pangloss

I see you have engaged the unholy egomaniac on ISCID.

You may want to review this thread, if you have not already done so:

http://www.evcforum.net/ubb/Forum16/HTML/000014.html

RBH

I loved this exchange:

RBH

I have just slogged through that whole damned thread. And I have a bit of advice for Alix:

STOP NOW! DON'T STEP IN THE QUICKSAND!

[/END frantic holler mode]

RBH

Quetzal

Alix,

Don't pay any attention to those men behind the curtain. Go for it. While you're at it, see if you can get him to explain in detail the creaton particle/wave (or maybe it was waves of creaton particles) that interact with the earth's morphogenetic fields on a periodicity of 26 million years that explain all mass extinctions and speciation events. I never could pin him down on that one.

Also, ask him about Wollemia nobilis and the evidence for his multipurpose genome. Try and find out whether he ever received his reply from Rod Peakall on it.

Finally, see if you can find out if he still thinks horseshoe crabs and coelocanths are evidence for the MPG.

Morpho - who "debated" Borger for 8 months without getting a single straight answer...

Alix Nenuphar

Gentlemen (I'm assuming you are all gentlemen - the only one I can speak to for certain is RBH.)

Thank you for your concern and your input. I have some followup questions (by the way, Pim appears to have prior experience with Mr. (Dr.?) Borger):

1) Does he really have any degrees?

2) What, exactly is he talking about? From what little I have gleaned, he is basically stating that phylogenic trees are an artifact of constrained mutation sites - which appears to be nonsense.

3) I note a sudden change in sentence structure, grammar, and spelling between his earlier posts and his later ones. Does this have any significance that you are aware of?

Again, thank you. II is certainly the friendliest internet board I have visited (one of my grad students is currently hanging out on Cafe.PlanetWisdom and has said that the fundamentalist Christians there are almost uniformly uncivil).


Edited to add: "Hanging out" is the right term, yes?

theyeti

I think Borger has an MD. As for what he's talking about, I don't know. I don't know what mturner's talking about either, despite having seen him here and at ARN since I first posted on the net. It seems that people like this just have a viceral hatred of evolutionary theory and want to tip the apple cart.

That ISCID thread is worth reading just for the sake of Rex Kerr's posts though. Using some proteins that Borger said were problematic for evolution, Rex actually went and did his own phylogenetic analysis, found one (count 'em) abberant data point, and guessed that this was most likely an error in data collection. He checked on it and found that GenBank had it mislabled! Apparently evolutionary theory is in serious trouble, but somehow it was used to accurately predict that a data point was faulty.

theyeti

RBH

Alix askedYup. You're doing just fine, even with colloquiallisms. Now if we can teach you to chew snoose and spit outta the corner of yer mouth, you'll be a real redneck!

RBH

P.S. And anyone out there who knows what "snoose" is is either from Minnesota or is too old to be hanging around Web boards!

P.P.S. Waitaminnit! I know what "snoose" is. What am I doin here?

P.P.P.S. Oh. 'sok. I once lived in Minnesota. (Whew!)

Alix Nenuphar

Gentlemen really chew snoose? What is snoose? Do I really want to know?

Does Mturner post on the internet infidels boards? Does he have the same name?

Nic Tamzek

Here's that Rex Kerr post series. It's quite a clinic (to which the the IDists are subjected) over there at ISCID sometimes.

http://www.iscid.org/ubb/ultimatebb....6;t=000345;p=4

What I think that many anti-common descenters just don't realize are the mathematics involved in getting highly congruent trees. *Even* if you have hotspots and mutational biases and homoplasy up the wazoo, you'll still get decent congruence of trees unless sequence similarity has decayed down near random similarity.

Theobald's common descent FAQ made me realize this but I have yet to successfully impress it upon a antievo.

RBH

Alix asked"Gentlemen" don't. Snoose goes with huntin' and fishin' and playin' poker in the cabin after trampin' around the woods all day. I think it's extinct now, unless there's a Norwegian bachelor farmer still hiding out somewhere in the woods.

RBH