And there is no poster on PT that goes by Scott Page. There’s one that goes by “slpage” that posts there very rarely. THAT Page, whose first name happens to be Scott, is a flaming Darwin apologist of quite some repute that has been banned over and over again on other forums where he’s changed his name and snuck back in. What goes around comes around.

On the other hand there’s a computer engineer in Austin employed by a major computer manufacuter named Scott Page (conincidently I’m a computer engineer in Austin formerly employed by a major computer manufacturer) that can be found here http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users.....page.shtml That Scott Page is D. Scott Page. Does it take a rocket scientist to make the connection between DaveScot and D.Scott Page? Probably not. I’m not saying I’m THAT person but did Elsberry even bother to check if there any other possibilities? Nope. But what do you expect from the Church of Darwin. They’re all congentially blind to other possibilities. He had a mission to ban me and after censoring me through disemvowelment and deletion and eventually he found his reason. You’re a hypocrite, Elsberry.

So there.

Over on Bill Dembski’s weblog, a couple of people banned for bad behavior from the Panda’s Thumb weblog were [...]

“6. Posting under multiple identities or falsely posting as someone else may lead to removal of affected comments and blocking of the IP address from which those comments were posted, at the discretion of the management.

Simply put, don’t make a jerk out of yourself.”

“Evolving Apeman” writes:

“My comments and IP address were censored at Panda’s Thumb without good reason (and without explanation). If the “premier” pro-neo-Darwinism site is unwilling to allow dissenting viewpoints, why should this site either?”

This is incorrect. There are two comments that explain why “Evolving Apeman” was banned. In between posting as “Andrew Rule, MD” and “Evolving Apeman”, “Evolving Apeman” had a go at posting as “Great White Wonder”, which is an alias used by another PT commenter. I can’t speak to the prevalence of deletions of comments, since each contributor at PT manages their own threads, but I can say that “Evolving Apeman” was quite prolific for someone who claims to have been censored, and quite a lot of his material remains online there.

“DaveScot” wrote:

“Trying to escape that treatment I resorted to using randomly selected names. I was then banned for using multiple names.”

This is incorrect. “DaveScot” was not banned for simply using multiple names; he was banned for making threats against PT and also posting under another person’s name. “Scott Page” is not a pseudonym, but rather an actual person who posts at PT from time to time. Was “Scott Page” “randomly selected” as a posting alias? Apply your EF/DI, Bill, and use a local probability bound. Here’s the data showing that “DaveScot” was well aware of the use of the name “Scott Page”: 1, 2, 3, and 4. The “DaveScot” corpus of material posted at PT is available for review.

PT doesn’t ask much of commenters, not even that they agree with us, given some (very) small modicum of decorum. But there are some behaviors that shouldn’t be tolerated anywhere, and both “Evolving Apeman” and “DaveScot” violated a clearly stated rule at PT.

I was quite relieved that Jason Rosenhouse wrote his piece on William Dembski’s recent bloviations about quote-mining.  Specifically, Dembski was challenging a portion of something written by Dave Mullenix and myself about a year ago publish…

I’ve also been a subscriber and dedicated reader of Scientific American for almost 40 years. I found that the editor, John Rennie, has a blog at http://sciam-editor.typepad.com Rennie is a flaming blind believer in the Darwinian narrative. I began posting my thoughts on evolution on his blog some weeks ago and he also summarily deleted all my comments and banned me. Some way to treat a subscriber of many decades. I’m a retired computer scientist and accomplished inventor in the field. I know a design when I see one and can easily point out some of the myriad things about the machinery of life, in common personal computer parlance, that make it as obviously intelligently designed as the computer y’all are using to read this. I guess they can’t take that.

I’m not any kind of a conspiracy theorist, nor am I religious (I follow the evidence, wherever it leads) but it sure looks to me like there’s a concerted effort by the mainstream science establishment to censor criticism of the Darwinian narrative. The only thing holding up the monumental atheist fraud is the judicial system and the tortured latter 20th century interpretation of the establishment clause. It’s really turns my stomach to see what these Darwin worshippers are doing to science. This is doing great damage to science in the eyes of the public. The Darwinian narrative is going to fall. It’s just a matter of time. The longer and more doggedly the atheist scientific establishment dishonestly clings to their fantasy the worse they look when the cookie finally crumbles.

Man, I’m sure glad I call myself an engineer instead of a scientist. Science is spelled “reverse-engineering” in our world. We resort to it when necessary instead of making a career out of it.

Sorry to rant.

Neo-Creationist William Dembski seems to have sunk to a new low. After being taken to task for quoting Peter Ward out of context Dembski puts the blame for his intellectual dishonesty on…Peter Ward. Word of advice: if you are an evolutionist and don’…

My comments and IP address were censored at Panda’s Thumb without good reason (and without explanation). If the “premier” pro-neo-Darwinism site is unwilling to allow dissenting viewpoints, why should this site either?

Deleting comments without good reason (and without explanation) is pernicious, and is exactly why I will now refer to Mr. Dembski as “intellectually dishonest.” He cannot waffle or weave, so he gags his opponents.

1) Ward states that Pre-Cambrian metazoa have been found
2) Ward states that the Cambrian explosion really just documents the origin of skeletonized hard parts
3) Dembski left these facts out.

Here’s why Dembski was justified in leaving out these facts:

1) The statutus of Pre-Cambrian metazoa (such as the Vendian and Ediacaran fauna) are of highly questionable relevance to Cambrian fauna. Consider these authorities have stated as such:

“Although the stratigraphic distribution of Ediacaran fossils is clear enough, their biological interpretation remains controversial, providing what amounts to a paleontological Rorschach test. Several distinct body plans are represented. Most radially symmetric fossils plausibly represent polypoid organisms or the inflated holdfasts of colonial, diploblastic animals-mostly unrepresented in the modern fauna. More complex fossils include a range of forms built of repeated, tube-like units. In a stimulating, if controversial proposal, Seilacher grouped such fossils into a clade that he christened the Vendobionta and viewed as an extinct experiment in multicellular organization. Others have questioned this interpretation, assigning various forms to colonial diploblasts or to stem members of several bilaterian clades. It is genuinely difficult to map the characters of Ediacaran fossils onto the body plans of living invertebrates. Long viewed as the principal problem of interpreting Ediacaran assemblages, this difficulty increasingly appears to be their central point. Much opinion supports the broad view that both extinct diploblastic-grade animals and bilaterian stem groups [for example, the mollusk-like Kimberella ] are represented. Trace fossils record a modest diversity of (mostly) simple bilaterians. Crown group protostomes or deuterostomes may also lurk in Ediacaran-aged rocks but at present, evidence of such animals remains equivocal.” (Knoll & Carroll, Science 284:212902136, 1999)

“The beginning of the Cambrian period, some 545 million years ago, saw the
sudden appearance in the fossil record of almost all the main types of
animals (phyla) that still dominate the biota today. To be sure, there are
fossils in older strata, but they are either very small (such as bacteria
and algae), or their relationships to the living fauna are highly
contentious, as is the case with the famous soft-bodied fossils from the
late Precambrian Pound Quartzite, Ediacara, South Australia.” (The Cambrian Explosion Exploded?, by Richard Fortey, Science, 293, 20 Jul 2001, pp. 438-439).

2) Many soft-bodied fossils are common throughout the Pre-Cambrian record (including, in fact, the Vendian and Ediacaran fauna), and thus if there was soft-bodied diversification of the phyla leading up to the Cambrian explosion (where hard parts supposedly suddenly evolved all at once in many different phyla), then where is that soft-bodied documentation? Fortey addresses this point:

“So just how explosive was the Cambrian evolutionary “explosion”?

Support for a phylogenetic fuse is provided by the discovery of a true crustacean in early Cambrian strata from Shropshire, England, reported by Siveter et al. on page 479 of this issue (3). This fossil phosphatocopid “ostracod” is preserved extraordinarily well, with all its delicate limbs cast in calcium phosphate, allowing it to be assigned to the crustaceans with confidence. Very few fossils of this great antiquity reveal so much detail or can be interpreted with such certainty.

Crustacea are one of the great groups of living arthropods, embracing crabs, shrimps, lobsters, and slaters (4). Hitherto, the oldest undoubted crustaceans came from the late Cambrian “orsten” of southern Sweden (5) (the alleged crustacean Canadaspis, from the mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale, British Columbia, has proved controversial). This allowed some 40 million years from the base of the Cambrian to generate an ancestral crustacean from some primitive arthropod–time enough, indeed. But if crustaceans were already present in the early Cambrian, this pushes back in time the necessary steps in the evolutionary tree of arthropods that led to the crustacean design. It then becomes perfectly plausible that this early radiation happened in the late Precambrian.

This squares with previous critiques, which noted that in the early Cambrian, some arthropods–especially the ubiquitous trilobites–had already differentiated into different kinds with separate geographical distributions. This differential evolution and dispersal, too, must have required a previous history of the group for which there is no fossil record (6). Furthermore, cladistic analyses of arthropod phylogeny revealed that trilobites, like eucrustaceans, are fairly advanced “twigs” on the arthropod tree (see the figure). Trilobite-like trace fossils extend to the base of the Cambrian in Newfoundland, and it would be easy to conclude that appropriate trace makers must have appeared still earlier, in the late Precambrian. But fossils of these alleged ancestral arthropods are lacking.” (Fortey, 2001)

Of course Fortey is an evolutionist who believes that some invisible arthropod radiation actually took place. We should have hard parts going back much further than the Cambrian but we don’t. And we also have soft-bodied fossils going way far back, so why is it that most of the major living phyla all appear at the same time? This is a question worth asking, and one that Darwinists dodge through their usual tactic of unjustifed intellectual namecalling. Dembski wasn’t wrong for leaving out Ward’s comments–Dembski was perfectly clear that Ward is an evolutionist, and if Ward is making other arguments that don’t withstand scrutiny, why bother listing them?

The Cambrian explosion is not just an artifact of hard-part fossilization, nor do the Vendian/Ediacaran fauna do anything to solve the problem.

|-Art-|

The weblog Proverbs Daily is coming to an end. He realized something important about his time spent working on his weblog:: I tried all 3 methods with varying degrees of success but the end result was always the same…something…