Friday, July 11, 2008

Your daily Denyseitude.


Oh, Lord:

Was the bison’s peculiar chest a design feature ... to help Native North Americans survive?

Some of my friends are creationist biologists, and one, Norbert Smith (now retired), writes to say,

One of the neatest evidences I see of God in Creation is the bison...with an incompletely divided mediastinum. As far as I know, it is the ONLY mammal like this and enabled native Americans to feed their families with one arrow anyplace in the chest...collapsing BOTH lungs. This obviously has NO selective advantage and should have been eliminated by natural selection. God created them special to feed a people.


Of course, if God had really cared about native Americans, he might have given them immunity to smallpox. Kind of a glaring oversight, wouldn't you say?

AFTERSNARK: The cracker-hating PZ is on the case.

17 comments:

Cameron Campbell said...

Umm.. the animals didn't have time to adapt to the presence of us and pointed, ranged weapons?

Actually, how does this even begin to be incompatible with evolution?

We were the dominant species. We came along and needed something (food, clothing etc) so we took it from the easiest source handy...

Joe said...

Yeah, how did the bison survive the early Pleistocene epoch with all those arrow-shooting predators around? Like the ... the ... the ... um, hold on, it'll come to me ... the ... um ... oh yeah. Right.

Lore_Weaver said...

"This obviously has NO selective advantage and should have been eliminated by natural selection. God created them special to feed a people."

I'm sure the evolution of Bison and the selecting of this structure happened before arrows. It probably would have been selected out over time, but over a much longer time.

Then again, we're dealing with people who think the earth is 6000 years old, so there isn't enough time. You need to find that Lewis Black clip CC, it'd go well with the Penn clip you've been using.

("What the fuck is that about")

Red Tory said...

That theory about the buffalo has to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.

bigcitylib said...

If God really wanted to help he would have had the bison come prepackaged in sandwich form.

Balbulican said...

Kinda weird of God to engineer millions of years of bison adaptation to help out Aboriginal people for a millenium or so, and then send them White People and smallpox. What a kidder. Sorry, I mean Kidder.

E in MD said...

Perhaps it evolved this way because without the presence of man there aren't ARROWS flying around.

Man first arrived on this continent about 10-15,000 years ago and the Indian tribes were effectively eliminated as a natural selection pressure about two hundred years ago... the shit didn't have time to evolve and has no real reason to evolve now.

Changes that drastic don't change over night.

Fucking stupid bint.

liberal supporter said...

I have no problem with the creation theory, it is a suitable euphemism for "we don't know yet". Of course the problem with it, is that it encourages cessation of thinking in favour of providing further conjecture as to purpose, the "why" which is outside the scope of science.

This encouragement to stop thinking is exemplified by these:

As far as I know, it is the ONLY mammal like this
Can't bother to look it up, otherwise it would have mentioned the fruitless search and the scope of the search. Shorter: Don't investigate or question. Accept.

and enabled native Americans to feed their families with one arrow anyplace in the chest...collapsing BOTH lungs.
Sounds just like today's nuclear family, doesn't it? I use Kingsford "one match" charcoal to barbeque food for my family. In the olden days the Indians prided themselves on "one arrow" hunts.

Except nobody went out to kill a bison alone. How would you deal with the carcass alone and fend off the scavengers? The natives hunted in groups. Sometimes they would actually use bows and arrows, but the main hunting method involved the "buffalo jump" or something similar. They hunted in groups. and would try to take a group of bison.

This obviously has NO selective advantage and should have been eliminated by natural selection.
Since the conclusion is already known, little effort goes into seeing what benefit this adaptation might have.

Australia is full of animals that should have been eliminated by natural selection. A selective disadvantage will be weeded out fairly quickly, but an obsolete advantage, or something that turns out to be neither advantage nor disadvantage can persist a long time.

God created them special to feed a people.
I'm sure God did, just like everything else in creation. But it does not allow you to bask in God's reflected glory and set yourself up as the middleman charging me for admission to God's realm.
And it does not explain anything.

Balbulican said...

"have no problem with the creation theory, it is a suitable euphemism for "we don't know yet"."

If only that were true.

It's the interpolation of a completely unnecessary intermediary between creation and "we don't know yet."

Model 1:

The universe was created through forces that we understand better and better with each passing decade, through science. Final, definitive answer on cause or mechanism? We don't know yet.

Model 2:
The universe was created by a thing called God. God wasn't created, but exists through a mechanism we don't understand any better now that we did two thousand years ago. Final, definitive answer on cause or mechanism? We don't know yet, and we never will.

Mike said...

Balb nails it. Creationism isn't a substitute for "we don't know" its a substitute for "don't bather looking".

Andy said...

If he really wanted the people to have an easy time of it, why didn't he give them Kirk Cameron's bananas?

And why did he put carnivorous wolves, grizzly bears and mountain lions there?

This God's a tricky bugger isn't he. Here's a carrot, come and get the carrot then WHACK! Here's the stick!

dan said...

This is too funny.

I was going to comment on the idea that the bison population may have exploded only after smallpox decimated the aboriginal peoples ( natural predator of the bison), but don't let me keep you folks away from your snark.

dan said...

Balbulican said...

Kinda weird of God to engineer millions of years of bison adaptation to help out Aboriginal people for a millenium or so, and then send them White People and smallpox. What a kidder. Sorry, I mean Kidder.


---------------------

He was waiting for the Catholic missionaries to show up with the little wafer sized pieces of Him.

Oh, wait, that's another line of snark.

Wouldn't want to confuse the Hisbollah.

Chimera said...

Oddly enough, the horse also has an incomplete mediastinum.

So much for uniquely "created" physiological characteristics.

liberal supporter said...

Wouldn't want to confuse the Hisbollah.

Hey! It's code word dan! Now, it's not just misdirection and channel changing, it's the new and improved version with passive aggression!

Truly, we are now blessed to have dan, the master baiter, here.

Yay!

Beijing York said...

Amazing that they take themselves seriously. But really, in defending their ridiculous theory by a creationist biologist no less, they are sort of implying that Aboriginals needed God's extra help to keep them fed. Are they suggesting that Aboriginals were too stupid or slow to kill other creatures? Idiots.

PsiClass said...

Soo... god gave them food to eat but failed to tell them about himself, therefore, according to rule 3.16 they are all rotting in hell. Hey, but at least they ate well when they were alive!