(December 14, 2013 at 1:19 pm)Chas Wrote: Why do y'all keep Statler and ronedee around? What do they contribute here except incredible ignorance, delusion, and stupidity?

(December 14, 2013 at 11:57 am)Minimalist Wrote: Try reading Richard Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth." His explanations of evolution are far superior to mine.

(December 14, 2013 at 1:23 pm)Esquilax Wrote:

(December 14, 2013 at 1:19 pm)Chas Wrote: Why do y'all keep Statler and ronedee around? What do they contribute here except incredible ignorance, delusion, and stupidity?

Quite simply: they don't break the rules. We aren't about to kick someone out just for having an opinion we find stupid.

(December 14, 2013 at 4:27 pm)Chas Wrote:

(December 14, 2013 at 1:23 pm)Esquilax Wrote: Quite simply: they don't break the rules. We aren't about to kick someone out just for having an opinion we find stupid.

Meh. It's not about opinions.

They don't discuss - it's only the appearance of discussion. They repeat the same shit over and over, never actually listening, never actually learning.

They're just less obvious than, say, DOS. But they are no different in substance.

Quote:Why do y'all keep Statler and ronedee around

(December 14, 2013 at 6:35 pm)Minimalist Wrote:

Quote:Why do y'all keep Statler and ronedee around

They serve as the bad examples.

(December 11, 2013 at 4:12 pm)Tonus Wrote:

(December 11, 2013 at 3:43 pm)Crossless1 Wrote: Mutation is random. Natural selection is not. Whoever taught you about evolution did a poor job.

That is how I was "taught" evolution by the JWs. My impression of the theory of evolution for a long time was that a mutation would appear (like a fully formed eyeball) and simply be carried over to each successive generation until you eventually had a new organism. So a lizard would be born with a beak, and successive generations would be born with beaks until there was one that was born with feathers, and they'd have beaks and feathers until one was born with its arms shaped into wings... and so on.

You can understand why such a person would wonder "why aren't there any transitional forms in the fossil record?" I think that many of them are waiting for the discovery of a fossil lizard with a beak, and of a fossil lizard with a beak and feathers, and so on. They cannot envision a scenario where evolution would occur aside from that. The "croco-duck" thing is a perfect example of that. There is this belief that evolution entails massive, wholesale changes on an unimaginable scale (such as a duck being born with a crocodile's head, or vice-versa) and that without those "transitional forms" evolution is simply bad science that shows just how desperate secular scientists are.

It's not that we believed that this could actually happen! On the contrary, it seemed as preposterous to us as it should to you. And we wondered how it was possible that people fell for such obvious silliness. The only possible explanation was that the desire to reject god simply overrode any sense of reasonableness. In other words, SATAN.

And then I learned how evolution really worked and... D'OH!!!

wikipedia Wrote:Oviraptor is a genus of small Mongolian theropod dinosaur, first discovered by the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, and first described by Henry Fairfield Osborn, in 1924. Its name is Latin for 'egg taker' or "egg seizer", referring to the fact that the first fossil specimen was discovered atop a pile of what were thought to be Protoceratops eggs, and the specific name philoceratops means "lover of ceratopsians", also given as a result of this find. In his 1924 paper, Osborn explained that the name was given due to the close proximity of the skull of Oviraptor to the nest (it was separated from the eggs by only 4 inches or 10 centimetres of sand). However, Osborn also suggested that the name Oviraptor "may entirely mislead us as to its feeding habits and belie its character".[1] In the 1990s, the discovery of nesting oviraptorids like Citipati proved that Osborn was correct in his caution regarding the name. These finds showed that the eggs in question probably belonged to Oviraptor itself, and that the specimen was actually brooding its eggs, when it died at the nest.

Oviraptor lived in the late Cretaceous period, during the late Campanian stage about 75 million years ago; only one definitive specimen is known (with associated eggs), from the Djadokhta Formation of Mongolia, though a possible second specimen (also with eggs) comes from the northeast region of Inner Mongolia, China, in an area called Bayan Mandahu.[2]

Quote:Tiktaalik looks like a cross between the primitive fish it lived amongst and the first four-legged animals (a group called "tetrapods" from tetra-, meaning four, and -pod, meaning foot. Actually, all animals that descended from these pioneer amphibians, including us, can be called tetrapods).