Feedback for March 1998

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• Carbon dating is quite accurate when used carefully, but due to its limited range it's not very relevant to the age of the Earth.
• It seems like poor strategy to post a claim that there is "no evidence for evolution" on a site that is loaded with evidence for evolution.
• Actually the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of an old Earth and solar system.

Your arguments were unsupported, but this feedback area is not the appropriate forum for lengthy debate anyway. If you wish to see how well your claims stand up, I'd recommend the USEnet newsgroup talk.origins.

There is a problem with the conclusion made here. There is observational data concerning the origin of symbiosis in a strain of amoebas in a laboratory. We know that it can happen, because it has been observed to happen. In this particular case, the symbiosis is between the amoeba and an infecting bacterium. Originally, the bacterium was simply a pathogen. In one population, however, certain of the amoebas survived the infection. This group was found to have developed an obligate dependence between the amoebas and the bacteria. This example of the formation of a symbiotic relationship between organisms demonstrates that symbiosis can evolve.

There is a lot of research going on with this example. I provide the following reference as a jumping-off point for further study.

Pak J W. Jeon K W. Localization of a symbiont-produced protein in the host nucleus in Amoeba proteus. 49th Annual Meeting of the Society of Protozoologists, June 11-15, 1996. Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology 44(1). 1997. 14A-15A.

It should first be noted that science does not concern itself with "proof." The theory of evolution is not proved any more than any other theory in science is. What scientific theories have instead is evidence.

You are incorrect about the historical and scientific evidence, as both firmly support the theory of evolution as the best explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. This status has not been in question by the scientific community for over a century; the theory of evolution has yielded consistently correct predictions for thousands of experiments. Step into any large university library and look for the section containing biology journals. You'll find millions of pages of experimental data that support evolution. If you'd like a starting point, look through the numerous FAQs on this site. Most contain lists of references for you to look up.

Certain creationists have misconstrued Darwin's writing style in On the Origin of Species to think that he didn't believe what he was writing. Darwin often provided examples of difficult questions that, at first glance, would seem to be contradictory to evolutionary theory. Then, later in the chapter, he would resolve those difficulties. Far from weakening his argument, Darwin was strengthening it by saying, "Look, even these difficult questions can be answered by evolution." When taken out of context, however, the initial questions Darwin poses might make it seem as though he is questioning his own theory.

But more to the point, it doesn't make any difference whether Darwin believed what he was saying or not. The theory of evolution was not accepted by science because Darwin said it was so. It was accepted by science because it was rigorously tested and found to provide the most consistent explanation of the evidence. Moreover, since Darwin's day, new discoveries in genetics, immunology, and embyrology (just to name a few) have provided independent lines of confirmation for the theory. That is why it is accepted by science, not because Darwin said so.

However, one need not be an atheist to accept evolution as the explanation for the diversity of life on Earth. Many devout believers of every faith, including many Christian denominations, accept evolution. See the God and Evolution FAQ, the Evolution and Chance FAQ, and the Evolution and Chance: Chance from a Theistic Perspective FAQ.

Here is an example from the card game Bridge. Suppose I deal you a hand of cards. There are 52 cards in the deck, and 13 cards in your hand, so the number of possible hands is:

             52!
        ------------ = 635013559600
        13! (52-13)!

For another example, suppose we throw 5000 quarters on the ground. Each one, we assume, will land with either "heads" or "tails" facing up. That means that the outcome which results is a one result of 2^5000 possibilities. Since this is WAAAAYYY bigger than the relatively small number 10^50, your position must be that the coins cannot land at all. But what will happen instead? Do they just evaporate into thin air before touching the ground?

What Sagan and Muncaster have done is talk about the probability that evolution would come out the way it did, and you have mistakenly extended that as if they were talking about the probability that evolution would happen at all. Their comments only mean that if we wound the universe back a few billion years, and set it running again, the outcome would not be the same as what happened the first time through. Just as, if we pick up all 5000 coins, and throw them again, we probably won't get the same result as we got from the first throw. (Precisely, the odds would be 1.4 x 10^1506.)

Improbable things happen all the time; every lottery win, the order of radioactive decay events in every nuclear reactor, the fertilization of an egg by one sperm out of millions. The path of evolution involved many events, and in many cases might have taken a different path. But that's not particularly astonishing or unexpected.

The atmosphere cannot hold that much water, and it can't be parked in space either, so whereever it came from, it didn't come from the air.

I should have been more clear in my initial response. The reader is correct to point out that an individual's eyes and ears may deceive him. However, science corrects for the possible bias, error, or misguidedness of individual scientists. How does it do this? Through the process of peer-reviewed publication of data. Scientists publish their findings for other scientists to see. If the observations of other scientists conflict with these results, then additional data are collected. People did think the speed of sound could not be broken, for example, but there were no data to support a result either way. Once such data were collected, it became clear that no such barrier existed. The problem comes when people make assertions without checking them against the real world.

So while it is true that the eyes and ears of an individual may be deceived, our collective eyes and ears are not.

Oh, and by the way, the existence of atoms are not accepted on faith.

The claims of Kent Hovind have been adequately debunked. See Dave Matson's exhaustive analysis of Hovind's claims, as well as his claims of people over ten feet tall and claims of 90-foot plum trees.

The use of index fossils to assign a relative date to strata was first employed by creationist geologists. See the Matson-vs-Hovind FAQ for more information. When combined with the principle of superposition, relative dates allow us to sort strata which are examined in disparate parts of the world.

Later, radioisotope dating methods have allowed us to assign absolute dates to strata. Absolute dates tell us how old rocks of particular strata are.

Does this imply unreliability? I can't see how it could. The two classes of methods are independent of each other, and accomplish different functions. Such claims of unreliability rely upon the impression that the fossils used in biostratigraphy are evaluated according to some notion of a "chain of being". This is untrue. Index fossils are most useful if they are geologically widespread, abundant, distinctive, show little morphological variation either with geography or in time, and are limited to a specific (and better if geologically short) period of time. No assumptions are made due to the taxonomic placement of the index fossils. An illustration of this point is the long use and significance of conodont fossils as index fossils, yet their taxonomic affinities were only resolved in the 1980's. It is difficult to sustain an argument that evolution uses state-of-advance of a fossil to assign a date, when the state-of-advance (which no biologist believes in anyway) or even taxonomic category of certain important index fossils was entirely unknown.

Other useful information can be found in the Geological Timescale FAQ.

We thank you for your commendation and are glad that you appreciate the effort that has gone into the Talk.Origins Archive. As for an intelligent and logical reply, I can only try.

One quick point: This forum is not really a debate forum, though we do try to respond to a good portion of our feedback. Debate and discussion about questions of origins should be carried out in the talk.origins USENET newsgroup, where a far greater number of people can participate and where you will receive answers much more quickly than through feedback to this Web site.

You say that ". . . Evolution beyond known written human history is indeed metaphysics." Perhaps. But why stop there? Why not say the same for everything that happened before you were born? How do you know the world didn't come into existence the second you were born? Your parents weren't around before, either; they were created at the same time with implanted memories of living before you were born. And why stop there? One frequent talk.origins poster (jokingly) asserts that the universe was created Last Thursday by his cat, and that the universe will end with the Judgment Day of the Litterbox Next Tuesday. He may be correct--there's no way of telling if he's right or not.

Since we cannot tell the difference between the universe of Last Thursdayism and the universe as we think it operates, we can only assume that there is no Trickster God fabricating evidence everywhere we look, including evidence--multiple independent lines of evidence -- that the universe is billions of years old. That doesn't mean geology or cosmology or evolutionary biology is metaphysics; it just means that science can't ultimately prove anything. All science can say about any question is, "It looks like this is the case, and this is what all the evidence we have points towards."

With regards to radioisotope dating: It is not necessary to have a "control rock" to determine the accuracy of radioisotope dating methods. Radioisotope dating is based on nuclear decay processes that have been studied for almost a century now, and are a consequence of quantum mechanics. The same basic theories that drive radioisotpe dating also drive your computer and everything electronic you own. The application of nuclear decay to dating procedures can be checked against objects of known age. Multiple decay processes can be checked for the same sample, to see if they yield the same results for the age of the sample. In fact, Andrew MacRae recently answered a question in talk.origins on this very subject:

[ . . . ]

And, because you are interested in independent confirmation of the method, and there is much more to that than just historical eruptions, I recommend:

Baadsgaard, H.; Lerbekmo, J.F.; and McDougall, I., 1988. A radiometric age for the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary based upon K-Ar, Rb-Sr, and U-Pb ages of bentonites from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Montana. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, v.25, p.1088-1097.

This one uses multiple methods at multiple localities to date the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary Periods.

[ . . . ]

See Andrew's article and a similar article by Chris Stassen on DejaNews. Also, see Chris Stassen's superlative Isochron Dating FAQ for more information.

See the Hominid Fossils FAQ, specifically the Hominid Species FAQ, for more information.

You can learn more from the National Earth Orientation Service

The only concepts of God that can be denied on the basis of facts are those concepts that make false factual assertions. The only concepts of God that could be affirmed by science are entirely physical or natural concepts of God. Concepts of God that assume God is neither physical nor naturally constrained are beyond all scientific validation or invalidation.

Some scientists make claims for or against some notion of metaphysics, of whom some are anti and some are pro. All of them are making philosophical or religious claims no matter how much they are dressed up in scientific terms, and they should be tested and assessed as such. There's nothing wrong with a scientist making nonscientific arguments, but they carry no more weight than those of a nonscientist would. If Dawkins argues that the world looks undesigned, or Paul Davies argues that it looks designed, the emphasis lies in their own subjective or moral views, not in the science.

I would like to correct a misapprehension you seem to have about the message this site intends to convey. We are not stating that evolution "must be the answer." Instead, we are saying that evolution is backed by over a century of observation and experimentation, and that no other theory seems to be consistent with all of the evidence we see. Science does not deal in proof, but in evidence, and the evidence is solidly in favor of evolution as the explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

The layering of sedimentary rock is not evolution, but geology. Any geologist worth the paper her degree is printed on can tell the difference between sediments laid down in a catastrophic explosion and sediments laid down over millions of years. Although we do not have a FAQ yet on this particular topic, it has been discussed widely in the talk.origins newsgroup. See the August 1997 Feedback for Chris Stassen's previous response to this question. You might also read this FAQ on Mt. St. Helens and coal beds and this FAQ on dating the Grand Canyon.

Before you "guess" how many statements are "wrong on each side," I suggest that you attempt to verify them independently. That's the whole point of science: discovering evidence about the physical world that can be independently verified. I'm not saying you have to become a biologist or a geologist, but keep your mind open and look carefully at which explanations make more accurate and precise predictions.

If these "creation scientists" are all that tough, why can't they use modern techniques to duplicate the process Lyttleton was talking about, and prove it for today, rather than hoping 1950 still works. I doubt they will; too much "science" and not enough "creation".

If you would like to visit other sites related to this topic, don't forget to consult our list of other links.

• Our Sun and Stellar Structure
• The Stanford Solar Center at Stanford University
• The National Solar Observatories
• 150-Foot Solar Tower on Mt. Wilson
• 60-Foot Solar Tower on Mt. Wilson
• Big Bear Solar Observatory
• Mauna Loa Solar Observatory

See if you can find a book by John Tyler Bonner called The Evolution of Complexity published by Princeton University Press in 1988 for a good introduction to these issues.