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This is a response to wazooloo's video "TheLivingDinosaur and starvation - a response to TLD's Holy
Halucinations (sic) 31.” Well, Boobie, here we are again. I’d like
to apologize for the inordinate delay in getting back to you, but I’ve been particularly
busy of late, and since my job involves developing cures for various ailments and not lying to
innocent children and the mentally impaired, I decided my time would be better spent doing
that than dealing with you. In any case, now that I’m a little freer, I thought it was
high time I replied. But before we begin, I’d like to thank you
for your response, because not only was it hilarious in its own right, it also attracted
an astoundingly motley collection of skid-marks to my channel who proceeded to smear themselves
across the comments section of Holy Hallucinations 31 to great comedic effect, and much to the
amusement of both myself and my subscribers. I’d also like to thank you for actually
accepting my response , but your chivalry in this regard was a little tarnished by the
way in which you used my, shall we say… Chaucerian… patois to score a few cheap
points with your peanut gallery when your time might have been better spent addressing
the major issues I had with your claims instead of avoiding them like a Southern Baptist does
empathy. I’ll get to your failings in this regard
later, but to avoid the same trick again, I’m going to spike your guns and try something
a different; and that’s not swearing at a creationist no matter how much its deserved.
I mention this in case you erroneously conclude that you’ve somehow shamed me, because I
stand by every insult I threw at you in that video, and also by the substantially better
ones I’ve thought of since. Finally, because addressing every point in
your voluminous yet strangely irrelevant reply would necessitate a trilogy of feature-length
episodes, for the most part I’ll concentrate on the relatively rare occasions that you
actually made a feeble attempt to directly address my criticisms. I’m able to do this
because a number of excellent YouTubers made responses to you and in the interests of time
I’ll be referring to these when necessary. I strongly urge my subscribers to check out
their channels posthaste. In particular I’ll be mentioning TheTruePooka
because of his excellent video to your two major points, that is your alleged works of
charity and the current state of the world’s food supply, which took up the majority of
your video and yet had nothing to do with either your original dishonest and erroneous
arguments nor the *** surgery I performed with them. So now that we’ve dispensed with
the preliminaries, let’s get back to business and take a look at what you had to say.
Now, Dino, in the words of the Newfoundlanders… CALM DOWN!!! Good grief man – you’re going
to have an aneurism. I’m amazed at your anger and vitriolic hatred. I mean… you
lost sleep over this. I can tell. Oh yes, I did lose sleep over this, Boobie.
This, and the countless other creationist lies I’m exposed to on an almost daily basis.
It might seem like a big joke to you, but to me the world that you and your fellows
seek to instantiate is a danger to us all, and more importantly to our children – children
that I’ve seen you unashamedly lying to while smiling as gleefully did here. Wisdominnature7
put this perfectly so I’m not going to dwell on it, but you’re playing a dangerous game
and shouldn’t be surprised if others become infuriated at you when they see the consequences
that you’re apparently oblivious to. I also take your lies personally because I’ve
a deep and abiding respect for the achievements of those who’ve hewn the astonishing edifice
of our scientific knowledge from the granite of our ignorance. Those same individuals whose
work, dedication, and intellects you spit on with a smile every time you open your mouth.
Those achievements that you take for granted and even use to spread you slanders and whose
subtle intricacies you have the arrogance to think that you understand and that you
think you can refute with simple-minded arguments that aren’t even fit for the playground.
But I don’t hate you, Boobie. But I hate everything you and your kind stand for; I
hate the promotion of ignorance and superstition over knowledge and enlightenment; I hate the
arrogance that comes with fools who think that everything is easy because they try nothing
that’s difficult; I hate the dogmatism of the zealot who thinks that nothing can be
understood because they understand nothing; and most of all I hate the hypocrisy of those
who pick gluttonously at the fruits of science and then, like overindulged brats, refuse
to accept the inevitable consequences of the banquet.
But you? You seem like an affable chap, Boobie, and I don’t hate you – just everything
you stand for. But what blows me away is the things you were
angry about the most were things that were not even true. You made a very long string
of slanderous accusations that were completely unfounded and you would have known this if
you had even taken just a moment to get to know me.
By that “long list of slanderous allegations”, I think you mean my irritation with your assertion
that we’ve “barely scratched the surface” of Earth’s food supply limitations coupled
to the self-evident fact that you and such limitations have been strangers for quite
some time. You seem to have taken my subsequent colorful
invective as an accusation that you don’t care about the poor and starving, Boobie,
but you’re quite mistaken. You see, regardless of your protestations to the contrary (which
incidentally mean nothing to me because of your proven track record of being willing
to lie at the drop of a choirboy’s underpants), my disgust wasn’t based on an assumption
I’d made about you personally, but rather on the callous disregard of the evident human
suffering in the world you demonstrated by dismissing food shortage as a limiting factor
in population growth solely to push your vile agenda. Say what you like, Boobie, but it
seems strange to me that someone who claims to care so much about the subject would be
so blasé with his language. I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on this
one though, and conclude that you said what you did because you put as much thought into
your choice of words as you to put into everything else.
This lack of deliberation was later evidenced by your accusation of my lack of charity.
Because, after all you know me exactly as well as I know you, so it was strange to see
you doing exactly what you accused me of. I’m not sure If that’s because you’re
even more mentally challenged that I’ve given you credit for, or you’re just a filthy
hypocrite, but since both reflect equally badly on you I won’t bother making a bet.
In any case, I’m going to leave it at that because even though I have no evidence that
your claims to philanthropy have any basis in reality, for reasons of anonymity I won’t
be able to prove that mine would either and, in any case, I have no interest in us measuring
the magnitude of each other’s’ urine streams. I will, however, point everyone to SoretaYuki’s
excellent video on the subject of your and atheist charity where he takes your words
and uses them to give you an extensive lexical colonic lavage.
I wrote to a young man in Arizona and asked him to comment. Harrison replied: “I’m
fifteen, and I think that is capable of living in the Sonoran desert. I’ve lived here for
fourteen years and suffered no side effects.” Heh, heh. Apparently TheLivingDinosaur is
unaware that there are millions of people living in the desert. The Sonoran in particular.
They even have internet access. Have you never heard of Phoenix. And before you start spouting
off about modern technology and conveniences, may I remind you that Phoenix was incorporated
as a city in 1881. Really, Boobie? Seriously? You proffer as
evidence the testimony of a fifteen-year-old boy that you met on the internet? I must say
I’m somewhat bemused as to why you think this should impress unless TheTruePooka’s
right and you’re just trying hard to cynically court a younger demographic of imbecile.
In any case, I think it’s safe to say that Junior’s assertion is about as accurate
as the average end-times prediction because I strongly suspect that he’s not roughing
it in under the desert sky at all but instead living in the air conditioned comfort of an
affluent suburb, and that if he ever did try living in the Sonoran that he’d last about
as long as a Kent Hovind’s dignity at shower time.
Now, it seems that your chronically anorexic mind somehow managed to anticipate this objection,
but the anemic argument you proffered in your defense suffered a terminal myocardial infarction
on its way to me and I had to pronounce it dead on arrival. You see, while Phoenix did
indeed incorporate in 1881 its population was about 2500, and if you seriously expect
that the current population of 1.5 million would have survived back then with no technological
advantages then I’d have to assume that you’ve been doing some research of your
own into desert survival and partaking of a touch too much ***.
I’m not sure who’s dumber Boobie – you for thinking that this was any kind of argument,
or the hordes of your brain-dead simpleton disciples for thinking that you’re capable
of thinking. And if Falchion49 is such an expert at archaeology,
why did he not inform you of the Native Americans who were living right there, in the Sonoran
desert, quite successfully, long before White Man came and built citifies. The Native Americans
actually dug irrigation canals and were raising crops in the middle of the desert.
As it happens, Boobie, Falchion had discussed a number of other problems with your ludicrous
population growth model with me at length, including the great restrictions placed on
early hunter gatherer populations due to inadequate resources; restrictions that limited their
growth so severely that they had to resort to infanticide as an alternative to starvation.
In the end I didn’t use this material because I had even more damaging arguments at my disposal,
and it happens that those were exactly the arguments that you conveniently chose to ignore
in this impotent response of yours. Those arguments, of course, involved me presenting
you with peer-reviewed data demonstrating empirically that the Earth’s population
growth has varied extensively over time, thereby castrating both your simple-minded constant
growth rate model and your “missing bodies” assertion.
I found it telling therefore that you ignored these and concentrated on discussing present
food supply problems, which have nothing to do with your original claims regarding the
past, while doing nothing to show why the professional archaeologists and anthropologists
who’ve spent decades determining past population sizes are all wrong. This kind of deliberately
distracting flim-flam obviously worked with your bible-blinkered, thought-averse followers
who seemed to think that you’d somehow defended yourself admirably, but to anyone whose mind
isn’t stunted by your mephitic dogma all you did was divert attention from the pile
of smoking rubble behind you by pointing at an empty sky.
Since in this respect TheTruePooka did a fine job in giving you a verbal enema with your
own words, I’m not going to spend more time dealing with your smokescreen and instead
restrict myself to reinserting the few attempts you made at refuting some of my more minor
points. But before I do, I will mention that no one is arguing that people are incapable
of inhabiting hostile environments, just that their populations are limited by them. In
fact, it seems that your reference to Native American irrigation does nothing but deliver
a fatal kick to the testicles of your argument, because you’ve tacitly admitted that ***
sapiens can, did and does adapt the environment to his advantage with technology. Since even
the most delusional buffoon would be hard pressed to deny that this technology has been
improving for millennia, resulting in man’s increasing ability to colonize less than hospitable
ecosystems, it seems that your contention of grossly simplified constant growth rates
is now lying in the gutter urinating blood. As Doctor… Doctor Robert Carter pointed
out in a very easy to access website, Carter documents some of the evidence in one easy-reading
article as well as multiple technical articles. Nelson wrote on this matter back in 2004.
He made use of the various mutation and variation process, which are well known, to make his
point about evidence for a genetic bottle neck in humans which was consistent with flood
account and timeline. Before go through your sources, Boobie, I’d
like to point something out. As you’ll see, I’ve actually read the references that you’ve
excreted, yet if you look back to your video you’ll notice that you haven’t seen fit
to reciprocate and merely ignored my sources and the specific points therein. Presumably
this is a reflection of just how deeply you care about the truth, eh?
So getting on to your first feeble offering, it rapidly became apparent that Carter is
either deliberately or mistakenly confusing our last common matrilineal and patrilineal
ancestors, colloquially referred to as Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam, with our first
female and male common ancestors. I’m not sure whether that’s because his brain has
atrophied due to prolonged exposure to fundie propaganda or because he’s simply a filthy
and disgusting liar, but in either case it does mean that his lame-brained inferences
about the latter from scientific data on the former are rendered utterly meaningless.
To put it another way Mitochondrial Eve and Y Adam are not perpetual specific individuals.
A few generations ago they were entirely different people than they are today, and will be different
individuals in the future due to the continual breaking on male and female lines of decent
over time. Thus when Carter tries to equate them to your fictional incestuous ancestors
it’s akin to a simpleton using astronomical data to attempt to explain why creationists
are so prone to verbal diarrhea. So I can’t be entirely sure whether you
referenced this particularly pungent piece because you’re too stupid to understand
why it’s fundamentally flawed, Boobie, but I’m much more certain that Robert Carter
does know better and that he’s desperately defending his and your particular version
of God the only way creationists know how– that is, by flagrantly lying through his teeth.
And now getting on to Nelson’s article, well, at least it was published in a magazine
and not a web page, though unfortunately for your arguments, Boobie, that magazine wasn’t
a bona fide scientific publication but rather the creationist rag known at the time as Technical
Journal but now renamed the Journal of Creation. As a result Nelson’s writings weren’t
reviewed by two or three experts in the fields of molecular and population genetics, but
almost certainly by laymen creationists who’d already accepted his conclusions before even
opening the manuscript and were there merely checking for typos.
So despite my trepidations of wasting my time, I took a look and promptly realized that sometimes
it’s just good policy to just listen to your gut. Because all that Mr. Nelson seems
to have done is list a selection of papers referring to human genetic diversity and possible
bottlenecks and then used them to make a vague, hand-waving argument that they could be explained
by your flood and Babel fairy tales. That in itself might be fair enough since
people are free to seek new explanations for various phenomena. But what distinguishes
Nelson’s scribbling from real science and clearly marks it as pseudo-intellectual garbage,
is not what it contains but rather what it lacks. For example: at no point does he offer
any mathematical models to affirm that his contention is at least consistent with the
empirical data; then despite his admission that the people whose data he’s twisting
to his own ends date their bottlenecks to tens and hundreds of thousands of years, he
offers no reasons for why they might be in error by orders of magnitude; next, to explain
extant levels of diversity he invokes accelerated mutation events but proffers no mechanisms
for their rapidity nor their deceleration to currently measured levels; and, finally,
in proposing his model he confines himself to the microcosm of molecular genetics and
completely ignores evidence from fields as diverse cosmology, geology, nuclear physics,
paleontology, comparative anatomy and biochemistry that all scream to the fact that his assumption
of a 6000 year old Earth has been rotting away for the past 200 or so years since it
fell off the tree of knowledge. Taken together, I think these points explain
why Mr. Nelson was unable to publish his manuscript in Science or Nature, Boobie, because this
kind of sloppy and amateurish drivel would have been rejected by an editor before getting
within even sniffing distance of a reviewer – not because of bias against his position
but because its utter lack of anything even vaguely resembling academic rigor. But with
all this said, there’s still something puzzling me, because while I can grasp that your restricted
cognitive faculties might have rendered you incapable for recognizing Nelson’s work
for what it is, I was nevertheless baffled when you said this:
Ironically Nelson was fourteen when he wrote that paper. So why is it a fourteen-year-old,
writing eight years ago, seemed to know more about the subject than TheLivingDinosaur does
now? See what I mean, Boobie? Did you really think
that Nelson’s age was a selling point? Because, while it’s possible that any given teenager
might be a prodigy, my experience is that most can’t be trusted to take their acne
medication let alone provide reliable information in disciplines in which they have no training.
Of course, having read his “paper”, it’s clear that Mr. Nelson must have had a complexion
comparable to the dark side of the moon. And as for your question, well, that all comes
down to the crucial word that you used, that is – “seemed”. You see the reason that
it “seemed” to you that he knew more than I was that you’re too stupid to realize
that you know as little about these matters as he does.
Let us also not forget the very significant point that Doctor Jana… Doctor Jonathan
Sanford elaborated on in his book, Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, which
I also explained in CrEvo Rant #78, The Boat that Don’t Float. Genetic Entropy shows
that not only are we deteriorating, the exact opposite of evolution, it also shows that
we could not have been around for millions of years as evolution proposes, because we
are deteriorating too quickly. Well, Boobie, unfortunately for you the problem
with this assertion is that the only reason that you and Sanford can make this claim is
because of his little novel and the cerebral fecal nuggets found therein, because despite
the theoretical arguments and calculations he presents , there’s not one shred of empirical
evidence that supports his contention that our genomes are “degrading” as he claims
they are, this same evidence being conspicuously absent from the citations in his book.
Nevertheless, despite my better judgment I took the time to read Sanford’s conjectures
and discovered that running entirely contrary to the observable facts is the least of his
problems. While I certainly don’t have the time or inclination to point out every piece
of misinformation that he crimped off onto its pages, I’ll try to at least give you
a hint of the pungent aroma that’s wafting from within.
Sanford’s entire thesis is based on the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, proposed
and developed by Motoo Kimura in the early 1970s to mathematically model the fixation
of non-selectable alleles by genetic drift. However, as sequences were amassed it became
clear that mutations accumulated at a constant rate over time, not generations. Kimura and
his student Tomoko Ohta therefore speculated that since populations with short life-spans
tend to be larger, this could be explained by postulating that population size determined
the probability of fixation of non-selected mutations and that smaller populations were
more likely to fix alleles that were neutral or slightly deleterious. They thus formulated
the Nearly Neutral Theory, and it is this theory that Sanford bastardizes to push his
agenda. Now, it would take a video so large that it
would potentially crash YouTube’s servers for me to go into detail on each of the brazen
lies and deliberate omissions that Sanford makes in his propagenda tract, but fortunately,
some of his falsehoods are so obscene and repugnant that it’s quite easy to discredit
the whole book by simply pointing to just three of countless possible examples.
Firstly, and perhaps most egregiously, Sanford asserts that based on the graphs of near-neutral
mutation distributions in Kimura’s papers, effectively no mutations can be considered
beneficial. Here Sanford blatantly ignores the fact that Kimura himself explained that
he ignored such mutations because in his model they led to, guess what? Unrealistically high
levels of evolution. Secondly, Sanford selectively quotes from
work by Richard Lenski on his long term E. coli evolution project to support his claim
that beneficial mutations are so rare as to be essentially non-existent while deliberately
ignoring papers from the same group that clearly contradict his position. Selective citation
is incredibly dishonest and the mark of an academic charlatan. I’m surprised you didn’t
know that, Boobie. Finally, Sanford quotes heavily from a paper
by population geneticist Alexey Kondrashov entitled “Contamination of the Genome by
Very Slightly Deleterious Mutations: Why Have We Not Died 100 Times Over?” while at same
time almost entirely ignoring the fact the purpose of the paper is to explain why we
haven’t. When he does tackle, for example, Kondrashov’s explanation of synergistic
epistasis, Sanford, in true creationist style, resorts to an appeal to ridicule by dismissing
it as hand-waving with no justification (other than presumably because it runs contrary to
the hallucinations that have been induced by his religious beliefs).
And it’s those beliefs I’ll finish with. It seems that Sanford was once a reasonably
well respected plant molecular biologist before he found religion and decided to settle upon
the most toxic variety he could get his hands on. Coincidentally, his new “theories”
only arose subsequent to him sipping from that poison chalice, and perhaps the most
telling thing about the quality of his new work is that, aside from a couple computer-science
papers on a simulation of his fantasy world, it seems he’s been unable to publish it
in anything resembling a scientific peer-reviewed journal.
Now I realize that you’ll play the bias card here Boobie, but I’ll beg to differ.
You see, I can assure that today’s medical community would be very interested to know
if our genomes were actually deteriorating so that they could work on a way to try and
stop it. There is absolutely no reason why Sanford could not submit his work for peer
review after stripping out the religious mumbo-jumbo and have it evaluated solely on its actual
technical merits. I suspect that Sanford has either not tried this because he’s fully
aware of the gargantuan levels of dishonesty he’s trying to promulgate, or that he tried
it once and hasn’t recovered from the embarrassment of being laughed at quite so hard.
In any case, it seems he’s resorted to disseminating this vile stream of filth via publishing a
book so that he can taint the minds of those who don’t know any better and, in my opinion
that makes the man (if you can call him that) a filthy disgrace to himself, to his teachers,
to his species and to whatever god there might be out there should one exist.
Secondly, you neglected to explain why this unfettered human population growth that you're
describing, when applied to the remaining members of the animal kingdom, hasn't left
us all wading knee deep in aardvarks, earwigs, koalas and kestrels. Could it be that you
didn't think of that, Boobie? Or that you just don't think at all, dumb-[expletive deleted]?
Or could it be that you Dino didn’t know your own glaring ignorance or that you just
contradicted yourself? The whole point of my rant that you were responding to was that
the population was too small for it to be millions of years old. So thank you for reinforcing
my point while simultaneously shooting yourself in the foot.
I’m afraid, Boobie, that the ignorance you perceived wasn’t a result of any fault on
my part but of the inability of your desiccated mind to process what I was saying. Of course
I shouldn’t be surprised because watching the rusty gears behind your eyes squealing
when NicolSD asked you about heliocentrism should leave no one in doubt as to the magnitude
of or neural dysfunction. Because as far as I can see, the whole point
of your video was to show that by pulling numbers out of your jacksie, and by ignored
bothersome trivialities such as empirical facts and established scientific concepts
such as carrying capacity, it’s possible to model the expansion of a population of
8 eight incestuous savages to 7 billion. You only inferred that the current population
is too small for evolutionary timelines because of a laughably misplaced sense of confidence
in your reasoning ability. So to clear it up for you, my purpose here
was to point out that if I were take these same patently fallacious assumptions and apply
them to populations that have demonstrably higher reproduction rates, the resulting exponential
growth would have us drowning furry friends faster that you could spit out your next lie
for Jesus. I’m afraid that my assessment of you as a dumb-fornicator will have to stand.
Of course you did have an explanation for this, but as it turned out it was probably
the funniest thing you said in your whole video.
People are the reason animal populations are controlled. Hunting, over-hunting, extermination,
wars and, yes, even ecological abuse by humans. Well, Boobie, this one’s really quite simple.
While I’ll agree that humans certainly can and do control populations even to the point
of extinction, your assertion that we’re the sole cause of animal population control
in order to avoid doing the honest thing and admitting that your denial of carrying capacity
is in error is teetering on the verge of lunacy. This astounding display of fatuousness can
easily be dismissed by pointing out that the vast expanses of unpopulated land on this
planet that you claim are essentially all eminently fit for human habitation are hardly
infested with unimaginable numbers of vermin, now are they? Why would that be, do you think,
Boobie? Do you think it could possibly be because that very land can only support a
limited number of organisms because it has a limited carrying capacity?
Furthermore, you as a biblical literalist should be more than aware of the concept of
a plague. You may, indeed be aware that these events are commonplace today, though presumably
because of naturalistic effectors and not sky-daddy ju-ju. Now, while I’m willing
to admit that in some cases the complex ecosystems that keep populations in balance may have
been influenced indirectly by human activity, I am pretty sure than none of these events
have ever been accompanied by mass extinction of the local populace. Regardless of the cause,
Boobie, plagues provide yet more fodder for the fire that’s cremating your utterly meritless
claims. So, with that, I think I’ll wrap things
up. There were a number of other minor points I could have stuffed back into place, Boobie,
but not only was I worried about rupturing your colon, it’s also looking like this
is going to be one of my longest videos as it is.
So I’m going to finish off here by thanking you, because while there’s little I or other
rational atheists and theists can do to prevent the promulgation of your beliefs within the
confines of your current cult members and their families, the videos made by you and
your kind of delusional lame-brains are doing a splendidly prophylactic job of retarding
the spread of your insanity while providing the rest of us with the greatest gift of all.
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