New guy who believes in God

Oh, dear, you just had to wade into this, didn’t you?

Apparently you’re unaware that dozens of interesting and in some cases bizarre fossils have been found in Precambrian strata, and this includes complex multicellular eukaryotes. Off the top of my head, I’m aware of Dickinsonia, Wiwaxia, Anomalocaris, Halucigenia and Opabinia, all of which are far removed from “algae and microorganisms”.

I just did. Read my posts and fucking weep, mythology fanboy.

As for your fatuous resurrection of Paley’s watchmaker bullshit, this apologetic garbage is an entirely typical (and duplicitous) mythology bait and switch, which in part relies upon the mendacious and false conflation of human design processes with magic poofing by a fantastic magic man. The latter is asserted by the requisite pedlars of apologetics, to involve purported “perfect foreknowledge” of the behaviour of parts both in isolation and when integrated into larger assemblages, but human design processes have never exhibited this feature, so on this basis alone, Paley’s watchmaker garbage is dishonest.

Indeed, human design processes have consisted of the following steps:

[1] Try out some new ideas;

[2] Discard the obvious failures;

[3] Build upon the successes.

Now what other observed process operates in this manner? Oh that’s right, EVOLUTION.

In short, human design processes bear FAR more connection to evolution, than to fantastic magic poofing by a cartoon magic man. As an illustration of this, here’s a nice video clip showing some of the early (and hilarious) failures that were tried out during the attempt by humans to build a working aeroplane:

Hilarious early aviation failures

But, it gets even better, because, wait for it, the history of watchmaking itself refutes Paley’s apologetic garbage.

when one traces the history of watches, one finds again a process of gradual development involving trial and error. The first portable clocks were still far too big to be carried in a pocket, let alone worn upon a wrist, and the first such instances of these, back in the 15th century, only had an hour hand. The accuracy of these devices was so low that they were little more than expensive toys for rich people. It took finite time for watchmakers to learn, for example, that the force delivered by a mainspring is not a constant, and that some means of taking account of this had to be devised, and the first of these, a device known as a stackfreed, was abandoned after about 100 years because of the undesirable friction it introduced into the mechanism.

The fusee, a different device, persisted for longer, but was eventually abandoned in the 19th century when a superior solution arose. The balance spring only appeared in 1657, and the first watches with a minute hand only appeared around 1680 as a result of the development of the balance spring. The verge escapement, which had been used in large pendulum driven clocks since the 13th century, was replaced by the cylinder escapement in 1695 - it took humans three hundred years or so to move on to this better idea.

We had to wait until 1759 for the lever escapement, which, ironically, only made major inroads into Swiss watchmaking around 1900. We had to wait until 1923 for the first successful self-winding system, based upon converting the wearer’s arm motion into rotary motion that kept the mainspring tension constant. The Incabloc shock protection system, to protect jewel bearings from critical failure stresses if the watch was dropped, wasn’t invented until 1934. The first working electrically powered watches did not appear until 1957.

Once again, the history of watches is replete with trial and error, discarding of failures, and building upon successes, and the development of the modern wrist watch bears more resemblance to an evolutionary process than to magic poofing by a magic man.

As for your excrement about the bacterial flagellum, I’ll deal with that in a later post, and you’d better strap yourself in, because you’re about to experience a minimum of 100g acceleration when I do.

6 Likes