Ah. Here we go!
Ian Juby offers up this intellectual equivalent of a steaming pile of dog turds.
So.
Let me get this straight:
T- rex was a vegetarian because the Bible said so.
And we can ignore all the evidence from T. rex morphology that says it was carnivorous for no other reason than fruit bats have pointed teeth?
Well, how do you explain why T. rex had such thick bones and such powerful jaws?
Was the vegetation back then that much more likely to fight back ?
Fruit bats don’t have very powerful jaws at all. They might have pointed teeth, but these can be explained by understanding that fruit bats evolved from insectivorous microbats, which needed pointed teeth to catch insects. The pointed teeth that fruit bats possess is the result of an historical legacy of their lineage. It is not an adaptation for eating fruit.
I’m surprised that ol’ Juby didn’t bring up hippopotamuses, which do have large pointed teeth that they use to fight with each other and defend themselves against predators. I’m also surprised he didn’t try to bring up the various primitive deer that possess tusks.
But all of those animals have flat, grinding teeth in the back, which would sort of hurt Juby’s little theory a bit.
Juby cannot explain why T. rex had such powerful jaws.
Ignore the teeth.
No herbivorous animal living today has a need for such extremely powerful jaws.
I doubt that the fruit and vegetable matter of T. rex’s day required such great strength to bite into.
However, if we accept that T. rex preyed up other large dinosaurs– and we have evidence of this–then the powerful jaws make perfect sense.
So this fruit bat analogy is one of the worst cases of intellectual dishonestly I’ve yet seen a creationist try to pull.
Surely Mr. Juby, a Mensa member, can find the evidence that T. rex was a predator.
And I am sure he already knows about this evidence, but he’s making career out of telling obvious lies to children and the gullible that he cannot accept the truth.
I feel sorry for the kids who are learning this crap.
Kids love dinosaurs. When I was kid, dinosaurs were an obsession for several years– until they started changing the scientific names on me.
I didn’t know that paleontology was forever revising the classification of these species.
So I drifted away from them.
However, dinosaurs can be a great way to introduce children to science and rationalism.
And the creationists know they are a great way to get children indoctrinated into their nonsense.
What was the name of Kent Hovind’s “museum”?
Scary, eh?
People like Ian Juby are robbing these children of a chance to understand the truth about the history of life on this planet.
It’s a terrible thing that he’s doing here, for dinosaurs can plant within the imagination of a child the beginnings of a scientific way of thinking.
One of these kids could be the person who discovers the cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s, or maybe one of them will be the person who comes up with cold fusion or some other breakthrough in the energy sector.
Creationism is about forcing children to believe what is demonstrably false.
It is the beginning of the dulling of inquiring, creative minds.
These are the minds that will carry our species on into the future.
Dulling them with such stupidity does our species and our planet a great disservice.
It’s a truly shameful act.
I don’t care how smart Mr. Juby is.
What he is doing is one of the worst things I’ve seen supposedly educated people do.
No IQ score can change that reality.
And no IQ score can disprove the overwhelming evidence for evolution.
Facts don’t care how smart you are.
If your IQ is 200 and you spout creationism, you’re still wrong.
Your IQ doesn’t give you license to change what’s true.
Another example of how Mensa membership is just a meaningless vanity and not something that actually means anything about a member’s intelligence.
If his IQ is that high, it’s a waste of a good mind. It really is.
He makes these easily debunked creationist claims, and then he has the temerity (which is Latin for balls) to attack AronRa’s video on beneficial mutations:
AronRa may not be a Mensa member (though I’m absolutely sure he’s smart enough), but at least he understands the scientific method.
And he made corrections to whatever errors he made in his videos, which Juby doesn’t do.
That should tell us a lot.
Intelligence is some that one is born with. Mental discipline is something one has to learn. Obviously Mr. Juby’s thought processes are very undisciplined.
I wonder what he thinks Sickle Cell Anemia is? If one lives in Malaria-prone regions, it most definitely is “beneficial”, even though its lethal when homozygous.
I truly do not understand how anyone can actually believe in creationism. But I know many people – otherwise intelligent, capable adults, who ignore the overwhelming evidence for the evolution of species and who really believe that God spoke everything into existence.
I used to think it was because believing in creationism is easier than thinking. But these same goodhearted, honest, intelligent people go through extraordinary study & mental acrobatics to justify their belief in Divine Creation.
I think that part of it is that so many people are indoctrinated with creationism, even from birth. Our culture is saturated with it. (At least, where I live, it is.) Even in public schools. It’s a sort of brainwashing.
Liked the motorhead song at the end :) neat little surprise and it saved me from listening to more of this dribble :)