Biogeography falsifies the worldwide flood.

While this isn’t exactly geology I think it belongs under the flood discussion. I don’t see an explicit discussion of it elsewhere on the board.When creationists attempt to explain the world's biogeography they often greatly underestimate the magnitude of the problem it presents for the worldwide flood. I consider it a falsification of the flood account, along with several others of course.There are particularly insoluble problems with the fauna of Australia/New Zealand/New Guinea and the Americas. According to the ark story marsupials and the other unique animals in Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea would have had to get there after coming off a boat, in pairs, in the Middle East along with representatives of all other land dwelling animals extinct and extant. Note that among the marsupials are blind marsupial mole like animals (of the Order Notoryctemorphia) that only live in sand. Overall there are 13 families and about 180 unique species of marsupials in the area including the famous kangaroos and kolas. The Kiwi, a flightless bird and the only monotremes (egg laying mammals) in world, the platypus and 2 species of echidna are found in the area and nowhere else. How is it that the marsupials and monotremes made it to Australia where they just happen to exist in fossil record while thousands of species of placental mammals that just happen not to exist in the Australian fossil record did not? How did blind marsupial mole like animals make it at all, let alone getting there with no placental mammals? Of course this is far from being the only problem. How did the flightless dodo bird come off the ark amongst all those hungry predators and make it to an island in the Indian ocean? The three-toed sloth can only drag itself slowly on the ground it can’t walk. How did they make it to the Americas, where sloths just happen to exist in the fossil record? The giant spiny anteater (one of the echidna species) is also a slow moving clumsy animal but is supposed to have made it to New Guinea ahead of all the placental mammals.How is it that Gila monsters got to the American Southwest and why did they not go to the much more convenient deserts around the middle east instead? How did armadillos make it across the Atlantic Ocean while wildebeest, zebras and giraffe did not? The question is not only how these animals got where they were going but also why other animals equally well adapted for the destination and in many cases far more able to travel did not.On the TrueOrigins ark defense page Jonathan Sarfati saysMigration patterns explain some of them, but another important factor is introduction by humans. That’s how the rabbit reached Australia, and the Australian marsupials could have arrived with post-Babel humans.This does not really explain anything. Many of these animals are not migratory. Post Babel Humans introduced them? By them time of the supposed Tower of Babel incident many of the animals would have scattered out over a vast range and either established themselves where they are not present now or become extinct, since marsupials don't generally compete very well with placental mammals. How and why did migrating humans take these particular animals? Do you really think people took blind marsupial moles, kangaroos, echidna, kiwis, koalas, wombats, the platypus, Tasmania devils, bandicoots, Moas ( a giant predatory bird), Cassowarys (a bad tempered bird that is the second largest now living in the world) and the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) to Australia, New Guinea and New Zealand along with all the other animals unique to the area? That would have been some interesting trips in dugout canoes. How and why did they gather all these marsupials and leave only a few behind (such as the prolific opossum which somehow got to North America without leaving any descendants in Europe and Asia and some others that got to Central and South America without leaving any descendants anywhere else) while taking no placental mammals except dogs? Did people bring Gila monsters to the American Southwest and sloths, new world monkeys, jaguars and rattlesnakes to the Americas?The land bridge explanation also fails. First Australia, New Guinea and New Zealand are separated from Indonesia by the very deep water, the so-called Wallace line, so land bridges are highly unlikely. Most importantly, even if land bridges did exist they do not help. How could marsupial moles or other slow moving marsupials get from the Middle East and cross land bridges to Australia while faster moving placental mammals did not? Do you really think tree sloths, which cannot survive low temperatures, move about 1 mile a month and only travel in trees and Gila monsters, which are desert reptiles crossed an ice age land bridge over the Bering Sea to get to their current habitats?Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
[B]I believe the currently observed biogeography is explained by a mix of naturalism and miracles - natural repopulation sure but at the gross level I suspect that God directed the major groups just as he brought them to Noah. [/QUOTE]

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Well at least you admit to God did it. How did He get all those marsupials to Australia after the flood? STP on OCW said the He teletransported them. It is an explanation but it sure isn't science.

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[quote]Here is a balck and white statement about races of people from the New Testement:

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Acts 17:26 "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live."

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We all tend to believe everything is chance and luck but the Bible makes it very clear that God gave different peoples to different lands. I would be not suprised at all if this is the same with animals.

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Once animals (and man) settled then, sure I'm a Galapogos man, and naturalism takes over.[/B]

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So do you admit that there is no natural solution to the biogeography problem and that biogeography falsifies the flood as a natural event? In fact, there is no way to have had a worldwide flood without a continous steam of miracles before during and after the flood. This is part of the reason that creation science is an oxymoron.
Randy

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Originally posted by Tranquility Base:
[B]^ When Scripture quite clearly indicates a miracle I will not try and construct scientific theories to account for it!

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On the other hand when Scripture indicates a process I will not pretend that a global event (eg the flood) will not leave evidence![/quote]

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So since there is no evidence for a worldwide flood are you admiting it didn't occur.

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[quote]PS - some have estimated that there were 2200 kinds on the ark, mostly below sheep size. I think these may correspond to the Linnean terrestial families. Your hyper-speciation may have primarily been hybridization and then Galapogos type microevoltuion. By completely standard mathematical processes every new state (eg the selected species after the flood) rapidly find a shifted equilibrium in the new environment. The rapid speciation would settle down quickly. Just like a heat transfer rate is high and settles down as the temperature differntial drops. I think this has even been observed in artificial bacterial evoltuion. Stress a bacteria and it will rapidly change or die and then settles down. (And before you get too excited that change is always to an existing gene's existing properties).

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[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 08-22-2002][/B]

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Don't forget that all the extinct "kinds" had to be represented on the ark as well as extant "kinds" it just happened that all the dinosaurs and therasid reptiles went extinct right after the flood I guess. Though maybe some dinos got to the American West to leave tracks in the Navajo sandstones if they are indeed supposed to be post flood. The diversity of life on earth is a falsification of the myth of Noah's flood along with several others such as the fossil record and the fact that 40 days and nights of global rain is physically impossible without cooking the earth to death, but I would prefer to keep this thread focused on the biogeography falsification. Maybe I'll start a new thread on the biodiversity falsification but not right now.
Randy

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Randy I'll admit that biogeography probably falsifies the flood as a completely natural event but I'll leave a tiny bit of room for natural repopulation.

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Since this is being discussed on the evolution forum, and since TB is also claiming the flood is falsifiable on that forum, I thought to bump this so that all can see that TB uses non falsifiable miracles when his problems get too big.Randy

Brad,I am glad to see you are back to normal. In post 20 I was really afraid that you were descending into comprehensibility. Were you sick that day? It would be a shame if you started writing posts that actually made sense but I see you have recovered.However, regarding your post 20, I don't really see how vicariance can be used in any way demythify the worldwide flood wrt biogeographyRandy

Nowhere in any reply on this thread will you see any explanation refuting the simple fact that the world's biogeography can't possibily be explained if all the land animals on earth are claimed to be descended from eithe 2, 7 or 14 ancestors who came off a boat together in the Middle East a few thousand years ago. Biogeopraphy is a falsification of the flood that can't be answered by YECs and Brad's incoherant attempts at obfuscation clearly fail as do all other YEC attempts to explain biogeography.Randy

If you are not claiming that all land animals or at least all vertebrates are descended from ancestors you came of the ark in the Middle East a few thousand years ago then you are not supporting the YEC myth. If you are then biogeography falsifies what you are supporting and you have done nothing to show otherwise.Randy

My opening post on this thread gives a small part of the problem that biogeography presents for the myth of a worldwide flood. Nowhere on this thread have there been any answers to the questions raised in the OP because there are none. Biogeography falsifies the worldwide flood and no amount of obfuscation can cover that that fact. Nice try but no cigar.Randy

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Now you want to discuss the "magnitude of the problem" and I believe that we have come across %that% in this thread with the view being expressed that perhaps a LOCAL FLOOD was by cause with you maintaing that no one has really actually addressed the opening post. OK lets address that quite explicitly. I leave what ever "others" are aside with accepting some philosophy of "falsification" and you assert therefore that IT is falisfied by bioegeography first and foremost... OK lets see what came out of what you actually said in the first instance. You enter the data on Aus/US/NZ/America/NG. Great that is all I need. I will go on ad panbiogeographic if need be to inform you from something I basically tried to establish is NOT YEC yet I think could/should be topographically but so far has been really only in evolutionary literature so we will be able to avoid between you and I any difference that is wholly attitudinal c/e and stick to the facts of the biogeography of a line that joins collection localites in these regions CIRCUMPACIFIC.

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Great. Now explain how thirteen families of marsupials and the only monotremes on earth are descended from ancestors who happened to come off a boat in the Middle East in the company of the ancestors of all the placental mammals on earth and yet made it to Australia and New Guinea with out the company of those placental mammals. Explain how they just happened to go back to the only place one earth that has a fossil record of modern marsupials. Explain how the marsupial mole, platypus and koala were able to make this trip while zebras, wildebeest, lions, tigers, antelope, and zillions of other placental mammals were not. Explain how the flightless kiwi made it to New Zealand where ratite birds have a fossil record, with no mammals of any kind for company. That should do for a start but try to do it using rationaly constructed English sentences without multiple obscure references if possible.I will be out of the country for the next 10 days so it may be a while before I post on this subject again.Randy

I asked the following.

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Great. Now explain how thirteen families of marsupials and the only monotremes on earth are descended from ancestors who happened to come off a boat in the Middle East in the company of the ancestors of all the placental mammals on earth and yet made it to Australia and New Guinea with out the company of those placental mammals. Explain how they just happened to go back to the only place one earth that has a fossil record of modern marsupials. Explain how the marsupial mole, platypus and koala were able to make this trip while zebras, wildebeest, lions, tigers, antelope, and zillions of other placental mammals were not. Explain how the flightless kiwi made it to New Zealand where ratite birds have a fossil record, with no mammals of any kind for company. That should do for a start but try to do it using rationaly constructed English sentences without multiple obscure references if possible.

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From your post above it seems the answer is no as I expected since there is no worldwide flood based answer to the biogeography problem and all you can do is obfuscate with convoluted sentences full of obscure references which is of course par for the course for you.Randy

As I said before all you have done is obfuscate. Biogeography falsifies the worldwide flood and NO creationist has a counter to this falsification so the only responses possible are attempts to change the subject to some irrelevant criticizm of evolution or obfuscation. Somehow I am not surprised that you chose to obfuscate.Randy

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Just because the "big boys" of evolution refused me admittance to their club does not give you right to think I am just a common joe,

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I never said you were a common joe, though I don't see what would be wrong with being a common joe. You are uncommly good at producing incomphrensible pseudo-intellectual gooblty-gook that almost sounds intelligible and especially good at obfuscation which is what I think you are up to now.Randy

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It is not psedo"intellectual" even though it does "SOUND"" such. You are simply wrong. I prooved my point. I am not common joe or it would be fine to be one but that you REFUSED in this immediate post before to do something but talk about ME or "obfuscation" shows you, yourself Randy, have no interest in the topic. I have decided NOT to EVER post under this thread again. I may do it by mistake but not if my will is willing. I have honsently tried but you keep refering to me or something in general but do not attempt to further the talk. Feel free to think that I have NOT answered you. I am done with trying to show you how it IS possible to both answer you and the topic that Biogeography STILL does it. You have made my point as well as to why there IS NO deductive biogeography that continues to stalemate biogeography itself. If you choose to answer one of the questions I have posted within your thread you are free to ask again and I will return but I will not try to show you otherwise even if i DO make progress in the question I really liked that you posed. GOOD-BYE and FAREWELL. Brad. This is not the best way to make friends.

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Gee Brad, you actually write more far clearly when you are mad. This may be the longest post without a nonsequitor that I have ever seen from you. Why should I answer any of the questions you claim to have raised. The question of the thread is flood based biogeography and you have not raised a question relevant to the actual problem.What you haven't done and can't do is give any actual explanation of how the world's biogeography could have come about if all the land animals on earth are descended from pairs or in a few cases sevens of each kind coming off an ark in the Middle East a few thousand years ago. I find nothing in any of your posts that addresses the points I have raised at all. Thus I concluded some time ago that your only interest in this topic as related to the flood is to sling out enough verbage to cover the fact that you have no actual answer to the problem. In that you are not alone. No YEC can counter the fact that biogeography falsifies the worldwide flood.Randy

Brad,I will read through your post in detail when I have time. It is a bit complex. Still I am puzzled that a YEC would invoke Croizat since it would seem to me that you must embrace a massive dispersalist philosophy to disperse the organisms that are concentrated in the Middle East after the ark lands and I thought that Croizat was opposed to dispersalism. It also seems to me that there would be massive barriers to vicariance tracks from the Middle East to Australia for many organisms that are supposed to have arrived there.Randy

Brad,It is going to take me a while to sort though your posts but my understanding is that in Croizat's hypothesis barriers arose along vicariance tracks to create the observed biogeography and that biogeography does not primarily arise because of dispersal patterns. It seem to me that to explain post-flood biogeography you must have dispersal of all "kinds" of animals from a common point a few thousand years ago which is very anti-Croizat and the barriers would have already existed. This is why I don't understand why you invoke Croizat.Meanwhile if you think that vicariance biogeography can somehow explain the biogeography that developed after the alleged worlwide flood perhaps you can figure out the vicariance "tracks" the were followed by playtypus, echinda, marsupial moles, Antechinus(marsupial mice), planigales, bilbies, kangaroos, Wallabies, koalas, wombats, numbats, sugar gliders, dunnarts, ninauis, tasmanian tigers, tasmanian devils, phascogales, bandicoots, quols, potoroos, bettongs and the Austalian flightless birds to get to Australia after comming off a boat in the Middle East in the company of every "kind" of land vertebrate that ever existed. Be sure to elucidate tracks that can't be followed by any of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of "kinds" of placental mammals that came off the boat with them except for bats and rats.Randy