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The Talk.Origins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy

Feedback for December 2002

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Response: This is not a discussion forum. There is no claim, anywhere, to be a discussion forum.

The discussion forum most closely associated with this web site is the Usenet discussion group talk.origins. Check it out. It would be a good idea to read the FAQ Welcome to talk.origins first. I hope to see you there.

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Response: The Bible also says that there is a solid firmament atop the sky. (It is part of the Flood story, in fact.) According to your reasoning, you cannot accept the absense of such a firmament and believe in the Bible. Yet I know of nobody professing belief in the Bible who does believe in a solid firmament.

The Bible contains words, not ideas. The words lead to ideas, but the ideas belong to the people thinking them, and each person's thoughts are their own. I can understand how you can have trouble understanding another person's thoughts; I have have the same trouble understanding how people could accept many aspects of creationism. An important point, though, is that you don't need to understand how a person can accept both Christianity and no Flood. Just be aware that many millions do.

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Response: Aboriginals came to Australia in several waves up to as recently as 12,000 years ago, but the earliest possible date is about 60,000 years ago.The nearest relatives of the aboriginal population are the Naga people in India, the Ngandong of Java, and the people of Papua New Guinea, with whom they share a number of physical characteristics. They came from the Indonesian Archipelago and use boats to cross the Timor sea, which 12,500 years ago was smaller with the lower sea levels. Even today, people in canoes can reach Australia from Indonesia or PNG.

There is no evidence whatsoever that humans arrived in Australia before that date. However, there is considerable evidence that Homo erectus, an earlier hominid and possibly our ancestor, lived in Asia many thousands of years before that, and possibly reached Australia as well.

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  • The oldest desert in the world is generally thought to be the Namib desert. It is about 80 to 90 million years old. You may be thinking of the Sahara, which indeed is thought to have formed about 4000 years ago. That makes it a young desert.
  • The Great Barrier Reef is quite young as far as coral reefs go. It began to form only about 18 million years ago, and much of it is less than a million years old.
  • The oldest known living tree is a bristlecone pine over 4,700 years old, called Methuselah. In 1964 an even older tree was cut down, after having lived 4,862 years. In the same location can be found dead trees, and all together the living and dead wood gives a continuous tree ring record going back over 9,000 years.
  • Hovind is a nutcase even by creationist standards. If you are not inclined to trust us on that point, try looking at what Answers in Genesis have to say on the matter.
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Response: Chris has already dealt with the factual claims in your letter. I'd like to deal with the last part, concerning "Dr" Hovind. I've had the experience of trying to arrange a debate with Kent Hovind, several years ago. After initially agreeing to everything, including the date, time and specific subject, he pulled out of the arrangement. It was a debate he had initially challenged ME to, after I had written to him to challenge him on the age of the earth and flood geology. Since that time, many people have challenged him to a written debate to be posted on the web where everyone can view it. He absolutely refuses to participate in a written debate. Why? The answer is obvious. It eliminates the advantages he has during an oral debate. I coached debate for several years, and his strategy is age old. Hovind's style is to spit out literally dozens and dozens of claims, no more than a sentence or two. They are always oversimplified, often just plain false, but by the time you've refuted the first one, 20 more have been thrown out like a machine gun. This used to be referred to as the "Gish Gallop", in honor of Duane Gish. These days I like to call it the Hovind Hustle. The audience during such a debate can't check a citation or reference because none is provided. But in a written debate, references can be demanded, offered, examined and refuted. The audience at one of his debates doesn't have the material on hand that shows that many of the arguments that Hovind uses were debunked even by creationists, sometimes decades ago. Hovind is very smooth and comfortable in front of an audience, and he can throw out arguments faster than a gatlin gun. But he avoids any forum where his arguments can be examined in any detail like a hemophiliac avoids paper cuts.

As far as his offer is concerned, I have told him in e-mail, over the phone, and in person that his "challenge" is a transparent fraud. I have even offered, on the web where everyone, including him, can see it, that I would give him $1 million if he can prove ANY historical claim using the same criteria he used in his challenge. The reaction: total silence. Again, the reason is obvious. He knows that his challenge can't be met, ever, under any circumstances, by anyone trying to prove anything. It is a complete and utter fraud. And if you think this is "talking behind his back", rest assured that you are completely free to forward this to "Dr" Hovind, along with my e-mail address.

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Plate tectonics is the study of how the plates of the Earth's crust move and rub against each other. There are four types of plate boundaries:

  • Divergent boundaries -- where new crust is generated as the plates pull away from each other.
  • Convergent boundaries -- where crust is destroyed as one plate dives under another.
  • Transform boundaries -- where crust is neither produced nor destroyed as the plates slide horizontally past each other.
  • Plate boundary zones -- broad belts in which boundaries are not well defined and the effects of plate interaction are unclear.

Plates that rub against one another create faults, or cracks, and tend to generate earthquakes. A famous fault is the San Andreas fault, which runs along most of California. Plates that spread apart create new crust from the magma (molten rock) lying underneath the plates. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is a well-known divergent boundary.

The U.S. Geological Survey has an excellent on-line publication, This Dynamic Earth, which discusses plate tectonics and is aimed at the layman. Houghton Mifflin also has a nice set of links called GeologyLink, which includes an entire section on plate tectonics.

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The site was originally created and maintained by Brett Vickers. He single-handedly put together the bulk of the site. Brett stills pays the bills for web hosting, but has passed the responsibilities for maintenance of the content to a group of volunteers. So far as I know, the only funding the site receives comes out of Brett's pocket. Everything else is done by volunteer effort. We are particularly fortunate to have a good group of people who take the time to respond to feedback messages.

Wesley

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Author of: Evolution and Philosophy
Response: No. Nothing can be "proved" if you are strict enough, and evolution is as well confirmed as any other scientific theory or program.
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Response: It does not depend so much on the species definition as the way the organisms themselves behave. Granted, the step intermediate tend to be classified somewhat arbitrarily, because there are "lumpers" and "splitters" in taxonomy (an old problem) and some will lump two or more forms as a single species while others will not.

The standard biological species definition includes both those that do not mate successfully because of some biological cause and those that do not because of some behavioural cause. In fact, the standard divisions since the beginnings of the modern synthesis are:

  • Premating
  • Postmating
  • Prezygotic
  • Postzygotic

Anything that prevents mating occurring can form a species just as anything that prevents a zygote from forming or coming to term and later reproducing in its own right.

Ring species are, in effect, species in the process of being born (in statu nascendi in biological Latin). There are no hard and fast rules about how big a genetic, or developmental, or ecological, or behavioural difference has to be. In the case of genetics, species with tens of thousands of genetic differences can sometimes successfully hybridise, while at other times, a few crucial differences can be enough. Sometimes the genetic changes aren't great but they cause major differences in the developmental timing of the fetus.

A classic case of one kind of ring species known as a "superspecies" which consists of chromosomal races (each race has a different number or arrangement of their chromosomes) is the Israeli Naked Mole Rat (Spalax erenberghi) which has been studied in depth by Eviatar Nevo. This is not the famous eusocial mole rat, by the way.

Here, such chromosmal differences are not enough to make the adjacent races unable to breed, but the more distant ones cannot interbreed, and one rampant bulldozer would instantly create two species where there were only one before. It is worth noting that this situation appears to have remained like this for around three million years.

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Author of: The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System
Response: My first reaction is to ask what's wrong with "I don't know"? Creationists react to this simple phrase as if it were some kind of huge victory, proving that creationism is right. But in real life, we often have to settle up with our own ignorance and admit that we just don't know. In the empirical sciences, it's almost always the case that we don't know something. It's that lack of knowledge that spurs further research, whereby we answer the old questions, while at the same time inventing a whole set of new questions.

But even if we don't know, that does not mean we are quite helpless yet. The idea that the universe popped into being ("something from nothing") is based on a very literal interpretation of general relativity (GR). In GR the initial state of the universe is undefined (it is a singularity). That leads to the conclusion that the universe came into existance at the "bang" of Big Bang cosmology, something from nothing, creation ex-nihilo.

But we have long recognized that GR has a major shortcoming. It is not a quantum theory, and some form of quantized GR is necessary to describe the initial state of the universe. Once we realize that, a whole new world of possibilities opens up. The new fields of quantum gravity and string theory have created a cottage industry in the new area of pre Big Bang cosmology. One recently publicized theory would have what we call the "bang" of the Big Bang be a collision between 5-dimensional surfaces called "branes", in a higher dimension universe (the cyclic universe of Paul Steinhardt).

Granted, its more math than physics for now, but it is a popular area of scientific research. And some people like it even better than I don't know.

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From: Tim Thompson
Author of: Creation Science and the Earth's Magnetic Field
Response: Quote: There is no current factually based scientific method (mathematical or otherwise) that can inherently prove the Earth is billions of years old.

People are always free to believe whatever they choose to believe. I won't labor over what I believe about Kent Hovind at the moment. However, I will labor over that which I know to be a fact. The statement that I quoted above is, as a matter of fact, false. One is still free to believe it, but that belief does not turn a falsity into a truth. As far as the word "prove" applies to the empirical or natural sciences (as opposed to the absolute nature of proof in mathematics), it is a fact proven, beyond any doubt or question whatever, that Earth is billions of years old. There are no valid counter arguments.

In this archive, see the many Age of the Earth files for detailed discussions of how one can show, beyond doubt, that Earth is billions of years old, and how one can show that creationist counter arguments are not just "false", but trivially so, embellished as they are with woeful blunders and misrepresentations.

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Response: Please think about the implications of a God who bars people from heaven for failing to have a sufficiently literal view of Genesis. This is an evil, repellent theology.

Unbelievers are not going to be concerned about such threats. Most believers recognize such threats as unbiblical, and no basis for failing to consider modes of handling the bible which do not require a strict literalism that is disproved by science.

This threat is aimed at existing creationists. It is part of a crude cultish mind control aiming to make creationists fearful of questioning a very restrictive and shallow brand of fundamentalism.

If you care about truth and integrity, forget about fears of hell and punishment and consider the witness of the natural world. That is all science really is; looking to see what we may learn directly from the natural world.

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Response: I can't imagine what evidence leads you to the conclusion that the scientific community is beginning to lean toward intelligent design. The advocates of Intelligent Design remain the same small group they have been for years, funded largely by the same set of foundations, and talking mostly to one another. They have yet to present a testable model to the scientific community, or even to submit a paper outlining a testable hypothesis to a refereed journal. They may talk loudly, but the notion that the "scientific community" is leaning in their direction is, to be blunt, utter nonsense.
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From: Chris Stassen
Author of: Isochron Dating
Response: Dating methods can give inaccurate results when mis-applied. For example, carbon dating only works on carbon derived from the atmosphere. Because molluscs and seals build their bodies from carbon that ultimately comes from other sources, they are not suitable for cabon dating. This does not, however, support the creationists' implication the method is therefore entirely unreliable and all "inconvenient" (to them) results can be ignored.

There isn't a single method that geologists use; there are dozens of methods, with varying difficulty, applicability, and strengths/weaknesses. Potassium-argon is one parent-daughter pair that several different assessment methods utilitze (and it is also a common name for one particular assessment technique involving that decay sequence). For an introduction to isotopic dating, see my Isochron Dating FAQ. For more detail, I'd recommend Faure's Principles of Isotope Geology or Dickin's Radiogenic Isotope Geology -- two excellent introductory textbooks on the subject.

The creationists' claim of "circularity" is, simply, a lie. The relative sequence of formations in the geologic column was worked out -- solely from vertical position that was discovered across Europe -- a century before isotopic dating methods were possible, and therefore cannot depend on isotopic ages. "Index fossils" are distinctive fossils that are used to match up formations of the same age, not to invent a sequence out of thin air. In my opinion, the "circularity" charge is so fundamentally dishonest that there is no legitimate excuse for creationists to propagate it. Andrew MacRae's excellent Radiometric Dating and the Geological Time Scale FAQ addresses this as well.

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Author of: Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution
Response: Most of the beliefs you list at the beginning were not believed by mainstream science. The flat earth and tarantella were mainstream folklore. Earth supported by a turtle is from Asian mythology, and the "turtles all the way down" story is folklore itself, quite likely never believed by anyone. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a scientific consensus about the existence of extraterrestial life.

You are correct that some scientific ideas change, but you overstate the extent. Old theories are almost never overturned completely. Instead they are modified. The theory of evolution itself has changed since Darwin's day to incorporate what we now know about genetics, symbiosis, horizontal gene transfer, and other things. Einstein, Bohr, and Heisneberg didn't eliminate the old Newtonian physics; they added to it. (And scientists 200 years ago did not think there was nothing left to discover; heck, study of the natural history of the New World had barely begun. Rather, some scientists thought that someday everything might be discovered.) Scientific revolutions typically come from opening up a new field, not overturning an old one.

Most important, the changeability of science is a big part of its strength. It allows mistakes to get corrected and new discoveries to get added. Fields which don't allow this sort of growth don't allow their faults to be fixed. Never trust anyone, whether scientist, religious leader, or whomever, who claims inerrancy.

Expect the theory of evolution to change in the future, but don't expect fundamental changes or disappearance. The changes will only correct what weaknesses and faults the theory has now, making the theory stronger.

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Response: I guess ANY evolutionary theory can convincingly refute that statement.

See Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations.

I regret I cannot comment directly on the figure you give here. But basically, the common flaw with all such arguments is that they simply ignore any evolutionary effects, such as cummulative selection.

You don't actually give the calculation, which is a pity. The number itself does not mean anything unless we know how it is calculated and what model is used. But I am completely confident that any model used to get a number like 10 to the power of 191 is going to ignore cummulative selection, which means (roughly) that it is a calculation of a cell forming without evolution.

Beware of trusting numbers given simply with the personal authority of a self declared expert, rather than a number given with the backing of a model and formula that is available for examination.

I am more of a mathematician than Mike Riddle; which is not actually all that difficult. Riddle is often described as a mathematician. The truth is simply that he has an an undergraduate science degree with a major in mathematics. His graduate work was in education, he worked in computers for many years. He is now full time as a touring creationist speaker. To be fair to Mr Riddle, I suspect he is mainly described as a "mathematician" by others; his own pages speak simply of having a degree "in mathematics".

I have an undergraduate science degree with majors in computing and mathematics, and a PhD in mathematical automata theory.

The fact is, having a degree in mathematics does not mean very much. Setting up a good mathematical model able to characterise complex phenomena in biology is very hard work; and the major expertise required is in biology. The maths is complex, but it is much more straightforward than the problem of making a realistic model of the biological and chemical processes to which maths may be applied. This is where creationist abiogenesis probability figures fall apart, and this is where I expect Mr Riddle's maths to be worthless as well.

Sight unseen, I would guess that the actual maths involved in Riddle's number is at a high school level, and that the physical model on which it is based is inmitigated codswallop. If anyone knows the model used, I am sure the talk.origins newsgroup would love to hear about it.

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