Feedback for December 2002

Yes, I read your "read this first" before complaining page. It simply said that most of the site is biased toward evolutionism. Well, I found that to be true. So, why masquerade as a serious discussion forum, when only one side of the discussion is SERIOUSLY entertained or explored? If I wanted to be spoon-fed evolution I wouldn't have come here. So, bye, and have fun thinking that you're all so "open-minded" and professional. NOT!

Stevizard

Andy

What a wonderful deal. Not only do I get to learn, I get to laugh.

Heartily.

Keep up the excellent work.

I have a question about ring species, as follows:

I came across a very interesting paper on the talkorigins site, in which Douglas Theobald offered information on ring species. My question appears below the relevant excerpts from the paper.

"There are countless cases of distinct species which can, in unusual or limited circumstances, form hybrids. One example is the West European raven and the Asian hooded crow, which have distinct ranges meeting in a narrow "hybrid zone." Another are the Platte river species of sucker fish of the Catostomus genus which live together and only rarely interbreed (Futuyma 1998, p. 454).

"One of the most striking instances of partial or incomplete speciation are the numerous 'ring species.' Ring species, such as the salamander Ensatina, form a chain of interbreeding populations which loop around some geographical feature; where the populations meet on the other side, they behave as completely different species. In the case of Ensatina, the subspecies form a ring around the Central Valley of California - the subspecies freely interbreed and hybridize on the east, west, and north sides of the valley, but where they coexist on the south side they are incapable of hybridizing and act as separate species (Moritz et al. 1982; Futuyma 1998, pp. 455-456).

"Another example of a ring species is the gull genus Larus. L. argentatus and L. fuscus were originally identified as distinct species in England. However, there is a continuous ring of Larus hybrids extending to the east and west all the way round the North Pole. Only in England are they incapable of interbreeding.

"The Great Tit, Parus major, similarly forms a ring species around the mountains of Central Asia, freely interbreeding everywhere except in Northern China (Smith 1993, pp. 227-230)."

Presently, I am aware of two different approaches to the concept of "species." In one approach, two species cannot interbreed and produce fertile offspring. In another, they simply do not interbreed, often because their mating habits differ.

But "do not" is not, perhaps, the same thing as "cannot." Perhaps, if thrown together without other mates, they would in fact breed, as wolves and dogs do, and produce fertile offspring. Indeed, some of our dog breeds have been regularly infused with "wolf blood" as a matter of breeder policy.

My two questions regarding "ring species" are:

1) Let us say that there are six species in a ring, and 1 and 6 do not mate. Will 2 and 5 mate, or only 2 and 3?

2) Has anyone studied whether mating can in fact take place between those ring members who meet but do not now customarily mate? Has anyone done in vitro experiments to see if viable offspring can be produced and implanted? Do they produce fertile offspring?

We should, of course, expect to see at least some processes of speciation in action, and ring species would appear to be an example -- but what definition of species is being used?

I apologize if the answers to this question are well known.

One question that stumps me, however, is when they ask, "But where did matter and the laws of physics come from in the first place? How can something come out of nothing? Someone must have set the ball rolling in the first place."

How would you handle that question?

I am specifically referring to comments made about Kent Hovind. I'm not the type to believe anything that any individual says just because an apparent authority says it. If I believe a piece of information is questionable, I will investigate. Yes, Kent is colorful and has many different theories about creationism. Notice I say theories. Evolution is a theory as well. Probably no question about that from anyone.

I personally believe that the bible is the inspired word of the living God. Thus I believe in creation. I could write a lot about my opinions on this subject but to be brief, I think that this site's opinion on Kent's 'agenda' or the nature of his ministry is not correct. I perceive this site's opinion to his ministry is the belief that Mr. Hovind hangs his hat on the fact that evolution can not be proven, or that creation is the only way that life began. While he does provide a lot of scientific information discerning the two positions, I believe that his main point is to prove that evolution is in fact a religion and therefore should not be taught as fact. The rest of the information, both scientific and his own personal beliefs, merely add to this main concept.

The article I read from this site about his $250K challenge doesn't provide any pertinent information in regards to his apparent dodging of the list of questions that were provided to him. The whole point of his challenge is that it is impossible to claim. This is because evolution is not a valid theory of the origins of life.

There is no current factually based scientific method (mathematical or otherwise) that can inherently prove the Earth is billions of years old. With that in mind, humans have a choice. Believe the Bible or believe in their own interpretation (guess) and hope they are correct.

The most obvious way to observe present-day accumulation of Greenland snow and ice is to lay a marker, like a one-meter square piece of stiff plastic on the surface, and come back one year later and collect a one-square centimeter column of snow and ice on top of it. Then by melting the snow and ice, and measuring the height of the equivalent one-square centimeter column of water, you know what the annual accumulation was, in an equivalent thickness of water. Other kinds of markers can be used, but I think you get the idea.

This has been done for many, many years. The average equivalent accumulation over the last 150 years, or so, is about 0.25 meters of equivalent water. (See 'Snow Accumulation at GISP2 Summit, Greenland' ) This number can be compared to visible layering in the snow and ice, especially the top layers where annual measurements have been made. By direct observation one visible layer is one year's worth of accumulation.

Individual visible layers have been counted downward with slightly increasing uncertainty as you go deeper. (See GISP2, on-line which discusses the conservative age error estimates of +/-2% from 0 to 11.64 kyrs, +/-5% from 11.64 to 17.38 kyrs, and +/-10% from 17.38 to 40.5 kyrs, Alley, et. al. 1993; or on the CD-ROM available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado at Boulder, and the World Data Center-A for Paleoclimatology, National Geophysical Data Center, Boulder, Colorado.) But down to a depth of about 1680 meters in the borehole named GISP2 the individual layers counted stand at 11,640 and that count is quite accurate. (See GISP2 Layer Counted Timescale and the Meeser/Sower official GISP2 timescale discussed on A Note on the Timescales.) This point in time, approximately 11,640 years before 1950 A.D., marks the end of the event called the Younger Dryas. This event is the global weather phenomenon used to delineate the transition from the Pleistocene Epoch to the Holocene Epoch, the Holocene being the geological time period we live in today, also called the Recent. It is a very illuminating exercise to plot various different data logs from the GRIP and GISP2 boreholes and observe this climatic event leaving its mark on so many of them.

Greenland is covered by a continental glacier that is 3,000 meters thick at the 'continental divide' or the 'summit,' being the approximate geographical center. Deposition of ice has been recorded in the recent past and continues today. In analogy to geological sedimentation, the oldest deposition is at the bottom and younger deposition sits on top, becoming progressively younger from bottom to top. In Geology this is known as Steno's Law of Superposition, first explained in print by the Dane, Nicolaus Steno, in the late 1600's. Some Young-Earth Creationists deny this simple, logical premise with regard not only to the Greenland ice but to all of Geology as well. (See 'Those Remarkable Floating Rock Formations'.)

If there are any physical differences in the ice as one descends through the depths, then those physical differences might be able to be used to date the ice and to discern something about Earth's climate over that time period. Boreholes have been drilled, and cores have been recovered. (Core drilling uses a cylindrical drill bit that cuts a circular ring of material away while leaving the interior material undisturbed. At certain intervals, like a few meters, this 'core' is broken at its base and physically removed up the borehole to the surface where it is preserved for study.)

A host of physical measurements have been made both in the boreholes and on the cores. These include visual observation of layers, electrical conductivity, concentration of various chemical ions, concentrations of Deuterium, concentrations of Oxygen isotopes, Carbon-14 dating of entrapped carbon dioxide, volcanic ash, borehole diameter, borehole orientation (boreholes are not perfectly vertical nor perfectly straight), temperature, and more.

Layering is visible in almost all of these logs. Deuterium and Oxygen isotope concentration logs, for instance, depend upon the surface temperature of the oceans from which the water came. During evaporation the seasonal differences in surface temperature make for different partial pressures of water composed of Oxygen-18 and Oxygen-16, and between common water molecules with Hydrogen and molecules with one Deuterium and one Hydrogen. The process of depletion of one isotope at a higher rate than the other continues to depend upon the temperature of the water as it travels from the ocean to the Greenland Summit. Summers are warmer and winters are colder, even in Greenland. Thus we see a record of seasonal temperature variations in the two different isotope concentration logs - Oxygen-18 vs. Oxygen-16, and Deuterium vs. Hydrogen. (See GISP2 Bidecadal Oxygen Isotope Data and Deuterium data cited below.)

The Deuterium log has been recorded at high resolution in GISP2 down to a depth of 194 meters, with an age of 680 years, or 680 warm-cold cycles, with an average sampling interval of about 3 centimeters, and about 16 samples per warm-cold cycle near the top, and about 9 samples per warm-cold cycle near the bottom. (See GISP2 Stable Isotopes (Deuterium) data file deltad.dat available on-line at GISP2 Stable Isotopes (Deuterium, High Resolution).) This data shows that there are no higher 'frequencies' of warm-cold cycles in the the ice, higher than one cycle per annum. These highly detailed warm-cold cycles correspond to the visible layers. This is another, independent confirmation that one visible layer is one annum.

Using the best available methods and the best available data for layer counting and for determining the time period for each layer, scientists have developed a time scale for the Greenland ice cores. The ice is more than 100,000 years old at the base. (See the Meese/Sower timescale, GISP2 Meese/Sowers Timescale, for time of deposition versus depth in GISP2 and GRIP Depth Age Scale from Flow Modeling for time of deposition versus depth in GRIP based upon flow modelling.)

Young-Earth Creationists oppose the interpretation of the Greenland ice cores as a continuous record of Earth's climate for the past 100,000 years, or more. If true then these ice cores, and the logs of various data recorded from the boreholes and from the recovered cores themselves, offer positive evidence that the Earth is at least 100,000 years old and certainly not less than 10,000 years old as the Young-Earth Creations insist.

Young-Earth Creationists attempt to discredit the Greenland ice cores at all costs because they destroy the very foundation of their belief in a young Earth.

One way they attempt to discredit the Greenland data is to insist that the layers are not annual layers but individual storms that occur more frequently that once per year. Never mind that the layering in the Oxygen isotope and Deuterium logs represent alternating warm and cold deposition. (Why would many tens of thousands of storms alternate between one warm storm and one cold storm for so many thousands of storms in a row? The Young-Earth Creationists respond by saying that the physicists must have gotten it wrong. There must be another explanation for the layers other than warm/cold deposition. Perhaps there was evaporation between storms, they argue in desperation.) They simply distrust the layer counting as annual layers and say "we just don't know" when asked to explain how the layers came about.

When presented with demonstrable evidence that present-day deposition is precisely equivalent to visible layering near the surface (and therefore one layer per year) they insist that in the past there must have been more than one visible layer per year. They offer no explanation of how this could have happened.

Young-Earth Creationists deny the efficacy of radiocarbon dating. They throw out the age dating of the ice from entrapped carbon dioxide. Because one radiocarbon date may have been wrong once in the past (due to perfectly well-known reasons, it should be noted) they throw out all radiocarbon and all radioisotope dating. (The radiocarbon dates of the Greenland ice agree with the layer-counting dates but are almost always a few hundred years younger. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere circulates down into the firn until the firn becomes ice and entraps the carbon dioxide.)

Young-Earth Creationists deny the correlation of the Greenland ice cores with known volcanic eruptions. They say that the record of the ash in the ice shows peaks where no one can name a corresponding volcano, and shows no peaks where volcanoes are known to have occurred. Thus correlation with volcanoes cannot be trusted. They ignore the multitude of positive correlations of known volcanic eruptions with ash in the Greenland ice.

Another way to discredit the accepted Greenland ice dating is by seeking independent evidence of the age of the ice without reference to other methods. This line of investigation is a valid means of research. But it is easy to misuse, to misconstrue, and to arrive at conclusions that will not stand up to critical scientific analysis.

One Young-Earth Creationist, with a Ph.D. in Physics, has published on a creationist website a document arguing that the Greenland ice is younger than scientists claim. (See 'Ice Cores and the Age of the Earth'.) His argument depends upon the World War II airplanes found buried in the ice recently. He demonstrates how their depth, divided by their known age, corroborates a young age for the ice, without considering the sinking of the airplanes into the ice and the thinning of the layers deeper down as the ice flows toward the sea. Then he applies an overly simplistic, and improperly chosen, average of the layer thinning observed from a coastal borehole to the thickness of the summit ice in order to compute a slightly older, but still young, age for the ice.

Strangely he says his calculations are in good agreement with annual layer counting but fails to mention that there are about 12,000 annual layers down to a depth of about 1,700 meters in the ice, increasingly thinner with depth on average. How many more annual layers are there in the lower 1,300 meters of ice? More than 12,000 to be sure. Layers become increasingly more difficult to count individually with increasing depth, but in the lower 1,300 meters of ice it is estimated, based on good science, that there are at least 98,000 additional annual layers. The Creationist mentions none of this.

As a physicist he should know that the ice near the surface, called firn, is riddled with air-filled pores and is much less dense than solid ice. As a physicist he should know that airplanes are much more dense than firn, or ice, and that they sink with time. As a physicist he should know that simplistic computations on data from the edge of a glacier (averaging values from the surface and 'near the bottom' instead of applying integration and curve fitting) should not be applied to the center of a continental glacier hundreds of kilometers away.

His computation of the short number of years needed to deposit more than 3,000 meters of Greenland ice is an extrapolation of his faulty annual deposition, overly simplistic math, and his failure to recognize that glacier edges are different from continental glacier centers.

It strains credulity that a Doctor in Physics can overlook these errors. Such is the scholarship, or integrity, of Young-Earth Creationists.

Cooper