Feedback for January 2000

I found this claim on that website.

* No mutations have been observed, or fossil evidence found which would show that mutations have ever accumulated to build a complex new organ, or to change a simple animal into a more evolved one: A fish into a reptile, for example, or some earlier creature into a moth.

As usual, the claims made are overarching and ignore relevant data. The impedance-matching ossicular chain in mammals is an example of a complex system that developed via evolution. The fossil record for stages in its development is quite good.

The anti-evolutionary attack on fossil evidence often demands that two separate attributes be shown: fine-grained evidence and large-scale change. If large-scale change happens, as in the impedance-matching apparatus of the mammalian ear, it is commonly seen that anti-evolutionists will object that we don't have such a fine-grained record as to allow us to construct an unbroken species-to-species line of descent. If we have in hand a fine-grained transitional series, such as found in some foraminiferan evolution, the objection is raised that such transitions do not record large-scale change.

The fossil evidence as it exists has been fully adequate to convince generation after generation of paleontologists of the reality of biological evolution, and stands as a major line of evidence for the theory of common descent. Anti-evolutionary critics should take some time to explain why this should be so, given that paleontologists and biologists subscribe to many different religious beliefs.

The usual false claims about liquefaction of pupae tissues during metamorphosis also appear in the suggested link.

We do have a "live debate". It is at the talk.origins newsgroup.

Wesley

Regarding Mt. St. Helens: The article you read is probably based on Steve Austin's work for the Institute for Creation Research, in which he claims that the Grand Canyon could have been laid down by a global flood. Unfortunately, many features seen in the Grand Canyon cannot be explained by this idea. (Not to mention that the "canyon" seen at Mt. St. Helens was carved in ash, not rock.) A discussion of this can be found at Coal Beds, Creationism, and Mount St. Helens and The ICR's Grand Canyon Dating Project.

I find it interesting that those Christians and other believers who accept the universe as the creation of God and the mechanisms discovered by science as the means of God's creation always seem to come in for more than their fair share of criticism. Comments like the one by the reader above are distressingly common. God, it seems, is constrained by the reader's understanding to have created in some way other than what the evidence appears to show. This, then, is supposed to represent a salvation issue by which someone who took the evidence of the creation seriously will come to suffer as a result of that. I will have to respectfully disagree with the reader.

Wesley

In fact, it is not the case that something in or before the universe has to be eternal. That assumption presumes that time is something that goes on for ever, and that universe and other things exist somewhere along an infinite span of time. The truth is far more strange. Time does not have a kind of independent existence, but is a another aspect of the universe along with space and matter and energy. We really don't know all about the origins of the universe; but scientists have learned not to rely on simple assumptions about time.

Some Christians who are aware of these strange aspects to cosmology speak of God, and eternity, as being outside of time altogether, rather than being a span of infinite duration throughout time.

Evolution is concerned with the origins of living diversity. The ultimate origins of the universe are simply not an issue. Evolution works fine regardless of how the universe got here, and whether or not it makes sense to speak of the universe or anything else being eternal.

It is also not true that it is scientifically or mathematically impossible for life to come from non-living material, and you have certainly never read a study in which NASA calculated the odds of life forming as being zero. It is not possible to make any meaningful calculations of odds without a detailed model, and no sufficiently detailed model exists. As far as we know, life might be highly probable in the right conditions, and spread widely throughout the universe. Or it might be highly unlikely, and Earth is the only place where life exists at all. In either case, evolution deals with what happens afterwards.

• The Science News Online report of the apparent fake.
• Discussion from the dinosaur mail list in October, showing that there was indeed skepticism by scientists from the beginning.
• More early skepticism. Even more can be found in the mail list archive.
• Early October reports of "Archaeoraptor lianoningensis" from the regular press, now discreditted.

• The fossil was not excavated by scientists, but was found and purchased at a sale in Utah.
• The early report was not in a peer reviewed journal, but in an article published by National Geographic. Even at the time this was considered premature.
• The reason the fossil seemed plausible is because of a number of recent finds of feathered dinosaurs in China, which have a much stronger standing. A readable discussion of these fossils for students is online at ZoomDinosaurs.

One might quibble that evolution is not about the origin of life, but its subsequent development. This is true enough, because regardless of how life got here, evolution remains incontestibly the basis for any credible explanation of the subsequent rich diversity in living species.

On the other hand, scientists are never satisfied with what is known, but seek to extend our understanding, and the origin of life is obviously an area where we have much indeed to learn; when and if we learn about this process it will almost certainly be considered a part of a more extended and comprehensive theory of evolution.

However, knowledge builds on knowledge; and if you are interested in this subject you would do well to take care with your starting point. Fred Hoyle is mistaken; neither he nor anyone else has anything like a sufficient understanding to calculate a probability, since meaningful calculations have to be based on a very comprehensive model (theory) indeed. You and I are apparently agreed that no such understanding yet exists.

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

The Miller experiment is getting on for fifty years old. If all you have seen are references to this experiment and vague references to other ideas, then I have good news for you. There is an enormous body of relevant investigative work for you to explore, often very detailed, and solidly grounded in empirical experiments exploring potential and hypothesized processes.

There are various facts in this area, of course. Most scientists to my knowledge are pretty good about distinguishing fact (that which is confirmed beyond reasonable doubt) and hypothesis. One fact is that abiogenesis did occur. Whether by a supernatural creative act, or by processes according to natural law, or by seeding from a more remote source of life; life was once not present on Earth, and now it is present; and it has developed and changed (or evolved) over time since its origin here on Earth.

To get you started in seeing what is happening in this exciting area, you may like to start with the following:

• The Abiogenesis Interim FAQ.
• A biogenesis bibliography.
• UCSC home page for research on origins and early evolution of life.

I also strongly recommend posting requests for references to the newsgroup talk.origins. There are many well informed professionals and amateurs who will be glad to help.

Finally, if at all possible, check all references yourself personally. This is hard work rather than being quick and dirty, but it is well worth it for the payoff in understanding and personal satisfaction.

University libraries and major reference libraries maintain subscriptions to many journals. References given to others should be material you have found and considered for yourself. If you have not been able to check a reference personally, it is good practice to acknowledge this up front, and to give the source from which the reference was obtained.

Good luck!

There are many different ways believers reconcile the findings of science with Genesis, and we do have one file which very briefly mentions a few of them at (Various Interpretations of Genesis), but this is really not a concern of the site.

Let's try a different example. If Douglas Johnson belongs to the Johnson family, why do other Johnsons continue to exist? In this case, it is easy to see that Douglas Johnson being born does not mean that other members of his family must die.

That humans derive from primate ancestors does not imply that other primates must cease to exist.

Wesley

Pasteur's now classic experiment on spontaneous generation was designed to disprove the claim that now living things arise from non-living matter, which is a claim that the version of evolution known as Lamarckism, and which predated Darwinism by about 50 years, made. According to that view, each species is part of an independent lineage that arises from non-living matter, and so this happens all the time. Pasteur showed that the evidence for spontaneous generation failed.

If life arose just once, then evolution as we know it kicks in. It may be that abiogenesis occurred as a matter of chance, but in fact it probably occurred as the result of a proto-Darwinian selection for efficient chemical reactions. Once life had arisen, any new abiogenesis would quickly be "eaten up" by the more efficient chemical processes of the earlier event, since selection would make them more efficient than the less evolved later forms.

You can, if you choose, believe in evolution (although as a theory not a doctrine, evolution should not be "believed" so much as accepted for its factual adequacy). But what then happens if abiogenesis is shown to be physically probable, even, given the conditions at the time, very likely? Is the role for God then reduced? That is to accept a God of the Gaps view, and I would think that it is not an option for anyone who wishes to be both scientifically accurate and theologically open.

We have three FAQs on archaeopteryx you may like to read. They discuss the similarites of Archaeopteryx with birds, as you do. They also discuss the similarities of Archaeopteryx with dinosaurs, which you seem to have omitted.

Your comment on natural selection is incorrect. Natural selection can and does drive change that moves in hapzard directions. It works only on local circumstances, with no long term view or direction. We have an introductory FAQ with a good section on natural selection.

Alan Feduccia proposes that modern birds may have evolved from the crocodilians or perhaps a small group of thecodont reptiles. The portion of your post in capitals is a gross misrepresentation. Feduccia accepts a relationship between birds and dinosaurs, but proposes that it is not one of direct ancestry.

Feduccia's ideas for the evolutionary ancestry of birds are well known, and have been discussed at length in talk.origins and elsewhere. Here is a link to a talk.origins posting from deja-news, quoting two separate posts that discuss Feduccia's ideas. Much more can be found in the archives of the dinosaur mailing list.

One wonders what is your point. I grant that there is considerable debate within science on specifics of some evolutionary lineages; whereas others are better known. For what it is worth, Feduccia represents a minority opinion on the available evidence; but like everyone doing scientific research in this area, he reconizes the facts of common ancestry.

Macro-evolution is not science if we follow the scientific method, right? Wrong. It helps a great deal to find out what science is, and what "science" means, before one sets out to decide what is or is not science. So many people seem to think that if you can't recreate something in a laboratory full of beakers and lab-coated scientists, then it can't be science. But that's not true. Science fundamentally requires only that one make testable hypotheses; it is the test of the hypothesis that needs to be observable, not the phenomenon in question. Astrophysics is certainly science, but when was the last time you saw a full up star recreated in a laboratory? Biological evolution, in the sense of an ancestor-descendent relationship, from some primitive, primordial life, down to life on Earth today, is very much "science". In fact, it's very good science. The theory of evolution is based on logical assumptions rooted in observation over a wide range of disciplines. Hypotheses relating the various assumptions and predictions are tested, and as is usual in science, the hypotheses that work are improved and expanded, while those which fail are discarded. There is nothing about biological evolution that would fail to qualify it as a fully deserving science.

For instance, there is no long-term reliable radiological clock, as mentioned by William Stansfield; the process of decay of material cannot be observed completely with all outside factors that may have affected it during the length of its existance. Wrong again. To start with, Stansfield never said any such thing, and all you are doing here is continuing to propagate more of the fictitious quotations that creationists are so fond of, and which those who are only too willing to believe, accept without question. In this case, your source has led you astray [you will find this related in the article Comments on David Plaisted's "The Radiometric Dating Game" - Part 2, by Dr. Kevin Henke; this is one of the articles found in A Radiometric Dating Resource List]. While it is true that geological systems are subject to outside influences, it is also true that most, if not all, of these outside influences, leave obvious clues behind. If radiometric dating is done right, then the criticism you raise about not being able to follow the system throughout its existence is negated. But creationist criticisms of radiometrc dating commonly ignore proper technique, and criticize only known mistakes. That's what you are doing here. See the Radiometric Dating Resource List for material on radiometric dating, including suggested books, and criticisms of faulty creationist reasoning.

The Evolution you present is Materialistic, wherein the only reality you think is present are material things, such as can be seen, or touched. Wrong again. you call this "the bottom line". But the real bottom line is that you aren't bothering to read through the articles in the archive to find out what we are presenting here. Evidently you didn't read God and Evolution, or Evolution and Philosophy. You are (wrongly) interpreting what you read as purely materialistic because you don't want to see that people believe in God and evolution, both at the same time. One of the reasons why you fail to appreciate this, is that your idea of what evolution is does not at all match what the people who call themselves "evolutionists" think it is. I suggest you try re-reading Evolution is a Fact and a Theory, this time without imposing so much of your own bias on top of it.

We try our best to present here the basic consensus accepted within the mainstream of science. You may like to look at the Introduction to Evolutionary Biology. If you are specifically interested in how we see the evolution of humans, you can look at the Fossil Hominids page.

This is an epistemological point: what we know through science depends on there being consistency to our observations and measurements. If a god intervened to make the physical world different to how it might have otherwise been, then we could not estimate the value of our observations, a point first made, I think, by TH Huxley.

Ockham's Razor does not say that things proceed simply. It says that the explanation that is simplest and consistent with the observations is to be preferred. The reason for this is simple enough (forgive the pun): suppose you have explanation X0 for data D. Suppose no simpler explanation is available, but many more complicated ones are: X1, X2, X3, X4 ... each of which adds unobserved twists and turns. Which should we prefer? Each time we try to apply our theoretical explanation, we have to add these unobserved complexities to our efforts to predict, explain or do further research. Since there are an infinite number of possible explanations for D, we must make a choice, and science chose to go with the one that postulates the least amount of unobserved processes and things. Yes, it's easier, but only in the sense that we can use the explanation, which is a reason for doing science.

This is not a reason to reject intelligent design - there are better reasons for that to do with the lack of work ID does in an explanation. It is a reason to choose between two competing explanations if nothing else offers itself, such as better empirical adequacy or internal consistency, etc.

In the meantime, I'll provide a short, off-the-cuff rebuttal of problems I see with Finley's asserted "Empirical Problems" with evolution:

1. Finley's critique of the available time for evolution suffers from at least one major flaw: He calculates time intervals taking only one organism into account. One organism, or one chain of organisms need not create all genetic variation. Especially among sexually reproducing species, genetic information is exchanged between organisms. It might be rare for one bacterium to have a thousand mutations, but it's not unexpected for a billion bacteria to have a thousand mutations spread throughout the population.

   Life is a massively parallel computer conducting billions of experiments at once.

2. Finley, like many before him, misunderstands the meaning of "graduality" in evolution. Evolution can be (though is not always) gradual on a human timescale. But compared to geological time, evolution often takes place quite rapidly. One hundred thousand years is an eternity in human terms but an eyeblink in geologic time.

   Furthermore, species may evolve in a localized area then migrate outwards. Unless one finds fossils in that localized area, the species will appear to have come from thin air. It didn't, but we just don't have the full records. See the Punctuated Equilibria FAQ.

3. Finley rehashes Michael Behe's irreduceable complexity arguments and makes the same mistakes Behe does. Evolution does not work on individuals, it works on populations. Finley (and Behe) assert, in essence, that "things don't work when you take parts of them away." The proper answer to that assertion is, "Yeah, so what?" The proper chain of analogy is not from car to car minus some parts. It is from car to go-cart to boxcar racer to skateboard to roller skates.

Diamond, Jared M. 1991. The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee. London: Radius.

De Cecco, John P., and David Allen Parker. Sex, cells, and same-sex desire: the biology of sexual preference. New York: Haworth Press, 1995.

All you are doing here is guessing. Your guesses turn out to be wrong. You can't analyze the tidal interaction between the Earth & Moon by guessing, you have to work out the physics explicitly. Part of my article follows the scientific literature where that is explicitly done; you can read the papers, see the results, and find out why your guesses are wrong. Or you can go on guessing.

Finally, I will note that the article which you saw contained an error in the Introduction to Tides section. It has since been corrected.

That being said, many people responding are professionals working directly in the relevant fields. (Not me, alas.) We all are able to read each others responses, if we feel like it, and we do sometimes pick each other up. You can see a fairly trivial example above, where I made an addendum to a response by Tim Thompson.

If anyone out there finds errors in a feedback response, by all means let us know.

Actually, our best responses in these feedbacks occur when we refer readers to existing Talk.Origins Archive FAQs or to other references. We do not expect readers to take our word for it. We expect readers to check our statements against the primary scientific literature.

1. Coevolution. As the anenome species became more and more poisonous, its commensal species the sea slugs may have evolved methods to first deal with and then exploit that poison.

2. Suppose sea slugs at first only briefly dealt with anenomes. Those with greater resistance to the poison were favored by selection if they benefitted. Over time, the sea slug could adapt to and exploit the resources of the anenome.

Note that these are just general ways in which selection could create this adaptation. The actual process, if we could uncover it, would be much more complex. But no poison works immediately to cause death, and evolution is full of "arms races" where species evolve to match each other.

By the way, see this: "Patterson Misquoted: A Tale of Two 'Cites' - Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, is frequently quoted by creationists as having said that there are no transitional fossils. But did he really say that? And if so, what did he mean?"

Some folks (like the young earthers) are inclined to read Genesis 1 as a literal account of events in prehistory. Other people read Genesis 1 in many other ways. Some take as a symbolic account of events in prehistory. Some take it as a statement about the immediate and ongoing relationship of God, man and the universe, expressed as a creation myth. Some take it as an ancient worship liturgy. Some take it as a reworking of Babylonian cosmogeny intended by the Israelite writer to emphasize the lessons of montheisism in contrast to the squabbling pantheon of Babylonian deities.

Debate with respect to the bible is not debate with the bible itself, but between people who have different views of the same text. The particular perspective which you might have, or I might have, or our local church leaders might have, do not have any special status. Your disagreement with young Earthers is not a problem with Genesis, and any disagreement I might have with you is likewise not a problem with Genesis.

Evolutionists, as a group, have no distinctive perspective on Genesis. Many of them probably hardly give it a thought; and discussions on that subject are not really what this group is about.

Some graduate students are able to construct grammatically correct sentences and some professors are not.

The issue concerning credentials arises because of the use of "argument from authority" in anti-evolutionary rhetoric. If an anti-evolutionist uses their credentials as a rhetorical weapon, the substance of those credentials has been made an issue by the anti-evolutionist.

That said, there appear to be fewer cases of bogus credentials among anti-evolutionists now than there were a few years ago, primarily due to the deaths of some of those anti-evolutionists. There are still some quite interesting cases, though.

Wesley

I know of no book that disusses evolution and spirituality in modern terms

However, the actual effects of selection are anything but tautologous, as is true of the S-curve or anything else that mathematically describes dynamics. There is more than a century of work on how selection occurs, and some close detail and experimental work. It doesn't matter if selection is a name we give to certain dynamic pattern or if you think it is a law of nature or something more substantial - in the end, some organisms out-reproduce others for good causal reasons, and that explains adaptive evolution.

The issue of mainstream science has a context: the internet is filled with crackpottery and crank science of every kind. There has to be a voice for the mainstream simply because while those with a scientific education or familiarity know that science is not a matter of democratic vote, and that scientists have good reasons for dropping or accepting a theory, most of those involved in public debate do not, from religious leaders to ordinary voters. This site aims to put that voice to the fore. Its contributors disagree over many issues from time to time, but at least the disputes are within the corall of science.

• Fossil Hominids
• Evidence for Evolution: An Eclectic Survey
• Observed Instances of Speciation
• Some More Observed Instances of Speciation
• Transitional Vertebrate Fossils
• The Archaeopteryx FAQs
• Horse Evolution
• The Natural History of Marsupials

In the cited page, the word "denigrate" appears once, in this sentence:

It is sometimes claimed by those who wish to denigrate the achievements of Charles Darwin that he was little more than a "serial plagiarist." This essay aims to show that Darwin, like any scientist, had influences, but that he was honest in his theoretical development.

All too often creationists spend their time arguing with a straw-man caricature of evolution. This brief essay resents a definition of evolution that is acceptable to evolutionists.

It is impossible to to debate creationists without hearing them claim that there are no transitional forms in the fossil record. This essay puts the lie to that claim by listing and briefly describing a large number of transitional fossils among the vertebrates.

However, you are quite right that this site is not intended to be impartial. We present unabashed advocacy from the perspective of mainstream science; though we do aim to be fair. This also is how scientific discussion is conducted.

There is no contradiction in the statement of our policy. We try to give easy access to alternative views, and we do this by supplying links. We would be very grateful for anyone who can let us know of links which are no longer working, with an email . (See also the contact page for more ways to contact the archive administrators.)

Our reasons for not actually presenting the alternative views on this site are as you have quoted. This is exactly the same as in scientific books or articles or web pages. You present and defend a view, and then make reference to further literature or information which may be relevant, including contrary views.

Your last sentence confuses being able to create things with being able to learn about them. We can't create a volcano, but most books on the formation of volcanoes still don't bother to discuss God's role in their generation. This would be the error of thinking that God's role is in some kind of conflict with the natural processes. That is a very theologically suspect dichotomy; and it is just as suspect with respect to the origin of species.

Does the evidence point two ways? Can evidence exclude an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient God?

I believe the answers to be "No" and "No".

Does the evidence point two ways? The evidence is consistent with an evolutionary history of life. Creationist views have become modified in order to become consistent with the evidence. As this process continues, creationist beliefs incorporate more and more elements of evolutionary biology. The creationism of today is much different from the pre-Darwinian creationism that yielded the concepts of geological superposition and the geologic column. One could say that the evidence points both ways, if one ignores the fact that creationist stances have been modified greatly in order to accommodate it.

Can the evidence exclude an infinite, omnipotent, omniscient God? I believe that the answer here is also, "No". An example of how such a theological concept is immune from mere evidence is the concept of "Omphalism". Such a God as postulated could just as well created everything with the "appearance of age". In other words, God's creation could be made to look like something that has been the result of a prior history even when newly created. Phillip Gosse put this forward in 1857 in his book, "Omphalos", as an explanation of earth history. His fellow theists were extremely critical of any such doctrine that essentially made God out to be a teller of lies.

This brings up the concept of "theological themata" which Paul Nelson has written about in critiquing evolutionary arguments. Theological themata are those statements made that assert certain attributes for God or God's works. Theological themata can be made susceptible to contrary evidence. For example, a theological theme called the doctrine of plenitude was current up to the early 1800's. According to this, God's concern for his created works would prevent any species from being completely extirpated from the face of the earth. Cuvier's demonstration of the reality of extinction as a phenomenon put evidence in conflict with this theological theme, and the evidence won.

Getting back to Omphalism, the evidence cannot ever set aside the theological theme of an Ompahlic God, but the evidence can in that case set aside certain other theological themata which relate to the properties that an Omphalic God possesses. As mentioned above, one theological casualty of the evidence necessitated by Omphalism is the concept of God as only telling us the truth in works and word.

What about the reader's scenario of instant parallel creation followed by limited evolutionary descent? In this case, we can examine the evidence of genetics and molecular biology to find those "overlapping genomic designs". What we find, even within those overlapping areas, is evidence that is consistent with common descent of those groups supposedly created in parallel. Insofar as the evidence goes, this is just another case of Omphalism. Gosse postulated Omphalic creation to coincide with a ~6000 year actual earth history. Modern critics of Gosse talk of "Last Thursdayism", where God created everything just last Thursday complete with a manufactured history and memories for everyone. The reader's version is no less Omphalic than the other two, but the time of the Omphalic creation can be pushed back further into the recesses of time than the other two.

If it is considered acceptable to postulate a theology whereby creation is followed by limited evolutionary change, what differs conceptually when we expand the role of the subsequent evolutionary change? What distinguishes a creation that looks like it evolved prior to the time of creation from one that actually evolved from a prior point? God could just as easily, it seems, have created the first self-replicator and allowed all further developments to proceed via evolutionary processes from there. Or God could have simply created a universe with favorable conditions for the self-organization of life, and let things develop from there. It is interesting how Omphalism can actually be seen to grade into Deism given this perspective, and how neither Deism nor Omphalism can be set aside on the basis of mere evidence.

But what about Omphalism and scientific inquiry? If an Omphalic God creates things with an appearance of history, then working out the prior history tells us something about what how God constructed pre-creation history as a concept. It seems reasonable that if an Omphalic God has gone to the effort of creating with apparent history that we should take that apparent history seriously and not ignore it. We should, it appears, treat the creation of an Omphalic God as if the Omphalic God had not intervened. To try and take an opposite stance leads nowhere. As discussed before, the date of the Omphalic God's intervention cannot be determined from the creation itself. When apparent history stops and actual history starts will not be reflected in the evidence.

Wesley

Louis Pasteur disproved the "spontaneous generation" of whole complex organisms (particularly flies & maggots) at one shot. His results are not applicable to the science of abiogenesis. Pasteur dealt only with large fully-formed organisms, whereas abiogenesis deals with the smallest possible molecular life forms.

Now, to begin with, my comments are only in relation to his erroneous appeal to Pasteur's research as an anti-abiogenesis argument. Also, as you note, I did say that the argument against abiogenesis had been disproven. But nowhere do you notice that I say abiogenesis has been proven, nor did I bring up Miller's experiments anywhere. Abiogenesis is the a-biotic genesis of life, and I have never heard anyone claim that Miller created life, or even came close, so what's your point?

Miller's experiments proved only that some amino acids can & will form in a putative ancient terrestrial environment. That's all the experiment was intended to do, and it certainly does not prove that abiogenesis happened. It is only one part of an expansive exploration of biochemistry which provides a large number of clues as to how abiogenesis might have happened. It has not been "proven" that abiogenesis did happen, nor perhaps even that it could have happened. However, neither has it been "proven" that it did not or could not have happened, and that is the main point of my comment.

The reader's comment regarding "Carbon 14 process dating the shell of a living mollusk at 23.00 years old" is certainly a typo. The reader meant 2,300 years old. The reader may also be interested that living snails have been dated to about 27,000 years old, and for very similar reasons. Tim is thus technically incorrect in his response on this point. Radiocarbon dating can be applied easily to living creatures, and any age obtained other than near zero is of considerable scientific importance for establishing limits of the method.

The source for the reader's figure of 2,300 years on mollusk shells is

"Radiocarbon Dating: Fictitious Results With Mollusk Shells", by M.L. Keith and G.M. Anderson, in Science, August 16, 1963, Vol. 141, No. 3581, pp. 634-636.

"Major Carbon-14 Deficiency in Modern Snail Shells from Southern Nevada Springs", in Science, April 6, 1984, Vol. 224, No. 4644, pp. 58-61.

These papers are widely used by creationists, but often indirectly and without reference. The papers themselves clear up the problems quite effectively; the organisms in question do not derive their carbon directly from the atmosphere, and radiocarbon dating is actually dating the time since a living creature took in carbon from the atmosphere or from plants growing in the atmosphere.

The usual creationist tactic is to cite such studies and impute a general unreliability to the whole of radiocarbon dating. This is not justifiable. They ignore the clear explanation of exactly how and why anomalous results are obtained, and more importantly they simply ignore the vast body of finely graded radiocarbon dates from uncontaminated sources (often cross checked with other methods) which plainly establish a timeline that utterly refutes the creationist position, regardless of occasional expected and well understood anomalies.

Spinning Sun
To begin with, the angular momentum of the sun is quite independent of the Big Bang (which I presume you mean to refer to as "Big Dud"). While the angular momentum of the sun is not a completely solved problem, it is hardly the issue that you make it out to be. Models of stellar formation show a great deal of mass loss (which expels momentum as well), and include magnetic braking. Spectacular images from the Hubble Space Telescope confirm these models, even to the detailed shape of the equatorial disk of the protostar system. These details of stellar formation easily handle the apparent, but not real anomaly of angular momentum distribution in the solar system.

The Mollusk Shell
What's wrong with a living mollusk being 23.00 years old? I presume this is a typo, and you meant something else. In any case, it does not matter, because it is well known that you cannot carbon date anything that is still alive. So the result is meaningless, and wrong.

The Dacite Dome of Mt. St. Helens
You say that carbon-14 dating of the dome reveals an age of 45 million years. This is an extremely weird statement. For one thing, carbon dating only works for organic material, never for rocks, so whoever did that does not appear to know what they were doing. For another thing, the short half-life of carbon 14 limits radiocarbon dating to no more than about 50,000 years. A "date" of 45 million years simply means that there was not enough carbon-14 in the sample to measure, which is not surprising, since a dacite rock shouldn't have any carbon-14 in it anyway (and can't be dated by that method, since it's inorganic). As for the K-Ar "date", 45,000 years is clearly too small a number to trust for that method. Therefore, the correct interpretation of such a "date" is not that the sample is 45,000 years old, but that the sample is "too young to date". In both cases that you cite the work was done improperly, and interpreted unreasonably, considering the physical limitations known for both methods. Therefore, in both cases, you are wrong.

• Radiometric Dating Resource List
• Radiocarbon Web

• Leap Seconds, courtesy of the National Earth Orientation Service.

Reversals of the Earth's Magnetic Field
The observational evidence consists of striping along the ocean floor, as well as deep cores drilled from under the ocean, and from volcanic rocks in continental volcanic fields. In all three cases, the same pattern of polarity reversals holds, and in all three cases, consistent radiometric dates show the same time sequence. The ability of the cold rocks to "store a magnetic field better" is not a relevant issue. Most magnetizable rocks that are exposed to an ambient magnetic field, while warmer than their Curie temperature, will retain that field imprinted in their own magnetic structure, when their temperature descends below the Curie point. The few exceptions that can self-reverse are well known, and accounted for in studies of paleomagnetism. The evidence therefore strongly suggests that, in fact, the Earth's magnetic field has reversed polarity on numerous occasions in the past. You say that there is no "legitimate hypothesis" for how the Earth's magnetic field might have performed the "incredible feat" of reversing. Yet, it was shown 14 years ago that stochastic processes in a simple dynamo could cause a spontaneous polarity reversal ["The stochastic excitation of reversals in simple dynamos"; D. Crossley, O. Jensen & J. Jacobs; Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, 42: 143-153, 1986]. By 1995, Glatzmaier & Roberts had shown that a physically reasonable geodynamo would spontaneously reverse polarity, for essentially the same reasons that Crossley et al. had uncovered in 1986 ["A 3-Dimensional Self-Consistent Computer Simulation of a Geomagnetic Field Reversal"; G.A. Glatzmaier & P.H. Roberts; Nature, 377(6546): 203-209 (21 September 1995); "A 3-Dimensional Convective Dynamo Solution with Rotating and Finitely Conducting Inner-Core and Mantle"; G.A. Glatzmaier & P.H. Roberts; Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors 91(1-3): 63-75 (September 1995); "An Anelastic Evolutionary Geodynamo Simulation Driven by Compositional and Thermal Convection"; G.A. Glatzmaier & P.H. Roberts; Physica D 97(1-3): 81-94 (October 1, 1996)]. These papers clearly outline, and model, the reversal process, and reveal that the time scale for such a reversal is consistent with the timescale observed in the geological evidence.

• On Creation Science and the Alleged Decay of the Earth's Magnetic Field
• Core Convection and the Geodynamo (includes images of reversal process).

• Evolution's Tiny Violences: The Po-Halo Mystery

As for your supposed "evidences" for a young Earth: nearly every one is already refuted in this archive, and a simple web search would find off-site refutations for the rest.

• It's false to say that we haven't "found fault" with Barnes' claims; they are demolished in no less than two places ([1], [2]) here. As the latter reference shows even the young-Earth crowd has owned up to magnetic reversals (which invalidates Barnes' unidirectional extrapolation).
• It's a falsehood to claim that Nebraska man is still being used as evidence for evolution; it was never taken all that seriously in the scientific community and the findings retracted (mid 1920s) fairly soon after original publication (circa 1920).
• The sea salt claims of Austin and Humphreys are demolished off-site by my friend Glenn Morton.
• Kelvin's calculations were incorrect because he assumed that no heat was added to the system (it is added by decay of radioactive isotopes, by gravitational settling of heavier materials in the core, and by growth of the solid portion of the core).
• Carbon-14 dating has actually been calibrated to over 10,000 years (see about the middle of the referenced article) by ring and varve counts, and to multiple tens of thousands of years by comparing C14 and other isotopic methods (such as U/Th-series disequilibrium ages).
• The "cosmic dust" argument is demolished in two places here ([1], [2]) and as the latter reference shows has been disowned by creation "scientists" as well.
• We've refuted the helium argument already (and by the way, the original creationist proponent of that argument is the Mormon young-Earther "Melvin Cook," not "Charles Cooke"). It's also discussed in Dave Matson's lengthy FAQ on young-Earth arguments.
• The "Earth's rotation rate" claim is demolished in May 1998 Feedback (search for "rotation" in that page), and the dynamics of the Earth/Moon system are subject of the excellent The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System FAQ by Tim Thompson.
• The "shrinking sun" myth is debunked at The Solar FAQ (and also by Glenn Morton - in about the middle of the referenced article). It's also discussed in Dave Matson's lengthy FAQ on young-Earth arguments.
• The "population growth" and "short-period comet" arguments are refuted in an archived debate on this site. Both are also discussed in Dave Matson's lengthy FAQ on young-Earth arguments.

You have presented a long list of scatter-shot claims, many of them already disowned by knowledgeable young-Earthers and nearly all of them already demolished in this archive. Next time, I would recommend that you strive for quality over quantity. Pick your three (or so) strongest pieces of "evidence." Use the archive's "search" facility to see if they're already dealt with here. Answer the archive's arguments up front. Let's see if you can come up with something less embarrassing to your cause, next time.

Brett Vickers, the Archive maintainer, has stated that financial donations are best given to a worthy organization, such as the National Center for Science Education. Our readers can help us, however, in three important ways:

1. By providing additional materials for this Archive according to our needs and the reader's area of expertise. See our Submission Guidelines and our Request for FAQs to see what we need.
2. By publicizing this Archive to others, and by submitting other worthy (and unworthy) sites to our list of links.
3. By pointing out any HTML bugs or factual errors you find in our pages.

The articles in this web site are not intended to be against religion. They are against a particular view of prehistory. Many contributors to the archive are Christians. Many others are not. I'm personally in the "not" category, but I work very happily and constructively with Christians all the same. Any differences we might have on the bible are just not relevant to the subject of biological evolution, since we agree that Genesis 1-11 is not, and was never intended to be, a simple unvarnished account of events in prehistory.

We do not, alas, have a good review of Hugh Ross' work in the archive; though there is an outstanding request for volunteers to submit an article for the archive. In the meantime, I suggest you look at this review of Hugh Ross' book The Genesis Question. The review is by Glenn Morton. Glenn is an evangelical Christian and ex-creationist, and an excellent counter example to the notion that Christians are opposed to science.

Another problem to keep in mind that the Big Bang is not an explosion, despite appearance to the contrary. An explosion is an energetic expansion into space, but the Big Bang is an energetic expansion of space, which may (or may not) be expanding "into" something else. String theory is interpreted in terms of structures called "branes", where our universe is interpreted as a 3-dimensional brane in a universe of 10 or 11 dimensions. A convenient analogy would be that the surface of an expanding bubble in our 3-dimensional universe, would be a 2-dimensional brane (if we ignore the fact that all real bubbles have thickness and are therefore really not 2-dimensional).

• Cosmology Tutorial, from UCLA Prof. Ned Wright; the section on spatial curvature discusses the meaning of flat
• Introduction to Cosmology, from the Microwave Anisotropy Probe.
• Big Bang Cosmology, a list of questions & answers from "Ask the Space Scientist".