Thanks Jeanie, the quick and easy one first:

This is a meteor impact site, it has the characteristics of meteor impacts. There is nothing controversial about this that I am aware of.

The standard geological explanation is simple: runoff (from snow and rain) is carried into a low point with no outlet, with evaporation concentrating what salts are in the runoff water (like boiling down a broth to thicken it), and where the inflow is low enough that it doesn't fill it up to some overflow low point (the bottom of Death Valley is below sea level).

It would be interesting to figure out how much water would be needed to fill this basin until the lowest current outflow point was reached, and then calculate how long it would take for that water to evaporate down to the level of the Great Salt Lake.

It would also be interesting to figure out if that would concentrate salts carried in runoff today to the levels seen in the Great Salt Lake.

Certainly an inquiring mind would want to ask how come the "Monster lakes left over" would not also include Death Vally and why "Catastrophic flood when natural dam breaks" and ""Catastrophic erosion takes place" would not also result in catastrophic flow out of Death Valley at whatever low point around the valley exists, and leaving behind a large lake.

Would that lake that size evaporate in 4000 years? If it doesn't evaporate then where did the water go and how did the Great Salt Lake reach the salt concentrations that it currently has?

Is there any evidence that water existed in Death Valley to that depth (ie - lake edge erosion patterns)?

This is actually a very critical question, and not one to be laughed off. The question is how do you validate what someone is saying to see if it really is true.

We'll take two examples to see how this works:

Example #1 - "Lucy's Knee":

A story repeated on many creationist sites is that the knee of the Lucy skeleton was found far from the site of the skeleton.

This claim originated with John D. Morris in "WAS LUCY AN APE-MAN?" published in November 1989:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041011063219/http://www.icr.org/pubs/btg-b/btg-011b.htm
This claim has since been retracted by Morris, but there are others that have repeated this claim that haven't (see Lucy's Knee Joint, A Case Study in Creationists' Willingness to Admit their Errors)

If there were two people debating this on a website, one using creationist websites to show it was from far away and the other using evolutionist websites to show that this claim is wrong, how would you know which was true?

You could look at a picture of the knee joint:


and you can look at the fossil skeleton:



And we see that (a) the knee joint is not the same, Lucy only has half per side and (b) the lengths of bone connected to the knee area are different lengths.

ie you can verify that the claim is false by looking at the evidence.

Example #2 - "Haeckel's Embryos":

The common claim is (a) that Haeckel's embryo drawing are frauds and (b) that they are still being used to teach evolution, even though evolutionists know they are frauds. This is a little more complex.

Haeckel hand drew the embryos (no photography back then) of several different animals in order to demonstrate his theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (ie - that the embryo development of an organism follows the path of the organism's evolutionary history). In the process he "fudged" the drawings a little bit to make his claim more visible.

Again, we can compare the drawings with actual embryos and see that there are little differences, but that by and large the drawings are recognizable as the organisms in question (at least by embryologists).

So it is true that the drawings were fudged. That they still look like the embryos in question though means that they are not frauds, complete fakes.

We can also look in textbooks and see if the drawings are used to teach evolution. They are.

But: they are not used to teach the theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny - which is usually pointed out to be a falsified (and discarded) theory, an example of the self-correcting process of science.

They are used to show that embryos from similar organisms undergo similar embryo development until a point is reached where they diverge to develop their particular traits. The more related two different types of organisms are the closer they follow similar embryo development paths.

Many modern texts now use pictures of actual embryos to show this same evolutionary process.

So why do some texts still use Haeckel's drawings? I can't say for sure, but I would say it is a combination of things: the evolution being taught is not really affected by the minor alterations Haeckle made in his drawings, the pictures are in public domain (no royalties) and are black and white (no color printing) and publishers are cheap, plus the publishers don't have to change what was used before.

So you can look at the evidence and see that (a) Haeckel did fake parts of his drawings and (b) they are used to teach an aspect of evolution that is observed in actual embryos today.


So how do you test for the validity of claims? Do you take a persons word for it? When two people disagree, do you chose the one you are more comfortable with, the one that fits your personal view of how things are? Do you stop with the comfortable answer? Or do you dig below the layers of comfort to find evidence that can show a different, possibly disturbing (to you), answer may be correct?

Inquiring minds want to know (and yes this is the same answer for our previous discussion).

When you start with an answer you haven't explored the question.

Enjoy.