Angular Unconformities

Another question for the YEC uplift model used to previously explain vertically uplifted strata is how does this deal with angular unconformities? If sediments were uplifted in a quasi-mud state and were pliable enough to allow this to happen quickly and subsequently turned solid after the flood how do we get explain formations like this:


Here we can see clearly uplifted sedimentary rock on the bottom with more layers of horizontally non-uplifted sedimentary rock capping it. If all these sediments were laid down prior to uplift they should all exhibit the same basic features, if the bottom section was uplifted while pliable and then the top layer dumped on top wouldn’t the bottom layers bend under the weight? After all, they are supposed to have been quasi-mud, not rock when all this occurred. Or are these formations explained with the top sedimentary rock having been deposited after the flood, and the near vertical layers below had solidified?

More examples of angular unconformities:




The standard model of angular unconformities explains them as layers of sediment compressed into sedimentary rock over long periods of time which were then uplifted at about the same speed your fingernails grow. Erosion then wore down the exposed uplifted rock until the environment changed to a depositional one. New sediments were added on top of the uplifted layers and were eventually buried and compressed into new layers of horizontal sedimentary rock capping older uplifted layers of sedimentary rock.

http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/DisplayImage.cfm?ID=4

Polonium Halos

The term “polonium halo” refers to a ring of damaged material where the emitted particles from a piece of radioactive material has basically messed up the surrounding rock. Since the size of the ring is related to the energy of the radiation it should be possible to determine what the radioactive material was that formed a given ring. Gentry looked at polonium halos in granite and concluded that since it takes millions of years for present day decay rates to form a “halo” and because Polonium isotopes have really short half lives (Po218 = 3.05 minutes, Po214 = >200 microseconds, Po210 = 140 days) that this was evidence for an increased rate of radioactive decay.

The problems that strike me are that there’s no mechanism for increased radioactive decay proposed, there’s no mechanism for getting rid of the huge amount of heat that would result from all that radioactive decay happening so quickly, and there’s no mechanism for dealing with the lethal amounts of radiation this would have produced. Finally, there’s a very plausible alternative that avoids all of these problems – Polonium halos are invariably found near uranium halos which makes sense since the isotopes we’re talking about here are all part of the decay series of various isotopes of Uranium.


The immediate precursor in this decay series is Radon, a gas that is quite soluble in water and easily diffuses through small fractures in rock. A steady amount of Uranium decay will produce a steady stream of radon which will steadily decay into polonium which will steadily emit particles as it is formed and quickly decays. I’m no geologist, but that seems like a pretty straigtforward explanation that works a lot better than proposing an unknown decay rate increase mechanism ostensibly offset by some unknown force to remove the huge amounts of heat and radioactivity it would produce.
http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/revised8.htm

When you look at Gentry’s halos you can see numerous rings showing clear sings of Radon and Polonium decay entirely consistent with Radon decaying into Polonium and creating rings along the way.



I’ve seen this argument handled by geologists before, a good discussion of it can be found here:

http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&m=162875

With some particularly pertinent posts on evidence for Radon here:

http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?act…6261&mpp=15&p=8

Meandering Photons

The sun is powered by nuclear fusion which takes place at it’s core, which looks something like this:


This process produces photons which, in order to be seen as light, need to make their way out of the core of the sun to the surface before they can begin their 8 minute journey from the sun’s surface to your eyes on earth.
“The core is the only location in the Sun that produces an appreciable amount of heat via fusion: the rest of the star is heated by energy that is transferred outward from the core. All of the energy produced by fusion in the core must travel through many successive layers to the solar photosphere before it escapes into space as sunlight or kinetic energy of particles.“(source)
However, these photons can’t just travel in a straight line from the sun’s core to it’s surface because there’s a lot of “stuff” in the way. Photons travel at around 300,000 kilometers a second but when they run into another charged particle they are absorbed and re-emitted in another direction. Because the sun is huge and it’s core is really dense any given photon is going to be re-emitted in all directions many many many times before it finally makes a break for the surface. Think of it kind of like a giant pinball game where the table is tilted so that the ball has to roll UPHILL in order to escape.



Estimates on the distance between charged particles in the sun vary from .01 cm in the core to about .3 cm at the surface so estimates on photon transit time vary widely however even the most gracious estimates top out at around 10,000 years which is too old for YEC.
http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2007/loc…t_sunlight.php

Now, to be sure, this argument shows that sunlight is too old for a YEC framework and doesn’t directly speak to the age of the actual sun beyond the obvious implication that it’s gotta be older than 10,000 years. To calculate the age of the sun involves using other techniques,
“The Sun’s current main sequence age, determined using computer modelsstellar evolution and nucleocosmochronology, is thought to be about 4.57 billion years.“(source)

Formation of the Hawaiin Islands

The Hawaiin islands are made up of 107 volcanoes stretched across 1500 miles of the Pacific Ocean. They were formed over about 70 million years by the movement of the Pacific plate to the Northwest over a stationary hotspot where magma wells up from the earths mantle.



This means that the further away from the hotspot an island is the older it should be, and this is borne out by observation. First we can use radiometric dating to get absolute dates for each island, which look like this:

(source)


Consequently, if we then run the clock backwards using near-present day rates of 3.4 inches a year these dates coincide with those islands being over the stationary hotspot.

Second, and this is one you can do yourself, we can look at the amount of erosion and weathering that have taken place. Obviously the older an island is the more eroded it should be with the oldest islands actually having been flattened by waves and eventually sink below the surface. This is exactly what we find.

(source)

The later point is something that’s pretty easily observed even without any complex understanding of radioactive decay or weathering.  For example, here’s Hawaii, one of the youngest islands in the chain, notice the nice tall mountains:


Now let’s jump to one of the last (oldest) islands in the chain, Kure:


Notice a difference in the amount of erosion that's taken place?

Even the ancient Hawaiins believed that the islands got younger as they approached Hawaii,
“The possibility that the Hawaiian Islands become younger to the southeast was suspected by the ancient Hawaiians, long before any scientific studies were done. During their voyages, sea-faring Hawaiians noticed the differences in erosion, soil formation, and vegetation and recognized that the islands to the northwest (Niihau and Kauai) were older than those to the southeast (Maui and Hawaii). This idea was handed down from generation to generation in the legends of Pele, the fiery Goddess of Volcanoes. Pele originally lived on Kauai. When her older sister Namakaokahai, the Goddess of the Sea, attacked her, Pele fled to the Island of Oahu. When she was forced by Namakaokahai to flee again, Pele moved southeast to Maui and finally to Hawaii, where she now lives in the Halemaumau Crater at the summit of Kilauea Volcano. The mythical flight of Pele from Kauai to Hawaii, which alludes to the eternal struggle between the growth of volcanic islands from eruptions and their later erosion by ocean waves, is consistent with geologic evidence obtained centuries later that clearly shows the islands becoming younger from northwest to southeast.”
(source)

Subsequent Note:




A noticeable shift in the Hawaiin-Emperor Seamount chain was caused by the Pacific plate changing direction from 50 to 42 million years ago. As with the Hawaiin chain the trend of consistently older radiometric dates continues as does the relative amount of erosion.
(source)

Further reading material:
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/GG/HCV/haw_formation.html
http://www.enotes.com/earth-science/…land-formation
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanoes/

Lake Suigetsu - Where no YEC Dares Swim

Every year we can observe algal blooms in Japan’s Lake Suigetsu that subsequently die and sink to the bottom of the lake forming a white layer. If you dig down deep enough into the lake bed you’ll run into thousands of these layers, in fact you’ll run into 100,000+ of them that look like this:


(source)

In these layers we find bits and pieces of organic material one would expect to find at the bottome of a lake which can be dated using carbon-14 dating.  If carbon dating is as error-prone as some claim there’s no reason for us to see any correlation at all, much less a close correlation with counting the number of algal blooms. . .but that’s exactly what we see:

(source)

The radiocarbon dates match up very closely with the varve layers, in other words we reach basically the same dates using two different methods. One of these methods relies on counting annual algal blooms, one relies on radioactive decay. I have never seen any real response to these kinds of correlations, neither have any young earth proponents ever been able to explain why this appears the way it does. And things only go downhill from here, because if we take this data and compare it to samples from around the world the correlations remain consistent.


(source)



Lurker

Radiometric Dating: The Basics

Radiometric dating measures ages based on the amount of radioactive decay that has taken place. There are over forty different techniques of radiometric dating including carbon dating, Potassium-Argon dating, and Argon-Argon dating to name a few.  To understand any of these dating methods you need to understand some of the basic properties of matter.

All matter is composed of atoms, which are in turn composed of a nucleus made of positively charged particles (protons) and particles with a neutral charge (neutrons) orbited by a cloud of electrons. Here’s an example:


The number of protons determines what element it is. In our example above there are two protons and two neutrons, so we can flip over to our periodic table and look for an element with an atomic number of 2 (atomic number = number of protons) and in doing so we can see that this is a helium atom.

Each element can have a given number of isotopes, which are atoms that have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. As an example, here’s an isotope of helium.



Notice that while the number of neutrons has changed this is still a helium atom because it still has two protons. This will become important later.

Atoms that are radioactive are unstable, so they throw off particles until they reach a more stable state (see Beta Decay Doodle). As the nucleus loses neutrons the atom can become a different isotope, as it loses protons the atom actually becomes a different element. We call this loss of particles “radioactive decay”, the original element is called the “parent”, while the new more stable form is called the “daughter”.

I really can’t stress enough that this is a very simplistic explanation of a very complicated process. If you want to get into exactly how or precisely why atoms and their particles behave this way you start getting into strong and weak nuclear forces and everybody starts to get headaches. That being said, the average decay rate is governed by those forces and, as such, is known. There’s no mechanism we know of that can actually alter these decay rates significantly. . .unless you drop a particularly unstable isotope into the center of, say, a very large star and strip off all it’s electrons. However, the decay rate for every isotope of every atom is unique, which means that if all of this were based on assumptions we wouldn’t expect different radiometric dating methods to reach the same results, which they consistently do.

Additionally, if radiometric dating isn’t reliable we certainly wouldn’t expect for radiometric dates to line up with non-radiometric dates derived from things like tree rings and varves but, again, they consistently do.



Further reading material on radiometric dating:



Lurker

Evolution of the Eye

Simple Example of Macroevolution


We start with two species of Spartina cordgrass, one is a European cordgrass (Species A) the other is an American species of cordgrass (Species B). When they interbreed they produce a sterile hybrid cordgrass (Species C). Because Species C cannot produce seeds it is reduced to reproduction via vegetative propagation, a process in which “new” individual plants arise without seeds or spores from parent plants, and doesn’t spread very fast as a result. However, after a while there is a polyploidy event in which during reproduction the number of chromosomes is doubled inside a cell where basically the nucleus of a cell divides but the cell doesn’t. You can visualize this pretty easily by looking at a normal example of cell mitosis here, the orange thing in the middle is the cell nucleus where the cell’s chromosomes are stored which are basically the filing cabinets for DNA. Now imagine that middle part dividing and the rest of the cell remaining the same, basically what you’ve done is double the number of chromosomes. Ta-da, you now understand polyploidy.

In our hybrid cordgrass (Species C) the result is a new species that can now reproduce sexually (Species D), and that is better able to survive in its environment. As a result it spreads faster than either Species A, B, or C. At the same time it cannot reproduce with species C, seeing as the hybrid is sexually sterile, nor can it reproduce with species A or B due to the large difference in chromosomes.


Lurker

Radiometric Dating, Phantom Variables, & Sock Gnomes

This is taken from an exchange at the end of the longest thread in recorded history on the subject of faith vs. science in which virtually every subject imaginable was covered. We had strayed into radiometric dating, with the thrust of the objections being that the consistent results from multiple independent dating methods (both radiometric and non radiometric) were simply an artifact of the assumptions of scientists.

How to Post Sources

If you're going to conduct a coherent discussion using sourced information you need to. . .

1) Quote the most relevant portions and provide a reference (preferably a link if possible).
For example, if I'm discussing the mechanisms of evolution and want to introduce a newly discovered process with enormous ramifications mentioned in an article I don't need to copy and paste the whole blasted thing, all I need are the important parts,
"In research published this week, the Leeds team reports that a protein known as REST plays a central role in switching specific genes on and off, thereby determining how specific traits develop in offspring. 
The study shows that REST controls the process by which proteins are made, following the instructions encoded in genes. It also reveals that while REST regulates a core set of genes in all vertebrates, it has also evolved to work with a greater number of genes specific to mammals, in particular in the brain – potentially playing a leading role in the evolution of our intelligence."
Look at that, I even italicized and indented it in order to make it clear that this was a quotation. Then I can include a link back to the original article so that if readers want to they can learn more about this amazing discovery. And because I'm such a nice guy I think I'll color my link blue to make sure it stands out.
Gene evolution process discovered
Or, if direct quotations aren't your thing you can. . .

2) Briefly summarize the essential points and provide a reference (again, preferably a link)
For example, for the same article I could have written:
The mechanisms of evolution are an established fact about which we are learning more and more every day. For example, last year a team of researchers from the University of Leeds discovered a single protein that regulates how specific traits are expressed as an organism develops. This discovery could potentially explain evolutionary differences between species not so much as a product of new genetic sequences but instead as the product of the sequence in which certain genes are switched "on" and "off" during development (source).
See how nice and easy to follow that is? That's how sourced arguments should be structured; not only does it make it easier (or, in my case, a delight) to read but it also demonstrates that you actually have read and at least have a basic understanding of the material itself.




Lurker

Beta Decay Doodle


Worthy of Question

It wasn't exactly out of the blue. After all, I had received several warnings against "teaching evolution" in the past, and even had multiple threads deleted. Each time I engaged in a private discussion with the moderator involved, but my questions about what specific rules I had broken seemed to always go unanswered. It didn't seem to matter that nothing I was being reprimanded for didn't appear in the forums TOS, all that mattered, apparently, was that I was explaining the scientific concepts involved in this issue (You can view the articles involved in that first incident here: Itinerant Lurker's Evolutionary Apocalypse of Awesome).

Then, some months later, I was discussing how the lack of a genetic bottleneck 4,350 years ago seems like a problem for a global flood which reduced all animal populations down to almost zero. As there were a lot of people who didn't quite grasp the significance of genetic bottlenecks I decided to provide some background information.

I took pains to explain that this had nothing at all to do with the ToE - I wasn't looking at common ancestry, I was looking at human migration over the last 50,000 years. Yet sure enough, this thread too was deleted because I was supposedly "teaching evolution".

When I asked moderators to point out where in my posts I had talked at all about the ToE I was ignored, the only responses I received seemed to be geared toward equating the ToE with leading Christians astray and taking umbrage at the fact that I back up many of my posts here. (You can view the painfully confused aftermath of this here (click to enlarge).)

The final email I received pretty much sums it up.

My as-of-yet unanswered reply:




It is an essentially inevitable result of these discussions that the hyperorthodox eventually come to recognize that the weight of evidence contradicting their views is so great that they must either ignore the evidence or reject reality as reliable. Unfortunately for me, part of ignoring evidence involves ignoring those who try to explain it.



Lurker

Augustine

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7]“

The Literal Meaning of Genesis, St. Augustine

The New Archive

Welcome to the new and improved IL Argument Archive.  I've switched over from wordpress (see the old blog here   for a trip down non-customizable memory lane).  Blogger lets me do all my tweaks without having to be locked into a theme, so I'll be slowly moving my content from the old site to this one.  Enjoy.

The old site:
(How freaking cool is that?)


Lurker