How did Monkeys get to South America?

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I don't think you can make that conclusion at all. A childhood experience is no substitute for verifiable evidence. Pine trees and other trees float quite well. Limbs on or not.

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It makes sense to me that a tree with leaves on it, floating on a body of water, is heavier at night than at day because of photosynthesis. Can we not agree on this?I supplied a laboratory experiment link that explains bouancy relative to photosynthesis. I asked if you can agree on its conclusion. If we can't agree on a standard and repeatable biology experiment performed by competent scientists in a laboratory, I don't think we are going to get anywhere.As for pine trees, do you agree that their specific gravity is relatively low? The childhood experience I presented was red oak. Do you agree that red oak is more dense than pine? If we can not agree on hydrostatics we also have an issue.

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Yes that is all it is opinion. We are not discussing opinion here. We are discussing evidence.

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Could you kindly provide some links to your evidence like I've done with the scientific computer models for ocean currents, plate tectonics, and such?

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You discount all evidence presented to you and then you say in your opinion something can't be possible.

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You aren't prenting any that helps solve the problem with rigor. That's the problem that I see here, not that monkeys rafted, but that you accept it without better evidence as people accepted a flat earth using occum's razor. Others have presented links and I appreciate their effort.

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Here you present another fallacy in reasoning, I'm entitled to my opinion (what is this your fifth or sixth fallacy in just this thread alone)

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As one lab manager told me, a good data set is worth a thousand expert opinions. Without good data we start with an opinion, and state it as such as I have clearly done -- opinion is not dogma as you imply it to be. An opinion is a good logical starting point for problem-solving. I see no point in debating this and all the scientific results this method has produced.I am entitled to my opinion as you are to yours. Everyone's opinion counts equally in the world of problem solving, and mutual respect produces an answer we can all accept. Admittedly, I could have treated you better and I apologize. Could you do likewise?

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You really should study up on logical fallacies.

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Good. Provide your best link to show you are more than just talk.Here's mine:Logical Fallacies and the Art of DebateWhile you are at it, supply evidence that a mile long clump of debris has ever been spotted far from a shoreline. This would be a considerable navigation concern for anyone in the shipping trade.

No, you still haven't provided your model.Yes, you gave a link. But there are all sorts of variables that you can enter. You claim that whatever you enter gives you 12mm per year. And you link has none of the values filled in, with all of the choices set to the default (GSRM 1.2 (2004), TPAM is auto, reference is NNR).However, I can get various rates using all the separate models with no net-rotation. Those rates vary from 9.61mm/yr with the APKIM2000.0 model with no-net-rotation with S.America as the reference plate, to 32.59mm/yr with the NUVEL 1 model with no-net-rotation with Africa as the reference plate. That data set was provided by using Brasilia and Brazzara as the reference points, with the simulation running all models, with no-net-rotation (NNR), with tectonic plate of attributed motion (TPAM) set to auto. The data I posted here is from the column "speed in mm/yr", not "N. v. mm/yr" or "E. v. mm/yr".Changing any of the TPAM or reference values gives you different data sets. For example, changing the reference from NNR to S.America gives a wildly different data set, where most of the movement in the models is zero (22 of 30), but of the 8 that have non-zero values, they are {12.03, 9.69, 32.02, 29.41, 32.47, 32.02, 33.05}. Funnily enough, those eight are also where the plate reference is SA(AF), not SA(SA).That is the information I am looking for from you. Which model did you pick? Which TPAM? Which reference?

Well, using current currents, that would be a touch of a problem. Your link shows that currents from 1992-2008 moved from 0 to .2m/s around Africa and South America (excepting some extremely fast currents close to the equatorial region that move to africa). If my math isn't screwy, than .2m/s = .72km/hr, or 17.2km/day. Assuming one could float as the crow flies, and that this is the speed of the current from africa to S.America the entire time, and assuming the current distance of 2850km, you have approximately 5.5 months to reach the other shore (165.7 days).Now then, this model has some problems. First, it is based on modern current speed. Second, it assumes the fastest speed of the south atlantic the whole time. Third, it assumes a straight line float. Fourth, it assumes that the continents are at their present locations. That said, it probably assumes a slower than average speed, as the equatorial region of the atlantic has speeds ranging from .1-.3m/s, excepting extremely fast currents off the coast of S.America, and it is also the equatorial region that has the continents closest to each other.As to your mention of the bathtub toys, it's worth noting that most of the surface current speed in the NE pacific, per your link, is 0-.1m/s. Roughly 10 months to travel 1450km works out to .2km/hr, or .056m/s.What you really need to find is an estimate of current speed for the oceans at the time that these animals and plants were suspected of having rafted across the oceans. You also need to know what the distance was at the time between the start and end points. The most accurate way would be to find magnetic strips on both sides of the atlantic that are the same age, and then measure the distance between the two.

The first google hit I got on rafts of vegetation was Charles Sutherland Elton's "The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants", which states that "a green monkey was noticed on floating timber near Java in 1883".Where do green monkeys come from? Sub-Saharan Africa. And Java, of course, is in Indonesia.I think an actual observation trumps an argument from incredulity.

You spin the argument, change the argument and present fallacy after fallacy.Give us your hypothesis. I do not have to prove how it happened. I just have to show it could have happened. You have provided no arguments showing, supporting or even mentioning an alternative.What??? You got nothing???

Drinking salt water kills.

Well, this is where we need to know more about monkeys and rafts.Is water, as such, necessary to a monkey's water requirements; or would succulent fruit, coconuts, even leaves, do as well? It seems to me that if I consumed nothing but fruit juice, I wouldn't die of dehydration. Do monkeys, in fact, ever come down from the rainforest canopy to drink? In a floating mat of vegetation more than a mile in extent, as your link says, might there not be places where rainwater would collect? How about in floating islands of pumice --- or would it drain through the porous rock? How much water does a small monkey need? Are there any monkeys that hibernate or estivate?In any case, my example of a green monkey sighted off Java seems to demonstrate that traveling such distances is possible; the rest is a question of detail. In my long experience of EvC debates, I have never known the word "surely" to be an adequate substitute for evidence.Why would the currents swirl? Normally they are kind of ... linear. It is true that such a raft wouldn't survive a maelstrom, but this is not necessary to the rafting hypothesis. Why would the waves do anything but lift the mat of vegetation up and down? How would this apply to a pumice island?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Nice work, and it certainly does the trumping. Earlier in the thread I said that I thought that individuals making inter-continental voyages might be relatively common. So, it's going to happen to a pair sooner or later. I also mentioned seeing a pair of crabs clinging to a piece of driftwood in deep ocean, and that was, coincidentally, off the coast of Java.Here's the evidence that mammals can produce a healthy population from a pair once the voyage is made.http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2007/06/070620154911.htmThose discussing the drinking water problem should never forget that common phenomenon called "rain", and that there can be a lot of it in some months.None of this is any comfort to young earth creationists looking for ways that animals can disperse after the ark, because that would require rafting in pairs to be so common that we would see it happening successfully all the time.

Really? You seem to be desperately making up problems that don't exist.

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The "Old Man of the Lake" in Crater Lake, Oregon is a full-size tree that has been bobbing vertically in the lake for more than a century. Due to the cold water of the lake, the tree has been well preserved.

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Driftwood - WikipediaWhat has buoyancy in fresh water has more in salt water. And our monkeys certainly don't need more than a month or two of buoyancy.

Hi, Engineer. I think it's worth noting that many plants disperse their seeds by ocean currents. The coconut and the mangroves are good examples of plants that disperse on the ocean.Granted, this is different from vegetation rafts, but it's still something.

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-Bluejay/Mantis/ThylacosmilusDarwin loves you.

If the green monkey travelled that far, the water problem is solved, insofar as it must have rehydrated itself somehow.

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Always wanting to hear other peoples opinions about God and evolution. Email me.

The only problem that I can forsee, in light of the green monkeys travels, is the difference in environments between Africa and South America.

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Always wanting to hear other peoples opinions about God and evolution. Email me.

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The burden of proof is not on me. Your OP expressed that you did not believe that monkeys could have rafted across the ocean, even the people you quote in the OP agree that that was how it happened. The hypothesis has been presented to you many times. You are the one that disagrees with the hypothesis and presents logical fallacy after logical fallacy.

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I think you're the one logically out of whack.I don't believe monkeys rafted across 40 million years ago and survived, though it's astronomically improbable.
You don't believe a religious teacher named Jesus ever existed 2000 years ago.I can't prove that monkeys didn't raft across and survive 40 million years ago.
You can't prove that a teacher named Jesus never existed 2000 years ago, though it was reported by several different people, and it remains in jewish tradition today.You say the burden of proof is on me regarding monkey rafting.
Shouldn't the burden of proof be likewise on you to prove Jesus never existed?Yet if we were debating bible history, the burden of proof would once again be placed on me. This seems to be a double standard.

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If you do not agree with the hypothesis then show an alternative.

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ok I changed my avatar just for you. I thought you'd like my hypothesis. ;-)

Another way to get moisture - as water itself is not necessary to be hydrated - is to eat raw fish.

A strange sentence. Why is it "astronomically improbable"? They're there in South America, aren't they? They can't fly, they couldn't have walked, and their physiology and genomes show that they share ancestry with the old world primates, all of which makes it astronomically probable, when you think about it.