Bullshit, redux

I liked a basic idea in this post - that a single resource could cut through a lot of logical and factual confusion and emotional misdirection. In it I pointed out that the heavy lifting had already been done about Urban Legends, especially those promoted by "please read an forward" emails.

One can simply look it up, and be easily convinced that the threat, crisis, sob story or medical advice is pure bullshit, passed on by well-meaning people in an incurious or gullible moment.

So here is another resource, in the area of creationism versus science: the Index to Creationist Claims at TalkOrigins.com.

The difference is that it can often take paragraphs to shoot down one short false sentence. Unlike Snopes, the Talk Origins site is more complex and detailed - like science, even. Unlike the assertion "Suzy Creamcheese was kidnapped in Poughkipsee" it takes more prose and citations to debunk "if humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

The former is rather easily refuted. The latter is so wrong, it's not even wrong. That takes more e'splaining, Lucy.

In another way, the two resources are similar. Chain-mail legends continue to propogate - the "closest approach .. huge planet Mars .. bigger than the moon " email crops up again and again. Including a time when Mars was, in fact, on the other side of the sun, and thus not visually huge, but invisible.

Similarly creationists repeat their claims as if they had never been debunked. This would be ordinarily called lying. But protected by the sacred mantle of religion, they carry on.

So here's your go-to source regarding claims like that there are no transitional fossils.