Posted on 09/25/2003 2:46:02 PM PDT by HalfFull
Evolutionists generally feel secure even in the face of compelling creationist arguments today because of their utter confidence in the geological time scale. Even if they cannot provide a naturalistic mechanism, they appeal to the "fact of evolution," by which they mean an interpretation of earth history with a succession of different types of plants and animals in a drama spanning hundreds of millions of years.
The Bible, by contrast, paints a radically different picture of our planet's history. In particular, it describes a time when God catastrophically destroyed the earth and essentially all its life. The only consistent way to interpret the geological record in light of this event is to understand that fossil-bearing rocks are the result of a massive global Flood that occurred only a few thousand years ago and lasted but a year. This Biblical interpretation of the rock record implies that the animals and plants preserved as fossils were all contemporaries. This means trilobites, dinosaurs, and mammals all dwelled on the planet simultaneously, and they perished together in this world-destroying cataclysm.
Although creationists have long pointed out the rock formations themselves testify unmistakably to water catastrophism on a global scale, evolutionists generally have ignored this testimony. This is partly due to the legacy of the doctrine of uniformitarianism passed down from one generation of geologists to the next since the time of Charles Lyell in the early nineteenth century. Uniformitarianism assumes that the vast amount of geological change recorded in the rocks is the product of slow and uniform processes operating over an immense span of time, as opposed to a global cataclysm of the type described in the Bible and other ancient texts.
With the discovery of radioactivity about a hundred years ago, evolutionists deeply committed to the uniformitarian outlook believed they finally had proof of the immense antiquity of the earth. In particular, they discovered the very slow nuclear decay rates of elements like Uranium while observing considerable amounts of the daughter products from such decay. They interpreted these discoveries as vindicating both uniformitarianism and evolution, which led to the domination of these beliefs in academic circles around the world throughout the twentieth century.
However, modern technology has produced a major fly in that uniformitarian ointment. A key technical advance, which occurred about 25 years ago, involved the ability to measure the ratio of 14C atoms to 12C atoms with extreme precision in very small samples of carbon, using an ion beam accelerator and a mass spectrometer. Prior to the advent of this accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) method, the 14C/12C ratio was measured by counting the number of 14C decays. This earlier method was subject to considerable "noise" from cosmic rays.
The AMS method improved the sensitivity of the raw measurement of the 14C/12C ratio from approximately 1% of the modern value to about 0.001%, extending the theoretical range of sensitivity from about 40,000 years to about 90,000 years. The expectation was that this improvement in precision would make it possible to use this technique to date dramatically older fossil material.1 The big surprise, however, was that no fossil material could be found anywhere that had as little as 0.001% of the modern value!2 Since most of the scientists involved assumed the standard geological time scale was correct, the obvious explanation for the 14C they were detecting in their samples was contamination from some source of modern carbon with its high level of 14C. Therefore they mounted a major campaign to discover and eliminate the sources of such contamination. Although they identified and corrected a few relatively minor sources of 14C contamination, there still remained a significant level of 14C—typically about 100 times the ultimate sensitivity of the instrument—in samples that should have been utterly "14C-dead," including many from the deeper levels of the fossil-bearing part of the geological record.2
Let us consider what the AMS measurements imply from a quantitative standpoint. The ratio of 14C atoms to 12C atoms decreases by a factor of 2 every 5730 years. After 20 half-lives or 114,700 years (assuming hypothetically that earth history goes back that far), the 14C/12C ratio is decreased by a factor of 220, or about 1,000,000. After 1.5 million years, the ratio is diminished by a factor of 21500000/5730, or about 1079. This means that if one started with an amount of pure 14C equal to the mass of the entire observable universe, after 1.5 million years there should not be a single atom of 14C remaining! Routinely finding 14C/12C ratios on the order of 0.1-0.5% of the modern value—a hundred times or more above the AMS detection threshold—in samples supposedly tens to hundreds of millions of years old is therefore a huge anomaly for the uniformitarian framework.
This earnest effort to understand this "contamination problem" therefore generated scores of peer-reviewed papers in the standard radiocarbon literature during the last 20 years.2 Most of these papers acknowledge that most of the 14C in the samples studied appear to be intrinsic to the samples themselves, and they usually offer no explanation for its origin. The reality of significant levels of 14C in a wide variety of fossil sources from throughout the geological record has thus been established in the secular scientific literature by scientists who assume the standard geological time scale is valid and have no special desire for this result!
In view of the profound significance of these AMS 14C measurements, the ICR Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) team has undertaken its own AMS 14C analyses of such fossil material.2 The first set of samples consisted of ten coals obtained from the U. S. Department of Energy Coal Sample Bank maintained at the Pennsylvania State University. The ten samples include three coals from the Eocene part of the geological record, three from the Cretaceous, and four from the Pennsylvanian. These samples were analyzed by one of the foremost AMS laboratories in the world. Figure 1 below shows in histogram form the results of these analyses.
These values fall squarely within the range already established in the peer-reviewed radiocarbon literature. When we average our results over each geological interval, we obtain remarkably similar values of 0.26 percent modern carbon (pmc) for Eocene, 0.21 pmc for Cretaceous, and 0.27 pmc for Pennsylvanian. Although the number of samples is small, we observe little difference in 14C level as a function of position in the geological record. This is consistent with the young-earth view that the entire macrofossil record up to the upper Cenozoic is the product of the Genesis Flood and therefore such fossils should share a common 14C age.
Percent Modern Carbon
Applying the uniformitarian approach of extrapolating 14C decay into the indefinite past translates the measured 14C/12C ratios into ages that are on the order of 50,000 years (2-50000/5730 = 0.0024 = 0.24 pmc). However, uniformitarian assumptions are inappropriate when one considers that the Genesis Flood removed vast amounts of living biomass from exchange with the atmosphere—organic material that now forms the earth's vast coal, oil, and oil shale deposits. A conservative estimate for the pre-Flood biomass is 100 times that of today. If one takes as a rough estimate for the total 14C in the biosphere before the cataclysm as 40% of what exists today and assumes a relatively uniform 14C level throughout the pre-Flood atmosphere and biomass, then we might expect a 14C/12C ratio of about 0.4% of today's value in the plants and animals at the onset of the Flood. With this more realistic pre-Flood 14C/12C ratio, we find that a value of 0.24 pmc corresponds to an age of only 4200 years (0.004 x 2-4200/5730 = 0.0024 = 0.24 pmc). Even though these estimates are rough, they illustrate the crucial importance of accounting for effects of the Flood cataclysm when translating a 14C/12C ratio into an actual age.
Percent Modern Carbon
Some readers at this point may be asking, how does one then account for the tens of millions and hundreds of millions of years that other radioisotope methods yield for the fossil record? Most of the other RATE projects address this important issue. Equally as persuasive as the 14C data is evidence from RATE measurements of the diffusion rate of Helium in zircon crystals that demonstrates the rate of nuclear decay of Uranium into Lead and Helium has been dramatically higher in the past and the uniformitarian assumption of a constant rate of decay is wrong.3 Another RATE project documents the existence of abundant Polonium radiohalos in granitic rocks that crystallized during the Flood and further demonstrates that the uniformitarian assumption of constant decay rates is incorrect.4 Another RATE project provides clues for why the 14C decay rate apparently was minimally affected during episodes of rapid decay of isotopes with long half-lives.5
The bottom line of this research is that the case is now extremely compelling that the fossil record was produced just a few thousand years ago by the global Flood cataclysm. The evidence that reveals that macroevolution as an explanation for the origin of life on earth can therefore no longer be rationally defended.
#397: You are delusional.
#381: How can a question be an analogy, Mr. Einstein? ... Your intellectual laziness is amazing - second only to your childish propensity of spewing silly insults.
#377: A smart thing to do [ignoring an offensive poster] for people that arrive unarmed to an intellectual debate. [I.e. stupid people]
#376: Says you. Are planning on providing any supporting evidence for this claim or are we supposed to just take your word on it, Ms. Inquisitor
#273: I am not fluent in Bullsh*tese - could you translate?
#271: Man of science demonstrate that someone's position is faulty. Closed minded people insult people that disagree with them.
#224: I find closed-minded people far closer to Luddites.
I would happily dismiss him as a guy who worked on a computer model that just happened to be used in simulations of old-earth tectonic process. However, Answers in Genesis likes to thump the table on the guy's mainstream credentials, as if his "mainstream" work wasn't in absolute total contradiction of his creationist work, which is also in conflict with Genesis. (Genesis does not mention all the seas boiling away, an inevitable consequence of Baumgartner's sudden and total subduction of the entire pre-Flood lithosphere. The energy can't just disappear.)
AiG can't have it both ways. If his mainstream work is at all right, his crackpot work is wrong. If his crackpot work is right, Genesis left out some important stuff (and mainstream science is of course wrong too).
Neanderthals were not 11' 9". They were gnarly, burly, and knobby, but not tall. When you find a Bible verse that mentions odd, bell-shaped rib cages, let me know.
Not only that, but the evidence strongly suggests that Neanderthals normally confined themselves to very limited geographic areas; i.e. they probably lived out their wholes lives in, say, a single valley. For instance the stone tools of contemporaneous Homo sapiens sapiens often came from rock sources located dozens and even hundreds of miles away. The sources of Neanderthal tools are seldom more than a few miles distant.
This wouldn't seem to qualify them as the "men of renown" that The Bible describes.
There is currently a research project on Free Republic to investigate this ancient manuscript. If you (or any Lurkers) are interested the link is Freeper Research Project Enoch and Astronomy
They were robust, not tall. They had short legs because their thighbone-to-shinbone ratios were unlike ours. They had short torsos because the lower spinal segments were shorter than ours (although they had the same number of bones as we do). A consequence of the short torso is that their odd, bell-shaped rib cages hung low over their hip bones. Thus, they probably weren't very flexible. Against that, they were better armored against the kind of "gut wounds" that were inevitably fatal in pre-tech times.
They would have been renowned for being ugly, squat, and the kind of guy you don't wrestle without a lot of help.
Own Your Own Jurassic Park 09/26/2003
The BBC News reports that, beginning in 2005, you may be able to plant your own Wollemi Pine at home. Discovered alive in an isolated Australian grove in 1994, Wollemi pines were thought to have gone extinct after the Jurassic era. According to a botanist involved in the discovery, it was “the equivalent of finding a small dinosaur still alive on earth.” The trees grow slowly in low light, in hot or cold climates, and would make perfect indoor plants.
Plant it next to your Dawn Redwood and Ginkgo trees, similar living fossils. Why no evolution in 100 million years? Who needs the millions of years? Imagine the fossil ones living just a few thousand years ago, and it all begins to make more sense.
Impress your friends with a living fossil garden. What an interesting conversation starter that could be.
Foraminifera Exploded onto the Fossil Record 09/22/2003
An international team looked for the family tree of foraminifera (small shell-bearing animals) in the fossil record and genetics. This is a lineage that has been “poorly understood,” and from the results, it seems like it still may be poorly understood. From their abstract in PNAS1 (emphasis added):
By using molecular data from a wide range of extant naked [shell-less] and testate [shelled] unilocular [single-chamber] species, we demonstrate that a large radiation of nonfossilized unilocular Foraminifera preceded the diversification of multilocular [multi-chambered] lineages during the Carboniferous. Within this radiation, similar test [shell] morphologies and wall types developed several times independently. Our findings indicate that the early Foraminifera were an important component of Neoproterozoic protistan community, whose ecological complexity was probably much higher than has been generally accepted.Prior to this, evolutionists had assumed there was a sequence of shell styles, one evolving into the other. According to their new phylogenetic analysis based on molecular comparisons, that view does not seem supportable:
Morphological variations in some lineages by far exceed the traditional morphology-based taxonomy. For example, the Antarctic notodendrodids comprise several morphotypes, including spherical, tubular, and arborescent forms, some of them present together in a single species. This evolutionary plasticity among early Foraminifera makes their present morphology-based classification of limited value. We conclude that the thecate or agglutinated walls in unilocular Foraminifera are convergent features [sic], and that the simple evolutionary progression from one to the other, as envisaged by earlier authors, did not occur.They infer from molecular-clock phylogeny that there must have been a “very rapid tempo of morphological evolution” in the Precambrian of the naked, unilocular types, some of them arriving with similar shell types by convergent or parallel evolution, and then another very rapid diversification of the multilocular types in the Cambrian. They speculate that perhaps early eukaryotic predators drove the evolution of all this diversity, “forcing prey organisms to adopt various avoidance or resistance modalities.” Maybe the compartmentalization brought about by early Cambrian multi-chambered Cambrian models allowed them to exploit new possibilities, like symbiosis. At least this model is “an important first step” in understanding the complex ecology of the Neoproterozoic.
Once again, no clear pattern of evolution, just hand-waving and JSS (just-so storytelling). Evolution is supposed to be so slow and gradual, but here is a story morphological radiation running prestissimo: i.e., multiple miracles at a rapid tempo occuring independently and simultaneously with no clear ancestral tree between forms. It’s the lawn or forest picture again, instead of the single tree. If the rapid evolution were true, why don’t we see it happening in the present? They use personal verbs like exploit to make it seem like these little critters are consciously planning and designing new things they can do with accidental inventions.
The authors build their tree on the molecular clock, which is broken (see 10/01/2001 headline). Does anyone really see a tree here? There are leaves, but all the branches are inferred based on evolutionary assumptions, as usual. They invoke lots of maybe, what-if, perhaps, and other speculative words in their story, and according to established Darwin Party custom, call this just a first step in understanding the evolutionary picture of this group. How long have they been studying these organisms that have an “excellent fossil record”? Time’s up.
Isa 40:22
22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
Zech 12:1
1 The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.
Strong claims that seem to be consistant with what would be required for it to be truth.
I figure if God has the capability to create a universe, and hurl galaxies at 500,000 miles per hour, He has the ability to stretch light across the universe so that it is seen everywhere from the start of Time.
Isa 40:12-15
12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand,
or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?
Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,
or weighed the mountains on the scales
and the hills in a balance?
13 Who has understood the mind of the LORD,
or instructed him as his counselor?
14 Whom did the LORD consult to enlighten him,
and who taught him the right way?
Who was it that taught him knowledge
or showed him the path of understanding?
15 Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket;
they are regarded as dust on the scales;
he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust.
NIV
Are his shins and forearms shorter than you'd think, given the length of his thighs and upper arms? Does he have a receding chin? Does he have practically no waist? Does he have a long (front to back), low head with a bun in the back and I don't mean hair?
The whole issue about the Lagar Velho child and other proposed hybrids is whether speciation occurred after Neanderthals diverged. That's only semi-relevant to the validity of a fossil series like the one posted. Fossil series never show an exact, known-for-sure line of descent. They show a progression of changes over time within a group of organisms. You're just looking for grounds to throw the thing out if you keep getting hung up on whether Species A is a great-great-great granddaddy or a great-great-great-great uncle.
But that's a given. All of the evidence, mountains and mountains of it, always gets thrown out by creationists every time.
Sometime I will have to post the series of monkey skulls I put together. I went from baboon through a series to some sort of monkey. It looked as plausible an evolutionary tree as the one you posted, but it was from extant animals and in no way represented a line of descent.
Irrelevant, precisely because that series is not a fossil progression but a demonstration of how some extant groups shade finely into each other. The latter phenomenon still hints at common descent, but it's a different line of evidence than seeing the changes appearing vertically in the fossil record in a logical order.
No, he isn't a mix of Quasi Moto and the Elephant man. He is formidable though.
At one time evidence that the earth was flat and evidence that the sun orbited the earth was also overwhelming.
I'm reproducing the first part of the paper. My copyright agreement with AAAS forbids me from reproducing the entire article.
Time Scales and Heterogeneous Structure in Geodynamic Earth Models
Hans-Peter Bunge, * Mark A. Richards, Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni, John R. Baumgardner, Stephen P. Grand, Barbara A. Romanowicz
Computer models of mantle convection constrained by the history of Cenozoic and Mesozoic plate motions explain some deep-mantle structural heterogeneity imaged by seismic tomography, especially those related to subduction. They also reveal a 150-million-year time scale for generating thermal heterogeneity in the mantle, comparable to the record of plate motion reconstructions, so that the problem of unknown initial conditions can be overcome. The pattern of lowermost mantle structure at the core-mantle boundary is controlled by subduction history, although seismic tomography reveals intense large-scale hot (low-velocity) upwelling features not explicitly predicted by the models.
H.-P. Bunge, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Laboratoire de Sismologie, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France.
M. A. Richards, Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
C. Lithgow-Bertelloni, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
J. R. Baumgardner, Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA.
S. P. Grand, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78713, USA.
B. A. Romanowicz, Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, and Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: bunge@ipgp.jussieu.fr
Geodynamic Earth models were pioneered by Hager and O'Connell (1), who calculated mantle flow by imposing present-day plate motions as a surface boundary condition. With the advent of global seismic tomography (2), these models were extended to predict the geoid and dynamic topography (3). However, these Earth models are "static," because they solve for instantaneous mantle flow in response to boundary conditions, internal loads, or both.
Time-dependent Earth models are required to understand how the evolution of mantle flow affects Earth processes that occur on geologic time scales. For example, continental shelf and platform stratigraphy are controlled by vertical motions of the continental lithosphere in response to mantle convection (4). True polar wandering is caused by changes in the inertia tensor as a result of mantle convection (5), and the alternation between periods of rapid and slow magnetic field reversals is probably related to mantle-controlled changes at the core-mantle boundary (CMB).
The development of time-dependent Earth models has been delayed for several reasons: (i) Sufficient computer power to resolve the narrow thermal boundary layers in global mantle convection models has not been available; (ii) it is not obvious how the internal mantle density structure can be related to plate motion observations at the surface; and (iii) it is not known how time-dependent Earth models can be initialized at some starting point in the past, because the mantle density structure is known only for the present day (6).
Some of these difficulties have been overcome. (i) Advances in computer power allow three-dimensional (3D) spherical convection to be simulated at a resolution on the order of 50 to 100 km (7, 8). At the same time, large-scale mantle velocity heterogeneity structure has been mapped in greater detail (9, 10), and seismic tomography has imaged subducted slabs (11-13). (ii) The connection of internal mantle density structure to the history of subduction (14, 15) has allowed estimation of the internal buoyancy forces that drive plates (16). These developments allow convection models to be combined with plate motion reconstructions and such models to be tested with seismic data.
Figure 1B shows an Earth model obtained with the TERRA convection code (17, 18). More than 10 million finite elements provide an element resolution of about 50 km throughout the mantle, which allowed us to model convection at a Rayleigh number of 108 (19). The history of plate motion is imposed as a time-dependent velocity boundary condition (20) starting in the mid-Mesozoic at 119 to 100 million years ago (Ma). We chose this starting time because well-constrained reconstructions exist only as far back in time as the 119 to 100 Ma period.
(Etc.)
The fact that Baumgardner on the one hand authors papers claiming great antiquity of the earth, and on the other claims evidence for young earth creationism, is not an irrelevant matter. It bears on his credibility. How can we believe anything he writes, if he's prepared to put his name on two completely discordant pieces of scientific work?
As for HalfFull's silly insinuations, until he's willing to say what he means forthrightly, he will be ignored.
(WP, returning to off-FR status)
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