Whacky quotes or the truth?

Question

I think it would be difficult to prove that vaccines have cured any diseases. I think you will find that cleaning up sanitation laws, inspection of cattle and stuff like that, getting rid of diseased creatures and diseased crops is really what has done the job. Now there may be a coincidence they happened at the same time. Like when they started, you know, vaccinating for one thing and at the same time had better sanitation laws and inspections. It may look like the vaccine cured the disease when actually something else cured the disease.
Source: Truth Radio 27 October 2003 @ 48:35

Ice can survive just fine right up against water, it does it all the time in Antarctica and the Artic Ocean. These huge blocks of ice called blue icebergs float around for five years. You could drag a giant iceberg down to off the coast of Sahara Desert on the Equator and it would take years to melt.
Source: Truth Radio 23 July 2003 @ 30:55

Sometimes .... people say you are not qualified to talk about a certain subject and then they will use the ad hominem argument "You can not discuss this because you have not been trained". Well, Columbus had no training and yet he proved the world was round.
Source: Debate 5 - Hovind v Hilpman @ 0:01:35

I say, you guys have to get two cells to evolve from the [primordial] soup - of the opposite sex, in the same place, at the same time. It's a big world, you know, cells are kind of small - they've got to find each other.
Source: Part 1---The Age of the Earth Video @ 0:57:45 [June 2003]

Dinosaurs have four perfectly good legs and birds have two legs and two wings. So if he’s going to turn into a bird his front legs are going to have to turn into wings [….] Somewhere along the line they’re going to be half leg and half wing. Which means now he can’t walk anymore and can’t fly yet.

Source: http://media.drdino.com/sem/audio/mp3/books2.mp3 @ 101:20 [March 2003]

Answer 1

All of these quotes are simply the stupid speaking to the equally stupid.

I encourage the speakers to travel to the tropics without vaccines, to examine the physics of temperature exchange and surface area, to remember the first cells reproduced asexually, and to recall that many dinosaurs didn't have 4 legs Tyrannosaurus and Pterodactyls. And Columbus? People knew the earth was round before he sailed. They just didn't know how far someone could go.

Sounds like these folks are just enjoying showing ignorance.

Answer 2

I'm not sure I'd call them "whacky quotes" because that would damage my credibility by the fallacy of ad hominem because I would be attacking the character of the man who said them by implying that he is whacky, but they are certainly not the truth. If this were the case, then there would have to be another explanation for the irradication of polio, rabbis, influenza, measles, mumps, rebella, (to name a few) dieseases that was cured as a result of vaccines. I personally will not withhold vaccination from my children based on the opinion of a man that is not a doctor nor has any prefessional medical credentials, not even something homeopathology or chiropractics.

Likewise, what do iceburgs have to do with anything? I guess if it was big enough it would take a year to melt, but what's the point?

Kent Hovind, the man in question, has even been rejected by some "young-earth" creationists because of the kinds of claims he makes because he uses bad evidence, bad logic, and numerous contradictions and fallacies. The two following sites show how so.

Answer 3

1. There is data from controlled studies that show that vaccines help to immunize people against disease. That is how the vaccines were originally developed. While it's true that sanitation measures and inspection processes have helped to prevent people from getting sick in the first place, vaccines are what helped to prevent epidemics from occurring.

2. A giant iceburg would take years to melt because it is, well, giant. I'm not sure what you (or Truth Radio) are trying to say with this remark--that global warming isn't real? Global warming, whether true or not, is a hugely complex issue dealing with multiple fields of science. You're going to have to come up with more than ice burgs melting to either prove or disprove it.

3. Questioning someone's credentials is not necessarily an ad hominem attack. Ad hominem is where you bring up something about the speaker that doesn't have a direct bearing on their argument, and try to use it to prove their argument false--for example, if someone is giving a lecture criticizing evolution, and someone who disagrees with him stands up and shouts, "Oh yeah? Well you cheated on your wife!" Even if it's true, that fact has no bearing on whether the man's assertions on evolution are true or false.

However, if someone brings up the fact that the speaker has no training in biology, and no understanding of evolutionary theory to begin with, then that is relevent to the situation at hand and is not ad hominem. It doesn't prove that he doesn't know what he's talking about, but it tells people to take his arguments with a grain of salt.

Checking credentials is not ad hominem. Otherwise, you wouldn't need a resume and references to get a job--people want to make sure you're qualified to do the job before they give you the responsibility.

Edit: 4. The original cells "reproduced" through cell division, which is still the primary method of cell reproduction today. Sexual reproduction did not arise until much later down the road.

5. Evolution does not proceed in herky-jerky steps where for thousands of years the organisms would have existed with half-legs and half-wings. As one poster mentioned, there were many species of dinosaur (and other non-dinosaurian reptiles) which fully or primarily used their hind legs for mobility, leaving their front legs free. Their front legs broadened and allowed for gliding, while still being useful for other functions as well (you see this in gliding squirrels and bats: they can glide and fly while still using their front legs to hold things, and even walk--ever see a bat doing its "wing walk?").

By the time the limbs fully lost their previous function of walking or holding, the wings were well-developed enough to provide the advantage of partial flight. Later addition of feathers (modified scales) helped along the road to full, true flight. All of these changes happened very slow and gradually, and the ones that provided the best balance of usefulness vs. energy cost were the ones that were maintained.

Answer 4

Vaccines prevent viral diseases or lessen the severity of infections. When I was a kid, polio was rampant. Now it's almost non-existent, all because of massive public health efforts to immunize.

Answer 5

Are you nuts? Polio was rampant till vaccines wiped it out. Small pox was destroyed. We use vaccines to protect against plague, measles chicken pox etc.

Answer 6

Sounds like a nut to me.

Answer 7

Um, what's your question?