May 15, 2015 | David F. Coppedge

Friday Funnies: Evo-Comics

Not every Darwinian explanation is useless. Some of them can function as entertainment.

“Human ancestors had tentacles.” Your great-great-….-grandparents were frond-like Ediacaran creatures, says PhysOrg. “By virtue of the fact that there are tentacles among the two main taxons of bilaterally symmetrical animals, it is logical to assume that the common ancestor also had them,” a Muscovite evolutionist says, displaying her grasp of logic. “It means that the common ancestor of chordate animals, including people, also had tentacles.” And the common ancestor of the Millennium Falcon is Lego blocks, too; no intelligence allowed.

“Ocean bottom microbes are our long-lost relatives.” Ever traced your family tree with software? Perhaps you didn’t go back far enough, or a single-celled organism on the sea floor would be in it. New Scientist is raving over the thrill of discovering our long-lost relatives. “SO THAT’S where they’ve been hiding. An entirely new group of organisms discovered at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean are our closest simple-celled relatives ever found.” Some of us look just like them, too: round, and transporting little bubble-like vesicles. Reaction to this “truly remarkable, landmark discovery” varies from mild skepticism to “we were really blown away” by it. Speaking of their brains, that may be true. Giving it a name (“Loki”) might help (BBC News). Even the venerable AAAS crashed this party.

“Tortoise approach works best—even for evolution.”  PhysOrg starts this comic with silhouetted figures from the Human March of Progress from ape to man. (Didn’t Henry Gee blow that icon away over a decade ago?—see 12/14/02). Speaking of bacteria again, the article begins, “When it comes to winning evolutionary fitness races, the tortoise once again prevails over the hare.” It’s just about which microbes can migrate faster than others, but the authors justify it with profound promises: “Understanding this effect is important, especially for understanding the evolution of disease, reducing the evolution of antibiotic resistance and predicting how populations respond to climate change.” Maybe that last appeal will bring in more funding.

“Researchers discover missing link in the evolution of complex cells.” Ah, the “missing link” meme has not outworn its usefulness, even though orthogenesis is long dead as a mode of evolution. We’re just evolved microbes, the article from Uppsala University begins: “The study provides a new understanding of how, billions of years ago, the complex cell types that comprise plants, fungi, but also animals and humans, evolved from simple microbes.

“‘Dino-chickens’ reveal how the beak was born.” It’s a bird; it’s a dinosaur; it’s dino-chicken! Nature joins all the other news outlets (e.g., PhysOrg) that jumped onto an announcement that evolutionists at the U of Chicago created birds with deformed beaks by altering their genes, claiming the result was a throwback to dinosaur days. Beak air-full. “We’re never going back to the actual dino-chicken or whatever it is,” one of the Darwinians admitted. Whatever it was, Casey Luskin responded to this claim in Evolution News & Views.

“Watch: Cave-Climbing Fish Found—Is It Evolution in Action?” A catfish that can climb cave walls for a bit is certainly a novelty, but is it evolution? National Geographic teases readers with that possibility. “Evolution is a process that’s constantly at work,” one Darwinian says. The fish may become adapted to the “dark side” of cave life. “It’s an exciting possibility,” he says. Are you excited? Watch! Let’s see if the fish evolves the ability hammer pitons into the rock.

“Lower back pain linked to chimpanzee spine shape.” Your inner chimp is responsible for your back pain, the BBC News claims. Apparently, though, not all of us are fully evolved: “Evolution is not perfect, so over many thousands of years humans have not all adapted in the same way.” No one seems to have asked if the chimpanzees have lower back pain, living with that posture all the time.

“Malaria continues to select for sickle cell trait in Central Africa.” Here’s the all-powerful force of natural selection, that brought forth humans from the womb of microbes, at work, according to PNAS: “this study shows that P. falciparum malaria continues to exert strong selective pressure in favor of the sickle cell allele.” Perhaps this is how the FBI exerts strong selective pressure in favor of criminals with no fingerprints.

“From James Taylor to Taylor Swift: Music evolves like biological organisms.” You may not (or may) realize it, but music is the product of blind, unguided processes of mutation and selection, according to Science Magazine. “In the early 1990s, rap took over the radio: Songs by Snoop Dogg and Jay Z played everywhere,” John Bohannon writes. “Was this a musical revolution or merely the result of a gradual change in tastes over time? Researchers say they’re now able to answer such questions, thanks to the largest data-driven study of pop music ever undertaken. Applying evolutionary theory to this data set, they say, could settle several debates that have raged over pop music for decades.” Your tax dollars at work. Evolutionists treated “the statistical traits shared among songs like biological traits” and found, surprisingly, that music does not evolve by Darwinian gradualism. Bohannon’s ending paragraph is a classic:

This is rigorous,” says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a data scientist at Harvard University and Palantir Technologies, which is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, who was lead author of a 2010 Science paper that kicked off the study of culture through massive data sets. “More researchers need to take this approach.” One of the findings that stands out, he says, is that pop music shows a pattern from biological evolution known as punctuated equilibrium, in which periods of gradual change are separated by explosions of complexity. The most famous example in geological history is the Cambrian explosion, a sudden, massive increase in biodiversity in the fossil record 542 million years ago. “There are differences, of course,” he says, “since biological evolution has the direct parent-offspring relationship, and we don’t know the mechanisms even in biology. So we have to be careful.

Senator Tom Coburn, we need you back! (10/29/14)

Refresher course: For those who might be laughing at all this, Live Science just walked in like a stern teacher whacking the ruler on the desk, bringing the students to order. “Despite the wealth of evidence from the fossil record, genetics and other fields of science, some people still question its validity,” Ker Than writes, after telling a whale of a tale about whale evolution. Who could these people possibly be? “Some politicians and religious leaders denounce the theory, invoking a higher being as a designer to explain the complex world of living things, especially humans.” Then his capstone argument is that all scientists agree evolution is true. Say—what’s that the teacher drew on the blackboard? Why, of course; it’s the March of Man, exhibit A as proof of evolution.

Despite advances that have allowed humans to profoundly alter our environment, natural selection continues to work on our species.

Ah, yes. We hope you laughed yourself silly with the Friday Funnies. Notice a few things. (1) If there was ever any doubt that evolutionists teach microbes-to-man evolution, the evidence is right there in the first four examples. (2) Icons of evolution, like the March of Man, never die, even decades after they are exposed as frauds.  (3) Darwinians can stare falsification (like the Cambrian Explosion) in the face and still say, “It evolved.” (4) The most prestigious universities and scientific institutions, like the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science are accomplices in this folly.

The continued barrage of evolutionary silliness is proof we’re not laughing loud enough. Big Science and Big Media is infected with incompetent, illogical, arrogant Darwinian boobs. Shame would be a good first step in cleaning house.

 

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Comments

  • rockyway says:

    “It means that the common ancestor of chordate animals, including people, also had tentacles.”

    – I’m a little confused. What about all those aliens that ‘graced’ the covers of the SF magazines I used to read? Why didn’t they lose their tentacles like we humans did? Does this mean they were more advanced than us or less? (Maybe if I could get a gov. grant I’d be be able to solve these pressing problems.) Maybe we should do a little genetic engineering and try to get our tentacles back. I imagine the creationists would be against this of course, as they’re always against new progressive ideas, but we shouldn’t let these people bully us, and prevent us from taking this step. (“We want tentacles! And we want them now!” And we don’t care what the Bible says about it.”)

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