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Author Topic:   101 evidences for a young age...
dwise1
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Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 21 of 135 (510958)
06-05-2009 2:59 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Coyote
06-04-2009 7:30 AM


The "Leap Second" Claim yet again, only stealthed up
So many PRATTS, so little time (isn't that the definition of the "Gish Gallop"?). Rest assured that I'll get to the "Bunny Blunder" (that one's always good for hilarious laughs), but this one just goes way too far:
quote:
67. Slowing down of the earth. Tidal dissipation rate of Earth’s angular momentum: increasing length of day, currently by 0.002 seconds/day every century (thus an impossibly short day billions of years ago and a very slow day shortly after accretion and before the postulated giant impact to form the Moon).
Now, the rate that they cite is correct, but the conclusions are completely wrong because they were derived from the original claim. You see, that site or its source had doctored the original claim. Here's the original claim as propagated by that creationist vector, "Dr" Kent Hovind (transcription of his taped seminars as posted at Dr. Hovind's Creation Seminar 1, part b - The Age of the Earth, cont... (1998)):
quote:
Slowing Earth
Another factor. The earth is spinningwe are turning around. How many knew that already? We are turning around. You know the earth is going a little over 1,000 miles an hour at the equator, but the earth is slowing down. It is actually slowing down 1000th of a second everyday. Pensacola News Journal, 1990, said on December 6, Earth’s rotation is slowing down, June will be one second longer than normal. The earth is slowing down 1000th of a second every day. Astronomy magazine announced, 1992 in the June edition, Earth’s rotation is slowing down, June is going to be one second longer than normal. We will have to have a leap second. A leap second? Most people have heard of leap year, but lots of folks have never heard of leap second. Did you know we have a leap second about every year and a half now because the earth is slowing down? Now kids this is going to be kind of complicated so listen carefully. The earth is spinning but it is slowing down. So that means that it used to be going faster. How many can figure that out with no help? Okay several. Well, now if the earth is only 6,000 years old that is not a problem. It was probably spinning a little faster when Adam was here. Maybe they had 23 and 1/2 hours in a day. They would not notice, they did not have a watch anyway. Some of these folks want you to believe that the earth is billions of years old. Now that would make a problem. If you go back a few billion years, the earth was spinning real fast. Your days and nights would be pretty quick! Get up, go to bed! Get up, go to bed! Get up, go to bed! You would never get anything done. And a centrifugal force would have been enormous, would have flattened the earth like a pancake. The winds would have been 5,000 miles an hour from the Coriolis effect. You think the dinosaurs lived 70 million years ago? I know what happened to them? I know what happened to them... they got blown off! No they did not live 70 million years ago, folks; it simply cannot possibly be true.
This particular claim originated around 1979 and was apparently created by creationist Walter Brown who had read about a leap second being added about every 18 months and, not understanding what a leap second is about, though that meant that the earth was slowing down at a rate of one second every 18 months. Uh, no, it is that the standard second is from much earlier (in 1820, whose second is the International Standard second) and the earth has slowed down a bit since then, so the mean solar day is not 86,400 standard seconds (SI) long. Just like the revolutionary period of the earth (AKA "one year") is not an equal number of days long, so once every four years the calendar would be one day off, so we have a "leap year" and add a day. Does that mean that the year is slowing down by one day every four years? Of course not! So leap seconds, although used to compensate for the earth's rotation slowing down, do not mean that the earth is slowing down at the rate at which leap seconds are added. DUH?
Within a few years, in 1982, that claim was soundly refuted (see "As the World Turns: Can Creationists Keep Time?" at As the World Turns | National Center for Science Education). While Walter Brown is the first example of a deliberately deceptive creationist that I had found (due to his infamous "rattlesnake protein" claim, which still exists as a footnote in his on-line book), even he had the good sense to drop his "leap second" claim after it had been refuted; I could not find any mention of it in his on-line book two decades later. Yet countless other creationists still use it unabated, such as Kent Hovind and Minority Report's chosen website, though that website has chosen to lie about the claim as well.
FWIW, I wrote a complete response to this claim which is posted at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.geocities.com/chastity403/questionevolution/solarsystem.html#A9. In writing that, I took Hovind's version of the claim and researched back through the creationist sources that he himself had cited. I'm "David Wise" among the responses there.
Now, Brown and the creationists who followed him gave a rate of the earth's rotation slowing by one second every 12 to 18 months and based their extrapolation on that rate. But that rate is about 18,000 times greater than the actual rate of 2 milliseconds per day per century.
That is why Minority Report's cited site is lying. Even though it gives the correct rate at which the earth's rotation is slowing, it then presents false conclusions based on a false rate that is about 18,000 times greater than the actual rate of 2 milliseconds per day per century.
The site to which I had responded was questionevolution.com, though the answers to that site are at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.geocities.com/chastity403/questionevolution/. You see, the author of questionevolution.com had originally invited comments on his postings and originally provided a link to those responses, but when he saw that everybody who had actually studied the subject knew that his claims were pure crap, he removed that link from his site. You see, his main claim was that "evolutionists" had no response to these claims, whereas "evolutionists" have always had responses, a fact that he had to cover up. Amazing how quickly creationists have to become liars in order to support their religion with creationism.
So then, how long would the days have been way back when, given the correct rate at which the earth's rotation is slowing down? That site had asked how long the day was 1 billion years ago:
quote:
So, to answer your question of how long a day would have been one billion years ago:
1 billion years / (100 years/century) = 10 million centuries.
10 million centuries * 2 milliseconds per day per century = 20,000 seconds shorter.
20,000 seconds = 5 hours 33 minutes 20 seconds.
Therefore, one billion years ago, one day should have been about 18 hours, 27 minutes, 40 seconds long.
Thwaits & Awbrey {the authors of that 1982 article} performed the same calculation for 4.5 billion years ago and arrived at a 13-hour day. They then pointed out that Jupiter has a ten-hour day and does not suffer from the extreme shape distortion that Brown predicted for the ancient earth ("The earth would have been shaped like a very rapidly spinning pizza crust." -- indirectly quoted by Thwaites & Awbrey).
Might I mention that the earth is a solid whereas Jupiter is gaseous. A solid would be far less likely to deform due to rotation than a gas would, so where's your "pancake" (AKA "pizza", depending on which creationist you just happen to reference).
Now here's the beauty of it. Do the math and you will find that about 400 million years ago, in the Devonian (Parc national de Miguasha - Parcs nationaux - Spaq), the year would have been 400 days long (in case you didn't know, the current year is 365 days long, 366 days in a leap year). The coral shows that the year back then was indeed 400 days long. Two independent lines of evidence coming together to give the same results.
So, (addressing Minority Report here, of course) your cited site gave the actual rate, but then presented the false conclusions of the original false claim whose premises it had chosen to hide. Uh, that's lying! So your religion depends on these claims, so then your religion depends on lies? And this would attract prospective converts to your lying religion ... how?
OBTW, I'm a software engineer who for over a decade has been been working on a line of products that use GPS receivers. GPS time is the straight count of seconds since the "beginning of time" on midnight, 06 January 1980; UTC time (what you used to get by calling "time" on the telephone) is GPS time minus the current number of leap seconds, which is currently 15 -- ie, 15 leap seconds have been added since 06 Jan 1980. IOW, I work with leap seconds every day.
Another side issue before comes from the "Religious Tolerance" site in Canada, in particular page, "A Failed Attempt to Dialog with Creation Scientists," (Unsuccessful dialog with young-earth creationists about an error) in which the author made a good-will effort to open an honest dialog with creationists. He compiled a list of 15 sites which repeat this false leap-second claim and contacted their webmasters informing them that the claim is false and precisely why. Since this claim is clearly in error, those creationists could not possibly not realize that the claim is false; it's not a difference of opinion nor of interpretation, but rather a clear unambiguous fact. He had hoped that once they saw that the claim was false, they would remove that claim, or at least amend it. He even saw it as a win-win situation, in which we would win by taking a falsehood out of circulation and creationists would win by improving the quality of their material. Unfortunately, he only got a few responses which either refused to accept that the claim is false (without addressing the facts), asked for more information, or simply thanked him for his interest. NONE of the sites made any changes. The author finally had to conclude that meaningful dialog is impossible.
So that is the only conclusion that people must reach when trying to deal honestly with creationists. That creationists and their religion are only based on outright lies.
Any comment on that, Minority Report? Please keep to the facts.
Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.
Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Coyote, posted 06-04-2009 7:30 AM Coyote has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 26 by Dr Adequate, posted 06-05-2009 10:01 PM dwise1 has replied
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 Message 28 by Dr Adequate, posted 06-06-2009 12:33 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 29 of 135 (511113)
06-06-2009 8:13 AM
Reply to: Message 26 by Dr Adequate
06-05-2009 10:01 PM


Re: The "Leap Second" Claim yet again, only stealthed up
Is it OK if I convert this into a SkepticWiki article? I feel that it deserves a wider audience.
I can post it in your name if you like. Or credit you on the talk page. Or set you up an account ...
You have my permission. Credit me or not, whichever you like. If you do post it in my name, please ensure that you post it accurately.
Also, do you mean my post here or my more complete posting in response to questionevolution.com, the link to which I had included in my post here?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 26 by Dr Adequate, posted 06-05-2009 10:01 PM Dr Adequate has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 30 of 135 (511118)
06-06-2009 8:32 AM
Reply to: Message 28 by Dr Adequate
06-06-2009 12:33 AM


Re: The "Leap Second" Claim yet again, only stealthed up
I do not doubt that the claim originated through a genuine misunderstanding of what a leap second was and what it meant -- Brown's references were two internal Air Force publications and a Reader's Digest article. Where the dishonesty comes in is when they continue to use that claim in spite of the truth long after they've been shown, repeatedly, that that claim is wrong and why it's wrong.
In this case, I was amazed at the outright deception being propagated by Don Batten. The conclusions of the claim are from its original form which was based on that genuine misunderstanding of leap seconds. But then either he or his creationist source (I'm sure that it was his source, since he was employing standard creationist scholarship practices of simply repeating other creationists' claims without any attempt to verify them) replaced the wrong rate with the correct one, thus creating a lie since those wrong conclusions have nothing to do with the correct rate.
Ironically, Don Batten also wrote an article that was highly critical of Carl Baugh and his obviously bogus creationist claims: What About Carl Baugh? which is reposted by Glen Kuban at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/paluxy/whatbau.html. He concludes that article with:
quote:
Muddying the water?
It is sad that Carl Baugh will 'muddy the water' for many Christians and non-Christians. Some Christians will try to use Baugh's 'evidences' in witnessing and get 'shot down' by someone who is scientifically literate. The ones witnessed to will thereafter be wary of all creation evidences and even more inclined to dismiss Christians as nut cases not worth listening to.
Also, the Christian is likely to be less apt to witness, even perhaps tempted to doubt their own faith (wondering what other misinformation they have gullibly believed from Christian teachers). CSF ministers to strengthen the faith of Christians and equip them for the work of evangelism and, sadly, the long term effect of Carl Baugh's efforts will be detrimental to both.
We would much rather be spending all our time positively encouraging and equipping rather than countering the well-intentioned but misguided efforts of some like Carl Baugh, but we cannot stand idly by knowing people are being misled. Truth sets people free, not error!
Batten demonstrated there that he is fully aware of the detrimental effects of propagating bogus creationist claims. And yet he did not hestitate to do that same with this list of "101 evidences ... ".

This message is a reply to:
 Message 28 by Dr Adequate, posted 06-06-2009 12:33 AM Dr Adequate has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 32 of 135 (511353)
06-09-2009 1:18 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Coyote
06-04-2009 7:30 AM


The Bunny Blunder, yet again
quote:
96. Human population growth. Less than 0.5% p.a. growth from six people 4,500 years ago would produce today’s population. Where are all the people? if we have been here much longer?
Ah yes! The Bunny Blunder! In 1984, a few years after I had started my "creation science" studies, I heard a presentation given by Fred Edwords in which he presented Morris' human population growth claim -- which Henry Morris had presented in his 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, and repeated several more times over the years. When Edwords then gave the model's predicted world population at various times in the ancient past, those figures were found to be ridiculously low. Since Edwords had taken his figures from David Milne's article (Creationists, Population Growth, Bunnies, and the Great Pyramid, Creation/Evolution Issue XIV, Fall 1984, pp. 1-5 -- Creationists, Population Growth, Bunnies, and the Great Pyramid | National Center for Science Education), I will quote from there:
quote:
As if these fatal flaws were not enough, Morris's calculation has ridiculous implications. For example, if we assume for the moment that human numbers really did grow exponentially at a per capita rate of r = 0.0033, starting with two people in 4300 BC, then we can calculate the world population of year 2500 BC. By Morris's calculation, that number is 750 individuals. If Egypt, with about 1% of the Earth's land surface area, also had 1% of its population, then about eight people must have lived in Egypt at that time. However, the Great Pyramid of the Egyptian king Cheops was built in about 2500 BC. If the creationists are right, then the Pyramid was built by eight people. In fact, suppose that the entire population of the Earth lived in Egypt at that time. Half of the 750 souls were women (who I don't think worked on the Pyramid); half of the males were children (ditto) and a few exalted characters (Cheops himself and his assorted advisors) undoubtedly convinced the others that nobility should not have to haul heavy limestone blocks. That leaves about 150 able-bodied men to quarry 2,300,000 blocks (ranging from 2.5 to 50 tons in weight), haul them to the construction site and raise the 480-foot Pyramid. Does anyone who has seen this colossal monument believe that 150 men could have built it? Yet that is what Morris, through the magic of his calculation, must boldly assert.
World history prior to 2500 BC, in the Morris scenario, becomes even more remarkable. Six pyramids, some comparable in size to the Great Pyramid, were built at nearby sites within the previous 200-year period (as were numerous accessory causeways, temples, etc.).14 The parents and grandparents of the 750 people at the Great Pyramid site must have built them, at the rate of one every 33 years. Their numbers (which, recall, constituted the entire human population of the Earth) were fewer thenonly about 300-400 soulsand they were distracted by the need to perform a fast migratory quick-step over to Mesopotamia to build (and abandon) a number of fortified towns that appeared at about that time. The action was even more frenzied in earlier centuries. World population in 3600 BC, as calculated by the Morris equation, was 20 people. A century earlier, in 3700 BC, it was 14 people. And a century earlier than that, it was 10 people. So, in the Morris scenario, a world population of one or two dozen people must have rushed back and forth between Crete, Mesopotamia, the Indus River valley, and other sites of ancient civilization, energetically building and abandoning enough cities, irrigation works, monuments and other artifacts to leave us with the mistaken impression that millions of people populated the ancient world.
Needless to say, when Edwords presented those figures, it brought down the house, the audience was laughing so hard.
The reason why Milne calls this claim "The Bunny Blunder" and why it is wrong is also given in that article:
quote:
To understand why the creationists are wrong, consider this example. Suppose that a creationist were studying snowshoe hares, somewhere in Canada in the early 1930's. At that time, the bunnies were multiplying at a per capita rate of about r = 0.57 (57% per year). If that was all that our biologist knew about the rabbits' history and biology, the Morris calculation would enable him to determine that the first two snowshoe hares of all time appeared on Earth in late 1885, during the Cleveland Administration.8 Not only that, but the Morris calculation applied to minks, muskrats, foxes, and lynxes (which were also multiplying at that time) would also place the date of the creation of the Earth and life in the late 1800's. If one accepts that the Cleveland Administration was not the perpetrator of it all, then where are the errors? Here, two major mistakes are involved. First, the creationist in this instance did not use all of the known facts in arriving at his conclusion. Second, he assumed that the entire rabbit history was similar to that of those last few years that he was able to observe. In fact, the hares (and their predators) are known to cycle in abundance. In 1933 their numbers were increasing, but only as the latest in a series of roller coaster ups and downs that can be traced clear back into the 1700's. Over the long haul, r = 0 for the bunnies, a fact that would not be evident to an observer who watched them only during the early 30's.
Now, to be truthful, Milne had arrived at his figures using Morris' rate of population growth and a "Garden of Eden" starting point and initial population, rather than Batten's stated rate and a "Noah's Flood" starting point and population. So we should take those parameters and plug them into the formula and see what the model reveals in that case.
The formula for "pure-birth" population growth (as observed in fruit fly jars before the food starts to run out) is:
P(n) = P(1 + r)**n
where:

P(n) is the population generated after n years.
P is the initial population
r is the rate of population growth
n is the number of years
** is the FORTRAN symbol for exponentiation, hence
(1+r)**n would read "the quantity 1 plus r raised to the nth power"
Since Batten wrote: "Less than 0.5% p.a. growth from six people 4,500 years ago ... ", our values for those parameters would be:

P = 6
r = 0.005
n = number of years since 2500 BCE
Now, at this point I wanted to compare the results from Batten's parameters with Milne's results from Morris' parameters, but I immediately ran into a snag. Milne was looking at the results on and before 2500 BCE, whereas Batten is only looking at that date and thereafter. Since 2500 BCE was when the Great Pyramid was built, then instead of it having been built by hand with a world population of 750 (including women and children), Batten offers us a world population of only six.
For the dates before 2500 BCE, Batten really offers nothing. Except for an enigma. He has given us a date for The Flood of about 2500 BCE. Since this Flood was supposed to have been so cataclysmic as to completely reshape the surface of the earth and cause near-instantaneous plate movement, how is it that the Great Pyramid and the six pyramids that preceded it and the Sphynx and all those other cities and irrigation works spread out from Crete to the Indus River Valley are still there and did not get destroyed by The Flood?
However, here are Batten's predicted populations for various dates, with actual populations for 1 CE on (using Morris' doubling dates) -- you might want to sanity-check them against what was happening in history:

2400 BCE 10
2300 BCE 16
2200 BCE 27
2100 BCE 44
2000 BCE 73
1800 BCE 197
1600 BCE 534
1400 BCE 1,448
1200 BCE 3,927
1000 BCE 10,647
500 BCE 128,906
1 CE 1,560,650 133,000,000 1/85-th what it should have been
400 11,474,409 End of the Roman Empire
800 84,363,589 Charlemagne
1650 5,852,043,422 545,000,000 10.74 times too great
1750 9,636,375,517 728,000,000 13.24 times too great
1800 12,365,645,826 906,000,000 13.65 times too great
1900 20,362,119,366 1,610,000,000 12.65 times too great
1950 26,129,197,217 2,400,000,000 10.89 times too great
2009 35,069,026,520 6,783,421,727 5 times too great

Even without the absolutely ludicrous historical conclusions that this claim would require us to arrive at, we can plainly see that it does not match reality. Ie, it doesn't work. But what I find truly amazing is that Batten had never bothered to check his model, to plug in his parameters and see what results it would give him for this year.
Futher Reading:
Wikipedia "World Population" at World population - Wikipedia
Wikipedia "World Population Estimates" at Estimates of historical world population - Wikipedia
Wikipedia "Population growth" at Population growth - Wikipedia
Wikipedia "Carrying Capacity" at Carrying capacity - Wikipedia
Michael Olnick, An Introduction to Mathematical Models in the Social and Life Sciences, 1978, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co -- over several chapters, develops a model of population growth as it discussed several of the problems inherent in such models; creationists' "Bunny Blunder" is a "pure birth" model, the most navely simplistic and least accurate type of population growth model.
Edited by dwise1, : table formatting

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 41 of 135 (511711)
06-11-2009 10:46 AM
Reply to: Message 40 by RAZD
06-11-2009 3:29 AM


Re: C14 dates too young ...
To offer an analogy:
Let's say that I have a very accurate postal scale that can measure up to 10 ounces. So when I try to weigh myself on that postal scale, it tells me that I only weigh 10 ounces. So I publish those results and report on all forms that ask for my weight that I weigh 10 ounces and I repeatedly insist that I weigh 10 ounces.
Since I am not an idiot, doing that would make me a liar.
Those creationists who made and use those C-14 claims are also not idiots.

This message is a reply to:
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