Variations that have nostrils moving from the end of the nose to the top of the head in a temporal sequence? That is *not* a within species variation. Why would God create species that so closely matched a progressive change from legs to shorter legs to no legs?
"Keep in mind how much variation has occurred in man since the flood. There would have been variation before the flood, and some of those wouldn't have necessarily looked identical to any of the current day races. "
Assuming that the flood occurred roughly 4000 to 4500 years ago, there has been *no* morphological change other than within group variation (such as the difference between you and your parents) in Homo sapiens. The only visible change we've seen is in height, which has been attributed to improvement in diet. By the way, within species variation, when caused by variation in allele frequency *is* evolution.
"Again, it depends on what timeframe you assign to the fossil record, and the way you interpret the record, but yes extinctions could have occurred when God first cursed the earty, anytime in the 1500-2000 years up to the flood, as a direct result of the flood, shortly after the flood, or in the estimated 4000-4500 years since the flood. (As a direct result of the flood, depends on whether you interpret "all animals" to mean representatives of "all animals that lived on the earth at the time" or "all animals that were saved".) "
The time-frame assigned to the fossil record has been determined through a number of different measurement systems to be much older than 4500 years. The dating is unquestionable unless you perform some rather questionable metaphysical tricks.
"Some extinctions like the Coalanthe and ratfish, weren't extinctions at all. They just looked like it from the fossil record. "
Which is irrelevant to the validity of evolution or creation.
"I believe the oldest tree ring series is thought to go back 16,000 years but is controversial because the ring patterns are often duplicated, significant variations occur between trees for the same periods and thus the reconstruction of them in a series is somewhat dubious.
From Mark Isaac, on the Talk Origins web site:
"For some trees, including bristlecone pine, ponderosa pine, and douglass fir, double rings are rare and easy to spot with a little practice. A bigger problem is missing rings; a bristlecone pine can have up to 5 percent of its rings missing. Thus, dates derived from dendrochronology, if they are suspect at all, should indicate ages too young. "
"For most of the dendrochronological record, dates are determined from more than one source, so errors can be spotted and corrected. "
The link you posted to AiG does not address varves in any way that can be construed as anything but a blatantly contrived strawman. Scientists know that varves can be developed quickly which is why they look for seasonal markers to help differentiate them along annual lines. They have done tests to determine speed of deposition according to particle size and type as well as water flow rates. When they have more than 20,000,000 varves as in the Green River formation it is impossible to even suggest a time frame of less than a few 100,000 years.
One 45,000 year varve formation had annual diatom bloom so was highly accurate. This was used to calibrate carbon 14 dating. Other varves were subsequently verified by radiometric dating.
I realize that AiG likes to make believe that dating methods are based solely on assumptions of unverifiable decay rates, but they are wrong; all dating methods are verified through either non-radiometric, or on previously verified radiometrics. In other words they a built up from things we know.