Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute lying on the TeeVee
Uploaded by: AronRa
Video Description:
I'm mirroring this video for DonExodus2, because I debated Casey Luskin briefly, until I proved he was lying on multiple points. Then he broke off the discussion saying that I was being mean to him. This is the same willfully ignorant shit-head who says that paternity tests don't work because if they did, they would challenge his religious nonsense. Now he's lying through his teeth on national TV. DonExodus2 caught him on it, as you can see, and the amoral bastiches at DI filed false -and illegal- DMCA against him. No. It ain't that easy.
Casey comments on Haeckel's embryos. Please see my video on the 13th foundational falsehood of creationism for more accurate information about that.
The Luskin/wrist bone comedy can be found here: pharyngula/2009/05/casey_luskin_smirking_liar.php
From New Scientist:
"As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that "New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong". Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not."
Tags for this video: DonExodus2 discovery institute creationism evolution intelligent design fox news haeckels embryos horizontal gene transfer casey luskin
Find more videos in the "People" category
See more videos uploaded by AronRa
| Ida Know | Answering AbdultheImpailler | 1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism |
 |  |  |
| The Texas Board of Indoctrination | Whaddya say Ray | Evidence Against Evolution (DiscoveryInstituteID mirror) |
 |  |  |
Share This Video:
Comments for this video: Show || Hide
Tell a friend:
Sometimes different molecules produce different phylogenetic trees, the anatomical data conflicts with the molecular data, it's unclear whether or not features of organisms are homologous or due to "parallel" evolution, in some cases there may be no discernable relationships, some examples of analogous features may seem too similar and too specific to have arisen by chance mutations and natural selection (at least it seems that way to me), fossils out of order, etc.
Google "Do Different Genes Mean Different Phylogenetic Trees?" Apparently the molecule cytocrhome B puts that cats and the whales in the wrong place relative to the primates. On that one, if they just moved the whales onto the same branch as the cats and then moved the tarsiers over a couples of branches it would be consistent, I think, so it's not devastating. And apparently they have some explanation, but it is a bit of a contradiction nevertheless.
It looks like another example would be the SlX1 and SlY1 genes in "catchfly flowers". Here's a quote:
Increasing evidence from DNA sequence data has revealed that phylogenies based on different genes may drastically differ from each other.........two parts of the same gene (SlX1/Y1) show conflicting phylogenies within Silene (Caryophyllaceae). SlX1 and SlY1 are sex-linked genes on the sex chromosomes of dioecious members of Silene sect. Elisanthe.
Just google "DNA conflicting phylogenetic trees". They may have done some sort of "meta-study" where looked at all the molecules and different trees to see just how common these conflicting phylogenies really are. If they're very rare compared to ones that don't conflict, then that seems more important than the question of whether they can explain the anomaly. Still, there's things like the so-called "Hox Paradox" which is considered to be problematic as far as I know.
The flower one might not be too serious because those genes still produce trees that place all of those plants within the same general grouping and the conflicts are closer to the species level, whereas the cytochrome B one involved entire orders of mammals being in the wrong place. Something that seems to be a bigger problem is sea urchins and starfish being more closely related to mammals than insects are, when insects and mammals seem to have greater body-plan similarity.
I accept common ancestry, but not necessarily the mechanisms of evolution, and I don't think that evolution is a very well understood thing. On the sea urchin thing, it's still not what we would expect given how different the body plan is for a sea urchin compared to a vertebrate.
What I mean is, I don't think we can claim to know that natural selection can really do what the theory requires it do. Nobody ever proved that it could and the scientists have been telling lies to the public because they don't want to admit that the whole thing is still a mystery. Google Fred On Everything Evolution. The guy's pretty naive, but he sums it up in a good way. With regard to sea urchins, how is a worm-like thing supposed to be transformed into a sea urchin?
I know that there are as many as nine different evolutionary mechanisms depending on how you count it. And they are all incapable of explaining how sea urchins and starfish evolved from an organism with bilateral symmetry. They can't explain how this change in body plan would occur as far as I know. I disagree when people say it's pretty much settled. I think it's still a mystery because the theory doesn't really explain what it purports to explain.
I'm not saying that natural selection doesn't occur, I'm just questioning whether or not it really has the power to do what evolutionary theory says it does (working in concert with the other evolutionary mechanisms of course). The small changes with finches don't prove the larger chances that take place among larger taxonomic categories of organisms.
I don't know the details of the whole finch thing. Apparently they played a role in the development of Darwin's thinking and there were about 13 species. And maybe a new one emerged sometime in the last 100 years or so? I wasn't clear on that. Nevertheless, to go from changes like that and extrapolate to changes like the development of lungs in amphibians is a totally unwarranted extrapolation. They don't know that known evolutionary mechanisms have the power to do that.
Also, they haven't necessarily isolated the genetic mechanisms responsible for the changes in the phenotype of the finch. Supposedly they know something about the developmental pathway that causes the beak to change size and/or shape and they know that calcium and at least one particular protein play a role, but beyond that, I don't think they really know all that much. It would be interesting to see if they did genetic studies by breeding finches.
What would be more impressive as a large change in the finches would be the behavioral changes that cause them to find different foods not just the fact that the beaks have different sizes or shapes and the two populations will no longer interbreed.