Idiots of the Week: Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort

For their pathetic performance in the recent televised debate on god and evolution, and for their ridiculous short film The Evolution Zone, for making arguments that should embarrass the average 6th grader, for either lying or being too lazy to actually study the targets of their ignorant criticisms, and yes, for that stupid smarmy smirk I've hated for 20 years, I hereby award the Idiot of the Week award to Kirk Cameron and Ray comfort.

Follow the links for ignorance on parade that has to be seen to be believed. Need more? Check out the famous banana video, where Ray, I kid you not, claims the domesticated banana is proof of God's handiwork, and "The Atheists Nightmare". Words don't do it justice, just watch. Check here for a refutation, and for another kind of laugh, here's the porn version.

At the debate with the atheists, Cameron trots out this beauty:

"Science has never found a genuine transitional form that is one kind of animal crossing over into another kind either living, or in the fossil record."

It is amazing to me that people can parrot this lie in public and not have rotten fruit tossed at them. Did Kirk miss all the hubub about Tiktaalik? Tiktaalik is a transitional form between fish and early tetrapods (4-legged animals) that was impressively found exactly where the scientists predicted it would be based on all those measures of geologic time that bother creationists so. That, gentlemen, is scientific verification, something none of you ever seem interested in. Look here for an extensive list of transitional forms for vertebrates of which somehow Mr. Cameron was unaware.

As if that wasn't bad enough, he proceeded to hold up artists renditions of a "crocoduck", a cross between a crocodile and a duck, a "bullfrog", a cross between a bull and a frog Har har, Kirk make joke!, and a "sheepdog". The reaction of the atheists in the debate is priceless. One just mutters "what a numbnuts" while the other just bursts out laughing.

Mr. Cameron, and anyone else who actually thinks this absurdity is some sort of point, the theory of evolution doesn't say that every animal is equally related to every other animal. It says that you and I are more closely related to monkeys than to cows, cows more than reptiles, reptiles more than amphibians, and amphibians more than fish. It also says these relationships are through GRADUAL changes. That means that if anyone did find a bull crossed with a frog, it would DISPROVE modern evolutionary theory, not confirm it. Ditto for sheep crossed with dogs, and ducks crossed with crocodiles.

This sort of thing is not only an embarrasment for our educational system, it is also something it is not called out on enough: arrogant. Thousands of brilliant scientists, over decades, have dedicated much of their lives to studying these issues, earning demanding degrees Messrs. Cameron and Comfort could only dream of earning. They have and are also doing the actual WORK of forming hypotheses, performing falsifiable experimentation (you know, actually gethering evidence and getting their hands dirty), subjecting them to the criticisms of their peers, and keeping up with that information in their fields. The idea of some layman like Cameron or Comfort, or me for that matter, is going to casually study the issue and discover something that ALL of those people missed, is absurd on the face of it. Any objection Cameron and Comfort could raise would be the sort of thing the scientists have dealt with long ago. It would be akin to a two-year-old thinking it can improve a chess master's play. They don't understand enough to ask an interesting question, and they are arrogant to think otherwise.