18. “Why have we found only 1 “Lucy”, when we have found more than 1 of everything else?”
Have you noticed how both 18 and 12, who makes essentially the same point about there being only one Lucy (ie, fossil hominid skeleton), both finish with a squiggle?
No-one else feels the need to bolster their argument with a graphical flourish. Perhaps it’s an unconscious attempt to compensate for its obvious weaknesses.
12 and 18 presumably don’t know that their premises are false. Sadly, they have such unwavering trust in the liars who’ve told them that there’s only one “missing link” fossil, that they didn’t bother to check. If they had, they’d know that in 1975, just a year after the much-publicised discovery of fossil AL 288-1, aka “Lucy”, the same researchers found another site nearby containing at least 13 skeletons of the same species, Australopithecus afarensis, named AL 333 or the “First Family”. That’s just the most notable example: there are numerous other specimens of A. afarensis, as well as galleries full of fossils showing every other stage of human evolution.
Amazingly, 18 manages to casually toss in a whole other universe of wrongness with his assertion that we have also found “more than 1 of everything else”, showing the usual bloated, pulsating ignorance which we’ve come to expect from him and his buddies. There are plenty of single specimen fossil species: the Apis nearctica bee, the Scipionyx dinosaur and the Endemichthys likhoeli fish, to name just a few.
But suppose 12 and 18 were right, and there was only one known early hominid fossil skeleton. What they’re saying is, “I don’t believe that any ancestor species of humans ever existed. And you can’t prove it, because you’ve only found one!” Er, what? So you acknowledge that there is at least one, but you still refuse to believe that there were any?
Imagine the converse: if god appeared on earth, but I said, “Sorry, only one deity has proven its existence, so I’ll remain an atheist.”
The sheer illogic of the argument is stunning. It’s not an exaggeration to call it ‘brainless’. The only mechanism by which I can imagine it spreading is that people like 12 and 18 are able to put themselves into a special “creationist credulity mode” when presented with certain inputs, which lets them store that data, without any processing, straight into memory slots labelled “things to say which disprove evolution”, and later output the contents of those slots from their mouths, still unprocessed.
I think it’s the requirement to prevent that unwanted processing, to remain in an unthinking zen state while the argument is being recited, which explains the squiggles. The hand has to copy out the contents of the memory slot while the mind keeps itself entirely blank. When it reaches the end of the data, it keeps itself occupied adding the extra embellishment, during the couple of seconds it takes for the conscious brain to boot back up from hibernation mode.
Either that, or they have thought about it, they know it’s stupid, and they’re trying to distract both you and themselves with a bit of pointless ornamentation.
One or the other.