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As They See It

skepticalbip said:
Found in 1919 huh, and it is still being claimed by Christian apologists that there are no such fossils? You would think that the Christian apologists would update their talking points occasionally.
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To be fair, it took a little while before people realized the importance of the find. The first scientific report on the fossil dates from 1926; and incorrectly described then as being part of Rhyniella praecursor, a hexapod species. It wasn't until 1928 that it was identified as part of an entirely different species and named as Rhyniognatha hirsti.

So they only had 87 years instead of 96 years to update their knowledge-base.
 
Evolutionary theory.
You could ignore it, you could show actual problems in evolutionary theory no matter who said it, you could show evidence that counters evolutionary theory, you could research it for it's its validity, you could dance in a circle chanting "God is great!"

Posting a quote mine does none of the above.
 
DLH said:
Malintent said:
"There is no God" - The Bible, 1 Kings 8:23

Mull that over... I don't even need to warm up.
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Good job. Except that in entirety it says "and he went on to say: "O Jehovah the God of Israel, there is no God like you in the heavens above or on the earth beneath, keeping the covenant and the loving-kindness toward your servants who are walking before you with all their heart,and he went on to say: “O Jehovah the God of Israel, there is no God like you in the heavens above or on the earth beneath, keeping the covenant and the loving-kindness toward your servants who are walking before you with all their heart,"
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I am very glad you got that. Now do the same for the quotes you provided in the OP... for exactly the same reason. What I did here is called "Quote Mining". It is also what you did in your OP.
 
I still don't understand what the point was to the original post. Was it (1) meant to criticize our understanding of evolutionary biology, or 2) what was it intended to highlight the point that quoting statements out of context is a bad thing?

And I don't believe that the OP (DLH) understands that science is a process used to gain knowledge of the natural world, not a monolithic entity or dogma to be followed blindly and never to be questioned or examined.
 
DLH said:
skepticalbip said:
Iznomneak said:
I'm not clear on the intent of the original post. In your own words, could you clarify what you are trying to express or establish?
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I too have no idea what the intent was but some of those snippets he presented must be from awfully old sources or from authors who didn't have a clue (if the full paragraph the snippet was taken from said what the snippet appears to say). Many of the fossils that are claimed to be "missing" are not. They have been found (in the fossil layer predicted by evolution) and had precisely the characteristics that researchers using evolutionary theory predicted they would have.
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What I want is pretty much what dystopian did. These are science publications I pasted from old references which, to me, are most likely as obsolete as today's science will be in the equally near future. I'm measuring them up with that standard.
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The 'standard' by which you have chosen to measure is not valid. By the same flawed logic, one can dismiss all claims, as at some point in the indeterminate future, the information will become obsolete. Is it raining? If it is or is not, it will not be raining at some point in the future, and therefore, by your standard, one cannot say if it is raining today. The methodology for determining if it is raining is sound, just as the scientific method is for determining the truth in a proposition. However, your standard for trusting the result is flawed.
 
DLH said:
skepticalbip said:
That was exactly his point. Your idiotic list of quote mines don't mean shit because you didn't include the context. He was simply using your "argument" style. It is only fair for one nonsense snippet to be answered with a nonsense snippet. Most if not all of your snippets will mean something entirely different than the snippet appears say if read in context just as Malintent's snippet does.
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I know it was your point, and my point in return was that all I had to do was complete the quote. All you have to do is address the simple quote mines.
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No. You need to complete the quote... I trust that if you were to complete the quote, it would self-refute the implication you intended with the quote-mined snippet. Also note that quote mining is against forum rules here. It is not the other member's role here to help you out of your forum violation of posting intentionally misleading information by cutting out the context. That should express to you the egregiousness of your error.
 
Malintent said:
DLH said:
are most likely as obsolete as today's science will be in the equally near future. I'm measuring them up with that standard.
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The 'standard' by which you have chosen to measure is not valid.
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An English Lit Major tried to teach science to Asimov.
"If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
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DLH said:
skepticalbip said:
And yet you got pissy because I said I would ignore it unless you could provide enough text to make your snippets worth considering.
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Did I? I apologize. I was wrong. Perhaps I should retract this thread. I concede, it was a bad idea. All I really wanted was a response like Dystopian gave so we could go from there.

My bad. I stand corrected and will try not to do it in the future.
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Very big of you. I will extend to you a similar courtesy and respond to the bulk of the quote mines with one statement:
All of these quotes appear to be taken out of the context of a long understood challenge. Fossils are relatively rare, and can only be made under very specific conditions, and only creatures with some decent rigidity that can make an impression in mud, and hold their form long enough for the mud to solidify, can be found.. more or less. There will be no complete fossil record. The fossil record is just one outcropping of data upon the mountain of data supporting the theory of evolution.

A missing fossil is as significant to the theory of evolution as a missing baseball card from a series is to the existence of baseball. We don't need that one card to figure out who is on what team and that baseball is played with a bat and a ball.
 
I found the OP's quote mine here, page 6 of 11. Looks like a couple of chapters from a Creationist textbook, and no, it doesn't cite the sources either.
 
Malintent said:
Kharakov said:
Wait... did you get the bolded part from Snopes or some other debunking forum? :notworthy:
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No. From the Talkfreethought Terms of Service (ToS)
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When I quote mine, it's a joke that's a bomb. Don't know if that's part of the current ToS, seems like old hat. Most of us like our own words too much to QM, unless we're fucking with you personally.
 
James Brown said:
I found the OP's quote mine here, page 6 of 11. Looks like a couple of chapters from a Creationist textbook, and no, it doesn't cite the sources either.
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I can't believe you took that mess seriously enough to spend time trying to find it. Well done though... I no longer have the patience to indulge creationists' nonsense by trying to explain since I have found that, no matter how much well documented information is furnished, they will simply dismiss it and repeat the same nonsense.

It was interesting to see that the OP was a quote mine that was just a clipped list of quote mines from another creationist that wasn't referenced or given credit.
 
Keith&Co. said:
A quote mine.
Those are always so very compelling unless one has access to google....
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Then you don't understand how Google's search technology works.

Google learns about your preferences in order to produce search results that you want. This means that the search results you get from Google will be shaped by your own beliefs. If a normal person searches for the term "evolution," they will get very different results than if a creationist uses the same search term.

So if a creationist uses Google as you suggest, they will only see search results that support what they already believe.
 
Underseer said:
Keith&Co. said:
A quote mine.
Those are always so very compelling unless one has access to google....
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So if a creationist uses Google as you suggest, they will only see search results that support what they already believe.
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Not what i was trying to suggest. I mean, when offered a quote with no name attached, no idea if it's from a magazine article on science or a letter to the editor, if it's from 2014 or 1972, anyone can try to find the context where the quote comes from.

And it doesn't take too very many such searches until one should realize there's a reason they're not dated, attributed or placed in any sort of accurate context. Just the fact that it's an obvious quote mine reduces the credibility to bupkes. If someone's just going to accept unattributed verbiage as a compelling argument, because it agrees with the conclusion they want to reach, then google won't help them, anyway.
 
Underseer said:
Keith&Co. said:
A quote mine.
Those are always so very compelling unless one has access to google....
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Then you don't understand how Google's search technology works.

Google learns about your preferences in order to produce search results that you want. This means that the search results you get from Google will be shaped by your own beliefs. If a normal person searches for the term "evolution," they will get very different results than if a creationist uses the same search term.

So if a creationist uses Google as you suggest, they will only see search results that support what they already believe.
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I didn't believe what you said about Google, and Google's search results supported my belief that your statement about Google was wrong! WTF does this mean!@!@$ It's like you're right and wrong at the same time (just like a creationist)!! WTF!@$!$

Really.. I did the search with search history off. Private browsing window. In my normal browser. Through fucking tor, which put me in .de

I got the same fucking results, although the German Google had 2 games included in the results of the search, and an additional German article.

This is only for the word Evolution, of course.

When I searched for sammiches, it gave me places close to me, and recipes from popular USA recipe sites in all the non-tor windows. In the .de site, I got lots of ads for places near the IP address.

When I searched for Black Hole, I once again got almost the exact same results for the various test searches I did.


In other words, Google tailors content for localities, and maybe a bit of personal preference, but considering all the shit I've looked at through the years.. ohh, wait a fucking second. I got German Google, and I have an analytic mind, so perhaps this is just a really fucking funny coincidence that the average German has the exact same search history as me. Is this bad or good?
 
Google search *does* personalize results based on browsing history; ranking certain results higher as a result. But this effect isn't so pronounced as to make it so that a creationist would only get search results supporting what they believe; that would require eliminating global results from the search and relying only on personalized results (which are generally only a relatively small percentage of all results); which afaik isn't possible to do. Besides, the algorithms aren't really advanced enough to cater to your beliefs. It can't distinguish between someone looking at porn because they like it, or because they're a religious censor looking for stuff to blacklist. A creationist who frequently visits a given creationist site to 'learn' about evolution might find that particular site ranking higher in his search results for subjects about evolution; but google isn't going to rank *other* creationist sites higher or scientific sites lower because of it.
 
dystopian said:
It can't distinguish between someone looking at porn because they like it, or because they're a religious censor looking for stuff to blacklist.
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Yes. I look at porn to blacklist it. That's it.

Still, I was about to say that I must be the epitome of average, and decided to google it, once again through Tor (got USA this time!), private browsing window, and regular browsing window with search preferences aligned with my 25k+ searches.

Got the same exact results, except the tor link included the advertisement link epitomeatl.com as the second result, with all other results being in the exact same order of the other 2 browser windows.

The shoes in images 3,5, and 6 of epitomeatl.com are nice.
 
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