Bishop Colenso and the Zulu

When I was reading The Woman's Bible a month or so ago, the story of Bishop Colenso stuck out to me.

Stories like this get you in trouble.  I am not a Victorian missionary to Zululand.  I have never been a missionary to anywhere.  I am not a converted Zulu reading this verse for the first time.  Also, we have to put Colenso into context.  He was already having doubts before this.  So when I say that "I cannot imagine as a 21st century American citizen (blogging on a computer, long after sundown), what it would be like to be a 19th century missionary to Zululand", that should be obvious on the outset.  Still the story took the 19th century by storm and it is not hard to imagine (there I go again) why.  Here is a reference to Colenso's own account.

Rabid dog versus beautiful innocent little children

Below is one of Chuck's ethics metaphor for the Old Testament genocides.   My main quibble is the Israelites are "beautiful innocent children" while the races to be exterminated (including beautiful innocent children) are referred to as a "rabid dog".

It would be as though you were hired by our school to be an attendant on the playground . And you have all of these beautiful kindergartners out there playing on the ground: frolicking, rolling in the grass, playing with their balls - beautiful little children. And you hear this yipping noise, and you look up, and here's a little rabid dog with foam running out the mouth coming towards the children. Now, you know that dog has rabies, you know because that dog has rabies it's going to die: there's no way that dog can live - the rabies are going to kill that dog . You also know that if that dog should bite one of these little children that are under your charge that the child will also get rabies and will either die, or have to go through the extremely painful Pasteur shots. Now, as an attendant out there on the grounds: your responsibility to watch over those beautiful innocent little children, with this mad dog that is going to die anyhow, being a threat to those children, would you be justified in killing that little dog? You better believe it.[1]

Honestly, calling a group of people and their families a "rabid dog" that needs to be put down; sounds like many other excuses to excuse genocide.  One such similar sounding reason was codified into a Disney song: "What can you expect from filthy little heathens?"  Tabula rasa aside, all the children were just "savages" and "rabid" dogs? Whatever you think about the genocide of holy war, the dog metaphor is beyond the pail.

Cotton Mather was pro-vaccine

Cotton Mather never ceases to amaze me.  He is a very complicated man.


God’s Will?

The religious debate was also important. Mather, who had lost his wife and three youngest children in a measles epidemic, argued that inoculation was a gift from God. Those opposed to inoculation argued that epidemic diseases afflicted the people for a divine reason, and that to attempt to prevent them was to oppose God’s will. Others argued that inoculation, with its roots in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, was a heathen practice not suitable for Christians.[1]

Sauropodomorpha and correcting myself

Original Source for the image http://www.gavinrymill.com/dinosaurs/Cladogram/SaurischiaSauropodmorpha.jpg

I said, I would source a rant about phylogeny later and this is my attempt to do so. Already, I have blogged about Crocodilians and Ceratopsians. In the original rant, I wrote:

May I ask, what is your view point? You point to this chart as evidence that “one thing, stayed one thing and never changed into anything else! What we see in the world today and what we read in the Bible is consistent and true.” As already mentioned “W” is Ceratopsians. Do you hold that transitioning from a biped to a quadruped is not changing? “O” is Prosauropods and “P” is Sauropods. Do you hold that quasi-quadruped prosauropods transitioning into sauropods is changing? If “W” is OK, then why is “O” to “P” not OK?

As I already mentioned there are at least three bipedal families in the generally quadruped ceratopsians. By Kerby [1] and Answers in Genesis [2], this is considered variation within a kind. However in this particular phylogeny, prosauropods and sauropods are separate branches. Kerby seems to suggest that each separate branch are their own separate “one thing” that “stayed one thing”.

Prosauropods, like ceratopsians, are both bipedal and quadrupeds[3]. They are named “prosauropods”, because they were thought to have evolved into sauropods. They seemed to be transitioning into obligatory quadrupeality. They grew bigger and their necks grew longer.[4] 

It is difficult to know what Answers in Genesis thinks about prosauropods. The word, “prosauropod”, does not occur on the Creation Museum website. It appears only once on the Answers in Genesis website. [5] Searching for “sauropod” on Answers in Genesis, yields over 300 hits. One contains the following quote:

Sauropods just appear and disappear in the fossil record, without connection and without explanation. According to The Complete Dinosaur, “The ancestry of the sauropods, before they burst onto the world scene on almost every continent in the Middle Jurassic, is obscure.”

No known process of change could derive them from any other known organism, and no evidence of such change is found in the fossil record. [6]

The rest of the paragraph in The Complete Dinosaur, reads:

Seems obvious
when you read
the chart :)

The frequent assumption that they arose from prosauropods, probably melanorosaurids, has yet to be verified. Furthermore, some characters, including the reduction of the fifth digit of the hind foot in all prosauropods (but not in sauropods), suggest that these animals were already too specialized to have served as sauropod ancestors, and that the sauropods may have arisen as a sister group in the Late Triassic. Indeed, the traditional assumption that the quadrupedal sauropods developed from bipedal prosauropods was questioned as early as 1965 by A.J. Charig, J. Attridge, and A.W. Crompton. [7]

So now we come to the portion of this blog where I need to
correct something in my rant. The current prevailing hypothesis is not that prosauropods evolved into sauropods, but that both prosauropods and sauropods share a common ancestor. I stated the following:

Do you hold that quasi-quadruped prosauropods transitioning into sauropods is changing?

As mentioned in The Complete Dinosaur this has long been known not to be the likely case. However, the question can be redeemed...I hope. Why is it not likely that both prosauropods and sauropods are the same kind or in Kerby’s language, “one thing”?

Grazing through Answers in Genesis, it is difficult to know what they think. Again, they only mention prosauropods by name once. They also seem reluctant to assign a non-sauropod ancestor.[8] [9] [10]

Ceratopsians and Phylogeny

I have been writing a series, critiquing Carl Kerby’s critique of a phylogenic chart. My main point has been that the chart does not say what Kerby says that it says. Kerby argues that the chart shows that “one thing stayed one thing and never changed into anything else.” I’ve brought up that the lines on the chart represent orders and sub-orders of animals. One of the limbs on the tree even represents birds. Within these orders and sub-orders are immense diversity. In the original post, I brought this up.

Just look at "W" which represents the suborder Ceratopsians. They were both bipedal and quadrupeds.

Kerby works with Answers in Genesis and both he and they generally argue that all ceratopsians are one created kind.

Even though breeding studies are impossible with dinosaurs, by studying fossils one can ascertain that there was likely one Ceratopsian kind with variation in that kind and so on.[1]

As I pointed out, ceratopsians do not just include the four legged dinosaurs that remind everyone of Triceratops. It also includes bipeds like Yinlong[2] and Psittacosaurus[3]. There are actually three different families of bipedal ceratopsians[4]. Clearly, Kerby and Answers in Genesis both accept Yinlong and Triceratops as diversity within created kinds.

 If this amount of diversity is accepted, I fail to see why feliformia cannot be considered a single created kind.  Surely the differences between Yinlong and Triceratops are no bigger than the differences between Hyaenidae (hyenas) and Felidae (biting cats and Sabre-tooth cats).[5]

Are Crocodilians one thing?

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about someone misrepresenting phylogenetic charts.

It is difficult to see, but the red line to the far left represents what used to be referred to as "Crocodilians".  The third red line from the top left represents "birds".  Now, I mainly took issue with the following statement.  

According to the chart, everything changed incredibly fast for 30 million years, then many didn’t change for the next 150 million years! Truth be told, it’s actually much worse than that. The fossil record actually contains things that are dated back to 400 million years and they are exactly the same as what we see today! Call me skeptical, but I find it hard to believe that an animal can stay exactly the same for long long of a time period...

...What these charts actually show is that one thing, stayed one thing and never changed into anything else! What we see in the world today and what we read in the Bible is consistent and true.

The fossil record confirms that one thing, stayed one thing, and never changed from, or into, anything else. Consider these quotes from non-creationists that support our conclusion.

In my original post, I pointed out that this is not what the chart says at all.  These red lines represent large amounts of diversity.

If you were to zoom in on that infraorder you would find that evolutionists think they changed for the next 150 million years producing new genera and species. For example, lions are a species. Their genus includes tigers, leopards, and jaguars. Their family includes other cats like pumas and house cats. Their sub-order, Feliformia, includes also hyenas, mongooses, meerkats, etc... Their order, Carnivora, includes bears, seals, dogs, etc... It is misleading to say that the order of Crocodilians did not change when an order or infraorder contains a lot of diversity. Just look at "W" which represents the suborder Ceratopsians. They were both bipedal and quadrupeds.

Well, I found a blog post by palaeozoologist Darren Naish explaining the taxonomy of what used to be called "Crocodilians".

Firstly – a minor point on nomenclature. This sort of thing has to be discussed whenever crocodilians are. The group of archosaurs conventionally called crocodilians, and frequently termed Crocodilia in the textbooks (that is, living crocodiles, alligators, gharials and all their crocodile-like, alligator-like and gharial-like fossil relatives) is now most typically termed Crocodyliformes. That is, ‘crocodilians’ of tradition are now crocodyliforms (note that the last ‘e’ gets dropped when you convert a ‘-formes’ name to its vernacular version). Within Crocodyliformes, the crown-group (that is, the group that contains the living species and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor) is termed Crocodylia. So, Crocodylia is a clade within Crocodyliformes (Clark in Benton & Clark 1988, Norell et al. 1994, Salisbury & Willis 1996, Brochu 2003).

Crocodyliformes is part of a more inclusive group that also includes the crocodyliform-like sphenosuchians, and this larger clade is termed Crocodylomorpha. In turn, Crocodylomorpha is part of a major archosaur group informally termed the crocodile-branch or crocodile-group archosaurs, the best technical name for which is (unfortunately) Pseudosuchia (how I hate the fact that this name might win out over Crurotarsi, if certain phylogenetic definitions are followed).

Massively simplified cladogram of crocodilians and their relatives, with numerous lineages not shown. The affinities between "rauisuchians", aetosaurs and crocodylomorphs are shown here as being unresolved, but some studies find aetosaurs to be closer to crocodylomorphs than are other croc-group archosaurs. Other studies find at least some "rauisuchians" to be closer to crocodylomorphs than are other croc-group archosaurs. Within Crocodylomorpha, some studies find thalattosuchians to be further away from Crocodylia than is Notosuchia.

In view of the confusion that ensues whenever an attempt is made to explain the use and meaning of these names (I’ve had to do it several times), I believe that we should stick with what we have: the archosaurs that we imagine as ‘crocodilians’ are now crocodyliforms, and the crocodyliform crown-clade is Crocodylia. However, some workers aren’t happy with this and have argued that we should use Crocodylia in place of Crocodyliformes (Martin & Benton 2008). I can’t see that this does anything useful bar complicate an already confusing situation and I think that we should ignore this proposal. When talking to technical audiences, I tend to use crocodyliform, but I don’t see anything wrong with ‘crocodilian’ being used as a vernacular term for the clades Crocodyliformes or Crocodylomorpha. [1]

In my last post, I made a comment about therizinosaurs.

They belong to “m” on your chart, the clades “Carnosaurs and Coelurosaurs”. Therizionosaurs, are in the clade, Coelurosaurs, and all posses sloth like giant claws. How can “m” which represents two parallel clades teach that “one thing stayed one thing”? Also, how is anything becoming a Therizinosaur not becoming a new thing?

I would like to echo that comment here.  The red line marked "Crocodilians" includes thalattosuchians.  How can anyone consider a group that includes these aquatic reptiles and alligators as "one thing stayed one thing"?   Clearly this chart does not teach that "everything changed incredibly fast for 30 million years, then many didn't change for the next 150 million years".  Thalattosuchians are thought to have evolved in the early Jurrasic.  

Whatever you believe about the Theory of Evolution, it is unwise to misrepresent information.  

Friday Quotes XXXVIII

I am no bigot, I can hear a prayer from a man of piety and virtue, who, at the same time, is a friend to his country. ~ Samuel Adams.

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone. ~ Mitt Romney

Heck with that. We have law. You come to this country; you break our law; you suffer the penalty of our law, not your law. You want to break your law? Go home and do it. But in our country, break our law, and the law will break you. ~ Mike Huckabee

Friday Quotes XXXVII (Mostly Mormon Quotes)

When my husband was translating the Book of Mormon, I wrote a part of it, as he dictated each sentence, word for word, and when he came to proper names he could not pronounce, or long words, he spelled them out, and while I was writing them, if I made a mistake in spelling, he would stop me and correct my spelling, although it was impossible for him to see how I was writing them down at the time. .?. . When he stopped for any purpose at any time he would, when he commenced again, begin where he left off without any hesitation, and one time while he was translating he stopped suddenly, pale as a sheet, and said, "Emma, did Jerusalem have walls around it?" When I answered, "Yes," he replied, "Oh! I was afraid I had been deceived." He had such a limited knowledge of history at the time that he did not even know that Jerusalem was surrounded by walls. ~ Emma Smith to Edmund C. Briggs, "A Visit to Nauvoo in 1856," Journal of History 9

Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine... ~ David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, Mo.: n.p., 1887),

[H]eaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation. . . .~ John Smith about Jamestown

[F]ree government rests, as does all progress, upon the broadest possible diffusion of knowledge. ~ Thomas Jefferson

I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power. ~ Thomas Jefferson, 1820

A government held together by the bands of reason only, requires much compromise of opinion. ~ Thomas Jefferson

A government held together by the bands of reason only, requires much compromise of opinion. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Truth between candid minds can never do harm. ~ John Adams

Friday Quotes XXXVI

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid! Listen carefully, for I proclaim to you good news that brings great joy to all the people: Today your Savior is born in the city of David. He is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign for you: You will find a baby wrapped in strips of cloth and lying in a manger.” Suddenly a vast, heavenly army appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among people with whom he is pleased!”

Luke 2:10-14

An interesting note only the KJV and NKJV preserve this reading:

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. Luke 2:14

From the NET

tc Most witnesses (א2 B2 L Θ Ξ Ψ Ë1,13 Ï sy bo) have ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκία (en anqrwpoi" eudokia, “good will among people”) instead of ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκίας (en anqrwpoi" eudokia", “among people with whom he is pleased”), a reading attested by א* A B* D W pc (sa). Most of the Itala witnesses and some other versional witnesses reflect a Greek text which has the genitive εὐδοκίας but drops the preposition ἐν. Not only is the genitive reading better attested, but it is more difficult than the nominative. “The meaning seems to be, not that divine peace can be bestowed only where human good will is already present, but that at the birth of the Saviour God’s peace rests on those whom he has chosen in accord with his good pleasure” (TCGNT 111).