Like take your medication?

I wouldn't claim this is the stupidest thing the Fergturd has ever broadcast, there is just too much ignorance to wade through, but this one did stick out just a bit:

"Rather, let the rationalist scientist explain how come we have never seen a monkey become a human being."

If any of you boys and girls out there want to know what skipping an education can do to your brain, just let that set in, and then get that backpack on and get to class. Don't walk, RUN!

Oh for fuck's sake, here's a particularly odious piece of duplicitous tard ...

Rather, let the rationalist scientist explain how come we have never seen a monkey become a human being

Look, Ferguson, if you can't be bothered learning what scientists actually postulate, instead of peddling your own retarded and mendacious misrepresentations thereof, you are unfit to engage in adult discourse. Though you've already established this on a grand scale with your stream-of-consciousness drivel, which long since entered the category of "prime example of how not to user your neurons".

What scientists actually postulate, on the basis of a supertanker load of evidence, is that humans and the other great apes share a common ancestor, the original population of which expanded its range, and diversified differentially across that range. As that diversification proceeded, the process known as "assortative mating" took hold at an ever increasing rate, whereby members of one diversifying subset of the population preferred to mate with other members of the same subset, instead of mating with members of other subsets. As a corollary of this process, gene flow between the diversifying subsets slowed to a halt, and those diversifying populations started acquiring different sets of new differentiating features. This process has been documented happening in laboratory experiments with the appropriate model organisms.

Eventually, that diversification reached the point where the subsets of our ancestors ceased to be interfertile with each other. Those subset populations became new species as a result of that diversification. Because, wait for it, that is how a species is defined in biology - namely, a population of individuals who are interfertile with each other, but NOT with individuals of other populations. Once again, this acquisition of interfertility failure between diversifying populations has been demonstrated in laboratory experiments, including several conducted by Theodosius Dobzhansky as far back as 1971.

Indeed, as I keep reminding those who failed to pay attention in class, evolution is a population phenomenon. The fatuous creationist caricature of one organism "turning into" another organism is precisely that - a caricature, and a retarded one at that. The species is the population that you are a reproducing member of.

Now, for those who paid attention in class, I'm aware, given my background which involved some taxonomic fun and games, the manner in which taxonomy has obscured this essential fact prior to the advent of the Modern Synthesis. Taxonomists use type specimens as the basis for defining a species, a practice that developed in the days before modern biology had been launched, and pioneer biologists were seeking to understand the contents of the biosphere. In order to do this, they had to find some method of differentiating between living organisms, a method that was reliable, because in order to be able to discuss the biosphere in a substantive manner, they needed to be able to attach names to different living organisms. Linnaeus, of course, launched this enterprise, and used comparative anatomy as the basis upon which to differentiate living organisms. Furthermore, when developing his system of taxonomic classification, he accepted as fact that organisms sharing large collections of detailed anatomical features, were in a sense related to each other. The more features shared by two different organisms, the more closely related they were. And, as modern biology moved on to genetic analysis, this relationship has been backed up by the molecular data.

Linnaeus instituted the practice of using those anatomical analyses as the basis for naming organisms, with scientific names intended to be descriptive in this manner. Though that intent has, for practical reasons, had to be modified, simply because even the rich vocabularies of Latin and Classical Greek, the languages chosen by Linnaeus as the basis for his taxonomic sytem, are rapidly exhausted when dealing with enormous species assemblages, such as teh insects (there are 1.2 million species of insect known to science, and that number is increasing daily).

But, in the days before modern biology, pioneers such as Linnaeus and his contemporaries had to start somewhere, and the choice made was to select representative individuals of a species to become type specimens, detailed anatomical analysis of which would form the basis for the description of the species in question. The trouble with this approach, of course, which was only learned later, is that a species is a dynamic entity, while the type specimens are, by definition, static. Which has led modern biologists to recognise that those type specimens will, over time, become representative not of the species as it is in the present, but as it was in the past. Furthermore, the process I described above, of population divergence, assortative mating and eventual interfertility failure, leading to the emergence of new species, will necessitate a revision of the manner in which the entire taxonomic enterprise is conducted, so that in future, series of type specimens gathered over time will need to be collected, so that the developmental trajectory of a species can be tracked, complete, of course, with a suitable genetic audit trail.

Those static type specimens led in some quarters, to several mistaken views about species circulating in the past, one of the most pernicious being that a species designation is somehow handed down from on high as a sort of decree, and fixed forever. Modern biologists - at least, the competent ones - simply don't entertain this mistaken view, and have been led away therefrom by the laboratory experiments on speciation I've mentioned briefly above. Furthermore, modern biologists recognise that a species designation is decided not by "decree", but by what the observational data from comparative anatomy tells us, a point that Linnaeus himself would have reminded us of. Augmented, of course, in the modern era, by DNA data, which has led to an expanded understanding of the biological species concept, and led to some interesting taxonomic revisions taking place, once the import of that DNA data was properly recognised.

Now of course, processing all of this data properly takes a lot of diligent effort on the part of a large number of properly trained scientists, who, along the way, as new generations of scientists appeared with new data to analyse, learned that some of our old concepts needed to be revised, because the data before them told them that this was necessary. Indeed, that is precisely why the scientific enterprise has been so successful - because its practitioners has modified their ideas when observational data told them that this was required. Which they have done in an entirely proper manner. As opposed, of course, to the mythological practice of pretending that unsupported assertions dictate how reality behaves for all time, regardless of how much observational data tells those mythological assertions to fuck off and die.

But one of the BIG problems diligent science educators in particular face, with respect to the propagation of proper, rigorous biological ideas among students, apart from the well-documented mendacious attempts at subversion by pedlars of creationist masturbation fantasies, is the view, entrenched by mythological adherence, of species as static entities, and the continuation of the past mistaken view of taxonomy as prescriptive rather than descriptive, a malaise that pollutes the supernaturalist ersatz for thought in a venomously pervasive manner. Supernaturalism is a prescriptive enterprise practically by definition, and its adherents have a habit of mistakenly regarding science as also being a prescriptive enterprise, when it isn't. Indeed, the idea of basing one's though on data instead of decrees from on high, is manifestly alien to many supernaturalists, and the malign effects of this failure of elementary understanding on their part, is merely another reason to regard supernaturalism as a pernicious influence corrupting and perverting the progress of human thought. Indeed, we're seeing more data points added to the relevant observational database in this regard right here in this thread.

In the meantime, I note the irony of supernaturalists trying to discredit evolution, a process that at bottom, is grounded in inheritance from ancestors, whilst adhering to mythologies within which inheritance was a concept of central importance. Indeed, to those of us who paid attention in class, evolutionary theory is, at bottom, the extension of genealogy to the entire biosphere, and the unification thereof via this. It doesn't require a special brand of magical thinking, it simply requires one to accept that [1] organisms inherit their features from their ancestors, and [2] some organisms acquire new features via appropriate, well-documented processes and pass them on. A reasonably astute primary school child can understand this.

Indeed, at this point, it is apposite to note the value of conceptual rigour, application of which has led to the development of modern scientific understanding. Without it, we would still be enduring the circumstances of our prehistoric ancestors. Unfortunately, supernaturalism continues to hijack minds and substitute fabrication for rigour, in a manner that is toxic to observe, a particularly noxious instance being provided right here in this thread. Quite simply, without conceptual rigour, your ideas are going nowhere, and you don't need to be a world class mathematician to realise this.