Religion & Law

Of Birds and Brains

By John Pieret

Oh, look! Ray Comfort is educable. In an article in WingNutDaily he responds to PZ Myers' criticism of Comfort's "argument" that:

Every male dog, cat, horse, elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn't keep going. Evolution has no explanation for the female for every species in creation ...

Species do not arise from single new mutant males that then have to find a corresponding mutant female ? they arise by the diffusion of variation through a whole population, male and female.

"Okay, I've got it," Comfort continued. "Your belief is that species do not arise from single new mutant males that then have to find a corresponding mutant female.

So, let's take it slowly for those of us stupid folk who like empirical evidence. We are looking at a contemporary male and a female elephant. They are part of a population of elephants. Let's go back to their elephant ancestors 10,000 years ago. They are still male and female elephants (they had to be because that's how elephants reproduce). Let's now go back one million years to what you called 'the populations of pre-elephants that contained males and females.' Obviously, they are still male and female way back then because that's how pre-elephants reproduced," Comfort said.

"Let's go back even further (100 million years ago) to pre-pre-elephants that also contained males and females. At what point of time in evolutionary history did the female evolve alongside the male? And why did she evolve?

Then explain, if you would professor, why horses, giraffes, cattle, zebras, leopards, primates, antelopes, pigs, dogs, sheep, fish, goats, mice, squirrels, whales, chickens, dinosaurs, beavers, cats, human beings and rats also evolved with a female, at some point of time in evolutionary history. Professor, I know you believe, but please, give us who are healthy skeptics some empirical evidence. Remember, stupid people like me want good hard evidence before we, like you, become believers in Darwin's theory," Comfort said.

"One of the latest beliefs that is being pushed on the National Geographic channel, is the wild speculation that the dinosaur may have evolved into the modern-day turkey. There are no bounds to beliefs.

Ray is only about 40 years behind the times (about one hundred and forty, if you count the early suggestion by Thomas Huxley) but, hey!, he's catching up. Most of his "thinking" is 2,500 years behind. And what piece by Comfort would be complete without an argument from personal incredulity?:

Evolutionists have done to science what hypocrites have done to religion. They leap through the so-called paleontological record like a Disney cartoon kangaroo, making statements that have more to do with an overripe imagination rather than with true science. They are unregulated speculators with ridiculous theories that are leaving the minds of today's youth bankrupt, and they need to be held to some sort of intellectual accountability.

But there is one true fact amid all the blather:

I'm just one incompetent idiot that's trying to do that," Comfort said.

And failing miserably on all counts.
.

Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on March 07, 2009 (boomark / email).