Less of a leap, why? Because you "feeeeel" that to be the case?

Let's take the evolutionary time frame out of it (it's 10 million years by
the way, trying to fit into the supposed fossil record).

Explain how the creature could reproduce and evolve it's testes from external to internal - while also "evolving" an internal cooling mechanism:

https://books.google.com/books?id=2r...urrent&f=false

"Blood cooled in superficial veins of the dorsal fin and flukes feeds directly into a venous plexus... that supplies the testis. Thus heat is drawn into the venous blood from the arterial blood before it reaches the testis, cooling the testis below body core temperature"

Use your "logical" brain. It's impossible. It didn't happen via a Darwinistic mechanism: small random mutations. That's the stupidest, most illogical thing I've ever heard of.

There are tens of thousands of impossible transitions that would have to happen for a land mammal to evolve into a whale.

And, putting fake whale fossils in museums, and keeping them there,
doesn't help the cause. http://www.thegrandexperiment.com/whale-evolution.html

Nowhere, really. It's mildly entertaining for me, in the sense and to the extent that the people who run 419eater largely do it for the lulz.

More evidence that your level of intellectual engagement is as low as those you wish to mock. You can change yourself and be different. Or you can continue wallowing in your own intellectual filth and making poorly-reasoned arguments.

Your choice.

I choose what's behind door number 2, Bob.

I've actually never posted in this thread sober. Make of that what you will.

Believe it or not, I actually kinda like you. I object to stupidity a lot more than I do to religion. Unfortunately for your position, the two seem to be pretty closely correlated. I served a year in prison, and boy, is the saying "there are no ahteists in foxholes" ever true. It seems to be a coping mechanism for the dumb.

Nevertheless, I have no problem if you personally want to believe what you want to believe. As stated in the first few posts of this thread, I object when you (not personally) seek to foist your beliefs upon me.

It seems that "freedom of religion" is code for "freedom to impose my objectively irrational views on you".

You are welcome to all of the unwarranted generalizations you want.

There's a deep irony to that, which is that it's only true when it is and it's not when it's not.

For example, there's a philosophical consistency with that statement and the idea that people can deny service to others for whatever reasons they choose. Many people saying that they don't want other people to foist beliefs on them are doing precisely that in a different area and in a different way. So it's not as clean as you wish to imagine it.

As I've noted many times, what seems to you to be true often isn't.

1. These adaptations don't have to happen simultaneously
2. >15 million years is a loooooong time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolib...le/evograms_03

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc...olve-73276956/

Edit: revised odds from 2:1 to 3:2, since I think this will actually get some takers. But Aaron would take evens anyway.

It's well-known that IQ tests are a pretty bad measure for actual intelligence and reasoning. That you're thinking this proves your point is a good reason for me to continue doubting your level of intelligence and reasoning.

I never claimed it was an argument. It's an assertion, and one that's tautological in nature if you accept a binary logic.

I don't understand how you think this is anything but a non-sequitur. Oh wait, atheist.

Ok, if you don't like IQ, can you come up with a measure that we can both agree on that measures logic, reasonableness, and rational thinking? I'm in for HU4ROLLZ if you can.

This is a poker forum. I am willing to quantify my argument, and I am proposing "IQ" as a proxy. What are you proposing to quantify your argument?

Edit: Oh, wait, I forgot, you people don't ever propose anything. You just obstruct, deny, and argue against the people who actually do.

HU4ROLLZ? Are you proposing that we do you vs me? I might be game for that.

I think this is the first true statement you've made your entire time. Congratulations!

You can propose all you want in a hypothetical. If you think we're going to actually find 200 people that fit the description and get them to take a meaningful test in a manner that's unbiased and measures what you think you're measuring more or less shows me that you really have no idea what it takes to put together a thing like what you're proposing.

Seriously, people work hard to earn grants to try to get groups of 50 people to do this type of thing. It's not as easy as you imagine it is, and it's not worth anyone's time to do it. Believe it or not, science is hard work and moronically blustering doesn't do anything but exemplify your level of ignorance.

Actually, I did propose something at the very beginning of the thread:

You've proven this every step of the way for me. That's really good enough for me. You've also conceded that your original post is wrong. That was an unexpected bonus when you had a brief moment of humility and there was a small window in which you had an opportunity to learn something new.

But you've chosen not to follow that path. Those are the choices you make.

Now, you are being obtuse on purpose -

1. When I said "HU4ROLLZ" I meant the bet I proposed, and not poker. You know this.

2. No, you have still not proposed a quantifiable measure. You just keep quoting old posts you made. I don't understand why you think quoting yourself somehow bolsters any point you seek to make.

3. I made it clear that I was not proposing administering IQ tests, only a statistically valid way from picking tests previously administered.

4. I have never admitted that my OP was wrong. I have narrowed some of my positions, and in my "brief moment of humility" I admitted my inability to argue it persuasively.

Do you ever wonder why people struggle with civility when responding to you, given whatever accounting method you choose?

Actually, I was joking that you wanted to take me on head up in some sort of measure of intelligence, not poker. But whatever. If you want to cry about it, I don't really care.

True. Most people who are aware of the literature know that quantifiable measures of intelligence are rife with problems. Among them, cultural bias is a huge issue. Here's what the American Psychological Association has to say about it:

http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx

You made it as a late edit that I missed. Whatever. It makes no difference.

You have admitted (or at least seem to have admitted) that I'm capable of rational thought. This is a denial that religious people are incapable of rational thought.

I know that you've revised that position to be "most" but you've still never actually argued this assertion. At best, you've pointed to one other poster and attempted to generalize based on that. Of course, this is literally a stupid thing to do, but the stupidity of a decision has not been sufficient to stop you before and I have no reason to believe that it will stop you in the future.

Nope. But do you think I'm really responding in a way to drive you towards civility? Think about it.

And therein lies the argument for religiosity and against logic: "I'm not dumber than you, because I will obstruct any way for you to measure this objectively and quantify it".

Basically, any way that humanity have been able to come up with to measure intellect, you people obstruct, because you score so low on the scale. Yet you propose no measures or scales of your own.

Yeah. The APA is such an obstructionist group. They've probably been bought out by the fundamentalist Christians.

So. Much. Irony.

Ok, you're not purely an obstructionist. Then, propose something.

How do you propose we measure intellect, or objectivity, or logic, or reason? Or is your proposal that these things are fundamentally not subject to quantification and cannot exist on a scale from "low" to "high"?

Boom - headshot.

Are you sure you know what an "obstruction" is? Whether or not I propose something does not imply that I've obstructed something. It's simply a fact that nobody has found an adequate measure for these things. Everything that has been done has been shown to be problematic.

I would provide them with the argumentation you've provided in this thread and ask them to analyze it. If they believe that you've put forth a good argument, classify them as "low" on the scale. If they provide meaningful objections to it, then classify them as "high" on the scale.

Did you just quote yourself and say "Boom - headshot"?

Not sure you understand what "quantify" means. Asking (any) people to give opinions on anything is not "quantifying" it.

But the humour is appreciated. Who said religious people were a bunch of humourless pricks?

Edit: Lol at you. "I take issue with every measure of intellect that has ever been proposed, yet I won't offer one of my own". Yes, when you shoot down other people's ideas and propose no alternatives of your own, that is pretty much the definition of "obstructionist".

Right. Because nobody can figure out how to rate the quality of a written argument and give it a rating of some type. There are no places in which quantifications of this type are performed anywhere.

I'm not the one shooting it down. It's those religious fundamentalist commies in the APA.

You're clutching at straws.

Yup. Me and the entire academic enterprise have no idea how any of this stuff works. They're like magnets.

Actually most evolutionary biologists that study the issue say it had to happen in less than 10 million years, which isn't even close to being enough time, because:

1. There are too few generations involved in the transition
2. The *known* adaptive mutation rates are far too low
3. Mammalian population sizes are far too low

In 2008, Michael Behe’s (Edge of Evolution) critics Rick Durrett and Deena Schmidt tried to refute him in the journal Genetics with a paper titled “Waiting for Two Mutations: With Applications to Regulatory Sequence Evolution and the Limits of Darwinian Evolution.” But Durrett and Schmidt found that to obtain only two specific coordinated mutations via Darwinian evolution “for humans with a much smaller effective population size, this type of change would take 216 million years.” The critics admitted this was “very unlikely to occur on a reasonable timescale.”

The transition from external testes, to internal ones (with an intricate cooling mechanism) would certainly take much more than 2 coordinated mutations. Keep in mind that whales with internal testes that aren't cooled, would
certainly produce sterile sperm - which would render the mammal unable to reproduce.

The testes transition is just one of thousands of changes that had to occur, with coordinated mutations - within
a very narrow window of evolutionary time.

Fact is, it didn't happen - at least not through neo-Darwinistic processes.

The timeline proposed for supposed whale evolution most recently was:

Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 mya
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya

But then, a fully aquatic whale bone was found in antartica, dated 49 mya:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44867222/n.../#.WRJoBtLytPY

So now we're looking at:
Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 mya
New Fossil Jawbone (fully aquatic whale): 49 mya
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya


Now we’re looking at much less than 200,000 generations, much too little time to allow the origin and fixation of all the multitude of traits necessary to convert a land-mammal into a whale. It didn't happen.