“why is a couch?” is a nonsensical question. There’s no answer. O’Donnell’s question, “why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?” is a question that actually makes sense. It’s a question that has an answer. A simple answer. In fact, Rand Rover has stated the answer (at least in part) in this very thread. It seems to me that, if you want to feel superior to Christine O’Donnell on the subject of evolution, you ought to be able to answer her question.
On the other hand, maybe having faith in the truth of evolution is enough.
The only answer to “why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans?” is that monkeys never did evolve into humans in the first place, so the question reveals a complete and fundamental ignorance about what evolution** IS** and how it works.
People and monkeys share a common ancestor. Monkeys did not “change” into humans.
Perhaps a better ridiculous question that reveals a deep ignorance of the subject matter would be “In the Bible, why does it recommend crucifiction as an appropriate punishment?” It makes no sense, because it reveals a complete ignorance of the Bible.
It makes sense in that the words are chained together, and the questions mark at the end is a nice touch, but it is rather factually challenged. There isn’t a simple answer. The best you could hope for is an explanation of what’s wrong with it.
But I’ll give it a go. Monkeys are still evolving, but not into humans. We won’t know what they’re evolving into until it happens. Similarly, humans did not evolve from monkeys as we know them today, but if you go back enough generations, we do have a common ancestor.
Do you think that’s the simple answer O’Donnell was looking for?
And don’t worry if you don’t understand what we’re talking about Dr. Love. If you get everything wrong, it is clearly our fault for not explaining it well enough.
No. What I am saying is that you are too stupid to know what you are actually arguing against. What you are complaining about is fundamentalism, not conservatism.
Try it this way:
Some ecoterrorists will spike trees so that lumberjacks with chainsaws will maim themselves if the attempt to cut them down. Those ecoterrorists will likely be liberals by political affiliation. If i despise those who Spike trees maiming lumberjacks, is my argument with liberalism or with ecoterrorism?
Is liberalism to blame for the excesses of PETA?
Conservatism is not to blame for you FILs fundamentalism. Being conservative does not make one a fundamentalist any more than being liberal makes you an ecoterrorists.
I think that this is simple and self-evident enough that your inability to grasp it is evidence that you are impaired.
It’s like saying, (assuming these eggs, milk and flour from last week somehow became a cake - scoff, scoff scoff), then why aren’t these caviar (eggs), gay politicians (Milk) and Picasso’s ‘Flowers’ becoming a cake right now!!! They should be becoming delicious cakes right now, according to evolution!
Neither. Both Euphonious Polemic and Robot Arm understood what I was saying.
That’s a reasonable answer. Robot Arm’s response is a reasonable answer. I would say that evolution is an undirected process, so monkeys are evolving into anything. Plus, it’s incredibly unlikely that any species will evolve twice.
The answer given in the video, that evolution “takes a long time,” simply doesn’t answer the question. Neither my answer, nor Robot Arm’s answer, nor your answer (Euphonious Polemic) has anything to do with the speed of evolution. It seems to me that Maher et. al.'s answer doesn’t reveal a much deeper understanding of evolution than Christine O’Donnell has.
What could have possibly lead you to post this? Have I written something incorrect? Is my understanding of evolution demonstrably lacking? Have I accused anyone of unclear explanations?
I don’t own any books written with crayons, which I’m guessing where you’d find support for something this stupid, so no.
No, just that we’ve established that not only are you so stupid that you confuse conservatism with fundamentalism but that you also lack the integrity to admit when your wrong.
Look, you’re the one claiming to be conservative. It’s not my fault that the majority of people who side with you ideologically believe stupid things. It’s just an attractive ideology for ignorant angry people.
I freely admit when I’m wrong. But I’m not right now.
I haven’t made that claim here. My ideology is moot to the point that you’re an idiot.
And, yet, inexplicably, liberalism has… you! Oh yeah, and that Le Jamiroquoi guy. What a team of intellectual giants you two make as representatives of liberalism.
Yes. You are. And it really can’t get much simpler.
Is denying evolution in favor of creationism an example of:
Sorry retardo. Most conservatives don’t believe in evolution. Denial is actively sold by the conservative media and I’ll leave it to you to count how many national conservatives believe in it.
There’s something I’ve noticed in the trades…it’s not that women can’t do what men do…it’s that every tool, nut, grip and fitting would have to be redesigned for someone who hasn’t got the kind of upper body strength a man with normal testosterone has and a woman can only usually get with a serious weightlifting habit.
Companies, being cheap, naturally don’t want to have to redesign everything they do for the ergonomics of women…if they did, there’d be giant bolts that came off with foot-fittings, collapsible ten-foot cheater-bars would be far more standard equipment(I looked online, a collabsible wrecking bar runs several hundred), and so forth.
Admittedly, men could still do the job at the woman-enabled workplace, in fact I suspect they’d be able to do it with less strains and stress injuries to themselves, because they wouldn’t be pushing their muscles nearly as hard. I suspect, in the end, there would be a lot of workman’s comp money lying around unclaimed, because of men not throwing out their backs on the woman-friendly industrial plant site.
But it would involve not only money, but a cultural shift. Labor sites are machisimo central. To enable women to do the job… well, it’s not likely, let’s put it that way.
And I realy wish more women would get into car repair. We’ve got smaller hands-and cars today have smaller spaces. We’re actually advantaged.
While you’re correct that evolution is an undirected process, you are still a bit unclear on how it works. There are those here who are much (much) better at understanding it and explaining it than I am, but evolution is not a thing that “happens” to a species. It is more of a continual process, whereby if there is selection pressure for a particular trait, more offspring will be born with that trait, and over time, the trait will be prevelant in the population. Over a long period of time, the population of animals might be different enough that if one could see both populations together, one would call them different species. If there is no selection pressure at all, a particular species might remain essentially unchanged for hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of years (eg. horseshoe crabs)
Bottom line - whether or not speciation occurs depends on the selection pressure on the population of animals. It can happen many times over the course of time.
No, not you - just a poke at another poster here, who seems to blame his own ignorance on the fact that others did not teach him well enough.
It’s almost meta how you’re arguing that I don’t know the difference when your point demonstrates that you don’t. Very post modern.
Rand, maybe you and Scylla can go play? I think the Chuck E. Cheese down by your trailer park is having a free double cheese special. Don’t get in an argument with any of the kids in the ball pit about self-determination!
Says the full of hot air know nothing of Climate change and who demonstrated incompetence when relying on Google vomits to show how “good” he was when looking for support for his say so’s.
The fact was that we have evidence that you are not even capable of discriminating good sources from bad ones. And one has to then take into account that there is indeed an effort to make people like you stupid.
Denying that that is not a problem is when one realizes that you are incapable of differentiate between fact an opinion.
AGW is based on facts, the problem is that merchants of doubt (Right wing think tanks, blobiators and politicians) attempt to turn their sorry opinions into “fact”.
You said the question had a simple answer, and it doesn’t. In the strictest sense, it doesn’t have an answer at all, just a description of why the assumptions are wrong.
Bill Maher is not running for the Senate, Christine O’Donnell is. Besides which, that clip is 12 years old. O’Donnell has had plenty of time to get a more accurate description of how and why evolution works. Has she learned anything in that time?
