually are, since not
everyone is aware that not all PhDs are created equal.
So in summary, from my perspective, if someone of the stature of a Jim Rothman were to come
to me and claim that some well-established area of biology was erroneous, I would at
the very least be obliged to take some time to hear them out. When, on the other hand,
the seemingly unending line of pseudo- or unqualified creationists *** of which
the Tweedles are our latest example do the same, I expect them to either immediately
produce empirical evidence and some very strong arguments, or to *** right off because their
pitiful qualifications mean absolutely jack-*** to me.
“The first point that Bill Nye makes is that denial of evolution is unique to the
United States. I’m sure that he knows better than that. After all, not only is evolution
criticize certainly d widely in the United States by at least 40% of its citizens, but
evolution is believed to be false in the Muslim World. Creationism is … er… taught in
South Africa, India, South Korea, Brazil. Err… smaller factions of creationists probably
are found in Japan, Israel, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.”
Aaah – the argumentum ad populum. Nice start, Dee. While I admit that Bill Nye could have
chosen his words more carefully, it should be quite clear that what he meant was that
the United States is the only place in the developed world where dumbfucks like you are
taken seriously by a substantial number of the population and where there is a danger
that you might actually do some significant harm.
And while you did acknowledge that your insanity is sadly all too prevalent in the U.S., you
didn’t mention that your compatriots in most of these other countries are marginalized
by the populace as the delusional loons they are, presumably because that would hardly
add to the impression you tried to create here by dishonestly trying to overstate the
acceptance of your buffoonery world-wide. Well, Dee, I regret to inform you that the
fact that that the world is liberally sprinkled with the demented fucktards that can be referred
to by the catch-all “creationists” doesn’t validate nor in any way diminish the magnitude
of your fucktardation – it merely demonstrates that you’re not the only cretin on the planet
and gives the rest of us yet another reason to despair at the state of our species.
Thus if you want your pronouncements to receive even a small modicum of respect, you might
consider spending some time putting that alleged science background to use and doing some actual
experimental research to back up your ***, rather than resorting to vacuous and fallacious
argumentation. “Bill Nye implies in his video that parents
and other adults are doing a great disservice to children by teaching them about biblical
creation. Well, you might be interested to know that I also teach my young daughter about
evolution. And I know many other Christian parents who do the same.”
Well, Dum, as I already told your organ-grinder in Holy Hallucinations 34, if you think that
sane people believe that you and your fellow intellectual cripples are teaching your children
anything other than a deliberately inaccurate and shoddily constructed straw man of evolutionary
theory, then you’ve got another thing coming. The veracity of my conjecture will be bolstered
shortly when I deal with some of your other comments, but before we move on I thought
it would be illuminating to compare what the reverend Ham said about creationist pedagogy
in his first video: “Creationists are teaching children that they’re special”; with what
you said in your interview with Michael Shermer on his recent visit to the Creation Museum:
“All of us have sinned. Even a one-year old child. I have a five-year-old daughter.
She’s a guilty sinner.” I have to say that this shines as clear a
light as I’ve ever seen on the magnitude of the mental illness that you delusional
and deliberately ignorant buffoons are suffering from. Not only have you managed to convince
yourselves that your woefully inadequate brains are in some way superior to some of the greatest
minds of the present and the past, but you’re also so profoundly stupid that you’re unable
to maintain even a scrap of internal consistency within the childish fantasy that you’ve
constructed and are trying to pass off as a world view. If this is any indication of
the kind of education you’re provided for your daughter… then I feel like crying for
her. “Children should be exposed to both ideas
concerning our past. Being a good scientist and a Mom, I want my daughter to be educated
about evolution so that she can see the inherent problems with it. For example, the complete
lack of a genetic mechanism that allows organisms to gain genetic information to go from simple
to complex over time.” As I’ve already demonstrated, you, madam,
are as far away from being a “good” scientist as I am from winning the “Nicest Knockers
on Youtube” award. As for being a good Mom, well, I have no reason to doubt that you’re
doing a fine job tending to her physical well-being, but as we’ve already seen any claims of
you doing the same for her psychological and educational welfare would be dubious at best.
As for your example, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this particular crock
of *** being enthusiastically filled by creationists. This is generally because, in the supreme
confidence born of their seemingly endless ignorance, they’re completely unaware of,
or else just deliberately ignoring the phenomenon of gene duplication, which has been documented
countless times and occurs via mechanisms as diverse as genome or chromosome duplication,
transposition, retrotransposition, unequal crossover and chromosomal breakage and fusion.
And while I might excuse this oversight by an irredeemable *** like Nephilimfree,
whose brain appears to have been replaced by a walnut that was shat out by a choleraic
squirrel, you don’t have that luxury because you hold a PhD in Molecular Genetics – a
PhD that now seems as deserved as Ian Juby’s Mensa membership. This assertion alone not
only confirms my suspicions of the kind of evolutionary “education” you’re providing
your daughter with, but proves that you’re nothing but a vile and loathsome, filthy liar.
I know that if I were in a position of power at Ohio State I’d be doing everything I
could to revoke that PhD from you, Ms. Dum, but since I’m not then the best I can do
is to tell you to take your disgusting lie and shove it up your arsehole until you feel
it tickling your tonsils. “Bill Nye also makes the comment that the
world becomes fantastically complicated …er… if one believes in creation. I would argue
that the world becomes fantastically complicated if one believes in evolution. You see, in
evolution you have to look at that hummingbird feeding at your feeder and assume that all
of its parts have somehow come together by random, purposeless change combined with natural
selection, which is nothing more than differential reproduction.”
You can argue all you like, Dee, but that doesn’t mean that those of us who know better
won’t smell your *** from half-way across the internet. You see, despite the
equivocation of your version of the word “belief”, that is – the blind and unquestioning acceptance
of propositions in the complete absence of evidence, or in your case despite over a century
of evidence to the contrary – and that used by people who’s diploma’s aren’t printed
on toilet paper – that is the provisional acceptance of propositions based on empirical
and verifiable evidence, I’m afraid that Mr. Nye made a valid point.
The complexity of evolution you describe is due to the inevitable intricacy of emergent
properties resulting from the interaction of effectively infinite numbers of infinitesimal
particles that nevertheless can be understood using relatively crude, mathematically tractable
approximations of their behavior. And while it could be argued that your perspective
is infinitely simpler because you can, and do, explain everything with an intellectually
lazy and vacuous appeal to the magic of a shaman in the sky, I believe the complexities
Mr. Nye was referring to were the psychological contortions creationists must go through to
keep their heads from dislodging from the comfort of their gluteal resting places. From
the bizarre and frankly profoundly retarded ad hoc explanations you’re forced to continually
devise as yet more evidence in support of evolutionary theory is uncovered; to your
almost supernatural ability to ignore said evidence when it’s all but kicking you repeatedly
in the balls to attract your attention; to having to continually run from here to there
like demented simpletons to cover up the cracks showing up in your ramshackle explanations;
to being forced to lie like rabbi caught at the breakfast bar at Denny’s to cover up
the fact that you have no evidence to support your claims and a world of evidence that’s
pounding them up the *** as hard and as fast as Donald Trump chasing after his hair on
a windy day. And all of this just to deny an elegant, beautifully
self-consistent reality that occurs through observed and observable physical processes
in favor of a fantastical and evidently erroneous alternative that relies on the evocation of
supernatural events that have never been observed by anybody.
“We need to understand in the video, that Bill Nye is confusing observational science
with historical science. Observational science is what I call ‘here and now’ science.
It gives us inventions and technology like computers and vaccines. We can observe it,
test it and repeat it. Historical science deals with the past, and both evolution and
creation fall into that category. We cannot test, observe or repeat them.”
So here we go with the “historical” and “observable” science *** that I promised
your paymaster I’d eventually deal with. I’ll begin by saying that this distinction
is a completely arbitrary one used to describe the differences between disciplines that are
aimed at understanding events that occurred in the past versus ones that seek to explain
events that we can observe occurring in the present. It is just as arbitrary as those
between, say, physical and biological sciences, or between quantum and classical physics,
or between plant and animal biology. These dichotomies are the result of human
language and our brains’ propensities for categorization. They provide useful distinctions
for the purposes of communication, but no serious scientist believes that any of them,
yours included, represents fundamental divides in the scientific enterprise. Because while
different fields may indeed require different experimental or observational approaches or
methodologies and different conceptual paradigms, they all follow the same systematic approach
towards investigating the nature of the physical world.
The only reason mentally and emotionally stunted oafs like you make this distinction isn’t
because of a demarcation of the past and present that somehow presents an insurmountable epistemic
barrier, but rather and solely because what we’ve learned about the past runs contrary
to the primitive fables you desperately wish to cling to for succor. I think we can safely
posit this as being true, because I don’t recall ever hearing any creationist numbnut
opining on the virtues of observational over futuristic science while simultaneously warning
us of the evils of listening to the Weather Channel or of trusting NASA with when and
where to see the next solar eclipse. Furthermore, despite your assertions to the
contrary, it seems that the global mining industry disagrees with your assessment and
in fact spends hundreds of millions of dollars on geologists to locate new reserves of minerals
and fossil fuels based on their knowledge of “historical science” and an ancient
Earth, and then billions of dollars more on exploration based on their advice.
I find it very amusing therefore, that the very sciences and discoveries that you have
the temerity to deny, are the same ones that allows you to gas-up your car so you can drive
your useless *** to church on a Sunday and talk to the ceiling. Once you and your fellow
simpletons use your “creation science” come up with an alternative way to find these
reserves that amount to more than sticking a pin in a map and praying to Jesus for a
bit of luck, and once you get Exxon to start paying you to do it, then maybe I’ll have
some time to actually listen to you. In the meantime I’ll like to ask you to kindly
stop crapping so enthusiastically on the work and achievements of those who make your worthless
lives better and just shut the *** up. “Yes, we do see fossils and distant stars.
But their history of how they got here really depends on our world view. Do we start with
Man’s ideas about the past, who wasn’t here during the supposed billions of years
of Earth history? Or do we start with the bible, the written revelation of the eye-witness
account of the eternal God who created it all? Rather than being inconsistent, as Bill
Nye states, er… observational science confirms the literal history in Genesis.”
Of course you didn’t have the courtesy to support that bold assertion by spending any
time explaining how observational science confirms this “literal history”, so in
the absence of such revelations I’m going to assume that your referring to the same
derisible *** that creationists have been trying to pass off as Shinola for decades.
This ***, of course, includes that unsubstantiated assertion that your book is an “eye witness
account” and not an allegory, which I might remind you the vast majority of Christians
find just as pungent as I do. So as far as I’m concerned, you can take that assertion
and insert it as vigorously possible so it can keep your lie on gene duplication company.
As for your ideas on perspective, perhaps this is a good time for me to point out yet
again that just four hundred years ago pretty much everyone started off with your world
view. Fortunately for our species, though, enough enlightened and intellectually honest
religious enquirers didn’t ignore the evidence in favor of clinging to their original biblical
notions and instead followed that evidence to its inevitable conclusion. This apparently
has slipped your notice, perhaps because you were too busy reading your bible during your
graduate and undergraduate studies rather than the text books that might have actually
taught you something new and turned you into a productive human being instead of an organic
device for wasting oxygen. Thus, for your information, these “man’s
ideas about the past” you refer to all began with your world view. It’s just that intelligent
people who were capable of objectively viewing the evidence and coming to rational and reasoned
conclusions realized that it was fundamentally flawed and moved on, leaving morons like you
to go on living in the past like sniveling children clinging to the skirts of the beliefs
that they find most comforting rather standing up like adults and following them into the
light. “The second point that Bill makes in his
video is that evolution is fundamental… er… to all life science. That life science
can’t be practiced… er… without it. This is certainly not the case.”
Well, as much as it pains me to do so, Dee, I shall have to agree with the words you said
here but not with the spirit behind them, which I will now proceed to roll up and slowly
insert back where it belongs. It is indeed true that isolated aspects of biological sciences
can be practiced without resorting to evolutionary theory, but only to a limited degree. More
specifically, those aspects are involved with describing and elucidating the mechanisms
of life. We don’t need evolutionary theory to sequence a genome, to determine a sequence
of events in a signal transduction cascade or to elucidate the molecular transformations
occurring during enzymatic catalysis. But what you missed out, is that without the
theory of evolution we simply can’t explain why we see what we do. Without evolution we
can’t explain the patterns of striking similarities and differences between the genomes of different
organisms. Without evolution we can’t explain why some pathways are redundant or why components
can be functionally substituted between diverse organisms. And without evolution we can’t
explain why enzyme homologs from different species possess very different activities.
So while you certainly can describe biological systems in a vacuum, the principle that Mr.
Nye was articulating is that you cannot develop a deep and unifying explanation for those
observations outside of the framework of evolutionary theory. I can see why this doesn’t occur
to you because you appear to have been pretty much and anatomist and histologist before
you sold your soul to the Antipodean Devil, and so probably fell into that shrinking class
of anachronistic stamp collectors who were content to simply catalog natural phenomena
rather than seeking to explain them. This inability to transition into doing true exploratory
research may explain why your career fizzled out so pitifully, and also why you seem to
be unable to comprehend the bigger picture Mr. Nye was alluding to.
“The evolutionist, Adam Wilkins, publishing in Bioessays, volume 22, er… number 12,
says as follows…” I stopped it here to quickly note my amusement
at you referring to Dr. Wilkins as an “evolutionist”. I’m sure that you did to give the dishonest
impression that biologists are divided into two camps on this issue, when I’m sure you’re
aware that something like 99.8% of biologists and earth scientists accept evolutionary theory
as being broadly correct, so this little trick hardly reflect well on you. In fact, the only
impression you left on me is that of a lying, deceptive, filthy and probably flatulent toad.
So with that said let’s move on and see what inevitable act of outrageous mendacity
I’m sure you’re preparing to perpetrate on Dr. Wilkins.
“While the great majority biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky,
that ‘nothing in biology makes sense without evolution. Y et he said, most can conduct
their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas. He concluded
that evolution would appear to be an indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly
superfluous one.” Unfortunately Dee, what you neglected to do
was to read the very next paragraph, which I will now do for you: “Yet, the marginality
of evolutionary biology may be changing. More and more issues in biology, from diverse questions
about human nature to the vulnerability of ecosystems, are increasingly seen as reflecting
evolutionary events.” Furthermore you also mysteriously didn’t
mention that that whole issue of Bioessays was dedicated to articles about these events
and, I quote: “the ways they shape the properties of living things, from bacteria to humans.”
So there’s not much more to say, is there Dee, except for me to tell you that this is
perhaps as egregious and underhanded a quote mine that I’ve ever had the misfortune to
come across, and to ask what kind of a repulsive and disgusting *** thinks that this
kind of repugnant behavior is even vaguely acceptable in a supposedly civil society?
That was a rhetorical question, of course, because the answer is that same as it’s
always been – and that’s a creationist. The fact that you seemed to be so stupid as
to think that no one would look up the reference you gave does make me suspect that, as with
the video that your boss crapped out, this was targeted to the poor fools who are in
the habit of taking your claims and your derisible qualifications seriously, and not to people
who are prepared to use their brains for more than generating cash for morally bankrupt
Australian shitbags. Thus I’d like to make it clear lest you or your fellow dimwits chose
to make a return to Youtube in order to do the same thing again, that I will be waiting
to ensure that you’ll at least have to do so at the expense of your dignity.
So now that we’re done, I’d like draw this to a close by thanking both Tweedle-Dum
and Tweedle-Dee for affording me the opportunity to yet again demonstrate the levels to which
creationists are ever willing to stoop to preserve of their stupefying childishness;
to show how fervently they lie and mislead at the drop of a hat in the name their god;
and to expose how pitiful and impotent that god must be if it has to rely on that kind
of behavior and these kinds of wretched and woefully inept creatures to rally to its defense.
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