EvC Forum: The phrase "Evolution is a fact"

Hi Archangel, I am back now from my travels, with time to devote to your assertions and opinions. I'll combine a couple of your posts in my answer, so I apologize for the length: many errors require many answers.

But here's the problem for you RAZD, nothing you promote here is founded in solid evidence that anything you claim is true at all regarding the timing for the events you claim. I don't believe that any of the fossil evidence which you interpret as million to hundreds of millions of years old is the least bit valid or rational as my time lapse video above clearly shows.

Curiously, and unfortunately for you, reality is completely unaffected by what you believe, what your opinion is, or what ad hoc explanation you can pull out of the air. Reality is what is shown by the evidence.

By that I mean that unless animals were buried via cataclysmic events such as the biblical flood which would have realistically laid down layer after layer of animal rich strata via sedimentation throughout the world in a very short period of time, which offers us a fossil record which your side misinterprets at every level of understanding, can the fossil record be rationally explained at all.

As noted in Message 185 the foraminifera fossils provide evidence contrary to this assertion of yours:

RAZD writes:

The problem for you is then to explain how the foraminifera are sorted by layers rather than randomly distributed throughout the whole sedimentation layers. Why do they show the gradual evolution of species after species and the tree of common ancestry? How does that occur from stirring a pot of mud with dead forams in it?

You attempted another hand-waving denial of the evidence in Message 187 where you again expressed an opinion rather than providing an argument supported by evidence:

I don't believe the fossil record shows this organized and gradual record of evolution as you assert it does. I believe the only thing organized about evolution science is the lie which it tells in order to convey a convincing story. It is no different than the dishonest, yet very neat way your original testimony of the Pelycodus reads. On its face one would have to be a denier of facts to reject your claims, but upon minimal scrutiny, it defines all of the inconsistencies and contradictions which are endemic with this false and pseudo science. Claiming something does NOT make it true at all, and neither does it become true if a massive volume of lies have been created over decades or even centuries. A lie doesn't become truth just because it is repeated thousands or even millions of times.

Interestingly, the mark of cognitive dissonance is to regard any and all evidence that contradicts your pet belief as a lie, misinformation and the product of some conspiracy.

Fascinatingly, calling any evidence you don't like a lie is not a different interpretation of the evidence, as you claimed was the case for creationists, nor is it skepticism, common sense or rational thinking, it is just ordinary denial of inconvenient evidence.

Unfortunately, for you, denial does not make the evidence go away, or even affect it in any way. The evidence does in fact show an organized and sorted structure:

http://www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/whatsnew/papers/biochart.pdf

Click to enlarge

The gray column on the left is the age determined by radiometric dating methods, the next set of columns are ages determined by relative stratigraphy (CHRONOSTRATIGRAPHY), the third set of columns lists the different species of foraminifera and other similar species (BIOSTRATIGRAPHY). The problem for you is that every time we find the same species of foraminifera, we find them in the same stratigraphic layers, and whenever we date those layers by radiometric methods we end up with the same ages for the layers.

Why is that true if the layers are not sorted and organized by the layers of sedimentation?

Because I have showed in real time video how quickly an animal decays even when it is protected from scavengers.

Place that rabbit in the unprotected wild and its decomposing odor is to animals, equivalent to the inviting odors we sense when passing in front of a restaurant. In other words, that any animals could survive unmolested long enough to become a fossil is a massive and ludicrous assumption which defies logic and observable evidence.

And yet your "real time video" is just something in your imagination, a made up attempt to explain away evidence that you find uncomfortable.

Once again, the fact is that the foraminifera evidence is not something that is scavenged by predators, it is the calcium shells ("tests") of the dead animals, shells that have rained down onto the bottom of the seas around the world year after year after year after year. No cataclysmic event required, nor does your proposed cataclysmic event explain the sorted and organized layers.

You need to explain how your flood model can produce these layers, not just assert some imaginary eventuality.

When you think you have a valid explanation, you can try an experiment: take a bag of diatomaceous earth (you can get it in a garden store and divide it into different piles that you then dye different colors; now mix them in a large container with water and get them to sort out by color.

If you cannot do this then you cannot explain the layers of diatoms and forams that are found all over the world, sorted and organized by sedimentary layers with a flood model.

Have fun.

In order for you to build your theory, you must deny and ignore common sense and rational consideration for how the real world actually works.

So you keep preaching, but common sense to me says that the diatoms and forams are formed in layers and organized by age, because this is perfectly consistent with what we observe in the world today, while thinking that the colored diatoms can be layered and organized by a certain swirling agitation of some imaginary flood process is totally against all common knowledge.

But you could prove be wrong by doing the experiment. That, of course, would be the scientific approach to determining how the real world works, as opposed to relying on opinion and belief, eh?

I never denied that evolution doesn't tell a nice story which you have captured in your well written defense. But that doesn't mean that anything you accept as real is true at all in reality.

The difference is that the "story" told by evolution matches and predicts the evidence and the pattern of evidence that we find, while your "real time video" fails to explain anything other than there are fossils. Curiously, that is not a useful explanation when we start with the fact that there are fossils.

And by that, I mean that it happened when you say it did. If you apply your beliefs to having taken place within the past 10,000 years or so, then all of a sudden the science starts to make sense to me. But when you insist that this is evidence of evolution occurring over the last 40 to 50 million years, you lose me.

Amusingly, I see that you have absolutely failed to take up the challenge I gave you in Message 167

RAZD writes:

Here's another thread you can peruse to understand that disagreeing with the interpretation is a problem:
Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1
And now you have and ADDITIONAL problem -- now you not only need to define what kind of change you are talking about, but you need to answer the clear evidence of an old earth, based on multiple correlations that are mutually supportive and confirming of each other.

If you are going to argue for a different interpretation of the fossils based on some pretense of "not accepting" the evidence of an old earth, you now need to show how each of those age measuring systems are individually wrong, and WHY THEY AGREE.

You have not done this, and your continued prattling on about having trouble with the age of the earth is rather amusing denial of reality, without your even attempting to answer this challenge.

You made a rather insipid attempt in Message 187 to confront the first part of the evidence of an old earth:

And speaking of tree rings, Can you explain why, in such a old earth, no trees have survived past 8000 years anywhere according to this link, with the previous oldest at around 5000 years old? http://www.t.../Worlds-oldest-tree-discovered-in-Sweden.html Now, by all means let the excuses fly as you attempt to explain to this innorant christian why he just doesn't understand what you secularists see so clearly.

Interestingly, we don't expect every living thing to live forever. Curiously there are three independent tree chronologies that agree with one another with 0.5% error over 8,000 years, as noted in Message 4 of the thread in question. Fascinatingly we can also measure carbon-14 levels in those tree rings, and we find the same levels in each of the three chronologies for the same year/s. Amazingly, the sun goes through an 11 year cycle of cosmic ray production that is responsible for making carbon-14 in the atmosphere, and the carbon-14 levels in the tree rings show this same 11 year cycle year after year after year.

What you fail to understand, is that evidence of young things in an old earth is entirely possible - common sense will tell you - that parts can be younger than formation of the earth.

What you cannot have - common sense will tell you - are parts older than the formation of the earth. Thus you cannot have formed features in a young earth that are older than the earth, and you certainly cannot have evidence of life that is older than any kind of valid concept for a young earth.

You guys make it seem as easy as reading tree rings when in reality the only way the majority of all fossils survived to become that way only through cataclysmic upheavals. So by its very nature, that would explain why there are pockets of fossils at certain strata levels apart from the universal layers which were created by the great Flood of Noah. How sad that you secularists misinterpret all available evidence and attempt to erase our Maker from the equation of how we came to be here.

As already demonstrated with the foraminifera, no cataclysmic event is needed to explain the layers of foram shells, nor does a cataclysmic event explain the layering and organization observed in the foram shells.

Lake Suiketsu in Japan offers a similar pattern of organization and layering, but one with an additional element that your model is incapable of explaining.

From Message 5 in Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1:

Scientists lead by Dr. H. Kitagawa were able to measure a chronology extending over a period of 29,100 years. ...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/279/5354/1187 (3)

quote:
A 75-m long continuous core (Lab code, SG) and four short piston cores were taken from the center of the lake in 1991 and 1993. The sediments are laminated in nearly the entire core sections and are dominated by darkcolored clay with white layers resulting from spring-season diatom growth. The seasonal changes in the depositions are preserved in the clay as thin laminations or varves. The sedimentation or annual varve thickness is relatively uniform, typically 1.2 mm/year during the Holocene and 0.61 mm/year during the Glacial. The bottom age of the SG core is estimated to be older than 100,000 years, close to the beginning of the last interglacial period.
To reconstruct the calendar time scale, we counted varves, based on gray-scale image analyses of digital pictures, in a 10.43- to 30.45-m-deep section, producing a 29,100-year-long floating chronology. Because we estimated the varve chronology of older than ~20,000 yr B.P. (19-m depth of SG core) by counting in a single core section, the error of the varve counting increases with depth, and the accumulated error at 40,000 cal yr B.P. would be less than ~2000 years, assuming no break in the sediment (12).

Note that annual varves run for a period of 29,100 years (from 8,830 back to 37,930 cal yr B.P if correctly aligned with the tree chronology), and that this alone is several times older than any YEC model for the age of the earth. The varve layers continue down below the limits of C-14 dating to ~100,000 years, with some assumptions made below the 37,930 cal yr BP level. As the data below this 37,930 cal yr BP level does not use annual varve layers but an estimated rate of sedimentation, we cannot use it for our minimum annual layer counts other than to say that the earth is older than the annual varves show.

Note that the layers are formed by alternating precipitation of diatom shells and clay, with the diatom layers coming from the spring-season diatom growth, and the clay layers formed during the rest of the year (particularly the winter months when no diatom growth occurs). Clay settles slower in water than the diatom shells.

Now in addition to the previous experiment proposed to test your "alternate explanation" of foram layers, we can try this: mix clay and diatomaceous earth with water, shake and stir according to your proposed explanation, and see if you can get the results to be alternating layers of diatoms and clay.

Have fun.

Note that these layers are used to calibrate carbon-14 dating, so the carbon-14 dates are not measured to date the layers, they are measured to compare to the layers. Curiously, there is a good correlation between the two: your model also needs to explain that little detail.

But it doesn't end there. In Message 21 of the same thread you have an additional correlation that needs to be explained:

Here is some more information from the Lake -- the correlation of both the varve ages and the 14C ages with the actual depth in the sediment.
A 40,000-YEAR VARVE CHRONOLOGY FROM LAKE SUIGETSU, JAPAN: EXTENSION OF THE 14C CALIBRATION CURVE

quote:
Figure 1 shows the varve and 14C chronologies as a function of depth of the SG core. Until now, the varve numbers have been counted in the 10.42-30.45 m deep section. The Lake Suigetsu floating varve chronology consists of 29,100 varves. As shown in Figure 1 the sedimentation or annual varve thickness is relatively uniform (typically 1.2 mm yr-1 during the Holocene and 0.62 mm yr-1 during the Glacial). The age below 30.45 m depth is obtained by assuming a constant sedimentation in the Glacial (0.62 mm yr-1). The 14C ages at 10.42, 30.45 and 35 m depth are ca. 7800, 35,000 and 42,000 BP, respectively.

Note the correlation between C-14 and depth with C-14 and varve count. See how at about 11,000 years ago ("BP" means "before present" with "present" defined as 1950 CE), both show a matching change in slope of the curves with depth.

When you realize that one is a linear system of varve counting and the other is a mathematical model based on actual measurements that are along an exponential distribution:
...
There is no rational reason for the ¹⁴C curve to make the same change in slope at the same time as the varve age curve, unless it measures the same thing that the varve counting does - age.

Common sense tells you that the only rational explanation of these triple correlations is that they are the result of the same process - the gradual deposition of diatoms and clay, year by year by year, for over 29,000 years.

But these differences in interpretation of the paleontological evidence and the evolutionists interpretations of nature is why Creationists and Evolutionists will never see eye to eye. Sorry I can't respond to your post point by point, but I don't have all day to spend on a rebuttal which your long winded post would require. But I couldn't leave without responding to this claim also.

Interestingly, I have no problem responding to your long and winding posts, sorting out the erroneous information from the made up fantasy, and rebutting it all with clear evidence of reality that is at odds with your opinion and your belief. Surely, if your beliefs, opinions, and assertions were remotely true, you should have no problem providing your "differences in interpretation" that actually explain ALL the evidence -- I can. I have.

It is also a fact that Mendel never asserted in any way that his predictions via observations were evidence of allele changes at all. He studied clear cut inherited traits and anticipated changes but it wasn't until much later that actual molecular science revealed the existence of genes or alleles at all.

Fascinatingly, I didn't claim that Mendel said anything about alleles, and indeed he studied the clear cut inherited traits that were later matched to genetic sequences and then identified as alleles. Curiously, the evidence of Pelycodus, Asian Greenish Warblers, Therapsids, Foraminifera and other fossil and living animals can also be compared in the same way, and when we look at the genetic evidence we see the same match between observed inherited traits and genetic sequences that we then label as the alleles for those traits.

ou just proved once again how you will adopt an unrelated science in order to further defend your original erroneous claim which was blatantly and factually FALSE and can accurately be called dishonest in its conclusions.

And yet we still see a distribution of hereditary traits in these populations, we still see that this distribution changes from generation to generation in those populations. It is only since the science of genetics has developed that we have been able to identify sequences responsible for the formation of the hereditary traits observed in all species, whether fossil, dead, or living.

The question is whether you understand that identifying a hereditary trait means that there is a genetic sequence related to it, and that the genetic sequence is then labeled as the allele for that trait.

You call my complaint downright false, but can you post absolute and undeniable evidence according to DNA which shows that the animals claimed in the two stages of evolution are in fact related?

The hereditary traits in the populations demonstrate this. To claim that this relationship is not validly demonstrated because you don't understand the context of the reference to alleles just means that you are grasping at straws in order to deny the evidence. This is another symptom of cognitive dissonance.

Let me ask you a simple question: are you aware of a single observable hereditary trait that is not associated with an allele?

Have fun.

No matter what aspect of evolution we are speaking about, we must take it all on faith in mans interpretation of observations which are alleged to have happened millions, to hundreds of millions of years ago.

Not at all. What we must do is filter through all the explanations that are proposed for the ones that best explain all the evidence.

Science does that.

Your model/s fail to do that, and your model/s are contradicted by some evidence that you cannot explain.

So if your interpretation of the available evidence is so fundamentally wrong from the outset, how can you be expected to come to accurate conclusions at all? The answer is, you can't expect to come to accurate conclusions.

So tell me again, then, why do you stick with falsified and hopeless explanations that are demonstrated to be wrong, that are invalidated by evidence that is contrary to it, and that can't even explain a fraction of 1% of the evidence that is explained by geology, physics and evolution?

Why don't you apply your alleged skeptical attitude to these failed models?

Message 197

From what I see of RAZD's thesis is that trees are used in order to determine the minimum age of the earth. What is also painfully obvious is that evolutionists make some dramatic assumptions later on in order to extend their dating of the earth as far back as possible. Never coming even close to 4.5 billion years though, of course, but only making it to the estimated 400,000 year age from his evidence. In other words, it comes no closer to proving that any of the overall beliefs regarding the age of the earth which evolution promotes are even close to accurate in reality.

Curiously, I don't need to come close to 4.5 billion years old, as a minimum age of 400,000 years makes your young earth concept impossible, while the maximum age can be greater still.

Fascinatingly, your absolute failure to address the issues of "dramatic assumptions" on the thread in question - content instead to fire blanks from the sideline, creating a lot of noise and disturbance, but accomplishing squat - means that you are still avoiding the issue of correlations and the consilience of all the different methods in demonstrating not only age, put consistent patterns repeated in each of the different methods.

Failure to confront the evidence that is contradictory to your pet beliefs and opinions is not skepticism, failure to provide a single different explanation that covers all the evidence is not skepticism.

Skepticism means questioning ALL concepts equally, and looking for actual factual evidence that supports the concepts.

You have failed to question a single creationist source that you have trotted out, content to use confirmation bias to select those that you think support your opinion and belief, while ignoring the ready evidence that such sites are full of misleading misinformation.

Cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias are NOT the tools of science.

Enjoy.

Edited by RAZD, : clrty

Edited by RAZD, : morclrty

Edited by RAZD, : evnmor

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