Monday, September 8, 2014

@tgnoble cannot POSSIBLY be this stupid

He has to be trolling. At first he seems to be genuinely confused, but after much attempt to explain on my part, he becomes an apparent misinformation troll who is purposely speaking nonsense. But what gets me is, I might be wrong. He may be genuinely this stupid.

I first came across him discussing with other people that evolution fails to explain the origin of life. Of course, I tried to explain that evolution and biogenesis are two completely different things. That’s been tackled, of course. And then he goes to this…

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image What he’s asking about is this article, about the lengthy journey of fish to land dwellers. He of course thinks that the article says fish just suddenly went, GO GO GADGET FEET! and became puppies or rhinos or something. Sigh… it does not.

Since evolution works by the unguided selection process of the environment and other criteria, what most likely happened is that these particular fish were competing for a food source, but found that the food they were able to get was closer to the shore. And with each generation, the particular fish that were able to get farther up the shore were selected for survival against the ones who could not. Mudskippers show quite the result of this struggle, as they can still skip around on land but are clearly fish who swim.

Over time (and I mean a very long time), each generation of these fish had traits that helped it get more on the shore for more of the food growing on the land (probably autotroph material). What would really help them do so? Appendages. Mutations that helped those grow from previous motivational features on the fish became longer and, eventually, they wandered further onto land until the creatures also evolved better abilities to breathe the air.

Now it’s not at all unlike the selective breeding of dogs. Anybody who thinks that nothing ever evolves has never selectively bred dogs. Choosing the traits you want and dismissing the ones you don’t, for the duration of civilized culture, has changed wild wolves into so many different breeds of domesticated dogs that are incredibly diverse. Most of these can interbreed, but many will not just because of the differences. While this isn’t yet speciation, you can say it’s almost sub-speciation. But you also can say that they will not interbreed with wild wolves. Given the populations of wolves in the wild and the population of Canis lupis familiaris (the familiaris is the sub-species name) are separate, over time their populations will change enough that they will become genetically incapable of breeding. Ta da! Speciation!

But if you think evolution hasn’t happened until that moment, you’re wrong. Evolution was happening every single step of the way. It happens from each generation to the next, because allele frequencies of every trait we pass on change. By allele frequencies, I mean the frequencies with which the population of that species has this trait vs. that trait in the same allele (meaning different color of eyes, hair, different ratio of left- and right-handed people, different numbers of blood types A, or O, or B, etc.). Natural selection tends to whittle away some traits and favor others over long periods of time (measured in thousands of thousands of generations, or more).

In other words, it doesn’t happen AT ALL as @tgnoble is about to suggest it does:

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So you can clearly see where this is going. Straight to Stupidtown:

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Oh, and whinyville. No problem. I have a personal account I can use to continue this, although I never do this crossover with accounts. One is for this blog, and that one is for personal use. And while I’m being as clear as possible to have him understand what evolution actually is, you’ll see no ability to grasp it . . .  or at least, no apparent ability:

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Okay, why should I try to make this make sense to a senseless moron in 140 characters? So I try to give him a link to the very misconception he’s making, that an individual can evolve. And then I give him a link to a list of a bunch of misconceptions about evolution and why they’re wrong, just in case he’d like to read more and really learn something. Yeah, they’re from Berkeley, because those motherfuckers know science. I wanted to see if he was serious about these questions, or just an asshole who’s purposely being a dick. Aaaaaaaaand……………

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So he actually says all those misconceptions in the list are actually accurate about evolutionary theory! He actually says that fucking shit! And this guy says we fail at logic???

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Oh yeah. He’s being nothing but a trolling dick.

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No response of course. He blocked my other account too. I think the jury has come back unanimous. He’s a troll.

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