Paluxy River
* (np) [FAQ] 1. The site near Glen Rose, Texas, of the "Paluxy River Mantracks", or "Creationist (sic) Piltdown". SciCre-ists from the CSRC and ICR, among others, long contended that certain trackways in the Paluxy River riverbed contained coeval man and dinosaur tracks. Upon close inspection, the putative human tracks were found to belong to a bipedal three-toed dinosaur. Amazingly enough, the ICR organ (not at all vestigial(1)) "Acts and Facts" announced that the Paluxy River trackways should no longer be considered evidence for SciCre. Various ICR fellow-travelers have been slow on the uptake, though, and one occasionally finds a "newbie" who posts the irrefutable truth about Paluxy River.
Pedant points
(np) Any attempts to define them are hopeless, since those who are interested in them will find faults in any definition.
Peking man
(n) 1. A hominid fossil (now generally agreed to be Homo erectus) discovered in China before World War II. The original bones were lost during the Japanese invasion of China, although castings survive. 2. An example of the sinister evilutionist plot to conceal the truth about man's origins by destroying physical evidence [conn, SciCre].
Phenotype
(n) 1. The set of measurable or detectable physical or behavioral features of an individual. The phenotype represents the expression of the genotype of the individual as modified by environmental conditions during the individual's ontogeny. [den., science]
Phylogeny
* (n) 1. The history of descent of a species. [den., science] 2. One third of Ernst Haeckel's famous, but flawed, dictum that "Ontogeny recpitulates Phylogeny".
Piltdown Man
(np) 1. Hoaxed fossil finds of 1912 and 1915 which combined jawbone of orangutan with a modern human skull, labeled Eoanthropus dawsonii. The hoaxed fossils were widely regarded as anomalous during the time when they were considered valid; the hoax was discovered by scientists in 1953. Gould hypothesized that Teilhard de Chardin was the person who may have done the filing and staining of the fossils in the hoax.
? Piltdown man
(n) 1. A hoax in which a skull with both human and ape-like features (actually, a chimera assembled from a modern human cranium and an ape's jaw) was "discovered" in an English quarry. Despite initial enthusiasm about the find (particularly among British paleontologists -- "As we always thought, mankind originated in Britain", rule Britannia et cetera), further examination exposed the hoax, and the Piltdown man now serves as a fine example of science's self-correcting properties. 2. A hoax which shows how evilutionists have fabricated all their so-called "evidence" about man's origins [conn, SciCre].
Po-haloes
contraction, see Polonium haloes
Politeness through sarcastic aggression
(np) The means by which young whippersnappers are made to see the error of their rude ways. See also Kalki Syndrome, hypocrisy.
Polonium haloes
* (np) [FAQ] 1. Radiation induced pleochroic haloes in mica. [den., science] 2. Phenomenon of (1) asserted to be contradictory to common assumptions of crust formation and radioisotope dating methods. [conn., SciCre, due to Robert Gentry]
? Progressive creationism
(n) 1. An old-Earth creationist variety which holds that the geologic history of Earth is as represented in the fossil record, but God intervened to create each species at the appropriate time in history. A legitimate theory, but falsified by modern observations of speciation events.
Proof
(n) 1. Alcohol content rating, equal to twice the percentage content. Properly used as one criterion for beer selection. 2. Assurance of truth of a proposition, available in certain logic systems, but not available in matters of scientific inquiry. 3. Level of evidence required of an EMT before a TAE will accept it. Obviously, no TAE need fear accepting an EMT, since EMTs are scientific in nature.
Punctuated equilibria
(np) 1. Hypothesis forwarded by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould that states that most species are characterized by long periods of stasis "punctuated" by occasional and brief productions of daughter species. This represents a modification of Darwinian evolution by stating that the rate of evolution can change, mainly depending upon population size and selection pressure. A prediction of PE is that transitional sequences showing speciation events should be rare in the fossil record, and when found, should show that speciation occurs mostly in small, isolated populations which subsequently spread rapidly. [den., science] 2. A cynical theory(2) which admits that no transitional fossils exist, and confirms exactly what SciCre-ists have been saying all along. [conn., SciCre]