Four Evidences of Cosmic Youth ("more empirically justifiable to infer young ages than old ages")

Creation-Evolution Headlines ^ | August 4, 2007

[GodGunsGuts]

Four Evidences of Cosmic Youth 08/04/2007

Astronomers and planetary scientists routinely talk in millions and billions of years. Three recent science news reports raise questions about how to fit apparently young objects into a vast timeline.

1) Lunar burps: The moon is passing gas, reported Science News). This explains the long history of observations of lunar transients, or bright flashes observed from Earth on certain parts of the moon. Arlin Crotts (Columbia U) believes the flashes come from the decay of uranium that escapes through cracks, but mentions the possibility that volcanism is still active.

2) Flinging rings: Saturn’s G-ring has been explained in an announcement from Jet Propulsion Lab (see also) Science Daily). A persistent ring arc in the outer bright rings, confined by the moon Mimas, gets swept by the magnetic field, flinging particles into the tenuous G-ring. (The G-ring lies between the thin F-ring and the broad E-ring fed by the Enceladus geysers; see 07/11/2006). The original paper in Science1 says, “The dust-sized particles that dominate this ring’s optical properties should erode quickly in Saturn’s magnetosphere, yet there was no direct evidence for larger source bodies that could replenish the dust and no clear explanation for the concentration of such bodies in this one region.” The article and original paper do not mention how long this has been going on, but presumably the material would have long been depleted well before millions of years, because collisions in the arc are steadily being ground to dust by collisions.

3) Bursting moons: Speaking of Enceladus, a recent paper in Icarus2 said that tidal flexing cannot explain the heat coming out of this small moon, either now or in the past:

"The heating in Enceladus in an equilibrium resonant configuration with other saturnian satellites can be estimated independently of the physical properties of Enceladus. We find that equilibrium tidal heating cannot account for the heat that is observed to be coming from Enceladus. Equilibrium heating in possible past resonances likewise cannot explain prior resurfacing events."

Meyer and Wisdom said that the neighboring moon Mimas, about the same size but closer to Saturn, experiences 11 times as much tidal heating but shows no sign of activity. In their conclusion, they wondered that both Io (at Jupiter) and Enceladus (at Saturn) are both so active:

"But it is curious that one has to appeal to nonequilibrium tidal oscillations or episodic activity to heat both Io and Enceladus (Ojakangas and Stevenson, 1986). If the fraction of time spent in an active state is, say, of order 20%, for each satellite, then the probability that both are found in an active state today is only 4%."

Cassini will fly by Enceladus at very close range on March 10 and even sample particles in the plume; see announcement in Space.com.

4) Veil unveilings: Portions of the wispy Veil Nebula in Cygnus have been photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope. This highly-distended nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion long thought to be tens of thousands of years old (see 02/16/2001). Now, a press release posted by Science Daily claims the explosion “could have been witnessed and recorded by ancient civilizations” as recently as 5,000 years ago.

Every once in awhile, it bears repeating: it is more empirically justifiable to infer young ages than old ages, because the observation-to-assumption ratio is much higher. You can take an observed phenomenon and extrapolate it backward from the present a bit – that is reasonable. But to start with an assumption of billions of years and then try to fit a short-lived phenomenon into it lowers the observation-to-assumption ratio by many orders of magnitude. Would it be reasonable to observe a sparkler for 5 seconds, and then claim it has been burning for 100 years? We think science should tether itself to the observations rather than run amok like a stray dog.

1 Matthew M. Hedman, Joseph A. Burns, Matthew S. Tiscareno, Carolyn C. Porco, Geraint H. Jones, Elias Roussos, Norbert Krupp, Chris Paranicas, and Sascha Kempf, “The Source of Saturn’s G Ring,” Science, 3 August 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5838, pp. 653-656, DOI: 10.1126/science.1143964.

2 Jennifer Meyer and Jack Wisdom, “Tidal Heating in Enceladus,” Icarus, Volume 188, Issue 2, June 2007, Pages 535-539.

[gondramB]

>>Perhaps you may wish to re-think that particular, shoot-from-the-lip statement?<<

Really, he self identifies as a Darwinist? I can’t find anywhere he does that. I know literally thousands of professional scientists and have never any one of them call himself a Darwinist.

Darwin is from the 1800’s - a lot has changed since then. They didn’t know about atoms, much less DNA.

But I could modify my statement a little bit

“if you see someone calling them self a Darwinist or referring to Darwinists as if they exist today you can be ALMOST CERTAIN that you are talking to someone without much science knowledge or SOMEONE DELIBERATELY DISTORTING THE TRUTH.”

[gondramB]

>>In the harsh light of reason, the article is exposed as the sham that it is. It’s a shame that credulous people believe such twisted lies.<<

The weird thing is that none of the four points in any way support the hypothesis. You have to wonder who their target audience is.

[Locke_2007]

“The weird thing is that none of the four points in any way support the hypothesis.”

Yes, which was exactly the point I was trying to make in my comments.

“You have to wonder who their target audience is.”

Credulous Creationists.

[SunkenCiv]

1) Lunar burps: The moon is passing gas, reported Science News). This explains the long history of observations of lunar transients, or bright flashes observed from Earth on certain parts of the moon. Arlin Crotts (Columbia U) believes the flashes come from the decay of uranium that escapes through cracks, but mentions the possibility that volcanism is still active.

Flashes observed on the Moon are the result of impacts, as are basically all lunar craters. Lunar material contains practically no uranium, and the volcanic explanation for lunar features was outmoded after Apollo 17.

Physics News Update Number 16 (Story #2)
by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein
January 10, 1991

The far side of the Moon, impossible to see from the Earth, was recently photographed by the Galileo spacecraft on its way toward Jupiter. New information about the mineralogical composition of the far side's crust was recorded and pictures revealed the largest impact basin yet seen on the moon, more than 2000 km in diameter and so deep that is may have penetrated through the crust to the moon's mantle. (Eos, January 1, 1991.)

A Celestial Collision
by Larry Gedney
February 10, 1983

Early in the evening of June 18, 1178, a group of men near Canterbury, England, stood admiring the sliver of a new moon hanging low in the west. In terms they later described to a monk who recorded their sighting, "Suddenly a flaming torch sprang from the moon, spewing fire, hot coals and sparks." In continuing their description of the event, they reported that "The moon writhed like a wounded snake and finally took on a blackish appearance"... [P]lanetary scientist Jack Hartung of the State University of New York... gathered enough clues to suggest that a large asteroid... might have smacked into the moon just over the horizon on the back side. To test his suspicion, Hartung went to the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, and inspected Russian and American photographs of the moon's back side. Sure enough, in just the right place, he found a remarkably fresh crater, 12 miles across and twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. From it radiated white splatter marks for hundreds of miles... Such an impact, reason astrophysicists, would set the moon to ringing like a gong for thousands of years... At Texas' McDonald Observatory, astronomers Odile Calame and J. Derral Mulholland of the University of Texas find that the surface of the moon moves back and forth fully 80 feet! Such an oscillation clearly implies a collision with something large, sometime within the not-too-distant past, probably within the memory of mankind. The problem is that there is no way to peg the date exactly at 1178.

A Flash From the Past:
New Evidence Supports Moon Blast
by Henry Fountain
March 4, 2003

On the Moon, material that is freshly exposed has a slight bluish tinge. Over time, because of the constant bombardment of cosmic rays, other high-energy particles and micrometeorites, the structure of the material changes and iron particles tend to predominate, making the material slightly red.

In the Clementine photos, Dr. Buratti and Mr. Johnson found one small crater that was "very, very blue and fresh appearing," Dr. Buratti said. It also happened to be in the exact center of the area they were looking. And it was the proper size — slightly less than a mile across, including the ejecta blanket. Dr. Buratti estimated the size of the asteroid at 20 yards in diameter.

Meteors Cause Visible Lunar Explosions
by Stefano Coledan
Popular Mechanics, 2002

Leonid meteor showers are produced when particles from the tail of the comet Tempel-Tuttle encounter the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of more than 60,000 mph... Unlike Earth, however, the moon doesn't have a protective atmosphere... when kilogram-size Leonids hit the lunar surface, they explode in spectacular fashion, digging craters and melting the terrain with temperatures reaching up to 200,000° F... only since 1999 that explosions on the moon have been seen from Earth, Cooke says. In fact, at least six Leonids hit the moon in 1999, causing explosions visible from Earth.

Magnetic Moondust
by Trudy E. Bell & Dr. Tony Phillip
April 5, 2006

"Moondust is strange stuff," explains Taylor. "Each little grain of moondust is coated with a layer of glass only a few hundred nanometers thick (1/100th the diameter of a human hair)." Taylor and colleagues have examined the coating through a microscope and found "millions of tiny specks of iron suspended in the glass like stars in the sky." Those iron specks are the source of the magnetism.

Researchers believe the glass is a by-product of bombardment. Tiny micrometeorites hit the surface of the moon, generating temperatures hotter than 2,000°C, literally the surface temperature of red stars. Such extreme heat vaporizes molecules in the melted soil. "The vapors consist of compounds such as FeO and SiO2," says Taylor. If the temperature is high enough, the molecules split into their atomic components: Si, Fe, O and so on. Later, when the vapors cool, the atoms recombine and condense on grains of moondust, depositing a layer of silicon dioxide (SiO2) glass peppered with tiny nuggets of pure iron (Fe).

[Locke_2007]

The Universe has no identifiable center. All galaxies are moving away from each other as space continually expands. You accuse evolutionists of making wild assumptions, yet you make the wildest assumption of all: that the Earth is the center of the Universe. Geocentrism was disproven almost 400 years ago. At any point in the universe (or any particle in an explosion) it will look like all other points/particles are expanding away from you wherever you happen to be inside that explosion. Assuming that you are at the center of such an explosion is both invalid (for obvious statistical reasons) and myopic. You need to look at the big picture. Furthermore, if the Earth were subjected to a gravitational time dilation effect that compressed billions of years into thousands on the Earth, this would be directly detectible by the local distribution of matter on inter-galactic scales and the rate at which we observe thermonuclear processes (and all other chemical processes and gravitational effects) occurring in areas of the Universe outside the local time dilation, never mind the Doppler effects on all incoming lightwaves. None of these effects is observed. Furthermore, observations have detected no bounds to the Universe, indeed, the rate at which it is expanding is accelerating. If this acceleration continues, in 200 billion years the expansion rate will be so high that individual atoms will be tearing themselves apart. I didn’t read that anywhere in the Bible – I guess God left that part out? The Universe is a vacuum fluctuation. Look it up.

[stillwaiting]

The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts.

ME: especially when you apriori, rule out any other possibility...

[Coyoteman]

Archaeology: few remains prior to 2500 BC. It investigates ancient civilizations, true, but millions of years has nothing to do with, for instance, investigating Jamestown, VA, or the Mayan ruins of Mexico.

Few remains prior to 2500 BC? I have obtained over 50 dates older than that myself! My colleagues around the world have thousands of cultures or communities dating older than that!

Radiocarbon dating is based on assumptions, such as the starting levels.

Starting levels are checked and accounted for via tree rings. And no, these trees do not grow all sorts of rings in one year. They use the standing dead bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of southern California. And those tree rings are cross-checked against volcanic events of known ages--and you know what? They agree.

It also assumes a uniformitarian history, and discounts catastrophic events.

False. It assumes anything as catastrophic as a global flood would leave some trace behind.

Lot's of controversy surrounding radiocarbon dating...wide ranges of conflicting dates, for instance. C14 dating - max: 10's of thousands of years...not millions.

The controversy is all from creationists who abhor any method that produces old dates--not for scientific reasons, but for religious reasons. The "controversy" is ginned up out of whole cloth to protect religious belief.

And the "wide range of conflicting dates?" I have examined a lot of these examples on creationist websites and find them to be the result of sloppy research, or outright fabrications. Here is an example:

Creationist claim: Natural gas from Alabama and Mississippi (Cretaceous and Eocene, respectively) — should have been 50 to 135 million years old. C14 gave dates of 30,000 and 34,000, respectively.

When you go back to the original article in Radiocarbon where these dates appeared, you find that they are cited as >30,000 and >34,000! Note the little “>” symbols in front of the dates? These mean “greater than” and indicates that the measured ages reflect the limits of the instrumentation rather than an actual age. In other words, the creationists either goofed and missed the “>” symbols, or lied and hoped that nobody would check up on their research. Busted!

And the fact that the radiocarbon method only goes back some 50,000 years? Everyone who uses that method knows that. It only comes as a surprise to those who have not studied science. Like several posters on this very site (not you) who have complained about using radiocarbon dating to date fossils. They expose their ignorance of the method rather than a flaw in the method.

So overall, archaeology and radiocarbon dating do not support a young earth, and there have been no flaws in the method pointed out by creationist which have withstood scientific scrutiny.

If you are any other readers here are interested, here are some good links for radiocarbon and radiometric dating:

ReligiousTolerance.org Carbon-14 Dating (C-14): Beliefs of New-Earth Creationists

Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective by Dr. Roger C. Wiens.

This site, BiblicalChronologist.org has a series of good articles on radiocarbon dating.

Are tree-ring chronologies reliable? (The Biblical Chronologist, Vol. 5, No. 1)

How does the radiocarbon dating method work? (The Biblical Chronologist, Vol. 5, No. 1)

How precise is radiocarbon dating?

Is radiocarbon dating based on assumptions?

Has radiocarbon dating been invalidated by unreasonable results?

Tree Ring and C14 Dating

Radiocarbon WEB-info Radiocarbon Laboratory, University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Radiocarbon -- full text of issues, 1959-2003.

[RightWhale]

We use statistical arguments when it suits us and deny statistical arguments when it doesn’t.

This is proof non-scientific methods are in use. Consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds.

[CottShop]

[[Perhaps young earth creationists should stick to religion and leave science to the scientists?]]

Yeah, wouldn’t want anyone exposing the dirty little secrets that work against evolution- let’s let the ‘real scientists’ just keep shoving their problem riddle fantasy down everyone’s throats uncontested

[MacDorcha]

“The Universe has no identifiable center.”

“Geocentrism was disproven almost 400 years ago.”

---

Just to be a pain- Don’t these two statements simply sugest that Geocentrism was unacceptably complex?

The simplest method to judge and gauge or relative position in the Universe is to state that the Earth revolves around the Sun and that the Solar System in turn, revolves around the center of the Milky Way, etc etc etc...

But that does not disprove, it merely points out the unneeded complexity (in regards to mathematics and observation) of that system.

Like I said, “just to be a pain”. :)

[BlueDragon]

"...Really, he self identifies as a Darwinist?"

He certainly doesn't correct those whom identify himself as such, does he? By your own shouting, one must conclude that Dawkins himself is either/or "without much science knowledge" [he is not without critics, in the science community, concerning his published writings] and/or is "someone deliberately distorting the truth".

You very well may know many whom you've never heard call themselves "Darwinists". Aah, but I have heard the use of "Darwin", as in "Darwin will take care of all that", the contextual meaning being that the fittest would survive --- and this usage arising within the framework of discussion concerning the implementation of an ambitious "Marine Protective Area" program. The speaker [of the quote] was a 'head of department' at one of the universities involved in this MPA effort.
This fellow used "Darwin" as a shortcut term, applying it to how events would transpire, who would get assigned to which task, etc., within the program, as it "evolved".

It appears he identified himself as a Darwinist, by the use of the term, at that time...and interestingly enough, I do believe has now found his own self to have been shunted aside, by the others, LOL....

[razzle]

“”modern evolutionary theory” in the 1930’s”

PC term for darwinism, specifically his macro-evolution theory - you know the one where one species lays an egg and out pops another different species, like a reptile egg cracking open and out flies a sparrow. Gould calls this accelerated equilibrium or neo-darwinsism. The reason for this is that Gould discovered that there was no way these tiny random mutations would ever amount to a hill of beans (but this hasn’t stopped the evos like the coyote from being true blue believers). Its all BS either way you look at it.

[Coyoteman]

Its all BS either way you look at it.

Thank you for your professional opinion.

I'll alert the Smithsonian and the other institutions that they can just shut down, and let the Nobel Prize committee that they can give all of their awards this year to a single recipient.

[GourmetDan]

"Perhaps young earth creationists should stick to religion and leave science to the scientists?"

Yes, they must be silenced at all costs.

The pronouncments of the priests of the church of naturalism must not be questioned.

[GourmetDan]

"Geocentrism was disproven almost 400 years ago."

Someone should have told Einstein and Hoyle:

“Can we formulate physical laws so that they are valid for all CS [coordinate systems], not only those moving uniformly, but also those moving quite arbitrarily, relative to each other? […] The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.”

Einstein, A. and Infeld, L. (1938) The Evolution of Physics (New-York: Simon and Schuster), 1961.

“The relation of the two pictures [geocentricity and heliocentricity] is reduced to a mere coordinate transformation and it is the main tenet of the Einstein theory that any two ways of looking at the world which are related to each other by a coordinate transformation are entirely equivalent from a physical point of view.... Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is ‘right’ and the Ptolemaic theory ‘wrong’ in any meaningful physical sense.”

Hoyle, Fred. Nicolaus Copernicus. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1973.

[Ichneumon]

“”modern evolutionary theory” in the 1930’s”
PC term for darwinism, specifically his macro-evolution theory - you know the one where one species lays an egg and out pops another different species, like a reptile egg cracking open and out flies a sparrow.

Such a goofy scenario has never, ever been any part of evolutionary theory. Period. I regret to inform you that you don't know what in the hell you're talking about.

A wise man once said, "never argue with a fool, bet him money." I'll bet you $1000 that you can't produce a verifiable quote from Darwin (or any other reputable evolutionary biologist) ever seriously stating that such an extreme scenario is part of evolutionary biology. (Note: Any half-assed failed attempt at providing a quote-mined, misquoted, or fabricated "quote" in support of your ridiculous claim will constitute an acceptance of my wager, and your subsequent failure to produce any valid supporting quote within a week's time will count as a loss of the wager on your part.) Your move. Or, perhaps you'd care to retract your BS.

Gould calls this accelerated equilibrium or neo-darwinsism.

No he doesn't. Not even if you had managed to write either term correctly. He calls that goofy kind of scenario "saltation". And he has long and loudly stated that saltation of that kind is not what he's talking about when he writes about punctuated equilibrium:

[From here]:

In particular, and most offensive to me, the urban legend rests on the false belief that radical, "middle-period" punctuated equilibrium became a saltational theory wedded to Goldschmidt's hopeful monsters as a mechanism. I have labored to refute this nonsensical charge from the day I first heard it.

In fact, he specifically laughed about such creationist misrepresentations, including exactly the one you here!

[From here]:

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am—for I have become a major target of these practices.

I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record—geologically "sudden" origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis)—reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological microsecond. It represents much less than 1 per cent of the average life-span for a fossil invertebrate species—more than ten million years. Large, widespread, and well established species, on the other hand, are not expected to change very much. We believe that the inertia of large populations explains the stasis of most fossil species over millions of years.

We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the different success of certain kinds of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuated and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. Yet a pamphlet entitled "Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax" states: "The facts of punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge…are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that Bryan insisted on, and which God has revealed to us in the Bible."

Continuing the distortion, several creationists have equated the theory of punctuated equilibrium with a caricature of the beliefs of Richard Goldschmidt, a great early geneticist. Goldschmidt argued, in a famous book published in 1940, that new groups can arise all at once through major mutations. He referred to these suddenly transformed creatures as "hopeful monsters." (I am attracted to some aspects of the non-caricatured version, but Goldschmidt's theory still has nothing to do with punctuated equilibrium—see essays in section 3 and my explicit essay on Goldschmidt in The Pandas Thumb.) Creationist Luther Sunderland talks of the "punctuated equilibrium hopeful monster theory" and tells his hopeful readers that "it amounts to tacit admission that anti-evolutionists are correct in asserting there is no fossil evidence supporting the theory that all life is connected to a common ancestor." Duane Gish writes, "According to Goldschmidt, and now apparently according to Gould, a reptile laid an egg from which the first bird, feathers and all, was produced." Any evolutionists who believed such nonsense would rightly be laughed off the intellectual stage; yet the only theory that could ever envision such a scenario for the origin of birds is creationism—with God acting in the egg.

So not only did Gould *not* advocate the ludicrous notion of a reptile egg hatching out a sparrow, he *explicitly* called it laughable and nonsense.

Do please try to learn something about a subject before you say anything about it, lest you spew utter nonsense and falsehoods as you are doing here.

The reason for this is that Gould discovered that there was no way these tiny random mutations would ever amount to a hill of beans

Again, no, he didn't. He didn't "discover" any such thing, nor did he ever say that he had. Anyone who has actually read many of Gould's essays couldn't possibly have missed the fact that he has always been a vocal proponent of how strong the evidence is for how minor mutations accumulate to produce long-scale evolutionary change. You're just making this up as you go along, aren't you?

(but this hasn’t stopped the evos like the coyote from being true blue believers).

Well of course -- your wild fantasies and false claims *are* unlikely to stop anyone from realizing the validity of evolutionary biology, because it's based on vast amounts of evidence and research, along multiple independently cross-confirming lines, meticulously gathered over more than a century.

The only surprising thing is that you would find this surprising. Not everyone's education is as crippled by disinformation as yours is.

Its all BS either way you look at it.

Well, I'll have to defer to you as the expert on *that* topic, anyway.

[Locke_2007]

You are twisting facts. They were speaking theoretically. What they are actually saying is that there is no reference point in the Universe that can be declaimed the “center” that is not equivalent to any other point, as far as observations from that point are concerned.

Are you seriously contending that the Earth (or Sun) is the center of the Universe because of those out-of-context quotes? Those quotes are as misleading as the ones in the Creationist article that started this thread. Do you understand no cosmology at all? Does the Earth not orbit the Sun, and the Sun not orbit the galaxy ~8 kiloparsecs out from the center in the Orion Arm? This would cause the center of the Universe to constantly be shifting, wouldn’t it? What Creationist site did you get those quotes from? BTW, Einstein never accepted the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is a proven fact. He wasn’t right about everything, and your misquoting him to obfuscate the truth of what I said does nothing to add to a reasoned debate.

[Ichneumon]

Furthermore, the different lines of evidence are consistent; they all point to the same big picture. For example, evidence from gene duplications in the yeast genome shows that its ability to ferment glucose evolved about eighty million years ago. Fossil evidence shows that fermentable fruits became prominent about the same time. Genetic evidence for major change around that time also is found in fruiting plants and fruit flies (Benner et al. 2002).

The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts.

Exactly. There are vast numbers of such examples, where all the different, *independent* lines of evidence all line up so perfectly at the same answer that only the most stubborn person would continue to deny the validity of the conclusion, or try to argue that some "alternative interpretation" might have any chance in hell of aligning so perfectly.

For yet one more example, of tens of thousands, here's something I wrote a while back about a genetic study of army ants:

Meanwhile, the study's findings are interesting in their own right, and add yet more data to the massive mountains of hard evidence *for* evolution (which insulting cartoons by our resident creationists do nothing to refute).

Using a variety of measures (DNA base-pair sequences consisting of three nuclear and one mitochondrial gene totalling 3538 basepairs from each of the 49 extant ant species, fossil evidence, and 116 morphological metrics), the author's mathematical analysis produced a cladistic tree for both army ants and many non-army ant species as follows:

The letters (A-H) indicate points in time where the subsequent "branches" are known to have already existed, because representatives from each "branch" have been disocovered in the fossil record.

The branches marked with "*" are branches where the ML tree analysis produced results with "a posterior probability of >95% after independent Bayesian phylogenetic analysis".

As described in the press release, this does indeed clearly indicate that all modern army ants (species shown in bold type) descended from a common ancestor, instead of from two or more common ancestors which were themselves not army ants.

It's also interesting to note that all the "old world" (OW) and "new world" (NW) army ants are separate branches of the oldest split of the army ant family tree. This demonstrates that, as previously presumed, the lifestyle of the army ant (especially, wingless queens) precludes any cross-continental "crossovers", where some species had (during the last 100 million years) managed to travel from one continent to another and take up new residence there.

This correct presumption -- along with the incorrect presumption that army ants had appeared more recently than 100 million years ago -- was the basis for the original assumption that old-world and new-world army ants had perhaps evolved independently (on their respective continents).

Instead, this DNA and morphological analysis (which, by the way, does *not* depend on a "genetic clock") strongly indicates that army ants first arose approximately 105 million years ago.

The reason that this is such an interesting result is that it *very* closely matches the known time of existence of the Cretaceous super-continent of Gondwana, *and* the time of the old-world/new-world army ant split matches the known time of the break-up of that supercontinent into separate continents which contain what is now South America (on one side) and Africa (on the other), the respective homes of the new-world and old-world army ants.

In other words, the analysis strongly matches an evolutionary model in many different ways, including several I haven't even mentioned here.

First, the fact that such a "family tree" works out *at all* is strong evidence that evolution has actually taken place. If instead ants of various species and/or "kinds" had been separately created, there's no reason at all that their DNA details *and* their fossil traces *and* their morphological details would so neatly fit a timewise evolutionary tree of common descent *at all*. For just one example, if the species at the top of the tree and the bottom of the tree shared a characteristic gene sequence, while the other species didn't (because, say, God felt they each would benefit from it), then the entire tree structure would be blatantly violated. Instead, every time DNA/morphological data is analyzed in this way, even across widely divergent species like cows and giraffes and whales, an implied "tree of common descent" is inarguably implied by the evidence.

Second, in this case, the "family tree" implied by the evidence "just happens" to *exactly* match geologic events which would be expected to explain parts of the tree if it came about via evolution. For example, if all modern army ants had a common ancestor, then at some point in time the ancestral army ant must have arisen at a particular geographic location (obviously). This would be a problem if, for example, the data implied that this happened at a time before ants existed at all, or after army ants were known to exist in fossils, etc. And yet, when the available evidence is objectively analyzed by a mathematical algorithm with no ideological ax to grind, the results beautifully match an evolutionary origin consistent with the known fossil record, timewise.

Furthermore, red flags would be raised if the time-and-place of the calculated origin happened to fall in a place where army ants would be highly unlikely to have gotten from their point of origin to the separate continents where they are seen today (e.g. South America and Africa). But lo and behold, the analysis shows the time-and-place of the calculated origin to be at a time when those two continents were known to be joined.

Furthermore, the calculated split between old-world and new-world army ants is found to fall at a time when the continents themselves split apart, perfectly explaining how and why the populations on each new continent, now isolated, should (and thus did) diverge into families of species which evolved in unrelated directions from each other (thus forming species that, while all still army ants in lifestyle, show characteristic differences).

And so on and so on.

Again and again, every time studies and analyses like this -- and every other conceivable type -- are performed, the results "just happen" to fall in a way that makes perfect sense if modern (and fossil) life had arisen from earlier life forms in a common-descent, evolutionary process, like individual jigsaw puzzle pieces all of which form a smooth, coherent picture (albeit with some pieces still not yet discovered) where all the pieces found so far all mesh smoothly with their neighbors.

If evolution is *not* true, why does the jigsaw puzzle formed by the mountains of evidence so well match the evolutionary picture predicted by the theory?

[Ichneumon]

[The evidence is extensive and consistent, and it points unambiguously to evolution, including common descent, change over time, and adaptation influenced by natural selection. It would be preposterous to refer to these as anything other than facts.]

especially when you apriori, rule out any other possibility...

I'm sorry that you completely missed the point. The point is that the evidence overwhelmingly matches one and only one theory, and that continues to be the case whether or not anyone has allegedly "ruled out any other possibility" in their own mind. Your unsupported charges of bias aside, the vast mountains of evidence itself rules out the other possibilities, while massively and repeatedly validating one, through multiply independent cross-confirming lines of investigation.

[Ichneumon]

You are twisting facts.

Welcome to GourmetDan's world. He has no problem believing three impossible things before breakfast.

They were speaking theoretically. What they are actually saying is that there is no reference point in the Universe that can be declaimed the “center” that is not equivalent to any other point, as far as observations from that point are concerned.

You know that and I know that, but he doesn't.

Are you seriously contending that the Earth (or Sun) is the center of the Universe because of those out-of-context quotes?

Yes. Yes he is. He's one of the rare breed, a real live geocentrist.

Those quotes are as misleading as the ones in the Creationist article that started this thread.

Well of course they are, at least when employed in the way he's trying to use them.

Do you understand no cosmology at all?

In my experience? Yes, that is indeed the case. Otherwise he would have long ago abandoned geocentrism. Stellar parallax alone does that, not to mention dozens of other observations.

Does the Earth not orbit the Sun, and the Sun not orbit the galaxy ~8 kiloparsecs out from the center in the Orion Arm? This would cause the center of the Universe to constantly be shifting, wouldn’t it?

And that's just for starters.

What Creationist site did you get those quotes from?

Heck, even most creationists aren't goofy enough to go in for geocentrism.

BTW, Einstein never accepted the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is a proven fact. He wasn’t right about everything, and your misquoting him to obfuscate the truth of what I said does nothing to add to a reasoned debate.

Ah, there's your mistake. You presume he's here for reasoned debate.