5/23/09

Ida, the Missing Link, Fossils and the Gospel of Judas

FYI: this post has been moved here.

5 comments:

  1. Why it was not actually released on his birth date (when Kyle Butt and Dan Baker debated) has me flummoxed; perhaps the books and DVDs were not ready yet.More likely, you're flummoxed because you're clueless about science and how its done. Papers get published when they've passed review and then come up in the queue. Look and you'll see that many journals have an "accepted for publication" date, and a publication date for papers. They often differ by months.

    Why you quote Moskowitz quoting other people seems silly when all you have to do is look at the original paper: "Note that Darwinius masillae, and adapoids contemporary with early tarsioids, could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates evolved, but we are not advocating this here, nor do we consider either Darwinius or adapoids to be anthropoids."

    It might be more interesting for you to write about why you think her confusion is so important. I think that would explain more about the credulous and biased Christian mind than what you have here.

    Oh, and by the way, what has a long-dead primate have to do with atheism?

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  2. MaskedMarauder,
    Thanks for the comment and please attempt to pay attention to the posts as I do not have time to waste on complaints ex nihilo.

    How do you know that it was not released due to the peer review process?
    You do not and I do not either—thus, my sarcastic speculation.

    How is it silly to quote Moskowitz quoting other people when their various statements do not solely amount to the quote you provided?

    As to your question, “what has a long-dead primate have to do with atheism?”
    Nothing—just like science. AiD occasionally posts points of interest on the fringes of what may interest atheists and theists.

    aDios,
    Mariano .

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  3. It's actually the demon-seed love child of Piltdown Man and Lucy. Better yet, I think it's that creature that tried to rape Sigourney Weaver in the Sci-Fi flick "Alien".

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  4. How do you know that it was not released due to the peer review process?
    You do not and I do not either—thus, my sarcastic speculation.
     
    If you had bothered to read the paper you would know that the paper was accepted for publication 58 days after submission, which was itself about a month after Darwin's birthday. It wasn't published before or on Darwin's birthdate because it wasn't completed until after that date. Your needless flumoxization of yourself seems just cheap theatrics to me.

    Your speculation is, as you say, baseless in fact and so your sarcasm is just baseless character assassination, the dominant form of christian apologetics these days, apparently.

    Scepticism does not require sarcasm. That you choose to be intentionally bitter and derogatory toward people you don't know, writing about things you don't understand, and based on no evidence, vividly reminds me why I wouldn't want to be a christian even if I did believe in your fairytale hero.

    AiD occasionally posts points of interest on the fringes of what may interest atheists and theists. 
    Why do you think gratuitous character assassination, even if it is of interest, should be indulged? I don't remember that in the Beatitudes.

    How is it silly to quote Moskowitz quoting other people when their various statements do not solely amount to the quote you provided? 
    Because, the quotes she uses (and you, derivatively) appears to be a criticism of the press coverage of an event They do not address the substance of the paper itself as the provided quote indicated and your pile-o-quotes dissembles. Your going out of your way to be anti-informative is very silly indeed, in my opinion.

    Compare what you offered with more competent, responsible and informative reporting. For example, this piece in the Wall Street Journal summarizes it without vituperation or malice: She [Ida] is "a representative of an ancestor group that gave rise to higher primates," said Jens Franzen of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, who helped analyze the fossil. However, he stopped short of calling the animal a direct ancestor of humans. "She's not our great-great-great-grandmother, but our great-great-great-aunt."I do not have time to waste on complaints ex nihilo. 
    Perhaps if you aspired to something more substantive in your writing than merely mining the internet for voluminous and undigested quotes superficially hostile to science there would be less nihilo here for you to defend and you wouldn't be so pressed for time.

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