More Shit For Creatards To Swallow

[Minimalist]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/04/scien...-our-past/

Scientists turn to 170,000-year-old Neanderthal DNA for clues to our past

[dyresand]

Yep they are shitting themselves and you know what they are going to say god put that there and or you guys made at up.
Interestingly enough some of us actually do have neanderthal DNA.

[The Valkyrie]

Unfortunately creationists are too stupid to recognise facts.

[Minimalist]

Still....they fear facts as a vampire fears dawn.

[Mothonis]

I wish Zalgo would make them apart of the Hive mind already.

[robvalue]

I remember this one "defence" against this sort of thing, I won't say who said it.

They said that our dating methods cannot accurately measure anything to more than 50,000 years. Therefor, nothing can actually be more than 50,000 years old.

Obviously the premise is nonsense, but I couldn't even get them to see the flaw in their "logic", that the age of something does not depend on our ability to measure its age.

[Minimalist]

You are dealing with idiots, Rob.

[robvalue]

Indeed. I can only wonder whether such people are really incapable of understanding such a point, or whether they just refuse to accept the obvious because it contradicts their imaginary reality. If it's the former, I feel very sorry for them. Not so much for the latter, although indoctrination can be considered diminished cognitive liability to an extent.

[Minimalist]

The latter.  They understand that science is the enemy of their bullshit...and they do so love bullshit.

We have already compared the benefits of theology and science. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To nearly all the children of men, reading and writing were unknown arts. The poor were clad in rags and skins -- they devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the necessities of to-day. Men in the middle ranks of life have more of the conveniences and elegancies than the princes and kings of the theological times. But above and over all this, is the development of mind. There is more of value in the brain of an average man of to-day -- of a master-mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago.
     These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They were not found in cathedrals or behind altars -- neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation and experience -- and for them all, man is indebted to man.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll, "God In The Constitution"

[Hatshepsut]

We have already compared the benefits of theology and science. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few... (Ingersoll)

I think Ingersoll's take on it simplistic. Theologians have never governed the world. They've had a function in legitimizing the political rulers who do govern the world, in western history most notably in connection with the divine right of kings. But the religious and political establishments in the West have always been separate. They were separate in most other societies as well, including Egypt: Islam's unification of spiritual leadership and state was actually an innovation, one which didn't last too long at that. The Galileo sideshow aside, religion didn't much interfere with the progress of science and technology either. Such renowned mathematicians and physicists as Renee Descartes, Simon Stevenius, and Isaac Newton were devout folks who spent more time on religious or philosophical rumination than on science. Religions have never opposed the introduction of new technologies from the wheel to the digital computer.

The emergence of people from their medieval huts was more a political than an anti-religious development. It did involve the reduction or abolition of traditional state subsidy of religion, yet it was the decline of birthright entitlement, the breaking of guilds and monopolies, and subsequent rise of a larger middle class, soon followed by mass production techniques which made goods cheaper, that has led to our current prosperity.

At least that's what my Inner Neanderthal is telling me.