The evolution of the bacterial flagellum: For Peter

[Oxyaena]

Nyikos has been seen sprouting the idea that the flagellum is designed
recently, despite the multitude of posts I have made (one very recent)
that show otherwise, so in order to get it through Nyikos' thick head
that the bacterial flagellum did indeed come about by evolution rather
than by design, I intend to make a post specifically about the evolution
of the flagellum, complete with links to other articles that do it even
better than I have.

The flagellum originally evolved from a Type-III secretory system, which
is a secretory system utilized by pathogenic bacteria to drill into an
organism's skin. We know this because the base 30 proteins found in the
flagellum, are also found in the Type-III secretory system i the exact
same configuration as the 30 base proteins in the bacterial flagellum.
Peter, this may be hard for you to comprehend, but there is an easy way
for the flagellum to evolve from the Type-III secretory system. The
process is this, in the ancestral set (in this case the Type-III
secretory system) the function was different from the flagellum of
today, but it still had some of the same parts. Over time, gradual
modifications would be made on the proto-flagellum by way of random
mutation, beneficial mutations would be selected upon, and would
gradually spread through the gene pool of bacteria, whether by
horizontal gene transfer or budding, I don't know, probably both. These
changes would gradually accumulate over time to where the
proto-flagellum would be drastically different from the original set,
that is, the Type-III secretory system, and the different stages it took
in its development would've had drastically different functions.

Functions that weren't beneficial would be discarded, functions that
were beneficial were kept and were refined upon by natural selection. By
this process, the bacterial flagellum gradually came about from the
original Type-III secretory system. See, Peter, we don't need to resort
to invoking design in order to explain features in biology that clearly
evolved anyways. Here's a few links to corroborate what I wrote:

http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13663-evolution-myths-the-bacterial-flagellum-is-irreducibly-complex/

http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB200_1.html

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/talk.origins/oxyaena%7Csort:date/talk.origins/xiNQGbzTiew/AhH3_WFlBQAJ
(One of my posts explaining this)

http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.html

[RonO]

Minnich did some research on the evolution of the flagellum and found
things like multiple functions for the units involved (they just don't
work to make a flagellum), and his work on the tail proteins (no tail no
flagellar function). He found that the tail proteins had evolved in a
manner consistent with how the flagellum is constructed, and that gene
duplication was obviously involved.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/epQCRdfToOo/vktI2MjyIwAJ

Ron Okimoto

[zencycle]

On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 5:55:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> Nyikos has been seen sprouting the idea that the flagellum is designed
> recently, despite the multitude of posts I have made (one very recent)
> that show otherwise, so in order to get it through Nyikos' thick head
> that the bacterial flagellum did indeed come about by evolution rather
> than by design, I intend to make a post specifically about the evolution
> of the flagellum, complete with links to other articles that do it even
> better than I have.

Speaking to the point of irreducible complexity, There's also the fact that the flagellum devolved to a less complex form.

https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article-abstract/25/9/2069/1305557?redirectedFrom=fulltext

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2018 17:52:03 -0400, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena
<oxy...@invalid.invalid>:

Good summary; thanks.

But don't expect it to help.
--

Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

[Ernest Major]

There are arguments about whether the flagellum evolved from the
Type-III secretory system, or vice versa (or both from a common
ancestors). A paper in PLoS Genetics find the Type-III secretory system
to be the derived state.

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002983

It seems likely to me that the bacterial flagellum evolved from a
secretory system or a pilus, but the details may be lost in the mists of
time.

--
alias Ernest Major

[jillery]

For the purposes of identifying what is IC, it doesn't matter which
evolved from what. As Miller argued, if bacterial flagella derived
from TTSS, that would mean parts of IC systems can evolve before the
IC system itself. OTOH if TTSS derived from bacterial flagella, that
would mean parts can evolve separate functions from what they do in
the system. Either way, Behe's claims about IC systems would be
refuted.

--
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Attributed to Voltaire

[Oxyaena]

Interesting, although it still disproves Behe's notion of IC because if
this is true, the flagellum was reduced and the resulting descendant of
the flagellum, the Type-III secretory system, is still functional, with
some of the same parts, even though it serves a separate purpose.
Zencycle posted a link to a paper essentially stating that the flagellum
itself was reduced from an unknown progenitor, which only serves to
hammer the final nail into the notion that the bacterial flagellum is
irreducibly complex's coffin. Although as you said, the details of the
evolution of the flagellum are likely lost to time, as are many other
things, such as what was the first human language.

> http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002983
>
>
> It seems likely to me that the bacterial flagellum evolved from a
> secretory system or a pilus, but the details may be lost in the mists of
> time.
>

Even with this in mind, it still disproves Peter's (and by extension,
Behe's) claims that the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex,
therefore God/Little Green Men. As I wrote in my OP, my post was only
meant to show that we know of ways the flagellum could've evolved, and
that we definitely know it was *not* designed. I started several
different threads on IC, including one way back in 2016 demonstrating
the ridiculousness of Behe's mouse trap argument. Nyikos has a penchant
for ignoring things that could/will otherwise inconvenience him, so I
doubt my post will matter in the long run. On the off chance he does
respond to this, he'll probably dismiss it out of hand like anything
else that contradicts what he believes.

[zencycle]

On Thursday, July 12, 2018 at 11:20:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>
> Zencycle posted a link to a paper essentially stating that the flagellum
> itself was reduced from an unknown progenitor,

Not quite. Essentially, bacterial flagellum in this species has devolved, and now serves a function akin to pooping out proteins. The paper states:

"The flagella pathway in endosymbiotic bacteria may represent therefore an example of reverse evolution dependent on the bacterium lifestyle whereby the ancient function of the flagella (cell motility) has been replaced by a new function (protein export) that mutational dynamics may be governed by the bacterium, but most likely by the host selection dynamics. "

and

" Maezawa et al. (2006) reported the existence of hundreds of flagellar expressed hook and basal body structures but lacking the filament part of the flagellum, supporting previous suggestions of the possible specialization of these genes in protein export from the bacterium to the host (Shigenobu et al. 2000)."

> which only serves to
> hammer the final nail into the notion that the bacterial flagellum is
> irreducibly complex's coffin.

That is exactly the point. it completely refutes the idea that bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex.

[Oxyaena]

On 7/13/2018 8:56 AM, zencycle wrote:
> On Thursday, July 12, 2018 at 11:20:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>>
>> Zencycle posted a link to a paper essentially stating that the flagellum
>> itself was reduced from an unknown progenitor,
>
> Not quite. Essentially, bacterial flagellum in this species has devolved, and now serves a function akin to pooping out proteins. The paper states:
>
> "The flagella pathway in endosymbiotic bacteria may represent therefore an example of reverse evolution dependent on the bacterium lifestyle whereby the ancient function of the flagella (cell motility) has been replaced by a new function (protein export) that mutational dynamics may be governed by the bacterium, but most likely by the host selection dynamics. "
>
> and
>
> " Maezawa et al. (2006) reported the existence of hundreds of flagellar expressed hook and basal body structures but lacking the filament part of the flagellum, supporting previous suggestions of the possible specialization of these genes in protein export from the bacterium to the host (Shigenobu et al. 2000)."
>

Oh. So, in essence, what the paper is saying is that what I said was
somewhat accurate, but only in the instance of a single species of
bacteria. I stand corrected, but as I wrote below and you acknowledged,
this does not change the fact that it still shows that regardless of how
the bacterial flagellum evolved, which is still under debate, it's long
been settled that there is NO way for it to have come about by
intelligent design rather than evolution by natural selection, when all
the evidence points towards the latter, and none towards the former.

I still doubt Peter is going to take *any* of this into consideration,
though, since he has a penchant for ignoring details that could/would
otherwise inconvenience him.

>> which only serves to
>> hammer the final nail into the notion that the bacterial flagellum is
>> irreducibly complex's coffin.
>
> That is exactly the point. it completely refutes the idea that bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex.
>
>

The fact that I've written several posts detailing this, I've linked to
at least a dozen reputable sources and peer-reviewed publications
supporting this conclusion, not to mention the sources you and Ernest
Major added, and that Nyikos is still trumpeting the "bacterial
flagellum is IC" bullshit really paints an accurate picture of Peter
when it comes to scientific accuracy.

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 11:26:59 -0400, the following appeared

in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena
<oxy...@invalid.invalid>:

>On 7/13/2018 8:56 AM, zencycle wrote:
>> On Thursday, July 12, 2018 at 11:20:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>>>
>>> Zencycle posted a link to a paper essentially stating that the flagellum
>>> itself was reduced from an unknown progenitor,
>>
>> Not quite. Essentially, bacterial flagellum in this species has devolved, and now serves a function akin to pooping out proteins. The paper states:
>>
>> "The flagella pathway in endosymbiotic bacteria may represent therefore an example of reverse evolution dependent on the bacterium lifestyle whereby the ancient function of the flagella (cell motility) has been replaced by a new function (protein export) that mutational dynamics may be governed by the bacterium, but most likely by the host selection dynamics. "
>>
>> and
>>
>> " Maezawa et al. (2006) reported the existence of hundreds of flagellar expressed hook and basal body structures but lacking the filament part of the flagellum, supporting previous suggestions of the possible specialization of these genes in protein export from the bacterium to the host (Shigenobu et al. 2000)."
>>
>
>Oh. So, in essence, what the paper is saying is that what I said was
>somewhat accurate, but only in the instance of a single species of
>bacteria. I stand corrected, but as I wrote below and you acknowledged,
>this does not change the fact that it still shows that regardless of how
>the bacterial flagellum evolved, which is still under debate, it's long
>been settled that there is NO way for it to have come about by
>intelligent design rather than evolution by natural selection, when all
>the evidence points towards the latter, and none towards the former.

That's a bit strong, since there is *nothing* which couldn't
be the product of ID; that is, in fact, the weakness of ID
as explanatory, since if anything is possible nothing is
actually explained.

Say rather that, since there are known pathways by which the
modifications yielding complex systems can occur naturally,
there is no reason to postulate unobserved "designers".

>I still doubt Peter is going to take *any* of this into consideration,
>though, since he has a penchant for ignoring details that could/would
>otherwise inconvenience him.
>
>
>>> which only serves to
>>> hammer the final nail into the notion that the bacterial flagellum is
>>> irreducibly complex's coffin.
>>
>> That is exactly the point. it completely refutes the idea that bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex.
>>
>>
>
>The fact that I've written several posts detailing this, I've linked to
>at least a dozen reputable sources and peer-reviewed publications
>supporting this conclusion, not to mention the sources you and Ernest
>Major added, and that Nyikos is still trumpeting the "bacterial
>flagellum is IC" bullshit really paints an accurate picture of Peter
>when it comes to scientific accuracy.

I thought he'd dropped that chimera...?

[Oxyaena]

Fair point, although when I say "we know" it's because we have a good
reason to believe so, and plenty of evidence that says so, so for
practical purposes we *do* know that nothing was designed in biology. Of
course, if this was a peer-reviewed journal my claims of us definitely
knowing that there was no designer wouldn't withstand scientific
scrutiny, but for the purposes of talk.origins it is sufficient.

>
>> I still doubt Peter is going to take *any* of this into consideration,
>> though, since he has a penchant for ignoring details that could/would
>> otherwise inconvenience him.
>>
>>
>>>> which only serves to
>>>> hammer the final nail into the notion that the bacterial flagellum is
>>>> irreducibly complex's coffin.
>>>
>>> That is exactly the point. it completely refutes the idea that bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> The fact that I've written several posts detailing this, I've linked to
>> at least a dozen reputable sources and peer-reviewed publications
>> supporting this conclusion, not to mention the sources you and Ernest
>> Major added, and that Nyikos is still trumpeting the "bacterial
>> flagellum is IC" bullshit really paints an accurate picture of Peter
>> when it comes to scientific accuracy.
>
> I thought he'd dropped that chimera...?
>

Not that I`m aware of, the "Pastafarian" thread is full of his special
pleading for ID, including at one point him saying that "there's no
evidence that the flagellum was designed, but no evidence that it wasn't
designed either...", which is a fallacious line of reasoning because he
uses the argument from ignorance to advance his "point". Peter, absence
of evidence (we *do* have evidence the flagellum evolved, how it evolved
is up for debate, as only a cursory glance at this thread should show,
but we *know* it did indeed evolve, something Peter should know, but is
just another of the many things he likes to ignore) *does* sometimes
count as evidence of absence.

He's essentially using an obfuscated version of the "God of the gaps"
"argument" (or should it be "Alien of the gaps" given Peter's adherence
to the "directed panspermia" hypothesis?), which still counts as an
argument from ignorance.

[jillery]

On Thu, 12 Jul 2018 23:19:35 -0400, Oxyaena <oxy...@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

Behe's IC is supposed to be about moleculary biology, but he uses a
mechanical device as analogy. An irony here is that his analogy
illustrates the flaws in his logic as well as anything anybody could
say otherwise. If Miller's mousetrap tieclip doesn't work for you,
the following is a classic decomposition of Behe's iconic mousetrap:

http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2018 14:34:28 -0400, the following appeared

Granted; I was being pedantic.

>>> I still doubt Peter is going to take *any* of this into consideration,
>>> though, since he has a penchant for ignoring details that could/would
>>> otherwise inconvenience him.
>>>
>>>
>>>>> which only serves to
>>>>> hammer the final nail into the notion that the bacterial flagellum is
>>>>> irreducibly complex's coffin.
>>>>
>>>> That is exactly the point. it completely refutes the idea that bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> The fact that I've written several posts detailing this, I've linked to
>>> at least a dozen reputable sources and peer-reviewed publications
>>> supporting this conclusion, not to mention the sources you and Ernest
>>> Major added, and that Nyikos is still trumpeting the "bacterial
>>> flagellum is IC" bullshit really paints an accurate picture of Peter
>>> when it comes to scientific accuracy.
>>
>> I thought he'd dropped that chimera...?
>>
>
>Not that I`m aware of, the "Pastafarian" thread is full of his special
>pleading for ID, including at one point him saying that "there's no
>evidence that the flagellum was designed, but no evidence that it wasn't
>designed either...", which is a fallacious line of reasoning because he
>uses the argument from ignorance to advance his "point". Peter, absence
>of evidence (we *do* have evidence the flagellum evolved, how it evolved
>is up for debate, as only a cursory glance at this thread should show,
>but we *know* it did indeed evolve, something Peter should know, but is
>just another of the many things he likes to ignore) *does* sometimes
>count as evidence of absence.

Assuming I've untangled that, I tend to agree, I've always
been a bit uncomfortable with "absence of evidence isn't
evidence of absence", since in a fair number of cases
absence of evidence *is* taken as evidence of absence, or at
least as a reason to ignore assertions of unobserved
entities or activities.

>He's essentially using an obfuscated version of the "God of the gaps"
>"argument" (or should it be "Alien of the gaps" given Peter's adherence
>to the "directed panspermia" hypothesis?), which still counts as an
>argument from ignorance.

Yeah, I've occasionally thought that DP (to him) is a
convenient way to "scientifically" argue against abiogenesis
without specifically invoking a Creationist deity, in much
the same way as ID is used by crypto-Creationists.

[erik simpson]

I've always thought that Peter's DP is indistinguishable from devine creation,
except that there's actually more evidence for the latter, albeit all of it
hearsay. As Crick himself says:

“The first [criticism to directed panspermia], which my wife has voiced more
than once, is that it is not a real theory but merely science fiction. This
is not meant as a compliment, though it might perhaps be taken that way.”

(p. 148 Life Itself; Crick and Orgel 1981)

[Oxyaena]

I`m not exactly sure. Peter definitely isn't your average creationist,
since he does acknowledge evolution as the sole explanation for
biological diversity as well as having a substantial amount of knowledge
on evolutionary biology and paleontology, but he has admitted to having
religious tendencies, so maybe he's a closet evolutionary creationist?

[Martin Harran]

On Sat, 14 Jul 2018 10:21:19 -0700, Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>

Has he ever actually addressed the question of how the alien life
forms came into being?

[jillery]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2018 02:10:18 -0400, Oxyaena <oxy...@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

My impression is he is a better-informed-than-average pseudo-skeptic.
His expressed opinions are Creationist in the same sense as Behe's, in
that he seasons his default core religious beliefs and worldview with
selected methodological conclusions.

[Ernest Major]

At one point he implied that complex life could exist without containing
irreducibly complex subsystems. The particular example was that his
panspermists didn't use ribosomes (protein assembly arguably being
irreducibly complex) in their own cells, but for some reason
incorporated them into the organisms they shot off into space.

--
alias Ernest Major

[Bob Casanova]

On Sun, 15 Jul 2018 09:45:14 +0100, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Martin Harran
<martin...@gmail.com>:

I *believe* his argument is that abiogenesis is possible,
but is so unlikely that it has only occurred once (or a very
few times) in this galaxy. Of course, there's no evidence
that it's actually unlikely, unless one accepts the
arguments of the Creationists regarding various large orders
of magnitude for chemical reactions, but that is not usually
addressed other than via arguments from incredulity or
ignorance.

[Bob Casanova]

On Sat, 14 Jul 2018 11:05:15 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by erik simpson
<eastsi...@gmail.com>:

>I've always thought that Peter's DP is indistinguishable from devine creation,
>except that there's actually more evidence for the latter, albeit all of it
>hearsay. As Crick himself says:
>
> “The first [criticism to directed panspermia], which my wife has voiced more
> than once, is that it is not a real theory but merely science fiction. This
> is not meant as a compliment, though it might perhaps be taken that way.”
>
>(p. 148 Life Itself; Crick and Orgel 1981)

If one grants that his advanced aliens are functionally
indistinguishable from deities, albeit not omnipotent ones,
that makes sense as a motivator.

[Peter Nyikos]

This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
at the present time.

What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good. But of course, we
cannot have really good evidence for DP in the next thousand or more years,
unless life on other solar system bodies all has a genetic code that is
only slightly different from ours, if at all.

On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 5:55:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> Nyikos has been seen sprouting the idea that the flagellum is designed
> recently, despite the multitude of posts I have made (one very recent)
> that show otherwise, so in order to get it through Nyikos' thick head
> that the bacterial flagellum did indeed come about by evolution rather
> than by design,

If you really believe what you say below is convincing to anyone here,
you are the one with the thick head.

> I intend to make a post specifically about the evolution
> of the flagellum, complete with links to other articles that do it even
> better than I have.
>
> The flagellum originally evolved from a Type-III secretory system,

You are treating a hypothesis as fact.


Everyone who posted to this thread has completely ignored Minnich's
testimony in Dover, where he gave some reasons, including one that was
*experimentally based*, why he thought the Type III secretory mechanism
devolved from the flagellum instead of the flagellum evolving from it.

He admitted that his was a minority opinion, but if anyone gave
actual, experimentally based evidence that his opinion was incorrect,
I have yet to hear about it.

> which
> is a secretory system utilized by pathogenic bacteria to drill into an
> organism's skin. We know this because the base 30 proteins found in the
> flagellum, are also found in the Type-III secretory system i the exact
> same configuration as the 30 base proteins in the bacterial flagellum.

Non sequitur, in the light of what Minnich said at Dover.

> Peter, this may be hard for you to comprehend, but there is an easy way
> for the flagellum to evolve from the Type-III secretory system.

Oxyaena, what you have given me below is a purely theoretical description
of evolution in general, with the flagellum conveniently grafted on to it.
Just about any example of hypothesized ancestor-descendant relationship
could just as easily have been grafted on to it.

For instance, I could just change a few details and "easily" "show" that
birds weren't designed because they evolved from sphenosuchid crocodilians.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

We have a house guest for the rest of this week, so my time
for posting is extremely limited until a week from today.
This may well be the last post I do to this thread today.

...which might also be the way the Type III secretory mechanism came
about. As I told Oxyaena, who based the above bombast on the claim
that it happened the other way around: Minnich stated his opinion,
at Dover, that the Type III mechanism devolved from the flagellum.


The following excerpt from your linked abstract suggests that this
is a case of parallel evolution to that which Minnich was hypothesizing.

Only proteins involved in protein export within the flagella assembly
pathway (type III secretion system and the basal body) have been kept
in most of the endosymbionts, whereas those involved in building the
filament and hook of flagella have only in few instances been kept,
indicating a change in the functional purpose of this pathway.

The swimming function of the flagellum is thereby lost. Minnich kept
stressing this over and over in describing how he and his students
showed that the flagellum they were experimenting with was
irreducibly complex (IC).

Behe's definition of IC in _Darwin's Black Box_ included the function
as an essential feature. Leaving it out is a mistake that all too many
people here make.

Analogy: the mousetrap described by Behe is NOT irreducibly complex
for the function of being used as a float for a fishing apparatus.
You could remove everything except the piece of wood which some
wise guy put *last* in the famous online "evolving mousetrap"
linked by Oxyaena.

The piece of wood keeps performing its function as an integral part of
the setup, whose remaining parts are hook, line, sinker, rod and reel.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina

http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos

[zencycle]

On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 12:40:03 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>
> The swimming function of the flagellum is thereby lost. Minnich kept
> stressing this over and over in describing how he and his students
> showed that the flagellum they were experimenting with was
> irreducibly complex (IC).
>
> Behe's definition of IC in _Darwin's Black Box_ included the function
> as an essential feature. Leaving it out is a mistake that all too many
> people here make.

So, all life forms are irreducibly complex?

[jillery]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2018 09:02:04 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

>This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
>the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
>at the present time.
>
>What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
>Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
>bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good. But of course, we
>cannot have really good evidence for DP in the next thousand or more years,
>unless life on other solar system bodies all has a genetic code that is
>only slightly different from ours, if at all.
>
>
>On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 5:55:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>> Nyikos has been seen sprouting the idea that the flagellum is designed
>> recently, despite the multitude of posts I have made (one very recent)
>> that show otherwise, so in order to get it through Nyikos' thick head
>> that the bacterial flagellum did indeed come about by evolution rather
>> than by design,
>
>If you really believe what you say below is convincing to anyone here,
>you are the one with the thick head.

You're just whistling in the dark.

>> I intend to make a post specifically about the evolution
>> of the flagellum, complete with links to other articles that do it even
>> better than I have.
>>
>> The flagellum originally evolved from a Type-III secretory system,
>
>You are treating a hypothesis as fact.
>
>
>Everyone who posted to this thread has completely ignored Minnich's
>testimony in Dover, where he gave some reasons, including one that was
>*experimentally based*, why he thought the Type III secretory mechanism
>devolved from the flagellum instead of the flagellum evolving from it.
>
>He admitted that his was a minority opinion, but if anyone gave
>actual, experimentally based evidence that his opinion was incorrect,
>I have yet to hear about it.

Of course, actual, experimentally based evidence was cited to Minnich
in the Dover trial, which he acknowledged showed the question of order
remained unsettled. It's been almost 13 years, do I really need to
cite the transcripts?

More to the point, as I pointed out elsethread, the order of the
origin of these two systems aren't relevant to the question of IC,
because if either evolved from the other, that refutes Behe's
argument, that parts of IC systems can't have functions outside what
they do in the IC system.

>> which
>> is a secretory system utilized by pathogenic bacteria to drill into an
>> organism's skin. We know this because the base 30 proteins found in the
>> flagellum, are also found in the Type-III secretory system i the exact
>> same configuration as the 30 base proteins in the bacterial flagellum.
>
>Non sequitur, in the light of what Minnich said at Dover.

Non-sequitur back atcha. Your veneration of Minnich notwithstanding,
he is not the final authority on this point. As you say, his is a
minority position, the consensus held by others of at least equal
abilities.

>> Peter, this may be hard for you to comprehend, but there is an easy way
>> for the flagellum to evolve from the Type-III secretory system.
>
>Oxyaena, what you have given me below is a purely theoretical description
>of evolution in general, with the flagellum conveniently grafted on to it.
>Just about any example of hypothesized ancestor-descendant relationship
>could just as easily have been grafted on to it.

Incorrect. Minnich himself claimed to be the first to recognize the
homology between TTSS and bacterial flagellum. It is not just a
hypothesis, but based on evidence from molecular biology.

>For instance, I could just change a few details and "easily" "show" that
>birds weren't designed because they evolved from sphenosuchid crocodilians.

Another non-sequitur; birds aren't designed. More to the point, the
argument for IC is based on the claim that IC systems are too complex
to evolve. A plausible hypothesis is all that is required to moot an
assertion of impossibility.

[jillery]

Of course, Minnich et al showed the bacterial flagellum was IC using
Behe's test, specifically, to remove a part and check for system
functionality. The trouble with that test is it doesn't meaningfully
test if the system could have evolved.

>Behe's definition of IC in _Darwin's Black Box_ included the function
>as an essential feature. Leaving it out is a mistake that all too many
>people here make.
>
>Analogy: the mousetrap described by Behe is NOT irreducibly complex
>for the function of being used as a float for a fishing apparatus.
>You could remove everything except the piece of wood which some
>wise guy put *last* in the famous online "evolving mousetrap"
>linked by Oxyaena.
>
>The piece of wood keeps performing its function as an integral part of
>the setup, whose remaining parts are hook, line, sinker, rod and reel.

Your echo an argument Behe makes. A fatal flaw in that line of
reasoning is that it allows parts of IC systems to have evolved as
parts with functions other than what they do in the IC system. This
moots Behe fundamental argument that IC parts must have their IC
function *before* they're assembled as IC systems, since evolution
can't do that. OTOH if parts can have other functions, then they can
evolve those functions, and then adapt those functions to the IC
system *after* they're assembled as IC systems, and that's exactly
what evolution does.

Of course, both of your arguments above were refuted long ago and many
times. Are you going to say you have yet to hear those refutations?

>Peter Nyikos
>Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
>University of South Carolina
>http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos

Instead of posting PRATTs, why aren't you helping your family get
ready for your house guest?

[Mark Isaak]

On 7/23/18 9:02 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
> the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
> at the present time.

You overstate the case. The evidence for the bacterial flagellum being
designed is nonexistent.

> What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
> Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
> bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good.

I don't know why you would think that. Why would the panspermists
design a feature to make pathogens more virulent?

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly
understand who we are and where we come from, we will have failed."
- Carl Sagan

[Peter Nyikos]

On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 3:35:02 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jul 2018 09:02:04 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
> <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> >This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
> >the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
> >at the present time.
> >
> >What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
> >Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
> >bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good. But of course, we
> >cannot have really good evidence for DP in the next thousand or more years,
> >unless life on other solar system bodies all has a genetic code that is
> >only slightly different from ours, if at all.
> >
> >
> >On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 5:55:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> >> Nyikos has been seen sprouting the idea that the flagellum is designed
> >> recently, despite the multitude of posts I have made (one very recent)
> >> that show otherwise, so in order to get it through Nyikos' thick head
> >> that the bacterial flagellum did indeed come about by evolution rather
> >> than by design,
> >
> >If you really believe what you say below is convincing to anyone here,
> >you are the one with the thick head.
>
>
> You're just whistling in the dark.

I didn't think you and Oxyaena were THAT fond of each other, that you
would be convinced by the amateurish logic in the OP. There may be
good arguments for the bacterial flagellum having evolved, but the
elementary school level generalities Oxyaena used aren't even in
the ballpark. [I've preserved them at the end of this post, for
the second time around, so people can see what I am talking about.]

>
> >> I intend to make a post specifically about the evolution
> >> of the flagellum, complete with links to other articles that do it even
> >> better than I have.
> >>
> >> The flagellum originally evolved from a Type-III secretory system,
> >
> >You are treating a hypothesis as fact.
> >
> >
> >Everyone who posted to this thread has completely ignored Minnich's
> >testimony in Dover, where he gave some reasons, including one that was
> >*experimentally based*, why he thought the Type III secretory mechanism
> >devolved from the flagellum instead of the flagellum evolving from it.
> >
> >He admitted that his was a minority opinion, but if anyone gave
> >actual, experimentally based evidence that his opinion was incorrect,
> >I have yet to hear about it.
>
>
> Of course,

...what you say below is something I already told zencycle, and
is NOT what Oxyaena claimed. Oxyaena was absolutely unequivocal in
saying that the flagellum evolved from the Type III system.

> actual, experimentally based evidence was cited to Minnich
> in the Dover trial, which he acknowledged showed the question of order
> remained unsettled.

You are merely saying what I did above, in different words. So your
next question makes no sense.

> It's been almost 13 years, do I really need to
> cite the transcripts?


> More to the point, as I pointed out elsethread, the order of the
> origin of these two systems aren't relevant to the question of IC,
> because if either evolved from the other, that refutes Behe's
> argument, that parts of IC systems can't have functions outside what
> they do in the IC system.

Behe never made that argument. It is a canard that has grown up
around Behe, that he ignored the possibility of exaptation.

If he had been like Stephen Meyer in _Darwin's Doubt_, Behe would have had
appendices in which he discussed more technical matters. But it
probably would not have helped: people routinely ignore Behe's comment
at the top of page 40, where he acknowledges that IC systems could
evolve by "indirect, circuitous route[s]."

>
>
> >> which
> >> is a secretory system utilized by pathogenic bacteria to drill into an
> >> organism's skin. We know this because the base 30 proteins found in the
> >> flagellum, are also found in the Type-III secretory system i the exact
> >> same configuration as the 30 base proteins in the bacterial flagellum.
> >
> >Non sequitur, in the light of what Minnich said at Dover.
>
>
> Non-sequitur back atcha.

Sorry, you don't get to redefine "non-sequitur" to your heart's content.
What you say below leaves my criticism of Oxyaena's illogic intact.

> Your veneration of Minnich notwithstanding,

If anyone here is guilty of veneration, it is you with your veneration
of Oxyaena's OP.

> he is not the final authority on this point. As you say, his is a
> minority position, the consensus held by others of at least equal
> abilities.

And on what is that "consensus" based? Perhaps it is nothing more
solid than the consensus of scientists for untold centuries that
the sun revolved around the earth and the earth stood still.

>
> >> Peter, this may be hard for you to comprehend, but there is an easy way
> >> for the flagellum to evolve from the Type-III secretory system.
> >
> >Oxyaena, what you have given me below is a purely theoretical description
> >of evolution in general, with the flagellum conveniently grafted on to it.
> >Just about any example of hypothesized ancestor-descendant relationship
> >could just as easily have been grafted on to it.
>
>
> Incorrect.

Correct, and if you took the bother to think about what Oxyaena wrote below
[still preserved below my virtual .sig from last time] you would know it.

> Minnich himself claimed to be the first to recognize the
> homology between TTSS and bacterial flagellum. It is not just a
> hypothesis, but based on evidence from molecular biology.

Nobody ever claimed otherwise. The issue is, which evolved from which?
And zencycle has provided information that suggests the consensus
may be wrong.

>
> >For instance, I could just change a few details and "easily" "show" that
> >birds weren't designed because they evolved from sphenosuchid crocodilians.
>
>
> Another non-sequitur; birds aren't designed.

That's your non-sequitur, all right.

In the part to which you are reacting with Pavlov-dog reflexes, I was
exposing the illogic and ignorance of Oxyaena: the ignorance of
thinking that I believe the bacterial flagellum to be designed, and
the illogic of thinking that grade-school level expositions on
evolution in general *prove* that the bacterial flagellum evolved.

> More to the point, the
> argument for IC is based on the claim that IC systems are too complex
> to evolve.

No, this misrepresentation is the argument AGAINST IC by the likes
of you. The truth is that Behe never made such an unequivocal claim
in _Darwin's Black Box_ or any of his later writings.

Unlike Oxyaena, Behe isn't given to unequivocal claims, even when his
argument is far better than Oxyaena's in the OP. Behe usually thinks
like a scientist even when advancing his own point of view about the
science. It is only after the scientific argumentation is over in _DBB_
that Behe lets his hair down and gives his opinions full rein.

> A plausible hypothesis is all that is required to moot an
> assertion of impossibility.

Directed panspermia is indeed a plausible hypothesis to moot Oxyaena's
assertion that we KNOW the bacterial flagellum evolved, i.e., that
it is impossible that it was designed.

I've left in Oxyana's grade school level pontificating below, for
the second time.

[Peter Nyikos]

Oops, I lapsed into Mark Isaak style talk about "evidence" at one
point below.

On Tuesday, July 24, 2018 at 9:20:03 AM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 3:35:02 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> > On Mon, 23 Jul 2018 09:02:04 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
> > <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

<snip to get to the issue>

> > >On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 5:55:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:

> > >> The flagellum originally evolved from a Type-III secretory system,
> > >
> > >You are treating a hypothesis as fact.
> > >
> > >
> > >Everyone who posted to this thread has completely ignored Minnich's
> > >testimony in Dover, where he gave some reasons, including one that was
> > >*experimentally based*, why he thought the Type III secretory mechanism
> > >devolved from the flagellum instead of the flagellum evolving from it.
> > >
> > >He admitted that his was a minority opinion, but if anyone gave
> > >actual, experimentally based evidence that his opinion was incorrect,
> > >I have yet to hear about it.

I was thinking of evidence over and above what was presented at Dover;
in other words, NEW evidence that Minnich was wrong and the consensus
was right. The new evidence provided by zencycle works in the opposite
direction.

> >
> > Of course,
>
> ...what you say below is something I already told zencycle, and
> is NOT what Oxyaena claimed. Oxyaena was absolutely unequivocal in
> saying that the flagellum evolved from the Type III system.
>
> > actual, experimentally based evidence was cited to Minnich
> > in the Dover trial, which he acknowledged showed the question of order
> > remained unsettled.
>
> You are merely saying what I did above, in different words. So your
> next question makes no sense.

Here, I was thinking only of the part about the question remaining
unsettled.

> > It's been almost 13 years, do I really need to
> > cite the transcripts?

I wonder whether any evidence *against* Minnich's hypothesis has
emerged in the last 13 years.

Peter Nyikos
Professor of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--

[Peter Nyikos]

Of course not. Our bodies are far from irreducibly complex, as
numerous amputees can testify. People have also been born without
limbs, and have managed to cope fairly well without them. The
1930's movie "Freaks" showed one of them lighting a match without
any assistance, using his mouth.


Peter Nyikos
Mathematics Professor
University of South Carolina (in Columbia)
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

[Oxyaena]

How exactly are they "elementary school generalities", you shining
exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger effect? You absolutely refused to address
any of my arguments in the portion you so eagerly dismiss as being
"grade-school pontificating", as if you are the best one to make that
claim. Everyone here agrees my explanation is succinct, and you have to
resort to a blatant ad hominem in order to wave away what I wrote, you
intellectually dishonest cretin.

>
>>
>>>> I intend to make a post specifically about the evolution
>>>> of the flagellum, complete with links to other articles that do it even
>>>> better than I have.
>>>>
>>>> The flagellum originally evolved from a Type-III secretory system,
>>>
>>> You are treating a hypothesis as fact.
>>>
>>>
>>> Everyone who posted to this thread has completely ignored Minnich's
>>> testimony in Dover, where he gave some reasons, including one that was
>>> *experimentally based*, why he thought the Type III secretory mechanism
>>> devolved from the flagellum instead of the flagellum evolving from it.
>>>
>>> He admitted that his was a minority opinion, but if anyone gave
>>> actual, experimentally based evidence that his opinion was incorrect,
>>> I have yet to hear about it.
>>
>>
>> Of course,
>
> ...what you say below is something I already told zencycle, and
> is NOT what Oxyaena claimed. Oxyaena was absolutely unequivocal in
> saying that the flagellum evolved from the Type III system.

You conveniently ignore my responses to zencycle and Jillery in which I
write that it doesn't matter that we haven't ironed out the details of
how the flagellum evolved, all the evidence points to the fact that it
*did* indeed evolve, and there is absolutely *no* evidence for design. I
wasn't aware of the new information at the time I wrote my OP, you
deliberate distorter of the facts, so my ignorance can be excused, your
dishonesty can't.

>
>> actual, experimentally based evidence was cited to Minnich
>> in the Dover trial, which he acknowledged showed the question of order
>> remained unsettled.
>
> You are merely saying what I did above, in different words. So your
> next question makes no sense.
>
>> It's been almost 13 years, do I really need to
>> cite the transcripts?
>
>
>> More to the point, as I pointed out elsethread, the order of the
>> origin of these two systems aren't relevant to the question of IC,
>> because if either evolved from the other, that refutes Behe's
>> argument, that parts of IC systems can't have functions outside what
>> they do in the IC system.
>
> Behe never made that argument. It is a canard that has grown up
> around Behe, that he ignored the possibility of exaptation.

YES HE FUCKING DID! ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND! I CAN PULL UP HIS OWN
FUCKING WORDS SAYING HE DID, YOU DISHONEST CRETIN! Here it is, Behe
explaining in his own words how certain "parts of IC systems can't have
functions outside of what they do in the IC system":

"By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several
well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,
wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to
effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be
produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial
function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight,
successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to
an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition
nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is
such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution."
Behe, Michael: *Darwin's Black Box* pg 39


[snip mindless drivel]

>
>>
>>
>>>> which
>>>> is a secretory system utilized by pathogenic bacteria to drill into an
>>>> organism's skin. We know this because the base 30 proteins found in the
>>>> flagellum, are also found in the Type-III secretory system i the exact
>>>> same configuration as the 30 base proteins in the bacterial flagellum.
>>>
>>> Non sequitur, in the light of what Minnich said at Dover.
>>
>>
>> Non-sequitur back atcha.
>
> Sorry, you don't get to redefine "non-sequitur" to your heart's content.
> What you say below leaves my criticism of Oxyaena's illogic intact.

Your supposed criticism of my "illogic" doesn't hold up under the light
of reason, you fallacious fucktard. You didn't even "criticize" it, you
dismissed my arguments as mere "elementary grade pontificating" without
even addressing them, a la committing the intellectually dishonest
logical fallacy of the *ad hominem*.

>
>
>> Your veneration of Minnich notwithstanding,
>
> If anyone here is guilty of veneration, it is you with your veneration
> of Oxyaena's OP.
>
>> he is not the final authority on this point. As you say, his is a
>> minority position, the consensus held by others of at least equal
>> abilities.
>
> And on what is that "consensus" based? Perhaps it is nothing more
> solid than the consensus of scientists for untold centuries that
> the sun revolved around the earth and the earth stood still.

I have explained why you are wrong over this multiple times you fucking
cheat. The scientific consensus is based off of the available evidence,
when new evidence comes in the consensus changes to fit the evidence, a
la the Kuhnean theory of paradigmatic change. Geocentrism was the best
explanation for the evidence for centuries, and even Copernicus failed
to show why it was wrong. It took the combined efforts of Kepler, Tycho,
and Galileo to convince the scientific community that Ptolemaic
geocentrism was, and still is, WRONG. You should know how science works,
you Machiavellian distorter of the facts.

>
>
>>
>>>> Peter, this may be hard for you to comprehend, but there is an easy way
>>>> for the flagellum to evolve from the Type-III secretory system.
>>>
>>> Oxyaena, what you have given me below is a purely theoretical description
>>> of evolution in general, with the flagellum conveniently grafted on to it.
>>> Just about any example of hypothesized ancestor-descendant relationship
>>> could just as easily have been grafted on to it.
>>
>>
>> Incorrect.
>
> Correct, and if you took the bother to think about what Oxyaena wrote below
> [still preserved below my virtual .sig from last time] you would know it.
>
>> Minnich himself claimed to be the first to recognize the
>> homology between TTSS and bacterial flagellum. It is not just a
>> hypothesis, but based on evidence from molecular biology.
>

> Nobody ever claimed otherwise. The issue is, which evolved from which.

> And zencycle has provided information that suggests the consensus
> may be wrong.

It doesn't matter if the consensus is wrong, that's how science works.
The consensus is based off of the evidence available at the time, it
will change when new evidence comes in. How many times will it take me
to say this to get it drilled through your nearly impenetrable skull.

>
>
>>
>>> For instance, I could just change a few details and "easily" "show" that
>>> birds weren't designed because they evolved from sphenosuchid crocodilians.
>>
>>
>> Another non-sequitur; birds aren't designed.
>
> That's your non-sequitur, all right.
>
> In the part to which you are reacting with Pavlov-dog reflexes, I was
> exposing the illogic and ignorance of Oxyaena: the ignorance of
> thinking that I believe the bacterial flagellum to be designed, and
> the illogic of thinking that grade-school level expositions on
> evolution in general *prove* that the bacterial flagellum evolved.

Go fuck yourself, you Machiavellian deceiver. I am not going to waste my
breath explaining why this is an ad hominem. Go to hell, asshole.

>
>
>
>> More to the point, the
>> argument for IC is based on the claim that IC systems are too complex
>> to evolve.
>

[snip slander made against me, snip baseless assertions asserted as fact
without evidence, snip grade-school pontificating by Nyikos, snip
mindless drivel, snip ad hominems against me, snip all the shit this
dunderhead wrote]

[Peter Nyikos]

I'm glad you are acknowledging that much. Lots of people here seem
to conflate IC with ID. And your next sentence below does nothing
to discourage that.

> The trouble with that test is it doesn't meaningfully
> test if the system could have evolved.

That's not a trouble with the test; it wasn't designed to test ID.

THE trouble with everything everyone has posted to this thread
so far is this: even if you are correct about the flagellum evolving from
a Type III secretory mechanism, that only kicks the can down the road: where
did the Type III secretory mechanism come from, if it didn't just devolve
from the flagellum?

One of the favorite "arguments against" directed panspermia (DP) is that IT
kicks the can of abiogenesis further down the road. And yet DP was never
formulated to address that particular "can", whereas the absence of
any scenario for evolution of Type III system is fatal to Oxyaena's
cocksure claim that we know the flagellum evolved.

>
>
> >Behe's definition of IC in _Darwin's Black Box_ included the function
> >as an essential feature. Leaving it out is a mistake that all too many
> >people here make.
> >
> >Analogy: the mousetrap described by Behe is NOT irreducibly complex
> >for the function of being used as a float for a fishing apparatus.
> >You could remove everything except the piece of wood which some
> >wise guy put *last* in the famous online "evolving mousetrap"
> >linked by Oxyaena.
> >
> >The piece of wood keeps performing its function as an integral part of
> >the setup, whose remaining parts are hook, line, sinker, rod and reel.
>
>
> Your echo an argument Behe makes.

Where?

> A fatal flaw in that line of
> reasoning is that it allows parts of IC systems to have evolved as
> parts with functions other than what they do in the IC system. This
> moots Behe fundamental argument

Wrong; it's an argument you are putting in Behe's mouth.

> that IC parts must have their IC
> function *before* they're assembled as IC systems, since evolution
> can't do that.

You just keep knocking down straw men that Behe never erected. Keep
reading what he wrote at the top of p. 40 of _DBB_ until it finally
sinks in.

A while back, you bragged about how you quoted that very passage
in an earlier post, yet you keep erecting and knocking down
straw men as though it never existed.

> OTOH if parts can have other functions, then they can
> evolve those functions, and then adapt those functions to the IC
> system *after* they're assembled as IC systems, and that's exactly
> what evolution does.

This is a pure Exaptor of the Gaps argument, with no more going
for it than the usual God of the Gaps arguments.

> Of course, both of your arguments above were refuted long ago and many
> times. Are you going to say you have yet to hear those refutations?

Of course, your straw men and Exaptor of the Gaps
have nothing to do with either of my arguments.

You can't refute an argument by slapping any old crud on them;
you have to show that some connection exists between your arguments
and those they are supposedly refuting.

> >Peter Nyikos
> >Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
> >University of South Carolina
> >http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos
>
>
> Instead of posting PRATTs, why aren't you helping your family get
> ready for your house guest?

It was ready a week ago, and he's been here a week. But other family
members have taken him on a day trip.

You sure are desperate to get the last word in for a couple of days,
aren't you? Well, you may get your wish after today: no more
day trips are planned for the rest of the week.

Go for it. Bask in the glory of burning straw men until next Monday.

Peter Nyikos
Professor of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina --standard disclaimer--

[Mark Isaak]

All life forms, and all organs, organelles, and systems of life forms,
are irreducibly complex. Simultaneously, No life forms, and no organs,
organelles, or systems of life forms, are irreducibly complex. It
simply depends on how you describe the "parts."

And that's not even the big problem with irreducible complexity.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net

"Omnia disce. Videbis postea nihil esse superfluum." - Hugh of St. Victor

[jillery]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2018 06:17:01 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos

It doesn't take you long to ejaculate your irrelevant spew. But since
you mention it, Oxyaena's argument, which you handwave away as
"amateurish", is similar to Ken Miller's. Do you consider Miller or
his arguments "amateurish" as well?

>> >> I intend to make a post specifically about the evolution
>> >> of the flagellum, complete with links to other articles that do it even
>> >> better than I have.
>> >>
>> >> The flagellum originally evolved from a Type-III secretory system,
>> >
>> >You are treating a hypothesis as fact.
>> >
>> >
>> >Everyone who posted to this thread has completely ignored Minnich's
>> >testimony in Dover, where he gave some reasons, including one that was
>> >*experimentally based*, why he thought the Type III secretory mechanism
>> >devolved from the flagellum instead of the flagellum evolving from it.
>> >
>> >He admitted that his was a minority opinion, but if anyone gave
>> >actual, experimentally based evidence that his opinion was incorrect,
>> >I have yet to hear about it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>++I was thinking of evidence over and above what was presented at Dover;
>++in other words, NEW evidence that Minnich was wrong and the consensus
>++was right. The new evidence provided by zencycle works in the opposite
>++direction.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>
>>
>> Of course, actual, experimentally based evidence was cited to Minnich

>> in the Dover trial, which he acknowledged showed the question of order
>> remained unsettled.
>
>...what you say below is something I already told zencycle, and
>is NOT what Oxyaena claimed. Oxyaena was absolutely unequivocal in
>saying that the flagellum evolved from the Type III system.

More of your irrelevant spew.

>You are merely saying what I did above, in different words. So your
>next question makes no sense.

You claim above that the TTSS came first. That's not what I say, in
any words. More to the point, which came from what doesn't matter to
the point, ie whether the bacterial flagellum is IC.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>+Here, I was thinking only of the part about the question remaining
>+unsettled.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


I suppose that's the closest to a retraction you know how to make.

>> It's been almost 13 years, do I really need to
>> cite the transcripts?
>
>
>> More to the point, as I pointed out elsethread, the order of the
>> origin of these two systems aren't relevant to the question of IC,
>> because if either evolved from the other, that refutes Behe's
>> argument, that parts of IC systems can't have functions outside what
>> they do in the IC system.
>
>Behe never made that argument. It is a canard that has grown up
>around Behe, that he ignored the possibility of exaptation.

Yes, Behe made that argument, and no, it's not a canard. It's another
PRATT. Courtesy of Oxyaena:
*********************************

"By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several
well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,
wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to
effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be
produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial
function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight,
successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor
to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by
definition nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if
there is such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian
evolution." Behe, Michael: *Darwin's Black Box* pg 39

**************************************

>If he had been like Stephen Meyer in _Darwin's Doubt_, Behe would have had
>appendices in which he discussed more technical matters. But it
>probably would not have helped: people routinely ignore Behe's comment
>at the top of page 40, where he acknowledges that IC systems could
>evolve by "indirect, circuitous route[s]."

Behe explicitly limited those indirect circuitous routes to the
simplest systems. He did not describe the bacterial flagellum and his
other examples of IC as "simple".

More to the point, if something "could" have evolved, that would
refute Behe's entire line of reasoning, that IC is a test against
evolution, which makes your interpretation of his "could" bizarrely
contradictory to it.

>> >> which
>> >> is a secretory system utilized by pathogenic bacteria to drill into an
>> >> organism's skin. We know this because the base 30 proteins found in the
>> >> flagellum, are also found in the Type-III secretory system i the exact
>> >> same configuration as the 30 base proteins in the bacterial flagellum.
>> >
>> >Non sequitur, in the light of what Minnich said at Dover.
>>
>>
>> Non-sequitur back atcha.
>
>Sorry, you don't get to redefine "non-sequitur" to your heart's content.
>What you say below leaves my criticism of Oxyaena's illogic intact.

You redefinitions disqualify you from complaining about my alleged
redefinitions. Tu quoque back atcha.


>> Your veneration of Minnich notwithstanding, he is not the final authority on this point.

>> As you say, his is a minority position, the consensus held by others of at least equal
>> abilities.
>
>
>If anyone here is guilty of veneration, it is you with your veneration
>of Oxyaena's OP.

More of your irrelevant spew.

>And on what is that "consensus" based? Perhaps it is nothing more
>solid than the consensus of scientists for untold centuries that
>the sun revolved around the earth and the earth stood still.

Since you asked, it is based on the same papers showed to Minncih
during his testimony, which forced him to acknowledge he held a
minority opinion about the flagellum's evolution, the same basis you
pretended you never heard of. You're welcome.

>> >> Peter, this may be hard for you to comprehend, but there is an easy way
>> >> for the flagellum to evolve from the Type-III secretory system.
>> >
>> >Oxyaena, what you have given me below is a purely theoretical description
>> >of evolution in general, with the flagellum conveniently grafted on to it.
>> >Just about any example of hypothesized ancestor-descendant relationship
>> >could just as easily have been grafted on to it.
>>
>>
>> Incorrect.
>
>Correct, and if you took the bother to think about what Oxyaena wrote below
>[still preserved below my virtual .sig from last time] you would know it.

More of your irrelevant spew.

>> Minnich himself claimed to be the first to recognize the
>> homology between TTSS and bacterial flagellum. It is not just a
>> hypothesis, but based on evidence from molecular biology.
>
>Nobody ever claimed otherwise.

Of course, you did, still preserved in the quoted text above, when you
claimed the relationship was purely theoretical. Can you say
"convenient amnesia"? I knew you could.

> The issue is, which evolved from which?

Incorrect again. The issue is, is the bacterial flagellum IC, and if
so, is IC evidence against Evolution and/or for Design. The relevant
fact is, whichever came first, if either evolved, the flagellum isn't
IC by Behe's argument.

>And zencycle has provided information that suggests the consensus
>may be wrong.

Once again, which evolved from what doesn't address the point under
discussion, ie whether the bacterial flagellum is IC.

>> >For instance, I could just change a few details and "easily" "show" that
>> >birds weren't designed because they evolved from sphenosuchid crocodilians.
>>
>>
>> Another non-sequitur; birds aren't designed.
>
>That's your non-sequitur, all right.

Unless you think birds are designed, the above is more of your
irrelevant spew.

>In the part to which you are reacting with Pavlov-dog reflexes, I was
>exposing the illogic and ignorance of Oxyaena: the ignorance of
>thinking that I believe the bacterial flagellum to be designed, and
>the illogic of thinking that grade-school level expositions on
>evolution in general *prove* that the bacterial flagellum evolved.

Who besides you said anything about *prove* in this thread?

>> More to the point, the
>> argument for IC is based on the claim that IC systems are too complex
>> to evolve.
>
>No, this misrepresentation is the argument AGAINST IC by the likes
>of you. The truth is that Behe never made such an unequivocal claim
>in _Darwin's Black Box_ or any of his later writings.

PRATT repeated.

>Unlike Oxyaena, Behe isn't given to unequivocal claims, even when his
>argument is far better than Oxyaena's in the OP. Behe usually thinks
>like a scientist even when advancing his own point of view about the
>science. It is only after the scientific argumentation is over in _DBB_
>that Behe lets his hair down and gives his opinions full rein.
>
>
> > A plausible hypothesis is all that is required to moot an
>> assertion of impossibility.
>
>Directed panspermia is indeed a plausible hypothesis to moot Oxyaena's
>assertion that we KNOW the bacterial flagellum evolved, i.e., that
>it is impossible that it was designed.

Who besides you said anything about KNOW in this thread?

>I've left in Oxyana's grade school level pontificating below, for
>the second time.

Ok, then I leave in your grade-school level irrelevant spew. Feel
better now?

[jillery]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2018 08:17:04 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos

More irrelevant spew. An irony here is Behe is the one who conflates
ID with IC.

>> The trouble with that test is it doesn't meaningfully
>> test if the system could have evolved.
>
>That's not a trouble with the test; it wasn't designed to test ID.

Yes, that's the trouble. Behe asserts IC as a test against Darwinian
evolution. A test that doesn't test if a system could have evolved
doesn't support Behe's assertion. For all the relevance Behe's test
for IC has to the claims he makes about IC, he might as well count the
number of carbon atoms in the molecule.

>THE trouble with everything everyone has posted to this thread
>so far is this: even if you are correct about the flagellum evolving from
>a Type III secretory mechanism, that only kicks the can down the road: where
>did the Type III secretory mechanism come from, if it didn't just devolve
>from the flagellum?

False equivalence. The claim is that the bacterial flagellum is IC,
and that IC is evidence against Darwinian evolution. As I noted
before, if either system evolved from the other, then neither are IC
by Behe's own line of reasoning. There is no road to kick anything
down.

>One of the favorite "arguments against" directed panspermia (DP) is that IT
>kicks the can of abiogenesis further down the road. And yet DP was never
>formulated to address that particular "can", whereas the absence of
>any scenario for evolution of Type III system is fatal to Oxyaena's
>cocksure claim that we know the flagellum evolved.

More irrelevant spew. Try to control yourself, if only for the
novelty of the experience.

>> >Behe's definition of IC in _Darwin's Black Box_ included the function
>> >as an essential feature. Leaving it out is a mistake that all too many
>> >people here make.
>> >
>> >Analogy: the mousetrap described by Behe is NOT irreducibly complex
>> >for the function of being used as a float for a fishing apparatus.
>> >You could remove everything except the piece of wood which some
>> >wise guy put *last* in the famous online "evolving mousetrap"
>> >linked by Oxyaena.
>> >
>> >The piece of wood keeps performing its function as an integral part of
>> >the setup, whose remaining parts are hook, line, sinker, rod and reel.
>>
>>
>> Your echo an argument Behe makes.
>
>Where?

Since you asked:

<https://www.trueorigin.org/behe05.php>

You're welcome. Now my turn: What's it matter where?

>> A fatal flaw in that line of
>> reasoning is that it allows parts of IC systems to have evolved as
>> parts with functions other than what they do in the IC system. This

>> moots Behe fundamental argument that IC parts must have their IC

>> function *before* they're assembled as IC systems, since evolution
>> can't do that.
>
>
>Wrong; it's an argument you are putting in Behe's mouth.

Nope. once again, courtesy of Oxyaena:

*********************************
>"By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several
>well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,
>wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to
>effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be
>produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial
>function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight,
>successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to
>an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition
>nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is
>such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution."
>Behe, Michael: *Darwin's Black Box* pg 39
**************************************

>You just keep knocking down straw men that Behe never erected. Keep
>reading what he wrote at the top of p. 40 of _DBB_ until it finally
>sinks in.
>
>A while back, you bragged about how you quoted that very passage
>in an earlier post, yet you keep erecting and knocking down
>straw men as though it never existed.

Right here would have been a good place for you to have posted that
cite for yourself. Your irrelevant spew gets more stupid with every
post.

>> OTOH if parts can have other functions, then they can
>> evolve those functions, and then adapt those functions to the IC
>> system *after* they're assembled as IC systems, and that's exactly
>> what evolution does.
>
>This is a pure Exaptor of the Gaps argument, with no more going
>for it than the usual God of the Gaps arguments.

Of course, there's plenty going for both arguments. Your denial above
suggests you think Evolution doesn't adapt molecular systems, a
fundamental claim of natural selection.

>> Of course, both of your arguments above were refuted long ago and many
>> times. Are you going to say you have yet to hear those refutations?
>
>Of course, your straw men and Exaptor of the Gaps
>have nothing to do with either of my arguments.

I take your non-answer as a "no".

>You can't refute an argument by slapping any old crud on them;
>you have to show that some connection exists between your arguments
>and those they are supposedly refuting.

Your slapping any old crud on your asinine arguments disqualify you
from complaining about the alleged same from me. Tu quoque back
atcha, asshole.

>> >Peter Nyikos
>> >Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
>> >University of South Carolina
>> >http://www.math.sc.edu/~nyikos
>>
>>
>> Instead of posting PRATTs, why aren't you helping your family get
>> ready for your house guest?
>
>It was ready a week ago, and he's been here a week. But other family
>members have taken him on a day trip.
>
>You sure are desperate to get the last word in for a couple of days,
>aren't you? Well, you may get your wish after today: no more
>day trips are planned for the rest of the week.
>
>Go for it. Bask in the glory of burning straw men until next Monday.

You sure are touchy about my commenting about something you raised
yourself. Can you say "irrelevant spew?" I knew you could.

[Bob Casanova]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2018 09:05:57 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Mark Isaak
<eciton@curiousta/xyz/xonomy.net>:

>On 7/23/18 9:46 AM, zencycle wrote:
>> On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 12:40:03 PM UTC-4, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>
>>> The swimming function of the flagellum is thereby lost. Minnich kept
>>> stressing this over and over in describing how he and his students
>>> showed that the flagellum they were experimenting with was
>>> irreducibly complex (IC).
>>>
>>> Behe's definition of IC in _Darwin's Black Box_ included the function
>>> as an essential feature. Leaving it out is a mistake that all too many
>>> people here make.
>>
>> So, all life forms are irreducibly complex?
>
>All life forms, and all organs, organelles, and systems of life forms,
>are irreducibly complex. Simultaneously, No life forms, and no organs,
>organelles, or systems of life forms, are irreducibly complex. It
>simply depends on how you describe the "parts."
>
>And that's not even the big problem with irreducible complexity.

The biggest problem with irreducible complexity is the fact
that it's basically meaningless. Yes, if any part of a
complex system is arbitrarily removed the system is likely
to stop functioning; that's a no-brainer. The problem occurs
when that fact is reversed, and becomes "no system can be
developed from previous less-complex systems, each of which
was nevertheless functional". It's as if no mode of
transportation were possible beyond a travois, even though
the steps can be traced directly from travois to Lamborghini
Diablo (the removal of most parts of which would result in
non-functionality), each step a "small successive
improvement". IC, as promulgated by the "design" crowd, is
basically a hand-waving variation on Zeno's Paradox -
effectively, it's impossible to have gotten from there to
here by traversing the distance.

[Mark Isaak]

On 7/24/18 6:17 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 3:35:02 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:

> [...]

>> More to the point, as I pointed out elsethread, the order of the
>> origin of these two systems aren't relevant to the question of IC,
>> because if either evolved from the other, that refutes Behe's
>> argument, that parts of IC systems can't have functions outside what
>> they do in the IC system.
>
> Behe never made that argument. It is a canard that has grown up
> around Behe, that he ignored the possibility of exaptation.

As others have pointed out, Behe made exactly that argument.

> If he had been like Stephen Meyer in _Darwin's Doubt_, Behe would have had
> appendices in which he discussed more technical matters. But it
> probably would not have helped: people routinely ignore Behe's comment
> at the top of page 40, where he acknowledges that IC systems could
> evolve by "indirect, circuitous route[s]."

A quote which you have repeatedly ripped from context. In the next two
sentences, Behe says (paraphrasing), "But that possibility is so
vanishingly small that we may ignore it."

It's a shame there is nobody to clean talk.origin and prevent the
cesspool environment such dishonest out-of-context representations create.

[jillery]

Well, even if nobody can clean T.O., it's enough that you kicked the
crap out of his comments.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Saturday, July 14, 2018 at 2:10:02 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:

> I've always thought that Peter's DP is indistinguishable from devine creation,

...because you never read the many kilobytes of scientific discussion
in my drafts for a FAQ, but simply clung onto grave suspicions
that I am a closet creationist, which you inherited from your
role model, John Harshman.

Typical of groupies, you went way beyond John Harshman, who was
nowhere near as aggressive about it as you were for three years.

For a while you claimed to have divested yourself of all those suspicions,
but it's clear from what you write here that you've never completely
let go of them.

> except that there's actually more evidence for the latter, albeit all of it
> hearsay.

This comment is about as indicative of closet creationism as anything
I've written to talk.origins, and this shows how much of a siege
mentality you have about creationism.


> As Crick himself says:

... something unlike what you write above, but you and Oxyaena think
similarly about what is evidence for what. No wonder Oxyaena shows
blatant favoritism toward you in sci.bio.paleontology.

>
> "The first [criticism to directed panspermia], which my wife has voiced more
> than once, is that it is not a real theory but merely science fiction. This
> is not meant as a compliment, though it might perhaps be taken that way."
>
> (p. 148 Life Itself; Crick and Orgel 1981)

Get it right: _Life Itself_ [1] was written by Crick. Orgel was his
co-author of the article in *Icarus* that introduced directed panspermia.
Like Crick's later book, it is a sober work [2] of scientific analysis,
quite unlike even the most science-oriented science fiction.

[1] Simon & Schuster, ISBN 0-671-25562-0 Library of Congress # QH325.C84

[2] Much more sober than _Vital Dust_, where another Nobel Laureate
in biochemistry, Christian deDuve, waxes rhapsodic about the conventional
wisdom about abiogenesis. I shared the conventional wisdom until I
read the two books one after the other, and Crick's use of reason (where
deDuve uses rhetoric) woke me from my dogmatic slumbers.

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina

http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

PS Everyone else in talk.origins is still dreaming the dreams of
dogmatic slumber-- the creationists and card-chested [3] one way and my
fellow anti-creationism regulars the other way.

[3] My new term for those who are generally believed to be creationists
but keep their cards close to their chests as to what their true
outlook is.

[erik simpson]

I have no idea what you have in your closet, or what you do there. My remarks
concerned the status of the notion of DP, in particular, the lack of any
evidence for it. If you could produce such evidence, it would outweigh any
number of kilobytes of "scientific discussion" of which you boast. In fact,
I doubt it's possible to have a scientific discussion of anything in the absence
of evidence for its existence.

[*Hemidactylus*]

Good riddance thread.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Tuesday, July 24, 2018 at 10:25:02 AM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 7/24/2018 9:17 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 3:35:02 PM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> >> On Mon, 23 Jul 2018 09:02:04 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
> >> <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
> >>> the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
> >>> at the present time.
> >>>
> >>> What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
> >>> Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
> >>> bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good. But of course, we
> >>> cannot have really good evidence for DP in the next thousand or more years,
> >>> unless life on other solar system bodies all has a genetic code that is
> >>> only slightly different from ours, if at all.

Of course, you said nothing about the above. But your benefactee
Erik Simpson has put his foot in his mouth about DP, so you
can expect more of the above.

I take the time here to remark that the above possibility applies
only if there are at least two other abodes of life in our
solar system, and you gave several in another thread.

That was where you *also* showed your ignorance about when life
could reasonably be expected to arise and evolve in our universe.
Since I pointed it out diplomatically, you simply breezed by the
correction as though it hadn't been there, and even complimented
me about how flame free my posting was.

What you will NEVER admit is that I am ALWAYS courteous to everyone,
even my worst enemies, when they stick to mature discussion of
on-topic issues.


Anyway, to finish my line of reasoning above. The natural expectation
of most scientists, AFAIK, is that if there is life on one of these
worlds (Mars, Europa, Ceres, Enceladus...) it will most likely be
"life as we don't know it," with a radically different biochemistry,
or IF they have a genetic code, it will be radically different from ours.

If on the other hand, they have an almost identical genetic code, then
the only reasonable competitors for the origin of all but one of our
worlds are directed panspermia and the "undirected" panspermia of
Arrhenius/Hoyle/Wickramasinghe. Homegrown abiogenesis won't cut it any more.

> >>> On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 5:55:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> >>>> Nyikos has been seen sprouting the idea that the flagellum is designed
> >>>> recently, despite the multitude of posts I have made (one very recent)
> >>>> that show otherwise, so in order to get it through Nyikos' thick head
> >>>> that the bacterial flagellum did indeed come about by evolution rather
> >>>> than by design,
> >>>
> >>> If you really believe what you say below is convincing to anyone here,
> >>> you are the one with the thick head.
> >>
> >>
> >> You're just whistling in the dark.
> >
> > I didn't think you and Oxyaena were THAT fond of each other, that you
> > would be convinced by the amateurish logic in the OP. There may be
> > good arguments for the bacterial flagellum having evolved, but the
> > elementary school level generalities Oxyaena used aren't even in
> > the ballpark. [I've preserved them at the end of this post, for
> > the second time around, so people can see what I am talking about.]
>
>
> How exactly are they "elementary school generalities",

I explained that very succinctly, by a *reductio ad absurdum* argument
below. But you are like Ray Martinez, incapable of recognizing such
middle-school level concepts as reductio ad absurdum.

> you shining
> exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

You are only showing what an insult addict you are here, with this
unsupportable piece of junk.

> You absolutely refused to address
> any of my arguments in the portion you so eagerly dismiss as being
> "grade-school pontificating", as if you are the best one to make that
> claim.

As a research mathematician, I have done hundreds of proofs via
*reductio ad absurdum*, so I believe I am at least as qualified
as anyone else to decide when something belongs to that category.
The only other person who could have been an exception was Richard
Norman, and he is long gone.

> Everyone here agrees my explanation is succinct,

You are taking the adage "silence gives consent" literally here
in a blatantly self-serving way.

Consider this: Casanova has repeatedly pointed out how Ray
Martinez cannot fathom *reductio ad absurdum*, but he is too fond
of jillery, who in turn is too fond of you, to break the news to you.

Others, seeing what a violent temper you have, would not take the
risk of crossing you, seeing how jillery sticks with you despite
your irrationality and hypocrisy.

> and you have to
> resort to a blatant ad hominem in order to wave away what I wrote, you
> intellectually dishonest cretin.

A demonstration via *reductio ad absurdum* is as far from an ad hominem
as can be, you hypocritical flinger of ad hominem fallacies (like
the one you have just uttered).


<snip to get to the reductio ad absurdum after a bit of context>

> >>>> Peter, this may be hard for you to comprehend, but there is an easy way
> >>>> for the flagellum to evolve from the Type-III secretory system.

Note that this allegation was designed to promote the mistaken
impression that you were refuting a belief of mine that the bacterial
flagellum was designed.

> >>> Oxyaena, what you have given me below is a purely theoretical description
> >>> of evolution in general, with the flagellum conveniently grafted on to it.
> >>> Just about any example of hypothesized ancestor-descendant relationship
> >>> could just as easily have been grafted on to it.

<snip of later additions>

> >>> For instance, I could just change a few details and "easily" "show" that
> >>> birds weren't designed because they evolved from sphenosuchid crocodilians.

There you have it: the extremely general talk of yours could easily
be adapted to do this. But as you know, the result is absurd: there
is a consensus that birds are NOT descended from sphenosuchid crocodilians,
but from theropods. That consensus is FAR more widespread than the
"consensus" that the flagellum evolved from the Type III mechanism
rather than the other way around.

> >> Another non-sequitur; birds aren't designed.
> >
> > That's your non-sequitur, all right.
> >
> > In the part to which you are reacting with Pavlov-dog reflexes, I was
> > exposing the illogic and ignorance of Oxyaena: the ignorance of
> > thinking that I believe the bacterial flagellum to be designed, and
> > the illogic of thinking that grade-school level expositions on
> > evolution in general *prove* that the bacterial flagellum evolved.

And now, with NO sense of irony whatsoever, you deliver one
vicious ad hominem after another:

> Go fuck yourself, you Machiavellian deceiver. I am not going to waste my
> breath explaining why this is an ad hominem. Go to hell, asshole.

Instead of squandering your integrity like this, why don't you
REFUTE my use of adjectives about what you claimed that you
had done? "illogic" and "grade-school level" are FACTUAL assertions
that could be disproved, or shown that they don't fall under
Casanova's very broad use of "talk.origins is an informal venue."

Keep in mind that the latter is a very high bar: Casanova
used it to excuse the use of "every" where "ca. ten percent"
would be more true to the facts, on that very basis.


I've left in a temper tantrum of yours below. It goes far to explain
why I said what I did about your "violent temper" up there.

> >> More to the point, the
> >> argument for IC is based on the claim that IC systems are too complex
> >> to evolve.
> >
>
> [snip slander made against me, snip baseless assertions asserted as fact
> without evidence, snip grade-school pontificating by Nyikos, snip
> mindless drivel, snip ad hominems against me, snip all the shit this
> dunderhead wrote]

Funny thing: you also snipped away your grade school level generalities,
about which you were so proud of up there. Contrast that with the
way I left them in twice running, so that everyone could judge the
truth of what I was saying for themselves.

Did you realize, deep down inside, how they wouldn't cut the mustard?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina

http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

PS If the stuff by ME that you snipped actually fit your description of it,
you should have no trouble demonstrating that. But of course, you are
powerless to justify the description.

But don't worry -- Casanova is almost sure to dismiss all criticism
of your tantrum by saying you were just taking advantage of the way
"talk.origins is an informal venue."

[jillery]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2018 18:17:05 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

<snip previous irrelevant spew>

>Consider this: Casanova has repeatedly pointed out how Ray
>Martinez cannot fathom *reductio ad absurdum*, but he is too fond
>of jillery, who in turn is too fond of you, to break the news to you.
>
>Others, seeing what a violent temper you have, would not take the
>risk of crossing you, seeing how jillery sticks with you despite
>your irrationality and hypocrisy.

This moment of inane insanity brought to you by Nyikos, the paranoid
peter.


<snip remaining irrelevant spew>

[Oxyaena]

You never demonstrated any ignorance about my supposed lack of knowledge
on the probability of life arising elsewhere in our universe, zero. My
posts to Glenn, Bill, and others had nothing to do with abiogenesis,
they only dealt with matters of biology and occasionally chemistry and
planetary geology, nothing to do with the actual matter of abiogenesis,
which I purposefully left out because my OP on the subject of
astrobiology had nothing to do with it. It's like you like to read
between the lines, and then forget to read the lines. And the few
details I gave about the matter of abiogenesis in that thread, showed I
have a substantial amount of knowledge of the subject you are accusing
me to be ignorant of. In short, another demonstration of your
dishonesty, blatant distorting of the facts, and outright slander. I
could sue you for libel, Peter, but unlike you I`m a decent person so I
won't.

>
> What you will NEVER admit is that I am ALWAYS courteous to everyone,
> even my worst enemies, when they stick to mature discussion of
> on-topic issues.
>
>
> Anyway, to finish my line of reasoning above. The natural expectation
> of most scientists, AFAIK, is that if there is life on one of these
> worlds (Mars, Europa, Ceres, Enceladus...) it will most likely be
> "life as we don't know it," with a radically different biochemistry,
> or IF they have a genetic code, it will be radically different from ours.

I already fucking explained that multiple times to Bill, in which I
explained hypothetical alternative biochemistries to him. Are you even
capable of reading, you dishonest fuckwad, or is it simply that you get
off of lying about me to create the illusion that you have the moral,
and intellectual, high ground when you clearly *don't*.

>
> If on the other hand, they have an almost identical genetic code, then
> the only reasonable competitors for the origin of all but one of our
> worlds are directed panspermia and the "undirected" panspermia of
> Arrhenius/Hoyle/Wickramasinghe. Homegrown abiogenesis won't cut it any more.
>
>
>>>>> On Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 5:55:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>>>>>> Nyikos has been seen sprouting the idea that the flagellum is designed
>>>>>> recently, despite the multitude of posts I have made (one very recent)
>>>>>> that show otherwise, so in order to get it through Nyikos' thick head
>>>>>> that the bacterial flagellum did indeed come about by evolution rather
>>>>>> than by design,
>>>>>
>>>>> If you really believe what you say below is convincing to anyone here,
>>>>> you are the one with the thick head.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> You're just whistling in the dark.
>>>
>>> I didn't think you and Oxyaena were THAT fond of each other, that you
>>> would be convinced by the amateurish logic in the OP. There may be
>>> good arguments for the bacterial flagellum having evolved, but the
>>> elementary school level generalities Oxyaena used aren't even in
>>> the ballpark. [I've preserved them at the end of this post, for
>>> the second time around, so people can see what I am talking about.]
>>
>>
>> How exactly are they "elementary school generalities",
>
> I explained that very succinctly, by a *reductio ad absurdum* argument
> below. But you are like Ray Martinez, incapable of recognizing such
> middle-school level concepts as reductio ad absurdum.
>

You're such a shining example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, I wish you
had a psych eval like everyone says you should. And by the way, you
never actually explained how you "proved" my argument was bunk, you
lying sack of fecal matter. Oh, BTW, here's the quote from Behe you
dishonestly, and conveniently, snipped out so you could attempt to hide
the fact that you were caught in a bare-faced lie:

"By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several
well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,
wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to
effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be
produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial
function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight,
successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to
an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition
nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is
such a thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution."
Behe, Michael: *Darwin's Black Box* pg 39

Happy now?

>
>> you shining
>> exemplar of the Dunning-Kruger effect?
>
> You are only showing what an insult addict you are here, with this
> unsupportable piece of junk.
>
>> You absolutely refused to address
>> any of my arguments in the portion you so eagerly dismiss as being
>> "grade-school pontificating", as if you are the best one to make that
>> claim.
>
> As a research mathematician, I have done hundreds of proofs via
> *reductio ad absurdum*, so I believe I am at least as qualified
> as anyone else to decide when something belongs to that category.
> The only other person who could have been an exception was Richard
> Norman, and he is long gone.

No, you *aren't*. You forget that we are not discussing mathematics, we
are discussing biology, which is SCIENCE and relies on EVIDENCE instead
of mathematical proofs. Biology is outside of your field of expertise,
you idiot, while it is mine. And BTW, as Jillery pointed out, my
argument was essentially the same as Ken Miller's, who is a qualified
biologist. Are you going to accuse Ken Miller of only having a
grade-school level of understanding of the subject when he is an actual
fucking biochemist unlike yourself? If anything, you have proven time
and time again you don't know nearly as much as you think you do, and
therefore are an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

>
>
>> Everyone here agrees my explanation is succinct,
>
> You are taking the adage "silence gives consent" literally here
> in a blatantly self-serving way.
>
> Consider this: Casanova has repeatedly pointed out how Ray
> Martinez cannot fathom *reductio ad absurdum*, but he is too fond
> of jillery, who in turn is too fond of you, to break the news to you.
>

More ad hominems, let's see, there are so many ad hominems in this
shit-stain you call a post I've lost count!

> Others, seeing what a violent temper you have, would not take the
> risk of crossing you, seeing how jillery sticks with you despite
> your irrationality and hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Peter Nyikos!

>
>
>> and you have to
>> resort to a blatant ad hominem in order to wave away what I wrote, you
>> intellectually dishonest cretin.
>
> A demonstration via *reductio ad absurdum* is as far from an ad hominem
> as can be, you hypocritical flinger of ad hominem fallacies (like
> the one you have just uttered).

Go fuck yourself, you demonstrated NOTHING, and now are accusing me of
conducting an ad hominem when you yourself did so. You never actually
addressed my arguments, you didn't discuss any of the details in my
argument I presented, and you now have the balls to declare what you did
was logically valid?

>
>
> <snip to get to the reductio ad absurdum after a bit of context>
>
>
>>>>>> Peter, this may be hard for you to comprehend, but there is an easy way
>>>>>> for the flagellum to evolve from the Type-III secretory system.
>
> Note that this allegation was designed to promote the mistaken
> impression that you were refuting a belief of mine that the bacterial
> flagellum was designed.

I was, and I did. Here's another portion from my post you dishonestly,
and conveniently, snipped to give the illusion that I`m a raging idiot
who has no clue what I`m talking about, like the lying, cheating
degenerate you are:

"You conveniently ignore my responses to zencycle and Jillery in which I
write that it doesn't matter that we haven't ironed out the details of
how the flagellum evolved, all the evidence points to the fact that it
*did* indeed evolve, and there is absolutely *no* evidence for design. I
wasn't aware of the new information at the time I wrote my OP, you
deliberate distorter of the facts, so my ignorance can be excused, your
dishonesty can't."


>

>>>>> Oxyaena, what you have given me below is a purely theoretical description
>>>>> of evolution in general, with the flagellum conveniently grafted on to it.
>>>>> Just about any example of hypothesized ancestor-descendant relationship
>>>>> could just as easily have been grafted on to it.
>
>
> <snip of later additions>
>
>>>>> For instance, I could just change a few details and "easily" "show" that
>>>>> birds weren't designed because they evolved from sphenosuchid crocodilians.
>
>
> There you have it: the extremely general talk of yours could easily
> be adapted to do this. But as you know, the result is absurd: there
> is a consensus that birds are NOT descended from sphenosuchid crocodilians,
> but from theropods. That consensus is FAR more widespread than the
> "consensus" that the flagellum evolved from the Type III mechanism
> rather than the other way around.

Here's another portion of my writing you dishonestly snipped like the
lying, cheating degenerate you are:

"I have explained why you are wrong over this multiple times you fucking
cheat. The scientific consensus is based off of the available evidence,
when new evidence comes in the consensus changes to fit the evidence, a
la the Kuhnean theory of paradigmatic change. Geocentrism was the best
explanation for the evidence for centuries, and even Copernicus failed
to show why it was wrong. It took the combined efforts of Kepler, Tycho,
and Galileo to convince the scientific community that Ptolemaic
geocentrism was, and still is, WRONG. You should know how science works,
you Machiavellian distorter of the facts."





>

You are accusing me of doing the same things I have demonstrated you
doing above, so please, readers, read this post without looking at
Nyikos' dishonest snips to see and judge the truth for themselves. I
think you'll find it agrees with me.

>
> Did you realize, deep down inside, how they wouldn't cut the mustard?
>
> Peter Nyikos
> Professor, Dept. of Mathematics -- standard disclaimer--
> University of South Carolina
> http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/
>
> PS If the stuff by ME that you snipped actually fit your description of it,
> you should have no trouble demonstrating that. But of course, you are
> powerless to justify the description.

PS the stuff by ME that you snipped don't actually fit ANY of your
accusations about my character and my post, but instead demonstrate that
I called you out on your bullshit multiple times, I showed why you are
wrong multiple times, and you KNOW it too, why else would you snip them?


>
[snip ad hominem; snip slander; snip mindless Nyikosian drivel]
>

[Oxyaena]

On 7/25/2018 2:20 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> [snip mindless drivel]

In any Internet discussion featuring narcissistic "holier-than-thou"
assholes, it is a statistical certainty that they are going to bring up
otherwise irrelevant "transgressions" against them in otherwise
completely unrelated circumstances, at which point the narcissistic
"holuier-than-thou" asshole automatically forfeits the argument, and the
opponent(s) of said asshole win by default.

[Peter Nyikos]

You are shamelessly changing the subject by ignoring the word "when"
in what I wrote. You made the following benighted claim in your OP
to the thread on the Fermi paradox:

Considering that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, and the
universe only settled down enough for life to develop some 4.5 Ga, ala
when our Solar System formed, this makes sense. There simply hasn't been
enough time for alien civilizations to spread through the galaxy.

In my reply to this bit, I wrote:

Hold it! The stars that become supernovae were much more common
in the universe during the first billion years than later. They
typically have a life span of a million years or less.

So the universe had plenty of heavy elements by about 11 billion
years ago, and there are stars that old that have plenty of them.

By the way, the planetary system within 100 light years of us
that SETI considered the best target for a long time
is Delta Pavonis, a G star like our sun. It is estimated to be
over 6.5 billion years old, yet has a higher percentage of
heavy elements than our sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Pavonis

> My posts to Glenn, Bill, and others had nothing to do with abiogenesis,
> they only dealt with matters of biology and occasionally chemistry and
> planetary geology, nothing to do with the actual matter of abiogenesis,
> which I purposefully left out because my OP on the subject of
> astrobiology had nothing to do with it.

Again you change the subject. The excerpt above was from my very
first post to the thread, and it had nothing to do with your replies
to others. It consisted of a VERY detailed reply to your OP:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/jI6KRtcqX30/0E97QgICBwAJ
Subject: Re: Potential answers to the Fermi Paradox
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2018 14:55:48 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <7f9ca503-e43b-445e...@googlegroups.com>

Your reply to that post stopped long before the part I quoted up
there, but you left it all in.

> It's like you like to read
> between the lines, and then forget to read the lines. And the few
> details I gave about the matter of abiogenesis in that thread, showed I
> have a substantial amount of knowledge of the subject you are accusing
> me to be ignorant of.

There is no such accusation above. It is YOU who are reading between
the lines: Everything I wrote in the part to which you are responding
referred back to your OP, nothing else.

> In short, another demonstration of your
> dishonesty, blatant distorting of the facts, and outright slander. I
> could sue you for libel, Peter, but unlike you I`m a decent person so I
> won't.

All you are doing here is showing how relentless your perennial vendetta
against me is. If you were to sue me for libel, you would not
only lose, you would be hit by a countersuit for frivolous lawsuit.


Remainder deleted, to be replied to later.

Peter Nyikos
Professor of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina at Columbia --standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

[Peter Nyikos]

You're just trying to delflect attention from everything else you

wrote, besides the following inference from what you did write:

> My remarks
> concerned the status of the notion of DP, in particular, the lack of any
> evidence for it. If you could produce such evidence, it would outweigh any
> number of kilobytes of "scientific discussion" of which you boast.

If you could provide evidence that abiogenesis took place on earth,
that would outweigh EVERYTHING you wrote about the relative merits
of these two conflicting hypotheses, which includes ZERO scientific
discussion AFAIK.

> In fact,
> I doubt it's possible to have a scientific discussion of anything in the absence
> of evidence for its existence.

I suspect you are so incorrigible about this "doubt" of yours,
that you will pretend that the following draft for my FAQ on DP
was never posted:

A7a: How did Crick and Orgel try to make directed panspermia plausible?

REPLY: They gave two pieces of what they regarded as scientific evidence
[See A7c below]. Also, right near the beginning of the article,
they gave some reasoning that belongs more to the philosophy
of science than to science *per se*:
Could life have started on Earth as a
result of infection by microorganisms sent
here deliberately by a technological society
on another planet, by means of a special
long-range unmanned spaceship? To show
that this is not totally implausible we
shall use the theorem of detailed cosmic
reversibility; if we are capable of infecting
an as yet lifeless extrasolar planet, then,
given that the time was available, another
technological society might well have
infected our planet when it was still lifeless.



They go on later in the article to speculate on various motives
the panspermists might have had. The one that most dovetails with
"the theorem" is this:

It seems unlikely that we would deliberately
send terrestrial organisms to planets
that we believed might already be inhabited.
However, in view of the precarious situation
on Earth, we might well be tempted to infect
other planets if we became convinced that
we were alone in the galaxy (Universe).
...
The hypothetical senders on another planet
may have been able to prove that they were
likely to be alone, and to remain so, or they
may have reached this conclusion mistakenly.
In either case, if they resembled us
psychologically, their motivation for polluting
the galaxy would be strong, if they believed
that all or even the great majority of
inhabitable planets could be given life by
Directed Panspermia.

Granted the "may have been able to prove..." part, the
"if they believed" bit is just a question of them having
attained to our level of technology, and their access
to hardy prokaryotes or close evolutionary precursors.

"if they resembled us psychologically" is somewhat misleadingly
worded. All it takes is for them to decide that for a planet
to have life is far better than for it not to have life.


A7b: Did Crick and Orgel really assume that the motivations
of extraterrestrials would be anything like ours?

No, they explicitly denied that:

It is entirely possible
that extraterrestrial societies might
infect other planets for quite different
reasons than those we have suggested.
Alternatively, they might be less tempted
than we would be, even if they thought
that they were alone. The arguments given
above, together with the principle of
cosmic reversibility, demonstrate the possibility
that we have been infected, but do
not enable us to estimate the probability.

The arguments "given above" do not include what they
called "possible biological evidence." That came
immediately after the above arguments; see next entry:


A7c. What scientific evidence did Crick and Orgel give for the theory of directed
panspermia?

REPLY: The scientific evidence was indirect, and admittedly weak. It took
two forms. One was the near-universality of the genetic code. [There
is one variation in ciliates and a few others in various mitochondria,
but the differences are very minor and point to a common ancestral
source.]

It is a little surprising that organisms
with somewhat different codes do not coexist.
The universality of the code follows
naturally from infective theory
of the origins of life. Life on earth
would represent a clone derived
from a single extraterrestrial organism.
Even if many codes were represented at
the primary site where life began, only a
single one might have operated in
the organisms used to infect the Earth.

I do not know whether Crick and Orgel knew of the exceptions mentioned above.
The real force of their "somewhat different" would include many deviations,
including the subset of amino acids actually coded for, and the
actual correspondence. [See A7d, directly below, for more on this.]

Of course, they acknowledged that there were various theories for the
(near-)universality of the code, "but none is generally accepted to be
completely convincing." [ibid.] Here is their other piece of strictly
scientific evidence:

The chemical composition of living
organisms must reflect to some extent the
composition of the environment in which
they evolved. Thus the presence in living
organisms of elements that are extremely
rare on the Earth might indicate that life is
extraterrestrial in origin.

Molybdenum is an essential trace element
that plays an important role in many
enzymatic reactions, while chromium
and nickel are relatively unimportant
in biochemistry. The abundance of chromium,
nickel, and molybdenum on the Earth are 0.20,
3.16, and 0.02%, respectively. We cannot
conclude anything from this single example,
since molybdenum may be irreplaceable in
some essential reaction -- nitrogen fixation,
for example. However, if it could be shown
that the elements represented in terrestrial
living organisms correlate closely with those
that are abundant in some class of star ... we
might look more sympathetically at "infective"
theories.

The above is a revision of Item A7 that I've put in every thread
devoted to my FAQ on DP so far. Thanks for giving me an excuse
to post it before my next thread devoted to the topic.

Peter Nyikos
Professor of Mathematics

Univ. of South Carolina in Columbia --standard disclaimer--
http://people.math.sc.edu/nyikos/

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, July 27, 2018 at 6:05:02 AM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 7/25/2018 2:20 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > [snip mindless drivel]

As usual, the above is a tacit admission of failure to deal with
something far more specific than the tendentious drivel you post below.

> In any Internet discussion featuring narcissistic "holier-than-thou"
> assholes,

...especially Erik Simpson, towards whom you displayed blatant
favoritism in a June 11 OP to sci.bio.paleontology, and Ron O,
of whom more below.

> it is a statistical certainty that they are going to bring up
> otherwise irrelevant "transgressions" against them in otherwise
> completely unrelated circumstances,

...like Ron O did when I tried to talk about anything besides
some things that happened over 7 years ago. But that is perfectly
OK by you, because you have a completely subjective moral code,
whereby these abstract standards ONLY apply to people you've decided
to target for abuse.

> at which point the narcissistic
> "holuier-than-thou" asshole automatically forfeits the argument, and the
> opponent(s) of said asshole win by default.

EVEN IF these "standards" of yours were anything besides polemical
opportunism directed against the only (AFAIK) person in talk.origins
whom you've targeted for abuse, they would still be worthless in a forum
like this one, inasmuch as they have nothing to do with the
facts in dispute.

Your alleged standards for "argument" are purely polemical, and fit
only for "forensic leagues" like the one I was familiar with
all through secondary school, where style counts for far more
than substance in assigning points in formalized debates.

Did you spend decades as a "debate judge" in such a league?
Or as a coach for participants in them?

Peter Nyikos

[Oxyaena]

On 7/27/2018 1:08 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
[snip mindless bullshit]

Fixed it for you, Petey.


--
"Biology only makes sense in the light of evolution." - Theodosius
Doubzhansky

[Oxyaena]

[Peter Nyikos]

On Friday, July 27, 2018 at 3:10:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 7/27/2018 1:08 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> [snip mindless bullshit]
>
> Fixed it for you, Petey.

Thereby burying your head in the sand over the damning, self-contained
evidence of multiple chicanery by yourself.

Readers having trouble finding the post about which you are shamelessly
lying can look here:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/Xub9hqEyM0A/l7gpBG1zCAAJ
Subject: Re: The evolution of the bacterial flagellum: For Peter
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2018 10:08:39 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <8174902f-492c-4d99...@googlegroups.com>

Not that I expect any of the following to read any of it:

jillery

Ron O

Hemidactylus

Erik Simpson

Mark Isaak

After all, it might cramp their style to have to pretend the
damning evidence in the linked post does not exist.

Peter Nyikos

[Oxyaena]

On 7/27/2018 8:15 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Friday, July 27, 2018 at 3:10:02 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
>> On 7/27/2018 1:08 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>> [snip mindless bullshit]
>>
>> Fixed it for you, Petey.

> [snip mindless bullshit]

> Message-ID: <8174902f-492c-4d99...@googlegroups.com>
>

Yes, let's let any anybody who cares see the truth for themselves, and
I`m sure they'll disagree with you.

> Not that I expect any of the following to read any of it:

I`m pretty sure nobody here, including me, gives a shit about what you
think is "damning".

>
> jillery
>
> Ron O
>
> Hemidactylus
>
> Erik Simpson
>
> Mark Isaak
>
> After all, it might cramp their style to have to pretend the
> damning evidence in the linked post does not exist.
>

No "damning evidence" in the post exists whatsoever, Nyikos, and there
is plenty of evidence damning you in that post, all of which you
dishonestly snipped out.


> Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

Since you didn't actually identify above any alleged damning evidence
contained in that post, I can assume you refer to your final sentence
from it:

"Remainder deleted, to be replied to later."

Damning evidence indeed, but not of Oxyaena.

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2018 17:15:12 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net>:

That link...

(https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/Xub9hqEyM0A/l7gpBG1zCAAJ)

....leads to the following post:

[begin]

Oxyaena
Jul 27
Other recipients: talk-o...@moderators.isc.org
On 7/25/2018 2:20 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

[snip mindless drivel]

In any Internet discussion featuring narcissistic
"holier-than-thou"

assholes, it is a statistical certainty that they are going

to bring up
otherwise irrelevant "transgressions" against them in
otherwise

completely unrelated circumstances, at which point the

narcissistic
"holuier-than-thou" asshole automatically forfeits the
argument, and the
opponent(s) of said asshole win by default.

[end]

Is that the "damning evidence" to which you refer? If so,
please point out the "damning" part; I don't seem to see it,
and the comment seems obviously true, in the same way
Godwin's Law does. Thanks.

[Bob Casanova]

On Sat, 28 Jul 2018 11:53:14 -0700, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:

[Crickets...]

Well?

[marcel....@gmail.com]

On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 9:05:02 AM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
> the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
> at the present time.
>
> What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
> Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
> bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good.

Repeating it doesn't make it any less fallacious.

> But of course, we
> cannot have really good evidence for DP in the next thousand or more years,
> unless life on other solar system bodies all has a genetic code that is
> only slightly different from ours, if at all.

There is very strong evidence that the bacterial flagellum evolved. There's no need to wait 1000 years.

[jillery]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 02:44:13 -0700 (PDT), marcel....@gmail.com
wrote:

>On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 9:05:02 AM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>> This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
>> the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
>> at the present time.
>>
>> What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
>> Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
>> bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good.
>
>Repeating it doesn't make it any less fallacious.

Good point. In fact, its fallaciosity was apparent the first time.

>> But of course, we
>> cannot have really good evidence for DP in the next thousand or more years,
>> unless life on other solar system bodies all has a genetic code that is
>> only slightly different from ours, if at all.
>
>There is very strong evidence that the bacterial flagellum evolved. There's no need to wait 1000 years.

[Bob Casanova]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 10:28:23 -0700, the following appeared

Still waiting for the answer to the question, Peter.

[Peter Nyikos]

Welcome (back?) to talk.origins, Marcel. I do hope you can come
through on at least one point below.

"Come through" might involve backpedaling or even retracting
some of what you wrote, but I'm very understanding with newcomers who
show some sign of sincerity.

On Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at 5:45:02 AM UTC-4, marcel....@gmail.com wrote:
> On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 9:05:02 AM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> > This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
> > the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
> > at the present time.
> >
> > What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
> > Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
> > bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good.
>
> Repeating it doesn't make it any less fallacious.

So tell me why it is fallacious, if you can.

> > But of course, we
> > cannot have really good evidence for DP in the next thousand or more years,
> > unless life on other solar system bodies all has a genetic code that is
> > only slightly different from ours, if at all.
>
> There is very strong evidence that the bacterial flagellum evolved.

Provide it, if you can.

> There's no need to wait 1000 years.

Did you notice my "unless" qualifier? If it turned out that at least
two other bodies in our solar system had some form of life, that
would be an enormous game changer no matter what we find.

Have you read enough of my posts to this thread to see why?

Peter Nyikos
Professor, Dept. of Math. -- standard disclaimer--
University of South Carolina

[Peter Nyikos]

On Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at 6:40:02 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 02:44:13 -0700 (PDT), marcel....@gmail.com
> wrote:
>
> >On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 9:05:02 AM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >> This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
> >> the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
> >> at the present time.
> >>
> >> What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
> >> Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
> >> bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good.
> >
> >Repeating it doesn't make it any less fallacious.
>
>
> Good point. In fact, its fallaciosity was apparent the first time.

You are just whistling in the dark. Your descent into personal
attacks in solidarity with Oxyaena kept you from ever showing
this alleged "fallaciosity," as did your almost contentless
cheerleading for Casanova.

I've replied to what Mr. Kincaid [1] wrote, and hope to get some real
discussion out of him instead of the grandstanding and cheerleading that you
have been doing, including right here.

[1] I have been addressing him as "Marcel" because of the address masking
that New Google Groups does. But your software let me see the whole thing
for the first time: marcel....@gmail.com


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 18:51:17 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

>On Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at 6:40:02 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 02:44:13 -0700 (PDT), marcel....@gmail.com
>> wrote:
>>
>> >On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 9:05:02 AM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>> >> This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
>> >> the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
>> >> at the present time.
>> >>
>> >> What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
>> >> Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
>> >> bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good.
>> >
>> >Repeating it doesn't make it any less fallacious.
>>
>>
>> Good point. In fact, its fallaciosity was apparent the first time.
>
>You are just whistling in the dark. Your descent into personal
>attacks in solidarity with Oxyaena kept you from ever showing
>this alleged "fallaciosity," as did your almost contentless
>cheerleading for Casanova.
>
>I've replied to what Mr. Kincaid [1] wrote, and hope to get some real
>discussion out of him instead of the grandstanding and cheerleading that you
>have been doing, including right here.
>
>[1] I have been addressing him as "Marcel" because of the address masking
>that New Google Groups does. But your software let me see the whole thing
>for the first time: marcel....@gmail.com

This episode of paranoid personal attacks and pointless lies brought
to you by:


>Peter Nyikos


What a clever way for you to destroy all incentive to engage in a
"real discussion" with you. Of course, it's not possible to have a
real discussion starting from the premise that the bacterial flagellum
was designed by ETs, so you needn't have bothered.

[Peter Nyikos]

It's in the post itself, you bootlicker of a craven libeler who
cannot face the truth about herself [1]. I SAID it was self-contained
(see words preserved up there).

But you didn't dare read any of it, did you?

[1] Oh, yes, Oxyaena gave away the fact in sci.bio.paleontology that she is
married [2] and her husband is a paleontologist.

He won't post there, according to Oxyaena. I wonder whether that has
anything to do with the way Oxyaena, under her old T-name, went on a spam
rampage that almost destroyed sci.bio.paleontology.

But I think it's safe to assume she will never tell the truth about the
connection, if any.

[2] So much for her talking about how she doesn't reveal such "private,"
"personal" information. You saw that on another thread, didn't you?

Will you also reveal such "private, personal" information about yourself?
Or do you plan to go on being as tight-lipped as Glenn about it?

> I can assume you refer to your final sentence
> from it:
>
> "Remainder deleted, to be replied to later."
>
> Damning evidence indeed, but not of Oxyaena.

You really love to flaunt how illogical you can be, don't you?

> --
> I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

You approve of Oxyana's libels, but there is no need for you to
defend her right to go on lying her head off.
After all, the people I named above will be glad to help you
shoulder that "burden".

By the way, I forgot to add Bob Casanova, who does a lot better
job of fooling people than you do in his own reply to the post
to which you are replying here. Also Wolffan, of course.

Maybe y'all can recruit John Harshman to go to bat for Oxyaena's
latest libels, too.

And I wouldn't be surprised if you and Martin Harran got to be
best friends over your mutual admiration of Oxyaena.

[Yes, he's shown no signs of admiring her yet, but two such similar
people can't long be unaware of each others' talents.]


But I don't expect any of the 27 people I've named on a list,
most of whom are "tough but fair," (as you yourself agreed) to join in.


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 18:39:44 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos

Of course I did. And your comments below prove you know it.

One of your problems here is, you can't admit that, just because
something is evident to you, doesn't make evident to anybody else.

Another of your problems here is, you would rather spew all kinds of
stupid excuses for not making yourself plain.

I doubt your fellow faculty put up with your laziness/dishonesty.
Neither do I.


<remaining irrelevant spew left unaltered for documentation>

[Peter Nyikos]

Casanova replies to himself twice. He is either very unused to
the display people get in New Google Groups or else a master
of misdirection.

But not directly. You are either very cunning and very dishonest,
or careless enough to be looking at a post elsewhere on the page from
the one to which the url links.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter is the
truth. "Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity"
is naively worded, but there is much truth to it.

The following will give you an undistracted view of the post,
but you do need to look below a huge amount of technical info
about it to get to the text:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/Xub9hqEyM0A/l7gpBG1zCAAJ

Now, if I am wrong and you are pulling a fast one on everyone here,
I'll go ahead and repost the whole thing so people can see just
how compromisingly jillery licked Oxyaena's boots in parallel
to your original post.


Peter Nyikos

PS I've left in Oxyaena's perfect (albeit unintended) description of
Ron Okimoto below, just for amusement.

[jillery]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 19:00:31 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

<snip most of the spew from your puckered sphincter>

>Now, if I am wrong and you are pulling a fast one on everyone here,
>I'll go ahead and repost the whole thing so people can see just
>how compromisingly jillery licked Oxyaena's boots in parallel
>to your original post.

Yet another episode of paranoid personal attacks and pointless lies

brought to you by:


>Peter Nyikos

Not sure if Oxyaena even wears boots, but if so, they wouldn't be for
licking:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2fPkzJsMU8>

--

[Oxyaena]

What do we have here? A malicious, libelous, gossiping son of a bitch
who never gave any "damning" evidence, and had to resort to insulting me
behind my back as a convenient escape hatch when this Machiavellian
douche bag was painted into a corner with his own lies? This is what I
find, and what I find here seems more like the writings of a
grade-schooler than a 72 year old mathematician, since it has about as
much maturity as one. Fuck you, Peter. If hell does actually exist, I
bet there's a special place reserved for you there.

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 19:00:31 -0700 (PDT), the following

appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net>:

>Casanova replies to himself twice.

No, Casanove tries to get Petrr to answer the questions
twice. Let's see if he does so...

> He is either very unused to
>the display people get in New Google Groups or else a master
>of misdirection.

I don't use GurgleGropes (nor do I particularly care what
its foibles might be), so it's the first. But I'm sure your
oft-displayed paranoia will steer you to your desired
conclusion.

It was up to the one who provided the cite to make the
intended target clear. I can't read what passes for your
mind.

>I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter is the
>truth. "Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity"
>is naively worded, but there is much truth to it.

Yes, there is. Such as the stupidity leading morons to
assume that others can read their "minds".

>The following will give you an undistracted view of the post,
>but you do need to look below a huge amount of technical info
>about it to get to the text:
>
>https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/Xub9hqEyM0A/l7gpBG1zCAAJ

I see quite a few accusations from *both* sides; which is
the "damning evidence" you claim is there? Please be
specific. I keep asking this, and I have yet to see a
substantive response, so my initial "let's see" is answered
as I expected.

>Now, if I am wrong and you are pulling a fast one on everyone here,
>I'll go ahead and repost the whole thing so people can see just
>how compromisingly jillery licked Oxyaena's boots in parallel
>to your original post.

>PS I've left in Oxyaena's perfect (albeit unintended) description of
>Ron Okimoto below, just for amusement.

I see no comment by Oxyaena about Ron there; I *do* see his
comment which is obviously about you. Senior moment on your
part?

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 2 Aug 2018 10:12:52 -0400, Oxyaena <oxy...@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

Yep, he's tried the same with me. I challenged him weeks ago about
specific lies he told about me and he made no effort to deal with
them. Now he tries to snipe at me in a discussion in which I am not
even involved, probably in the hope that I won't even notice it.

>This is what I
>find, and what I find here seems more like the writings of a
>grade-schooler than a 72 year old mathematician, since it has about as
>much maturity as one.

I'm inclined to agree on the basis that he clearly thinks he is
successfully bluffing people with his patent nonsense.

[Oxyaena]

He's been doing the same with me here in multiple threads, and several
times in sbp on one major thread. I can't say I`m in a position to
disagree with you.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 1:20:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 19:00:31 -0700 (PDT), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
>
> >Casanova replies to himself twice.
>
> No,

Yes, the attribution lines below don't lie. They don't even mislead.

<snip>

> > He is either very unused to
> >the display people get in New Google Groups or else a master
> >of misdirection.
>
> I don't use GurgleGropes (nor do I particularly care what
> its foibles might be), so it's the first.

The first time you've ever clicked on a NGG url, despite
the fact that I've posted hundreds of them? I used to
take people to displays that showed only the one post,
until I learned from Ron O how to modify the default url
to one that takes you right to the webpage of 25 or more
posts on a typical NGG Usenet page.

But the first post that hits one's eyes is the linked one,
so I'm surprised that you latched onto the wrong one.


<snip baseless insult by you>

>
> >On Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at 2:40:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:

...replying to the following post:

> >> On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 10:28:23 -0700, the following appeared
> >> in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:

...replying to the following post:

> >>
> >> >On Sat, 28 Jul 2018 11:53:14 -0700, the following appeared
> >> >in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:

Funny, all three attributions refer to one "Bob Casanova,"
your "No" at the beginning notwithstanding.

See my explanation above for why this is a baseless insult by you.

> >I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter is the
> >truth. "Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity"
> >is naively worded, but there is much truth to it.
>
> Yes, there is. Such as the stupidity leading morons to
> assume that others can read their "minds".

You are baselessly accusing me of something I've been
*accurately* accusing Jillery and Oxyaena of. See
my explanation again.

>
> >The following will give you an undistracted view of the post,
> >but you do need to look below a huge amount of technical info
> >about it to get to the text:
> >
> >https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/Xub9hqEyM0A/l7gpBG1zCAAJ
>
> I see quite a few accusations from *both* sides; which is
> the "damning evidence" you claim is there?

There isn't the slightest amount of justification in it for
Oxyaena's LIBELOUS description of what I had written:

> In short, another demonstration of your
> dishonesty, blatant distorting of the facts, and outright slander. I
> could sue you for libel, Peter, but unlike you I`m a decent person so I
> won't.

The alleged "demonstration" consisted of me making a simple,
ACCURATE statement about how Oxyaena had displayed ignorance
about WHEN the universe could have been hospitable to life anywhere.

If you read what came next carefully, you will see that
Oxyaena totally evaded the issue, changing the subject to the
probability of life evolving elsewhere in the universe,
and then to a list of topics of discussion between her
and OTHER participants. These topics also had zilch to do with
Oxyaena's ignorant claim that the universe only became suitable
for life at 4.5 gya, when our solar system was formed!!

So I documented her ignorant statement and also what my
refutation of it had been. It is all in the post to
which you are replying. It includes a link to the post where
I very diplomatically had originally corrected her ignorant idea.
Here is an url of the "only the linked post" sort for it:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/jI6KRtcqX30/0E97QgICBwAJ

> Please be specific. I keep asking this,

Was the above specific enough? If not, I could repost the whole
post which you are superficially describing above and take it
apart bit by bit.


<snip>

> >Now, if I am wrong and you are pulling a fast one on everyone here,
> >I'll go ahead and repost the whole thing so people can see just
> >how compromisingly jillery licked Oxyaena's boots in parallel
> >to your original post.
>
> >PS I've left in Oxyaena's perfect (albeit unintended) description of
> >Ron Okimoto below, just for amusement.
>
> I see no comment by Oxyaena about Ron there

I see you failed to comprehend what "albeit unintended" meant.
Oxyaena was dishonestly pretending to be describing me.
There are many people far more deserving of that
description than me, but the most deserving is Ron Okimoto, IMO.

Capice?

> I *do* see his
> comment which is obviously about you. Senior moment on your
> part?

No, and you've seen a demonstration of what Usenet is so very useful for:
explanations can be put in EXACTLY where they are needed. We post lots
of things that seem clear to us, but when others explain their
problems in understanding, these can be corrected in continuing dialogue.


Peter Nyikos

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 3 Aug 2018 15:56:34 -0700 (PDT), the following

appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net>:

>On Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 1:20:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
>> On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 19:00:31 -0700 (PDT), the following
>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
>> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
>>
>> >Casanova replies to himself twice.
>>

>> No, Casanova tries to get Peter to answer the questions

>> twice. Let's see if he does so...
>

>Yes, the attribution lines below don't lie. They don't even mislead.

No, they don't. And your snippage of what makes you
uncomfortable (restored, with spelling corrections) doesn't,
either.

>> > He is either very unused to
>> >the display people get in New Google Groups or else a master
>> >of misdirection.

>> I don't use GurgleGropes (nor do I particularly care what

>> its foibles might be), so it's the first. But I'm sure your
>> oft-displayed paranoia will steer you to your desired
>> conclusion.

>The first time you've ever clicked on a NGG url, despite
>the fact that I've posted hundreds of them?

No, the first of *your* stated two options, still visible
above. Try reading your own posts for comprehension.

> I used to
>take people to displays that showed only the one post,
>until I learned from Ron O how to modify the default url
>to one that takes you right to the webpage of 25 or more
>posts on a typical NGG Usenet page.
>
>But the first post that hits one's eyes is the linked one,
>so I'm surprised that you latched onto the wrong one.

See (quite a ways) below; "But just to be clear, that link
leads...":

><snip baseless insult by you>

Restored above. It's an observation, one shared by many
here, not a "baseless insult".

>> >On Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at 2:40:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
>
>...replying to the following post:
>
>> >> On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 10:28:23 -0700, the following appeared
>> >> in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:
>
>...replying to the following post:
>
>> >>
>> >> >On Sat, 28 Jul 2018 11:53:14 -0700, the following appeared
>> >> >in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:
>
>Funny, all three attributions refer to one "Bob Casanova,"
>your "No" at the beginning notwithstanding.

Funny indeed that you can characterize two follow-on
questions directed to you (as I noted, and as you snipped
because they contradicted you) as replies to myself.

Still no acknowledgement that it's your responsibility to
make your reference clear? No surprise.

But just to be clear, that link leads *directly* (first post
at the top of the page) to the post by Oxyaena which I
quoted below. Just for clarity, here it is again:

"In any Internet discussion featuring narcissistic
'holier-than-thou' assholes, it is a statistical certainty
that they are going to bring up otherwise irrelevant
'transgressions' against them in otherwise completely
unrelated circumstances, at which point the narcissistic
'holuier-than-thou' asshole automatically forfeits the
argument, and the opponent(s) of said asshole win by
default."

So once again, as I asked and which you failed to answer, is
that the "damning evidence" to which you referred? If so,

please point out the "damning" part; I don't seem to see it,
and the comment seems obviously true, in the same way
Godwin's Law does. Thanks.

>> >I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter is the
>> >truth. "Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity"
>> >is naively worded, but there is much truth to it.
>>
>> Yes, there is. Such as the stupidity leading morons to
>> assume that others can read their "minds".
>
>You are baselessly accusing me of something I've been
>*accurately* accusing Jillery and Oxyaena of. See
>my explanation again.

You assumed I would know what you referred to, without
specifying that reference, and apparently assumed I would
share (or at least see) what you considered to be "damning
evidence". If that doesn't indicate your belief in the
ability of others to read your mind it indicates a serious
lack of acumen on your part. So, which is it?

>> >The following will give you an undistracted view of the post,
>> >but you do need to look below a huge amount of technical info
>> >about it to get to the text:
>> >
>> >https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/Xub9hqEyM0A/l7gpBG1zCAAJ
>>
>> I see quite a few accusations from *both* sides; which is
>> the "damning evidence" you claim is there?
>
>There isn't the slightest amount of justification in it for
>Oxyaena's LIBELOUS description of what I had written:
>
>> In short, another demonstration of your
>> dishonesty, blatant distorting of the facts, and outright slander. I
>> could sue you for libel, Peter, but unlike you I`m a decent person so I
>> won't.
>
>The alleged "demonstration" consisted of me making a simple,
>ACCURATE

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you
think it means. Many things you have referred to, explicitly
or implicitly, as "accurate" I would class as "unsupported
opinion", such as the "damning" nature of the content of
Oxyaena's post, the one originally under discussion.

> statement about how Oxyaena had displayed ignorance
>about WHEN the universe could have been hospitable to life anywhere.
>
>If you read what came next carefully, you will see that
>Oxyaena totally evaded the issue, changing the subject to the
>probability of life evolving elsewhere in the universe,
>and then to a list of topics of discussion between her
>and OTHER participants. These topics also had zilch to do with
>Oxyaena's ignorant claim that the universe only became suitable
>for life at 4.5 gya, when our solar system was formed!!
>
>So I documented her ignorant statement and also what my
>refutation of it had been. It is all in the post to
>which you are replying. It includes a link to the post where
>I very diplomatically had originally corrected her ignorant idea.
>Here is an url of the "only the linked post" sort for it:
>
>https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/talk.origins/jI6KRtcqX30/0E97QgICBwAJ

That is your reply to Oxyaena, and fails to show any serious
ignorance on his (or in your opinion, "her") part. I see a
fair number of your usual condescending "corrections" and
personal opinions regarding XT life, and, interestingly, I
see the same sort of treatment of a conjecture by Carl
Sagan, a man whose intelligence and knowledge put yours (and
mine) to shame.

>> Please be specific. I keep asking this,
>
>Was the above specific enough? If not, I could repost the whole
>post which you are superficially describing above and take it
>apart bit by bit.
>
>
><snip>
>
>> >Now, if I am wrong and you are pulling a fast one on everyone here,
>> >I'll go ahead and repost the whole thing so people can see just
>> >how compromisingly jillery licked Oxyaena's boots in parallel
>> >to your original post.
>>
>> >PS I've left in Oxyaena's perfect (albeit unintended) description of
>> >Ron Okimoto below, just for amusement.
>>
>> I see no comment by Oxyaena about Ron there
>
>I see you failed to comprehend what "albeit unintended" meant.
>Oxyaena was dishonestly pretending to be describing me.
>There are many people far more deserving of that
>description than me, but the most deserving is Ron Okimoto, IMO.
>
>Capice?

Sure, even with the incorrect spelling: You took what
someone said and applied it to a specific individual, and
expected anyone who read it to agree with your assessment
regarding its applicability. Perfectly clear. And again, I
see nothing there about Ron.

Capisce?

>> I *do* see his
>> comment which is obviously about you. Senior moment on your
>> part?
>
>No, and you've seen a demonstration of what Usenet is so very useful for:
>explanations can be put in EXACTLY where they are needed. We post lots
>of things that seem clear to us, but when others explain their
>problems in understanding, these can be corrected in continuing dialogue.

Good point. So please humor me, and specify the "damning
evidence" which prompted my original response.

[Oxyaena]

On 8/4/2018 1:30 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Aug 2018 15:56:34 -0700 (PDT), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
>
>> On Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 1:20:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
>>> On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 19:00:31 -0700 (PDT), the following
>>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
>>> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
>>>
>>>> Casanova replies to himself twice.
>>>
>>> No, Casanova tries to get Peter to answer the questions
>>> twice. Let's see if he does so...

Not yet, and knowing him, he probably never will.

>>
>> Yes, the attribution lines below don't lie. They don't even mislead.
>
> No, they don't. And your snippage of what makes you
> uncomfortable (restored, with spelling corrections) doesn't,
> either.

He always uses that tactic against me, which is one of the reasons why I
stopped engaging him. It's really just a headache nowadays dealing with
his bullshit, and with my neurological conditions the infuriating nature
of the libelous horseshit he "writes" about me might just lead to a
headache, or worse, a migraine.

>
>>>> He is either very unused to
>>>> the display people get in New Google Groups or else a master
>>>> of misdirection.
>
>>> I don't use GurgleGropes (nor do I particularly care what
>>> its foibles might be), so it's the first. But I'm sure your
>>> oft-displayed paranoia will steer you to your desired
>>> conclusion.
>
>> The first time you've ever clicked on a NGG url, despite
>> the fact that I've posted hundreds of them?
>
> No, the first of *your* stated two options, still visible
> above. Try reading your own posts for comprehension.

You're trying to reason with a guy that's explicitly opposed to reason,
he's a lost cause.

>
>> I used to
>> take people to displays that showed only the one post,
>> until I learned from Ron O how to modify the default url
>> to one that takes you right to the webpage of 25 or more
>> posts on a typical NGG Usenet page.
>>
>> But the first post that hits one's eyes is the linked one,
>> so I'm surprised that you latched onto the wrong one.
>
> See (quite a ways) below; "But just to be clear, that link
> leads...":
>
>> <snip baseless insult by you>
>
> Restored above. It's an observation, one shared by many
> here, not a "baseless insult".

Contrast that with the innumerable baseless insults he's written about me.

Nyikos' law.

He conveniently ignores the parts of this thread where I refuted his
bullshit, and has so-far ignored every single one of my refutations,
instead refusing to own up to his mistakes he'd rather snip what I write
and then call it "sophomoric." Please, if anything, he's the one acting
like a toddler, if one googles my nym on Gurgle Gropes, one could see
that between June 2017 and June 2018 the vast majority of references to
my name were Peter's doing, all of them vitriolic and libelous, which
also indicates an unhealthy obsession with me. He insults me in threads
that I have nothing to do with too, but apparently there's one set of
standards for Peter, and another for everybody else.

>
>>> Please be specific. I keep asking this,
>>
>> Was the above specific enough? If not, I could repost the whole
>> post which you are superficially describing above and take it
>> apart bit by bit.
>>
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>>> Now, if I am wrong and you are pulling a fast one on everyone here,
>>>> I'll go ahead and repost the whole thing so people can see just
>>>> how compromisingly jillery licked Oxyaena's boots in parallel
>>>> to your original post.
>>>
>>>> PS I've left in Oxyaena's perfect (albeit unintended) description of
>>>> Ron Okimoto below, just for amusement.
>>>
>>> I see no comment by Oxyaena about Ron there
>>
>> I see you failed to comprehend what "albeit unintended" meant.
>> Oxyaena was dishonestly pretending to be describing me.
>> There are many people far more deserving of that
>> description than me, but the most deserving is Ron Okimoto, IMO.
>>
>> Capice?
>
> Sure, even with the incorrect spelling: You took what
> someone said and applied it to a specific individual, and
> expected anyone who read it to agree with your assessment
> regarding its applicability. Perfectly clear. And again, I
> see nothing there about Ron.
>
> Capisce?

There has never been such a shining exemplar for the Dunning-Kruger
effect as Peter Nyikos. Congratulations, Petey.

[Bob Casanova]

On Sat, 4 Aug 2018 16:26:49 -0400, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@invalid.invalid>:

>On 8/4/2018 1:30 PM, Bob Casanova wrote:
>> On Fri, 3 Aug 2018 15:56:34 -0700 (PDT), the following
>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
>> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
>>
>>> On Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 1:20:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 1 Aug 2018 19:00:31 -0700 (PDT), the following
>>>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
>>>> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
>>>>
>>>>> Casanova replies to himself twice.
>>>>
>>>> No, Casanova tries to get Peter to answer the questions
>>>> twice. Let's see if he does so...
>
>Not yet, and knowing him, he probably never will.

Probably not; it's happened in the past.

>>> Yes, the attribution lines below don't lie. They don't even mislead.
>>
>> No, they don't. And your snippage of what makes you
>> uncomfortable (restored, with spelling corrections) doesn't,
>> either.
>
>He always uses that tactic against me, which is one of the reasons why I
>stopped engaging him. It's really just a headache nowadays dealing with
>his bullshit, and with my neurological conditions the infuriating nature
>of the libelous horseshit he "writes" about me might just lead to a
>headache, or worse, a migraine.

My condolences on your problems. If I had that sort of
issue, or got physical symptoms from reading and posting
here, I'd probably give it up, at least for a while.

>>>>> He is either very unused to
>>>>> the display people get in New Google Groups or else a master
>>>>> of misdirection.
>>
>>>> I don't use GurgleGropes (nor do I particularly care what
>>>> its foibles might be), so it's the first. But I'm sure your
>>>> oft-displayed paranoia will steer you to your desired
>>>> conclusion.
>>
>>> The first time you've ever clicked on a NGG url, despite
>>> the fact that I've posted hundreds of them?
>>
>> No, the first of *your* stated two options, still visible
>> above. Try reading your own posts for comprehension.
>
>You're trying to reason with a guy that's explicitly opposed to reason,
>he's a lost cause.

Hope springs eternal...

>>> I used to
>>> take people to displays that showed only the one post,
>>> until I learned from Ron O how to modify the default url
>>> to one that takes you right to the webpage of 25 or more
>>> posts on a typical NGG Usenet page.
>>>
>>> But the first post that hits one's eyes is the linked one,
>>> so I'm surprised that you latched onto the wrong one.
>>
>> See (quite a ways) below; "But just to be clear, that link
>> leads...":
>>
>>> <snip baseless insult by you>
>>
>> Restored above. It's an observation, one shared by many
>> here, not a "baseless insult".
>
>Contrast that with the innumerable baseless insults he's written about me.

....and about others. Yeah, I've noticed; see below.

Yeah, several of us have noticed that. Of course, Peter
disagrees; we're all in a "conspiracy" against him.

I regretfully have to disagree; The Good DrDr (or "DocDoc",
or Allie) is a *much* more egregious example.

But let's see if, and how, Peter responds.

[Oxyaena]

Thanks.

>
>>>>>> He is either very unused to
>>>>>> the display people get in New Google Groups or else a master
>>>>>> of misdirection.
>>>
>>>>> I don't use GurgleGropes (nor do I particularly care what
>>>>> its foibles might be), so it's the first. But I'm sure your
>>>>> oft-displayed paranoia will steer you to your desired
>>>>> conclusion.
>>>
>>>> The first time you've ever clicked on a NGG url, despite
>>>> the fact that I've posted hundreds of them?
>>>
>>> No, the first of *your* stated two options, still visible
>>> above. Try reading your own posts for comprehension.
>>
>> You're trying to reason with a guy that's explicitly opposed to reason,
>> he's a lost cause.
>
> Hope springs eternal...

Don't get your hopes up.

>
>>>> I used to
>>>> take people to displays that showed only the one post,
>>>> until I learned from Ron O how to modify the default url
>>>> to one that takes you right to the webpage of 25 or more
>>>> posts on a typical NGG Usenet page.
>>>>
>>>> But the first post that hits one's eyes is the linked one,
>>>> so I'm surprised that you latched onto the wrong one.
>>>
>>> See (quite a ways) below; "But just to be clear, that link
>>> leads...":
>>>
>>>> <snip baseless insult by you>
>>>
>>> Restored above. It's an observation, one shared by many
>>> here, not a "baseless insult".
>>
>> Contrast that with the innumerable baseless insults he's written about me.
>
> ....and about others. Yeah, I've noticed; see below.

Once I wrote this, I regretted only mentioning me, I should've also
mentioned the fact that others are harassed by him constantly as well.

Does this "conspiracy" mean we're part of the Illuminati? Are we rich
and powerful yet? :D

True, but I haven't payed much attention to The Good DrDr, but what I
have read of his puke leaves me appalled at the fact that he's a genuine
doctor, as if someone wants this prick to be their physician, or at the
fact that he was awarded a doctorate in the first place, never mind two.

[Bob Casanova]

On Sun, 5 Aug 2018 14:19:40 -0400, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@is.a.god>:

You're welcome.

>>>>>>> He is either very unused to
>>>>>>> the display people get in New Google Groups or else a master
>>>>>>> of misdirection.
>>>>
>>>>>> I don't use GurgleGropes (nor do I particularly care what
>>>>>> its foibles might be), so it's the first. But I'm sure your
>>>>>> oft-displayed paranoia will steer you to your desired
>>>>>> conclusion.
>>>>
>>>>> The first time you've ever clicked on a NGG url, despite
>>>>> the fact that I've posted hundreds of them?
>>>>
>>>> No, the first of *your* stated two options, still visible
>>>> above. Try reading your own posts for comprehension.
>>>
>>> You're trying to reason with a guy that's explicitly opposed to reason,
>>> he's a lost cause.
>>
>> Hope springs eternal...
>
>Don't get your hopes up.

I may continue to hope. I *won't* hold my breath.

If only...

I don't know where or how he got his doctorates, but I
suspect neither was from a top-end university.

[Bob Casanova]

On Sat, 04 Aug 2018 10:30:14 -0700, the following appeared

[Crickets...]

As usual.

[Oxyaena]

On 7/31/2018 9:51 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at 6:40:02 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 02:44:13 -0700 (PDT), marcel....@gmail.com
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 9:05:02 AM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>> This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
>>>> the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
>>>> at the present time.
>>>>
>>>> What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
>>>> Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
>>>> bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good.
>>>
>>> Repeating it doesn't make it any less fallacious.
>>
>>
>> Good point. In fact, its fallaciosity was apparent the first time.
>
> You are just whistling in the dark. Your descent into personal
> attacks in solidarity with Oxyaena kept you from ever showing
> this alleged "fallaciosity," as did your almost contentless
> cheerleading for Casanova.

You say this as if you are innocent of not committing any personal
attacks on me. You're so full of shit that Trump himself would be
jealous at how pathological a liar you are.

[Oxyaena]

On 7/31/2018 8:49 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> Welcome (back?) to talk.origins, Marcel. I do hope you can come
> through on at least one point below.
>
> "Come through" might involve backpedaling or even retracting
> some of what you wrote, but I'm very understanding with newcomers who
> show some sign of sincerity.
>
>
> On Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at 5:45:02 AM UTC-4, marcel....@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 9:05:02 AM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>> This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
>>> the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
>>> at the present time.
>>>
>>> What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
>>> Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
>>> bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good.
>>
>> Repeating it doesn't make it any less fallacious.
>
> So tell me why it is fallacious, if you can.

Scroll through the fucking thread, asshole, and you'll (well, maybe not
you, you have a skull so fucking thick that it would make a blue whale
blush, but OTHER readers will) see why.

>
>
>>> But of course, we
>>> cannot have really good evidence for DP in the next thousand or more years,
>>> unless life on other solar system bodies all has a genetic code that is
>>> only slightly different from ours, if at all.
>>
>> There is very strong evidence that the bacterial flagellum evolved.
>
> Provide it, if you can.

Scroll through the fucking thread, asshole, we've provided it to you
multiple times. The burden of proof is on *you* to show that the
flagellum was designed, we have already done our part.

>
>
>> There's no need to wait 1000 years.
>
> Did you notice my "unless" qualifier? If it turned out that at least
> two other bodies in our solar system had some form of life, that
> would be an enormous game changer no matter what we find.
>
> Have you read enough of my posts to this thread to see why?

Dunning-Kruger alert! Dunning-Kruger alert!

[jillery]

On Wed, 8 Aug 2018 09:39:37 -0400, Oxyaena <oxy...@is.a.god> wrote:

>On 7/31/2018 9:51 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>> On Tuesday, July 31, 2018 at 6:40:02 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>>> On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 02:44:13 -0700 (PDT), marcel....@gmail.com
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Monday, July 23, 2018 at 9:05:02 AM UTC-7, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>>>>> This whole thread is based on a misconception. I have always said that
>>>>> the evidence for the bacterial flagellum being designed is very weak
>>>>> at the present time.
>>>>>
>>>>> What may have confused some people is my oft-repeated statement that IF
>>>>> Directed Panspermia (DP) is true, THEN the circumstantial evidence that the
>>>>> bacterial flagellum is designed becomes quite good.
>>>>
>>>> Repeating it doesn't make it any less fallacious.
>>>
>>>
>>> Good point. In fact, its fallaciosity was apparent the first time.
>>
>> You are just whistling in the dark. Your descent into personal
>> attacks in solidarity with Oxyaena kept you from ever showing
>> this alleged "fallaciosity," as did your almost contentless
>> cheerleading for Casanova.
>
>You say this as if you are innocent of not committing any personal
>attacks on me. You're so full of shit that Trump himself would be
>jealous at how pathological a liar you are.

It's worse than that. I don't see how remarking about his fallacious
comments qualifies as a personal attack, but I suppose it makes sense
to him. My experience is anytime anybody says anything contradictory
to Nyikos the peter, he considers it a personal attack, which he then
uses to rationalize personal attacks against them.

[marcel....@gmail.com]

Fuck off and die, maggot. I don't engage with people acting in bad faith.

[Oxyaena]

On 8/12/2018 4:17 PM, marcel....@gmail.com wrote:
> Fuck off and die, maggot. I don't engage with people acting in bad faith.

Pure wisdom. You, sir, are a wise one, I applaud you.

[Peter Nyikos]

On Sunday, August 12, 2018 at 4:20:03 PM UTC-4, marcel....@gmail.com wrote:

You disappeared for a while, Mr. Kincaid. I looked for you
last week because I wanted to remind you of this post of mine,
and also of a post in "The blessings of religion" where Martin
Harran made a curt dismissal of you after you caught him saying
something that was not as nasty as the following:

> Fuck off and die, maggot.

However, your statement was not directed at one person, but was about
apologists for religion in general. Hence it is worth far
more attention than your insulting one-liner. Here is the context:

__________________ excerpt, names added in brackets____________________

[Mark Isaak:]
>> >A problem with pastoral counseling is that the counselor's religious
>> >community is likely to support his or her biases, and so you get things
>> >like conversion therapy or wives counseled to submit to their
>> >wife-beating husbands.

[Martin Harran:]
>> What a dreadful allegation to make about a group of people of whom you
>> have no direct knowledge!

[you, Marcel Kincaid:]
>All of a sudden direct knowledge, rather than empirical inference, is required?
>
>Here's a funny thing: whenever I see arguments by apologists for religion, my opposition to it gets stronger. The more time in their life they have spent crafting their arguments so as to appear reasonable and rational so they can push back hard at non-believers in public forums, the less I think of them. And I know I'm not the only one.

[Martin Harran:]
Sounds like a fairly typical case of self-affirmation.

_______________________ end of excerpt from
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/3rRJIe9FiX0/9jFpCjyrCgAJ
Subject: Re: The blessings of religion
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2018 15:04:54 +0100
Message-ID: <jbf3mdt7lndvg2ql3...@4ax.com>

> I don't engage with people acting in bad faith.

Then I suggest you not engage with the following:

Casanova, Martin Harran, Mark Isaak (not to be confused with Andre Isaak,
whom I've never caught acting in bad faith), jillery, Ron O, Oxyaena,
and Erik Simpson.

I've caught all of the above posting in bad faith dozens, and in all
but perhaps two cases, hundreds of times.

There are a few others, but they haven't posted to this thread.
But notice how the above named people (except Ron O, who only
made a cameo appearance) have been dominating this thread [1].
So it is worth noting that zencycle is NOT listed above, although
he too has posted here. I have never caught him posting in bad
faith either.

[1] Except for minor tiffs between some of them, their main
reason for this is to get revenge for the numerous times I
have documented [2] their acting in bad faith, and since they
cannot do it in good fa

[2] Just let me know whether you want documentation on any of them.
I don't post it very much in reply to them because they know it
all too well, and are bent on revenge for my having posted it.

Now, as for you, you made several statements that I challenged
below. You made no attempt to support them. I'm sure this
will make you very popular with the people I've named. Note
how Oxyaena has already praised you for having posted your
completely unsupported insult.

Had you supported it, you may not have gotten such a hearty reception.
Just give the word, and I'll explain why I say this.

Peter Nyikos

[Peter Nyikos]

When the cat's away, the mice will play. None of the shenanigans
of the people mentioned in the post below during my week+ of
absences surprises me in the least.

On Tuesday, August 7, 2018 at 12:35:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Sat, 04 Aug 2018 10:30:14 -0700, the following appeared
> in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:

<huge snip of you spin-doctoring and nitpicking in your usual
inconsequential manner to avoid confronting the dishonesty of Oxyaena.>

> >>> >> >Well?
> >>> >>
> >>> >> Still waiting for the answer to the question, Peter.
>
> [Crickets...]
>
> As usual.

I keep telling twits like you that I do not do things on your
timetables. I've been ignoring you because I have had much
more important things to talk about with Burkhard in "More Dawkins"
and with John Harshman in sci.bio.paleontology.

But I did take time in s.b.p. to also nail Oxyaena in her slander
which you've been prostituting your integrity over.

Here is where I laid it out especially starkly.

________________________excerpts, deletia in [...]_______________

On Wednesday, August 8, 2018 at 12:37:47 PM UTC-4, Oxyaena wrote:
> On 8/8/2018 11:47 AM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> Let's add "slander" to the list of words you don't know the meaning of
> but keep using anyways.

You are describing yourself, not me. And now I will let you know how.

I documented your most over-the-top slander in "Pterosaur dietary
hypotheses," and you snipped it in reply, not daring to confront it.
It went:

In short, another demonstration of your
dishonesty, blatant distorting of the facts, and outright slander.
I could sue you for libel, Peter, but unlike you I`m a decent person so
I won't.

What you called a "slander" and legally actionable "libel" was a
COMPLETELY accurate statement:


you *also* showed your ignorance about when life
could reasonably be expected to arise and evolve in our universe.

And, after your mangling of the concept of "slander" and "libel,"
I showed you just how accurate that statement of mine was.
You had written the following benighted, ignorant comment:

Considering that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, and the
universe only settled down enough for life to develop some 4.5 Ga, ala
when our Solar System formed, this makes sense.

I gave you a carefully reasoned analysis of why this is completely false,
ending in:

the planetary system within 100 light years of us
that SETI considered the best target for a long time
is Delta Pavonis, a G star like our sun. It is estimated to be
over 6.5 billion years old, yet has a higher percentage of

heavy elements than our sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Pavonis

I have documented all this, both in talk.origins and in
sci.bio.paleontology. Here is the data on the talk.origins post:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/Xub9hqEyM0A/l7gpBG1zCAAJ
Subject: Re: The evolution of the bacterial flagellum: For Peter
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2018 10:08:39 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <8174902f-492c-4d99...@googlegroups.com>

The only reply anyone has made to the above post was you,
digging yourself in deeper with a two-line reply:

[snip mindless bullshit]

Fixed it for you, Petey.

And here is the data for the s.b.p. post.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/sci.bio.paleontology/RNINuDOndSM/n9Iq_m2OBQAJ
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2018 15:15:24 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <9d03402c-db16-46c4...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Pterosaur dietary hypotheses

[...]

> > On Thursday, August 2, 2018 at 4:34:36 PM UTC-4, erik simpson wrote:

> >> Let the Ranting of the Cladophobe commence!
> >
> > There never was any ranting by me on the subject, and there never
> > will be.
>
> More lies coming out of the King of Liar's mouth.

This isn't talk.origins, Oxyaena. Casanova and jillery aren't
here to back you up on slanders like the above, nor is Martin
Harran here to commiserate with you. They did all that and more,
AFTER I posted the documentation you see above.

You've been spoiled rotten in talk.origins, and you don't seem
to realize that this is a totally different venue.

As the song in "Prince of Egypt" goes: "You're playing with the
big boys now."

========================== end of excerpts from

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/sci.bio.paleontology/nNhyCBvm_9k/qDXzclOtDQAJ
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2018 08:47:59 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <cf7d78bd-67df-4670...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Paraphyly vs. Monophyly

There's a lot more in that long post, but I don't think you
want to see any more of it, even though it mentions you and
jillery and your Number One Benefactee Martin Harran one more time.


Peter Nyikos

[Oxyaena]

On 8/14/2018 9:03 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> On Sunday, August 12, 2018 at 4:20:03 PM UTC-4, marcel....@gmail.com wrote:
>
> You disappeared for a while, Mr. Kincaid. I looked for you
> last week because I wanted to remind you of this post of mine,
> and also of a post in "The blessings of religion" where Martin
> Harran made a curt dismissal of you after you caught him saying
> something that was not as nasty as the following:
>
>> Fuck off and die, maggot.
>
> However, your statement was not directed at one person, but was about
> apologists for religion in general. Hence it is worth far
> more attention than your insulting one-liner. Here is the context:
>

You *do* realize that he doesn't want to deal with your inane bullshit,
but it's an excuse, however pathetic, to act in bad faith and smear your
fecal matter all over t.o. anyways from your POV so I shouldn't really
be surprised.

> __________________ excerpt, names added in brackets____________________
>
> [Mark Isaak:]
>>>> A problem with pastoral counseling is that the counselor's religious
>>>> community is likely to support his or her biases, and so you get things
>>>> like conversion therapy or wives counseled to submit to their
>>>> wife-beating husbands.
>
> [Martin Harran:]
>>> What a dreadful allegation to make about a group of people of whom you
>>> have no direct knowledge!
>
> [you, Marcel Kincaid:]
>> All of a sudden direct knowledge, rather than empirical inference, is required?
>>
>> Here's a funny thing: whenever I see arguments by apologists for religion, my opposition to it gets stronger. The more time in their life they have spent crafting their arguments so as to appear reasonable and rational so they can push back hard at non-believers in public forums, the less I think of them. And I know I'm not the only one.
>
> [Martin Harran:]
> Sounds like a fairly typical case of self-affirmation.
>
> _______________________ end of excerpt from
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/3rRJIe9FiX0/9jFpCjyrCgAJ
> Subject: Re: The blessings of religion
> Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2018 15:04:54 +0100
> Message-ID: <jbf3mdt7lndvg2ql3...@4ax.com>
>
>
>> I don't engage with people acting in bad faith.
>
> Then I suggest you not engage with the following:

Add yourself to the list, and then remove everyone except you and
Harran, since none of us act in bad faith, and have posted innumerable
on-topic posts, almost none of which you've replied to.


>
[snip libelous list]

>
> I've caught all of the above posting in bad faith dozens, and in all
> but perhaps two cases, hundreds of times.

Documentation please.

>
> There are a few others, but they haven't posted to this thread.
> But notice how the above named people (except Ron O, who only
> made a cameo appearance) have been dominating this thread [1].
> So it is worth noting that zencycle is NOT listed above, although
> he too has posted here. I have never caught him posting in bad
> faith either.

This is a mostly dead thread, but you have an obsession with fucking
dead corpses as a general rule in Usenet, so I shouldn't be surprised.

>
> [1] Except for minor tiffs between some of them, their main
> reason for this is to get revenge for the numerous times I
> have documented [2] their acting in bad faith, and since they
> cannot do it in good fa

Citation needed. Put up, or shut up.

>
> [2] Just let me know whether you want documentation on any of them.
> I don't post it very much in reply to them because they know it
> all too well, and are bent on revenge for my having posted it.

Another excuse. You *know* you have none, and since you are
categorically incapable of admitting to lying, you'll continue to insist
that you *do* have these mercurial documents.

>
> Now, as for you, you made several statements that I challenged
> below. You made no attempt to support them. I'm sure this
> will make you very popular with the people I've named. Note
> how Oxyaena has already praised you for having posted your
> completely unsupported insult.

I praised him for his wisdom in not wanting to deal with you. If only
you'd go to some other newsgroup and leave t.o. alone, but you *love*
trolling here, don't you?

>
> Had you supported it, you may not have gotten such a hearty reception.
> Just give the word, and I'll explain why I say this.

Go fuck yourself, Nyikos. Your explanations aren't worth shit.

>
> Peter "King of Deceit" Nyikos

[jillery]

On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:03:09 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

>On Sunday, August 12, 2018 at 4:20:03 PM UTC-4, marcel....@gmail.com wrote:

<snip spew>

>> I don't engage with people acting in bad faith.
>
>Then I suggest you not engage with the following:
>
>Casanova, Martin Harran, Mark Isaak (not to be confused with Andre Isaak,
> whom I've never caught acting in bad faith), jillery, Ron O, Oxyaena,
>and Erik Simpson.

IOW anybody who is unlucky enough to say anything which Nyikos the
peter imagines is a personal attack. Tu quoque back atcha, bozo.

[zencycle]

On Monday, August 6, 2018 at 1:20:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Sun, 5 Aug 2018 14:19:40 -0400, the following appeared in
> talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@is.a.god>:
>

> >True, but I haven't payed much attention to The Good DrDr, but what I
> >have read of his puke leaves me appalled at the fact that he's a genuine
> >doctor, as if someone wants this prick to be their physician, or at the
> >fact that he was awarded a doctorate in the first place, never mind two.
>
> I don't know where or how he got his doctorates, but I
> suspect neither was from a top-end university.
>

That question was answered here:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/60OjU4cm398/OmC4WkXXCAAJ

On Friday, August 10, 2018 at 8:25:03 AM UTC-4, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
> On Friday, August 10, 2018 at 5:20:03 AM UTC-7, zencycle wrote:
> >
> > doctor littlemans _real_ credentials:
> > https://memegenerator.net/instance/44766878/doctor-grover-i-got-my-medical-degree-from-the-cereal-box
>
> It was a Wheaties box.

[Bob Casanova]

On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:46:57 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net>:

>When the cat's away, the mice will play. None of the shenanigans
>of the people mentioned in the post below during my week+ of
>absences surprises me in the least.
>
>On Tuesday, August 7, 2018 at 12:35:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
>> On Sat, 04 Aug 2018 10:30:14 -0700, the following appeared
>> in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:
>
>
><huge snip of you spin-doctoring and nitpicking in your usual
>inconsequential manner to avoid confronting the dishonesty of Oxyaena.>

<huge snip of you spin-doctoring and nitpicking in your

usual inconsequential manner to avoid confronting your own
dishonesty.>

Fun, huh?

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2018 07:34:54 -0400, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by jillery <69jp...@gmail.com>:

>On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:03:09 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
><nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>>On Sunday, August 12, 2018 at 4:20:03 PM UTC-4, marcel....@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
><snip spew>
>
>
>>> I don't engage with people acting in bad faith.
>>
>>Then I suggest you not engage with the following:
>>
>>Casanova, Martin Harran, Mark Isaak (not to be confused with Andre Isaak,
>> whom I've never caught acting in bad faith), jillery, Ron O, Oxyaena,
>>and Erik Simpson.
>
>
>IOW anybody who is unlucky enough to say anything which Nyikos the
>peter imagines is a personal attack. Tu quoque back atcha, bozo.

But he's *not* paranoid. No, really, he's not <nudge, wink>.

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2018 05:33:25 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by zencycle
<funkma...@hotmail.com>:

Yeah, yeah, I saw that. But I was serious; have you seen any
evidence he actually has two doctorates, or what university
awarded them?

[Bill Rogers]

On Wednesday, August 15, 2018 at 1:35:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Aug 2018 05:33:25 -0700 (PDT), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by zencycle
> <funkma...@hotmail.com>:
>
> >On Monday, August 6, 2018 at 1:20:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> >> On Sun, 5 Aug 2018 14:19:40 -0400, the following appeared in
> >> talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena <oxy...@is.a.god>:
> >>
> >> >True, but I haven't payed much attention to The Good DrDr, but what I
> >> >have read of his puke leaves me appalled at the fact that he's a genuine
> >> >doctor, as if someone wants this prick to be their physician, or at the
> >> >fact that he was awarded a doctorate in the first place, never mind two.
> >>
> >> I don't know where or how he got his doctorates, but I
> >> suspect neither was from a top-end university.
> >>
> >
> >That question was answered here:
> >
> >https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/60OjU4cm398/OmC4WkXXCAAJ
> >
> >On Friday, August 10, 2018 at 8:25:03 AM UTC-4, Alan Kleinman MD PhD wrote:
> >> On Friday, August 10, 2018 at 5:20:03 AM UTC-7, zencycle wrote:
> >> >
> >> > doctor littlemans _real_ credentials:
> >> > https://memegenerator.net/instance/44766878/doctor-grover-i-got-my-medical-degree-from-the-cereal-box
> >>
> >> It was a Wheaties box.
>
> Yeah, yeah, I saw that. But I was serious; have you seen any
> evidence he actually has two doctorates, or what university
> awarded them?

Yes, he is licensed in California as an MD, with his MD from the American University of the Caribbean. I've sen the abstract of his PhD thesis, which I think he got in one of the University of California schools, UC Pasadena, I think, but I don't remember.

[Bob Casanova]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2018 10:53:02 -0700 (PDT), the following
appeared in talk.origins, posted by Bill Rogers
<broger...@gmail.com>:

OK; thanks. So one of the two actually *was* from a top-tier
school. Engineering of some variety, right?

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, August 15, 2018 at 7:35:03 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:03:09 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
> <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> >On Sunday, August 12, 2018 at 4:20:03 PM UTC-4, marcel....@gmail.com wrote:
>
>
> <snip spew>

What you actually snipped was something you really hate -- me being
invariably polite to newcomers, and giving people the benefit of
the doubt until they remove all doubt by repeated displays of
obvious dishonesty and/or hypocrisy and/or cowardice.

___________________ repost of what you hatefully call "spew" ______________

=================================== end of repost

Oxyaena hates this kind of courtesy even more. When she started
posting to talk.origins under another name that lives in infamy
here in talk.origins, she initiated the same kind of unsupported,
unprovoked attack you see up there against me. Then she decided
my courteous reply to her was "condescending" and went into all out,
relentless war against me, with one unsupported tirade after another,
while I kept scratching my head for something like a year about
what was eating her.

This behavior carried over into sci.bio.paleontology, where Harshman
sometimes made comments about T**********on being "off your meds".
This was before Oxyaena caught on to the fact that no one will bother
her if she only confines her insanity and slander to me, and leaves
everyone else alone or even shows them blatant favoritism.

>
> >> I don't engage with people acting in bad faith.
> >
> >Then I suggest you not engage with the following:
> >
> >Casanova, Martin Harran, Mark Isaak (not to be confused with Andre Isaak,
> > whom I've never caught acting in bad faith), jillery, Ron O, Oxyaena,
> >and Erik Simpson.
>
>
> IOW anybody who is unlucky enough to say any

...thousands of lines, spread out over hundreds of posts
(maybe dozens in the case of Martin Harran, but I expect those to burgeon)
flaunting their dishonesty, hypocrisy AND cowardice.

And NONE of the now-27 list of people who you admitted were mostly
"tough but fair" has even posted ONE line that is unequivocally
any of these.

> which Nyikos the
> peter imagines is a personal attack.

Do you imagine "Fuck off and die" is NOT a personal attack? Yet
I give people like Mr. Kincaid plenty of opportunity to change
their minds about me. For instance:

Dr. Hurd came at me with dozens of insults in several posts, but
my patience and courtesy paid off. Once both Glenn and I did on-topic
replies to the same post of his, showing how wrong he was about
several things, he evidently realized he had bitten
off more than he could chew, and disappeared from talk.origins
altogether.

He was better man than any of the people on the above
list, including yourself. He was very abusive before he woke
up to the realities of talk.origins, but at least
he never was as juvenile about it as you are here:

> Tu quoque back atcha, bozo.
>
> --
> I disapprove of what you say,

Of course you do. That's why you made such a huge deletion, because
you disapprove of things I say that make hash of the virtual reality
that Casanova, Oxyaena, and yourself keep building around me.


Peter Nyikos

[jillery]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2018 16:03:36 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos

<nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:

>On Wednesday, August 15, 2018 at 7:35:03 AM UTC-4, jillery wrote:
>> On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:03:09 -0700 (PDT), Peter Nyikos
>> <nyi...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>
>> >On Sunday, August 12, 2018 at 4:20:03 PM UTC-4, marcel....@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>
>> <snip spew>
>
>What you actually snipped was something you really hate -- me being
>invariably polite to newcomers, and giving people the benefit of
>the doubt until they remove all doubt by repeated displays of
>obvious dishonesty and/or hypocrisy and/or cowardice.
>
>___________________ repost of what you hatefully call "spew" ______________
>You disappeared for a while, Mr. Kincaid. I looked for you
>last week because I wanted to remind you of this post of mine,
>and also of a post in "The blessings of religion" where Martin
>Harran made a curt dismissal of you after you caught him saying
>something that was not as nasty as the following:
>
>> Fuck off and die, maggot.
>
>However, your statement was not directed at one person, but was about
>apologists for religion in general. Hence it is worth far
>more attention than your insulting one-liner. Here is the context:
>
>__________________ excerpt, names added in brackets____________________

NOTA have anything to do with the thread or with anything anybody said
in it. IOW your copy/paste above is just another ejaculation of your
repetitive irrelevant spew from your puckered sphincter. Not sure how
you *still* don't understand this.

You must enjoy proving me right, you do it so often.

<snip remaining spew>

--

[Oxyaena]

On 8/20/2018 7:03 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:

As the infinitely wise Marcel Kinkaid once said:

"Fuck off and die, maggot. I don't deal with people (meaning you) who
act in bad faith."

How does calling me mentally ill behind my back *not* count as an
insult, *Mr.* Nyikos?



--
"Right action is always better than right knowledge, but in order to do
what is right, we must *know* what is right." - Charlemagne

[Peter Nyikos]

On Wednesday, August 15, 2018 at 1:30:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:46:57 -0700 (PDT), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
>
> >When the cat's away, the mice will play. None of the shenanigans
> >of the people mentioned in the post below during my week+ of
> >absences surprises me in the least.
> >
> >On Tuesday, August 7, 2018 at 12:35:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> >> On Sat, 04 Aug 2018 10:30:14 -0700, the following appeared
> >> in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:
> >
> >
> ><huge snip of you spin-doctoring and nitpicking in your usual
> >inconsequential manner to avoid confronting the dishonesty of Oxyaena.>
>
> <huge snip of you spin-doctoring and nitpicking in your
> usual inconsequential manner to avoid confronting your own
> dishonesty.>
>
> Fun, huh?

It must indeed be fun for you to pretend that truth is falsehood,
and falsehood truth.

Specifically, you are pretending that the following statement
by Oxyaena was true:

In short, another demonstration of your
dishonesty, blatant distorting of the facts, and outright slander.
I could sue you for libel, Peter, but unlike you I`m a decent person so
I won't.

And you are pretending that the following statement, the
sole basis for Oxyaena's accusation, is false:

you *also* showed your ignorance about when life
could reasonably be expected to arise and evolve in our universe.

And you are pretending that the following display of ignorance,
to which I was referring, was actually the truth:

Considering that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old, and the
universe only settled down enough for life to develop some 4.5 Ga, ala
when our Solar System formed, this makes sense.

And you are pretending that the following statement was so completely
false that it did nothing to exonerate me from the accusation
of slander, etc. by Oxyaena:

the planetary system within 100 light years of us
that SETI considered the best target for a long time
is Delta Pavonis, a G star like our sun. It is estimated to be
over 6.5 billion years old, yet has a higher percentage of
heavy elements than our sun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Pavonis

In short, it must be great fun for you to act as though 4.5 billion years
is a longer stretch of time than 6.5 billion years. Is this your way
of getting back at your fifth (or whichever) grade teacher who made
you suffer through tests on decimals?


NOTE TO READERS: all of the above follows logically from the
documentation in the post to which Bob is replying here;
more to the point, in the post I linked there, the one
where the exchange first took place:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/talk.origins/Xub9hqEyM0A/l7gpBG1zCAAJ
Subject: Re: The evolution of the bacterial flagellum: For Peter
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2018 10:08:39 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <8174902f-492c-4d99...@googlegroups.com>

Back to you, Bob:

What lesson should I take away from all this? that you think talk.origins
is all a role-playing game like "Dungeons and Dragons" and that
anyone who takes anything said here seriously has missed the boat?


Peter Nyikos

[Oxyaena]

On 8/24/2018 3:39 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
[snip libel]

Could you at least once *not* libel me? I've told you this dozens of
times, just because planets were capable of forming 6 Ga doesn't mean
life was, and even if it was you ignore the fact that sapient life on
Earth has only been around for a small sliver of Earth's history, with
most of that history being dominated by microbes. The timespan between
six billion years and the time when Earth formed is too small for
multicellular life to have evolved, which took almost three billion
years here on Earth alone, and unless alien lifeforms have some sort of
super=evolution there's no way multicellular life evolved quite that
rapidly, in "merely" 2 billion years.

[Bob Casanova]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2018 12:39:22 -0700 (PDT), the following

appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
<nyi...@bellsouth.net>:

>On Wednesday, August 15, 2018 at 1:30:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
>> On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 18:46:57 -0700 (PDT), the following
>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by Peter Nyikos
>> <nyi...@bellsouth.net>:
>>
>> >When the cat's away, the mice will play. None of the shenanigans
>> >of the people mentioned in the post below during my week+ of
>> >absences surprises me in the least.
>> >
>> >On Tuesday, August 7, 2018 at 12:35:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
>> >> On Sat, 04 Aug 2018 10:30:14 -0700, the following appeared
>> >> in talk.origins, posted by Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off>:
>> >
>> >
>> ><huge snip of you spin-doctoring and nitpicking in your usual
>> >inconsequential manner to avoid confronting the dishonesty of Oxyaena.>
>>
>> <huge snip of you spin-doctoring and nitpicking in your
>> usual inconsequential manner to avoid confronting your own
>> dishonesty.>
>>
>> Fun, huh?

<huge snip of you spin-doctoring and nitpicking in your
usual inconsequential manner to avoid confronting your own
dishonesty.>

Still fun?

[Bob Casanova]

On Sat, 25 Aug 2018 04:11:19 -0400, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena
<oxy...@invalid.invalid>:

>On 8/24/2018 3:39 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>[snip libel]
>
>Could you at least once *not* libel me?

That would almost certainly be a "no".

> I've told you this dozens of
>times, just because planets were capable of forming 6 Ga doesn't mean
>life was, and even if it was you ignore the fact that sapient life on
>Earth has only been around for a small sliver of Earth's history, with
>most of that history being dominated by microbes. The timespan between
>six billion years and the time when Earth formed is too small for
>multicellular life to have evolved, which took almost three billion
>years here on Earth alone, and unless alien lifeforms have some sort of
>super=evolution there's no way multicellular life evolved quite that
>rapidly, in "merely" 2 billion years.

[jillery]

On Sat, 25 Aug 2018 04:11:19 -0400, Oxyaena <oxy...@invalid.invalid>
wrote:

>On 8/24/2018 3:39 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
>[snip libel]
>
>Could you at least once *not* libel me?

Nyikos the peter already admitted he intentionally includes such spew
just to obscure any relevant points he might accidentally make, so
don't hold your breath.

> I've told you this dozens of
>times, just because planets were capable of forming 6 Ga doesn't mean
>life was, and even if it was you ignore the fact that sapient life on
>Earth has only been around for a small sliver of Earth's history, with
>most of that history being dominated by microbes. The timespan between
>six billion years and the time when Earth formed is too small for
>multicellular life to have evolved, which took almost three billion
>years here on Earth alone, and unless alien lifeforms have some sort of
>super=evolution there's no way multicellular life evolved quite that
>rapidly, in "merely" 2 billion years.

I used to argue similarly as you do above. I made several posts which
help explain why I no longer do. I posted links to several articles
which note the recent discovery of stars and galaxies of stars which
formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and of a
galaxy which is known to have an abundance of oxygen, an element not
formed by the Big Bang, and that early galaxies and star clusters have
an abundance of blue super-giant stars, which explode in just a few
millions of years and form an abundance of neutron stars, which merge
and synthesize heavy elements into even heavier ones, and that our own
Milky Way galaxy is also almost as old as the universe.

All this is evidence for a plausible hypothesis that rocky Earthlike
planets, with a periodic-table-complement of elements, were orbiting
in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars in this galaxy not just a
mere 6 billion years after the Big Bang, but much sooner, perhaps just
3 or 4 billion years after the Big Bang. To borrow a phrase from a
once-famous senator, "a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon
you're talking about real time".

One really can't make many good conclusions about the natural history
of exoplanets based on the natural history of Earth; it is but a
sample of one. That life formed on Earth almost immediately after it
could, I agree suggests it's likely single-celled life happens where
ever and whenever it can. But that it took about 3 billion years for
life on Earth to evolve multicellularity, and then about another
billion years to evolve toolmaking intelligence, that only means these
features *can* evolve in that time. It does not mean the can't evolve
sooner, or later, or even that they must evolve at all. And of
course, how long it takes a tookmaking intelligence to evolve a
star-traveling culture is pure conjecture.

The point being is it's almost certain Earth was not the first place
life formed in the Milky Way. But take heart, there are lots of good
reasons for criticizing DP, that's just not one of them.

[Oxyaena]

Of course, the budget for DP would be astronomical, not to mention the
distances involved, what does Petey have in mind if and when the
capsules containing the seeds for life *don't* reach their target? What
kind of technology would be needed to do so? If DP is a viable
hypothesis, where's the evidence? Why haven't we seen any remnants of
ancient alien starships?

[Peter Nyikos]

On Saturday, August 25, 2018 at 2:25:03 PM UTC-4, Bob Casanova wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Aug 2018 04:11:19 -0400, the following appeared
> in talk.origins, posted by Oxyaena
> <oxy...@invalid.invalid>:
>
> >On 8/24/2018 3:39 PM, Peter Nyikos wrote:
> >[snip libel]
> >
> >Could you at least once *not* libel me?
>
> That would almost certainly be a "no".

In a post to which you haven't replied, I acknowledged how
you find great fun in pretending that truth is falsehood,
and falsehood truth.

The unvarnished truth is no fun for you: I have never libeled
anyone on the internet, especially not Oxyaena.

Oxyaena had written:

> > I've told you this dozens of
> >times,

Less than half a dozen times, but who's counting? Oxyaena has,
if anything even more fun pretending truth is falsehood, and falsehood
is truth, than you do.

The rest of what Oxyaena wrote is very amateurish as far as stellar
and planetary evolution goes. More importantly, it is too illogical
to support her falsehood that I had slandered and libeled her,
and so it is of no interest to you. Small wonder you didn't comment on it.

But I will eventually [1] comment on it, in direct reply to Oxyaena,
just in case anyone reading it is so devoid of reasoning ability as
not to see why the preceding paragraph is true.

<snip rest of what Oxyaena wrote>

[1] Like I've told you in an earlier post along this thread:
I do not reply to people on THEIR timetables. And as I've told
several people more than once: The mills of justice grind slowly [2],
but they grind exceeding fine.

[2] This is an adaptation of a famous saying, and does have rare
exceptions. There *are* circumstances where justice does need to be swiftly
administered. This is not one of those circumstances.


Peter Nyikos