Notices by ambulocetus@qoto.org

@freemo @medley56
Let us go over what has happened here..
1. I made a post,
2. you asked me to explain,
3. I wrote a long explanation which you said was insufficient. 4. I suggested a compromise, but you just ignored that and declared yourself the winner.
OK, I guess I am outnumbered here and that means that I lose, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I will remain silent in your presence from now on. You are the winner, May I go do something else now?

@medley56 @freemo If I was wrong I would have admitted it. Maybe you should watch the video, brother.

@freemo I gave you a long answer to your question that took me quite a while to write, but you replied by asking me to be even more detailed. That seemed to me that you were being disingenuous to ask for more after that, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt. If you really want, we can go back to the video and download the entire transcript to give you a sentence by sentence breakdown.. I don’t want to do it because I don’t think it is a good use of my time, especially since I feel that my first reply was more than sufficient, but I will do it if you really want me to. I would rather just go about my business, but I don’t like people getting the wrong impression about me. How about we compromise. You go download the transcript and post it here and I will do the rest of the work.

@freemo @medley56
Or it could be "once bitten, twice shy" as they say.

@freemo No, I won’t give you specific word for word examples, because that smells like a trap to me, and I’m not falling for it. If you disagree with me, that’s your prerogative, but I’m not watching it again just because you can’t see my point. I never said that he said anything factually incorrect, maybe you should read what I wrote one more time. In my experience, when someone creates a straw-man like that, it usually means they have an agenda. If so that is one more reason to not spend any more time on this. People can watch the video, and keep in mind what both of us have said, and make up their own minds.

@freemo That's the one. If a creator wants to talk about their religious beliefs, great. But this video from Destin didn't do that. It was using really cool science to misinform about an antiscientific religious belief of his. Here's what happened. He read a book by a creationist on irreducible complexity of flagella evolution. And he went and talked to some scientists about really cool cutting edge science on how flagella motors work. I don't know if he read the book first or started reading it after he already planned to talk about it. He didn't say in the video. Either way, the video starts by saying the complexity and the necessity of every component raises real philosophical debate about the origin of life. It, in fact, does not. It is cool science and an interesting debate within evolutionary theory, but mainly because flagella don't fossilize, so we have to piece the evolution together by looking at extant organisms as well as lab experiments and simulations. Regardless, his video wasn't about evolution, it was about the molecular machinery, very cool science. Everything between the intro and the outro was great, as his videos always are. Then, in the outro, he used more intelligent design buzz words, both sidesed the "debate" recommended a book by a creationist, and told people to look into it further. And in response to critical comments he told people to read the scientific papers. Anyone who doesn't already know this stuff who tries to look up papers using the buzz words he used, especially that author, will find creationist papers that appear, to a lay audience, to be scientific. But to anyone who knows the field, they are junk. It's a sneaky and dishonest way of appearing impartial, while actually giving credence to a hypothesis that was debunked decades ago.

Youtuber Smarter Every Day released a video yesterday that appears designed to spread misinformation on creationism. I don't know his beliefs or his intent, but I know what he has done and said both in past videos and this new one that really shook a lot of his fans.

It was deeply disappointing from one of my favorite science communicators. I urge other science communicators and skeptics, who share a lot of his audience, to speak out about this.

@LeftistLawyer I know that and you know that, but the guys who hate electric cars hate them because they can't gun the engine real loud to show the world how cool and macho they are. Cars and trucks aren't transportation for them; they are an aposematic signal like the stripes on a bee or the bright colors of a poison frog.