At least he threw in a really fucked-up analogy, so the old Pat is still in there somewhere.

I think the old coot is just trying to cover his ass for when he finally buys the farm, goes up to Heaven & St. Peter stops him at the gate. "Did you REALLY tell people the earth was only 6,000 years old, and that dinosaurs were just some trick being played by Lucifer to fool the unfaithful? Man, that was completely fucking STUPID of you! We're going to have to seriously review your case, so please take a seat over there in the Purgatory section and we'll get back to you. There's some vending machines in the hallway and the restrooms are just down from there if you need them."

If this keeps up, pretty soon ol' Pat is gonna go get himself gay-married.

@3 He has already said that he is not that horrified by the devil weed.

The bizarre thing is that most of the genetic mutations in the human genome are actually within the time span of the whole creationists "time on earth".

Why?

Because there weren't a lot of people before then.

Not because they didn't exist, or that they rode dinosaurs.

He actually knows what radiocarbon dating does? I bet he's got a lot of yokels scratching their heads. Next he'll be saying DNA exists and we're definitely from the ape family tree. Naw.

If that woman's "biggest fear" is that her family members won't go to heaven because they wonder why the Bible doesn't talk about dinosaurs... well then fuck. Must be nice to have so few actual problems. Lucky her.

@7 actually, there used to be a chapter written in Aramaic by dinosaurs, but the Church suppressed it.

The end of one time is the beginning of another.

@5: "most of the genetic mutations in the human genome are actually within the time span of the whole creationists[sic] 'time on earth'."
So...the majority of polymorphisms in the human genome today arose during the last 6 to 10 thousand years? Please, shut your ignorant pie hole.

@10 yes. Learn science, doofus.

(source: Science) (it's online, do your own fracking work before you open your ignorant pie hole, it's also not surprising)

@11 No really, shut it. You have no idea what you're saying here.

Here in TN, they have taken steps though new legislation to allow creationism back into the classroom. This law turns the clock back nearly 100 years here in the seemingly unprogressive South and is simply embarrassing. There is no argument against the Theory of Evolution other than that of religious doctrine. The Monkey Law only opens the door for fanatic Christianity to creep its way back into our classrooms. You can see my visual response as a Tennessean to this absurd law on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2012/… with some evolutionary art and a little bit of simple logic.

Sigh.

@12 check UW Medicine News 2 days ago. Like I said, keep up.

@14 instead of being a self-righteous fuckhole, why not LINK THEM TO SOMETHING? You know, educate instead of whining WHY AREN'T YOU EDUCATED?

WiS, I suspect either you or the authors of said article are misinterpreting, or mis-explaining, the data. It stands to reason that there'd be a lot of recent garbage in the genome, as that stuff hasn't had a chance to die out yet. Also in the genome, however, is every bit of DNA that's given us the advantage to be here, some of that goes back before the eukaryotes, the rest distributed through the ages. Of course, back in any time frame, most of the variations were only thousands of years old, too. In fact, at any point in time, there's going to be lots of random crap that hasn't proven its worth one way or the other. That's the raw material for evolution.

So, it all comes down to how you count variation, and the value thereof. Haven't read it yet, but the title of Nate Silver's new book seems applicable to this field, too, "The Signal And The Noise." In our case, the signal is all the variations that added up to an evolutionary advantage, and the noise is the recent stuff where the verdict is still out.

Will in Seattle, there are polymorphisms we share with chimpanzees. Therefore, those mutations most likely occurred before the human-chimp divergence 5 million years ago or so.
Don't try to explain science to others, please. You're somewhere between gawdawful and terribad at it.

Read what I said, not what you think I said.

It's not my problem that you don't keep up with the news.