The "Threat" of Creationism, by Isaac Asimov

Internet ^ | 1984 | Isaac Asimov

[js1138]

Indeed, non-locality of memory does not favor Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis." I hadn't heard of the salamander experiments, so they were particularly interesting.

Crick studied vision, which is highly localized and has structures that have an organized physical pattern. He studied vision becuse it is "easy".

As you study the brain structures that we have in common with other species, you see more specific localizations. But speech and language have well studied localizations. Damage to specific sites produce predictable deficits. Dficites of production (speech) can sometimes be trained around, but deficits of thought seldom recover. The intersting thing about people with thought deficts is that they sometimes don't know that anything is missing.

[FrdmLvr]

There is no fossil evidence for evolution.

[js1138]

There is no fossil evidence for evolution.

I guess it's time to reboot this thread and start over.

[f.Christian]

Most of the geologic column formed from below .. .. .. no fossils === no evolution too !

[unspun]

I just have one thing to add, to my pretzelly prose above:

Don't use Netscape Composer, even if it is free. Or if you do, expect it fool you every so often into thinking you have paragraph codes in place.

[unspun]

Apologies:

- And aren't the natures of what our imaginations may well deal with not indicative of what may be the nature of the things outside of us, which matter to our lives? Certainly, in the "imagining of our hearts" all sorts of matters are felt and considered, accurate and inaccurate, matters having to do with not only "material" things, but other beings and a panoply of abstractions and emotions about it all.  If I'd start to describe that, I'd loose any readers and I would have to get the aspirin bottle, myself. -

My editor took the day off -- and "any readers" may have, too! And now, I will take some asprin, before I start seeing those pink unicorns.

[plusone]

True. Asimov tends to think too highly of his own intellect. He once gave an interview where he stated that individual names were too impersonal. It would be much more convenient if everyone was given their own ID number. Afterall, there might be many "John Smiths" but each would have a unique number. (And I think his sci-fi writing is overblown as well).

[bondserv]

Thanks for responding.

I don't hear Senior Research Physicist from Stanford University on Art Bell all the time. Michio Kaku a teacher of Theoretical Physicist used to go on Art Bell, but I do not believe he is a research physicist.


Difficulties Mount

The sun contains 99.86% of all the mass of the solar system. Yet the sun contains only 1.9% of the angular momentum. The nine planets contain 98.1%. (This was known in the time of Laplace a century ago.) There is no plausible explanation that would support a solar origin of the planets. James Jeans (1877-1946) pointed out that the outer planets are far larger than the inner ones. (Jupiter is 5,750 times as massive as Mercury, 2,958 times as massive as Mars, etc.) This is also a difficulty with current theories. Other observations seem to raise even more provocative enigmas concerning our planetary history:

There are three pairs of rapid-spin rates among our planets: Mars and Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, and Neptune and Uranus, are each within 3% of each other. Why?

Earth and Mars have virtually identical spin axis tilts (about 23.5°). Why? (From angular momentum and orbital calculations, it would seem that three pairs of these planets may have been brought here from elsewhere.)

Why does Mars have 93% of its craters in one hemisphere and only 7% in the other? It would appear that over 80% occurred within a single half-hour!



The Shrinking Sun

Has the size of the sun changed over the years? John A. Eddy (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder) and Aram A. Boomazian (a mathematician with S. Ross Co. in Boston) seem to have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century, corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet/hour.3 The data Eddy and Boomazian examined spanned a 400-year period of solar observation, so that this shrinkage of the sun, though small, is apparently continual. If the sun was larger in the past than it is now by 0.1% per century, a creationist, who may believe that the world was created approximately six thousand years ago, has very little to worry about: the sun would have been only 6% larger at creation than it is now. However, if the rate of change of the solar radius remained constant, 100 thousand years ago the sun would have been twice the size it is now, and it is hard to imagine that any life could exist under such altered conditions. Yet 100 thousand years is a minuscule amount of time when dealing with traditional evolutionary time scales.4

Furthermore, assuming (by uniformitarian-type reasoning) that the rate of shrinkage has not changed with time, then the surface of the sun would have touched the surface of the earth at a time in the past equal to approximately 20 million B.C. And, since the time scales commonly assumed for organic evolution range from 500 million years to 2,000 million years,5 it would appear especially amazing since all of the evolutionary development, except the last 20 million years, took place on a planet that was inside the sun!

bondserv - find the rest of this article at:
http://khouse.org/articles/technical/20020601-418.html

[js1138]

Aram A. Boomazian (a mathematician with S. Ross Co. in Boston) seem to have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century...

I think you can safely say that your source for this is nuts. Perhaps you'll grace us with a summary of the argument in your own words, so that we can tell whether you have a good reason for taking it seriously.

[js1138]

I might add, that you are suggesting tha sun was 8 percent larger 8,000 years ago -- well within the usual constraints for creationism -- but also well inside a significant ice age.

[PatrickHenry]

The good thing about this "shrinking sun" business is that we need all the global warming we can generate. The other good thing about it is that by noticing those who adhere to this bizarre idea, we can identify those who have not yet heard of nuclear fusion. Generations ago, before this energy source was understood, it was widly assumed that the sun could not be very old, because it couldn't keep burning at its observable rate for very long. It was part of the "young earth" line of thinking.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Sun size data should be taken with a grain of salt. It could be oscillating at a very slow rate (in the millennia range). If the sun has done nothing but shrink in recorded history, then what would that imply about observations of solar eclipses well B.C.? Wouldn't they all be annular eclipses? A young sun with its present mass but as large as the earth's orbit also might not be dense enough to burn.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your post!

I didn't mean to get into the anatomy of the brain, my interest was in the biophysical mechanism and consciousness - but you got me interested, so I looked around and found a lot of information available on the anatomical mapping of the brain!

For lurkers who might be interested in more:

An introduction from Princeton

The visible human project (NIH)

My connection is much too slow to take advantage of the second one (LOL!)

[bondserv]

I did not write the article, but it looks as if a private sector mathematician (Aram A. Boomazian) was commissioned by John A. Eddy (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder) to verify some of his assertions.

Were you implying that a capitalistic mathematician is inferior to a government grant mathematician.

Or were you just making fun of his name?

[bondserv]

Hello Pat et al,

Did the article mention anything about the sun shrinking because of burning? Seemed to me they were using, "The data Eddy and Boomazian examined spanned a 400-year period of solar observation".

It doesn't seem like they were speaking of a theoretical burning shrinkage of the sun, but an observable physical shrinkage. "Furthermore, assuming (by uniformitarian-type reasoning) that the rate of shrinkage has not changed with time".

Seems like an honest examination of observable evidence to me. What else can we do to make assessments?

[jennyp]

Well, thank you betty boob.

Either you two got into a snit I didn't notice, or you need to make one more little edit... :-)

[unspun]

Either you two got into a snit I didn't notice, or you need to make one more little edit... :-)

Why do I suddenly have that warm feeling in my face and neck? I've fired my proofer and told my publisher not to return my calls.

Sorry Ms. boop.

Maybe I won't write any more hydra-headed essays after going to bed at 4:30 Saturday morning.

And I do still intend to read that chick article, Ms. j, well, it's not a "chick article," well, you know what I mean.

[bondserv]

As PatrickHenry pointed out, larger radius doesn't mean hotter for lets say 10,000 years (if nuclear fusion makes the sun hot, and size has no bearing on temperature). But physical size does become an issue when one extrapolates those percentages further back in time, because of physical proximity.

[f.Christian]

Most of the geologic column formed from below .. .. .. no pre cambrian fossils === NO evolution either // NEVER !