Hi all
I feel a little déjà-moo in the air.
Lack of Transitional Fossils. Well except for all of those which are known this would be a good argument
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_fossilshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalikhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceanshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horsehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archeopterixhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_mammalian_auditory_ossiclesLack of a Natural Mechanism. Boiled down his complaint is that there is no such things as beneficial mutations. I’ve already explained how a single bacteria evolved in a lab under observation into a plethora of different bacteria with different abilities incuding novel new metabolic pathways and defense mechanisms against predators. How anyone could not see that as beneficial I have no idea. Given that the experiment started with just one individual there was no genetic variation to start with so all of the change seen were due to the inventiveness of evolution. Evolution has been observed to work in the wild and in the lab and the mechanisms of mutation and natural selection have been observed in detail. Maybe the authors of this website are ignorant of that. Does that lend much support to their claims of credibility in other areas especially after they got it so wrong on the transitional fossils point above?
This article demonstrates that beneficial mutations do occur as we watch in lab experiments. They prove that selection among preexisting genetics is not the only mechanism behind these benefits but novel new inventions also play a part.
Lederberg, J. and E. M. Lederberg, 1952. Replica plating and indirect selection of bacterial mutants. Journal of Bacteriology 63: 399-406.
So the website is only half a century out of date with that claim.
Other examples include the observed evolution of the ability for bacteria to digest nylon by-products, chemicals unknown on this planet till we invented them last century. Another group of bacteria have evolved the ability to digest 2-4 dinitrotolulene another novel new invention.
There are plenty more examples from bacterial and insect resistance to our chemical attacks on them. Where the genetics is know it is often the case that novel new genetics are involved in their new abilities so a mechanism is indeed well known, observed, tested and understood except, apparently, by the authors of this website.
Both Creationists and Evolutionists agree that if evolution is at all possible, there needs to be an excessive (if not infinite) amount of time. It’s true, evolution takes a long time, it’s probably much faster than Darwin envisaged in the right conditions but it’s certainly not a fast process. I very much doubt that any ‘evolutionist’ would suggest that it is an excessive amount of time far less infinite. The observed facts of evolution in action in the experiments I have documented above and in wild observations show that the earth is easily old enough to account for the evolution that has apparently occurred here.
For much of the 20th century, it was thought evolutionists had all the time they needed. If the earth ever looked too young for certain evolutionary developments to have occurred, the age was pushed back in the textbooks.Conspiracy theory’s is it? The age of the earth, as revealed by geology surprised Darwin in his day, he was amazed that it could be so old, and it has continued to surprise everyone involved in working it out. Of course it has nothing to do with evolutionary theory it is the physical sciences, geology and physics specifically, which work out the age of the earth. I guess this author is ignorant of how that’s achieved too apparently. Lets face it the science behind the age of the earth measurements is rock solid. Many don’t understand it and so don’t accept it but for those who take the time to study it there is virtually universal consensus with the age of around 4.6 – 4.7 billion years.
[b}However, Young Earth advocates have identified quite a few Young Earth chronometers in recent years. Currently, there are approximately five times more natural chronometers indicating a "Young Earth" than an "Old Earth." Each discovery is a separate "Limiting Factor" that places a constraint on the possible age of the earth. [/b]
It’s true, they are constantly coming up with young earth chronometers but do any of them stack up? Do they stand the test of evidence? Let’s have a look at the few he mentions.
Moon driftI’ll assume he’s talking about the moon’s recession rate here, ‘moon drift’ is too vague to be sure. Let’s look at the simple figures here first.
The moon is receding from the earth at a rate of 3.8 cm / year. The moon is currently 38500000000 cm from the earth. Got a calculator. That means that, all things being equal, the moon would have been sitting on the earth 10 billion years ago. Doesn’t sound like much of a problem for the scientific, old earth, view here? The mechanism for this is well understood, the moon is taking rotational energy from the earth by tidal forces to increase it’s velocity (angular momentum has to be conserved) and this extra energy slows the earth and speeds up the moon so it’s orbit slowly progresses away from the earth. Simple maths from there will tell you how far away it would be at any given date in the past. These dates show that the moon was well above the earth for far longer than Young Earthers claim the earth has existed.
Do we need to go further?
Coral’s form daily and yearly layers in their skeletons so it’s possible to count the number of days per year in the earths past and exactly as the orbital mechanics figures suggest the earth is slowing down and the moon is receding in line with a solar system that is less than 5 billion years so the YEC limit of 10 billion is no problem. The coral layers show that around 400 million years ago the earth had around 410 days per year.
What’s interesting here is that the day counts in corals provide yet another, independent method of dating the age of some structures on the earth and they show that the earth is far older than YEC ideas would suggest. Again YEC contradicts the evidence.
earth rotation speedAs described above the earth’s rotation is slowing, 400 million years ago there were 410 days per year, YEC says that the earth is only a few thousand years old so how could such changes have occurred 400 million years ago. Yet another contradiction between YEC ideas and the physical evidence!
magnetic field decayLOL this one is so old and so foolish, does anyone still buy it? Based on the false assumption that the earth is a simple bar magnet who’s field is decaying with age, the claim is that, given it’s current strength the earth must be young or the field would have been impossibly strong only a few thousand years ago.
The fallacies are in not understanding how the earths interior generates the magnetic field, it’s far more complex than a simple bar magnet, and thus in assuming that a decaying magnetic field today means that it was always decaying the author misses true understanding of this fascinating system.
We know today that the earths magnetic field varies having peaks and troughs, we know that the poles wander and even reverse at times. We even use the signatures of these variations trapped in rocks to confirm dating of rocks and to confirm the great age of the earth. Palaeomagnetism is yet another confirmation of the great age of the earth in contradiction of YEC claims.
Gee, J. S. et al. 2000. Geomagnetic intensity variations over the past 780 kyr obtained from near-seafloor magnetic anomalies. Nature 408: 827-832.
erosion ratesIf we assume that there is no such thing as plate tectonics then this is a problem for an old earth but we can measure the movement of the plates so it’s a long stretch to suggest that they are stationary. With movement of the plates mountains build at collision boundaries and are eroded only to be built again as the plate continue to move. We can measure how fast they move, how fast mountains build etc today. The idea that the plates don’t move, which is implicit in this complaint, contradicts the direct physical evidence. Simple survey equipment, a theodolite for instance, is all that’s required to measure the movement and today we can use GPS systems to accurately track the movement of the continents all around the globe.
Yet again YEC ideas contradict the evidence!! Are you starting to see a pattern here?
chemical influx into the oceans and ocean salinityAnother old one, I think this one was Henry Morris, basically if you work out how much of a given chemical is entering the ocean per year divided by the amount currently there you get an upper limit for the age of the ocean. Given this Morris calculated that for Sodium (salt) the earth can’t be more than 260,000,000 years old while for Silicon the ocean can’t be more than 8000 years old. His method starts too look dodgy when you do the math for lead which only allows for a 2000 year old earth and get’s truly bizarre when you do the math for Aluminium which would give an upper limit of around 100 years. By now I’m sure you’ve all worked out that something is wrong with this methodology. I’ll assume that you don’t have a problem with the idea that the earth is more than 100 years old, even the YEC’s among you.
So what’s really going on here?
It’s pretty simple, Morris forgot to take into account the rate at which these materials leave the ocean. In some cases they form condensates which fall the to bottom of the ocean forming the fine silts that exist in great abundance in the deep oceans, some will be removed by other mechanisms such as being deposited on the shores of land or being consumed by sea creatures and then deposited with their skeletons on the sea floor or wherever their remains ended up. The figures this method gives are the equilibrium levels for all of these materials. It is the concentration they get to once their influx rate equals their removal rate.
Each Limiting Factor is distinct. If one were successfully challenged, there is still the problem of all the rest.And that’s the creationist game here and that’s why scientists generally won’t debate them. Look at what just happened, he threw out one line, it would have taken him 10 seconds to read that one sentence. Every single complaint was flawed and contradicted the evidence but it took me several pages to explain in detail what was wrong with his statements. In a time constrained debate would I have had the time to explain what was wrong with that 10 second sentence? How many more such could he have made in his time? That’s why YEC’s love open debates and that’s why they are the wrong forum for these sorts of exchanges, well they are if you are interested in the truth which is not always simple enough to explain to a lay audience in 5 minues.
And of course he’s right that there are many such ‘constraints’ on the age of the earth invented by YEC’s but to date every single one has proven to be flawed, not one has stood the test of evidence and reason. I suspect that there is a really simple reason for that, their idea of the age of the earth is wrong.
Furthermore, there are Limiting Factors constraining the possible age of the universe, such as spiral galaxies where they're maintaining their spiral shapes despite their centers spinning faster than their extremities.Yes there are limiting factors detectable to the age of the universe, the one Hubble first discovered being the most obvious, but this spiral galaxy problem is not one of them. Spiral galaxy’s are actually disks of stars with thinner and thicker regions. The thick regions we see as the arms of the spiral but there are stars throughout the disk. So what are the spiral arms? They aren’t actually made of a single set of stars that hangs around in that shape for long periods of time, the stars in the arms are constantly changing, those in the gaps between the arms flow into the front of the arms while those on the other side drop out the back of them. It turns out the spiral arms have more in common with traffic jams than the spokes of a bike. As cars slow at the front of the jam the cars behind them bank up. Even once the initial slow down is cleared the bank of cars will continue to build backwards along the freeway as the front of it clears producing a backwards travelling wave to the traffic which looks quite a lot like a slice through a spiral arm when seen from the air.
Obviously there’s much more to the orbital mechanics involved but that’s a very basic view of what’s going on. Linked by gravity these waves of bunched up stars travel around the galaxy producing the familiar spiral pattern that we can see if we have a good telescope and a clear sky.
Unacceptable Model of Origins. Moooo!!!
Sorry but I’ve done this one so many times.
Yes I understand that it is unacceptable to some christians just as christian theology is unacceptable to Moslems etc. The difference here is that, unlike Islam and christianity we can use evidence to test this idea. Accept it or no the evidence still supports it alone.
Firstly we have to understand that the big bang was neither. That term was invented by a reporter not a scientist and it has gone on confusing people ever since. It’s catchy but it’s wrong. The ‘big bang’ was a tiny event, far smaller than an atom, and it was an incredibly smooth but powerful flash of energy, nothing like the chaotic and destructive force people imagine when they think of an explosion.
Uneven distribution would actually be easier to explain if it was an explosion, the problem is that the universe is very smooth but the structure of the earliest moments of the universe, far less than a second after the ‘big bang’ suggest no mechanism capable of producing such smoothness. Inflation being too fast for information to travel from one side of the early universe to the other to smooth out any perturbations. This remains a problem for the theory though there are a number of ideas which may resolve it some of which will be tested when the LHC get’s going properly.
Retrograde motion is a non sequiter, even orbital mechanics 101 will teach you about several mechanisms that are capable of producing such motions without any challenge to the big bang theory. A couple of obvious ones are impacts of two bodies at oblique angles (think billiards shots with lots of spin) and slingshot effects of object passing closely in space throwing them into orbits opposite to those of their surroundings. The law of angular momentum, like the second law of thermodynamics only talks about the total momentum of the system and allows for and even explains these ‘contradictions’. When a retrograde system is formed the angular momentum imparted to it must be matched (ala Newton) by an equal and opposite moment added to some other bodies. The total is indeed conserved but the individual parts have a great deal of freedom.
Furthermore, the Big Bang does not address the primary question at hand, "where did everything come from?" Did nothing explode? How did this explosion cause order, while every explosion observed in recorded history causes disorder and disarray?Where did everything come from is indeed a great question. The short answer right now is that we simply don’t know. Before 10e-35 seconds after the initiating event it’s all a mystery and only slowly get’s less so after that. The LHC can create conditions and energies such as would have existed at that early stage of the universe so we can explore how matter behaves in those conditions and glean some more knowledge about the early universe.
There has been some theoretical and experimental work on the big question, where did it all come from. One of the current crop of ideas, and one with experimental support is the idea that a true vacuum is unstable. From the laws of Quantum Physics we learn that it is not possible for a quantum object to exist in a wholly known or even knowable state. This isn’t a limit of our science but a property of matter. Stick with me this is Quantum Physics so it gets really weird. A true vacuum, the absence of all matter, energy and even the fields of space/time itself would constitute a fully knowable state which is not allowed under QM. The suggested solution to this conundrum was the Cassimere effect. In this idea a vacuum would instantly be filled with a foam of particles and matter which borrow energy from the vacuum (called for obvious reasons Vacuum Energy) to form short lived parings. Now it all sounds very far fetched I know but then someone worked out how to test it, they setup a vacuum chamber and pumped out as much of the matter as possible while excluding as much energy (light, heat etc) from it. Into the chamber they placed a detector which would measure the pressure created by these Vacuum Fluctuations if they really existed and, exactly as predicted, there they were.
What the math of this experiment also showed is that a true vacuum, as opposed to the very limited one created in the lab, would produce unbounded vacuum fluctuations as it is only the limited nature of the vacuum which restricted the size of these.
Now how does any of that relate to the big bang? In the absence of a universe you would have nothing, a true vacuum, no matter, no energy, no fields of space/time. Such a state, according to QM can’t exists as it is unstable and unbounded vacuum fluctuations would be created in a foam of energy and matter to fill the void.
Now there’s one signature feature of a vacuum fluctuation, it has, in total, zero energy. The positive energy of one part of it is matched by the negative energy of the other. To the measurement accuracy we have available the universe we live it has zero total energy with the positive energy of matter and radiation being matched exactly by the negative energy of gravity.
It would all seem like a mad dream if it weren’t for the fact that we can create small vacuum fluctuations in a lab to confirm the maths behind it. How we could ever go on to confirm it in the universe I have no idea, maybe someone will work that out one day but till then we just have to say “I don’t know” when asked the question of where the universe came from.
LOL Carl Baugh is just brilliant, I love his stuff. I actually think he believes the stuff he writes which is sad but it’s still very funny. Did you know that the YEC website AnswersInGenesis lists Carl’s dino tracks arguments on their “Arguments we think creationists should NOT use” page in the “Which arguments should definitely not be used” section.
These original excavations yielded human footprints among dinosaur footprintsWhich turned out when properly examined to be the eroded footprints of a three toed dinosaur. It was this obvious detail that convinced AIG to drop Carl and his dino tracks arguments.
(see the Director’s doctoral dissertation).Oh yes, read it, he wrote it for the unaccredited diploma mill that gave him is PHd and it’s about up to the standard you’d expect. Have a read, the link was on his website last time I looked for it.
Here is some compelling information about the Grand Canyon that you won't find in modern-day textbooks or in the heads of self-styled evolutionists:I think the vast majority of geologists would be surprised to learn that they believe they don’t know how the Grand Canyon formed. And there’s a really good reason why you won’t find such ideas in the heads of most scientifically minded people either. Most scientifically minded people have read enough to realize that these claims are rubbish and so not worth filling their heads with. Certainly there are details of the grand canyon’s formation that we don’t understand fully but there’s no serious doubt that it was carved by the Colorado river over a very long period of time. We also know that a flood could not have produced such a formation and that’s not just a guess, we have plenty of examples of flood created landscapes and they don’t resemble the grand canyon plus there are literally mountains of dating evidence that shows the canyon to be old and to be the products of a long period of geological processes.
In Reason
Mooooo!!!
Russell
