Summations Only

I fear consilience will not be on the agenda any time soon, but admire your optimism.

Whoa, easy there big fella. That would seem to be the only conceivable value of having Faith here.

So, never heard of the Sahara? The ocean floor? Kansas?

Not that Faith has the slightest desire to understand, but a way of helping the sincerely gormless understand the order amid apparent chaos in the geological column can go like this:Imagine you start with an unpainted wall. Every day someone enters the room with a couple cups of thick paint and covers a few random square feet of the wall.The next day someone else comes in with a few cups of a different color and paints a random different part of the wall.And so on and so on. Some days the new paint overlaps almost right on top of a previous layer, some days it overlaps several previous patches.This goes on and on for years. Some times a dude comes in and sands off a random area or chips out a chunk of paint.After a few years, the paint is about a foot thick. No matter where you bore through the paint, you find layer on layer of different colors.Most of the core samples you bore out have different colors. But when you start comparing a lot of samples, you can figure out a pattern. You see the same sequence of layers when you drill holes near each other, and you see different colors dropping in and out of the sequence as you move around.With a whole lot of work - pushing 200+ years in the world of geology - you can draw a pretty good map of where the different areas of paint were laid down, and in what order.Paint, incidentally, takes a while to dry.It really is just that simple, and you really have to be extra stupid, or extra dishonest, not to understand it.Lookin' at you, Faith.Ken "Capt Stormfield" PhelpsEdited by Capt Stormfield, : Edit typo & omission.

Well, there's always self gratification. Send yourself a few abusive posts. Type slow and sexy.....

Technically, you didn't. You're so disconnected from reality that you are in the zone known as "not even wrong".Listening to you talk about the geological column is pretty much like listening to a cat explain split shifting. The cat's mouth is moving and sound is coming out, but you kind of get the sense his feet have never actually reached the pedals.

To return to my previous metaphor, please try to explain how a new layer of paint on a previously painted wall could not be over an existing layer of paint? How would that layer of paint not be part of the accumulated layers of paint called "the geological/paint column"?

So when you walk into the painted room and stick your finger into the new layer of paint, do you cry out "This isn't the next layer of paint! It's fresh and sticky! It's nothing like the other layers! They're dry and this is wet! The painting stopped yesterday! Those other layers were put on the wall in a completely different way! They're not wet like the top layer!"Oh, yeah, right. That's exactly what you do.

Thank you for doing precisely what I predicted. You have just stated that the wet layer isn't dry.

Odd that you bring up semantic obfuscation. Could you please explain in some detail how a layer that needs to be buried and compressed to acquire its defining characteristics, could be "new" and "on top"?

The Sahara. It's not quite done yet. It needs to get covered up and squished flat. Shouldn't take long.

Put it in the mail with the rent cheque.Laughable.

There is no paradigm problem. There is just dishonest (or, to be fair, incredibly clueless) use of language. Faith has defined layers that are "under construction" as not part of the geological column, and layers that have acquired the definable characteristics of a layer part of the existing column. It's like defining wet paint as "not part of the wall" because it's not yet hard like the existing paint; and existing paint as unchanging, since she just got here this morning and knows nothing of the room's history. Since she'll only be in the room for 5 minutes, she will, by definition, never see paint change from wet to dry.Edited by Capt Stormfield, : No reason given.

Except that we find footprints, nests, plants, burrows, stream beds, eggs - all the things that we see being buried in vital habitats today. It's so sad that you are so disconnected from the outdoors and gardening that you don't understand what it looks like when the slow and inevitable decomposition of the living surface creates the greater (visual, at least) homogeneity of soil, and eventually, rock. If only you had, at least once in your life, been given the opportunity to dig a hole in the earth and see that gradation first hand. I pity you sheltered city folk.Edited by Capt Stormfield, : typo

You mean like beaches, or wetlands, or lake bottom? The places that are literally crawling with life?Verily it is said, the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.ABE: Faith, did you pause for even an instant to think about the implications of stating that tracks and burrows, the artifacts of living things, are found in a place where things don't normally live? I mean really?Edited by Capt Stormfield, : No reason given.