Has it been another month already, with no response? Yes it has. Greetings to anyone at RTB who may be reading. See you in the new year.
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Pretty sure that co-hort is 0.
Another new year, and still no response. See you in February.
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Can we let another month go by without comment? No, we cannot. We now enter the 10th month without any response or recognition from RTB. Iâm thinking that the probability of anything, ever, is getting smaller and smaller as time passes.
Yeah, thereâs no upside for them in it, is there? Creationists not infrequently rely upon Looney Tunes physics: the coyote need not fall to the bottom of the canyon until after he notices heâs run off the cliff. Accordingly, the key is to pretend not to notice. Once you notice, the gameâs up.
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Ahh yes, alternatively known as âthe moon doesnât exist when youâre not lookingâ physics. Somehow it still remembers where all the craters were when it comes back, and even its location and trajectory in orbit.
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Hello again. February is at an end, March begins, and itâs another month with nothing from RTB. I fully realize that this isnât news any more.
I had a conversation with Fuz. I donât think there will be a response any time soon. That is unfortuante.
Did he perchance explain why?
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British naval historian Cyril Parkinson is still remembered for Parkinsonâs Law: âWork expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.â Perhaps we need to codify Hamâs Law: âA baramin/kind expands so as to dismiss all available evidence of so-called macro-evolution. But, yeah, sometimes it shrinks. It is a very flexible and useful term.â
Wouldnât be wrong. 
The observation below is in regards to the YEC model of hyperrapid speciation, but itâs more than applicable to many progressive creationists nonetheless:
In taking this approach, postcreationists are essentially rediscovering basic morphological phylogeny. While still claiming that the various baramins all have intrinsic, essential diferences that render them totally unique and distinct from one another, they have arrived at a selection of representative progenitors for each which display a high degree of morphological similarity (Fig. 5). There is generally more morphological and genetic variation within each of the individual kinds identifed by Answers in Genesis than within the collective group formed by their ancestors.
â R.J. Duff et al., âDissent with modification: how postcreationismâs claim of hyperrapid speciation opposes yet embraces evolutionary theoryâ (2020), Evo Edu Outreach 13(9): 10.
Humans and chimps are more genetically similar than tigers and house cats, yet creationists only regard the latter pair as belonging to the same âkindâ and not the former. No rigorous methodology undergirds this.
Todd Wood probably has the most promising approach to baraminology, but thatâs lacking too.
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Itâs much funnier when you extrapolate back to the characteristics the common ancestor of each mammalian âkindâ would need to have had. Hilariously and predictably, those âkindâ progenitors look very closely related to each other:
From:
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I can only imagine a phenetic phylogeny that includes all those ancestral species as taxons! Poor Answers in Genesis. Biological relatedness abounds.
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Good question. Why would a leading member of the progressive creationists be unable to say whether or when any member of the group would respond to rational, polite criticism?
I tried contacting members of the group some time ago, to get clarity on the question John Harshman has been asking. The Ross website is set up so that you canât contact anyone directly, and there doesnât seem to be anyone manning a general inquiry desk, either.
I did finally get hold of one fellow, not one of the group leaders, but one of the camp, and he explained that they donât have a really good system of intra-group or extra-group communication. He tried to answer my inquiry as well as he could, but he knew that he could not speak either for Ross or for anyone else there; he couldnât even claim to speak for the majority view or average view. All he could give was general impressions of what heâd heard from some of the Ross people.
I am not much impressed by the Ross organization. Ross himself has written some good things about the cosmos, fine-tuning and so on, but as a leader of an organization, he is not particularly skilled. By comparison, Discovery, BioLogos, and the various YEC organizations are far better organized internally and are much easier to contact. Itâs not all surprising that OEC is much less influential in public debates over origins than the other players, given its inability or unwillingness to interact consistently with questioners or even provide ways of reaching its leaders. We shouldnât need people like Joshua to be privately prodding people like Fuz Rana to get results.
If the OEC people want to be influential, they have to get their act together. Otherwise, they will fade away as a cultural force. One might even say that in the competition for survival in the environment of ideas, ânatural selectionâ will weed out OEC, leaving the other groups with the field to themselves. 
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Follow-up to my previous post. In 2020 I sent a private Peaceful Science message to Anjeanette Roberts, a scientist who use to post here (and whose posts I liked) who identified herself as aligned with Ross. I had to write to her here because Rossâs site gave no way of getting hold of her. Since I have the legal right to reuse my own words, Iâll quote what I wrote:
âIs there a range of opinion within OEC regarding how far microevolution extends? For example, Fazale Rana argued in a talk on the RTB site that evolutionary change at the genus and species levels does in fact happen. He gives the example of the âhorse series.â That would suggest that the created âkindâ roughly corresponds to animal âfamiliesâ. However, Iâm told that Dr. Ross thinks the ceiling is at the genus level. Are you aware of a range within OEC? Can you direct me to examples of OEC people who think the created âkindsâ could have been families, or even orders, or even classes? Or OEC articles which deal specifically with such an âedge of evolutionâ (to borrow Beheâs phrase)?â
Dr. Roberts did not reply. Maybe she doesnât check her private messages here, or maybe by that time she had pulled out of PS altogether and never got the message. But this is another example in which a leading OEC proponent is inaccessible for intellectual conversation, unless you have her private phone number or e-mail address. The Ross people seem to shut themselves off. They are willing to appear for certain scheduled debates, and they write articles for their own site, but they want to control where, when, and how people can get hold of them and they want to choose whether or not to answer questions about matters absolutely central to their position. Iâm deeply unimpressed. Say what you might against Ken Ham, or the Discovery people, they are constantly responding to critics, not hiding from them. If this is going to be the attitude of the Ross group, I would venture the prediction that 10 years from now, that group will no longer exist.
Joshua is apparently in contact with them, but to no effect whatsoever.
It appears to be established that the people who should be capable of responding to Johnâs article are aware of it, and the request for a response.
It appears to be equally well-established that there will be no response forthcoming.
I am trying to think of a legitimate reason for this, and am coming up empty. I donât think it could just be that they are too busy. This is exactly the sort of dialogue they should welcome.
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I think itâs simple: they know they are badly wrong and that their position cannot be defended. While dishonest people can sometimes benefit from âdebatesâ and the like, not all of them have the skill to pull it off. Why should they? Does their audience care what scientists think?
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Yes, but so long as even one scientist gives them what they want, theyâre happy. Doesnât even really have to be a scientist. A dentist, doctor or engineer will do.
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Heck, Casey Luskin will do for those people. As the saying goes, âthose who can make you believe Luskin can make you commit atrocities.â
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Oddly enough, @swamidass never answered that question. Why will a response from RTB not be forthcoming âany time soonâ? And what does âsoonâ mean here? Inquiring minds want to know.
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