tgamble

Once upon a time, a battleship was docked at a port. Nearby, right at the foot of the pier, was a fork. Both were gleaming in the sunlight on one fine day.

"My, how alike we are," said the battleship to the fork. "We reflect the sun in very much the same way."

"Hmm," mused the fork, "that's true. Yet we have hardly anything else in common. You are an awesome military machine, and I am a humble little eating utensil."

"We mustn't look at outward differences," protested the battleship.

"Just because we have different functions, it should not obscure our amazing similarities, nor our common evolutionary descent from some metallic ancestor."

"How so?" asked the fork.

"Well, let me explain," said the battleship. "We are both made of metal, so we both conduct electricity very well. Our densities must be very much alike. Our melting points are probably quite close.

"I can think of so many other similarities," continued the battleship, "that I am almost tempted to consider myself as little more than a large ocean-going fork! Why, I'll bet our respective modulus of elasticity is very much the same. There is no doubt that we are both malleable. We are corroded by salt solutions over long periods of time. We both heat up and cool down very rapidly. We both carry sound waves within ourselves at very much the same velocity. Even all of the atoms within us participate in the same type of metallic bonding.

"The list is endless," the battleship concluded, quite pleased with how his argument had turned out. "No rational person can doubt that we had a common evolutionary ancestor at some time in the past."

The fork, somewhat embarrassed, replied, "I'm sorry, but I think your good sense has taken flight. Don't you realize that, although we are made of the same material, we are substantially entirely different? I am not a primitive form of battleship, nor are you an advanced kind of fork. The engineers who made us used the same material for entirely different purposes. Try fighting a naval war with a fork, or feeding yourself with a battleship."

In this fable, the fork represents the chimp and the battleship represents the human. Evolutionists commonly cite the extremely close biochemical similarities (as well as similarities between sequences of DNA) of chimps and humans to further the notion that humans are little more than evolved chimps. (See, for instance, UCLA biologist Jared Diamond's book The Third Chimpanzee, which argue--as the book's title claim--that humans are simply another kind of chimpanzee.) Yet the similarities between humans and chimps are at least as inconsequential as those involving the metallic properties of battleships and forks.

Clearly, similarities between the "building material" count for very little when we consider the extreme differences in capabilities of humans and chimps, just as the many close similarities in metallic properties between forks and battleships mean almost nothing when compared with their respective capabilities.

<a href="http://www.rae.org/shipfork.html" target="_blank">http://www.rae.org/shipfork.html</a>

<img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" /> <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

Ragnarok

This makes sense only because a fork and a battleship really are quite different in function and layout. But what if you found the battleship to have five compartments like the fork has five tines and other similarities that didn't make much sense from a "top down design" point of view? Um, kinda like all mammals have the same basic body plan, whether they are whales or bats? And if forks and battleships had some kind of "DNA" and you tested them and they came out about 99% the same??? Then would this idea make sense.

But tgamble, I've read some of your other posts. And I think you're just an atheist doing a bit of educational trolling...

tgamble

I agree.

Why would you think that? Those bang the head against the wall gifs should indicate that I reject such a silly argument.

I don't think it would counts as trolling. I'm not pretending to agree with it!

Automaton

What a horribly lame straw-man. Perhaps it is too hard for creationists to actually argue any more, considering how poor their arguments actually are, so they have to tell their flock little fairy tales to convince them that evolution is The Big Lie.

Ragnarok

Or it could mean that you're agreeing with the last paragraph and trying to show how stupid evilotionists are. Forgive me. I've seen a few of your previous posts but I'm new here so I don't yet quite know who's for real and who's not. And we have people like CurtX and MoG aboard and you can't trust the sincerity of any position they take.

lpetrich

Actually, we and the chimpanzees have MUCH greater similarity than forks and battleships; a more reasonable analogy would be as follows:

Consider a simple design for a gunboat. It has some food and fuel and ammo capacity, so it does not have to be resupplied that often. But it does not have enough to make it capable of long sea voyages and adventures, meaning that it is only useful for defending the homeland.

Now consider a slight modification. The gunboat has increased storage capacity, meaning that it can last longer without needing to be resupplied. This change makes possible going on military adventures at distant shores.

So a simple change in design can make possible a great change in its owner's foreign policy.

And many human-chimpanzee differences have that same quality.

Kevin Dorner

The biggest reason that these analogies (forks and battleships, 747's in junkyards, mousetraps) are completely worthless:

Forks, battleships, 747's and mousetraps are not born of anything, nor do they procreate themselves, for the simple reason that they aren't alive. Bloody obvious I know, but still bears repeating.

Valentine Pontifex

More trite from Jan Peczkis.

It is not that much different than Gish's old nonsense of having a similiar water content to a watermelon or a clould.

The point the evolutionists make has been completely missed. (Well knowing Peczkis, I would not rule out intentionally missed/ignored.) The point has never been that humans and other animals merely share the same building materals but rather that we share the the vast majority of the building instructions. This is, of course, something that forks and battleships do not share. And even the mere similiarities of body plans is not point. But rather a very specific patern of sharing: forming a unique hierarchal pattern. Then there are things like plaigerized errors, etc, etc, etc.

scombrid

They are wrong in their cloud/watermellon example you know. Everybody knows that clouds and jellyfish are more closely related than clouds and watermellons. Here's another for them:

The graphite said to the pile of sugar....


&lt;Reid now writes: "Structural similarity, be it biochemical or mechanical, is not the same as similarity of material composition. Stop misrepresenting evolutionary theory." on a 4X4 timber and leaves to go fundie hunting&gt;

lpetrich

And I think that my alternative analogy can be summarized as short-range vs. long-range gunboats that have a very similar overall design.