Feedback for August 2003

The example used here contrasts sharply with the way conventional scientific dating methods are characterized by some critics (for example, refer to discussion in "Common Creationist Criticisms of Mainstream Dating Methods" in the Age of the Earth FAQ and Isochron Dating FAQ). A common form of criticism is to cite geologically complicated situations where the application of radiometric dating is very challenging. These are often characterized as the norm, rather than the exception. I thought it would be useful to present an example where the geology is simple, and unsurprisingly, the method does work well, to show the quality of data that would have to be invalidated before a major revision of the geologic time scale could be accepted by conventional scientists. Geochronologists do not claim that radiometric dating is foolproof (no scientific method is), but it does work reliably for most samples. It is these highly consistent and reliable samples, rather than the tricky ones, that have to be falsified for "young Earth" theories to have any scientific plausibility, not to mention the need to falsify huge amounts of evidence from other techniques.

Your extract reverses the sense of the original FAQ. What the Young Earth Creationists need to falsify are the simple and straightforward cases. Showing errors in cases where radiometric dating is likely to give invalid answers is not surprising. Creationists need to explain the huge mass of unexceptional cases, which are unremarkable as far as science is concerned, and which are the foundation for dating the major geological ages in Earth's long history. As the FAQ says in its conclusion:

For potential critics: Refuting the conventional geological time scale is not an exercise in collecting examples of the worst samples possible. A critique of conventional geologic time scale should address the best and most consistent data available, and explain it with an alternative interpretation, because that is the data that actually matters to the current understanding of geologic time.

We have two FAQs on the Polonium Radio-Haloes. The term is a misnomer. The creationist Robert Gentry has studied small ring shaped discolorations in various minerals, and attributes to them to Polonium decay; and the FAQs point out the flaws in this identification.

Hunter and gathering economies need different kinds of tools than the other two most common was of making a living: nomadic pastoralism, and agriculture. We can tell what kind of activities people did by their tools. Also, some life styles can actually change the chemical composition of your bones. So, sometimes archaeologists can use the chemical analysis of bone residues to learn about ancient economic activities.

You might look at the following websites:

• A Look at Modern Human Origins
• The Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution

and here at TalkOrigins

• Fossil Hominids: The Evidence for Human Evolution

Hopefully, you have already looked at the TalkOrigins FAQ.

One thing to recall when talking about evolution is that it always occurs in a selective regimen, or an environment of adaptedness. This is not always the same thing as the environment in which the organisms exist at a given time. Sometimes their adaptations allow them to exist more effectively than their local competitors because they did the hard work somewhere else. All these things complicate simple metaphors, and it is easy to strain a metaphor beyond usefulness and create false problems for selection and evolution.

Pennock's reworking of Behe's metaphor is good at showing how Behe has set it up to make trouble for selection. He overcomes the particular "problems" of Behe's metaphor, but of course he doesn't incorporate all the aspects of evolution. He is just showing the way in which Behe's canyon metaphor failed.

There are many things about natural selection that are counterintuitive - for example it can drive a population extinct, although at each point the "fitter" variant out-competes its rivals. it can cause what is referred to as the Tragedy of the Commons, where common resources are overused. It can enable parasites to flourish by using the adaptive features of others. And so on. And it ought always be remembered that much of evolution does not rely on selection so much as drift.

So metaphors and analogies should be seen to be good or bad ways to conceptualise selection, but not as substitutes for the proper models.

One of the first things one needs to understand about evolutionary biology is that populations evolve not individuals. Thus there would always be a male and female similar enough in an evolving population to mate and produce offspring. If this were not the case then the insipient species would become extinct in short order. See the following FAQs for some basics on evolutionary biology:

What is Evolution? by Laurence Moran

Introduction to Evolutionary Biology by Chris Colby

It is the fact that this is so basic a concept in evolution that makes this “objection” so amusing. When you read these sorts of objections in antievolutionist books or web pages, ask yourself how it is that they could be ignorant of something so very basic to evolutionary biology and yet feel that they are qualified to intelligently critique it.

I don’t have an answer to that.

As for the origin of a new species being “a clearly recognizable event”, no it would frequently not be clear since speciation usually involves relatively small changes, be they physiological, morphological, behavioral, or, as often the case, simply genetic.

Walt Brown proposes that the earth's crust rest upon water without any other support. Regardless of what words you use to describe it, such a configuration is highly unstable and would not last a day, much less hundreds of years. Water pressure can support very heavy weights over small areas, but rock -- even when 10 miles thick -- is much too flexible and fragile to maintain its shape over the planet-wide areas that Brown requires. In order to maintain the water underground for Brown's scenario to work, the rock would literally have to float.

The heat inside the earth comes from the decay of radioactive nuclei. Seismic studies show that the interior of the earth is molten far, far deeper than the collapsing hydroplates would affect. The heat from that magma conducts through the earth's crust at a predictable rate, which we also observe. Since this heat literally permeates the earth, it must have heated any deep subterranean waters as well.

You are probably correct that a temperature change of liquid water upon escaping the rupture would be negligible. (If the water were superheated, though, it would immediately expand into cooler but still superheated steam. We observe exactly this, on a smaller scale, in some volcanic eruptions.) The stratosphere, although cold, does not have much heat capacity, so it would take little hot water to heat up the stratosphere almost as hot as the water was. Little heat would be radiated into space because vacuum is a good insulator. (If you could leave the water up there for a few months, then radiative cooling would be a factor, but on the short time scale needed for the Flood, it would be negligible.) Even if the water did cool, you still have a heat problem: The water has gravitational potential energy. When it falls, that energy must get converted to heat. The physics and math are not particularly advanced; I urge you to work out the numbers yourself.

I would not expect uniform distribution of sediments from the escaping hydroplate waters. Sediments caught in the middle of the fountains would be carried into the stratosphere with the water, so they would spread widely, but sediments at the edge of the fountains would be blown more outwards, and not with as much force. At the very edge of the effect, the force would not push on entire rocks, and rocks would just get overturned. However, we see neither uniformly distributed granitic and basaltic sediments, nor do we see the remains of fissures which look to be created by escaping underground water. The hydroplate theory, if true, should have reshaped the globe, but we can find no trace of it.

I'd like to comment on the last remark by our reader, that intellectual honesty is somewhat less common in those pushing the "most popular ideas" in this debate. This is a perspicacious remark wholly worthy of contemplation. Popularity is no guarantee of correctness, and indeed we can see that in this instance the popularity of the notions of "intelligent design" and "scientific creationism" do go hand in hand with a certain disregard for the niceties of accuracy, logic, and respect for the empirical evidence.

Here are some antievolution advocacy sites or advocates crowing about the popularity of the ideas they push:

• RECENT POLLS AND CONGRESS SHOW A DEMAND FOR OBJECTIVITY IN ORIGINS SCIENCE
• IDnet-NM ANNOUNCES THE RESULTS OF ZOGBY POLLS REGARDING THE TEACHING OF EVOLUTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN IN NEW MEXICO'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

  (Be sure to also see the page by New Mexicans for Science and Reason concerning the bogosity of this poll. This makes a very neat package - ID advocates saying how popular their ideas are -- and -- being intellectually dishonest about it all at once.)

• Skepticism's Prospects for Unseating Intelligent Design by William A. Dembski. Dembski basically said that ID is more popular than skepticism, thus ID was going to win out.
• WHAT DO AMERICANS BELIEVE ABOUT ORIGINS, ACCORDING TO THE POLLS? by John Morris of the ICR. Hey, why should ID advocates have all the fun in citing polls?
• EVOLUTION AND THE POLLS. Another YEC site makes the argumentum ad populum.

And so it goes. That's a sampling, not a complete compendium.

Wesley

Q2. This is a good question. The best answer is that, as with any species that has some character no other species has, ours was the only species in a condition to be able to evolve those traits, and which actually encountered the conditions in which they mattered. What those conditions were is a matter of much debate. My best answer is that we adapted to each other, and this took a lot of mental power. One of the things we need brainpower to track is social altruism - who owes who what. An excellent and non-trivial book on this, with a lot of information about how we relate to other primates, is Terence Deacon's The symbolic species.

Q3. Not all human societies wear clothes to cover the naughty bits. However, all human societies use adornments to declare social standing, wealth, rank, and role. My immediate guess is that clothing developed from this. The hiding of sexual organs and secondary characteristics like breasts varies from culture to culture, but is, I think, due more to the control of women as breeding resources than to shame - if you hide women from the gaze of other males, then you can control how they breed; thus gaining a valuable resource to trade if you are a father, and control over your paternity of those children you raise. [Note: I'm not saying this is good or natural, just an explanation.] In warm climates it is often not considered wrong for men to display to other men. The western bias is due to a need for the original biblical cultures to demarcate themselves from the surrounding cultures where they were a minority, such as the Greek or Babylonian cultures.

Those are my best answers. Others may want to contribute more.

Ah. Yes. It's been a while since I have had time to do anything with those pages. It may be some time yet before I get the opportunity. Please be patient.

Hopefully the Archive's change of servers in August did not inconvenience too many of our readers. That was one of the tasks I was involved in performing. I would like to bring the Jargon and Biographica resources up to date, but it is going to be a big job.

Wesley

Despite what may seem intuitively obvious, chromosomes can pair up in many ways and are fairly accommodating of changes within and sometimes between species.

First, this is the TalkOrigins Archive, not the Usenet talk.origins newsgroup. If you want a poll of the Usenet talk.origins newsgroup, you will have to post to it.

Second, Meert's argument for inclusion of discussion of Genesis is that Walt Brown's writings show that "hydroplate theory" is drawn from Brown's reading of Genesis. Brown uses discussion of Genesis in his books and essays, so why should this area of relevant discussion be excluded from a debate?

Third, you apparently did not read Joe Meert's text carefully. If you had, you would have noticed the following:

[INITIAL IF APPROPRIATE] I wish to propose a modification to the above conditions. However, I am willing to have the editor decide the matter after my opponent and I have presented our positions. I will abide by this ruling and participate in the written debate. My suggested changes and their justification are listed below.

[Source: Walt Brown's Pseudochallenge]

Apparently, Meert is amenable to debating Brown and leaving discussion of Genesis out of it, if the editor agrees with Brown that Meert's argument for inclusion of the topic is mistaken. Brown has had years to find an editor and get a ruling, which Meert has agreed to be bound by. I don't see how any of this could possibly be construed to provide an argument that could be called "convincing" that Meert does not have the requisite confidence to meet Brown in debate. The ball is in Brown's court, and has been for years.

If anything, I think the "convincing argument" to be made goes in the other direction.

Wesley

We do have a response to the accusations of Fernandez on the site.

We also have, and have had for years prior to Fernandez's complaints, a clearly stated disclaimer about what is to be found on the TalkOrigins Archive. There is a short statement on the home page, and a longer explanation in the Welcome FAQ. Fernandez's curious inability to find this text on our site is not our fault.

As for the second point, it is the policy of this Archive to allow the antievolutionists to make their own case, in their own words, on their own sites, which we link to. We have links. We have a collection of links such as you will not find on any other web site that touches upon the evolution/creation controversy. We link to other sites that present mainstream science, as one might expect. But we also link to antievolution sites -- hundreds of antievolution sites. We link to the antievolution articles we critique, right from the pages of our critiques. This accomplishes two things: we discharge our responsibility to the reader by making it easy to reference the material being critiqued, and we avoid any claims that we have distorted the argument made by the antievolutionist. After all, when the reader clicks on the link, they get the antievolutionist's argument straight from the antievolutionist with no funny business in the middle.

We do address the "intelligent design" movement (there's no "theory" there as yet). There are several FAQs hosted here that examine the claims of Michael Behe and William Dembski, and our sister site, TalkDesign, provides even more. We're always open to specific criticisms aimed at improving our accuracy. These articles, like our other articles, link to online resources written by the intelligent design advocates themselves.

As Mike Dunford points out, the criticism by Fernandez is hypocritical. No antievolution site on the web meets the high standards set by the TalkOrigins Archive for clearly stating where we are coming from and providing ready access via links to what the opposition is saying. Not a one. At least, none that I have seen, and I have seen a lot of antievolution sites. This includes the TrueOrigins site where Fernandez's screed is hosted. TrueOrigins does link within articles back to some of the articles they critique, but in their list of links they only link to antievolution sites. By contrast, we link to far more antievolution sites than does TrueOrigins. We're not afraid of an informed readership, and we provide the means for our readers to become well-read.

The implication that our volunteers might somehow have less than spiffy intellectual integrity and ethics because some antievolutionists don't like what we say or how we say it is really quite risible.

Wesley

Thanks, we already link to five of "Harun Yahya"'s sites. There's no need to take up space on our feedback system with "his" error-filled drivel.

Wesley

Congratulations for making it into the feedback, and do play again.

Since C14 dating is good for under 100K years at best, the assertion that one could have "million of years difference in carbon dating" is simply ludicrous. What this says, then, is that the claimant is pretty much completely ignorant of C14 dating techniques.

Wesley

However, he held species were the outcome of changes that happened to lead to a failure to interbreed, rather than an outcome of a failure to interbreed directly. What he did think, though, was that the rank of species was arbitrarily given - the differences were real enough, but what "degree of difference" was sufficient was subjective.

I, too, was extremely disappointed. In 1986, I attended an antievolution lecture and spoke to the lecturer afterward. I asked if there were further materials I might look at. He gave me a copy of Henry M. Morris's "The Scientific Case for Creation". As I read it, my disappointment grew and grew. The sheer mendacity which suffused that book, and which apparently pervades the antievolution movement in general, spurred me into action to counter it.

I did not attend that lecture as a "dogmatic Darwinist" or "atheist" or whatever scare words might be popular. I was willing to be persuaded by a well-founded apologetic. What I found, though, were lies peddled as if true.

Antievolutionists can be experts in their disciplines. However, they seem to be inept when it comes to making critiques of evolutionary biology.

If you have a specific instance of where something on the Archive failed to give proper credence to an antievolution argument, please let us know.

Wesley

Thanks for your feedback. I just wish we knew which of the hundreds of pages here you liked so much.

Wesley

I've added a redirect instruction on my server, so that link should work now.

Here's the new URL for the t.o. home game.

Wesley

Dear "Freak",

You apparently failed to note our prominent disclaimer and had to go to the trouble of entering the feedback system from another page. Again, we don't endorse the goals or aims of the International Flat Earth Society. We document the existence of the IFES for the incredulous.

Wesley

Let's go with C) Have looked at the report of the World Health Organization concerning making pregnancy safer:

1. Each year around 210 million women become pregnant. Among the 130 million or so births annually some 10% to 15% require rapid and skilled intervention if the woman is to survive without lifelong disabilities. In about 5% of cases life-threatening complications develop. According to the latest available figures, more than half a million women are estimated to have died in 1995 from complications during pregnancy, delivery and the postpartum period.

The medical community recognized the risk of use of chloroform as an anesthetic agent as unacceptable, and it never had a mortality rate higher than one-half of one percent.

I am happy for you that you do not appear to be among those who have had life-threatening complications due to pregnancy and childbirth. However, there appears to be plenty of scope for selection given the noted rates of morbidity and mortality.

Wesley

Welcome. I hope that you find the articles here useful in your search for knowledge.

Wesley