Although, actually, Darwin is literally dead

Oh, and to make it even funnier, the one real blog entry can't even get the physics right. It states that electrons are made up of quarks -- they aren't. Neutrons, protons, and gobs of other particles are made up of quarks, but electrons, muons, and taus are leptons, which aren't made from quarks.

Despite my having put my foot in my mouth in the comments there, I maintain that they're a bunch of maroons, and this is the most pathetic excuse for a blog carnival I have ever seen.

Pbtbtbtbbt, I say.

Mr. Myers, would you be able to answer a question? On another blog, a commenter said "At 8 weeks pregnant, my doctor placed a stethescope on my tummy and I could hear the babies heartbeat" This sounds very fishy to me. Could it be correct?

Mooser,

I'm no expect, but my son was a high-risk pregnancy monitored by almost biweekly ultrasound imaging. You definitely can see the pulsation of the embryonic heart on ultrasound at eight weeks. But it's pretty tiny -- looks a bit like a small blinking light. I suppose that the ultrasonic "stethoscopes" some obstetricians use might be able to pick it up if they aimed it just right. But you definitely aren't going to get anything but the maternal heartbeat and bowel sounds with a conventional stethoscope.

Creationist bait and switch: Duane T. Gish, a retired official of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, said, "This alleged transitional fish will have to be evaluated carefully." But he added that he still found evolution "questionable because paleontologists have yet to discover any transitional fossils between complex invertebrates and fish, and this destroys the whole evolutionary story." from the NYTimes.

As best I understand their bizarre logic, creationists typically posit that there are no transitional fossils, since there have been no transitions in the past 6000 years. To disprove this, you do not need to find all transitional fossils, you need to find any transitional fossil, of which paleontologists have descovered many. Creationists can only argue within the bounds of logic that there are some transitions without fossils, and I doubt that this is really the point they want to make, since for them that leaves the glass very half empty.

Um...am I completely off-base here, or is the second essay a satire that this Radaractive guy didn't notice? Not only is the author's name 'Jon Swift', but the first paragraph reference to Kubrick's 2001 as a "movie that tried to explain evolution" is suspect at best. Thoughts?

Yup, we saw 2 pixels moving at a 7 weaks echo too.

oops...now I feel dumb...didn't notice your first bullet point, PZ. ah well, thought i was clever and look what i got...

paleontologists have yet to discover any transitional fossils between complex invertebrates and fish

I thought that lancelets were considered the transition between vertibrates and invertibrates. Am I wrong or is he?

A ton of laughs in the comments section over there. Radioactive claims he's got loads of "irreducibly complex designs" he's keeping under wraps because no one has yet explained the flagellum. When another commenter tried to explain, his response was:

On a personal note, I do get puzzled sometimes when very intelligent and reasonable people are unwilling to even consider supernatural answers.

Yeah, they're called scientists.

GAAAAAAAAAAAACK! I am horrified that the article that claims "we know that electrons are made up of quarks" is apparently NOT a satire!

Now I have to rinse my soul off with PBS.

Yeesh.

From the last link:

Moreover, as one with degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering and a lifelike career in science in one form or the other, I just cannot accept the claims of the hardcore Darwinists who believe that God, if he exists, had nothing to do with the growth of life here on earth.

What is a lifelike career in science? Inquiring minds want to know.

Y'know, sometimes it is embarassing to be an engineer. Most of us aren't kooks, but the ones who are give the rest of us a bad name.

What is a lifelike career in science? Inquiring minds want to know.

Well, a typical usage of the word "lifelike" would mean:

Artificial, but a sufficiently good facsimile of the real thing that a non-expert can't tell the difference.

That piece on the Wollemi pine is astonishingly idiotic. I've never seen a more blatant deus ex nihilo argument than to say "it all makes sense if you ignore everything remotely resembling rational thought and simply accept that the noahnic flood is responsible."

I'm absolutely speechless.

"It's quite a challenge [determining the number of creators]," Dr. Pootle said. "We know it's more than one--that's incontrovertible. The problem is nailing precisely how many creators the universe actually has." Well, if those creators be makin' eye-babies with each other, the number of creators could very well exceed the number of created entities! And what then? Big Crunch, or All To Brunch? If the Designers come to vastly outnumber the Designed, how solvent does religion become, and can I serve on one of these committees? Because I know a great place for Dim Sum.

Alright, alright already!

So I screwed up a bit. I noticed a link to the carnival on the Pooflinger's blog early this morning and wanted to whip off a comment about it for my own blog before getting to work. (See what happens when I blog in a hurry?) I did notice the Discovery Institute piece but didn't read a couple of others.

The really funny thing, though, is that Radaractive apparently didn't initially realize that one of the pieces was a satire poking fun at ID; he thought Jon Swift was poking fun at Darwin and didn't realize his mistake until later in the comments.

Oh, I forgot, the Skeptics' Circle is also coming up again next week, hosted once again by the Pooflinger himself, who did such a fantastic job last time. There are usually about three or four times the number of entries as were in the "Darwin Is Dead" Carnival, and, unlike that carnival, the Skeptics' Circle entries, like the Tangled Bank entries, are almost always uniformly of excellent quality.

Creationist bait and switch: Duane T. Gish, a retired official of the Institute for Creation Research in San Diego, said, "This alleged transitional fish will have to be evaluated carefully." But he added that he still found evolution "questionable because paleontologists have yet to discover any transitional fossils between complex invertebrates and fish, and this destroys the whole evolutionary story."

What a bunch of crap! The fact that we haven't found every single transitional fossil yet destroys the entire explanation?? Is our knowledge of Roman history all wrong because there are bits and pieces missing in the archeological record? Give me a $#@!ing break! Of course we all know that if we did have a perfect, complete set of transitional fossils for the entire history of life, that wouldn't convince them one iota.

And anyway, if missing bits and pieces completely destroy the theory, what's questionable about it?

"Is our knowledge of Roman history all wrong..." Cheer up, Leon, you would love the lecture that our museum is sponsoring tonight: "Ghostwriting or Lying in Stone? Can We Believe Roman Building Inscriptions?" Sit down, creationists, history has "gaps." Must mean there were no Romans, right? ;-)

LOL! Yeah--Pompeii and Herculaneum were the victims of the Flood, not some preposterous eruption of ash and liquid rock from beneath the earth, caused by the movement of tectonic plates.

paleontologists have yet to discover any transitional fossils between complex invertebrates and fish

I thought that lancelets were considered the transition between vertibrates and invertibrates. Am I wrong or is he? -RCP

Both, actually. From Wikipedia:

Cephalochordata is traditionally seen as a sister subphylum to the vertebrates, and are grouped together as a sister group (sometimes called notochordata) to the simpler still urochordates. But newer research shows this is not the case. It is the urochordates who are the sister group of the vertebrates, while cephalochordata is the most original and primitive subhylum of the chordates. The asymmetric nature of juveniles is unique to the cephlochordates, and proves that lancelets do not contain an ancestor of the vertebrates.

In other words, extant lancelets are generally held to be very similar morphologically to the early transitional forms between invertebrates and fish, but they split off as a separate clade and have been evolving separately for...what, 400 million years? They just haven't changed much in all that time. ^.^

I see things somewhat differently than they do, I guess. "Darwin" of the "Darwin is Dead Carnival" title refers, of course, to the amazing, elegant, unifying, explanatory, useful, predictive, applicable, clarifying, integrating, justifying, extrapolating, elucidating, enlightening, conceptual, theoretical, practical, guiding, broadly encompassing, broad, deep, wide, and just plain wonderful theory of evolution, not the truly great scientist himself who is, of course, in fact, quite dead. Over the nearly 150 years since the publication of "Origin of Species," millions of pieces of data have created a mountain of support for evolution and since new supporting evidence is published almost daily, evolution is not only alive and well, but its life, energy and vitality is constantly reinforced.

I contracted the Darwin bug myself about 40 years ago, so I suppose by now it's what one might call chronic. My affliction might be easier to eliminate if I could find just one anachronistic fossil or even one verifiably unevolvable biochemical pathway. I'm not holding out hope, mind you, but it is nice to see that the scientific community is constantly looking for a cure for my malady. Every year, scientists themselves conduct untold numbers of experiments which could demonstrate the error of Darwin's ways. But, it's been almost a century and a half and nothing even looks promising as a potential disproof of evolution. Now, for myself, I've come to accept it, take it in stride, so to speak, learned to live with it, but it still provides some comfort to know that science itself will never stop trying to disprove that gnarly evolution.

I call shenanigans.

this "radaractive" individual is too stupid to actually be for real. His creationist weblog is obvoiusly a put on.

this post he linked to, however is brilliant.

Thanks for all the visitors you sent my way. And thank for catching my "lifelike" scientist typo.

Thanks, too, for catching me on the electron/quark thing. You are correct -- for every quark there is a corresponding lepton; the electron corresponds to the up quark and the electron neutrino to the down quark.

Stingray:  a blog for salty Christians

this "radaractive" individual is too stupid to actually be for real.

Oh no no no. You can never tell.

The appropriate response to a fundie intoning "Darwin is dead" is "Jesus is dead". Just have a bullet-proof vest close by.

Thanks, Idlemind, for your response. I didn't get a chance to check back until today. That's pretty much what I thought- she was listening to her own body sounds.