Message 12 of 138 (448861) 01-15-2008 2:47 PM

Reply to: Message 10 by johnfolton 01-15-2008 2:33 PM

There is no "Mitochondrial Adam." Mitochondrial DNA is inherited exclusively from the maternal side in sexually reproducing organisms, with a very few exceptions (and humans aren't one of them).

Message 46 of 138 (449063) 01-16-2008 10:39 AM

Reply to: Message 45 by johnfolton 01-16-2008 9:12 AM

Looking to answersingenesis for information about science is like going to a scientologist for information about psychiatry, or asking a KKK member for information about race relations.

Mutation rates are not only calibrated by the fossil record (from which we don't often find genetic information anyway simply due to the nature of fossils). It's also calibrated by the mutation rates we see today. When we do receive genetic information from a fossil, it can be checked against radiometric dating (C14 or other types, depending on age - different radiometric dating techniques are accurate only for certain sets of ages) and the geological placement of the fossil. When all of these agree on a ballpark figure for an age, we can be pretty certain of our estimate's accuracy.

It's Creationists who are making the assumption here: that mutational rates (and radioisotope decay, etc) were all somehow "different" in the past...but they provide no evidence for this idea other than the Bible, and never any mechanism for the acceleration or slowdown in mutation.

Not to mention all the havok caused by messing with the physics involved in altering the decay of radioisotopes. That requires changing universal constants like the speed of light...if that were different in the past, the universe as it exists today could not have formed.

WHAT?! I'm going to be blunt: that statement is the most idiotic thing I've heard in the past 6 months. Cold fusion to "wind up" radioactive clocks?! That's not how it works, not even close! This is a strawman the size of Mt. Everest!

Radioisotopes are created by nuclear reactions...like those inside of stars. ALL heavy elements (as in anything heavier than Hydrogen or Helium) are created exclusively in the core of a star. When a star dies and goes nova, it spreads all of those heavy elements around, and the nebulae formed will eventually form into solar systems like ours. That is when the radioisotope heavy elements like Uranium and Carbon were originally "wound up" - before the Earth had even formed.

Radiometrics and other methods of dating are supported my mountains of evidence.

I'm sorry, but I didn't understand any of that, except for the assertion that scientists are for some reason falsifying results. I assume you have proof of this?

You've already established that you don't understand what mitochondrial DNA is.

So, Creationism is true because Mitochondrial Eve proves Genesis. We know how long ago Mitochondrial Eve lived because Genesis tells us - the mutational rate that shows she's older must have simply happened at an accelerated rate.

Nice circular reasoning.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v12/i1/eve.asp

Message 49 of 138 (449247) 01-17-2008 10:56 AM

Reply to: Message 47 by johnfolton 01-17-2008 2:33 AM

We agree that the heavy elements that make up terrestrial planets were formed long before the planets themselves coalesced...but that in no way means the Earth was formed 6-13000 years ago. The evidence clearly contradicts that, in fact. Radioactive decay rates take far, far longer than that (not all, but many). Remember how everybody whines about nuclear waste, and how it wont stop being radioactive for millions of years? We know exactly the rates of radioactive decay, and if they were as fast as you're asserting, we wouldn't have to worry much about spent nuclear fuel.

Where are you getting this idiocy? It appears you've been fed a few lies regarding physics.

"globalflood.org?" Somehow I'm disinclined to believe a site that purports the global flood to have actually occurred, contrary to what we observe in nature.

Aside from that, C14 dating is only useful for a specific range of dates. It's not the only form of radioisotope dating we use, for that exact purpose. C14 dating is only useful up to a little over 60,000 years - hardly long enough to date a dinosaur fossil, for example. Other radioisotopes must be used for those.

Here's a quote from your site (please stop with the bare links, btw - if you want to cite a website, give the link and also quote the relevant portion):

quote:

---

Given the short 14C half-life of 5730 years, organic materials purportedly older than 250,000 years, corresponding to 43.6 half-lives, should contain absolutely no detectable 14C. (One gram of modern carbon contains about 6 x 1010 14C atoms, and 43.6 half-lives should reduce that number by a factor of 7.3 x 10-14.) An astonishing discovery made over the past twenty years is that, almost without exception, when tested by highly sensitive accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) methods, organic samples from every portion of the Phanerozoic record show detectable amounts of 14C!

---

Why does C14 dating have an error margin? Why does it require calibration?

Because C14 can enter a sample even after the organism is dead. Bacteria feeding on the rotting creature, plant material that covers the fossil at a later date...this is why C14 dating comes with an error range. The fact that incredibly old samples should not contain any original C14 is the reason C14 dating is useless on very old samples. That's why C14 isn't used at all to date dinosaurs, for example.

Your site is apparently run by morons who don't understand physics or archeology.

The evidence does not support a young Earth. Not 6000, or 13000, or 6000000 years, but billions of years old. Plate tectonics could not possibly move fast enough in 13000 years to create the geological features we see today and still leave the Earth habitable, and then magically slow down to the rate we see today. Yearly sediment deposits that we can observe happening even now would have needed to magically speed up to millions of times the currently seen rates (which are controlled by seasons, so we'd need seasonal changes to accelerate as well) and then magically slow down again before people were around to notice the difference. Mineralized fossils like the vast majority of dinosaur bones would have needed a completely different mechanism of fossilization from that which we currently understand, and that mechanism would have needed to magically stop happening now that we could observe it. Geological features like the Grand Canyon formed through a few million years of erosion would have needed to be magically accelerated (and no, floods don't create canyons), and then magically slowed back down to the rates we see today. The light from stars we know are millions or even billions of light-years away would have needed to be created en-route, or the speed of light would have needed to be different (which would have made the universe as we see it today an impossibility).

I could go on, but I think you get the point. A "young Earth" has been disproven so many times from so many independent fields of research that it's a position as laughable as the "flat Earth" believers at this point.

The problem is that every time scientists find an excellent example of a transitional species, Creationists say "nuh uh!!!" without even studying the fossils, or claim it was a hoax (and continue to claim so even after it has been proven there was no hoax). The problem is that Creationists are unwilling to understand what a transitional fossil would even look like. The problem is that Creationists don't understand how rarely fossilization occurs, and that we don't expect to see an example of every generation of organism.

The real problem is that Creationists and cdesign proponentists don't bring any actual science to the table - they paint real scientists as liars and phoneys, and try to squeeze religious nonsense into science classrooms without any supporting evidence or having even followed the scientific method!

Quote the text you want me to read. I'm not going to go out and buy a book to see your argument - post it. I'm not responding to any more bare links or book citations.

Message 55 of 138 (449287) 01-17-2008 3:05 PM

Reply to: Message 54 by johnfolton 01-17-2008 2:32 PM

You aren't paying attention. There is no "winding up." Your statements show that you don;t understand even the most basic concepts surrounding radioactive decay. Let me take this slowly for you.

Stars are giant balls of nuclear fusion. They constantly combine Hydrogen to make Helium, which then combines again and again and again to make all of the heavier elements. Some elements, like Uranium, decay into other elements, over a very predictable rate called a "half-life." Given perfect measurements and a guarantee that all of the original material and its products are present, we caa calculate exactly how long it has taken for the sample to decay.

All of the radioactive heavy elements on Earth were formed in a star.

Some radioisotopes, like C14, are different - I'm not going to talk about C14 at the moment because it is only accurate on timescales that are geologically insignificant.

There is no "winding." There is no "charging with nukyular powarrr!!" Uranium was never "made radioactive." It is radioactive. Uranium did not form in the Earth. It was formed int he core of a star. Radioactive decay is simply the nature of radioactive elements - they decay into stable products over very predictable periods of time. We can use radioisotope dating with elements that have very long half-lives to determine a rough age of the Earth. Combined with other evidence that agrees, "You Earth" believers are living in a fairy tale.

Who disproved that? Was it a pastor at a church? Or a scientist?

Which is statistically tiny compared to the amount of living things that have existed on Earth...

This is all nonsense. Please sort out a complete thought next time.

Or do you really believe the fossils were created as-is by magic? Do you worship Loki, the Trickster God of Norse mythology?

You don't even understand what radioactice decay is! Give me a quote instead of these bare links and I'll argue against you. Again, Im not doing your homework for you.

No, it's not. If that were so, we wouldn't be able to see any stars. Or anything else for that matter - the expansion of the Universe is constant throughout, so the space between your eyes and the computer screen would be moving apart faster than light could reach you.

What?! This doesnt even make sense.

I have a book that says the Flying Spaghetti Monster made the Universe last Thursday with all of our memories pre-created, and it says it's infallible, too.

A book proves nothing alone, regardless of how old it is. And especially not when all of the evidence is against it.

So you admit that the Bible cannot possibly be infallible, as it has been subject to human translation and copying for a few thousand years.

You're not making any sense here. I cant even debate this - it's like you strung a bunch of random words together with a few terms from physics you don't understand.

Message 56 of 138 (449292) 01-17-2008 3:09 PM

Reply to: Message 54 by johnfolton 01-17-2008 2:32 PM

The topic here is the reaction of Creationists to a human/chimp hybrid.

I think our discussion has proven that Creationists will either not understand the implications in the first place and simply deny that it has anything to do with humans being related to apes, or will make up some crazy rationalization to account for it ("free will" allows man to play god, or "its not a real hybrid," or "but it doesnt have a soul").

Message 58 of 138 (449335) 01-17-2008 6:21 PM

Reply to: Message 57 by johnfolton 01-17-2008 6:03 PM

That's not the way it works! I've explained it to you already. There is no "winding up." Radioactive isotopes don't need to be "charged" by anything. They're unstable atoms, and they decay at a predictable rate. Most of them, like Uranium, are unstable as soon as tehy are formed from nuclear fusion, and begin the decay process immediately.

But that's not what the fossil record shows. It shows gradually increasing compelxity with age, with new species branching off of pre-existing ones.

...unless there isn't a "design" at all, and evolution is the natural process by which new species arise from pre-existing ones. The ones that "dont work" dont survive to reproduce. We have all sorts of these "mistakes" today, in the form of birth defects. But because fossilization is an incredibly rare ocurrance, and birth defects are statistically rare as well, AND severe birth defects that we could actually detect in a fossil would likely cause the creature's early demise in conditions not well-suited for fossilization...your whole premise falls flat.

We don't know how life originally occurred. We know how species began to increase in diversity after that point, but abiogenesis research just isn't "there" yet. I think it's got a damned good chance from what I;ve seen so far, but we haven't followed the whole process through yet.

You're the deluded one. All of our measurement techniques point to an extremely old age for the Earth. They only "evidence" against it is a collection of musty old tomes based on stone-age mythology.

[qs]If light is stretching then its still going the speed of light because nothing is nothing then general relativity does not violate special relativity even though light by triangulation has went more miles per second than special relativity in normal space. Right?[qs/]

Wrong.

The space in front of the light would be stretching at a speed faster than light travels. It would be like trying to go the wrong way on an escalator that's moving at 100 MPH. You'll never get to the top, regardless of what happens to your body.

You have no idea what you're suggesting. The speed of light is a constant everywhere. Remember E=MC^2? If you change (C), nuclear reactions like those in stars get completely altered, and there wouldn;t be enough mass to make enough gravity to hold the stars together - in other words, speed up light, and stars start exploding. This is one of the reasons we know light is a constant speed everywhere in the Universe.

None. Of. This. Makes. Any. Sense.

Please go read a physics textbook.

...which means it's not the "Word of God." It's the "Words of Translators."

Believe what you want, it doesn't really change the facts.

Nobody said chimps were our common ancestor. They're our cousins. Mitochondrial eve would have happened long after the split from our shared ancestor.

Message 98 of 138 (450205) 01-21-2008 10:00 AM

Reply to: Message 97 by johnfolton 01-20-2008 10:40 PM

It is the nature of all science and discovery that whenever a question is answered, even more questions will be able to be asked. Don't confuse this as an excuse for an argument from incredulity to have any hold - scientists don't claim to understand everything, or even individual subjects perfectly. All they claim is to have the most accurate model currently available, and a method of inquiry that ensures increasing accuracy over time in the modeling of the natural world.

I honestly have no idea what this has to do with "dividing marrow and the spirit" or "giving up the ghost."

And now an appeal to authority. A single person with a PhD and questions does not refute anything alone. And if you are even remotely suggesting that you had a "computer glitch" that prevented you from posting everything you typed because of the interference of "evilutionists," you are placed firmly in the "conspiracy nut" corner.

Add to this the fact that you're citing a man who complains about the "scientific establishment" and you fit even better in this category. The "scientific establishment" is very receptive to being disproven...as long as you bring the actual evidence, and not unsubstantiated claims.