thunderf00t ... did you actually say that? (part 1)

 

series:
	Creation vs Evolution : thunderf00t ... did you actually say that? (part 1) thunderf00t, did you really say that? (part 2) Trivium, Quadrivium 7 cætera : Thunderf00t on futile questions Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... against Thunderf00t on Dembski ... on Thunderf00t having a point on feminism - and then a few not so on Ken Ham

"even if we hadn't known the cause of aging for over thirty years"

That being, not X-rays but end pieces of telomeres getting shorter. Wonderful observation, but what if X-rays shorten end pieces of telomeres faster? Not as if I were either a PhD or a natural scientist or anything, as I think I have mentioned before I am a linguist at academics and one without degree at that.

"the giant tortoise ... trees ... some of the shellfish"

A tortoise has a shield and a thicker skin than we. Trees have barks. Shellfish are called shellfish because they have ... shells! (Yeah, I grant you linguistics has its strange quirks, but somehow this is not one of them. And if you think the use of the word "fish" is, well, no, in linguistics a fish is a creature that is not a plant and does not look like a plant either and which lives in the water, no backbone needed at all. Just as linguistic Latin does not put Rosa or Canis on repeat unlike the Biologists' variety, which also is deficint in the verbs that the real linguistic Latin had about 143 finite forms of each complete one).

Now, it may come as a surprise to you, but shields, shells and bark is somewhat better at getting X-rays or other cosmic radiation out of the way than same thickness of mere air or water would be. And the shells of shellfish are already shielded off by the waves above them.

"[citing hovind:] started off tiny and getting bigger and stronger and smarter [reacting:] ugh"

Would apply to the supposed evolution from amoeba or any creature that size. Would, except possibly for strength, apply to supposed evolution from Australopithecus Afarensis.

0:46 same video, Invention of Modern Science (somewhere between 1500 and 2000) and a Years of Life Expectancy statistics curve close to twenty years is shown. Well, if infant mortality is counted, medium life expectancy was lower, but for people surviving infancy and not getting killed in wars and epidemics life expactancy was pretty close to present one.

You make heavy weather out of fact that medium length has risen by six inches in industrialised countries last fifty or hundred years, conveniently forgetting that ... before that it had sunk. Also by a few inches. Might be the weather which went colder and reached a real ice peak in the years after thirty years war, now getting warmer again.

And of course in modern life expectancy you are not counting fetal death by voluntary abortion.

"[sth about the inventions that very recently helped increase life expactancy] ... which were evidently beyond our 'stronger' and 'smarter' forefathers."

1) Being capable of making an invention does not necessarily equal making it.
2) Who says these inventions were beyond the forefathers in the Land of Nod? Or in Atlantis if that was a continent? Noah may have had an Amish attitude about the top of technological achievement in Nod.

"Genes for largeness are gone, for whatever reason"

What if they were no legitimate species but rather pre-flood GMO's? In that case "genes for largeness" were not there in the first place either. Until some cooky scientist whack put them there from another organism which had more legitimate use of them - and even at that maybe less of them. Which would explain a possibly somewhat Amish attitude in Noah pretty well, as well as the fact that T Rex shows in only thirty exemplars. Not the fault of 65 million years of destruction but of being a GMO experiment gone wrong and scarce in the first place.

The creationist point about a hundred aminoacids in the right place, is not quite comparable to the chance of crystals having their atoms in a particular state. Granted that aminoacids would have to be in a state, but who says it would be anything like a state with a long string, and who says if it were the order of aminoacids on the string would make biological sense, i e be useful for a living creature?

Then there was your video with the slogan "respect for science" and in the very next video you knock down on quote mining. Well, Dawkins gave that phrase a specific meaning. He had stated what can schematically be referred to as "I grant a but I observe also b". He deems quote miners those who have quoted only a but neglected or never heard of b. Now, that creationist was mentioning and even quoting Isaac Newton. And just maybe, he was not in that sense quote mining Newton.

When did Rejection of Supernatural Explanations of Anything Become Part of Scientific Method? If Ever, That Is?
http://triv7quadriv.blogspot.fr/2012/10/when-did-rejection-of-supernatural.html

The question I pose in title is not answered in very much detail. I have not come across any date at which any country's scientific academies or societies said "from now on, supernatural explanations are not accepted for anything any more". I know that in Russia there was a marked difference between pre- and post-1917 science. I also know that Isaac Newton was not on the post-1917 side of Russian scientific standards. I do link to the source for my quotes, which is a documentary about Newton.

Did you say the scientific credentials of Newton were not shared by Creationists quoting him? What if Isaac Newton was a creationist rather than an atheist? And what about you hoping that the credentials of rocket scientists should rub off on you? And why play it with Bach? Were you hoping the credentials of that Christian Fundamentalist in musical genius should rub off on the rocket scientists?

Your case about avoiding snake oil salesman techniques in academic circles since an argument stands on its own merits becomes somewhat ludicrous when compared to your own snake oil salesman techniques in this series. So thank you a bunch for making it. If you feel free to use rhetoric to impress public of your video series, because they are not all academicians, why should he not have the same freedom?

"It has no place in the academic arena" is a prime example of rhetoric and scoffing presenting no scientific argument at all. But maybe you find you are only explaining things to laypeople, who might need an extra nudge for having no academic training. Guess what the audience of those creationist guys was?

As to your next example, some of the science books were precisely attributing the beauty of snow flakes (chrystals, not living creatures) to ... an infinite wisdom who knew how to fashion processes that breed chrystals. Obviously written by creationists, but to us your parallel argument is no parallel about "not really needing a designer".

Now, you claim there is one naturalistic explanation for life, called evolution. But in other instances you refuse to refer to "abiogenesis" as "evolution". And not just life but eyes and a few more things are not very convincingly explained by life and reproduction including a variable for variation and death and reproduction including a variable for selection. Not very convincingly at all.

Sorry if this is too rhetoric by the way! I am not trained in Natural Science Academics, and when I wrote my first academic essay (on Erasmus' de Conscribendis Epistolis) I was censored and had to rewrite it because it was too rhetoric.

And yes, we do believe God designed liquids in part to fit glasses and other things that make them drinkable without too much bending your body down. Also we believe they were created so as to fit perfectly around bodies. By the way, where except Earth have you found water in all three states of aggregation, especially liquid water?

Now, your example of "can it evolve" does not explain how life arose from things that cannot evolve because they do not reproduce. Whether a particular life form was designed or evolved, the argument that life itself was designed rather than evolved has not been given any satisfactory answer by you.

Yes, even unicellular beings can evolve. We call it microevolution, not because they are observed in microscopes (I have genuinely met that confusion) but because that is a kind of evolution which does not change much and does not explain the difference of tortoises from mammals. So, on your view, how did creatures able to reproduce and therefore evolve at least in microevolution arise from such that cannot do that?

Here is the video where I stop this list for now, due to library closing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKdfeP1sGIg&feature=channel&list=UL

[started from part 1 of series, and am back now]

One can of course add that thunderf00t gives a conspicuous graph of background radiation right now in US (360 mRem/year is US average. Of those 54% come from Radon, which is not uniformly present all over Earth, but either present in certain rocks (granite volcanic is bad, especially if on top of that you have an uranium mine in it) or in building materials, some of which very recent, from those rocks. Sweden banned a modern building material because it was precisely too rich in radon. X-rays meaning artificial X-rays from medical apparatus add 11% of US average. Also added very recently. Where those other 11% labelled "Internal" come from, I do not know. Nuclear medicine and consumer products treated with radiation are recent.

It seems the clearly natural sources for radiation are Cosmic 8% and Terrestrial 8%. Radon levels vary, 54% of 360 mRem/year being an average. I am not sure whether you find areas on earth with 0 radiation from radon, but you sure find areas with far less than 180 plus something mRem/year. Other, I know not. Internal I know not.

8+8=16, 11+1=12, 12+16=28. So the dose of radiation somewhere after the flood may well have been between sixteen and over 28% of present average dose in US. It seems pretty clear that choice of habitation plus choice of modernity can account for more than half the dose.

I think both cosmic and terrestrial radiation can have been turned on by God after the Flood. But if I were to account for cosmic rays reaching us less before flood by the water canopy theory (which I do not believe, but you are making publicity for it), it would account for a maximum of half the radiation reaching man immediately after the flood - depending on radon levels.

[source]

The US average is not the world average. And even in US, it is only average. Meaning that you have areas with higher levels too: maybe more than 360 mRem/year and radon accounting for more than 54% of it.

Some of the radon part and all of the nuclear medicine part, consumer products part, X-ray part come from modern high tech lifestyle. more infor on background radiation.

Oh, the internal radiation source seems to mean body internal. ⁴⁰K and ¹⁴C account for it, with one fifth from ¹⁴C. Which is in the atmosphere in the first place due to ... cosmic radiation! But those two percents would of course add up to the 8% directly from cosmic to the 10%, so that you have already taken into account.

Now, I am not sure about your science teacher. But some teachers do say something wrong and when challenged "oh, I was testing your attention". The cloudy days might have been that or might have been an intro to saying the X-rays are a little stopped on cloudy days, but there still are such.

A bit like the humour when I said in a title "I take it the gravitational constant is below zero ..." and only in the text added "... point zero zero one ...". When you cut that way, I cannot tell. If you attribute what you use correctly, you do not just attribute the video in general to Kent Hovind, by showing his face on it, you may for instance also link to it or show title in some other way. Some of us might like to check that out.

Well, will be back on this after watching another video by the very funny thunderf00t (the 00 are really not two O's, though they look so here, but two zeros).

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Audoux, Paris
St Serapion
14-XI-2012