Mithcoriel
Member
So Shawn has posted a new video in which we get to see once again how defenseless children are brainwashed into believing creationism and undermining any education they might get. But let's not just cringe and move on. I'd like to debunk the video. Cause one thing you can praise about it is that a lot of the arguments in it are new, I don't think they appear in Talkorigin's old index of creationist claims. A lot of people complain that there's nothing more to do on youtube, cause all the creationist claims have been debunked. Well, here's fresh meat.
I've compiled all the claims in a list below, and debunked the ones I can, marking in red those I'm not sure about. (And if you don't wanna spend the time to watch the above video, maybe skimming through the list below will be faster.) It would really be great if people add more counter-arguments. I'm no scientist, so I can only debunk the most basic ones.
3:33 One of the items in the store is a femur of a 14-foot-tall man.
That sounds an awful lot like the woman's femur that ExtantDodo debunked in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foWdiT9iH44, position 19:15-20:00
3:49 Also in the collection: Ica stones, where humans carved dinosaurs. They show dinosaurs as having circle patterns, which was supposedly found to be true later, indicating that the only way the carvers could have known about the circle patterns was if they saw dinosaurs
The ica stones have been debunked by talkorigins here. However, I've never been able to debunk the claim that these stones show characteristics of dinosaurs that were ahead of what scientists knew at the time. This video claims it was circular patterns, another creationist source says the stones show the dinosaurs as having frills, which scientists didn't figure out until later.
6:39 Dr. Charles Jackson's credentials.
Probably not that relevant, but I'll include an index to this for the sake of completeness. Maybe someone wants to check em.
9:37 A girl answers the question "what is meant by evolution". It's hard to understand, but she seems to be saying "...and a bird turned into a monkey and monkeys turned into us..." and the presenter agrees with her
Wrong. This has got the usual misconception that animals evolved in a ladder, one after another, rather than the tree pattern in which evolution really happened. It assumes that presently living animals are ancestors of other presently living animals, rather than having common ancestors.
Starting here, he starts ridiculing the idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Dishonest as he is, he doesn't actually show the evidence in favour of this, just the "evidence" against it. If I were one of those kids, I'd actually wonder why he bothers to tell us such little details as "the lungs are wrong" if it's supposedly so obvious birds didn't evolve from dinosaurs.
10:38 He claims that scientists believe a Tyrannosaurus evolved into some small red songbird.
Appeal to ridicule as well as argument from ignorance. Aside from the fact that T-rex isn't an immediate ancestor of birds, they deliberately picked two species that would make the comparison look as ridiculous as possible. This is deceitful, and it teaches kids to be satisfied with the first impression and dismiss something if it seems weird, without looking into it further.
11:03 Dinosaurs breathe like we do, breathe in, then out. Birds breathe out at the same time that they breathe in. Therefore, a transitional between the two would not have been able to breathe
EDIT: The part about birds breathing in and out at the same time seems to be true, but theropods already had the same respiratory system. he_who_is_nobody's Link.
13:00 Archeopterix wasn't a transitional fossil, just a bird.
Debunked by Talkorigins here.
14:25 "[Evolution] is not true. What God says in his bible is true"
A holy book can not be used as scientific evidence, since it could easily have been written by ignorant bronze age goat herders. They're wrongfully putting words in God's mouth (yes, assuming God exists of course) without any proof that God actually agrees with this.
15:09 We find petrified trees standing up
Probably refers to the claim debunked by Talkorigins here.
15:26 Most animal fossils have their nose in the air, and look like they're trying to get a breath, showing they drowned in Noah's flood
EDIT: he_who_is_nobody's Link describes that this Opisthotonus in dinosaurs is either caused by spasms due to diseases, or more likely, rigor mortis which would have tensed the muscles in the neck and tail, arching them back. Furthermore, these creatures are lying on their side, pointing their heads back, not up.
16:33 They never found the hind end of Tiktaalik. The fossil has very short fins. Because it has bones in its fins, like a zebra fish (land would break those bones), they said that those evolved into fingers.<i></i>
EDIT: No one claims Tiktaalik walked on land.
17:30 Tiktaalik is an eskimo word for "big freshwater fish", the word actually means it's a fish
What a word means doesn't indicate anything about reality.
17:53 The fossil of Tiktaalik has short stubby legs, the model of it in a museum has long legs, so that's a fraud.
EDIT: The image posted by he_who_is_nobody shows they match:
17:54 Tiktaalik was dated just last year.
he_who_is_nobody: In the second paragraph of this link, they give the age and cite sources from 2008 and 2006. Furthermore, they knew the dates of the fossils in the layer they were looking for, that's why they searched there.
18:35 Last year, fossil footprints which were older than Tiktaalik were found, showing that, contrary to popular belief, Tiktaalik wasn't the first thing to walk on land. "All the main researchers admitted [...] that everything has to start over."
Assuming this claim is true: just cause some other animal turns out to be the first thing that walked on land, doesn't mean evolution didn't happen. It just means things came to land a lot sooner than we thought, and Tiktaalik was a late survivor. And the whole "now we need to rewrite evolution" is probably a misinterpretation of the common habit of newspaper to blow everything out of proportion and claim "This overturns everything" despite the fact that it actually fits nicely into what science has already found.
EDIT: Squawk's link debunks this.
And here's he_who_is_nobody's link.
20:03 When they find a new fossil, they mention it on the front page. Once they discover something's wrong, they mention it on like page 12 so that people miss it.
I'm guessing this is true, minus the part where they imply that scientists are doing this deliberately to make people miss it, and minus the implication that this happens all the time, with most of the fossils having been debunked.
EDIT: he_who_is_nobody: "If this is true, and I do not even agree that it is true, this would be a case of science being blamed for the mistakes made by the media."
20:31 In science reports, you'll often find words such as "we think that", and "probably", showing that they're not actually sure
This is because scientists are honest and don't claim to know everything. This is the only way you can figure out new things. Creationists simply claim to know everything while they tell you all their falsehoods. Claiming to know doesn't make it true.
20:58 How many times have evolutionists needed to retract and change their story? At least twice a day. They always come up with more problems.
The big picture of evolution isn't under debate. Scientists argue about little details, such as which branch of primate the mandril belongs to (but not the fact that it is a primate), but not the fact that evolution happens at all.
22:24 Scientists claim the little bumps on a velociraptor's arms are for attaching feathers. The truth is, they are for attaching muscles to the bone, and we have them too.
I find it hard to imagine that scientists would spread such an obvious lie, which can be debunked so simply.
And as he_who_is_nobody pointed out: paleontologists can tell the difference between quill knobs, grooves and tuberosities.
24:59 The reason people see [various evidence for evolution] is because they desperately want evolution to be true. It's like when you wish your favourite musician would walk down your street, and everytime someone walks by you wonder if it's him.
Scientists don't have an emotional attachment to evolution, unlike creationists, who feel like they can't go to heaven if their "science" isn't true. Many scientists are thrilled when they discover they are wrong. Dogma has no place in science.
Also, I don't know anyone who has such vivid illusions of their favourite singer walking down the street.
25:37 How do scientist know the age of fossils? First and foremost: wishful thinking. A lot of people think they use radiometric dating. Actually when they dig the fossil up, they won't date it with some dating method. They look at where it is in the layers of rocks, and make some guesses.
People decided the rocks were millions of years old before radiometric dating methods were made, by Charles Lyell, who said himself that he wanted to "free science from Moses". They based it on guesses of how long an animal needs to evolve.
EDIT: I'll just copy in what was posted:
27:50 Scientists pretend evolution happened slowly, that's why they want the earth to be billions of years old.
Not much to debunk here, except that no, scientists aren't basing their findings on wishful thinking, but are following the evidence where it leads.
28:25 All the history books say the earth is thousands of years old, including the bible.
That's because they didn't know any better when those books were written. Are you gonna rely on the ignorance of ages past, or actually look at what science tells us?
28:50 According to evolution, it takes millions of years for everything to evolve. But Carbon14-dating can only date things a few thousand years old. Dinosaurs are too old for that. No scientist uses C14 on dinosaurs
That's why they use other dating methods on dinosaur bones which have a longer half-life. This is well-known, but creationists are so dishonest they make it sound like "evolutionists" are keeping this a secret.
29:50 Only last year did they first date a dinosaur bone using uranium-lead. Normally they never date the dinosaur bones themselves, just the rocks. And they found out they were several hundred thousand years off of what they usually thought.
For fossils that are 65 million years old, an error of several hundred thousand years is 0.01%, which is too small to matter.
30:40 Scientists are wrong about how fast radioactive things decay. We have scientific proof of that, but don't have time to adress it.
That's debunked by Talkorigins here.
I've compiled all the claims in a list below, and debunked the ones I can, marking in red those I'm not sure about. (And if you don't wanna spend the time to watch the above video, maybe skimming through the list below will be faster.) It would really be great if people add more counter-arguments. I'm no scientist, so I can only debunk the most basic ones.
3:33 One of the items in the store is a femur of a 14-foot-tall man.
That sounds an awful lot like the woman's femur that ExtantDodo debunked in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foWdiT9iH44, position 19:15-20:00
3:49 Also in the collection: Ica stones, where humans carved dinosaurs. They show dinosaurs as having circle patterns, which was supposedly found to be true later, indicating that the only way the carvers could have known about the circle patterns was if they saw dinosaurs
The ica stones have been debunked by talkorigins here. However, I've never been able to debunk the claim that these stones show characteristics of dinosaurs that were ahead of what scientists knew at the time. This video claims it was circular patterns, another creationist source says the stones show the dinosaurs as having frills, which scientists didn't figure out until later.
6:39 Dr. Charles Jackson's credentials.
Probably not that relevant, but I'll include an index to this for the sake of completeness. Maybe someone wants to check em.
9:37 A girl answers the question "what is meant by evolution". It's hard to understand, but she seems to be saying "...and a bird turned into a monkey and monkeys turned into us..." and the presenter agrees with her
Wrong. This has got the usual misconception that animals evolved in a ladder, one after another, rather than the tree pattern in which evolution really happened. It assumes that presently living animals are ancestors of other presently living animals, rather than having common ancestors.
Starting here, he starts ridiculing the idea that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Dishonest as he is, he doesn't actually show the evidence in favour of this, just the "evidence" against it. If I were one of those kids, I'd actually wonder why he bothers to tell us such little details as "the lungs are wrong" if it's supposedly so obvious birds didn't evolve from dinosaurs.
10:38 He claims that scientists believe a Tyrannosaurus evolved into some small red songbird.
Appeal to ridicule as well as argument from ignorance. Aside from the fact that T-rex isn't an immediate ancestor of birds, they deliberately picked two species that would make the comparison look as ridiculous as possible. This is deceitful, and it teaches kids to be satisfied with the first impression and dismiss something if it seems weird, without looking into it further.
11:03 Dinosaurs breathe like we do, breathe in, then out. Birds breathe out at the same time that they breathe in. Therefore, a transitional between the two would not have been able to breathe
EDIT: The part about birds breathing in and out at the same time seems to be true, but theropods already had the same respiratory system. he_who_is_nobody's Link.
13:00 Archeopterix wasn't a transitional fossil, just a bird.
Debunked by Talkorigins here.
14:25 "[Evolution] is not true. What God says in his bible is true"
A holy book can not be used as scientific evidence, since it could easily have been written by ignorant bronze age goat herders. They're wrongfully putting words in God's mouth (yes, assuming God exists of course) without any proof that God actually agrees with this.
15:09 We find petrified trees standing up
Probably refers to the claim debunked by Talkorigins here.
15:26 Most animal fossils have their nose in the air, and look like they're trying to get a breath, showing they drowned in Noah's flood
EDIT: he_who_is_nobody's Link describes that this Opisthotonus in dinosaurs is either caused by spasms due to diseases, or more likely, rigor mortis which would have tensed the muscles in the neck and tail, arching them back. Furthermore, these creatures are lying on their side, pointing their heads back, not up.
16:33 They never found the hind end of Tiktaalik. The fossil has very short fins. Because it has bones in its fins, like a zebra fish (land would break those bones), they said that those evolved into fingers.<i></i>
EDIT: No one claims Tiktaalik walked on land.
17:30 Tiktaalik is an eskimo word for "big freshwater fish", the word actually means it's a fish
What a word means doesn't indicate anything about reality.
17:53 The fossil of Tiktaalik has short stubby legs, the model of it in a museum has long legs, so that's a fraud.
EDIT: The image posted by he_who_is_nobody shows they match:
17:54 Tiktaalik was dated just last year.
he_who_is_nobody: In the second paragraph of this link, they give the age and cite sources from 2008 and 2006. Furthermore, they knew the dates of the fossils in the layer they were looking for, that's why they searched there.
18:35 Last year, fossil footprints which were older than Tiktaalik were found, showing that, contrary to popular belief, Tiktaalik wasn't the first thing to walk on land. "All the main researchers admitted [...] that everything has to start over."
Assuming this claim is true: just cause some other animal turns out to be the first thing that walked on land, doesn't mean evolution didn't happen. It just means things came to land a lot sooner than we thought, and Tiktaalik was a late survivor. And the whole "now we need to rewrite evolution" is probably a misinterpretation of the common habit of newspaper to blow everything out of proportion and claim "This overturns everything" despite the fact that it actually fits nicely into what science has already found.
EDIT: Squawk's link debunks this.
And here's he_who_is_nobody's link.
20:03 When they find a new fossil, they mention it on the front page. Once they discover something's wrong, they mention it on like page 12 so that people miss it.
I'm guessing this is true, minus the part where they imply that scientists are doing this deliberately to make people miss it, and minus the implication that this happens all the time, with most of the fossils having been debunked.
EDIT: he_who_is_nobody: "If this is true, and I do not even agree that it is true, this would be a case of science being blamed for the mistakes made by the media."
20:31 In science reports, you'll often find words such as "we think that", and "probably", showing that they're not actually sure
This is because scientists are honest and don't claim to know everything. This is the only way you can figure out new things. Creationists simply claim to know everything while they tell you all their falsehoods. Claiming to know doesn't make it true.
20:58 How many times have evolutionists needed to retract and change their story? At least twice a day. They always come up with more problems.
The big picture of evolution isn't under debate. Scientists argue about little details, such as which branch of primate the mandril belongs to (but not the fact that it is a primate), but not the fact that evolution happens at all.
22:24 Scientists claim the little bumps on a velociraptor's arms are for attaching feathers. The truth is, they are for attaching muscles to the bone, and we have them too.
I find it hard to imagine that scientists would spread such an obvious lie, which can be debunked so simply.
And as he_who_is_nobody pointed out: paleontologists can tell the difference between quill knobs, grooves and tuberosities.
24:59 The reason people see [various evidence for evolution] is because they desperately want evolution to be true. It's like when you wish your favourite musician would walk down your street, and everytime someone walks by you wonder if it's him.
Scientists don't have an emotional attachment to evolution, unlike creationists, who feel like they can't go to heaven if their "science" isn't true. Many scientists are thrilled when they discover they are wrong. Dogma has no place in science.
Also, I don't know anyone who has such vivid illusions of their favourite singer walking down the street.
25:37 How do scientist know the age of fossils? First and foremost: wishful thinking. A lot of people think they use radiometric dating. Actually when they dig the fossil up, they won't date it with some dating method. They look at where it is in the layers of rocks, and make some guesses.
People decided the rocks were millions of years old before radiometric dating methods were made, by Charles Lyell, who said himself that he wanted to "free science from Moses". They based it on guesses of how long an animal needs to evolve.
EDIT: I'll just copy in what was posted:
he_who_is_nobody said:
27:50 Scientists pretend evolution happened slowly, that's why they want the earth to be billions of years old.
Not much to debunk here, except that no, scientists aren't basing their findings on wishful thinking, but are following the evidence where it leads.
28:25 All the history books say the earth is thousands of years old, including the bible.
That's because they didn't know any better when those books were written. Are you gonna rely on the ignorance of ages past, or actually look at what science tells us?
28:50 According to evolution, it takes millions of years for everything to evolve. But Carbon14-dating can only date things a few thousand years old. Dinosaurs are too old for that. No scientist uses C14 on dinosaurs
That's why they use other dating methods on dinosaur bones which have a longer half-life. This is well-known, but creationists are so dishonest they make it sound like "evolutionists" are keeping this a secret.
29:50 Only last year did they first date a dinosaur bone using uranium-lead. Normally they never date the dinosaur bones themselves, just the rocks. And they found out they were several hundred thousand years off of what they usually thought.
For fossils that are 65 million years old, an error of several hundred thousand years is 0.01%, which is too small to matter.
30:40 Scientists are wrong about how fast radioactive things decay. We have scientific proof of that, but don't have time to adress it.
That's debunked by Talkorigins here.
As I pointed out in my tentative answer in the first post. But it's of course not the most convincing argument to just tell the creationist "Well I never heard that argument before, but I'm sure the experts wouldn't make any mistakes, so you must be wrong..." Hm, I suppose in order to rebut that one, one would have to show comparative pictures of tuberosities, grooves and quill knobs, and I can't find any useful google pics for the first two. Oh well.