1. Russell T Davies: Return of the (tea) Time Lord

Comment #155899 by Horwood Beer-Master on April 6, 2008 at 9:10 am

My take on this news can be found here,
http://richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=795901#p795901

Sorry for being a bit sceptical (although I suppose this is the right place for it!)

2. A new website addition: Debate Points

Comment #81289 by Horwood Beer-Master on October 24, 2007 at 2:39 pm

The question (in one form or other) of the lack of transitional forms keeps coming up from time to time in discussions of evolution, I can think of no better response to this than the following extract from 'Climbing Mount Improbable' which I've used before in this thread,
http://www.richarddawkins.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=13077

"There is a supremely banal reason why transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level. I can explain it best with an analogy. Children turn gradually and continuously into adults but, for legal purposes, the age of majority is taken to be a particular birthday, often the eighteenth. It would therefore be possible to say, 'there are 55 million people in Britain but not one of them is intermediate between non-voter and voter.' Just as, for legal purposes, a juvenile changes into a voter as midnight strikes on the eighteenth birthday, so zoologists always insist on classifying a specimen as in one species or another. If a specimen is intermediate in actual form (as many are) zoologists' legalistic conventions still force them to jump one way or the other when naming it. Therefore the creationists' claim that there are no intermediates has to be true by definition at the species level, but it has no implications about the real world - only implications about zoologists' naming conventions."

3. Is Prince Philip an island god?

Comment #49234 by Horwood Beer-Master on June 11, 2007 at 5:16 am

A new religion stating because a tribe thinks someone vaguely fits the profile of a prophecy from their existing religion, even though they know practically no real details of his life? who'd have thought THAT could happen?

4. The Cyclic Universe: A Talk With Neil Turok

Comment #42262 by Horwood Beer-Master on May 18, 2007 at 2:11 am

"but perhaps it was due to Fred Hoyle — the main proponent of the rival steady-state theory — who seems to have successfully ridiculed the Big Bang theory by saying it did not make sense because it implied a beginning of time and that sounded nonsensical"

Fred Hoyle again! Couldn't the guy ever keep his big mouth shut, he clearly misunderstood his own field almost as much as he did Biology.