Silvestru's Global Flood: Part five. The Bouma Sequence

This is part of a longer post about Silvestru's video containing evidence for a Global Flood.  I chose to break up the posts so that individual claims can be better discussed.  The video can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BaMAt4dnE

Note that the video starts with about thirty minutes of introduction.  I believe the original poster of the video has left some suggestions of where to start watching to skip the intro.

In this post, I display my ignorance:

At 1:18, he claims that fine sediment can settle in fast moving water, describing this as the Bouma sequence. I don't know if this is possible, but the results of this Google search seem to show otherwise.

After some quick searching, understanding the Bouma sequence seems to require more time than i wish to spend.  Read this abstract for some details.

Mostly, I want to say that when a specialist offers an incomprehensible argument, you need to look at other arguments, ones that you understand, to determine if you want to believe the new one.  Logic states that each argument rises or falls on its own merits but we can use logic to consider the trustworthiness of the speaker as well.  However you look at it, this is not an argument I am capable of rebutting, but that does not mean it is correct.

Silvestru's Global Flood: Part six, the Himalayas

Silvestru discusses the Himalayas around 1:22.  To simplify, he points out that there are fish fossils on or near the peak of Everest and also that geologists agree on a 3cm/year erosion rate.  He states that the mountain should be 135km deep valley in the mantle by now if erosion had continued for millions of years.  He says there is no way the mountain was raised 50 million years ago, it would have eroded to nothing.

I do feel moderately competent to comment here, especially as he provides nothing but assertion for his claims.  No evidence of anything is given here and I feel that is because there was no evidence for his claim.

Here is a very short video of how geologists feel the Himalayas were formed.  As I was taught in elementary school, they appear to have been formed when the Indian subcontinent impacted Asia.  The rocks found on Everest came from North and South, not vertically. This admirably explains the fish fossils as well - they may have come from the North.

Unless Silvestru can defend his claim that the rock rose vertically and not from either side, he has to be considered a liar, and a poor one.  This is grade school stuff.

Law of Biogenesis?

A fragment from a website called Truth-is-life:

"If you accept the law of biogenesis as reality, you accept a major pillar of creation science that Pasteur, a major creationist opponent of Darwin, conclusively proved. If biogenesis is scientific then creation has scientific support. "

I am reminded of faith healing charlatans that claim their therapies use quantum theory.  Quantum theory explains the actions of minute particles and does not show much or any effect on the human scale of things.  In the same way, Pasteur did show that a sterile organic solution, in a glass container, did not spontaneously produce macroscopic life.  It probably did not produce any life, but Pasteur would not be able to 'conclusively prove' that as microscopes were limited in resolving power at the time.

Here is one (admittedly, of many) definitions of 'scientific law'.  Note the bolded clause:

"A scientific law or scientific principle is a concise verbal or mathematical statement of a relation that expresses a fundamental principle of science, like Newton's law of universal gravitation. A scientific law must always apply under the same conditions, and implies a causal relationship between its elements.
A law differs from a scientific theory in that it does not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: it is merely a distillation of the results of repeated observation. As such, a law is limited in applicability to circumstances resembling those already observed, and is often found to be false when extrapolated."

This is important as Pasteur studied a limited amount and variety of materials  amount of material for a limited time.  He did not have - and had no reason at the time to include - rock faces that could work as catalysts.  Some catalysts, notably meteor fragments, are known to change the chirality ratios of amino acids formed on their faces.

There is no explanation for how life originated from non-living materials and it seems likely that there never will be.  This is not to say that it could not happen, but that the evidence is transient and there is no reason to imagine it would last.  The recipe for creating life may include "simmer  for a hundred thousand years".

I don't want to argue by metaphor, but imagine someone questioning your (or my) ancestry.  Here is my claim:  If you cannot name all of your 32 great-great-great grandparents (five generations back), then those of your 16 great-great grandparents (four generations back) were created by God.  This claim is almost impossible to disprove.  If you find it disprovable, then let me go back ten generations to your 1024 ancestors.  At some point, the genetics would be inconclusive and you would be utterly unable to prove your ancestry was not created by God.  And yet, even creationists would say that only two people were created by God and that was a lot more than ten generations ago.

More at The Frame Problem and Talk Origins.

Status:  The point is, as far as the possibility of an ancient origin of life from non-life, The Law of Biogenesis does not apply and people using it are either innocently ignorant or deliberately deceptive.

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I may need to reread the truth-is-life article.   It contains gems like:

CONCLUSION Many of the giants in medicine--Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, Selman Waksman--did pioneering work (including in genetics and antimicrobial resistance) while either rejecting Darwinism or ignoring it altogether.

This after pointing out that Pasteur was a contemporary of Darwin's, as was Mendel.  It would be better to say that they were unaware of Darwin's work, rather than that they rejected or ignored it.  This is certainly true of Mendel, whose work only came to light after his death, while Pasteur's famous experiment took place in the same year as Darwin's theory was published.

DARWINISM DIRECTLY PROMOTED THE MEDICAL PRACTICE OF EUGENICS 

I am not sure what Darwinism is.  Some proponents of self-directed evolution (more on this below the extended quote) were involved, but Wikipedia suggests it started with Mendel's work.

The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,

It is also well-known that at least some religious groups were involved.

...as the Eugenics movement came to the United States, the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.Methodist churches around the country promoted the American Eugenics Society “Fitter Family Contests” wherein the fittest families were invariably fair skinned and well off. Methodist bishops endorsed one of the first books circulated to the US churches promoting eugenics. Unlike the battles over evolution and creationism, both conservative and progressive church leaders endorsed eugenics.  The liberal Rev. Harry F. Ward, professor of Christian ethics and a founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said that Christianity and Eugenics were compatible because both pursued the “challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak. Conservative Rev. Clarence True Wilson, the General Secretary of the Methodist Episcopal Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, and the man chosen to debate Clarence Darrow after William Jennings Bryan’s death, believed that only the white Aryan race was the descendent of the lost tribes of Israel.

The problem with laying all the blame for eugenics on evolutionists (and self-directed evo proponents) is that artificially altering an organism's characteristics was not what Darwin proposed.  He did use 'artificial selection' as a comparison for what evolution could do, but did not invent farming techniques or animal husbandry.  A related problem is that the author of the Truth-is-life article accepts micro-evolution, a subset of which could be said to include the goals of eugenicists. 

Just as our understanding of how atoms are put together does not mean we need to make atomic bombs, knowing how evolution works does not mean we have to change animal characteristics.  The 'Darwin-caused-eugenics' argument has nothing to do with whether Darwin's scientific claims are correct.  It seems a disgusting attempt to confuse the issue.

Why are there still creationists?

The following creationist argument is not one used by my (now ex-) coworker.  He is more sophisticated in his debating.  Still, the following rhetorical point is and has been used again and again, so here is my attempt at a comprehensive response.

Here is the point:  If humans came from monkeys why are there still monkeys?

A common alternate is: If humans came from apes, why are there still apes?

Stephen Baldwin "If we are from apes, why are the apes still here?"

Here is a similar formulation (March 16, 2012):

This is where Kern began to argue that evolution - at least macroevolution - doesn't make sense because "viruses are still viruses" and other organisms are still what they have always been ... "You're talking about adaptation here," he told her.
Smith went on to talk further about viruses, while Kern sat there with a sour look on his face, coming back to tell her that "You go back and viruses are viruses ... they may have adapted ... they are still viruses."
When Kern asked where the virus fossils are, Smith responded that viruses are too small to fossilize.

The short answer is clear and simple.

Apes are not, evolutionarily speaking, our ancestors but our cousins.  We both evolved from a common ancestor.

The viruses that exist today may or may not be similar to ancient ones but they too have evolved.  It is possible that a virus was the first sorta-lifeform and more complex animals evolved from it, although I have not heard that claim stated anywhere.  Still, viruses today are distant relatives, not ancestors.

Done.

There is a  larger question and it could be stated as "If humans are so superior, why do any other animals exist?" or "If humans are so successful, why do other animals exist?"

Dawkins discussed primitive and advanced animals in The Ancestor's Tale:

...Darwin's advice to himself would serve us all: 'Never use the words higher and lower'.
   Lancelets are live creatures, our exact contemporaries.  They are modern animals who have had exactly the same time as we have in which to evolve.  Another telltale phrase is 'a side branch, off the main line of evolution.'  All living animals are side branches.  No line of evolution is more 'main' than any other, except with the conceit of hindsight.  (Page 365 of First Mariner Books edition, 2005, The Ancestor's Tale.  This is the third or fourth paragraph from the start of the Lancelet chapter)

From the Wikipedia article on The Ancestor's Tale.

But lancelets are not primitive nor our remote ancestor. They are as modern as all other members in the pilgrimage. The Lancelet's Tale continues to develop the theme introduced in The Duckbill's Tale, that all living animals have had equal time to evolve since the first concestor, and that no living animal should be described as either lower or more primitive.

Perhaps an example from the military will help.  I have no background in the military but I think this metaphor works.  In the ocean, the most powerful vessel is the aircraft carrier.  And yet, this does not mean that the only military vessels used today are aircraft carriers.  Missile launching and countering vessels are needed as are mine sweepers and submarines.  A vessel, or an animal, can be very strong and successful and yet not be supreme in all areas.

Below is the beginning of a list I started looking at successful animals.  I count success as a combination of numbers and total mass.  Ants are on the list as they outnumber us by so much that their total mass is similar to ours.  Although a recent discussion of viruses encouraged me to write this post, I did not add microscopic animals to the list.

chickens: "More than 50 billion chickens are raised annually" 

sheep: 1.078 billion 

rats:

There are around 5 billion rats here on earth, which makes them arguably the second most successful mammal. After humans, of course. An average rat weighs around 450 grams. That makes for almost 5 billion pounds of rat. They are about 25 centimeters long, or 10 inches. That makes 1 and a quarter million kilometers of rat.
Blue whales are the biggest animal that has ever existed on this planet. They weigh almost 400 thousand pounds each. There are approximates 12000 blue whales on this planet. The weight of all the blue whales, is almost 200 million pounds less than the weight of all the rats.

ants:

It has been estimated that the total ant population is around 10 quadrillion, or 10,000,000,000,000,000. That’s a lot of ants. It’s more than 1.4 million ants for every person.
An average ant weighs about 20 milligrams, which is almost nothing. But that means all of them together weigh around 440,924,524,000 pounds. So do they outweigh humans? Unless the weight of an average human is only 63 pounds, then no. But let’s look at it another way.
Ants aren’t very good at being heavy. One thing they are good at though, is lifting a lot of weight. An ant can lift around 50 times its own body weight. So every ant in the world combined could lift more than 22 trillion pounds. If the human population wanted to lift that much, we’d each need to lift more than 3000 pounds. Which is more than 6 times the world record for weight lifting.

So my list, rather unimaginatively, consists of only two groups, human food items and detritivores with two examples of each.  I am so ignorant of ocean ecology that I feel unable even to suggest a fish to search online for.  Krill could also be on this list, I guess.

The lesson could be: there are a variety of ways of being successful.  Being small and having many offspring appears to work the best.  With this in mind, why are there still humans?

About this blog

I have some background in biology and an enduring interest in science.  On the other hand, I have published no research nor am I deeply knowledgable in many areas of biology.  You may ask why I am writing blog posts on a subject that I have just admitted I don't have much to add.  My goal here is to pick creation science's low-hanging fruit as a service to both creationists and to people uncertain about the subject.

Radio-carbon dating of shells

From "Dating the Earth -3":

 Quotes from Experts onDating about Gigantic Errors In Dating Methods

Examples of where uniformitarian dating has been shown to be wrong.:

... 

16 A living water snail taken from an artesian spring in Nevada was given as assessed age of 27,000 years. Science, Vol. 224, April 6, 1984 p:58-61  The original article explains that C14 dating works when living things get their carbon from atmospheric sources. But, for many years, evolutionists were claiming C14 could be used for dating all sorts of things, including living things. (check this for accuracy). 

17 Shell from living clams was 'dated' thousands of years old. Science, Vol. 141, August 16, 1963 p:634

Indeed, check it for accuracy.

The abstract for "A living water snail taken form an artesian..."

Carbon-14 contents as low as 3.3 ± 0.2 percent modern (apparent age, 27,000 years) measured from the shells of snails Melanoides tuberculatus living in artesian springs in southern Nevada are attributed to fixation of dissolved HCO₃^- with which the shells are in carbon isotope equilibrium. Recognition of the existence of such extreme deficiencies is necessary so that erroneous ages are not attributed to freshwater biogenic carbonates.

If you don't understand my concern, let me explain where Carbon-14 comes from:

To have some understanding of how carbon dating works I will describe it for you. Basically the sun shines down on the earth's atmosphere, which is composed mostly of nitrogen 14. By the sun shining on the atmosphere it makes the nitrogen 14 or (N14) atom unstable changing into a carbon 14 isotope or (C14). The small amount of C14 made each day combines with our normal carbon dioxide. Organic objects such as people, animals, and trees are either taking or breathing in carbon dioxide every day. When an organism dies it will no longer take in any more C14. So the C14 unstable isotope continues to decay. Scientist measure this decay time by a unit called half-life. The half-life of C14 is 5,730 years. Scientists then take what organic item they want to date and find out how many half-lives have passed on that object. Thus the date of an organism is found. See figure 1 to visualize the paragraph above. See the figure to visualize the paragraph above.  

This quoted section and image come from We Need Intelligent Creation Education and from the article 'Dating the Earth-3'.

So, for radiocarbon dating to work, the Carbon-14 needs to come from the atmosphere in the plant material and gathered through photosynthesis or from the plants the animal eats.  Note that the Science abstract specifically states that the shell of the snail is made from carbonate in the water, not from food the snail has eaten.  The article in Science is not at all showing that radio-carbon dating is wrong.  It is showing that the source of carbon needs to be known.

The best metaphor I can think of for the complaint in "Dating the Earth-3" is that of a student going to a language school (by a huge coincidence, I work in a language school).

Little Timmy goes to language school for a year and studies very hard.  Then he takes a proficiency test.  His mother comes in, furious."My son studied here for a year and look at his proficiency score.  He scored 5% on his TOIEC (a standardized test for English ability).  Therefore your methods here are terribly wrong!"  She says.
The school director looks at her quizzically, then responds, "You do know this is a French language school, do you not?"

The quoted section in red confuses me. Especially this part: But, for many years, evolutionists were claiming C14 could be used for dating all sorts of things, including living things.
I presume this is true, but I notice no reference or attribution.  I would like to see evidence that evolutionists claimed "C14 could be used for dating all sorts of things, including living things."


My original concern, the one that eventually led to this blog, is that Evolutionary (or mainstream scientific) claims change with new evidence while creationist ones do not. I think everyone would agree that many scientific claims have been changed with new evidence - this is a strength, not a weakness!  The sub-title of the quoted section is "Examples of where uniformitarian dating has been shown to be wrong."  These days, I only hear creationists using the term 'uniformitarian' but what we have seen, and what the cited articles describe, is how to improve dating techniques.  The sub-title could be "Examples of where uniformitarian dating has been shown to improve".

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'Dating the Earth-3' is a long article and my goal is to break it up so that individual pieces can be examined in depth.  One problem I have is that I am going into far greater depth than my coworker did in making the article.  I specifically asked him where I could find the articles he references and quotes from and he replied he had not read most of them himself.  I feel this means I need only show how a few are deceptive.  If he has researched these claims properly, then any serious rebuttal (more than typing errors or the like) of even one claim throws all the rest into doubt and harms his perceived honesty greatly.  If he has not researched these claims, then any serious rebuttal of even one claim throws all the rest into doubt and shows him to be a bad researcher, although not a deceptive person.

As examples of articles I do not feel he has read, see the above two referenced above and these:

Dried seal carcasses less than 30 years old were 'dated' as 4,600 years old. Antarctic Journal of the United States, Vol. 6, October, 1971 p:210+ 

A freshly killed seal was assessed at 1,300 old. Antarctic Journal of the United States, Vol. 6, October, 1971 p:210+ 

"There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radiodecay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic [era] to a close may not be 65 million years ago but, rather, within the age and memory of man." Written in Frederic B.Jueneman, "Secular Catastrophism", Industrial Research and Development, June 1982 p:21

The Antarctic Journal of the United States is only available online form 2005 so am certain that he could not have read it.  I have not either, but suspect that it may have included information like this:

The seals feed off of animals that live in a nutrient-rich upwelling zone. The water that is upwelling has been traveling along the bottom for a few thousand years before surfacing. The carbon dioxide in it came from the atmosphere before the water sank. Thus, the carbon in the sea water is a couple of thousand years "old" from when it was in the atmosphere, and its radiocarbon content reflects this time. Plants incorporate this "old" carbon in them as they grow. Animals eat the plants; seals eat the animals, and the "old" carbon from the bottom waters is passed through the food chain. As a result, the radiocarbon content reflects a mixture of old radiocarbon, which is thousands of years old, and contemporaneous radiocarbon from the atmosphere. The result is an apparent age that differs from the true age of the seal. 

Or this:

Notice that all of the examples given of discordantly dated artifacts result from organisms from aquatic environments or which obtain significant amounts of carbon from aquatic sources. Since carbon in aquatic environments may have long since have been removed from atmospheric sources, it will have depleted its ratio of C14 to C12 already to some degree even before incorporation into the organism eventually tested. Trying to produce a C14 date when the initial assumptions are violated is not likely to succeed.

My second quote is from October '99, so this information has been available for more than ten years.

As for the quote by Jueneman, no such article exists online nor can I find any journal with the fairly generic name of Industrial Research and Development.  If such a journal exists, from it's name, I cannot see it being a strong forum for "Secular Catastrophism".  If such a journal and entry exists, my bet is that this is a letter to the editor, not a peer-reviewed article in it.

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Status:  These quotes, divorced of all outside context, have to be questioned and treated skeptically.  I have shown how a very few are incorrect and plan to look at more, but again, I feel I am putting in more work than my coworker did in listing them here.  They may have started as innocently wrong, but after ten or more years without fact-checking, they are close to being deliberately deceptive.  Because the man is my coworker, I cannot go that far.  Innocently Wrong

Coral growth rates and the age of the earth

From my coworker's letter "Dating the earth-3"*:

Enewetak coral reef has been drilled through and is about 1,405 meters thick.  Evolutionists say that this proves the world is millions of years old.  Creationists say it’s only a few thousand years old.  But, here is the real scientific data.   This shows how all scientists are tempted to interpret data according to their own worldview. Here are the facts:
FACT:  The Enewetak reef is about 1405 m thick (2^nd pic is enewetak)
FACT:  Observed rates range from .5cm (=5mm/year) to 414mm/year  with many in the 100-200mm range (faster or slower rates may also exist but haven’t been observed).
z1405m = 1,405,000mm 5mm/year rate =281,000 years estimated coral age 50mm/year rate =28,100 years estimated coral age 100mm/year rate =14,050 years estimated coral age 200mm/year rate =7,025 years estimated coral age 300mm/year rate =4,683 years estimated coral age 414mm/year rate =3,393 years estimated coral age

These are ONLY the observed rates of coral growth.  Faster or slower rates may have that haven’t been observed.  In 1992, this coral in the picture above was found on a shoe that was less than 4 years old.  This shows that coral growth can sometimes be extremely fast.

 This image was in the email but also can be found here.

For Enewatak’s rate of growth, we only have recent observations.  Many things can cause drastic changes in the rate of growth and we don’t know the rates of growth for most of the past.   Which rate happened at Enewetak? Nobody has been watching and measuring the Ewenetak coral reef for 5,000 years, so we don’t know.  Science can only guess what might have happened.  Skeptics choose the 5mm rate. Creationists choose the 200-400 rates.  Both are using a lot of faith.  It does seem logical to match the fast rates with the thickest corals on the planet, but this is just a logical guess and cannot be proved scientifically.

Here is the problem: Coral reef growth rate appears to be conflated with Coral growth rate.  The difference? Corals obviously grow faster than the reef they are part of.

Let me take a moment to explain this.

First, here is Staghorn coral.

 Here is lettuce coral.

Here is Brain coral. 

Finally, here is a gorgonid coral.

 If that brain coral grows 414 mm a year, it looks like it would fill a two-metre diameter hemisphere in about two-and-a-half years.  That is, it would be one metre tall and two metres wide and all that volume would be filled.  This clearly is not true for the other three examples.  If the coral on the shoe, offered as evidence of a high growth rate, were ten centimeters tall and twenty wide, we would not say the reef had grown by this much.  Most of the volume is open sea-water, not solid material.

My coworker's letter included several links.  One was to an article at grisda.  At grisda, my point is repeated:

   The fastest growth rate reported for any coral is the staghorn species Acropora cervicornis (Figure 4). Lewis et al. (1968) found in Jamaica a maximum rate of 264 mm/year. Shinn (1976) studied the growth of this species following destruction in a hurricane near Florida. He estimated linear growth rates of 100 mm/year. He also found that because of the branching habit (several new branches added to a single previous one) much more than the linear growth of a single branch is involved in establishing a dense stand of this coral (see Figure 3 for an example). Under these branching growth conditions, carbonate production would be more geometric than linear and could contribute further to the carbonate mass of the reef. Gladfelter, Monahan and Gladfelter (1978) report rates of 99 mm/year for Acropora palmata in the Virgin Islands. Some massive corals (Figure 5) grow much more slowly.

The Cervicornis is a kind of staghorn coral and there is an example of a 'massive coral' that is a brain coral similar to the image I used above.  Both of these corals are familiar to me as I spent time diving on coral reefs and studying them as part of my degree in biology.

Another problem is the source of the 414mm/year growth rate.  It is from an 80 year old paper (J. Verstelle, ‘The Growth Rate at Various Depths of Coral Reefs in the Dutch East-Indian Archipelago’, Treubia 14:117–126, 1932.) and I don't believe any modern paper suggests growth rates nearly as high.  A third and very-related problem is that neither my coworker nor I have read this article.  For this reason, when I proclaim a status below, I will not be calling this claim 'intentionally deceptive' as I don't have enough information to make that call.  I do have enough to information to say this claim is very weak.

Here are some relevant links.
Fast growth:
Answers in Genesis
creation.com
Apologetics Press
asa

Slow growth or rebuttals of above:
earthhistory
exploring our matrix
talkorigins
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Status: Weak.  I am satisfied that this claim does is not supported by evidence and that coral growth rates support an old earth.  As I have not read the Verstelle paper (414 mm/year growth rate), I cannot say this argument is debunked, but I do note that no one seems to quote the contents of this paper, only that one number.  This has to appear suspicious.

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*The original email he sent me was "Dating the earth-1".  I don't see any differences in the letters but I suspect that the sections of short quotes has been changed or expanded.  This document (Dating the Earth-3) can be found online by searching for some of the quoted text.