On What Evolved from What: Aron wrote, "Many times in our discussion"¦ Bob"¦ insist[s] that whatever fact I present be endorsed by 'leading' experts in whatever field it happens to relate to." I recall asking for this once (in Round 1, Part 3, at 26:40) regarding what evolved into what. For example, Aron says that it "
is a fact", yea, a "
verifiable fact" that birds evolved from (are a subset of) dinosaurs. But in an unguarded moment,
dinosaur expert (and Jack
Horner associate
Don Lessem wrote:
"Little dinosaur meat-eaters were probably the ancestors of birds, but we aren't sure which ones."
Again, a group doesn't evolve into a group so these repeated claims violate one of the primary observations of biology, that, like bodily organs, supergroups are not reproducible entities. So, because they cannot reproduce, which is a requirement for any Darwinist mechanism, therefore it is obfuscation to claim that a supergroup evolved into something else, especially when used in a circular fashion such as when
a conclusion is presented as the very evidence that supports that conclusion, which illusion is the primary mechanism of AronRa's phylogeny. Yet, that illusion, as we'd say here in the U.S., is "too big to fail." And so, among Darwinists, it persists and has become the dominant paradigm, the one by which Aron "proves" descent as "a demonstrable fact."
The Standard Model of the Universe (as having no center) is Not Based on Observation: [
Aron's 4th of 9]: In
Part 3 of our radio debate, AronRa defended his Falsehoods video in which he emphatically asserts that: "
there is NO CENTER to the universe." [
hear it] I explained that such a conclusion is not based on scientific fact but on belief; specifically, on philosophy. Aron you insisted however on defending your statement as though it were not a "belief," but something that you are justified in asserting as true. However, in Scientific American's profile of cosmologist George F. R. Ellis, the Stephen Hawking co-author, Ellis
stated:
"People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations... For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations... You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds... What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that."
Further, Hawking and Ellis together wrote, in
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time on page 134, that scientists, "are not able to make cosmological models without some mixture of ideology." Even Wikipedia's article on the
Cosmological principle says that this a "working assumption", and a "strongly philosophical statement"¦"
Yet to mock what you say the Bible teaches, Aron you emphatically claim that, "
there is NO CENTER to the universe!" I differentiated between
a lack of evidence for a center, as compared to
positive evidence for no center. Aron shows no appreciation for this important distinction. Further, as a way of fending off criticism he wrongly argued that his support for the current BB model was
not an affirmation (because what he was defending was the BB's claim that there is no center; so he thought the "no" in "no center" meant that he was not making a positive affirmation). Thus Aron you violate your own test of integrity. Click to
hear Ra in his own voice, almost as though he were chastising himself:
"¦if you believe in truth at all, then you should make sure that the things that you say actually are true [something he hasn't done regarding the universe having no center]. That they are defensibly accurate, and academically correct. And if they are not correct, you should correct them. You wouldn't claim to know anything that you couldn't prove that you knew [like that the universe lacks a center]." hear it
Aron, you should correct yourself on this. Make it clear that the passionate belief [
hear it] that you present as fact, that "there is NO CENTER to the universe," is not based on scientific observation, but probably on your emotional opposition to the Bible, an emotion which moves you to state as fact things that you cannot defend as academically correct. You could edit your video to say something like, "Most cosmologists believe that the universe has no center."
Aron wrote that "the redshift quantization [Bob] pleaded for is an illusion":
No Pleading: Far from "pleading," I said that I don't at all know whether or not the universe even has a center. I did go on to say that some have proposed that the mapping of hundreds of thousands of galaxies seems to show a quantized redshift that
might suffice as evidence that the universe has a center.
An Illusion: The scientists at the Institute of Physics in Kiecle, Poland did not view the
galaxy redshift periodicity they found in their comprehensive review, updated in 2008, of all the major studies as an illusion. This survey is consistent with a
Quantized Redshifts review back in 1997 which found that "the redshift distribution has been found to be strongly quantized in the galactocentric frame of reference. The phenomenon is easily seen by eye and apparently cannot be ascribed to statistical artefacts, selection procedures or flawed reduction techniques. "¦ The formal confidence levels associated with these results are extremely high." Aron should be able to admit that this data which, if true, would mean that the universe has a center and that it is centered on our galaxy, is not the product of creationism bias but is the product of mathematical analysis by qualified scientists of the measurements of hundreds of thousands of galaxies. It seems to be primarily the Big Bang evangelists who object to this scientific data, and notice, that because their "no center" universe is a belief not based on science but on philosophy, that they are putting their ideology above apparent scientific data. So, just like soft tissue was not an illusion (much to the dismay of many here on League of Reason), it might be that quantized redshift is here to stay also.
On AronRa's claim that Bob was wrong to say PNAS published an alternative model to the Big Bang: I told Aron that I didn't know if the universe had a center or not, but that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 published a paper proposing an alternative cosmology, of a bounded universe centered on our Milky Way galaxy. Aron dismissed this on air, and has now asked me to respond to this:
"Bob claimed an alternative model to Big Bang cosmology -which does not exist"¦" -AronRa
Standard BB cosmology claims an unbounded, homogeneous (the same everywhere) universe that therefore lacks a center. The alternative BB model I referenced was
published in 2003 in PNAS. Smoller and Temple describing their proposal, wrote that, "by incorporating a shock wave at the leading edge of the expansion of the galaxies"¦ [which would be] bounding a finite total mass", that they thereby present, "a cosmological model"¦ of an asymptotically flat Schwarzschild spacetime." For those unfamiliar with the subject, physics professor John Hartnett
explains that Smoller thereby "implies that the earth or at least the Galaxy is in fact close to the physical center of the Universe." As Smoller and Temple themselves admit, in their paper, "the Copernican Principle is violated in the sense that the earth then has a special position relative to the shock wave.
"Bob claimed an alternative model to Big Bang cosmology -which does not exist, and he said it was concordant with the creationists' model of the universe -which also does not exist." -AronRa
See the two creation models I briefly describe and link to at RealScienceFriday.com/
starlight-and-time#time-dilation proposed by two physicists, one a professor in Australia was has received a prestigious IEEE award, and the other an alumnus of Sandia National Labs where he received awards, including an Award for Excellence for contributions to light ion-fusion target theory.
Aron, again, as with soft tissue, nautiloids, 14C everywhere, you seem to be the one in denial. I don't promote these young-earth models, but as I said on air, they are consistent with that 2003 PNAS paper including in that they propose a bounded universe centered on our solar system. Yet instead of engaging on the substance you and other atheists mock me and my creationist associates.
On Aron repeatedly referencing Lawrence Krauss: Aron wrote, "I defended myself against Bob's accusation of having misrepresented Laurence [
sic] Krauss by showing where Krauss also refuted Bob's claim of a geocentric universe."
Aron, not only did I never claim (listen to the beginning of
Part 3 of our radio debate) that we have a geocentric universe (I don't know if we do), I specifically and repeatedly told you that I was NOT claiming such a thing, and that I don't know, one way or another. However, if there
is actually a center (and I did say there is some evidence that
might indicate a center), that this would falsify your cosmology and the standard BB model, which already is challenged by
many leading secular scientists and by
many astronomical observations. It is your falsehood videos that are emphatic on this matter to a point beyond what the science justifies.
Aron, your repeated mentions of Krauss led us to set up an interview with him, which was especially enjoyable. Unfortunately, while interviewees are attracted by the great audience reach of the
50,000-watts of our "blowtorch" radio station, still, I had to agree to interview him on his latest book, A Universe from Nothing. So, while your geocentric universe concern is addressed above, our RSF Krauss interview was very worthwhile, including, for example:
- Krauss does not side with you and the Soft Tissue Deniers but admitted that his friend
Jack Horner has excavated a [url=http:dinosaursofttissue.com]
T. rex that still had blood vessels[/url] in its thigh bone.
- Krauss characterized the hundreds of scientists
at respected institutions who have publicly announced that they doubt the Big Bang, as "400 nuts."
- Krauss did not have a good defense of my challenge to chemical evolution from Supernovas when I cited the unexpected different isotopes of oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth and the Sun, and that 90% of Earth's radioactivity is concentrated in less than 1% of its mass, in the continental crust (which observation Krauss agreed to). My argument was that if our solar system condensed from a post-Supernova nebulae (gas and dust cloud), then the Earth and Sun should have the same isotopes (versions of oxygen and nitrogen). Similarly, if our uranium and thorium came from stardust, we should expect to find it more evenly spread out through the earth than we do, and especially, we should find it in greater abundance in the ocean floor. While Krauss might be able to come up with a workable explanation, he had none immediately available (other than to admit my point, that the radioactivity is concentrated around granite). Incidentally, while the chemical evolution theory (from stardust) requires extreme secondary mechanisms (rescue devices), Dr. Walt Brown's
Origin of Earth's Radioactivity is a great fit to the observed data.
- Krauss responded to my argument that Carbon 14, which cannot last a million years, is everywhere it's not supposed to be (like in petrified wood, oil, marble, dinosaur fossils, diamonds, etc., as described at
RealScienceFriday.com/Carbon-14), by saying, "Don't talk to me about anomalies." That's a shocking sentiment coming from an allegedly unbiased scientist. It is exactly the "anomalies" that led Christian young-earth creationist Johann Kepler to discover the laws of planetary motion and free the world from millennia of the science-stagnating geocentrism that came not from Scripture but from commitment to the pagans Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy.
On Mitochondrial Eve, AronRa, and Y-chromosomal Adam: [
Aron's 5th of 9]: Aron wrote: "Y-Chromosome Adam evidently lived 140,000 years ago, and"¦ a genetic bottleneck in the human lineage was traced to 74,000 years ago, not the 4,000 years that Bob claimed for both of these."
Women First: Taking her namesake from Genesis
3:20, genetic researchers have named the one woman from whom all humans have descended, "Mitochondrial Eve" and theoretically, they can date her based on today's mitochondrial DNA variation among humans (I know, I know, "What's a human?") and extrapolating backward using current mutation rates. Of course, as with soft tissue in dinosaurs, along with 14C (also in diamonds) evolutionists can hardly bear to even look at evidence that calls into question their old-earth scenario. (For example, for this summer's Singapore conference hosted by the American Geophysical Union in Singapore, five leading laboratories found ample modern carbon in the 10 dinosaurs that they dated with AMS. Lord willing, I'll air an interview with the presenter by October.) So, one technique used to suppress the young age for mtEve is to begin not with human DNA, but with an illusion, with theoretical, non-existent, composite human-chimp mtDNA.
Geneticists have
openly admitted that they included chimpanzee DNA in some of their analyses, including to get what they viewed in one study as a reasonably old date of 200,000 years ago (which is still surprisingly recent from their perspective, but old enough not to strain Darwinism too much). But then as widely reported including by Science magazine, when they dropped the chimp data and used only
actual human mutation rates, that process determined that Eve lived
only six thousand years ago! (See also RSF's
Gorillas, Chimps, Baboons, Ann Gibbons.) In
Ann Gibbon's
Science article, "
Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock," rather than again using circular reasoning by assuming their conclusion (that humans evolved from ape-like creatures), they performed their calculations
calculating with actual measured mutation rates on human DNA. This peer-reviewed report stated that if these rates have been constant, "mitochondrial Eve"¦ would be a mere 6000 years old." (See also the journal
Nature and "
A shrinking date for Eve" on creation.com and Walt Brown's
assessment.) Expectedly though, evolutionists have found a way to reject their own
unbiased finding (the conclusion contrary to their self-interest) by returning to their original method of using circular reasoning, as
reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics, "calibrating against recent evidence for the divergence time of humans and chimpanzees," to reset their mitochondrial clock back to 200,000 years. Finally, I
interviewed a molecular geneticist (Ph.D from Ohio State University) and we discussed that many such age chronometers typically
yield a maximum age.
Creationist Example of Maximum Possible Age: Wikipedia says that manganese nodule "growth is one of the slowest of all geological phenomena, in the order of a centimeter over several million years." And a Texas A&M Marine Sciences technical slide
presentation says, "They grow very slowly (mm/million years) and can be tens of millions of years old." Yet according to a World Almanac documentary, they have formed
around beer cans said marine geologist
Dr. John Yates in the 1997 video
Universe Beneath the Sea: The Next Frontier. So, the creationist reasons: that particular nodule can be at most only a few decades old (dated by the beer can), and further, manganese can evidently precipitate more rapidly than claimed, not unlike the wildly rapid formation of many geological features
on Surtsey Island).
Evolutionist Example of Maximum Possible Age: Skull 1470 was discovered by Richard Leakey, and according to the journal Nature, the rocks around it were dated to 220 Mya by Cambridge University and University of London. For the evolutionary timeframe, that doesn't work, since such a "human like" skull would have to be far more recent. So the unbiased scientists discarded the parts of the rocks that gave them older dates and re-dated the strata to 2.6 mya. That's much closer to what's needed to support the theory and made people happier, but not Donald Johanson. In his book
Lucy I read this (p. 240): "Nearly everyone but [Leakey] w[as] convinced that the"¦ skull 1470 date would have to be corrected." Corrected? What? Did Johanson find an error in the radiometric dating methodology? No. All the scientific dating corroborated the older dates, but those dates conflicted with a comfortable hominid timeframe. The paleontology community agreed with Johanson and wanted to throw out the radiometric dating and go with their theory (just like with mtEve and Y-chromosomal Adam, forcing the data to fit the theory). For Johanson (p. 171) quoted Leakey, "Either we toss out this skull, or we toss out our theories on early man." So, because the hominid story is "too big to fail," guess what lost, the potassium argon, or the theory? Say goodbye to the argon. It didn't matter that independent labs using different techniques agreed on an "accurate" and "secure" date. That data was out and the theory was preserved. For as the political pressure began to build over the next few years, attention was being given to pig evolution in Kenya, for the evolutionists were confident that they had accurately dated the pigs. So to better calibrate their results, they didn't use more accurate half-life measurements, instead, they used pig evolution. And voilà . The Skull was younger still. (Aron, did I misrepresent the dinosaur soft tissue? If I didn't, consider that I'm not misrepresenting this example; I just don't have the time to document all this right now but as I recall it's all in Nature.) It went from 220 million years, to 2.9 million, to settle down into the pages of Wikipedia and TalkOrigins at 1.9 mya. So, 1470 was finally dated, not by uranium fission track dating, nor by rubidium decay, nor by potassium/argon. But by the pigs. As Johanson put it, for Leakey to accept a younger date "on the basis of some pig fossils would be shockingly difficult." There's only one part of all this that is logically valid, of course: that the youngest date typically provides a maximum age and therefore trumps older dates.
Now the Men: Geneticists call him Y-chromosomal Adam, although he should be called, Y-chromosomal Noah. According to
PNAS and as reported by ABC News from the director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, "Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham "¦ And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years," and, also as expected from biblical history, Jewish priests share a genetic marker, according to a science correspondence item published in
Nature titled,
Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests, by scientists from the University of Arizona, Haifa Technical Institute, and University College of London, who wrote: "These Y-chromosome haplotype differences confirm a distinct paternal genealogy for Jewish priests," many of whom,
according to Dr. Jonathan Safarti, "have the name
Cohen, [which is] the Hebrew for priest, or variants like Cohn, Kohn, Cowen, Kogan, Kagan, etc. "¦ [And] it is possible to identify the Levites, because they have names such as Levy, Levine, Levinson, Levental..."
But back up to the finding in the 1970s of evolutionist Maynard Smith and others that the human population must have passed through a period of drastically reduced size prior to the more recent rapid population increase. About this, the journal
Nature published a letter,
Noah's Haemoglobin, from Dr. Richard N.
Harkins and others from the
Oregon Health and Science University describing the:
"reduction in the human population to eight individuals; Noah, his wife, their three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth, and the sons' wives. It seems entirely plausible that this small population could be homogenous for haemoglobin genes. Thus the book of Genesis documents a series of human population changes which are consistent with changes required from consideration of amino-acid sequences alone."
Then in 1995 as
reported in Science, a study of 729 base pairs of 38 men sampled from around the world surprisingly showed ZERO difference from mutations. Of course evolutionists can re-calibrate Eve based on chimp data, and let pigs trump radiometric dating, ignore 14C in diamonds and dinosaur bones worldwide, and even Lawrence Krauss just told me that finding blood vessels in a T. rex is "perfectly consistent" with things that are 65 million years old. Yes, perfectly. So, it's not surprising that evolutionists can find a way to say that near identical male Y chromosomes worldwide show evidence of have diverged from a common ancestor 74,000, or 270,000 years ago (what's the difference really, when there's a theory to prop up).
As Dr. Walt Brown
summarizes all this, "How likely is it that other men lived a few thousand years ago but left no continuous male descendants, and other women lived 6,000 years ago but left no continuous female descendants, and we end up today with a world population of almost 7 billion people?" Extraordinarily unlikely. Most astronomers uneasily came to admit that the universe had a beginning (but still they reject Genesis by holding to an increasingly
untenable Big Bang theory). Likewise, evolutionists are acknowledging much of what the biblical creation model predicts about the human genome, while not realizing that the historic events recorded in Genesis help wonderfully to account for their data. For Jesus said that Adam and Eve were made "at the beginning of creation" (that is, not billions of years after a big bang) and that "Eve... was the mother of all."
On Aron's Refusal To Correct His Claim that Genetics Doubly Confirm Darwin's Tree: [
Aron's 6th of 9]: Just like Aron wants the reader to believe that everything I've reported on dinosaur tissue has been unconfirmed or refuted, and that there are not a million nautiloid fossils in limestone at the base of the Grand Canyon, and that my reports of 14C everywhere it shouldn't be show only creationist confusion, likewise, Aron hopes to discredit all the genetic science
in my previous post from dozens of scientists saying that genetic trees of descent contradict both themselves and Darwin's traditional tree, by claiming that I don't understand the difference between genes and an entire genome, and he's still promoting the canard comparing human DNA "to the chimpanzee genome" that "if we only include genes, the ratio is roughly close to 99%." And why would we do that, if not to provide an illusion? For humans and apes being about 99% similar is "too big to fail."
Aron, you omitted text from my brief quote so that you could then tutor me on the difference between genes and an entire genome. If you were correct, and I don't understand the difference, then of course, the reader will assume my points about sponges, chimps, and people were invalid. On the other hand, if I do understand the difference, and my observations are valid, than you are obscuring the alternative assessment of the data. You schooled me: "You should understand that sharing 70% of a gene set does not mean the same thing as having a 70% identical codon sequence..." You give that lesson in response to what you quoted from me, but your two ellipses left out the material that showed that I was not conflating genes with genomes. (We creationists are the ones who LOVE the non-coding regions; we'd never overlook all
four million of them
!
Readers might notice a difference in content between my posts and Aron's, which is characteristic of the wider creation/evolution debate. Here's what I don't do that Aron does: he repeatedly posts the conclusions of people on his side of the debate, saying that they agree that their position is correct! If you removed that kind of content from Aron's posts and videos, they would virtually disappear. For example, I quote the geneticists in New Scientist, hostile witnesses to a creationist, saying that evolutionary lineages based on genetics significantly contradict both themselves AND the traditional trees based on fossils and anatomy. You offer to me and the readers in
Round Five the rebuttal that I should have read the "editorial" in that issue, which assures everyone that all is well in the Darwinian camp; and that evolutionist Metzinger assures us that "8% of human DNA is actually old virus DNA", yet she's the same evolutionist you quoted as saying that other than the "3%" that codes for protein, the "rest of our genome is called non-coding or junk DNA. Despite the fact that there is so much junk"¦" You quoted that in 2012, and Carrie wrote it in 2011, yet such claims, that most of our DNA is junk, are a decade out of date. The latest study, by 440 researchers working in 32 laboratories around the world (affirming what creationists have been saying
for decades), published
in Nature that so far, they've been able to identify
function for 80 percent of the human genome! In contrast to your continuous citing of the
opinions and conclusions of those you agree with, regardless of what you think of my position, even many evolutionists should be able to acknowledge that in this debate, I have presented mostly
evidence, like:
- Grand Canyon nautiloids
- Soft-tissue in dinosaurs
- A hundred million years of missing deposition and erosion in the Grand Canyon between smooth and regular strata boundaries.
- Short-lived 14C in gas, dinosaurs, diamonds, etc. (with you dismissal by quoting your friend Claire1 claiming, completely in error, that all the modern carbon is a "margin of error", all of which is
decades out of date).
When debating, when I quote conclusions to make my point, it is not virtually always from people on my side, like Aron and the evolutionists do; but it is almost always from hostile witnesses, like from:
- Leading Big Bang cosmologists who admit that their model of a universe without a center is not based on scientific observations but on ideology
- The discoverer of the whale "ancestor" Rodhecetus, Dr. Philip Gingerich, concluding that he severely misrepresented (in all the biggest whale-like features) what the creature was really like, learned when the rest of its skeleton was found (see below)
- The many evolutionary geneticists
I offered who openly argue that trees based on genetics frequently and significantly contradict the traditional Darwinian lineages built from fossils and anatomy and that they significantly contradict one another (i.e., the mutually exclusive proposed histories that arise from trees based on RNA, and other trees based on protein sequences, and yet other trees based on DNA). Aron, in your
final (Ira Flatow) post, you say that your
10th Foundational Falsehood, "explained the very point [proteins, DNA, etc., contradictory trees] you just mentioned. It's right there in the beginning, so how did you miss it?" Perhaps Aron, because your video was done years before these hard-hitting studies were published, and because you spoke in code, with probably 99% of your viewers having no idea that you had just told them to expect extreme contradiction in the phylogeny data as compared to traditional Darwinian trees.
I still call on Aron to correct his 10th Foundational Falsehood video in which he wrongly
says that: "the phylogenetic tree of life is plainly evident from the bottom up to any objective observer who dares compare the anatomy of different sets of collective life forms. But it can be just as
objectively doubly confirmed from the top down
when re-examined genetically."
hear itOn Millions Mammoth Remains in the Arctic, on Frozen Mammoths, and Tropical Seeds: [
Aron's 7th of 9]: Aron brought up this topic on air as an example to my audience of how they can't trust what creationists say. He rejected my defense that the remains of millions of mammoths are known in the northern latitudes, saying, "there were 51 mammoths, not millions." He said that if we were having a
written debate, we could actually document the evidence, so that the readers would know who was reliable. So, now that we are in that debate, it would have been nice of Aron to acknowledge that he was wrong about the number of mammoths. But instead, he dropped that error of his, and pressed these other disagreements:
I challenged Bob to show that there were [n]ever any mammoths found frozen with tropical flora anywhere near them. "¦ Bob also said mammoths could not possibly survive in the environments where millions of them are known to have lived and I refuted his claims about those conditions too."
Sigmund Freud would have enjoyed this segment of our radio debate (
Part 5, just fast-forward to 15:30). Aron is bothered that he was mislead "since I was a little kid"¦" So here's how it actually went:
Aron: "There were 51 mammoths." Bob: "There are millions."Aron: "I found that there were 51 mammoths, not millions. And that none of them, not one, was found with tropical flora in their mouths"¦ so when you look into the data, if this were a written discussion"¦"
BE: "I've got the data. The tonnage of mammoth tusks, that were sold on the worldwide market, indicate that there were millions of mammoths that were buried in Siberia, and at the Arctic Circle, and north of the Arctic Circle. And there were mammoths that had the seeds of tropical plants, the seeds, in their digestive track."
Aron: Wrong.
Enyart: We'll, I could give you the data.
Aron: I challenge you.
Enyart: Do you thing I'm wrong"¦
Aron: Yeah I do.
Enyart: "¦about [there being] over a million mammoths buried.
Aron: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely do. And it's a formal challenge.
Enyart: How about a $500 bet to your favorite charity, that the documentation shows that over a million mammoths have been buried?
Aron: With tropical flora in their mouths?
Enyart: No, no. There was just one like that.
So here is the documentation I promised:
New York Times:
Trade in mammoth ivory"¦ flourishes, "The Siberian permafrost blankets millions of square kilometers"¦ Hidden in one of the upper layers of this mass, corresponding to the Pleistocene epoch, are the remains of an
estimated 150 million mammoths. Some are frozen whole, as if in suspended animation, others in bits and pieces of bone, tusk, tissue and wool." Aron, this information had been in the Mammoth article on Wikipedia until I linked to it for our radio program, and then within 24 hours, one of our atheist RSF fans
removed it. That's
not a unique phenomenon.
Smithsonian publication:
Frozen Mammoths from Siberia Bring the Ice Ages to Vivid Life, "Nikolai Vereshchagin, Chairman of the Russian Academy of Science's Committee for the Study of Mammoths, estimated that more than
half a million tons of mammoth tusks were buried along a 600-mile stretch of the Arctic coast. Because the typical tusk weighs 100 pounds, this implies that about
5 million mammoths lived in this small region." (quoted by
Walt Brown, p. 68)
Creationists are excited about this data. But the hard scientific data that atheists prefer to ignore (just Google this stuff) includes millions of mammoths buried in permafrost, 14C everywhere, Grand Canyon nautiloids, and dinosaur soft tissue!
Dr. Walt Brown's map along with his
Table 8 presents the locations and documentation for each of the 58 sites shown where frozen mammoth and rhinoceros remains have been discovered.
Just like 14C in diamonds, and tissue in dinosaurs, if you want to find buried mammoths in permafrost all you have to do is just go look.
Aron: No tropical plants near mammoths in Arctic. Bob: Yes there were.In fact, there's a lot of tropical flora buried near the mammoths in the Arctic.
With earthquake expert and graduate of the U.S. Naval Nuclear Power program,
Kevin Lea, we recently aired
realsciencefriday.com/mammoths. The following two references were part of our show prep, courtesy of Dr. Walt Brown:
Geophysical Research Letters: "[Canada's Ellesmere Island, well inside the Arctic Circle, was] warm enough throughout the year to sustain
palm trees and other tropical flora and fauna." Daniel B. Kirk-Davidoff et al., "On the Feedback of Stratospheric Clouds on Polar Climate", Vol. 29, 15 June 2002, p. 51.
Natural History: "On eastern Axel Heiberg Island [in the Arctic Circle in Canada], ... fossil forests are found. ... just 680 miles from the North Pole. The stumps of ancient trees are still rooted in the soil and leaf litter where they once grew. ... many
trees reaching
more than a hundred feet in height." Jane E. Francis, "Arctic Eden,", Vol. 100, January 1991, pp. 57-58.
The strange loess hills that Siberian mammoths are often found in contain, "two and a half times the amount of carbon that's
in all the world's tropical forests."
And in Alaska, where today the nearest forests are hundreds of miles away:
"Though the ground is frozen for 1,900 feet down from the surface at Prudhoe Bay, everywhere the oil companies drilled around this area they discovered an ancient tropical forest. It was in frozen state, not in petrified state. It is between 1,100 and 1,700 feet down. There are palm trees, pine trees, and tropical foliage in great profusion. In fact, they found them lapped all over each other, just as though they had fallen in that position." -Lindsey Williams, The Energy Non-Crisis, Worth Publishing Co., 1980, p. 54, quoted by Walt Brown!
The most well-studied frozen mammoth is Berezovka, with its mouth and tongue well preserved, and according to
Nature, its "mouth was filled with grass, which had been cropped, but not chewed and swallowed." And the grass was frozen so quickly that, "it still had the imprint of the animals molars," wrote Lister and Bahn in
Mammoths on page 46. However, its mouth Its stomach contained three seeds from plants that produce delicate, yellow buttercups. Fragments of other flowers were in its stomach. No large flowers were in its mouth.
As summarized
by Dr. Brown, "Its stomach contained three seeds from plants that produce delicate, yellow buttercups. Fragments of other flowers were in its stomach." Aron denied that these creatures would have frozen quickly, and he offers that one particular mammoth was buried while eating a tulip from Denmark. However unless frozen rapidly, vegetation would digest in an animal's stomach and intestines. And in all, "Twenty-four pounds of undigested vegetation were removed from Berezovka and analyzed by Russian scientist V. N. Sukachev. He identified more than 40 different species of plants: herbs, grasses, mosses, shrubs, and tree leaves. Many no longer grow that far north; others grow both in Siberia and
as far south as Mexico."
Aron says that such mammoths were eventually buried when they fell into a hole, broke a leg, and froze to death in the cold. But, millions of them? In the Arctic? Aron denied that there were millions of mammoths in the Arctic, that any tropical flora were found near mammoths, and he denied my point that all those giant creatures would have a problem finding sufficient food and liquid water, needing more than 100 gallons a day each. Consider that a recent 150-pound, 7-foot tusk was found 110 miles north of the Arctic Circle where, today, for five months of the year the high temperature is lower than freezing, and for six months of the year the low is
less than 0 degrees F. But
during the ice age at those latitudes almost all year long it would have been a lot colder! These all didn't wander into pits; they died catastrophically.
On MSds: [
Aron's 8th of 9]: Aron says that evolutionists have identified "the ancestry of turtles"¦ flowering plants, backbones, bats, fish"¦ trees"¦ and"¦ turtles."
For an example of what AronRa considers to be evidence, look back up at his
Round 5 post and search for: flowering plants. He presents quotes that he perceives as strong evidence that evolutionists *know* what creature it was that fish evolved from. And that they *know* what organism it was that flowering plants evolved from. We can repeat this same exercise with any evolutionist's claims about the ancestry of bats, backbones, trees, and turtles. I'll stand on my argument earlier in this post regarding Aron's item #3 of 9 above, that evolutionists have developed a system of illusions to obscure the truth that they have not in any kind of rigorous scientific way established evolutionary lineages for such creatures.
On MSds: [
Aron's 9th of 9]: Aron wrote, "In the 7th and final segment of our discussion, Bob accused me of not knowing why Rhodocetus and Pakicetus were considered related to whales. He said this even after I explained about the diagnostic traits in each of their skulls. Bob accused paleontologist, Phillip Gingrich of 'recanting' this fossil,which he did not, and of rendering this animal as a fish,which he did not."
Aron makes his assertion. I'll give you actual quotes from Dr. Philip Gingerich. This discoverer of Rodhocetus now admits, "I speculated that it might have had a fluke [whale-like tail], I now doubt that
Rodhocetus would have had a fluked tail." And regarding the imaginative whale-like flippers he had included in his reconstruction of the partial fossil, Gingerich also admitted: "Since then we have found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arms of
Rodhocetus, and we understand that it doesn't have the kind of arms that can spread out like flippers on a whale."
I've seen Dr. Gingerich say these things and I've transcribed them myself. You could see him say these things too Aron if you subscribed to more reliable science video and interview services and science journals, like the resources that are available in our young-earth creation circles. But in the meantime, you can find out more at
realsciencefriday.com/Rodhocetus-whale-of-a-tail.
Finally, AronRa's Phylogeny Challenge: Aron's
Phylogeny Challenge asks creationists to identify dozens of created kinds as they diversified on the earth. As a creationist, I'll quote below the evolutionists who oppose us to give a more objective assessment of our attempt to do this. First realize however that Aron's phylogeny challenge is an Evolution of the Gaps argument. If creationists can't answer all our questions about life, then obviously, evolution did it.
The creation movement has a careful effort underway, the discipline of baraminology, to lay the groundwork to answer many such questions. At
realsciencefriday.com/creation-orchard-vs-evolution-tree, I interviewed
Dr. Roger Sanders of Bryan College about baraminology, which is a furtherance of Adam's first task (
to name the animals), into a classification of living things within the framework of the created kinds as described in Genesis.
The Assessment of Our Enemies:
Eugenie Scott's anti-creationist National Center for Science Education begrudgingly
states, in an article by Alan Gishlick, that researchers, such as Dr. Sanders, "practice a form of systematics, called 'baraminology', and for creationist science it is surprisingly rigorous and internally consistent." Gishlick, Scott, and Ra disagree with the motivation and findings of this work (being done by various scientists including at Bryan College (founded after the
Scopes Monkey Trial) and separately, at Answers in Genesis by geneticist
Dr. Prudom and others). But hopefully, Aron can acknowledge that there are people who disagree with his worldview but who, nonetheless, can make careful scientific observations and draw conclusions consistent with the data. For my part, I'm happy to accept Gishlick's compliment on behalf of creationists. Just as evolutionists are beginning to turn away from their longtime Junk DNA claims and in increasing numbers, begrudgingly side with the view,
long held by creationists, that non-coding regions are not junk, so too, related to baraminology, is the study of the dispersion of animals around the world, called biogeography, where evolutionists are beginning to emphasize aspects of the creation model, regarding the transport of countless animals across ocean currents on floating log mats.
An Example of the Creationist Perspective Predicting a Genetic Observation: I asked Dr. Sanders if there is evidence of a genetic
bottleneck among land animals. I predict that such a pattern will become increasingly evident over time. Why? Because a global flood destroyed almost all land animals and birds only thousands of years ago. So I asked if marine animals have been shown to have greater genetic diversity than bird and land animals. Dr. Sanders recalled that a study done on land and marine turtles showed greater genetic diversity among sea turtles. This is expected by creationists. However, evolutionists believe that sea turtles evolved from land-dwelling creatures, so if evolution were true, genetically we would expect to see greater genetic diversity among land-dwelling turtles, the opposite of what apparently is reality. This reminded me of one of our recurring themes (which both evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould and creationist
Dr. Carl Werner agree with), that the fossil records documents stasis rather than evolution, regarding turtle fossils.
Bob Strauss, on turtle evolution, wrote: "the basic turtle body plan arose very early in the history of life (during the late Triassic period), and has persisted pretty much unchanged down to the present day... Paleontologists still haven't identified the exact family of prehistoric reptiles that spawned modern turtles and tortoises, but they do know one thing: it wasn't the
placodonts."
Aron, baraminology is the creationist effort to answer our own phylogeny challenge of sorts, as Kepler is paraphrased, said, to glorify God by thinking His thoughts after Him.
My Assessment: It's sad to assess the life's work of studied evolutionists including Aron. He is like a renowned Star Wars trivia buff, able to distinguish between a juvenile Wookiee and a mature Ewok, and explain from geology what froze the oceans on Hoth and how Tatooine was covered by dessert. But degreed evolutionists are like science fiction fanatics who gradually convince themselves that it's all real (not unlike the unbelievers who started a fiction to mock Christians only to realize that today, quite a few atheists actually
do believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster). One day, Dawkins will join Dobzhansky and Darwin in their current realization that it was all wrong. Yet for him, and PZ, and AronRa, there is still hope. And I pray for them.
That's 9 of Aron's 9 challenges plus his phylogeny question. This debate has raised many other great science questions that we will address overtime by updating the record at
realsciencefriday.com/aronra. So, thanks again Aron and League of Reason!
And remember the nautiloids!
In Christ,
-Bob Enyart
Real Science Friday
Re: AronRa vs Bob Enyart - Phylogeny
