Sighing and Head Shaking

This one just astounded me with it's breathtaking inanity and illogic. Their basic understanding is true, matter + energy can sometimes create life. Any sense they try to make stops after that statement. Peanut butter is arbitrarily selected to represent all matter and shown as proof that evolution can not happen since new life is not being "created". To clearly state the two main problems with this: 1.) Peanut butter is not relatively close to the type of matter thought to have been in the "primordial soup", and 2.) Theoretically, what they're stating could be happening. New life could be in millions of jars of peanut butter right now, but it would be microscopic in size. Absolutely nothing you could see with the naked eye. The point where he reaches the zenith of the argument and opens the peanut butter to show "no new life", is like watching a seven year olds bad science experiment. 

"And as we can see the cooties have now transferred from Jill the stinkyfacegirl, to Billy poopoohead, proving that cooties scientifically exist!"

What the fuck? Five minutes reading this on Wikipedia about the Miller-Urey experiment could have explained the problems with their argument. If you want an even better explanation of how it works, check out the second episode of Cosmos on Hulu. It starts at about 47:42 and does an excellent job of talking about what needs to happen for amino acids and dna to develop and doesn't involve peanut butter, jelly, nutella, any grocery stores, or bullshit.

Peanut butter video really managed to highlight what I hate about these people and their bullshit. I don't care what you want to believe. Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Xenu, Joseph Smith, whatever. Everyone has the right to believe whatever they want regardless of the evidence for or against it no matter what other people think of it. When you try to claim that your ideas are science and need to replace the peer reviewed and tested material, regardless of the fact that little to no evidence exists to support your claim, that's when I call bullshit. Using half assed notions of science, illogic, and rationalizations may help you to make your beliefs jive with contrary evidence that science has for evolution and the big bang, but don't ever go to a school board and try to tell people that kids shouldn't learn about Evolution because it's "just a theory" (it's a fact), and that all scientific theories should be given equal weight in the classroom. That could be true if "science" ever entered into their arguments, which it rarely if ever does. 

Finally, I would like a tip of the hat to Bad Astronomy for mentioning on his blog that Cosmos was available for free on Hulu.

-Lyell

New Cartoon: The Peanut Butter Solution

Here it is in all its physically impossible glory: a video that makes Ray Comfort look reasonable.

Finished Recording

Wallace and I just finished recording audio for the latest edition of the finches. Every time we do one of these I am simply astounded how creationists plaster over the gaping holes in their logic. This video is a perfect case in point. As many stupid things as I hear when we're looking at videos to finch, there are so many that still make me drop my jaw due to sheer inanity. If you can stomach it, watch the original source material for the video when it comes out. It's only about two minutes long, but what the stupid lacks in length, it makes up in density.

-Lyell

Update on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 09:15AM by Lyell

I forgot to mention last night, this one has more swearing than typical and as such I have to categorize it as NSFW. Watch at your own risk. Unless your boss is cool with swearing, then go for it.

-Lyell

Yes, We Do Know About the Audio Problems

Hello everyone! This is the inaugural post on what will become The Darwin Finches homepage. First of all, we would like to thank everyone who has given us support from the cartoons we've posted so far, we appreciate your encouragement. We will continually strive to keep the cartoons coming out as consistently as we can, our goal for the present is about one cartoon a week.

The Darwin Finches are still very much a work in progress, and we appreciate all of your constructive criticism on what we can do to improve the quality of our cartoons. Speaking of quality, as the title states, we do in fact know about the audio problems which plague our work. If you check the progression of the cartoons, you should notice some slight improvements in the sound quality as we tweaked around with things. For the latest Berlinski video, we thought we had ironed out all of these problems. We used a better area for our recording, we worked hard on the mixing, and what was on our computer sounded perfectly mixed between the source material and our own snide commentary. Then we loaded it into YouTube to find out that it sounded like he was whispering, and we recorded our voices in a subway station men's room with the microphones inside of our mouths. Hopefully next time around we'll have those issues straightened out.

If there had to be an audio problem I'm glad it turned out in our favor instead of in his. Having listened to that pretentious asshole spouting off arguments from authority and an insane cow to whale "quantitative analysis" once was bad enough, to subject others to that would count as torture in my eyes. The worst part of this whole thing is watching and re-watching the drivel that comes out of these morons mouths, and listening to it again and again as we record and write jokes over it. Logical fallacies, pseudo-science, and general idiocy abound so much in these videos that during the writing process it can get hard to decide what to make fun of and what there just isn't time for. 

-Lyell