Chemistry guides evolution, claims theory

That enduring metaphor for the randomness of evolution, a blind watchmaker that works to no pattern or design, is being challenged by two European chemists. They say that the watchmaker may have been blind, but was guided and constrained by the changing chemistry of the environment, with many inevitable results.

The metaphor of the blind watchmaker has been famously championed by Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford. But Robert Williams, also at Oxford, and Joäo José R. Fraústo da Silva of the Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal say that evolution is not strictly random. They claim Earth's chemistry has forced life to evolve along a predictable progression from single-celled organisms to plants and animals.

Williams and da Silva take as their starting point the earliest life forms that consisted of a single compartment, or vesicle, enclosing the cytoplasm that produced polymers such as RNA, DNA and proteins. That cytoplasm was partly dominated by the reducing chemistry of the primitive oceans and atmosphere from which it formed, and has changed little since, says Williams.

As these primitive cells, or prokaryotes, extracted hydrogen from water they released oxygen, making the environment more oxidising. Ammonia became nitrogen gas, metals were released from their sulphides, and non-metal sulphides became sulphates.

These changes forced the prokaryotes to adapt to use the oxidised elements, and they evolved to harness energy by fixing nitrogen, using oxygen, and developing photosynthesis. But these oxidising elements could also damage the reducing chemistry in the cytoplasm.

For protection, there was just one option: isolate the elements within internal compartments, says Williams. And that gave rise to eukaryotes - single-celled organisms with a nucleus and other organelles.

Quiet revolution

Harold Morowitz, an expert on the thermodynamics of living systems at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, says these ideas are very exciting. "It's part of a quiet paradigm revolution going on in biology, in which the radical randomness of Darwinism is being replaced by a much more scientific law-regulated emergence of life."

According to Williams and da Silva, eukaryotes also had to evolve a way to communicate between their various organelles. The surrounding raw materials dictated how this could be done. Calcium ions would have routinely leaked into cells, precipitating DNA by binding to it. So cells responded by pumping the ions out again.

Eukaryotes evolved to use this calcium flow to send messages across internal and external membranes. Similarly, sodium ions formerly expelled as poisonous became the basis of communication in nerve cells.

Life continued to react to Earth's oxidised environment. Hydrogen peroxide gave rise to lignin - an oxygen-rich polymer that is the chief constituent of wood. And eukaryotes used copper oxidised from copper sulphides to cross-link proteins such as collagen and chitin, which help hold nerve and muscle cells in place. Such evolution of materials suitable for multicellular structures paved the way for plants and animals.

Chicken or egg

Not everyone is convinced. Evolutionary biologist David Deamer of the University of California, Santa Cruz, says the claim that evolution followed an inevitable progression should be qualified: "The inevitability depends on the origin of life and oxygenic photosynthesis."

He agrees that life arose in vesicles, but says that oxidative chemistry cannot explain everything from prokaryotes to humans.

Williams admits their theory has limitations. For instance, he agrees that Dawkins's argument is correct in that chance events drive the development of species. But he does not believe random events drive evolution overall. "Whatever life throws away will become the thing that forces the next step in its development."

However, David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, says Williams and da Silva have simply listed the chemical processes that coincided with each evolutionary transition, which does not prove that the chemistry caused the transitions. But Williams says that the environmental changes had to come first, because they occur faster than changes in biological systems.

Your post reveals gross misunderstandings (one might suspect "mischaracterizations") of science, evolution, and the cited passages from "Origin of Species".

This supposedly stunning "proof" of the evolution of the eye, so stunning that "creationists" would pointedly omit it, has been (ANALYSED) by me and it establishes only that Darwin was a Sophist, not that the eye evolved.

This sentence by you contains multiple misconceptions.

First, no one puts forth the Darwin passage as "proof" of the evolution of the eye, for it quite obviously is not. Period. That you misrepresent it as such is a Straw Man fallacy of the worst sort (i.e., ridiculing an opponent by falsely putting ridiculous words in their mouth). I challenge you to quote any scientist who has ever declared this passage to be a "proof". You can't and you know it. So any charges of "sophistry" from you are rank hypocrisy.

(Sidebar: The whole creationist fixation on "proof" is a fundamental misunderstanding of how science actually works.)

Second, the reason that creationists omit it is so that they can present the passage which *precedes* it in an out-of-context and misleading way. In isolation, the preceding passage sounds as if Darwin is "admitting" that he thinks the evolution of the eye would be impossible, and that's *exactly* how creationists often dishonestly present it (examples here, here, here, and here).

Instead, Darwin was only setting up a rhetorical position, which was then to be examined in the next part of the paragraph (the part that creationists often leave out).

You're right that the passage "does not establish that the eye evolved", but this is another cheap shot, because neither Darwin nor other scientists claim that it does. Instead, the clear intent of the paragraph was to propose (and *only* propose) a plausible possible mechanism for the development of the eye, WHICH COULD BE TESTED AT A LATER DATE. This is why he clearly labeled each portion of it with "if", which flagged each piece of speculation obviously enough that it hardly needs your redundant annotations. Darwin was mapping out areas for future investigation and confirmation/falsification.

He does this countless times through the book. You have no idea what proper science looks like, so you misunderstand it when you see it. Many, many times Darwin frankly laid out the areas of his (then novel) theory which were speculative and needed to be investigated before the theory could be considered verified. This is one of them. Any competent scientist proposing a new paradigm does likewise -- Einstein's papers on Relativity pointed out ways that the theory could and should be tested based on its predictions, for example.

Pointing out the as yet untested implications of the theory and laying it out for consideration and testing is not "sophistry", it's how science is done.

Try to learn the procedures of the field before you stoop to attack it, lest you make a fool of yourself.

"What Darwin was doing, in effect, was creating a 'logic of possibility'. Unlike conventional logic, where the compound of possibilities results not in a greater possibility, or probability, but in a lesser one, the logic of the Origin was one in which possibilities were assumed to add up to probability."

Horse manure. Darwin only argued that if each link in a chain of events was possible, then so was the end of the chain (which seems inarguable). The ultimate "probability" of the sequence was left up to later researchers to determine, once more evidence was available.

Pre-Darwin, the natural development of the eye seemed flatly impossible, for lack of *any* sort of conceivable chain of possibilities. The new theory of evolution provided a mechanism which opened the door to its possibility, in the manner in which Darwin described, and this "it could have happened this way" (not "must" have, not "likely" did) was the point of Darwin's claim. Any examination of whether it *did* happen that way would have to come later, but Darwin at least was laying out a roadmap for an area of investigation.

"When imagination exhausted itself and Darwin could devise no hypothesis to explain away a difficulty, he resorted to the blanket assurance that we were too ignorant of the ways of nature to know why one event occurred rathar than another, and hence ignorant of the explanation that would reconcile the facts to his theory..."

This is an unfair summary. Darwin never went beyond saying that in the areas in which his theory had yet been untested, it needed to *be* tested. The most he said, while trying to open people's minds to giving the theory a chance to be considered and tested, was that absence of evidence was not evidence of absence (because much had yet to be examined and/or discovered). He was asking people not to presume that unresolved issues would necessarily someday be resolved in favor of the *old* theories.

Furthermore, contrary to the implication of the quoted paragraph, although Darwin was careful to point out the many possible objections to and possible problems in his theory, I recall nowhere in the "Origin of Species" where he just threw up his hands and could "devise no hypothesis to explain away a difficulty". You are welcome to point out where he allegedly did so if you think you can find it.

Darwin was a masterly Sophist and Evolution was gleam in his eye, but that is all.

On the contrary, Darwin was a remarkably good visionary and scientist. His book "On the Origin of Species" does an incredibly good job of laying out the many implications of his theory, and despite his going out on a limb on a number of speculations, all have been subsequently shown to be admirably accurate. There's not a single blunder in the work. This is made all the more amazing when one realizes that not only was DNA unknown at the time, but so was *any* methodical examination of the rules of heredity (Mendel's work was not widely known or appreciated until later).

Seldom is any field of science so thoroughly envisioned and fleshed out at the start through the insights of one man (the only other similar example is Einstein's single-handed development of the entire field of Relativity). Most other scientific revolutions in thought have been the result of a seed of an idea, expanded and pieced together over time by many people contributing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.

As for your uninformed claim that evolution is nothing more than a "gleam in Darwin's eye":

It is time for students of the evolutionary process, especially those who have been misquoted and used by the creationists, to state clearly that evolution is a fact, not theory, and that what is at issue within biology are questions of details of the process and the relative importance of different mechanisms of evolution. It is a fact that the earth with liquid water, is more than 3.6 billion years old. It is a fact that cellular life has been around for at least half of that period and that organized multicellular life is at least 800 million years old. It is a fact that major life forms now on earth were not at all represented in the past. There were no birds or mammals 250 million years ago. It is a fact that major life forms of the past are no longer living. There used to be dinosaurs and Pithecanthropus, and there are none now. It is a fact that all living forms come from previous living forms. Therefore, all present forms of life arose from ancestral forms that were different. Birds arose from nonbirds and humans from nonhumans. No person who pretends to any understanding of the natural world can deny these facts any more than she or he can deny that the earth is round, rotates on its axis, and revolves around the sun.
The controversies about evolution lie in the realm of the relative importance of various forces in molding evolution.
- R. C. Lewontin "Evolution/Creation Debate: A Time for Truth" Bioscience 31, 559 (1981) reprinted in Evolution versus Creationism, op cit.

The Creature was caught on a down plane with an ice flow coming at it from behind. As the flow moved past it's rear legs, the force of it twisted it's rear legs slightly, and moved them forward. The awkward position of the legs under pressure is what caused compression along the axis of the bone to shatter it lengthwise. But in essence, the flow took the animals legs out from under it after they had frozen and While the beast was yet upright. The term "looked like" it fell in a crevace describes the look, not the actuality.

Uh huh... I'll stick with the informed opinions of the folks who examined the corpse on location, thank you. You're free to imagine any intricate scenario you please, including aliens setting up booby traps for it, but don't pretend you've got actual evidence for it.

Not irrelevant. If one is considering things that might be capable of interfering with the atmosphere in such a way as to cause a global deep freeze,

It hardly requires a "global deep freeze" for a mammoth to die in a fall and the corpse to freeze.

Note specifically that it had grass in it's mout still bearing the imprint of the molars from it's chewing.

So... You're claiming that food can't end up jammed between the teeth after a few chews?

That the mouth was full of Grass that had been "Cropped; but, not chewed and swallowed" In other words, it pulled the grass, stuck it in it's mouth and before chewing it all up and swallowing it, it was killed.

Your "in other words" is not a necessary interpretation of the quoted passage. The act of cropping the grass can result in some being immediately stuck between the teeth before it can be chewed. I've done that with kernels of popcorn on occasion.

But even if some food was found on teeth and tongue, this in no way proves that the animal was "flash frozen" in mid chew. It could have taken a mouthful of food, stepped forward after one or two chews, and fallen into the crevasse with the food still in its mouth. From that point, it had bigger problems to worry about than finishing off its mouthful. Thus it would be no surprise that some of the food could still be there when it died within the next minute or two. No flash-freezing necessary.

Great, there are hardy flowering species of a type of buttercup in the north. If you can match the seed to a hardy plant instead of to a warm weather plant, then you might have something. Them danged appearances... Nobody said that no buttercups or flowers grow in the north. The statement they make is that of the 40 varieties of foods found - they were largely Temperate weather plants.

Fine, be my guest and name one that was positively identified in the dead mammoth and document the fact that its range does not include siberia. I'll wait.

Did I paint it as pristine? Didn't think so.

Others have. And that's the erroneous implication of the "flash frozen" description. The reality is far different.

lips, tongue, etc of the animal were still fleshy according to the writeups - not consistant with mummification by natural or other causes. So what you've posted in retort as compared to what appears in the citations are two opposite things.

Incorrect -- ice mummification can still be described as "fleshy", since the flesh is still present, even though it's hardly in great shape.

Leading one to believe that everyone is wrong but your citation, or your citation was looking at a picture of another beast or - just as likely, she was looking at photos after preservative measures were used on the beast before it could be displayed.

Horse manure. She was working from primary sources. Clue: You're not allowed to pick and choose among direct observations of the find. You can't just accept the ones that appear to bolster your theory while rejecting out of hand the ones that don't. That's incredibly dishonest.

Gee. Who'd a thunk it.

Gee, "who'd a thunk" that a creationist would throw out the evidence which he finds inconvenient?

Your baby mummith doesn't serve any purpose. Why you posted it is beyond me other than to detract based on look rather than deal with the facts as they are. I'm guessing here; but, given your tendancy toward what would seem disingenuiness, I must consider a pattern is forming.

I posted it to show what state frozen mammoths are *actually* found in. If you have a photo that alleges to show a thawing mammoth in better condition, post it now.

"Being stuck in an ice crevasse, needless the say the corpse then froze. But over hours or days, not "flash-frozen"."

Didn't say it was stuck in an ice crevasse.

No, I did. Because that's what the folks who found it had reconstructed, and I think they're in a better position to know than you or I, or Brown.

Fact is, it was frozen into a river bank. Must have conveniently forgotten that in your well researched reply - right?

An eon ago it was a crevasse, now it's a river bank, which is how the mammoth finally came to be exposed again. Try to keep up.

The diagnosis shows that it's front legs were solidly encased by the time the bone fractured but while the flesh was still soft.

No it does not, the wild creationist supposition is all that "shows that". The only indisputable fact is the mammoth's leg was broken. Period. All the rest is creationist story-telling.

So Flash frozen still stands. Flash means rapid - very quickly.

Nothing about the mammoth is inconsistent with its freezing over hours or days.

For the beast to be taken with it's eyes wide open means it didn't have time to shut them to protect them.

Oh, for pete's sake... Contrary to how it's usually shown on TV shows, things often die with their eyes open. This hardly means it "didn't have time" to close its eyes. Dying of suffocation in the crevasse could easily have left its eyes open. Then, obviously, they froze that way as the corpse froze. No mystery needed.

Slow freezing would have pulvarized the outer tissue and mangled the leg under the weight of animal and ice.

Huh? It fell down and broke its leg. It died. It froze. That's why its leg was found fractured. Why make it any more complicated?

You just dislike that term - flash frozen for some reason and even more dislike the notion that the beasts were frozen while standing.

I "dislike" it because both try to imply that the animals were frozen within seconds in some sort of weird cataclysmic cold flash. Instead, all frozen corpses are consistent with animals that died in ordinary manners, then their corpses froze because, well, it was cold.

Creationists like to spin incredible tales of bizarre "flash freezings" due to miraculous cataclysms, but unfortunately there's no support for such fairy tales.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There's nothing extraordinary about this corpse, unless you spin ordinary things *really*, *really* hard while simultaneously flatly denying (for no good reason) perfectly ordinary explanations.

That one must really ruffle your feathers.

Only in the way that it's dishonestly spun to sound more strange than it really was.

Beyond that, your statements re the dating of the animals is of little value. They could have as easily died 12 minutes apart and you guys couldn't tell the difference.

Don't be ignorant.

And don't be so dishonest as to eagerly swallow any stretched line of reasoning that leads to a conclusion you *like*, then reject out of hand long-established and verified procedures (like dating methods) which happen to give results which you *don't* like.

But that's par for creationists.

There is nothing you have that you can test this with that will give you any accurate dating and for obvious reason. You don't know of any proveable constants to work against. And you can't rule out biological contamination due to changing atmosphere or the intrusion of nature. Sounds good to the Scientifically dumb though.

Spin all you like, but you know you're wrong. You can't just hand-wave away dating methods, they've been verified countless times over, by dozens of different independent methods.

The fact that you would so vigorously deny that says volumes about you, as does your childish attempt to name-call by saying that I'm "scientifically dumb".

"The Beresovka mammoth died more than 39,000 years ago."

Based on what. Carbon 14. ROFL.

Yes indeed, as well as other types of measurements. Now, of course, because it gives results you dislike, you have to start flying off in every direction trying to discredit it:

You guys kill me. Carbon 14 levels in even todays atmosphere are constantly shifting. You don't know what the C14 levels were at the time the beast died, therefore, you cannot date the beast accurately on c14. Or any other method for that matter. . Cause when your side don't like the numbers, you fudge them to fit your story anyway.

Uh huh... Isn't it more accurate to say that *you're* the one who is fudging (or entirely discarding) information because you "don't like the numbers" so that you can "fit your story"?

Accepted, verified, established techniques have dated your mammoth at 39,000 years. Deal with it.

Now to examine your various silly assertions:

Carbon 14 levels in even todays atmosphere are constantly shifting.

Sure -- by *tiny* amounts, which affect the overall accuracy of the results of carbon dating by less than 5% (but see below).

You don't know what the C14 levels were at the time the beast died, therefore, you cannot date the beast accurately on c14.

Actually, we can. There are about a dozen different techniques which have been used to calibrate carbon dating to better than the 5% mentioned above, including using ancient tree-ring data to tie down carbon dating measurements to *exact* years in the past, which provides a *direct* measure of both the accuracy of carbon dating, and the necessary amount of the c14 in the atmosphere in any given past year (up to the limits of carbon dating).

Furthermore, bubbles of trapped air in yearly layers of arctic ice (tens of thousands of years are "sampled" in the ice this way) and measurements of the actual amounts of c14 (and decay products) in them reveal complete agreement with the figures arrived at by the tree-ring verification, even though this is a *totally* independent method of cross-checking.

And so on for several other cross-checks.

Are you not familiar with the literature on this topic, or are you in enormous denial about it?

You might as well pick a number out of the air.

No thanks, we prefer not to use *your* methods.

It's abundantly evident from your response to my post that you have a serious problem with misrepresentation. I am therefore going to repost it as a rebuttal to your diatribe and so the lurkers can judge for themselves.

The following comes directly from Evolution of the Eye by John Stear.

The complete quote by Darwin is from The Origin of the Species(Chapter 6 under the heading "Organs of extreme perfection"). The ... second paragraph [below] is the part [creationists] omit.

"Yet reason tells me, that if (SPECULATION) numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor (IMMENSE SPECULATION), can be shown to exist; if further, (SPECULATION) the eye does vary ever so slightly, and (COMPOUND SPECULATION) the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; (ASSUMED, NOT SHOWN) and if (MORE SPECULATION) any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. (WHOLLY UNWARRANTED CONCLUSION BASED WHOLLY UPON SPECULATION). How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound."

This supposedly stunning "proof" of the evolution of the eye, so stunning that "creationists" would pointedly omit it, has been (ANALYSED) by me and it establishes only that Darwin was a Sophist, not that the eye evolved. But we know this already, don't we?

A thorough and masterly book punctuated with a delicate sense of humor ... Until he has read, marked, learnt and inwardly digested this authoritative volume, no one should presume henceforth to speak on Darwin and Darwinism.

hmmm...

We begin at page 333 of the Elephant Paperback edition published in 1996:

"...For his essential method was neither observing nor the more prosaic mode of scientific reasoning, but a peculiarly imaginative, inventive mode of argument.

"In was this that Whewell objected to in the Origin:

For it is assumed that the mere possibility of imagining a series of steps of transition from one condition of organs to another, is to be accepted as a reason for believing that such transition has taken place. And next, that such a possibility being thus imagined, we may assume an unlimited number of generations for the transition to take place in, and that this indefinite time may extinguish all doubt that the transitions really have taken place.

"What Darwin was doing, in effect, was creating a 'logic of possibility'. Unlike conventional logic, where the compound of possibilities results not in a greater possibility, or probability, but in a lesser one, the logic of the Origin was one in which possibilities were assumed to add up to probability.

"Like many revolutionaries, Darwin embarked upon this revolutionary enterprise in the most innocent and reasonable spirit. He started out by granting the hypothetical nature of the theory and went on to defend the use of hypotheses in science, such hypotheses being justified if they explained a sufficiently large number of facts. His own theory, he continued, was 'rendered in some degree probable' by one set of facts and could be tested and confirmed by another -- among which he included the geological succession of organic beings. It was because it 'explained' both of these bodies of facts that it was removed from the status of mere hypothesis and elevated to the rank of 'well-grounded theory'. This procedure, by which one of the major difficulties of the theory was made to bear witness in its favor, can only be accounted for by a confusion in the meaning of 'explain' -- between the sense in which facts are 'explained' by a theory and the sense in which difficulties may be 'explained away'. It is the difference between compliant facts which lend themselves to the theory and refractory ones which do not and can only be brought into submission by a more or less plausible excuse. By confounding the two, both orders of explanation, both orders of fact, were entered on the same side of the ledger, the credit side. Thus the 'difficulties' he had so candidly confessed to were converted into assets.

"This technique for the conversion of possibilities into probabilities and liabilities into assets was the more effective the longer the process went on. In the chapter entitled 'Difficulties on Theory' the solution of each difficulty in turn came more easily to Darwin as he triumphed over -- not simply disposed of -- the preceding one. The reader was put under a constantly mounting obligation; if he accepted one explanation, he was committed to accept the next. Having first agreed to the theory in cases where only some of the transitional stages were missing, the reader was expected to acquiesce in those cases where most of the stages were missing, and finally in those where there was no evidence of stages at all. Thus, by the time of the problem of the eye was under consideration, Darwin was insisting that anyone who had come with him so far could not rightly hesitate to go further. In the same spirit, he rebuked those naturalists who held that while some reputed species were varieties rather than real species, other species were real. Only the 'blindness of preconceived opinion', he held, could make them balk at going the whole way -- as if it was not precisely the propriety of going the whole way that was at issue.

"As possibilities were promoted into probabilities, and the probabilities into certainty, so ignorance itself was raised to a position only once removed from certain knowledge. When imagination exhausted itself and Darwin could devise no hypothesis to explain away a difficulty, he resorted to the blanket assurance that we were too ignorant of the ways of nature to know why one event occurred rathar than another, and hence ignorant of the explanation that would reconcile the facts to his theory..." And so on ...

Darwin was a masterly Sophist and Evolution was a gleam in his eye, but that is all.

Right. Informed opinions.. I almost forgot you guys consider theory as fact until you don't like the theory or are pointed to the notion that your theory is neither the only one possible nor the only likely conclusion that may be drawn - the which you accuse me of. Rather funny.

It hardly requires a "global deep freeze" for a mammoth to die in a fall and the corpse to freeze.

Didn't say it was required. I find it funny that you guys argue an ice age with no real evidence of how it happened and yet when the evidence points to the type of global calamity you don't want to deal with for some odd reason, you discard it so you can run from religion. And the theories you do produce beg the limits of believeablility to the point of being stupid. Your theorizing not only begs belief, it leaves countless holes that can't be merely batted aside. Brown presents a theory that not only explains everything easily and logically, it accounts for all the things you evolutionists can't account for. Darn, let's attack that. Gotta be wrong cause you all are too smart to be upstaged by someone that knows what they're talking about. This Mammoth is just one thing that gets explained as part of his overall theory.

So... You're claiming that food can't end up jammed between the teeth after a few chews? ... The act of cropping the grass can result in some being immediately stuck between the teeth before it can be chewed. I've done that with kernels of popcorn on occasion.

Food gets stuck around teath often. Nothing new. I stated from memory what the citations said, and you tried to explain it away as particulate matter requiring flossing to remove. And you presumeably looked at the material, you darn sure enough cited enough stuff to put up that pretense. I called you on it. Now you want to be coy. How about just be honest and admit you were wrong. That's how honest conversation works. If I can do it; one would hope you could be honest enough to do it. Or is that asking too much.

The animal died with a mouth full Grasses and bean pods according to one of the citations. According to other citations it had 24 pounds of undigested matter in it's stomach from 40 species of mostly warm weather (temperate climate) plants. If we agree that Elephant and mammoth body Chemistry are the same, which appears to be the case, then the mammoth needed to consume 300 plus pounds of food per day - or more considering the size differential. But here's where your problems start to mount. Elephants are warm weather creatures - extremely warm weather creatures actually. Which is why you find them largely in AFRICA. There is nothing about mammoth body chemistry that intones a cold weather creature. Not even it's Shaggy hair - which we find on Buffalo, sheep, Goats, Dogs, Cats, ect. Has nothing to do with climate. Has everything to do with the unique feature of a living creature.

Next, even the russian scientists noted that the majority of the foods consumed either do not or cannot grow in that region. Warm weather beasts do not go trapsing across ice to find temperate climate foods. That tells us that the Mammoth didn't fall into any ice crevace, unless it was one forming around the animal as it would not by body chemistry be in that intemperate climate. Nor would Rhinos found in the same region. Or have we missed the fact that Rhinos have also been found frozen in siberia and can't handle that climate. Hmmm. Pretty suspicious. Tells us that at one time, Siberia was a temperate zone. What made it freeze... do tell. I'll link in Brown's map...

The orange dots are Mammoth finds, the Yellow are Rhinoceros Finds. Here is a manifest of what the dots represent.

Now, we have a mammoth roaming in a once temperate zone eating temperate climat foods. Where'd you find the ice crevace in the middle of that? Warm climate critters don't venture off into cold areas that their bodies can't protect them from in order to die looking for food they can only find in teperate areas. Hmmm. Gee, It was walking along minding it's own business - gathering food and all of a sudden it got really cold and wet. Brown notes that Mammoths and Rhinos are not the only frozen critters found in climates they don't belong in. Either the whole world went nutso and had animals going places they would not go to under any normal circumstance, or it was a warm climate at the time. What's the name of that razor.. Hockum's Okham's... LOL.

But I'm not done. This beast, you'd have us believe, is feeding, falls in a hole and neither spits out it's food nor finishes chewing it and swallows. Do we need to bring in Columbo on this one? Sorry, I don't mean to be fecetious, it's just so blatent it couldn't be more so. One goes where the evidence points. And when frozen ancient fruit trees keep showing up from under the ice sheets of siberia and the northern coast of old Russia, one wonders what warm weather fruit trees are doing under the ice of a cold climate. Dang, there we go again with that warm climate evidence. Don't we wish that would go away. Can you bring me an ice crevace for this beast to fall into in the middle of a warm climate zone so it can freeze over a period of days? Hmm. Guess not. Something happened to turn this tropical forest into a bitter tundra and catch warm climate plants and animals unawares such that fruit bearing trees are burried in ice and Warm weather animals are frozen in it. Goodness me - making sense. best stop, huh?

Fine, be my guest and name one that was positively identified in the dead mammoth and document the fact that its range does not include siberia. I'll wait.

You'll have to take that up with the scientists that wrote it. See how that works. Turnabout is fair play.

Others have. And that's the erroneous implication of the "flash frozen" description. The reality is far different.

No, that is not the implication of flash frozen. The implication is that when it froze it was caught pristine. What happened in the midst of that is another matter. Or do you care to tell us how a beast that falls down What happened to it after thawing could not be helped. It's a matter of the practical nature of things. Ever pulled freezer burnt steaks out of your fridge? Even fresh they come out looking like, what. Can you tell us Leather or mumified remains. Gee how does that work. When it thaws it looks and feels like soft tissue again. I should know, I eat steak often enough. (bad habit). But the writeup describes the thawed flesh not as mummified; but as fleshy - something that mummified remains are not. Not by a longshot. And cannot be mistaken. Any idiot who knows the first thing about mummification knows that. Finding intact flesh that is preserved from mummification is RARE.

Oh, and regarding the notation on the cells not bursting, you might actually bother reading why it happens and take note that there was no evidence they had. Not to make too much of it yet; but, I'm working on it.

No, I did. Because that's what the folks who found it had reconstructed, and I think they're in a better position to know than you or I, or Brown.

Correction, that is what they postulated might have happened. Not quite the same thing as saying that is what did happen. Nor do I believe it is the only postulated happenstance. I've read more on this particular find elsewhere. And am trying to find it. But that aside, you are reading, as evolutionists usually do, postulation as a fact. The postulation doesn't account for the body and all aspects of the find. Whatever the truth may be.

An eon ago it was a crevasse, now it's a river bank, which is how the mammoth finally came to be exposed again. Try to keep up.

Gee, more unsupported postulation - stated as fact. I am keeping up.

No it does not, the wild creationist supposition is all that "shows that". The only indisputable fact is the mammoth's leg was broken. Period. All the rest is creationist story-telling.

Not supposition. It's a fact. The leg was broken yet frozen in a position with weight squarely on it and not deformed. IE, no pulvarization of the leg under weight and it was not in a position showing favoring of it. The only way we get to this is if the leg is frozen in place at the time it broke. If you can account for it, I'm all ears. Love to hear you try. The pose of the beast is all telling from your own picture. Know why? Care to guess? Cause I got it wrong in relaying it from memory. It was one of the front legs. Care to guess which one? Or perhaps you'll go read the notes.. Short of that, you can't ignore the laws of physics. Theory has nothing to do with it. Ever seen what happens when you put full weight on a compound fractured leg? There's a really famous one that was captured in a nationally televised football game in the last ten years, - actually, two, if memory serves. One was a leg that bent the wrong direction and did a lot of damage. But that Mammoth's bone broke Axially into 12 pieces. Physics my boy. "I cannah' change the laws of physics, laws of physics, cap'n" Or do you wish to tell us Klingons prevented the damage from occuring... And who was being flip about aliens..

Nothing about the mammoth is inconsistent with its freezing over hours or days.

Nothing but the physics that stand to tell us otherwise. Laws and physical properties. Gee I'm so glad I took Physics and Calculus. Come in soo handy sometimes. Need a demonstration, go break your leg in 12 places and put all your weight on it. If you can keep it looking like a leg and posed like a leg with no cast or casement of any kind and all your weight on it, you come and talk to me and we'll write a book together. Nothing indeed.

Well let's just examine this shall we. closing one's eyes when being hit with falling debris is an involuntary response. Right up to the point of death. And you're arguing it fell in a hole and was being covered by falling debris, of which there is no evidence; but, there you have it. Doesn't fit your own story. I know, get columbo again cause natural involuntary reactions are not your schtick. Right.. If your story is right, it's eyes should be closed to protect them from debris. It's trying to right itself so it's obviously not given up. And the lack of decomposition of the Body other than around the exposed part eaten away by animals presents problems for you. Oops. Forgot to throw that in earlier, so just a freebie there.

Huh? It fell down and broke its leg. It died. It froze. That's why its leg was found fractured. Why make it any more complicated?

I didn't make it complicated. The state in which it was found was complicated. You're trying to bat it away as though it isn't necessary to explain things that require explanation. See above. I'm not rehashing it again. Go break your leg in 12 places and put all your weight on it and when it deforms, bends, folds and twists in funny directions, you come back and we'll discuss how wrong you were further.

Only in the way that it's dishonestly spun to sound more strange than it really was.

Right. A several ton beast can stand on a leg broken in 12 parts and freeze in place without showing any signs of fracture.... who's spinning? Ya'll don't like details you can't explain and seem to get perturbed quickly by them. One wonders why you don't rather dig in and explore what you can't explain to find out if what is relayed is true or could be true instead of out of hand trying to discredit the other guy and end up wearing egg. I just look for the truth of things and take the hunt where it leads to a viable conclusion. Doesn't require dismissing people out of hand until they start getting into things that are not scientifically plauseable.

Don't be ignorant. And don't be so dishonest as to eagerly swallow any stretched line of reasoning that leads to a conclusion you *like*, then reject out of hand long-established and verified procedures (like dating methods) which happen to give results which you *don't* like. But that's par for creationists.

I'm not being ignorant nor dishonest. Even the scientific community has admitted there is a problem. and your recitation about tree rings and ice cap core samples don't address the problems. The core samples are subjected to the atmosphere over time. They don't know if going back there is a decrease, an increase or a constant level, though they are full of theories. I've been to this debate at length on prior threads. They always end up in the same spot, Dating methods are subject to assumptions that cannot be proven. And no matter how you want to argue it, that is the final position. If you can't prove the assumption true, then their is no accuracy to the methodology. Agreeing on a standard doesn't make it accurate any more than agreeing that a blue car is red makes it red. It's a simple truth; but, powerful. Just like the fact that sedimentation occuring naturally does not sift itself into well defined layers. It rather produces an amalgum. How then are our "sediment" layers sorted into layers that are consistent with liquifaction? what you guys call dating lines or levels, is a bunch of sorted layers of material laid down by liquifaction. Or do you presume to tell us that when these layers are taken in core sample, mixed thoroughly then run through liquifaction, it's an optical illusion that they just happen to sort back out to the same ordered layers as the core sample. Kinda blows a hole through that bogus bunch of tripe. Though as a theory it sounds good - for about five minutes till you give it serious thought. Anyone can test liquifaction - anyone. And that's the fun of it. The average joe can go out an prove it to themselves. So much for high science...

Uh huh... Isn't it more accurate to say that *you're* the one who is fudging (or entirely discarding) information because you "don't like the numbers" so that you can "fit your story"?

Nope. sorry. No fudging needed. If you want to pin me down, label or categorize me, you are going to go mad. I just, as I've said before, look for the truth and go where it leads. I play the game the way science and physics require. A constant is not a constant until it is proveable. Any math using that constant until it is proven is only as accurate as the constant used. When the constant is assumed the result is therefore an assumption. That is Logic 101. Problem is when most of the "learned" people with agendas get in hip deap, they start discounting anything that hurts their story. The initial approach was to assume Carbon levels were constant. When the point was driven home uncerimoniously that this was not the case, Then the study was done on levels measured over time. From there they assumed a couple of "likely" possiblities - assumption coming back in. They picked one and went with a curve based on their measurements. The measurements assume no contamination to a degree of contamination. So now you have plus or minus an assumed percentage based on variance of an assumed curve. The point being that in overcoming the appearance of an arbitrary constant that is demonstrably wrong, they heap assumptions together and compound the error. But we're not done - oh no. When they decide to come up with another system of dating that they claim superior. What do you suppose they use to fine tune it? Why the uncertain system based on assumptions again. And then they think they've proven their figures correct when the new system (calibrated against the old) generates the same conclusions. Gee, am I missing something here? I don't need math or physics to tell you that this screwball approach is worthless as teets on a bull. Has nothing to do with bias and everything to do with being honest and precise. I didn't take Basic Chemistry, Physics, Calculus, etc and have Mathmatical and scientific principles pounded into me to be told by the community that all I learned only matters to the borders of an agenda.

Bottom line, your dates are only as good as the system that created them. If the level of precision is guided by unproveable guesses, the product of the guess will be a guess. That is a mathmatical and scientific certainty. Given that, and the fact that your dating methods involve constants that are unsupportable, the dates themselves are unsupportable. If you say something is 400 years old or 4000 years old, or 40,000 years old, your date is only as good as your ability to prove it. Just as with anything else. Honestly, I wish science could produce an accurate dating method that was without question. It would answer a great many questions I have about South American cities and actual dates for Early Egypt that made sense. Much of the popular dating of egyptian archeology is so full of holes it's pathetic. There are many things that don't make any sense in the dating as to make it seem arbitrary at times. At other times it is known to be arbitrary and everyone refuses to budge cause the old timers don't want egg on their face or their agendas to be uprooted.

No thanks, we prefer not to use *your* methods.

I know, you prefer not to follow evidence. You prefer assumption and theory to testable fact. And if you are like other evolutionists I've squared off against, you have little tolerance for being proven wrong. And just as little tolerance when our side can not only offer a proposition; but, test it and prove it. Our approach is simple. Follow the evidence and assemble it into a whole that can explain all the evidence in a falsifiable manner. Really simple. Ya'll should try it instead of piling up theories and selling them as facts. See I don't mind saying "I could be wrong". But I don't accept things based on popular opinion. I accept or decline based on evidence. I only take God on Faith. Scientists haven't earned that, nor are they likely to.

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