There was just such a paucity of material on it, and so many of these old neighbourhoods have these old contractor-installed Waltec bits of hardware, it was crying out for just a straightforward explanation and some of my trademark horrible artwork.

I hope it helped!

>You’re right when you say that “Demanding an ‘ape-man’ is actually just SILLY.” Glad you now admit that it’s “SILLY.”

Wow, stop with the “gotchas"; it’s unbecoming, because that’s a strawman version of what he said, and what he said was a complain about strawmen in the first place. It’s the demands for creatures halfway between a clade and a member of that clade. It would be like demanding a book halfway between the Bible and the Vulgate, or the Bible and the NSV.

There are more gaps in the fossil record now, in large part because there are more fossils and less space between them. The going joke between biologists is of course that (from a creationist’s perspective) every gap we fill produces two new gaps.

>Humans are distinct from the animal kinds. Look in the mirror, Aron. Do you see an ape or a human looking back at you?

I’m sure the answer would probably be “yes".

To my recollection, chimpanzees and gorillas were classified with humans taxonomically back when Linnaeus was first sorting things out. Some readings I came across of the era thought gorillas might be a form of lower, cursed or devolved human, and that dovetailed rather well with some of the “erudite” thoughts of the age vis-a-vis black people.

But now that we know that gorillas are not actually devolved humans, well, the church is all about separate creation. Well, at least the sects that worry about such stuff.

But the original taxonomic tree wasn’t far off. Biochemically, anatomically, physiologically and genetically, chimpanzees and bonobos are closer to us than any other life forms on Earth, and gorillas aren’t too far behind.

I did a whole blog post on using online protein databases to tell, and it matters little what genes you start with, as long as they are commonly sequenced:

http://blogs.nimblebrain.net/index.php/a_little_of_the_tree_of_life?blog=2

Creationism’s playbook on baraminology/created “kinds” really hasn’t changed much since the seventies, and its proponents had a habit of seldom retiring any of them, no matter how short they were brought up in debate.

If you have evidence like that, publish it. I’ve been through numerous books and “papers", and the amount of handwaving, pretense of open questions, poisoning the well and outright deceit from those publications makes me despair of them actually making a forthright attempt to prove their case.

I went through Sarfati’s book with a fine-toothed comb and was appalled. There was food for another 45 posts if I were so inclined; I have scrawled notes all over my copy of his book.

http://blogs.nimblebrain.net/index.php/refuting-evolution-by-jonathan-sarfati?blog=2