Science Disproves Evolution

You remind me a lot of a creationist, Paul Ekdahl, back in the day on CompuServe. Like you, he would just copy creationists verbatim, including footnote references. Though in his case, since that was before public access to the Internet, he would type several pages out of creationist books and that was all he would post. And, he copied them so slavishly that he would include the footnote references, but not the footnotes themselves. On a couple occasions, I was able to goad him into writing something himself, which was invariable an attempt to convert me to his own particular heresy, which he delusionally believed he could accomplish by having previously posted pages of crap claims.My first question(s) to you is/are:
1. Who the hell is Steveson? Why should what he wrote (assuming that he had written what was presented; with creationists, one can never assume such things) be considered authoritative?
2. What did he write? Ie, what book or article or whatever is being quoted by that footnote? Do you know?
3. What did he write? Ie, what actual statements did he make in that book/article/whatever?A common creationist source of meteoric dust amounts, especially when nickel is mentioned, is a Feb 1960 Scientific American article, "Cosmic Spherules and Meteoritic Dust", by Hans Pettersson. That article reports his findings from an experiment in which he collected samples of dust raining down on a mountain top in Hawaii and, knowing the relative abundance of nickel in meteors, used those samples to try to estimate the amount of meteoric dust falling to earth. He describes his reason for picking Hawaii as being that he wanted to prevent contamination of the samples by industrial pollution. He decribes core samples taken from the Mediterranean sea floor and that they showed a very high amount of nickel spherules over the previous 150 years due to industrial pollution. He figured that Hawaii would be far enough from major industry to be affected. What he didn't know at the time was the extent to which high altitude winds blow dust and particles over global distances; much of the nickel that he detected was indeed pollution from the heavy industry in East Asia. Anyway, still not knowing that, he came up with a maximum value and a much lower reasonable value which he prefered. Of course, the creationists (eg, Henry Morris) grabbed that maximum value and went running with it.Please also note that this and most other sources creationists use for their meteor dust and moon dust claims used indirect methods of measurement that predate our presence in space.At a 1985 debate I attended, Morris' response to his opponent's criticism of using outdated sources was to mention a "1976" NASA document, "written well into the space age", which showed with direct measurements that the moon should be covered with a layer of dust 284 feet thick if it were really 4 billion years old.My page detailing my research into this claim is at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/moondust.html. I wrote to Dr. Henry Morris at the ICR for details about that claim and Dr. Duane Gish, his partner at the debate, responded with a xerox'd copy of a letter written by Harold Slusher, the originator of the claim -- that letter is reprinted at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/slusher.html.Then I found that "1976" NASA document, Meteor Orbits and Dust, Smithsonian Contributions to Astrophysics. Volume II, in the university library. It was actually printed in 1967, the papers were presented at a conference in August 1965, it was Volume Eleven (11, not II), and Slusher had misrepresented what it had said. Actually, the document had not made the 284-foot claim, but rather Slusher had constructed a formula for calculating the amount of dust that would have accumulated in a given amount of time and for converting that to a layer thickness, and then he took values from the document and plugged them into his formula. Now, the figures were for the earth, so he made that calculation and then converted it over for the moon. His formula contained two extraneous factors:
- a 10,000 "factor from observation and theory for gravitational enhancement of particles sink for the Earth". However, the document clearly states that that is a maximum value for particles much smaller than what he was working with; for that size particle, this factor was unity (a mathematical and physics term meaning "one"; ie, it has no effect whatsoever -- multiplying by one is like adding zero)
- a factor of 100 that he through in thus: "the measured flux average frequently showed increase by a factor of 170 for extended periods of time (so this factor is used to estimate changes in the flux)". My response to this is on my page at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/moondust2.html:

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On {the document page that Slusher cites}, it says: "The flux of small dust particles observed in the vicinity of the earth sometimes undergoes large systematic variations with time. On one occasion, the flux rose by a factor of 170 above the average value. The measured flux also shows variations by a factor of 10 within intervals of a few hours' duration."

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First, as you can see, Slusher did not accurately quote his source. One occasion hardly qualifies as "frequently". Nor, when you are talking about billions of years, would a few hours qualify as "extended periods of time". Also, his factor of 100 is an entire order of magnitude greater than the factor of increase experienced in the "extended periods of time" that he cites. But this is not the main problem I have with this factor.

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Second, Slusher's formula applies the AVERAGE flux over an extended period of time, 4.5 billion years. Certainly we could expect the flux to increase at times, but we would also expect a proportionate DECREASE balancing out the increase, otherwise the average would be higher. When one uses an average rate over an extended period of time to obtain an overall value, one does not normally use excursions from the average. Excursions would be of more interest in statistical analysis and in constructing best-case and worst-case studies, none of which Slusher was attempting to do. Therefore, I consider this additional factor of 100 not to be applicable and to have inflated his results by that amount.

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Thus Slusher inflated his results for the earth by one million and for moon by 10,000. When corrected, the layer of meteoric dust we should expect for the moon would be about 1/3 inch thick.Now, if we look at where Dr. Morris had used that claim in his book, Scientific Creationism, he cites the NASA document as his source, even though it is obvious that he had never seen that document (since just looking at the front cover would be enough to indicate that it was from a conference in 1965 -- duh? -- and that it was Volume 11, not II). It is also rather obvious that Slusher hadn't even researched from that document, but rather had apparently relied on another unidentified creationist source -- Slusher is infamous for ignoring questions about his claims. This problem of creationists citing sources while actually researching from other creationists is typical.And we see such things all the time in PRATTs ("Points Refuted a Thousand Times"). Even though they were created decades ago and first refuted decades ago, they continue to surface with each new batch of creationist suckers. From that my same page give above (No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/moondust2.html):

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I haven't gotten around yet to writing the epilogue on this affair. A few years later, a fundamentalist friend became curious about all this, so he wrote to the ICR asking about meteor dust on the moon. A graduate student answered the letter, saying that the ICR had long since dropped that claim, because there are too many unknowns to come up with anything definite, and quoted out of H. Morris' book/attack on Davis Young, "Science, Scripture, and the Young Earth" (1989, 95 pp.), that the moon-dust claims are unreliable and are no longer used because of the difficulty in getting a consistent value for the rate of meteoric dust infall. Okay, it looks like the ICR does occasionally correct itself, after all.

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But now, a decade after the ICR said that they had washed their hands of the moon-dust claim, their books still propagage it. Morris' "Scientific Creationism" is still sold in bookstores and directly from the ICR with the admittedly bogus moon-dust claims still in it, as are several other creationist books (eg, Ackermann's "It's a Young Earth After All", which bases an entire chapter solely on Slusher's bogus NASA claim). You can walk into just about any Christian bookstore that sells ICR books, pick one up, and read in their ubiquitous age-of-the-earth "evidences" list that the accumulation of moon dust shows the earth to be about 10,000 years old and references Morris' "Scientific Creationism."

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I can't really say whether the ICR is deliberately continuing to make claims that it has admitted to be false, or it is just being sloppy. Either way, the effect is the same.

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The moon-dust argument is still very popular among creationists. Even though the ICR has gone through the motions of trying to distance themselves from it after Slusher's claim blew up in their faces, their publications still carry that claim and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they continue to use it in their debates. A search through web-space shows that the moon dust claim continues to circulate widely among creationists and the literature presents it to newly arrived creationists as if it were still the current doctrine.

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This illustrates the principal strength of creation science: even though its claims have been refuted, every few years there comes along a new generation of creationists who are not aware of what had gone before them and who accept without question the same old false claims that have already been refuted many times before -- verily, a sucker is born every minute.

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Edited by dwise1, : epilogue

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

A creationist on another forum several years ago slipped up and gave me the answer to that question. An answer which led to a "aha!" moment for me.That creationist cited a number of age estimates, including millions of years for sodium to accumulate in the oceans. So I asked how "millions of years" could possibly support his claim for less than 10,000 years. And he responded with (quoting from memory): "Just so long as it isn't the billions of years that science says it is."Aha! The actual ages they get doesn't really matter to them. All they want is be able to say that science is wrong. And then from there they can pick and choose what findings of science they can arbitrarily say is wrong and so can ignore. They don't really care about proving their claims right; they just want to prove science wrong.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

That's why science tests its methods, in order to verify them and to find flaws so that they can be corrected, corrected for (eg, discrepancies caused by variations in C-14 production due to fluctuations in the geo-magnetic field), or the method can be dropped from use. While science welcomes tests and valid challenges to its methods, creationism has produced no valid challenges.As I quote Thwaites and Awbrey on my beta-version page, No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/new_index.html):

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Professors William Thwaites and Frank Awbrey teach in the Biology Department at San Diego State University, where they used to run a true two-model course, in which half the lectures were given by creationists, but they had to discontinue it after protests by Christian clubs. In 1977, they pioneered the successful debating strategy of researching creation science claims beforehand and then presenting what the evidence really showed or what the misquoted source had actually said.

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In 1993, they announced their retirement from the fray and described their very last debate on 1993 April 29. The description of the debate was preceeded by a summation of their experiences in those 15 years, of what they had hoped to learn, and of what they had learned. They had entered into debates with the hope and expectation that:

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... a creationist would dig up a real biological paradox, one that would prove to be an interesting brain-teaser for the scientific community. We hoped that we could use the creationists to ferret out biological enigmas much as DEA agents use dogs to seek out contraband. ... While we had discovered that every creationist claim so far could easily be disproved, we still had hope that there was a genuine quandary in there somewhere. We just hadn't found it yet.

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What did they discover after those 15 years? Complete disillusionment with the creationists. None of the creationists ever presented any real paradoxes or genuine quandaries. The creationists had no actual case to present.
(Thwaites, W., and F. Awbrey 1993. "Our last debate; our very last." Creation/Evolution 33:1-4.)

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The problem that Ringo (I think it was; I'm in the reply page now and can't look) presented was that the creationist "estimates of the earth's age" vary among themselves greatly, whereas science's determinations of the earth's age agree with each other overall.As I remember confidence intervals (that was after all 30 years ago and not my best class), if multiple independent tests yield the same results, then your confidence in those results increase. For example, if you have, say, 10 independent methods and you're only 50% confident in any of them, then if two of them yield the same answer, you're 75% confident, if three then 87.5%, if four then 93.75%, if five then 96.875%, and if ten then 99.90% confident.Now, I'm sure that our confidence in any one actual method is higher than 50%, but I needed to make it low to demonstrate the point. Because several independent tests yield the same results, we have very high confidence in those results. On the other hand (gee, that sounds familiar), the results that creationism presents vary widely by several orders of magnitude. Just on that basis alone we cannot help but find creationism's claims to be suspect.Science offers a view of the world that is very self-consistent and consistent with the real world. Creationism (as in "creation science") offers a view of the world that is not at all self-consistent and that contradicts much of the real world.But this lack of self-consistency does not trouble creationists at all, because they don't care about it. Coming up with a self-consistent world model is not their goal. Their goal is to kill evolution and one of their methods is to discredit any science that they perceive as supporting evolution.

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... -- the idea of killing evolution instead of playing these debating games that we've been playing for nigh over a decade already.
(Paul Ellwanger, author of the "Balanced Treatment" model bill on which Arkansas Act 590 was based, from the closing of a letter written to Tom Bethell, which was admitted as evidence and cited by Judge Overton in his Decision of the Court)

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

First, if you're going to post something, then you'd damned well better have some idea about it. Just hurling crap (accurate description of the vast majority of creationist claims) at the wall in order to see if any of it sticks does not go over very well in these here parts.Second, don't pass your obligation to research your own posts off on somebody else. I do realize that is common creationist practice *, but you do need to do your own work.{* Footnote: From my report on Duane Gish's infamous "bullfrog protein" claim, No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/bullfrog.html:

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Shortly afterwards, at the 1984 National Bible-Science Conference, Schadewald again confronted Gish. This time Gish responded by saying that because of that Origins Research letter he was not responsible to provide any documentation (Schadewald had used "ungentlemanly language in print," i.e. the words "lie" and "charlatan"). When asked who is responsible for documenting those proteins, Gish said that it was up to Schadewald and Curtis (i.e. "You want to know the sources for my claims? YOU go look it up!").

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Within the week, Schadewald and Patterson sent a letter to Gish's boss, Dr. Henry Morris, President of the ICR. In it, they brought Morris up-to-date on the affair, quoted Gish's statement on national television concerning the chicken and bullfrog proteins, told of Gish's repeated failure to produce his repeatedly promised documentation for them, and finally related his reversal and subsequent refusal to produce that documentation or to accept any responsibility for producing it. They concluded the letter:

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We have long been conscious of the numerous substantial differences
between creationism and science, but this is new to us. Scientists (and science writers) take full responsibility for their public statements. Gish apparently rejects this responsibility. Was he speaking for himself in this matter, or is this doctrine of non-responsibility an official ICR policy? If so, we suggest that ICR speakers should level with the public and preface their presentations with the following disclaimer: "I am not responsible for the truth or accuracy of any statements I make."

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As of press time, there had been no reply to this letter.

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That report also relates Walter Brown's fraudulent use of his "rattlesnake protein" claim, which is still hidden away in his book as a footnote.
}Edited by dwise1, : corrected qs boxEdited by dwise1, : corrected quote

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

So now you're resorting to flat-out lying. Yet another all-too-common creationist practice.PS
In order to label a qs box to indicate who's being quoted, you follow the qs with a "=" and then that person's name or moniker. Take a look at my post in "peek mode" to see what I mean.Edited by dwise1, : PS offering qs editting

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

But we're not talking about "fulfilled prophecy", the very existence of which is in question. We're talking about studying the natural universe and, more specifically, determining the ages of that natural natural and structures in it, including our planet.Furthermore, the question much more specifically was whether science or creationism does a better job of arriving at these dates. Even more specifically, the question you involved yourself into was why is it that the many independent scientific tests are in agreement with each other, whereas practically none of creationism's result are even remotely in agreement with each other.Now, it is indeed a very good idea, especially in engineering, to team together people from different disciplines, which enables the team to think outside the box during brainstorming. However, creationism would have nothing to offer and ID much less.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

Pahu, please refer to my article on the subject that I wrote 18 years ago: MOON DUST at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/moondust.html. Was 1990 before or very shortly after you were born? That should give you some idea of how old this and most other PRATTs are.Paul Ackerman, author of It’s a Young World After (please don't give me that blank stare; you did cite it as one of your "sources"), relied on work done by creationist Harold Slusher. My article deals with that work in which Slusher claimed to have calculated how much meteoric dust should be on the moon if it were actually 4.5 billion years old. Slusher cited his source thus:

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The figures I am using below for the calculations come from Hawkins, G.S. ed., 1976. Meteor Orbits and Dust, Smithsonian Contributions to Astrophysics. Volume II, Smithsonian Institution and NASA, Washington, D.C. These collected papers are based on radar, rocket and satellite data well into the "space age".

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Every creationist (with but a single exception) whom I've seen use Slusher's claim would cite that NASA document as their own source and most would also intone that same "well into the 'space age'" phrase -- though thankfully Ackerman did not, even though he himself also cited that NASA document.However, they had clearly never seen that document and I rather suspect that Slusher himself had never seen it. Because I have seen it and read what it said. That NASA document was actually published in 1967 from papers submitted at an August 1965 conference. Oh, and it was Volume Eleven (11), not two (II), something else that they all would have immediately seen. And Slusher ignored what that document said and he ignored the rules of mathematics in order to introduce two extraneous factors that inflated his results for the moon by a factor of ten thousand (10,000). Slusher claimed that an old moon should be covered in a dust layer 284.8 ft thick, but when we corrected it by removing his extraneous factors that dust layer becomes 1/3 inch thick.I first encountered it at a debate when Henry Morris of the ICR mentioned it to counter his opponent having pointed out quite correctly that creationists keep citing old sources and ignore more recent findings, which is exactly what you did in posting that tired old PRATT. Morris' emphasis was on the false claim that it was a "1976" document and he implied that the measurements were made directly from the moon's surface. When I found that document in the library and discovered the truth, I tried to inform Morris and Gish (who had supplied me with their full version of the claim) and Gish just kept denying the hard facts in front of him. A few years later, a creationist I had informed wrote to the ICR and a graduate student informed him that the ICR no longer used that claim. However, the ICR's books continued to carry that same claim and still carry it to this very day, over 15 years after they claimed to no longer use it.And as a result, kids like you come along and read those false claims and believe that they are still current.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

Humble? Not hardly. Rather, extremely arrogant. And such arrogance is, as I recall having been taught, supposed to be contrary to Christian faith. The vast majority of that dust is of terrestrial origin and consists of what's being redistributed by the atmosphere as well as the organic debris sloughing off of all the inhabitants of the house, including yourself.An analogy would be the snow in a North Dakota winter. You get most of your snowfall in the beginning and the end of the winter when it's warm, but in the dead of winter it's too cold to snow, the air is just too cold to hold any moisture. And yet you have to shovel your walk and driveway almost constantly. Why should that be if it can't snow? Because the North Dakota wind just keeps redistributing the snow -- also mixing dirt in with it, producing what Nodaks call "snirt" and which produces some interesting little snow mesas during the spring melt.OK, in that analogy, falling snow would be equivalent to cosmic dust and redistributed blown snow would be what accumulates on your furniture. I guess the snirt part would be the mixing in of the organic crud that you produce.Now, that analogy also illustrates why scientists with their earth-bound means of measuring in influx of cosmic dust had such problems getting accurate measurements: because of contamination from the dust of terrestrial origin. Even Hans Pettersson's experient (as reported in Scientific American of Feb 1960 and misrepresented by Henry Morris and countless creationists who followed in order to support their bogus moon dust claims) was thrown off by heavy contamination from human industrial sources in the Far East, even though he had chosen the top of a mountain in Hawaii in order to avoid such contamination -- at that time, we did not realize how far the upper atmospheric winds will carry that stuff.In other words, you are dead wrong. Yet again.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

Uh, dude, punctuated equilibrium is evolution. And it is Darwinian evolution. Your statement certainly makes it look like you have no idea what you're talking about. If you want to oppose an idea, it would certainly help your cause if you were to break with creationist tradition and actually learn something about your opponent.Even though Darwin knew and wrote that the rate of evolutionary change would vary greatly, he saw others abusing that idea by advocating near-instantaneous appearance of new characteristics, so he over-emphasized slow and gradual change. The only Darwinian idea that Punc.Eq. refutes is that over-emphasis on slow and gradual change.But how sudden is "sudden"? I have stowed away somewhere an excellent quote from back in the day on CompuServe (hot-bed of creation/evolution discussion in the late 1980's) that addresses this. Since I cannot locate it just this instant, I will paraphrase it. Sudden to a person is in less than a second. Sudden to a generation is within a year. Sudden to geology is thousands of years. Thousands of years.I also have a copy of the circa-1980 article in either Science or Nature (it's been a couple decades and I'm going strictly by memory right now; I moved a few years ago and everything is still packed away in boxes). But I remember vividly the diagrams in that article. Each generation was represented by a bell curve and the graphics showed a continuous line of bell curves over a very large number of generations "suddenly" changing over thousands of years.Are you starting to get an idea of what Punc.Eq. is? Not at all what your creationist masters told you, is it? Of course not. Since when did they ever tell the truth about anything?

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

BULLFROG!!No, I agree with you. In my "BullFrog Affair" article, I included an incident with Walter Brown and his infamous "rattlesnake protein" claim which he still has hidden in a footnote of his on-line book; from my web page at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/bullfrog.html#RATTLESNAKE (original article written and posted on CompuServe in 1990):

quote:

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One of Brown's claims that Arduini was especially interested in was that the rattlesnake's closest biochemical relative is humans. However, Brown demanded $70 from Arduini to provide that documentation.

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. . .

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Brown claimed that on the basis of data from a 1978 study by Margaret Dayhoff, comparisons of cytochrome c show that the rattlesnake is more closely related to humans that to any other organism. When Kenney asked Brown to provide the name of the scientific journal and the page number in which Dayhoff had reached this conclusion, Brown stated that he couldn't. Dayhoff had never reached such a conclusion, but rather Brown's son had used Dayhoff's data to reach that conclusion for a science fair project. It was Brown's son who had concluded that rattlesnakes are more closely related to humans by cytochrome c than to any other organism.

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For fifteen dollars, Brown sent Kenney photocopies of his son's project (apparently, Brown's price depends on who you are). Kenney wrote:

quote:

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In the project I quickly found that the rattlesnake and humans differed by only fourteen amino acids. Humans and rhesus monkeys differed by one amino acid. Later, Brown called me again and then explained that of the forty-seven organisms in the study, the one closest to the RATTLESNAKE was the human, not that the one closest to the human was the rattlesnake. You see, among the forty-seven there were no other snakes.
(Creation/Evolution Newsletter Vol.4 No.5 Sep/Oct 84, pg 16)

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Most of the other organisms in the study were as distantly related to the rattlesnake as were humans; it is coincidence that human cytochrome c was just barely less different than the others. Obviously, this is just semantic sleight-of-hand which can serve no other purpose than to mislead and it is so blatant that Brown had to know what he was doing.

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Later after a debate, Kenney found Brown telling a small group about rattlesnakes being more closely related to humans than to any other organism. When Kenney started explaining to the group how misleading that was, Brown quickly changed the subject.

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Just to point out the end of the second-to-the-last paragraph, Brown's claim had to be worded with extreme precision to remain technically true. The personal effort that it would take to ensure that one words that claim precisely correctly would require that one know that looser wording would fail to be technically correct.One of the perennial questions that "creation science" opponents ask themselves is, "Do these people (ie, the leading creationists who dream up all those lies) really believe that nonsense?" To me, this claim of Brown's was hard proof that he was purposefully lying. He had to know precisely how to word it, therefore he had to know that it was a false claim. His immediate action of changing the subject when his lie was being exposed is further evidence that he knew he was lying.Edited by dwise1, : softened the endingEdited by dwise1, : corrected quote tags

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)