Saturday, August 29, 2009
All Hands on Deck!
Ya gotta love creationists!If there is some way to twist facts so as to mislead, they'll find it. Today's example is from Bill Belew, a particularly dense example who blogs at Examiner.com. As seems to be frequently the case with Belew, he doesn't really blog but cuts and pastes, which is just as well, since the few examples of his own writing that I've seen tend to be incoherent in the extreme.
Today's pastee is one Andrew McIntosh, a Reader in Combustion Theory, Department of Fuel and Energy, University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, who penned an article at the website of Creation Ministries International (which is the breakaway organization from Answers in Genesis that couldn't stand Ken Ham anymore than the rest of us). There is, of course, no one better than an expert in combustion theory to go to for an than explanation of biology.
After waxing poetic about the "complexity of the life cycle of creatures such as the butterfly (caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly) and the dragonfly (water nymph to dragonfly)," McIntosh delivers this:
There are no half-formed butterflies in the fossil record. They are similar to modern ones—fully formed and ready to go!
Naturally, given the ubiquity of fossil butterflies, if there was a transitional, you'd have expected to have found one already! The things literally litter the ground and are a serious threat to pets and small children ... right?
Well, no. As of last year, when the Florida Museum of Natural History held its "ButterflyFest," which included "four rare butterfly fossils not normally on public display" because they must be protected from excessive light, the accompanying materials pointed out that "the specimens are four of [only] about 50 known fossil butterflies in the world," despite the fact that they are thought to have evolved in the Late Cretaceous Period, 65 to 70 million years ago.
If someone held a gun to your head and demanded on pain of death that you name a creature that you have a non-zero chance of finding a fossil of but, nonetheless, that you'd have the least chance to find a transitional fossil of, it would be hard to imagine a better choice than butterflies.1
If you want your deck stacked, creationists are the people to see.
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1 If you want to see the transitional fossils we have found, the Talk Origins Archive has a handy, though probably not up-to-date, list.
.
Well, no. As of last year, when the Florida Museum of Natural History held its "ButterflyFest," which included "four rare butterfly fossils not normally on public display" because they must be protected from excessive light, the accompanying materials pointed out that "the specimens are four of [only] about 50 known fossil butterflies in the world," despite the fact that they are thought to have evolved in the Late Cretaceous Period, 65 to 70 million years ago.
If someone held a gun to your head and demanded on pain of death that you name a creature that you have a non-zero chance of finding a fossil of but, nonetheless, that you'd have the least chance to find a transitional fossil of, it would be hard to imagine a better choice than butterflies.1
If you want your deck stacked, creationists are the people to see.
_______________________________________
1 If you want to see the transitional fossils we have found, the Talk Origins Archive has a handy, though probably not up-to-date, list.
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