Feedback for June 1997

There are strong pressures against evolution in wider society, but they have little to do with evidence, and much to do with certain religious views.

If you have any concrete examples of dishonesty or unwarranted bias in the archive we would welcome pointers.

The proofs of creationism offered by Dr. Gish and Dr. Morris are flawed and do not stand serious examination; nor do they attempt to submit these supposed proofs to scientific journals or conferences for peer review.

The following articles in the archive address some of the attempted proofs:

• Debating the ICR's Duane Gish
• Some Verifiable Instances of Creationist Dishonesty
• Scientific Creationism and Error
• Creationist Whoppers
• Retracking Those Incredible Man Tracks

You can find more articles on Dr. Gish and Dr. Morris by using the archive search facility.

The archive also provides a list of pro-creationist pages; feel free to browse and compare the information available in the talk.origins archive and these other pages.

Also, the big bang was not a simple explosion. It is better thought of as saying that the early universe was very very hot and dense, and that it has been expanding and cooling ever since. The talk.origins archive does not address cosmology in detail, but you may like to explore Introduction to Cosmology Web Site and Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial (both offsite).

The actual statement made by Eugenie Scott in her FAQ is Creation "science" is the new kid on the block., which is quite true. Belief in the literal truth of the creation stories in Genesis has been a default position for a long time; but it is only a very recent phenomenon to regard the literal meaning as being highly significant, or to attempt a "scientific" justification of their literal truth.

The words garbage and rubbish do not appear in Eugenie's FAQ. She does speak of nonsense and error; and in doing do she is not calling anyone names. She is describing the content.

You are correct that a refutation from any side may require more time than the comment being refuted; Eugenie Scott's suggestions would go a long way to alleviate this problem for all debaters. However, creationist debaters seem to prefer to avoid such a format.

Creationist arguments in favor of a young earth, based on the alleged time variability of the speed of light, are critiqued in the c-decay FAQ file, and there are numerous other files criticizing various other pro-young-earth arguments.

The speed of light in a vacuum is, according to the physics of special relativity, a universal constant. In other words, every observer everywhere, regardless of their state of motion with respect to any other observer, must measure the same absolute speed for light, with the restriction that the motions involved are all inertial, which in turn means at rest or in a straight line at constant speed. To the best of our collective ability to measure this, it has always been verified by observation. The theory which supports this universal speed limit continues to be verified by observation after observation, over the 92 years since it was introduced by Albert Einstein in 1905.

There are no reasons that we know of now to doubt the validity of this theory, or the restriction on the speed of light. Prognosticating what new discoveries may lie ahead, including the possiblity that this is wrong, or that there may be a way around the limitation, remains a purely speculative activity. Keep in mind also that the restriction applies only to the speed of light in a vacuum; we know that light slows down when it moves through a medium, such as glass, but this change in velocity [it always slows down, it never speeds up, relative to the speed of light in a vacuum] is not a violation of Einstein's cosmic speed limit.

It was because the very successful electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell implied the constancy of the speed of light, that Einstein adopted it as a postulate, and this required him to introduce the concept that time was relative as well as space. So the relativity of time comes to us as a consequence of the observation of the constancy of the speed of light, and not the other way around.

• UCLA Professor Ed Wright's Relativity Tutorial
• Albert Einstein Online
• The Einstein Papers Project

Behe accepts the basic evolutionary principle of common descent. He believes there is an additional mechanism at work which augments accepted evolutionary processes; but the scientific consensus is that he has failed to make his case.

• Noah's Ark: A Feasibility Study (a review)
• Geochronology kata John Woodmorappe
• Woodmorappe Replies (to the above)
• Schimmrich Responds (to Woodmorappe's reply)

Those interested are welcome to read and compare the views expressed.

Finally, evolution is observable and observed; the observations are repeatable and repeated; and it has been passing tests with flying colours now for over a century. This is addressed in the Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution FAQ, and also in many other files available in the archive.

The second claim usually made about the "Cambrian Explosion" is that most if not all of the major animal groups came into existance at this time. This claim is not correct. It is almost certain that such major groups as annelids (worms), cnidarian (corals and jellyfish), gastropods (snails) and probably arthropods have a pre-Cambrian history. It should be pointed out that almost all pre-Cambrian fossils have no hard parts such as mineralized exoskeletons, and as such they are very unlikely to be preserved.

While there was a rapid (over a 5-10 million year period) diversification of animal life during the "Cambrian Explosion", this was a diversification from an already existing stem stock of organisms, which were soft bodied and thus underrepresented in the fossil record.

What we see in the fossil record are representatives of all the major groups which possess mineralized body parts. This record funnels back to the Early Cambrian where most of the groups apparently disappear. This disappearance does not represent the origin of the group, as some would suggest, but the origin of mineralized hard parts. The groups continue to exist below their occurrence in the fossil record, but they appear to be absent because they have no hard parts and are not fossilised.

The "Cambrian Explosion" represents what we call a taphanomic boundary, that is, it represents a large increase in the chances of organisms to be fossilised (by having hard parts) and hence appear in the fossil record. It does not represent the origin of those groups.

Chris

Nobody has ever found a terrestrial rock that "predated" the Earth -- the oldest Earth rocks ever found are more than 500 million years younger than the planet itself. The evidence suggests that the entire surface of the Earth was once molten, and therefore we wouldn't expect any such rocks to have survived.

From: dk@imager (Dave Knapp)
Subject: SN1987A Distance
Date: 15 Jul 1993 23:23:00 GMT
Message-ID: <224osk$g44@lll-winken.llnl.gov>

Since the distance to SN1987A has recently come up, and since I am the one who (as far as I know) first introduced it into the creation/evolution debate, I decided it was time to actually go out and get some decent references.

The reference I originally had was:

"Ring Around SN1987A Supernova Provides a New Yardstick," Physics Today, Feb. 1991 p. 20.

This work has now appeared in a peer-reviewed journal:

"Properties of the SN1987A Circumstellar Ring and the Distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud," by N. Panagia et al., Astrophysical Journal _380_, L23-L26 (1991).

Using a ring of material surrounding the supernova remnant, the distance was geometrically determined to be 51.2 +/- 3.1 kpc, or about 167,000 ly with an error of about 6%.

Unfortunately for young-Earth creationists, the error makes it essentially impossible to support a decaying-speed-of-light argument.

There are a few other related articles for the obsessively interested:

Fransson et al., Ap. J. _336_, 429-441 (1989)
Crotts, Kunkel, and McCarthy, Ap. J. _347_, L61-L64 (1989)
Bond et al., Ap. J. _354_, L49-L52 (1990)
Jakobsen et al., Ap. J. _369_, L63-L66 (1991)

". . but I think we may with much probability say that the consolidation cannot have taken place less than 20,000,000 years ago, or we should have more underground heat than we actually have, nor more than 400,000,000 years ago, or we should not have so much as the least observable underground increment of temperature." (Thompson 1862, p. 159)

In his last comment on this issue, in 1897, Lord Kelvin states:

". . to form a closer estimate of the time which has passed since the consolidation of the earth, and we have now good reason for judging that it was more than 20,000 000 and less than 40,000,000 years ago, and probably much nearer 20 than 40. (Kelvin 1897, p. 345)

Thus, Kelvin actually DECREASED his estimates with time, not increased them!

Chris

Thompson, W. (1862) On the secular coolin of the Earth. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 23: 157-159.

Kelvin, Lord (1897) The age of the Earth as an abode fitted for life. Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1897: 337-357.