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This is a response to PPSimmons’ video, “EVO TAKES ANOTHER HARD FALL! Slammed again.
Tiktaalik NOT a transitionary (sic) fossil!” Well, Carl, just when I thought you’d given
up on smearing science with the vile filth that’s continually being disgorged by that
pasty organ that passes for your brain, you’ve surprised me by puking up two new fine examples
of creationist mental manure in short succession. I dealt with your somewhat unconventional
ideas regarding the nature of science in Holy Hallucinations 26, but it appears that I was
a little too gentle with you on that occasion, because you seem to have been able to sit
down a lot earlier than I expected to produce this new video in which you offer us your
profound insights into the paleontological significance of Tiktaalik.
As luck would have it, Carl, I recently finished reading “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shubin,
the co-discoverer of this particular fossil. This quite stunning coincidence almost had
me thinking that it had been deliberately orchestrated by some kind of omniscient and
omnipotent, yet empirically elusive celestial agency. So if that does happen to be the case,
Carl, I can only assume that you’ve been a naughty, naughty boy and that the said agency
brought about this state of affairs to afford me the opportunity to ram Professor Shubin’s
book roughly up your ***. Sideways. So let’s get onto the matter in hand and
take a look at what you had to say, and while we watch the first clip, Carl, might I suggest
that you drop your strides, bend over and get ready to take your divine punishment like
a man. “According to an intriguing article from
Creation Ministries International, tracks of footprints found in a quarry in Poland
have turned the evolutionary world upside down. For years there has been a neat evolutionary
story, CMI says, about how fish evolved four legs and came out of the ocean onto the land.”
The first thing I did after I saw you video, Carl, was something that appears to be anathema
to you – and that’s a little research. It appears you’ve based your latest three
minutes and forty-nine second offering of digital diarrhea solely on a single article
by a “gentleman” named Tas ***… I mean Walker. While superficially it seems
that Dr. ***’s PhD in Mechanical Engineering doesn’t really qualify him as an authority
in the areas of paleontology and evolutionary biology, it turns out that he does hold a
bachelor’s in Earth Science. This means that Dr. *** can’t claim ignorance
as an excuse and so, having suffered through reading his article, I can only conclude that
he’s either the dumbest *** to ever earn a degree, or the biggest liar to emerge from
the creationist camp since Kent Hovind pulled out his biro and started filling in his first
tax return. In either case, of course, this didn’t stop you from wolfing down his festering
intellectual *** as if it were the last donut at a cops convention and then spewing it back
up all over YouTube in you own inimitable style.
As for the “neat evolutionary story” with regard to the origins of tetrapods, I presume
that this is the same “story” that is part of perhaps the most empirically supported
theoretical edifice in all of science and the cornerstone of modern biology. You know,
the same theory that you and your fellow lying *** disparage at every opportunity because
it not only demonstrates that your cherished fables are based in imagination and not fact,
but also because it interferes with your ability to cling to the notion that humans are somehow
better than animals, despite your own behavior doing nothing other than demonstrate that
your own place in the animal kingdom lies somewhere between the tape worm and the ***
louse. So, we’ll get back to those Polish footprints
later, but for now let’s get on and see why you and Dr. *** have a problem with
physical evidence in general and Tiktaalik specifically.
“Probably the most famous fossil in this sea to land icon of evolution is Tiktaalik
rosae, a fish with fins that was claimed to have had features intermediate between fish
and tetrapods. Creationists consistently rejected the evolutionary spin put on the fossil and
showed that it had nothing to do with the alleged sea to land transition.”
Tiktaalik has been extensively studied by the most the world’s most highly trained
and respected paleontologists and anatomists, who have dedicated lifetimes to becoming leading
experts in these fields. These experts have published their results in the world’s most
prestigious scientific journal, and their work has therefore been thoroughly vetted
by passing the critical review of their peers. From this we know that Tiktaalik was an animal
that was in the process of transitioning from an aquatic to a terrestrial lifestyle because
it possessed some of the characters of fish, some of tetrapods and some intermediate between
the two. On the fish side it had webbed fins, scales and gills, while numerous skeletal
features such as; the combination of a humerus, tibia and fibula with radiating fish-like
digits in the forelimb, the size and placement of the spiracles, or ear notches, and the
dimensions of the hyomandibula in the skull are clearly intermediate between their counterparts
in fish and early tetrapods. On the tetrapod side, Tiktaalik had eyes placed
atop a flat head, lungs, ribs, an articulating neck and a pectoral girdle that wasn’t attached
to its head, features that are never found in fish but are common to most tetrapods.
It’s interesting then, Carl, that while pointing out that Creationists “rejected”
the “evolutionary spin” put on the fossil you also claimed that this miserable collection
of incompetent and dishonest buffoons “showed” that it had nothing to do with the sea-land
transition. As far as I’m aware, Creationists have done
no such thing. As an example, let’s take Jonathan Farti… er, sorry Jonathan Sarfati’s…
article for Creation Ministries International on the subject of Tiltaalik. It seems he has
a PhD in Physical Chemistry, which apparently eminently qualifies him to reject the essentially
unanimous opinion of the world’s paleontological community, but unfortunately all his article
essentially amounts to is a series of outrageously dishonest quote mines and quite stupendously
inaccurate representations of the mechanics of evolution and the nature of transitional
forms. In this particular digital ***-stream, Dr.
Farti does nothing to discredit Tiktaalik’s mixture of fish and tetrapod characters, and
instead tries to muddy the waters by working on the simplistic and probably intentionally
misleading assumption that the fossil record represents a lineage of direct descent rather
than a phylogeny of both closely and distantly related cousins, and by discounting the well
established concept of evolutionary stasis. To illustrate this point, let’s take a look
at how Shubin, Daeshler and Jenkins described the articulation of Tiktaalik’s humerus
in their landmark Nature paper: “The simultaneous apposition of the reversed concavoconvex geometries
of the anterior and posterior parts of the articulation represents a close-packed, or
most stable, joint position. Additional stability would be contributed through the action of
the trans-coracoid musculature.” Now let’s compare that with what Dr. Farti
had to say about that particular part of the anatomy: “Indeed, Tiktaalik’s fin was
not connected to the main skeleton, so could not have supported its weight on land. The
discoverers claim that this could have helped to prop up the body as the fish moved along
a water bottom but evolutionists had similar high hopes for the coelacanth fin.”
Notice the complete lack of technically descriptive detail, the failure to even attempt to provide
an argument to support the bold assertion, and the substitution of said argument with
a pathetically transparent ‘Guilt by Association’ logical fallacy. Anyone with any kind of background
in science will immediately recognize Farti’s language as that of either a rank amateur
or sophist that could only be convincing to someone who’s either been extensively indoctrinated
or is recovering from a particularly nasty cerebral embolism. You know, Carl? Someone
like you. So while this might count as “showing”
to you, to anyone with the ability to sustain an even vaguely coherent thought process,
in reality it’s merely reminiscent of a retard standing up and either proclaiming
“no it’s not” to every statement of fact or settling for shouting nothing but
“it’s a fish” in lieu of argumentation, while fully expecting to be taken seriously.
Rejecting something outright without specifying precisely why, Carl, doesn’t constitute
an argument because it’s so easy that any subnormal *** can do it. For example,
if I wanted to I could quite happily make myself look like a complete *** by claiming
that Barak Obama is not a US citizen whilst providing not one shred of evidence or even
a cogent argument to support it. Of course, that wouldn’t mean that I was right, just
that I was complete and utter *** and quite possibly the dumbest *** on the planet.
“Richard Dawkins in his latest book, ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’, is the perfect
missing link. Perfect because it almost exactly splits the difference between fish and amphibian,
and perfect because it is missing no longer, Dawkins says. But now this footprint evidence
from Poland consigns Tiktaalik and all its companion fossils onto the garbage heap.”
Unfortunately, despite your most fervent desires, Carl, as we’ll see later, the footprint
evidence does nothing of the kind. I’m afraid that your ambitious claim about the fate of
Tiktaalik and other elpistostegid fossils is about as accurate as the Vatican’s pronouncements
on viral epidemiology. It is unfortunate that Dawkins used the outdated
layman’s term “missing link” because it leaves the impression that paleontologists
claim that transitional fossils are de facto direct ancestors of either other fossilized
life forms or of extant species. It’s exactly this fallacious misconception that pompous
asshats like Jonathan Farti, and the collection of other CMI *** he cites in his so-called
article, use as the basis for their ludicrously simple-minded arguments.
In reality paleontologists take pains to point out that such fossils are much more likely
to be cousins, side-shoots in the tree of life, but nevertheless most likely reasonable
representations of the actual common ancestors of the major evolutionary lineages.
That’s because the only way to be 100% certain of any given phylogeny is to watch and track
every single birth along the lineage, and while this might be the only kind of evidence
that the most delusional of creationists would accept (and even then, quite frankly, I’m
not convinced they would), anyone even vaguely in tune with the concept of reality will realize
that that’s not going to happen. So, despite what you say Carl, Tiktaalik remains
a transitional fossil because it was never purported to be the basal ancestor of the
tetrapod lineage, but because it bears a distinct mosaic of characters of both fish and tetrapods
as well as several intermediate features, and as a result represents a reasonable approximation
of that ancestor. This very fact is wonderfully illustrated
by the following passage from Neil Shubin’s book, “Your Inner Fish”, where he describes
what happened when he took along a cast of Tiktaalik to his son’s Kindergarten class
and asked them what they thought it was: “Hands shot up. The first child said it
was a crocodile or an alligator. When queried why, he said that like a crocodile or lizard
it has a flat head with eyes on top. Big teeth, too. Other children started to voice their
dissent. Choosing the raised hand of one of the kids, I heard: No, no, it isn’t a crocodile,
it is a fish, because it has scales and fins. Yet another child shouted, “Maybe it is
both.” Tiktaalik’s message is so straightforward even preschoolers can see it.”
And that’s exactly the point, Carl. The significance of Tiktaalik is blindingly obvious
to even a five-year-old, and yet escapes the attention of grown men and women suffering
from that tragic case of profound mental retardation known as creationism. I fervently hope that
one-day both you and the poor people whose minds you’re poisoning with your delusions
will just grow up. “Creation International claims that it has
been demonstrated in a strong case that these supposed evolutionary links were, in reality,
four-legged animals that resembled large lizards.” I was in two minds as to whether to include
this clip, because the point I wanted to make might seem a little trivial. In the end I
decided to use it, though Carl, because it’s a wonderful demonstration of exactly how big
a bunch of dim-witted bell-ends Tas ***, you and your sniveling toadies at the PPSimmons
channel truly are. And that’s because the original Nature paper,
which you quite evidently didn’t bother to read before you opened up the spigot to
this particular sewer, doesn’t mention “reptiles” at all, and in fact uses a generic representation
of the early amphibian tetrapods Ichthyostega and Acanthostega. In case you don’t know
what the rest of us learned in third grade, Carl, lizards are reptiles, not amphibians,
which may not matter much to you but I assure you matters considerably to the animals concerned
- which is why it is exceedingly rare to come across a frog trying to *** an alligator.
As I said, this is somewhat of a minor point, but I decided to bring it up to illustrate
not only your but also Tas ***’s complete disregard for anything even vaguely approaching
academic rigor, and your complete disdain for those pesky inconveniences that the rest
of us refer to as facts. “If four-legged animals existed 18 million
years earlier, then Tiktaalik can’t be the transitional fossil is has been claimed to
be. Tiktaalik has suddenly been demoted to an evolutionary dead end, along with all the
other fossils connected with it. In other words, all those neat evolutionary diagrams
that vividly displayed the transition from fish to four-footed animal ancestor now need
to be disposed of.” So now we’re getting down to the heart of
the matter, so let’s get this over with. Firstly, despite your deluded and uninformed
assertions, Tiktaalik is very much “still” a transitional fossil for the reasons I gave
earlier. However if, as I strongly suspect, what you were trying to say is that Tiktaalik
cannot be the direct common ancestor of extant tetrapods, then surprisingly you’d be quite
right. But since no credible paleontologist or evolutionary biologist ever claimed it
was then your point is somewhat moot, isn’t it?
At the risk of repeating myself, these species have never been purported to be our direct
ancestors, but rather representative cousins of those ancestors. Using the diagram you
yourself showed, anyone who cares to can clearly see that that all of these species are not
placed in the line of direct descent, but rather as offshoots of it. You see, Carl,
your doltish ignorance of evolutionary theory and the inability of your woefully crippled
mind to understand or read a cladogram doesn’t magically lend credence to your assertion
– it simply provides the rest of us with yet more opportunities to laugh at you.
The reason this matters is because, due to the documented phenomenon of evolutionary
stasis, these elpistostegids were more than capable of living contemporaneously with tetrapods
because both could have evolved earlier from common elpistostegid stock. Tiktaalik therefore
represents a lineage that remained morphologically relatively stable while the tetrapod lineage
continued to evolve to exploit the free ecological niches being offered by land. This is exactly
why there are still coelacanths and lungfish alive today alongside all the tetrapods that
descended from their common sarcopterygian ancestor. It’s because we didn’t evolve
from coelacanths, Carl. We evolved from a coelacanth-like species that lived and died
over 400 million years ago. As a result, the effect of this discovery
on the previous phylogeny isn’t quite as dramatic as you and you mate Tas would like
to make it out to be, and was in fact quite succinctly summarized by Niedzwiedzki and
colleagues in the final figure of their paper. In fact, I found it fascinating that Dr. ***
didn’t include this figure in his article. I wonder, Carl… do you think it was because
he was so ignorant of the subject on which he judged himself qualified to pontificate
that he didn’t realize it’s significance? Or was it because he knew full well that if
he showed it, it might tip off the people he was so enthusiastically lying to exactly
how full of *** he is? Whether Tas was being deliberately deceitful
or merely retarded is neither here or there, though, because in either case the net effect
was that he didn’t present the diagram that would have shown exactly how much hot air
had gone into over-inflating the effect of this discovery on evolutionary theory. You
see Carl, while it certainly does lead to a reassessment of the timing and environment
of the water to land transition, all that has happened is that the original phylogeny
has been stretched back 18 million years to accommodate the new find, creating a slew
of so-called ghost lineages where both tetrapods and elpistostegids must have must have co-existed
but have not yet been discovered in the fossil record.
Imperfections in this record are nothing new and have long been recognized and well documented.
For example, Romer’s gap originally ran from 360 to 345 million years ago, a critical
period in early tetrapod evolution and, while more recent discoveries have closed it somewhat,
it still remains a poor source of information from this period of Life’s history. There’s
a gap of some 60 million years in the record of pachycephalosaurs, which are present both
before and after it, while the coelacanth, which is still with us, hasn’t been found
in the fossil record since the Cretacous, representing a ghost range of some 80 million
years. And while 18 million years may seem like a
long time, try considering it in comparison to the 3.8 billion years since life first
arose or the 660 million years since the appearance of multicellularity. The big deal you’re
trying to make here, Carl, here amounts to an adjustment of one half to less than three
percent, so while the discovery is scientifically a highly significant contribution to our understanding
of tetrapod evolution, it’s hardly the silver bullet that you and your fellow fuckwits have
been dreaming of finding to take out the werewolf that been pounding your beliefs up the ***
for the past one hundred and fifty years. “Something of the magnitude of the upset
can be gleaned from statements made about the find in Nature magazine. Quote: ‘This
forces a radical reassessment about the timing, ecology and environmental setting of the fish-tetrapod
transition, as well as the completeness of the body fossil record.” And this quote:
‘It will cause a significant reappraisal of our understanding of tetrapod origins.”
You may not have noticed this Carl, but neither of these statements or the other tactical
quote mines in Tas ***’s article say anything to the effect of: “This discovery
seriously undermines the entire basis of evolutionary theory and thus forces us to consider alternative
hypotheses with regards to the generation of biological diversity, particularly those
concocted millennia ago by ignorant, bloodthirsty desert goat-***.”
All of these quotes exemplify the nature of science and the scientific method, which is
obliged to consider all new data and modify its explanations to reflect the collected
evidence as accurately as possible. Of course this new evidence will result in the reformulation
of current phylogenies, a reassessment of timing of the colonization of land and, because
the tracks were discovered in what used to be marine environment, a revision of the hypothesis
that the transition might have occurred in rivers.
Now let’s contrast this self-correcting and intellectually honest approach to discovering
the truth with you particular religious mindset, shall we Carl? You know? The mindset that’ll
never allow you to admit you’re wrong no matter how much evidence is rammed unceremoniously
up your tailpipe, nor how hard you have to fly in the face of patently demonstrable reality.
The mindset that means that even if Lord Vishnu himself were to materialize before both you
and your pal Tas, cut off your dangly bits and shove them up each other’s body cavities
you’d still insist that yours’ was the only true religion and that Hindu’s were
the ones who were being delusional. How well do you think that mindset would have
served us in this ever-changing world if everyone had chosen to adopt it Carl? Could it be that
we’d still be sitting around our darkened hovels, dining on roast witch, debating how
many feathers are on an angel’s wing and discussing who was going to be the next guest
on the “Torture the Heretic” show? All in all, I’m glad that ignorant *** like
you didn’t get your way and grateful to those in the past who chose discovery and
enlightenment over dogma and superstition. So you see, Carl, the kinds of statement you
and Tas quoted are indicative of the strength of science, and not some kind of fatal weakness
that you seem to think you’re dramatically exposing. Of course, you at least have some
excuse for peddling this particular line of nonsensical *** because you are, after
all, an ignorant *** who doesn’t know the difference between his pyloric and his
(highly dilated) *** sphincter. Dr. ***, on the other hand has, at least
allegedly, a scientific background, and so for him use these perfectly legitimate statements
to sleazily smear genuine science with his putrid misrepresentations proves just one
thing – and that’s exactly how big of a lying *** bag he is. But then again, he
is a creationist, so unlike the Polish trackways, that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
“Those scientists who have dedicated their lives and careers to the standard fish-to-beast
story will not be very enthused by the implications of the latest find. They will be reluctant
to change. Especially since they have nothing to replace it with, CMI says.”
Jesus-***-H--Christ, Carl. The thing that amazes me about your videos is that, just
when one thinks that you’ve plunged to the very limits of human mental retardation, you
somehow manage to find a way to push the envelope just a little further. In this case, you and
Tas have managed to reach the intellectual level of an amoeba, and not a particularly
bright one at that. In response to this particular festering ***,
I’d simply ask one question. Who the ***, exactly, do you think discovered these tracks
and published them in one of the world’s most respected journals? I think you’ll
find that it was none other than some of those scientists who’ve “dedicated their lives
and careers to the standard fish to beast story.”
Does this really seem like the action of people who’d be so crushed by the implications
of this new evidence? If they really were that concerned, Carl, wouldn’t it have made
more sense to suppress it ? After all, that’s an accusation that many of your fellow fucktards
make on a regular basis and which you and Tas have just done a fine job demonstrating
is simply yet another pile of steaming creationist crap.
I myself can’t imagine the magnitude of the neural dysfunction that would allow any
human being to make this kind of patently ludicrous pronouncement and do it in all seriousness.
This assertion, or more to the point the fact that neither you or Tas seemed to realize
how utterly and unambiguously self-pwning it is, really does highlight the toxic nature
of your particular flavor of belief, Carl, because it’s poison cripples minds to the
point where reality and fantasy, sanity and psychosis, and truth and delusion become indistinguishable.
For your information, you sad and pathetic little man, surprises such as this are the
lifeblood of working scientists. They provide new challenges, new opportunities for discovery
and new questions to be asked and answered. In this particular case a new span of 18 million
years and a new environmental milieu to explore, I’m sure has paleontologists everywhere
champing at the bit to get into the field to uncover what I’m sure are going to be
some particularly spectacular new fossil finds. That’s because, unlike you, Carl, these
people aren’t happy to settle for the warmth of the comfort blanket provided by the certainty
of dogmatic beliefs whose accuracy isn’t important, but instead are driven with the
desire explore the vistas of the unknown, to uncover the truth about nature and by the
thrill of discovery. And I, personally, thank my lucky stars for
people like them, Carl, because if in the past it had been entirely up to people like
you, we wouldn’t be discovering the magnificence of this breathtaking universe and the intricacy
of the wonders of life – instead we’d be eking out a miserable existence and explaining
everything with primitive fables and magic. �