My turn!
David F. said:
How is it they know how old this find is?
How do they know this is not just a modern monkey or one of the millions of recently extinct species?
By the same means by which it is possible to me to watch a film set in the 1930s (lets say) and make a pretty accurate guess as to whether it was
made in the 1930s or a period film made later - and in the latter case I could make a pretty good guess to within a decade of when the film was made. I picked an example of something that I think most of us here could do, primarily because we are exposed to this kind of material fairly frequently. I know when a film was made because of the quality of the film, or the soundtrack, the colours (or absence of) in the film stock, the identities of the people in the film. It's the same for palaentologists, archaeologists and geologists. They are experienced in examining various strata, rocks, animal bones, what have you, and their personal experience coupled with their knowledge of the
body of knowledge already built up makes them experts in this area.
David F. said:
Fascinating... Please continue. How exactly do you know the age of the particular strata and how do you know whether one strata is laid down on top of another in one minute or whether it took a million years?
Geologists have undertaken any number of experiments to determine sediment deposit rates, and have done so over more than a century. Why don't you get a book and find out? This is not a subject which can be adequately researched by Googling, you have to actually read text books.
David F. said:
Do you know how Ice Cores are dated? There is no radioactivity to measure and no landmarks (timemarks) along the way. Ice dating is done in the same way that tree dating is done - by counting rings or layers. The problem of course is that you have to know how long a period is represented by the ring or layer. It used to be thought that tree rings represented a summer/winter cycle. It turns out that this is not true. Tree rings are laid down based upon weather patterns and wet/dry cycles. While some locations have only one wet season per year, others have two, or even the rare three seasons per year. In the same way, Ice Archeologists assumed that layers of ice were laid down as summer and winter layers but this is also turning out to be incorrect. Ice layers are laid down by storms and then sunny periods between storms. If a high precipitation storm comes through the polar region and then the sun comes out and melts the top layer of snow into an ice sheet, and then another storm comes through, a series of layers can indeed be established in only a few days or weeks - but the Ice Archeologists count each layer/cycle as an entire year, making the count significantly incorrect. Ice Layer counting, like tree ring counting, is turning out to be much more difficult then originally theorized. Thus far, no one (that I am aware, please correct me if I am wrong) has come up with a method for establishing how many storms per year come through the Polar Region and thus how many layers are laid down per year. Even if such a method could be established for the present conditions, what were the weather patterns like last century or last millennium? While Ice Layer counting is intriguing, it is still fraught with errors and unanswerable questions.
If Ice Archaeologists are getting the age of ice cores wrong, exactly who is getting it right? Or finding the errors? It seems to me that the experts on Ice Core dating are the Ice Archaeologists you claim to be getting their numbers wrong. I think the same people are the experts on determining where the errors may be occurring, the extent to which storms need to be taken into account.
David F. said:
I am very interested in knocking down silly ideas like Evolution of life from non-life or the Evolution of reptiles into mammels and birds - Fish simply do not become horses.
Evolution of life from non-life is not a silly idea because you say so. You believe the evidence of microevolution, but you simply don't believe the evidence of speciation. Fish do not, indeed, become horses. But some blob of protoplasm did eventually become fish
and horses. Expecting non-existant intermediates, by the way, is a hallmark of Creationism.
David F. said:
I'm looking at your link and I will admit, it looks very impressive.
However, I see two problems. first, all the dating methods except counting layers are labed with "The major disadvantages of this method are ...", while at the end it explicitly says:
While unable to provide specific dates (within a millenia), the analysis show definate evidence of the the last two ice ages. Using the methods listed above the bottom of the ice-core was laid down 160,000 +- 15,000 years ago. It should be noted that all of the methods listed above were consistent with the above results.
Really? Despite major disadvantages, the methods were all consistent? I'm not trying to be critical here (I don't necessarily disagree that the Earth is over 160k years old - I simply don't know) but this sounds a little fishy. How can all these methods which all have major problems, all come up with the same date?
If all the methods, with their different problems, all come up with the same date, that is the evidence that despite the problems and the difference in methodology, that the methods are indeed sound.
David F. said:
How can there be definite evidence of the last two ice ages, when no one knows exactly when those ice ages were - and the article even mentions this lack of knowledge? This is just a little too good to be true (and I don't even have a problem with it being true). What I would really like to see is the evidence for Europes "little ice age" and how that age was determined in the ice cores since this is an event which is really not in dispute - I mean the dates are not in dispute.
But the evidence of the ice ages is not related to when the ice ages were. Now with this dating, the last two ice ages can be more firmly placed in time. This is how science works, signs of ice ages are identified, but the age isn't - then in a different environment, the signs are seen again. The previous scientific work showed that these signs are the signs of ice ages, and the new work can satisfactorily date them. And the store of human knowledge grows a little bit.
David F. said:
Second, I found this
article, and I just can't think that this has never happened before in the history of the world. The concern here is that one of the major glaciers in Antartica is thinning and will float off of the ocean floor and literally leave the continent. It also says that the ice flows (at its fastest point) at a rate of about 2.5 km per year. That's pretty fast. At that rate (granted that is the fastest rate) ice could flow all the way from the center of Antartica to the outermost point in only 1000 years? Ice flow rates like this do not bode well for the proposition that Ice Cores show 160,000 years of continuous growth. With ice flowing out from the center at measurable rates (which do very from decade to decade), how can there be ice-cores which span a hundred times the known flow rate? -
And the glacier in the article flows up hill!
I will keep investigating.
The 160,000 year old ice core is obviously not formed from ice which flows quickly - but is permafrost that pre-dates recent ice ages and warm periods. That same page cited before points out, for example, that Greenland could not have formed its ice cap as we now see it from bare ground in a short a period as 10,000 years or so (since the ice age or the proposed age of the earth by Creationists - which is what that page is going on about, I know you're not going on about that specifically, David).
Keep investigating - well, do so, primarily by purchasing some books on geology and palaentology and archaeology, so that you can argue from a position of knowledge, not a position of ignorance.
David F. said:
Many modern biochemists and evolutionary biologists have recognized this fact and are looking for some other method whereby the first cell might have been realized on Earth. The most prevelent theory is seeding from space, although no one has any clue how the first cell might have originated in space any more than it might have originated on Earth.
Seeding from space is very far from being "the most prevalent theory". Fred Hoyle advanced it many years ago, but it hasn't really been taken seriously for decades. There are a number of reasons why it might be considered impossible for any kind of seeding from space (assuming, well, actual seeds, as opposed to Aliens landing and planting life here) but I'll put the argument by Isaac Asimov when he dealt with this issue in
Extraterrestrial Civilizations (Crown, 1979): "Besides, of what use is it to claim that life originated elsewhere? One would still have to determine how
that life originated, and you're no further forward."
David F. said:
A one-celled animal is not just a bubble with some chemicals in it. It is a biological machine which runs a predefined, very complex program called DNA. It also has mechanisms for locomotion, gathering food, converting food into energy, storing energy, moving required molecules around within the cell to the locations they are needed, creating new proteins and enzyms. disposing of waste and of course the hardest of all, replicating itself. This is not something which just pops up out of nowhere.
All this is very true. On the other hand, the imaginary evolutionist that supposes that a one-celled animal (which does all that living organism stuff) has "popped out of nowhere" is just that: an imaginary straw man. Straw person, sorry. The one celled organism with mechanisms for locomotion, gathering food, converting food into energy, storing energy, moving moving required molecules around within the cell to the locations they are needed, creating new proteins and enzymes, disposing of waste and of course the hardest of all, replicating itself, evolved from bits of life which did none of those things
except the last. You may feel that replicating itself is the
hardest thing for such an object to do, but in fact it's the basic original and
only thing that is required. It is, in fact, the definition of life. Anything else is
just a chemical reaction. Which is not to say that the appearance of a self-replicating molecule was not a difficult and low-probability event - it was. But if it only happened once in a billion years on once in a billion planets, that's plenty of time for it to have happened about 3000 times in our galaxy alone.
David F. said:
It is a vastly complex machine which defys all attempts to define in any Darwinian sense or to show how such a mechanism might have occured by chance. The key phrase here is irreducably complex, meaning many of the mechanisms within the cell must have sprung up fully formed and fully functioning because there is no less complicated system which can be shown to work thus negating the idea of Darwinian evolutionary progression. Where did this animal containing many irreducably complex organic machines come from and how did it originate? Well, the best answer thus far seems to be that the first cell was originally designed and built by an alien species with far superior intellegence of unknown origin (careful, that sounds an awfully lot like God). They even made a movie about it - Mission to Mars (2000).
Of course, even once such a cell does find itself on this planet, it is still a huge unsubstantiated leap from one celled animals to multicelled animals and branching into the various Kindoms, Phylum, Order... No one has yet shown any method whereby such an ordered progression might be accomplished (just hand waving and a vague comment about "survival of the fittest"). My favorite book on the subject, as I have mention before, is Darwin's Black Box by Professor/Microbiologist Michael Behe.
Lets start with Behe first - a past master of the "Argument from Personal Incredulity". For a simple debunking, simply read the customer reviews on amazon.co.uk.
I've dealt with the uselessness of the "Aliens created life on earth" theory - you're just pushing the problem of life-from-nonlife to somewhere other than Earth, and where does that get you?
Mission To Mars was, by the way, practically a re-hash of
2001: A Space Odyssey, which dealt with those concepts in a far more intelligent fashion.
David F. said:
I have read and I have researched (I have several books sitting right in front of me) and No there are not researchers who are trying to refine the current hypothesis. When it comes to biochemical evolution, there are very few working in the field and there is a resounding silence in the scientific literature concerning the subject. The idea that all things are possible given enough time and enough tries, is simply not so - its called lieing with statistics.
Nope, calling it that is what is called lying. I don't need a full mathematical treatment to see that unlikely events are possible, given enough time. And there is very far from silence on the issue, but like the origin of the Universe, we're still at the stage at which the precise origin of Life has to remain somewhat speculative.
David F. said:
Biochemical Evolution is impossible, not improbable but impossible. It doesn't take all that much research and study to understand this (although it is certainly more than I can type into a thread like this).
A thing is not impossible just because a single, one-size-fits-all, this-is-definitely-the-way-it-happened explanation has not been found. Science has come up with many different plausible explanations of how life could have arisen, but just because not one of those may be the correct one does not make the thing impossible.
David F. said:
The truth is that we don't know how life got here and we don't know how old the Earth is. There are NO DATING METHODS which have passed anything like a rigorous scientific evaluation showing that correct results emerge.
This is just a lie.
David F. said:
In fact, Radiocarbon dating has totally failed many times - so many that professional historians reject all C14 test data. Somehow we still use these incredibly long dates, 4-5 billion years, as the accepted age of the Earth, without any scientific data to back them up at all.
Radio
carbon dating is only useful for dating documents and other human-historical artefacts. None of this has anything remotely to do with the 4.6 billion year age of the Earth, which is quite well attested using other age-determination factors. All of said methods involve physics, which subject you are supposed to be expert in. Exactly on what grounds are you rejecting
all the different results which come up with the same solution? The age of the Earth is "well-attested". That means that all sorts of different people have come to the same conclusion in different places and different times and using different methods.
David F. said:
Why? Because any date less than this would certainly doom the whole science of Biological Evolution - thus the need in science for these dates to be true (actually even this age is ridiculously small when faced with the needs of evolution, but other sciences have to struggle to just maintain this incredible age).
That's palpable nonsense. Evolution has created the entire plant and animal world that we recognise in only 600 million years (based on the earliest fossils of creatures which had hard parts), let alone the enormously diverse ecologies which have developed over the last 100 million years since the continents broke up. 3-4 billion years is quite long enough to create the far simpler lifeforms that existed prior to that.
David F. said:
The idea that there are scientists out there fixing the problems and validating the data, is simply wrong wishful thinking – kind of like faith in one’s religion. (Lightning in gloop jars does not produce the correct amino acids nor explain how they might survive even if they were produced since amino acids decay quickly in the presence of oxygen).
Already covered elsewhere, but you make the same mistake lower down in so laughable a fashion, I'll leave it until then.
David F. said:
MW, I also was educated in Texas in the '60s. I have a BS & MBA and am working on a PhD (Physics). I don't think I would qualify as uneducated. I have enough science training to know not to believe Evolution. May I qualify that rejecting the scientifc validity of Evolution does not mean accepting Creation.
Since more or less everybody else with
actual scientific training believe Evolution, how is it that you are coming to a different conclusion? Science is not a democracy, but it is a consensus. The explanations for various results are arrived at by logical processes which are accepted by the vast majority of reasonable, reasoning people. Saying you are "scientifically educated" but that you disagree with the general consensus of opinion
without a viable alternative explanation of your own is anti-scientific and irrational.
David F. said:
Actually, in my opinion, it is the lack of real science education which allows pseudo-intelectuals to foist ridiculous theories like this on a scientificly-illiterit population.
It is your lack of scientific education which is allowing you to place a scientifically well-attested fact - called Evolution - in the realm of pseudoscience. There is
nothing ridiculous about Evolution, and you have not been able remotely to show why it
should be considered ridiculous. And the one word you should not misspell under any circumstances, is, of course, illiterate.
David F. said:
I suppose you are calling my world "religious" although I have not invoked religion in any way in my arguments.
You are doing here exactly what you are accusing Andre of - he never said that "your world" was religious, any more than you do. He merely stated that your view of things is inconsistent with the world that Andre lives in (and me too) and that therefore you live in a world of your own, where obviously the rules must be different. Time and time again, you have argued that people have put words in your mouth - but on that occasion you are doing exactly the same thing! Other people have accused you of being religious. I personally take you at your word. But your claim that there is no known explanation is based solely on your own inability to accept the explanations that science gives you. You are at liberty to point out the many times that science has been wrong in the past, but to do so with the current consensus, you must show some valid unexplained or unexplainable phenomena which proves the current paradigm to be incorrect - which you have failed to do. You simply continue to state and restate your incredulity, which is not a valid argument.
David F. said:
I don't know how old the Earth is - nor do I have to. I can tear down a false theory without knowing what is true. It's OK to just say we don't know.
You simply ignore or state as false all the validly arrived at results for the age of the Earth, the (even easier to determine) age of the Universe as a whole. Also, what you state is incorrect - you cannot really base your ideas as to an alternative theory of creation without knowledge of acknowledged facts. You claim that there's no problem with the age of the Earth and yet you continue to claim that "we don't know the age of the Earth". Either the evidence for the earth's age came about through natural means, or it was put there. Your position is that, since nobody was about at the time, it's impossible to say. If this was the case, mankind would not have made any advances, certainly not as far as allowing me to broadcast my thoughts across the world in this way.
David F. said:
Yes, I know the theory, but somewhere along the way the atmosphere has to change to 20% or so oxygen. As soon as that happens, life must be already in progress and the cell must already be living, working, reproducing - which as far as we know - requires oxygen. Which came first, the amino acid or the oxygen? How did life, which requires oxygen, develop without oxygen?
Lets assume you mean free oxygen in the form O[sub]2[/sub]. I don't know about you but I personally encounter a great many life forms which would exist quite happily without oxygen - in fact they
produce oxygen, and they're called plants. And there are millions of anaerobic microscopic life forms, and have been for billions of years. Mobile animal life of the kind we're used to seeing (all of which is less than 600 million years old at the oldest) needs oxygen, but its evolution was preceded by a long period of oxygen-creating life existing. Most of which I learned in primary school.
Everybody? I knew this was pointless, but I felt like answering David point by point, although I know many of you have already done so far better than I could.
David, the way we know you're a Creationist is because you reject known scientific facts on the basis that the science result was arrived at to "fit the theory of Evolution". But this is manifestly not the case. In your Ice Cores example, you claim that the people who know all about Ice Cores are ignoring sources of error in providing their data. But if their data showed that no ice was as old as 6,000 years, why would they fake an older result? If no ice predates 6,000 years, that doesn't mean Creationism is true and Evolution is false - it just means that no ice is older than 6,000 years. The people trying to determine the age of the ice core are doing so
in order to determine the age of the ice core, not to "disprove Creationism" They are doing this, because it is useful information, and consequently it had better be right. As it happens, the data they have found
does disprove Creationism. Quite a lot of scientific discovery, in all fields, has disproved Creationism. None has disproved Evolution (and Evolution, as it is understood, is
certainly falsifiable - ie, subject to disproof - unlike what Creationists state).
Michael said:
It seems to me that your entire argument stems from this idea of a watchmaker. Maybe you should read: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design I’m sure it will answer many of these questions for you.
Why the hell do these American editions have those useless bloody subtitles?? The book is
properly called
The Blind Watchmaker - no inflammatory subtitle required. It is also one of the best books on the subject, and in my view Dawkins' best book of all.
