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Yea. Shit hit the fan today, big time. Take one male, 5'11 230 pagan scientist, and pit against one other male, 5'11 230 devout JW ex-'bethelite'. He's been staying here more and more during the last few weeks, and over the last week started to engage me in theosophical conversation. I held no fear and was happy to engage in what I thought would be intelligent discussion.

Wrong.

I had forgotten just how deeply washed their minds are. Yesterday evening, we started into a discussion on the time-old ridiculous and boring topic of Creation versus Evolution. To me, this is pablum, but I try to reach him about what we've discovered and how to look at things from all sorts of interesting perspectives. It ended up with us in a shouting match, with him yelling that, "Jehovah will stop the hurricanes!!!" Okay. Time for bed, goodnight.

This morning, I was presented with his 'essay', which was basically the Creation books (the older and the newer one) quoted word for word. Other than sadness at what his essay-capabilities could have been like in a different life, no problem. I figure I'll just read and respond.

Here was his first 'thought'.

"Older sediment (than Cambrian period) beds should contain progenitors of Cambrian period forms. These older sediment beds are almost barren of evidence of life. Darwin could not find it. It still can not be found today below the lowermost division of the Paleozoic."

Hmm, interesting. Alright. So I Google a bit, and find plenty of information on early bilateria. Did you know there's a Ediacaran Period? I didn't. It's pre-Cambrian, and we have a fossil history of some really amazing organisms! Check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ediacaran

The next ones dealt with the dreaded subject of our early ancestors. One of his 'thoughts' was

"Australopithecus looks simian, closely resembling a chimpanzee skull, not in any way a human skull."

As someone who studied anatomy through the Anthropology department of University of California Santa Cruz, taught by a brilliant Professor who has made comparative primate anatomy his life's work, I knew a bit about the subject, enough to say to myself, "hold on." First, simians? Simians are higher primates, including Homo sapiens! What is this, some sort of joke? Yea, the head looks like a bit of a hybrid, but...

We've got the Laetoli footprints, footprints that are believed to be from Australopithecus.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/1/l_071_03.html

And for petesake, we have their fossilized bones!

http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vwsu/gened/learn-modules/top_longfor/timeline/afarensis/afarensis-a.html

Bones that show bipedal posture! You put two and two together, and it's pretty easy to see that they didn't walk like any chimpanzee I've ever seen! They were bi-pedal. Their feet even had arches, like ours. Their big toes pointed outwards for balance, like ours. The footprints show us that their gait was similar to ours. Not only that, but it can be deduced from the prints that there could even have been social behavior similar to ours! I don't need a book to figure it out. It's all right there! We can look at it! We can touch it! Thanks to the people who were lucky enough to have stumbled on these remnants of a distant past, and who took the time and energy to work carefully and thoroughly enough to share it with the rest of the world.

I had presented him with the information of Tiktaalik roseae, a fossilized species that was discovered in 2006. It had features found only in fish (such as fins and gills) and features found only in land animals (wrist, elbow, neck).

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/news/2006/apr/news_7948.html

His response was

"Tiktaalik was not a transitionary between a fish and tetrapod. Simply a separate creation, the morphological gap is wide."

WTF? I don't see fish + land animal characteristics as being any type of "wide' anything? My mind was just feeling so very insulted at this point.

Next was a "quote from a Scientist", oooooo.

"The first fish evolved...To our knowledge, no 'link' connected this new beast to any previous form of life. The fish just appeared, with that structure which divide all animals into higher and lower life? the backbone." Marvels and Mysteries of Our Animal World, page 25, by Jean George"

A bit of Google, and I find

http://www.tolweb.org/Osteostraci/14842

Not too difficult to figure it out, to me.

There was more, but by this point I couldn't give it any more brain-power. It was just so black and white, all there for anyone to see. So, he comes home from work (practice for preparing the New World...he told me the other night that it's coming in "two years, about"...I reminded him that he told me something similar over a decade ago, which he professed that he never said). I approach him in the kitchen, thank him for his writing, and that I had come up with my answers. I start out with the fact that we actually do have fossil history from pre-Cambrian, and he just flipped. Totally bonkers. Starts ranting about how 'man' is evil and incompetent and can't rule 'himself'. I'm like, 'woah, we're talking about pre-Cambrian', he interrupts with 'Your evolution is what's the cause of all of it! It's what's responsible for the immorality in the world!!!!' At this point, we're both like bull walruses yelling..."There are pre-Cambrian fossils!!" "No there isn't!!" 'Wtf, do you want me to show you or not??" "I don't want to see those falsehoods and lies!!!" So at this point my parents step in between us because, yet once again, there's about to be violence between us. He uses the restroom and takes his pillows and leaves.

I go out and show my parents the pictures of the Ediacaran fossilss. Those organisms were beautiful, so delicate. They begrudgingly glance, but my father looks at it with more interest, so I send him the link. This is his reply:

"The reason I'm dubious about all that information is the high amount of conjectureinvolved. Words like 'not defined',
"assumes", "controversial" and "sparse" to name a few are not enough for me to accept at face value. O, and then there's the 'give or take 100 million years'. Give me a break.

Look at Mars - all that money and effort. Then the sudden announcement "water!" But the next day it is acknowledged that it is loaded with perchlorate - and away we go again.
For me, I'll take good old Earth. Makes sense to me - it just needs a good cleanup."

There's so many dodges in there, that I can't even reply to it. What I did write back was this.

"I've learned something important through all this, a few things. One, is that truth is simple. It is what it is. Interpretation is of course involved to a certain extent, but for the most part, truth is solid. The other thing I'm learning is that some people don't want to know truth, not really. They say they do, but in the end, they don't. They want what they think truth should be, or what they want it to be. And the third thing I've learned, and I suppose this would be the most important thing, is that those people don't change what's still true. Truth is simply what it is, regardless.

I look at those fossils, and you know what I think? I think, 'awesome'."

So, there you are. Thanks for sticking with the story, you've obviously gotten through it if you've made it this far. I do love my family. But I can't wait to get out of here. I put up a new screensaver after all this was over, one that for me says it all...