Posted on 05/30/2002 7:40:53 AM PDT by Gladwin
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:34 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Two House Republicans are citing landmark education reform legislation in pressing for the adoption of a school science curriculum in their home state of Ohio that includes the teaching of an alternative to evolution.
In what both sides of the debate say is the first attempt of its kind, Reps. John A. Boehner and Steve Chabot have urged the Ohio Board of Education to consider the language in a conference report that accompanied the major education law enacted earlier this year.....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
not the man made--up---DENIAL of it!
"But of course, you're always confusing Haldane's Dilemma with Haldane's Rule . . ."
"You split more infinitives than Lincoln split logs."
"For the last time, a nucleon is not a nucleotide!"
But thanks for mentioning that I write books, even if only have one published so far.
" . . . if I only have the one published . . ."
With editing like that, no wonder I'm having trouble.
You should at least try to keep current with your own BS ideology; nobody, and I mean nobody who keeps up with evolution debates on either side views horses as any sort of an argument for evolution anymore.
Delicious!
Not only isn't there any such evidence, but the problem is much bigger than most people would imagine.
Alexander Mebane, of the Tampa Bay Skeptics ("Darwin's Creation Myth") notes:
The most recent episode of great changes, the advent of the modern (Cenozoic) mammals after the death of the dinosaurs, is the one that we should expect to have left the best-preserved fossils of intermediate species. At the catastrophic end of the Cretaceous, 65 Myr ago, mammals were small nocturnal "tree-shrew"-like animals, none larger than cats; roughly ten million years later, we find essentially "modern" bats*, bears, and lions18. "All modern orders of mammals seem to have arisen independently and at about the same time": Wesson, p. 40, quoting Bonner 1988 and Carroll 1988.If these vast changes really proceeded in the manner prescribed by Darwin, surely many hundreds (at the least!) of intermediate species in each lineage must once have lived during that protracted period of radical transmogrification. None of them have ever showed up in the fossil record.
And not only are all traces of intermediate species' missing, but anyone who seriously tries to imagine a believable sequence of viable intermediate animals between a tree-shrew and a bat-every one of which, according to Darwin, supplanted its predecessor by virtue of being "better adapted"! -wiII very soon be convinced that such a sequence is simply inconceivable: "What use is half a wing?" as everyone since Mivart (including even Gould) has asked. The reason we have found no trace of them is simply that they never existed, and the reason they never existed is that it would be impossible for them to have done so. It was this unavoidable conclusion that led Simpson in 1944 20 to publicly acknowledge his heretical conviction that these megaevolutionary" transformations, at least, must have occurred in some rapid and entirely non-Darwinian way. For this he was censured, and forced to recant, but it is safe to assert that no one has ever been able to sketch out, with even the slightest semblance of credibility, any Darwinian route to the already-" modern" bats that appear-twice over! in the early Cenozoic, roughly 55 million years ago.
God could pop up explain it and this joker would still deny the obvious.
"Darwin... was embarrassed by the fossil record... we are now about 120-years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, ... some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information."
David M. Raup, Curator of Geology
Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago
"Conflicts Between Darwin and Paleontology"
Field Museum of Natural History
Vol. 50, No. 1, (Jan, 1979), p. 25
"The evolution of the horse provides one of the keystones in teaching of evolutionary doctrine, though the actual story depends to a large extent upon who is telling it and when the story is being told. In fact one could easily discuss the evolution of the story of the evolution of the horse."
Prof G. A. Kerkut
Dept of Physiology & Biochemistry
University of Southhampton
Implications of Evolution
Pergamon Press, London, 1960, p 144
"The family tree of the horse is beautiful and continuous only in the textbooks. ...... The construction of the whole Cenozoic family tree of the horse is therefore a very artificial one, since it is put together from non-equivalent parts ..."
Prof N. Heribert Nilsson
Lund University, Sweden
Famous botanist and evolutionist
Synthetische Artbildung
Verlag CWE Gleerup Press
evolution should be taught in the social sciences under abnormal psychology and marxist political science.
Did you ever read the change David Horowitz made from liberalism to conservatism...
he accepted the biblical world view of the biased subjective nature of liberalism---evolution...
and the reality to deal with it and not glorify--intellectualize--politicize it!
You may not be able to read English but most people on these threads can. They know what Therefore, the common occurrence of oxide-type BIFs suggests the atmosphere-ocean system has been oxygenated since ~3.8 Ga. means.I certainly hope people know what "suggests" means. Here's a little more for them to chew on.
As for Uraninite and Pyrite you brought them up, you tell us how they come about.
. . .
Archean
small young continents
virtually no free oxygen
life consisted of simple bacteria
Proterozoic
appearance of large stable continents (cratons)
appearance of free oxygen
life evolved to more advanced, multicellular forms
2. An Oxygen-Poor Earth
Your text (and others) argue that the early Earth may not have been completely anoxic, although this is still a point of ongoing debate. What everyone can agree on is that, even though there may have been a small amount of oxygen in the upper atmosphere, most surface environments on Earth were virtually anoxic. That is, they had no oxygen prior to about 2.0 billion years ago. You say: "fine, but what is the evidence for this sweeping claim?".
The evidence for an early anoxic Earth is found in the geologic record, and specifically in special strange types of minerals that are found in ancient sedimentary rocks greater than about 2 b.y. old. The minerals of interest are known to have accumulated by deposition in river and beach environments. These key minerals include:
pyrite, magnetite and uraninite
which are reduced forms of sulphur, iron and uranium. "Reduced" means that the elements exist in a lower oxidation state (smaller positive ionic charge) than their oxidized equivalent. For example, magnetite is an iron mineral that contains reduced iron with a charge of +2 (Fe 2+). By contrast, hematite is an iron mineral that contains oxidized iron (Fe 3+). Hematite is basically rust: it can be produced by the oxidation of iron and will form all over your bicycle if you leave it out in the rain for a while.
Importantly, iron, sulphur, and uranium in today's world are quickly oxidized if exposed to oxygen and water. For this reason the reduced forms (pyrite, magnetite and uraninite) are very unstable and cannot survive in any significant concentration in modern stream and beach environments. However, these minerals are quite abundant in many ancient sedimentary rocks that are older than about 2 billion years old. This simple observation of ancient sedimtary deposits requires that the ancient streams and beaches where they accumulated existed under anoxic conditions: the atmosphere had no oxygen at that time. We are saying that between 4.6 and about 2.0 b.y. ago, there was no free oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. This is more than HALF of Earth History!
BUT if cyanobacteria and stromatolites were producing oxygen since 3.5 b.y. ago, then WHY did it take ~ 1.5 billion years (until ~ 2 b.y. ago) for free oxygen to finally begin to build up in the atmosphere?
The answer to this question is found in the concept of "chemical sinks". Chemical sinks are systems or entities, in this case minerals, which absorb and take up the chemical in question: in this case, oxygen. Prior to about 2 b.y. ago, all oxygen that was being produced by phtosynthesizing cyanobacteria was immediately used up in oxidizing reactions with minerals such as pyrite, magnetite and uraninite (and others). The volume of minerals available greatly exceeded the amount of oxygen being produced, so the minerals acted as a large chemical sink that used up all the available oxygen, and this resulted in the condition of "no free oxygen" that existed for such a long period of geologic time (more than half of Earth history).
It isn't how they came about, of course, it's why they exist as pyrite and uraninite instead of something rather more oxidized. And I've now dealt with that, but let's pile on. What I'm saying is that one line of evidence can make a suggestion, but there's such a thing as a preponderance of evidence.
Atmosphere, Oceans, and Life in the Precambrian.
Emphasis mine on the "pyrite" and "uraninite" stuff.Evidence from the Rock Record
Conclusion - amount of O2 in the atmosphere has increased with time.
- Iron (Fe) i s extremely reactive with oxygen. If we look at the oxidation state of Fe in the rock record, we can infer a great deal about atmospheric evolution.
- Archean - Find occurrence of minerals that only form in non-oxidizing environments in Archean sediments: Pyrite (Fools gold; FeS2), Uraninite (UO2) . These minerals are easily dissolved out of rocks under present atmospheric conditions.
- Banded Iron Formation (BIF) - Deep water deposits in which layers of iron-rich minerals alternate with iron-poor layers, primarily chert. Iron minerals include iron oxide, iron carbonate, iron silicate, iron sulfide. BIF's are a major source of iron ore, b/c they contain magnetite (Fe3O4) which has a higher iron-to-oxygen ratio than hematite. These are common in rocks 2.0 - 2.8 B.y. old, but do not form today.
- Red beds (continental siliciclastic deposits) are never found in rocks older than 2.3 B. y., but are common during Phanerozoic time. Red beds are red because of the highly oxidized mineral hematite (Fe2O3), that probably forms secondarily by oxidation of other Fe minerals that have accumulated in the sediment.
Experts always hedge their bets. And uncertainty is a hallmark of science - why would you expect it to be otherwise?
Shall we engage in dueling quotes? To what end? One can always find a quote that seemingly disputes the record itself - so what? If you cannot accept the obvious transformations in the available records, you are a complete waste of oxygen.
You didn't read what I linked. You looked at the picture I pasted in-line.
Show me instead a fossil record of the gradual evolution of one mammal species into another, or of any species into a completely different species. This you cannot do.
Why, because I'm tired? The Transitional Vertebrate Fossils. Let's throw on The Evidence for Dinosaur-Bird Transition. You might want to check out the situation with whales for yourself. Try Pakicetus, Ichthyolestes, Ambulocetus, and Rhodocetus.
Your explanation that, in essence, this happens fast when the environment changes, so there is no record, is nothing more than faith.
You'd be home free if that were true. If you've checked out the links I gave you, you know that there is enough of a record to outline the tree of common descent rather well.
And finally, I, of course, do not believe that the minnow gave birth to the frog or any other such nonsense.
Neither does anyone else, but you're probably going to try to rebut it anyway. (Just kidding.)
One particular family of fishes gave rise to an initially very similar group of amphibians. Eusthenopteron to Panderichthys to Ichthyostega, give or take a few specimens. But you know that already now, having read the materials.
Okay, you've surprised me, I didn't think you or your cohorts had a real sense of humor.
(Hmmm... You don't suppose that type was just for an ENP, do you?)
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