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We Dodged Extinction
ABCNews ^ | Lee Dye

Posted on 01/29/2002 7:23:19 PM PST by Sabertooth

We Dodged Extinction
Chimpanzees
‘Pruned’ Family Tree Leaves Little Genetic Variety

Just one group of chimpanzees can have more genetic diversity than all 6 billion humans on the planet. (Corel)



Special to ABCNEWS.com
A worldwide research program has come up with astonishing evidence that humans have come so close to extinction in the past that it’s surprising we’re here at all.
    Pascal Gagneux, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at San Diego, and other members of a research team studied genetic variability among humans and our closest living relatives, the great apes of Africa.
     Humanoids are believed to have split off from chimpanzees about 5 million to 6 million years ago. With the passage of all that time, humans should have grown at least as genetically diverse as our “cousins.” That turns out to be not true.
     “We actually found that one single group of 55 chimpanzees in west Africa has twice the genetic variability of all humans,” Gagneux says. “In other words, chimps who live in the same little group on the Ivory Coast are genetically more different from each other than you are from any human anywhere on the planet.”

Primate Tree
The branch lengths illustrate the number of genetic differences, not only between species, but among species as well. The pruned bush for humans shows how little genetic diversity exists. (Marco Doelling/ABCNEWS.com)

The Family Bush
“The family tree shows that the human branch has been pruned,” Gagneux says. “Our ancestors lost much of their original variability.”
     “That makes perfectly good sense,” says Bernard Wood, the Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University and an expert on human evolution.
     “The amount of genetic variation that has accumulated in humans is just nowhere near compatible with the age” of the species, Wood says. “That means you’ve got to come up with a hypothesis for an event that wiped out the vast majority of that variation.”
     The most plausible explanation, he adds, is that at least once in our past, something caused the human population to drop drastically. When or how often that may have happened is anybody’s guess. Possible culprits include disease, environmental disaster and conflict.

Almost Extinct
“The evidence would suggest that we came within a cigarette paper’s thickness of becoming extinct,” Wood says.
     Gagneux, who has spent the last 10 years studying chimpanzees in Africa, says the implications are profound.
     “If you have a big bag full of marbles of different colors, and you lose most of them, then you will probably end up with a small bag that won’t have all the colors that you had in the big bag,” he says.
     Similarly, if the size of the human population was severely reduced some time in the past, or several times, the “colors” that make up our genetic variability will also be reduced.
     If that is indeed what happened, then we should be more like each other, genetically speaking, than the chimps and gorillas of Africa. And that’s just what the research shows.
     “We all have this view in our minds that we [humans] started precariously as sort of an ape-like creature” and our numbers grew continuously, adds Wood. “We’re so used to the population increasing inexorably over the past few hundred years that we think it has always been like that.”
     But if it had, Gagneux notes, our genetic variability should be at least as great as that of apes.

A Stormy Past
Gagneux is the lead author of a report that appeared in the April 27 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, carried out with researchers in Germany, Switzerland and the United States, is the first to examine large numbers of all four ape species in Africa.
     “We can do that now because new technology allows us to non-invasively take some hair, or even some fruit that these apes chew, and then we get their DNA from a couple of cells that stick to a hair or a piece of fruit they chewed.”
     Then they compared the DNA variability of apes and chimps to that of 1,070 DNA sequences collected by other researchers from humans around the world. They also added the DNA from a bone of a Neanderthal in a German museum. The results, the researchers say, are very convincing.
     “We show that these taxa [or species] have very different amounts and patterns of genetic variation, with humans being the least variable,” they state.
     Yet humans have prevailed, even though low genetic variability leaves us more susceptible to disease.
     “Humans, with what little variation they have, seem to maximize their genetic diversity,” Gagneux says.
     “It’s ironic,” he notes, that after all these years the biggest threat to chimpanzees is human intrusion into their habitats. When he returned to Africa to study a group of chimps he had researched earlier, Gagneux found them gone.
     “They were dead,” he says, “and I mean the whole population had disappeared in five years.”
     Yet as our closest living relatives, chimps still have much to teach us about ourselves.

Lee Dye’s column appears Wednesdays on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer for the Los Angeles Times, he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.



TOPICS: Front Page News; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: crevolist; godsgravesglyphs
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Comment #81 Removed by Moderator

To: Sabertooth
Suggested experiment for the evolutionary biologists that could put Noah and the flood right out of business as an explanation for the human/chimp genetic diversity differences. -------- Measure the genetic diversity of fishes and sea creatures and compare those differences to the chimp and human differences. Since Noah had no reason to take sea creatures along they would have not run into the Noah pair bottleneck to genetic diversity. They should have much greater diversity than the humans and the Noah land passangers. Hope they will not ignore this crucial experiment if they have not already done it.
82 posted on 01/29/2002 8:56:11 PM PST by Rushian
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To: John H K
Most likely candidate I've seen for the cause of the almost-extinction was the eruption of the Supervolcano Toba in Indonesia 70,000 years ago...the last Supervolcano to have erupted.

That's a good point. I think the scientists that thought about that one projected 5000-10000 survivors of humans ... tops.

Of course there is the flood as well.

83 posted on 01/29/2002 9:03:55 PM PST by Centurion2000
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To: Rushian
Suggested experiment for the evolutionary biologists... Measure the genetic diversity of fishes and sea creatures and compare those differences to the chimp and human differences.

There's a problem with this experiment... fish genetics can't be extrapolated to mammal genetics.

For example, hybrization appears much more frequently among fish in nature, than it does with mammals. Also, in captivity, fertile hybrids occur between related species, and hybridization even takes place between different genera. Not so with mammals.


84 posted on 01/29/2002 9:10:14 PM PST by Sabertooth
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To: Sabertooth
If you have to have mammals test the sea mammals such as whales,pinnipeds, seals, sea Lions and walruses, etc.
85 posted on 01/29/2002 9:14:04 PM PST by Rushian
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To: Sabertooth
The First Man Was a Woman

I can’t prove it, but I believe the first man was a woman.

Modern science has used mitochondrial DNA to track human origins back to a single female. This is the so-called Eve hypothesis.

I believe that this was the first fully human Homo Sapiens. A girl was born with a genetic “defect” in her mitochondria. The mitochondria control the enzyme activity in the cell. This change affected her metabolism at a deep cellular level.

The first human had an altered metabolism that manifested itself in a suite of gross differences:

She lacked vibrissae, the sensory whiskers common to all other mammals.
She had full lips, not the thin line at the rim of the mouth typical of other species.
She was weak, compared to others of her kind.
Her features retained a more child-like appearance as she grew up.
But, the two most critical differences were a lack of body hair, and a monthly estrus cycle.

Why are the last two most critical?

The lack of body hair provided an interesting advantage. To understand this, let’s look at cats. There is a breed of hairless cat. Instead of fur, they have a velvety skin. Their owners often comment on how affectionate their cats are. Affectionate? Not really, these cats are just COLD, they snuggle to keep warm!

Back to our first human, she sure is cuddly. She is much more desirable than her standoffish hairy sisters.

Rather than the annual fertility cycle, she is “in heat” all of the time. Cuddly and friendly too!

Lacking muscle strength, she needed to be protected. The beginnings of love as we now understand it.

That she needed protection is deeply ingrained it the human psyche. In propaganda there are surprisingly few common themes. The enemy is depicted as snakes, spiders, octopus, and, … and … hairy ape-men seizing the furless women. The massive muscular King Kong is interested in the petite Fay Rae. Did you ever wonder why this resonated with the audience?

Simple. The first man was a woman…

86 posted on 01/29/2002 9:17:26 PM PST by null and void
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To: John H K
"It's not unusual for extinction events to have a larger effect on some animals compared to others. For one thing, they tend to affect animals more the larger they are (witness dinosaurs and mammals)"

I don't know that it's at all relevant to the discussion, but when a pond "winterkills", it's the bigger fish that die off. The worse the kill, the smaller the victims, so with a "mild" kill, only the largest fish will die. The explantion I've heard is that larger fish need a disproportionatly greater level of oxygen than small fish. How/if this translates to air-breathers I do not know.

87 posted on 01/29/2002 9:20:21 PM PST by Don Joe
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To: Diddle E. Squat
That would be "environmental disaster."
88 posted on 01/29/2002 9:28:23 PM PST by Carry_Okie
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To: Doctor Stochastic
This agrees with the Toba event. Looks like that eruption wiped out most of the human race.

And the eruption selectively killed hominids, sparing the chimps?

89 posted on 01/29/2002 9:30:41 PM PST by AndrewC
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To: Doctor Stochastic; Sabertooth
That would depend on where the populations resided and the relative numbers...,

Since the world at that period was in the throes of an ice age it can be assumed that few modern humans lived in Europe (unless we can equate Neanderthal as modern).

Asia would have been toast and Africa affected for scores of years due to massive climate upheavals.

It is possible that all that remained were residents of South Western Africa which repopulated Asia during the inter glacial periods ca 60,000ya.

Fits the "Out of Africa" theory.

90 posted on 01/29/2002 9:34:19 PM PST by Mike Darancette
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To: realpatriot71
Well in the Flood story there were eight people left after the flood to populate the world, but only two chimps. I wonder how that would explain the chimps having more genetic diversity when they started with a smaller gene pool in the first place. The Noah story helps not a bit here . . . sorry.

There's nothing quite like a gross over-simplification that fails its own supporting theory upon inspection.

The replicative cycle of chimps is shorter than the typical human. There would have been many more generations of chimps than people in the intervening period from a common singularity greatly exceeding the distinctions of four to one. Try again, and no, I am not a Biblical literalist.

91 posted on 01/29/2002 9:34:21 PM PST by Carry_Okie
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Comment #92 Removed by Moderator

To: Carry_Okie
I tried this explanation earlier, but it didn't seem to sink in.
93 posted on 01/29/2002 9:39:52 PM PST by Rushian
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To: John H K
view>source> GEOLOGY and the FLOOD function displayWindow(theURL,winName,width,height,features) { //v3.1 // Implemented by Jason Daniel Henderson, Sr. Web Designer var window_width = width; var window_height = height; var newfeatures= features; var window_top = (screen.height-window_height)/2; var window_left = (screen.width-window_width)/2; newWindow=window.open(''+ theURL + '',''+ winName + '','width=' + window_width + ',height=' + window_height + ',top=' + window_top + ',left=' + window_left + ',features=' + newfeatures + ''); newWindow.focus(); } //--> // implemented by ICR Sr. Web Designer, Jason Daniel Henderson function printWindow(){ bV = parseInt(navigator.appVersion) if (bV >= 4) window.print() } '+descrip+''; return mes; } // -- End Hiding Here -->

Institute for Creation Research

"Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." Rev 4:11
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IMPACT No. 6

 


GEOLOGY and the FLOOD

by Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.

Institute for Creation Research, PO Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92021
Voice: (619) 448-0900 FAX: (619) 448-3469

"Vital Articles on Science/Creation" July/August 1973
Copyright © 1973 All Rights Reserved

 


In the early days of geology, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries, the dominant explanation for the sedimentary rocks and their fossilized contents was that they had been laid down in the great Flood of the days of Noah. This was the view of Steno, the "father of stratigraphy", whose principles of stratigraphic interpretation are still followed today, and of John Woodward, Sir Isaac Newton’s hand-picked successor at Cambridge, whose studies on sedimentary processes laid the foundation for modern sedimentology and geomorphology. These men and the other flood geologists of their day were careful scientists, thoroughly acquainted with the sedimentary rocks and the geophysical processes which formed them. In common with most other scientists of their day, they believed in God and the divine authority of the Bible. Evolution and related naturalistic speculations had been confined largely to the writings of social philosophers and rationalistic theologians.

Toward the end of the 18th century, and especially in the first half of the 19th century, the ancient pagan evolutionary philosophies began to be revived and promoted by the various socialistic revolutionary movements of the times. These could make little headway, however, as long as the scientists were predominantly creationists. Evolution obviously required aeons of geologic time and the scientific community, including the great Isaac Newton himself, was committed to the Usher chronology, with its recent special creation and worldwide Flood.

Therefore, it was necessary, first of all, that the Flood be displaced as the framework of geologic interpretation, so that earth history could once again, as in the days of the ancient Greek and Oriental philosophers, be expanded into great reaches and cycles of time over endless ages. Geologic catastrophism must be, at all costs replaced by uniformitarianism, which would emphasize the slow, uniform processes or the present as a sufficient explanation for all earth structures and past history. This was accomplished in two stages: first. the single cataclysm of the Flood was replaced by the multiple catastrophes and new creations of Cuvier and Buckland, each separated from the next by a long period of uniform processes; second, these periodic catastrophes were gradually de-emphasized and the uniformitarian intervals enlarged until the latter finally incorporated the entire history.

It is significant that this uniformitarian revolution was led, not by professional scientific geologists, but by amateurs, men such as Buckland (a theologian), Cuvier (an anatomist), Buffon (a lawyer), Hutton (an agriculturalist), Smith (a surveyor), Chambers (a journalist), Lyell (a lawyer), and others of similar variegated backgrounds. The acceptance of Lyell’s uniformitarianism laid the foundation for the sudden success of Darwinism in the decade following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin frequently acknowledged his debt to Lyell, who he said gave him the necessary time required for natural selection to produce meaningful evolutionary results.

Nevertheless, the actual facts or geology still favored catastrophism, and flood geology never died completely. Although the uniformitarian philosophers could point to certain difficulties in the Biblical geology of their predecessors, there were still greater difficulties in uniformitarianism. Once uniformitarianism had served its purpose—namely, that of selling the scientific community and the general public on the great age of the earth—then geologists could again use local catastrophic processes whenever required for specific geologic interpretations. Stephen Gould has expressed it this way:

"Methodological uniformitarianism was useful only when science was debating the status of the supernatural in its realm." 1

Heylmun goes even further:

"The fact is, the doctrine of uniformitarianism is no more ‘proved’ than some of the early ideas of world-wide cataclysms have been disproved."2

With adequate time apparently available, assisted by man’s natural inclination to escape from God if possible, Darwin’s theory of evolution by chance variation and natural selection was eagerly accepted by the learned world. Pockets of scientific resistance in the religious community were quickly neutralized by key clerical endorsements of the "day-age theory", which seemingly permitted Christians to hang on to Genesis while at the same time riding the popular wave of long ages and evolutionary progress. For those fundamentalists who insisted that the creation week required a literal interpretation, the "gap theory" ostensibly permitted them to do so merely by inserting the geologic ages in an imaginary gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, thus ignoring their evolutionary implications.

The Biblical Deluge was similarly shorn of scientific significance by reinterpreting it in terms of a "local flood" or, for those few people who insisted that the Genesis narrative required a universal inundation, a "tranquil flood". Lyell himself proposed a worldwide tranquil flood that left no geological traces. In any case, the field of earth history, was taken over almost completely by evolutionists.

In turn, this capitulation of the scientists to evolution was an enormous boon to the social revolutionaries, who could now proclaim widely that their theories of social change were grounded in natural science. For example, Karl Marx and the Communists quickly aligned themselves with evolutionary geology and biology, Marx even asking to dedicate his Das Kapital to Charles Darwin.

"However harshly a philosopher may judge this characterization of Marx’s theory (i.e., that Marxism unites science and revolution intrinsically and inseparably) an historian can hardly fail to agree that Marx’s claim to give scientific guidance to those who would transform society has been one of the chief reasons for his doctrine’s enormous influence."3

The "science" referred to in the above is, in context, nothing but naturalistic evolution based on uniformitarian geology. Similarly, Nietzschean racism, Freudian amoralism, and military imperialism all had their roots in the same soil and grew in the same climate.

Yet all the while the foundation was nothing but sand. Uniformitarian geology was contrary to both the Bible and to observable science. Now, a hundred years later, the humanistic and naturalistic culture erected upon that foundation is beginning to crumble, and men are beginning again to look critically at the foundation.

The two Biblical compromise positions are now widely recognized as unacceptable, either theologically or scientifically. A brief discussion of the fallacies of the "day-age" and "gap" theories. as well as "theistic evolution" and "progressive creation" appeared in Impact Article No. 5, of the ICR ACTS & FACTS, "Evolution and the Bible."

The local-flood theory is even less defensible. The entire Biblical account of the Flood is absurd if read in a local-flood context. For example, there was obviously no need for any kind of an ark if the flood were only a local flood. Yet the Bible describes it as a huge vessel with a volumetric capacity which can be shown to be equal to that of over 500 standard railroad stock cars! According to the account, the ark floated freely over all the high mountains and finally came to rest, five months later, on the mountains of Ararat. The highest of these mountains today is 17,000 feet in elevation, and a flood which could cover such a mountain six months or more was no local flood!

Furthermore, God’s promise never to send such a flood again, sealed with the continuing testimony of the rainbow, has been broken again and again if the Flood was only a local flood.

A list of 96 reasons why the Flood must be understood as worldwide is given in one of the writer’s books.4

The tranquil-flood theory is even more ridiculous. It is difficult to believe anyone could take it seriously and yet a number of modem evangelical geologists do believe in this idea. Even local floods are violent phenomena and uniformitarian geologists today believe they are responsible for most of the geologic deposits of the earth’s crust. A universal Flood that could come and go softly, leaving no geologic evidence of its passage, would require an extensive complex of miracles for its accomplishment. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the hydraulics of moving water and the hydrodynamic forces associated with it would know that a world-wide "tranquil" flood is about as reasonable a concept as a tranquil explosion!

As far as science is concerned, it should be remembered that events of the past are not reproducible, and are, therefore, inaccessible to the scientific method. Neither uniformitarianism nor catastrophism can actually be proved scientifically. Nevertheless, the Flood model fits all the geologic facts more directly and simply, with a smaller number of qualifications and secondary assumptions, than does the uniformitarian model.

An obvious indication of global water activity is the very existence of sedimentary rocks all over the world which, by definition, were formed by the erosion, transportation, and deposition of sediments by moving water with the sediments gradually converted into stone after they had been deposited.

Similarly, an obvious indicator of catastrophism is the existence of fossils in the sedimentary rocks. The depositional processes must have been rapid, or fossils could not have been preserved in them.

"To become fossilized, a plant or animal must usually have hard parts, such as bone, shell, or wood. It must be buried quickly to prevent decay and must be undisturbed throughout the long process."5

The importance of this fact is obvious when one realizes that the identification of the geologic "age" of any given sedimentary rock depends solely upon the assemblage of fossils which it contains. The age does not depend on radiometric dating, as is obvious from the fact that the geologic age system had been completely worked out and most major formations dated before radioactivity was even discovered. Neither does the age depend upon the mineralogic or petrologic character of a rock, as is obvious from the fact that rocks of all types of composition, structure, and degree of hardness can be found in any "age". It does not depend upon vertical position in the local geologic strata, since rocks of any "age" may and do rest horizontally and conformably on rocks of any other age. No, a rock is dated solely by its fossils.

"The only chronometric scale applicable in geologic history for the stratigraphic classification of rocks and for dating geologic events exactly is furnished by the fossils. Owing to the irreversibility of evolution, they offer an unambiguous time-scale for relative age determinations and for world-wide correlation of rocks."6

Thus, the existence and identification of distinctive geologic ages is based on fossils in the sedimentary rocks. On the other hand, the very existence of fossils in sedimentary rocks is prima facie evidence that each such fossiliferous rock was formed by aqueous catastrophism. The one question, therefore, is whether the rocks were formed by a great multiplicity of local catastrophes scattered through many ages, or by a great complex of local catastrophes all conjoined contemporaneously in one single age, terminated by the cataclysm.

The latter is the most likely. Each distinctive stratum was laid down quickly, since it obviously represents a uniform set of water flow conditions, and such uniformity never persists very long. Each set of strata in a given formation must also have been deposited in rapid succession, or there would be evidence of unconformity—that is, periods of uplift and erosion—at the various interfaces.

Where unconformity does exist, say at the top of a formation, there may well have been an interval of uplift or tilting, at that location. followed by either sub-aerial or sub-marine erosion for a time. However, since such formations invariably grade laterally into other formations (no unconformity, is worldwide), sooner or later one will come to a location where there is a conformable relationship between this formation and the one above it. Thus, each formation is succeeded somewhere by another one which was deposited rapidly after the first one ... and so on throughout the entire geologic column.

Thus, there is no room anywhere for long ages. Each formation must have been produced rapidly, as evidenced by both its fossils and its depositional characteristics, and each formation must have been followed rapidly by another one, which was also formed rapidly! The whole sequence, therefore, must have been formed rapidly, exactly as the Flood model postulates.

But, then. what about the geologic ages? Remember that the only means of identifying these ages is by fossils and fossils speak of rapid formation. Even assuming a very slow formation of these beds, however, how can fossils tell the age of a rock?

Obviously, fossils could be distinctive time markers only if the various kinds each had lived in different ages. But how can we know which fossils lived in which ages? No scientists were there to observe them, and true science requires observation. Furthermore, by analogy with the present (and uniformitarianism is supposed to be able to decipher the past in terms of the present), many different kinds of plants and animals are living in the present world, including even the "primitive" one-celled organisms with which evolution is supposed to have begun. Why, therefore, isn’t it better to assume that all major kinds also lived together in past ages as well? Some kinds, such as the dinosaurs, have become extinct, but practically all present-day kinds of organisms are also found in the fossil world.

The only reason for thinking that different fossils should represent different ages is the assumption of evolution. If evolution is really true, then of course fossils should provide an excellent means for identifying the various ages, an "unambiguous time-scale," as Schindewolf put it. Hedberg says:

"Fossils have furnished, through their record of the evolution of life on this planet, an amazingly effective key to the relative positioning of strata in widely-separated regions."7

The use of fossils as time-markers thus depends completely on "their record of evolution." But, then, how do we know that evolution is true? Why, because of the fossil record!

"Fossils provide the only historical, documentary evidence that life has evolved from simpler to more and more complex forms."8

So the only proof of evolution is based on the assumption of evolution! The system of evolution arranges the fossils, the fossils date the rocks, and the resulting system of fossil-dated rocks proves evolution. Around and around we go.

How much more simple and direct it would be to explain the fossil-bearing rocks as the record in stone of the destruction of the antediluvian world by the great Flood. The various fossil assemblages represent, not evolutionary stages developing over many ages, but rather ecological habitats in various parts of the world in one age. Fossils of simple marine invertebrate animals are normally found at the lowest elevations in the geologic strata for the simple reason that they live at the lowest elevations. Fossils or birds and mammals are found only at the higher elevations because they live at higher elevations and also because they are more mobile and could escape burial longer. Human fossils are extremely rare because men would only very rarely be trapped and buried in flood sediments at all, because of their high mobility. The sediments of the "ice-age" at the highest levels are explained in terms of the drastically changed climates caused by the Flood.

The flood theory of geology,9 which was so obvious and persuasive to the founders of geology, is thus once again beginning to be recognized as the only theory which is fully consistent with the actual facts of geology, as well as with the testimony of Scripture.

REFERENCES

1. Stephen Jay Gould: "Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?" American Journal of Science, Vol. 263, (March 1965). p. 227.
2. Edgar B. Heylmun: "Should We Teach Uniformitarianism!", Journal of Geological Education, Vol. 19, January 1971, p. 35.
3. David Jorafsky: Soviet Marxism and Natural Science (New York, Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 12.
4. Henry M. Morris: The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (San Diego, Institute for Creation Research, 1972) 114 pp. [Editor's note: Referenced book is out of print. "Genesis Record" book lists 100 reasons why the Flood must be understood as worldwide.
Henry M. Morris: The Genesis Record (San Diego, Institute for Creation Research, 1976) 716 pp. ]
5. F. H. T. Rhodes, H. S. Zim and P. R. Shaffer: Fossils (New York, Golden Press, 1962). p. 10.
6. O. H. Schindewolf, "Comments on Some Stratigraphic Terms", American Journal of Science, Vol. 255, June 1957, p. 394.
7. H. D. Hedberg: "The Stratigraphic Panorama", Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, Vol. 72, April 1961, pp. 499-518.
8. C. O. Dunbar: Historical Geology (New York, Wiley, 1960), p. 47.
9. See The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Nutley, N. J., Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961), for a much more extensive treatment of the various topics discussed in this brief paper. Available also through the Institute for Creation Research.

 


Additional Resources:

The Genesis Flood by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb (1961, 518 pp.)

The Genesis Record by Henry M. Morris (1976, 716 pp.)

The Beginning of the World by Henry M. Morris (2nd ed. 1991, 184 pp.)


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94 posted on 01/29/2002 9:53:46 PM PST by netman
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To: razorbak
With all due respect, I suggest you take a Geology 1 course at your local community college. You don't have a clue about geological processes.
95 posted on 01/29/2002 11:18:32 PM PST by capitan_refugio
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To: adakotab
"a reputable scientist"

Baumgardner's BS and MS were in electrical engineering. And at UCLA, the Earth and Space sciences program doesn't require a "sound" foundation in geology or geophysics to get a specialist PhD. Baumgardner is pretty unsophisticated when it comes to geology. Cases in point:

(1) "The earth science community neglected and suppressed the evidences for catastrophism" Baumgardner makes a nonsensical argument. Geologists recognize the signature of catastrophic processes in the geologic record all the time - be it paleontology, sedimentary deposition, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. No good scientist ever suppresses evidence, or misrepresents the data.

(2) "The time scale the uniformitarian scientists use today is dramatically too long" Baumgardner is misrepresenting the data and the terminology. As a foundation of rational scientific thought, "... we accept the conclusion that nature's law are unchanging. This means we have no reason to doubt that the principles of physics and chemistry, the operation of gravity, and the essential nature of geologic processes are independent of time. During past earth history rocks must have been formed and some of them subsequently broken down physically or chemically in the same manner as now; we may be sure that rains fell, water flowed downhill, winds blew, and waves beat against the shore, just as they do today. This concept has come to be known as uniformitarianism, and holds that the present is the key to the past. Our ablity to analyze the rock record depends on the completeness and accuracy of these present-day processes and laws, and on the extent of the rock record available for us to study." (This quote comes from Page 2 of a 50-year old geology text.) Baumgardner, and other creation scientists choose to deny the fundamental nature of physical processes, such as radioactive decay constants, amino acid racemization, etc. Uniform time is the enemy of the creation scientist. For instance, potassium-argon isotope dating suggested there was a significant thermal event in the earth's early history, approximate 3.5 billion years ago (possibly related to the differentiation the the earth's core and mantle from the crust). If the earth has been around in more-or-less its present form for 3.5 billion years, that leaves a lot of time for the accumulation of "small scale" catastrophies and, by the way, evolutionary processes.

(3) "Rock that represents the ocean floor is colder, and therefore denser than the rock below it and so can sink into the earth's interior. And the properties of the rock inside the earth, especially at the high temperatures that exist there, make it possible for the colder rock from the earth's surface to peel away and sink in a runaway manner down through the mantle - very rapidly." This is pure and simple goobledegook. Baumgardener misunderstands or misrepresents fundamental rock mechanics - but of course, he is an electrical engineer filling a geophysical computer programming position. The density of any rock mass, be it a continent, the ocean floor, or the mantle, depends on it chemical make-up as well as its temperature. Continental crust, rich in Si and Al, is less dense that oceanic crust, which in rich in Mg and other heavy minerals. And so too, the upper mantle is much denser too, composed of rocks such as eclogites, peridotite, dunites, etc. Plate tectonic mechanisms have been argued since the 1950's. Density problems were one of the most compelling arguments against plate tectonics for years. Bumgardner's description of cold crustal rock sinking in a "runaway manner" into the upper mantle defies physics, logic, and measurement. Perhaps he should read a few petrologic papers on mineral phase equalibria. If Baumgardner reviewed solid evidence concerning rates of subduction on the continental margins, and rates of new crust forming at mid-ocean ridges and volcanic hot spots, he would clearly understand that the ocean basins have evolved over a the course of millions of years, and that several lines of evidence for dating the ocean basin support this model. Baumgardner's computer algorithms don't prove anything. The econazis have been using "sophisticate computer programs" to "prove" global warming too. Garbage in, garbage out.

(4) "Once this sinking of the pre-Flood ocean floor starts, it is not slow a slow process ... it's almost certain that it runs to completion and recycles all of the existing ocean floor in a few weeks or months." This is a breath-taking statement that explains why this guy has ZERO CREDIBILITY outside of creation science "research". He doesn't explain what happens to the continental crust during this process, nor does he suggest why the oceans must necessarily cover the continents. (In his and similar publications there is a vague suggestion that the suddenly exposed hot mantle vaporizes the oceans which then rain down endlessly - but this still does account for the ocean basin volume or lack thereof).

If you want to believe, literally, a biblical creation story, which probably had antecedants in Mesopotanian literature, be my guest. It is a matter of faith. Baumgardner and his cohorts distort science to fit their concepts. If he wants to recycle the ocean crust in a few weeks or months, instead of inventing outrageous and impossible processes while perverting science, why doesn't he just invoke an all-powerful diety to wave his hands and make it so? It has been said before, but it bears repeating, creation science is neither good creationism, nor good science.

96 posted on 01/30/2002 12:36:58 AM PST by capitan_refugio
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To: Rushian
Or maybe Noah didn't need to load up chimps? Humans hadn't quite populated all the lands so God only needed to "cleanse" the areas we were in. I doubt also the Noah loaded up Penguins and Kangaroos either.

All God needed to do was flood Eastern Africa and the Middle East. Voila!

97 posted on 01/30/2002 12:44:00 AM PST by Bogey78O
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To: Sabertooth; Snow Bunny; Alamo-Girl; Republican Wildcat; Howlin; Fred Mertz; onyx; RonDog...
We Dodged Extinction

Excerpt:

“If you have a big bag full of marbles of different colors, and you lose most of them, then you will probably end up with a small bag that won’t have all the colors that you had in the big bag,” he says.

Similarly, if the size of the human population was severely reduced some time in the past, or several times, the “colors” that make up our genetic variability will also be reduced.

If that is indeed what happened, then we should be more like each other, genetically speaking, than the chimps and gorillas of Africa. And that’s just what the research shows.

“We all have this view in our minds that we [humans] started precariously as sort of an ape-like creature” and our numbers grew continuously, adds Wood. “We’re so used to the population increasing inexorably over the past few hundred years that we think it has always been like that.”

But if it had, Gagneux notes, our genetic variability should be at least as great as that of apes.


Probably caused from our ancestors early tampering with "Global warming?" (/sarcasm) LOL!
(((PING))))))
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my ping list!. . .don't be shy.
98 posted on 01/30/2002 1:30:02 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
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To: My back yard
add-on ping (to #98). . .
99 posted on 01/30/2002 2:18:01 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
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To: MeeknMing
Probably caused from our ancestors early tampering with "Global warming?" (/sarcasm) LOL!

Had to. Somehow "we" were responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs too.

100 posted on 01/30/2002 3:48:46 AM PST by LoneGOPinCT
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