On Wednesday, January 31, 2018 at 6:55:02 PM UTC-5, John Harshman wrote:
> On 1/31/18 1:24 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Wednesday, January 31, 2018 at 10:35:04 AM UTC-5, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
>
> >> I'm only destroying the TOE. But I am correctly explaining how rmns works.
> >
> > Not in talk.origins, not in sufficient detail for us to see just
> > how you model natural selection. Harshman would long ago have been
> > silenced if you had done that rather than shower him with insults.
>
> If you would just read his papers,
All in good time. I'm trying to get him just to post enough
of what he claims to have done in talk.origins in the past.
If he can't repost any such thing, or even post some of it for
the first time, then we will know he is not much better than
Ray Martinez, who has claimed (for how long? a decade? more?)
yet refuses to post any excerpts from any drafts.
I have challenged him directly in the first of two replies I
made to his reply to the above, less direct challenge.
And I expect him to duck like a quack again, like he did
several times already -- I point them out in my two replies.
> you would be able to see for yourself
> whether he models natural selection (and if he does, how). Of course he
> doesn't, though he clearly thinks he does. He's very confused about what
> his own math does.
We'll see. If he doesn't duck the question at the end of my first
reply to him today, but answers YES, then I will take a good long
look at his paper some time in February.
> >> They have the ArchieDumbtrex fossil to justify their beliefs.
> >
> > You've posted a lot of inchoate insults about THEM [1], and it's time
> > for you to come clean.
> >
> > Do you, like most creationists, point to biological papers a century
> > or more old, that say Archie was "a full-formed bird"?
> >
> > If so, do you also consider Microraptor to be a full-formed bird
> > even though its hind legs also seemed to qualify as wings?
> >
> > If so, do you simply DEFINE a bird as something with genuine [2] feathers?
Alan ducked the first question like a quack, then
left the crickets chirping after the other two.
> > [1] Actually, fossilS. We now have fossils of over half a dozen individuals,
> > at least four of which are essentially complete skeletons.
> I believe the current total is 10. Yes, 10 is "over half a dozen", but
> that phrase minimizes the number.
Even more: if you had read Pandora's post on Archie (Jan. 26) in
sci.bio.paleontology, you could have put 12 instead of 10.the
total is a dozen.
> > [2] Careful: kiwis have genuine feathers, even though they lack barbules
> > and hooks.
>
> Are you sure that's true? No barbules?
Yup, a better part of a whole thread was about kiwi feathers
back around 2015. And just last October the following excerpt
appeared in a reply by me to you:
____________________________________________________________________
> >>> But wait! we are seeing MODERN FEATHERS in the picture near the bottom,
> >>> in A and B with C showing Prum's theory. Long, well developed
> >>> rachises with individual barbs coming off them just like the
> >>> detached ones in the other pictures!
> >>
> >> No, those are not modern feathers. The rachis is not well developed,
> >> being no thicker than the barbs in all but the most proximal bits.
The rachis is long and is exactly where it is in modern birds.
What makes you think a 90 million year old specimen would
necessarily have a thick rachis?
Also, take a look at the kiwi feathers in the illustration on
the side of the following webpage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi
The ratio between barb thicknesses and rachis thicknesses seem to
agree pretty well with what you see in the bottom B picture
that we are talking about here, in:
http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/feathered-dinosaur-tail-burmese-amber-04437.html
======================= end of excerpt from reply to an October 9 post
of yours.
Do you agree that the feathers in the Wiki picture lack barbules?
You can click on the picture to get a full page magnification.
> > PS On the other hand, I still can't get over how ignorant Ron Okimoto
> > was to flame you for not "admitting" that mere hairlike growths,
> > like on Sinosauropteryx, were feathers.
>
> Sinosauropteryx doesn't have "mere hairlike growths"; that would be
> stage 1, while those structures would appear to be at least stage 2.
Hairlike growths in small clusters still don't qualify as feathers.
> You
> should stop the gratuitous attacks on others not present.
You call an accurate description of what went on a "gratuitous
attack"?
The irony is, I kept after you to say something about
Okimoto's insistence that those were feathers, on a thread
where he did the OP, and you ran away every time.
But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume
that you are trying to make amends for that display of
cowardice, by actually saying something about those "feathers".
[That's your cue to whine about how I am making
a "gratuitous" attack on you.]
> So, has Alan said anything new yet?
I don't think so. He said some four or five letter symbol
is supposed to model natural selection, but he didn't
explain how.
Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics
U. of S. Carolina, Columbia -- standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/