By the way, Genie Scott can sing lead on “Farther Along” with the best of ‘em, knows all the words to that and any other gospel song you want to mention.

Vyoma said:
“While I can’t prove it, I found it very suspicious that a school bus was picking up passengers who were clearly not school-age after the forum ended. We have numerous evangelical churches here in Tallahassee, and it’s likely that one of them used this bus to ship a number of fundamentalists to the the forum.”

I was on that bus, unless there was another one. The occupants (including me) were members of the University Research Magazine Association (URMA). URMA was a co-sponsor of the Vigil After Dover, which was scheduled to coincide with our annual meeting. Eugenie Scott hung out with us on Thursday evening.

Creationist antievolution in all of its many guises relies upon falsehoods. Telling falsehoods is evil. As Blaise Pascal said, “The abuse of truth should be as much punished as the introduction of falsehood.”

I hope that is clear enough for “Darwiniana”.

In Q’s particular case, he was peddling the falsehood that his question made sense and was beyond the capacity of the panel to effectively respond to.

For all we know this guy was a stooge set up for the mainstream evolutionists.

So some guy asked a rambling question; this proves…what?

Actually, I think there is something to that claim. I think that the professional antievolutionists and evolution deniers make a livelihood of fostering ignorance of the sort that makes people like Q into stooges, so that when they confidently trot out the “magic bullets” that the professionals peddle, they fall flat on their face.

I tend to think of SciCre argumentation, and even some of the ID argumentation, as a search for a “magic bullet”. By this, I don’t mean it in the sense that Ehrlich did when searching for a cure for syphilis. I mean it in the sense of werewolf movies. There, the magic bullet is simply a silver slug that will destroy the lycanthrope on contact. Those wielding the magic bullet need invest no other effort in dealing with the lycanthrope, are not required to be pure in spirit, and certainly have no need to *understand* lycanthropy in any deep sense. Similarly, the SciCre “professionals” are engaged in the peddling of “magic bullets”, which retain their magic only so long as they aren’t used on real lycanthropes. The magic bullet users, as Scott relates, remain secure in their faith that the evil lycanthropes can be held at bay or vanquished, right up until the time the magic bullet is fired — and is found to have lost its virtue.

Instead of magic bullets like “too little moon dust” or “materialistic philosophy”, more good would come of trying to understand what exactly evolutionary biology is. As it is, creationist belief has tended more and more to resemble evolutionary biology. In little more than a century and a half, we have seen a change from general adherence to the doctrine of special creation to a range of beliefs, at the most different from evolutionary biology, creation of each separate “kind” (which when defined at all, tends to be defined such that the evolutionist term “clade” comes close to fitting the concept), and at the least different, a belief in physical common descent but separate imbuement of spirit.
(Source)

I’d modify this previous statement by not quibbling over any difference between SciCre and ID argumentation, since further study has shown those to have a superset/subset relationship.

What does this incident prove? To me, it shows that “level of confidence” does not equal “level of knowledge”. The question was not merely “rambling”; it was deeply incoherent. “Aping” as a term means copying behavior from observation. Q appears to have been “aping” what he thought of as scientific discourse without any apparent understanding of how it actually is conducted.

I appear to have discovered the source of Q’s “10^9 km3″ of primordial soup:
http://www.veritas-ucsb.org/library/origins/quotes/OL.html

He is using a quote from:
“Stephen J Mojzsis, Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, and Gustaf Arrhenius,
Before RNA and After: Geophysical and Geochemical Constraints on Molecular Evolution
Chapter 1 of The RNA World: Second Edition, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1999, p 7″

In which the author is discussing the dilution of biomolecules in seawater. The funniest thing is how Q confuses this concept with collision probability of HYDROGEN atoms??

Obviously, the kinetics of the reactions of abiogenesis are concentration-dependent, and that is why the substrate-bound theories (surface theories involving clays or FeS) are much more palatable to chemists. Still, Q and others must consider the relative diffusion of molecules in seawater, if we place them in proximity to one another underneath the wave action layer. Depending on thermal currents and such, the diffusion away from one another will not occur at a rate which justifies using even a fraction of the entire volume of the ocean as the dilution factor. It may take hours for the distance between the molecules to separate them in a volume as large as a few liters. Diffusion in liquids is much slower than in gases, as collisions are increased. Temperature is the major consideration, and deep water is damn cold. Thus, kinetic motion of the particles is quite slow, thus, diffusion is quite slow.

It appears kinetics is what Q was going for here–if we have two atoms in some large volume, what is the likelihood they will collide to form a molecule? He wants us to then extrapolate this to the entire genome (as if that was how it was formed–by random collisions), I’m guessing he wants us to do it atom-by-atom for every molecule in 3 Gbp of DNA.

It just sounds like this guy pulled random quotes from the internet, and didn’t know how to combine them to make a coherent point.

He obviously missed that after replication is possible, selection occurs to non-randomly build genomes. He also missed that there is no need to form biomolecules atom-by-atom.

Q missed a lot of things. Including his brain.

I was at the FSU panel. This might be a niggling point, but the moderator’s name was Deborah Blum, not Patricia.

Also, for those who want to view archived video of the entire forum discussion, including this young nut-job’s efficient demonstration of his sheer ignorance, it’s online at http://mediasite.oddl.fsu.edu/mediasite/viewer/?peid=d6bd1be5-dfbd-4d9d-9bec-ac646c24217d

I’d also like to note that there were a number of creationists in the audience, although only two of them made it to the microphones for the Q&A. While I can’t prove it, I found it very suspicious that a school bus was picking up passengers who were clearly not school-age after the forum ended. We have numerous evangelical churches here in Tallahassee, and it’s likely that one of them used this bus to ship a number of fundamentalists to the the forum. There were rumors of some kind of protest against it circulating, but there were no protestors outside. The event was very well-publicized locally.