NAU Astrobiology Blog

Age Dating Techniques I

DaveK — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 21:25:05 +0000

Radioisotope dating has demolished the notion that Earth is merely 6,000 years old. In retaliation, young-earthers wage an all-out smear campaign against mountains of evidence in the public domain. Their level of denial is exceeded only by the likes of Flat Earth Society. For example, the CSEM FAQ page says:

The only thing that these dating methods have proven is that they (Carbon, Ar-K, Isochron, etc.) are completely unreliable.

Right. And I suppose this is borne out by the ~900-page graduate text sitting on my desk, Isotopes, Principles and Applications. Funny I can’t find this point in there anywhere. Nor does it appear in a truly vast refereed literature (137 selected references for the K-Ar chapter alone). Ah, but CSEM explains this too:

Typically a wide range of ages are given by these methods with the date selected being the one which matches the Geologic Column.

Ok, this is really not obvious from the text; they never taught it to me in grad Geochemistry at Caltech either. I guess that’s because geochemists secretly throw out all the “bad” measurements before they report them. I’m glad a creationist was available to explain this to me - I’m sure they know better, having spent untold hours undercover as mainstream geologists witnessing the discarding of all that “bad” data. As a mere professor in planetary science with a Ph.D. from a Geological Sciences Division, I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to witness such a plot. Or could it be this is a great big fib? I thought that was against the ninth commandment. Surely biblical literalists would never act thus!

Alas, creationists do in fact lie about even published radio-isotope data. Blatently. And often. And in whole books no less. I guess they think it’s for a good cause. For example, John Woodmorappe (a pseudonym) selectively quote mines the geologic literature to “prove” its unreliability (Schimmrich). He will quote one scientist out of context as disagreeing with another’s result but conveniently leave out the magnitude of the discrepancy, which is typically a few percent in the very worst cases (Hencke). I guess this is what is meant by “wide range of ages.” Indeed. “…completely unreliable.” Right. Frequently off by as much as 1%! Terrible. Proof that reported measurements of billions of years could easily refer to material no older than 6,000 years. Of course, such contextomy is a favorite creationist trick (together with misquoting altogether) going back to Henry Morris. Did you know, by the way, that the Bible actually says, “There is no God?” We have it on God’s own authority that He doesn’t exist. The reference is Psalm 14:1. There’s a simple word for this technique as practiced by creationists: lying. Future posts that compare facts about particular techniques with creationist claims will illustrate this all too well.

Flood Geology II - Polystrate Fossils

DaveK — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 20:02:19 +0000

My rejection of YE Creationism owed a lot to weak arguments like this one from the CESM FAQ page: “Animals and plants must be buried quickly to become fossils, further proof of the global deluge. Polystrata fossils traverse multiple strata layers proving their rapid formation.” No geological knowledge is required to see the non sequitur in the first sentence. Since when does it take a global flood to bury an animal or a plant?! A minor local flood like ones we see today will do just as well! My home insurance company apparently agrees, since they will charge me a lot extra or refuse a policy altogether if my house is in a “100 year flood plain,” i.e., a place where a lot of mud may be deposited rapidly once every 100 years or so. Fact is, the existence of fossils poses no problem for even the strictest form of uniformitarianism (i.e., “the present is the key to the past”). As for the second point, the term “Polystrata fossils” (more commonly spelled “polystrate”) is a concoction of YE Creationists and not used by mainstream geologists. It is most often invoked to imply that multiple layers traversed by a “polystrate” fossil had to be deposited in the short period of the Noachian Deluge (less than a year), else the organism would have decayed before fossilization. But geologists believe episodic local floods are quite up to the task of rapid burial, so this argument is a big “straw man.” Unless, perhaps, you could find some humungous organism that traversed layers believed to represent the passing of many thousands of years. Perhaps a whale fossilized in an orientation with its length perpendicular to rock layers? Such an example so enticed young-earthers that they felt obliged to make it up! See A Whale of a Tale for the full story. After finding out that the alleged “vertical whale” was actually buried horizontally in layers that were later tilted by 40 or 50 (but not 90) degrees, Darby South comments: “What was found to be most disturbing was the tendency for creationists to deliberately omit specific locational data and references… It almost seems that the people making the claims about this whale being evidence for a catastrophic or Noachian Flood wanted the reader to take their claims as a matter of faith and wanted to make it impossible for anybody to check the veracity of the story. This is propaganda, not science, in the form of paragraph- to page-size versions of media sound-bites.” Note to self: Don’t take any YE Creationist “facts” at face value without checking them out. So are there any “polystrata” fossils with documentation? What YE creationists are usually referring to is fossilized vertical tree trunks. None of these pose any problem for mainstream geologists who simply call them “in situ trees.” In situ forests have been buried and sub-fossilized in historic times! Trees as tall as 20 feet and tree-ring dated between 1479 and 1857 were buried by lahar flows at Mount St. Helens and exhumed by mudflows in the 1980 eruption. See Don Lindsay on “Polystrate” Fossils, OE creationist Neyman’s rebuttal of John Morris’s Q&A #81, and Andrew MacRae’s “Polystrate” Tree Fossils. Most damning, perhaps, are fossil forests that could not have formed in the time allotted for the global flood, since successive forest horizons appear that would have required time for the growth of several generations of trees! See Fossil Forests and the Flood. The larger botanical fossil record contradicts flood geology over and over. For example, any Colorado Plateau tourist can view a petrified forest of conifers and tree ferns in the Chinle Formation, another within the Morrison Formation, and thousands of feet of rock in between these layers, including the desert Navajo Sandstone. There are no fossils of land plants at all in Cambrian rocks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or in Cambrian rocks anywhere on Earth for that matter. Thousands of feet of marine limestones overlie Grand Canyon Cambrian rocks. Above these, fossil fern leaves can be seen along the Kaibab trail in the Permian Hermit Shale . This layer is capped by a desert sandstone, then a limestone reef deposit. These all lie underneath the Chinle to the east, which is full of petrified wood. There are no flowering plant fossils (angiosperms) in any of this. For those you must go near to the top of the Grand Staircase. All this rock is interpreted by YE Creationists (and CESM in particular) as deposited in a single global flood! Why, then, are the major plants on Earth today never found in rocks below those with primitive tree ferns and cycads, for example? YE Creationists nit-pick about upright tree trunks but make no effort to square with the major features of the record. This calls to mind the phrase “strain at a gnat and swallow a camel” by somebody or other. So where are we? YE Creationists effectively say that stubby vertical fossil tree trunks prove a single flood was responsible for 2 vertical miles of rock near where I live. Even though these fossil localities are quite limited in extent, they conclude the flood was global. I’m frankly astonished that anyone would think this leap of irrational imagination is persuasive! Nevertheless, I suspect the argument will stay around and provide another iota of false comfort to those who believe YE Creationism for reasons that have nothing to do with empirical evidence and everything to do with wishful thinking.

Flood Geology I

DaveK — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 19:23:24 +0000

My young earth creationist friend says: “We all have the same evidence. Our worldview defines how we interpret that evidence. Remember that not too very long ago we were being taught gradual accumulation. Now it is “lots of floods”. I think there is lots of global flood evidence. Keep in mind the earth’s surface is more than 70% covered by water.” Do modern geological theories really distort facts because of a “worldview?” Are “lots of floods” incompatible with “gradual accumulation?” Do todays oceans and local floods (e.g., tsunamis, monsoon floods, Katrina, etc.) support a past global flood. No, No, and NO! So what facts support flood geology? From the CESM FAQ page: Some of the facts which prove that the earth endured a worldwide flood include the sedimentary strata layers which comprise the crust of the earth. These layers found in a mixed order of deposition around the globe were laid down by water and have marine fossils throughout. Do sedimentary rocks really show the global demise of all fiat-created organisms save their Ark-borne representatives? Nah! Fossils appear in an order that is decidedly un-mixed. Trilobites are never found above Permian rocks, for example, while flowering plants are never found below. Ammonites and dinosaurs are never found above lowest Paleocene rocks, while large mammals are never found below. The number of sequentially appearing and disappearing organisms is actually quite large and mushrooms rapidly when you include micro-fossils like pollen and dinoflagellates (See UCMP web page ). William Smith created the first geologic map in 1799. He noticed that strata were arranged in a predictable pattern and always in the same relative positions. Each particular stratum could be identified by fossils it contained; the same succession of fossil groups appeared in many parts of England. Between 1820 and 1850, geologists used this observation to produce the sequence of geological periods still in use today. This was before Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” The original framers of the geologic column were mostly creationists! In a very small fraction of cases, structural deformation or faulting overturns or offsets part of the sequence. When this happens, the tectonic context is discernible and presents no problem for basic stratigraphic principles. This is what YE creationists typically interpret as a “mixed order” that supports a flood origin. Nonsense! In the case below, for example, the rocks are in temporary reverse order (not “mixed” order) for obvious reasons.
Recumbent Fold Are all sediments “laid down by water” as required by flood origin? Even if they were, does that mean they all indicate a global flood? No and No! Certainly, a lot of sediment transport is done by water even today. But last time I checked I was still breathing air. River and lake deposits account for much “water” sediment transport, but chemistry, grain sizes, shapes, and sorting differ radically from what you’d expect in a one-year global flood. For example, limestones are marine chemical precipitates of calcite from the shells of dissolved organisms. The current deposition rate in oceans is about a million times lower than needed to create ancient limestones in a single flood “year.” Moreover, the associated calcite formation would release enough heat to boil the oceans on the YE Creationist timescale. But not all strata are waterborn deposits! Windborn (”eolian”) sediments like Saharan dune complexes have quite distinct features and are easily identified in the rock record. The Coconino Sandstone in the Grand Canyon and the Navajo Sandstone in Zion Canyon are just two, but they are hundreds of feet thick. That’s hundreds of feet of eolian desert deposits laid down right in the middle of the flood. These and other land deposits show surface features like mudcracks, fossil tracks, salt casts, ripples, and dune structures that simply could not exist at the bottom of a global flood. What about the last point? Are “marine fossils” found “throughout” the rock record? They are frequent, but marine fossil layers are often interrupted by thick terrestrial sequences without marine fossils. These often have good assemblages of land-dwelling paleo-flora and fauna. Such evidence led Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) to shift from a single global-flood view to multiple limited floods and multiple creations some 200 hundred years ago! Today, we detect in the order of marine/non-marine fossils an ancient tale of rising and falling sea levels, punctuated with catastrophic extinctions. The Grand Canyon records three such in-and-out coastal migrations. This is absolutely contrary to what you’d get from a single one-year flood! In sum, modern geologists don’t reject global flood geology because of their wordview. They reject it because it is an inadequate explanation of geological data. Contradictions of flood geology are legion. For more detail, see OE creationist David Siemens’ Non-technical Problems with Flood Geology, Ed Babinski’s Creationist “Flood Geology” Vs Common Sense, and Mark Isaak’s Problems with a Global Flood.

This Just In: Sun Not Shrinking

DaveK — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 21:50:55 +0000

The litany of errors on the Creation, Evolution, and Science Ministries FAQ page contains this little gem:

“The sun is shrinking. This causes a host of problems for old age believers. One is that as the sun shrinks, its gravity weakens. Earth’s orbit around the sun is held in place by the sun’s gravitational pull. If we were a fraction closer to, or further from, the sun, life could not exist on earth. The solar system can’t be old.”

Where to begin? Even if the Sun was shrinking, its gravitational pull on Earth would not “weaken.” This reminds me of Star Trek Season-one, Episode 7 where the ancient planet “Psi 2000″ contracts and “grabs” the Enterprise out of its orbit - quite a howler to anyone who passed high-school physics! The gravitational pull of a spherically symmetric body is equivalent to that of a point mass located at its center - its radius is irrelevant, shrunk or otherwise. But it seems this is Russ Miller’s own idiosyncratic gaff. Other creationist versions like that of ICR, make no mention of weakened gravity.

The ICR tale of the “Shrinking Sun” is more in tune with other YE arguments that use a reported measurement (often wrong), assume it’s constant, and extrapolate back in time with contradictory conclusions for an old earth. Other examples include changes in earth’s magnetic field, sea floor sediment accumulation (without plate tectonics!), and the amount of helium in the atmosphere. Not surprisingly, Russ Miller cites all of these embarassingly wrong claims in his FAQ page.

The “Shrinking Sun” was born in 1979, when astronomers John Eddy and Aram Boornazian presented an abstract at an AAS meeting called, “Secular Decrease in the Solar Diameter, 1836-1953.” This over-interpretation of historical data was subsequently withdrawn by the authors (who never imagined extrapolating their result far back in time) and never submitted to a professional journal for publication. Nevertheless, ICR picked it up immediately and naively extended the shrinkage rate into the indefinite past. This led to a Sun too bright for life sometime within the last million years. The “Shrinking Sun” thus quickly became a part of YE creationist legend under the dubious assumption that it had always been shrinking at the claimed rate. I would address the obvious flaw in this reasoning, but it’s not necessary, because:

The Sun is not shrinking. YE creationist Andrew Snelling chronicles some of the ensuing “debate” on the topic here, as does Old Earth creationist Howard J. Van Till. More important, high-precision studies of helio-seismology have weighed in on the “shrinkage” question. Sverker Johannsson looked at the Shrinking Sun in the light of these observations here. It appears that the Sun has stopped shrinking! But don’t expect YE creationists to stop preaching the Gospel of the Shrinking Sun anytime soon.

Dwelling in the Past

DaveK — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 20:36:21 +0000

Ad hominem, strawman, poisoning the well, and appeal to ridicule, all abound within the YE Creationist’s repertoire of clever retorts. These are most easily constructed by dredging up eccentric beliefs from over 50-100 years ago. When I recently told a creationist friend that I did not find modern scientists to be “fudging data in order to hide their fear of God,” I was informed: “These are the same people who taught about Piltdown man to Ramapithecus to the theory of recapitulation to … well you get the picture.” Well no, those people are dead; their claims were falsified and repudiated long ago by scientists who believe in evolution.

The Piltdown hoax was put forward early in the 20th century and definitively exposed as a fraud in 1953 when greater access was granted to the putative “fossils” (though many experts believed it was a forgery soon after it was published). It’s still not clear who carried out the forgery; suspects include Arthur Conan Doyle and the Roman Catholic priest Teilhard de Chardin. Most, however, believe it was the initial “discoverer,” Charles Dawson, acting out of a desire to gain prestige (rather than trying to “prove” evolution). Other suspects may have been motivated by British nationalism and racism. In any case, these people have all been dead for a LONG time, so what’s the point? Perhaps it is of value as a cautionary tale. If so, it applies alike to political, religious, business, and scientific institutions. It certainly doesn’t support a claim that modern scientists, as a group, are in a mass conspiracy to foist evolution on the public with falsified evidence!

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a believer in Lamarckian (not Darwinian) evolution who, in 1866, first propounded his “biogenic” theory of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” i.e., that individual embryonic development retraces the steps of the evolution of species. He apparently embellished embryo drawings to drive home the point. Biology has rejected this view for some time; see Stephen Jay Gould’s 1977 book: Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Haeckel has been dead for nearly a hundred years. And the point is ….?

The classification of Ramapithecus as an ancestor of humans on the basis of a single jawbone find was more mistake than fraud. Biochemical studies and more fossil finds contributed to the reclassification of the specimens as Sivapithecus - a genus of extinct primates. Apparently some anthropology texts were slow to note the change. This is not fraud - just laziness. Shame on those textbook writers!

I guess I must admit that scientists I know are like many in these stories - the ones that repudiated the falsehoods, that is! Science’s greatest strength is the provisionality of its theories - these may be overthrown at any time if contradictory evidence is discovered. By contrast, a hallmark of pseudo-science is to retain belief in a theory despite strong evidence to the contrary. YE creationists are ardent protagonists of disproven theories (e.g., the “Genesis flood”). As we see above, they also dredge up and criticize extremely outdated ideas as if they were current. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the origin of their “theory” is 2-3,000 years old. On that timescale, a mere 50-100 years seems practically like the present!

Russ Miller and “Flood Geology”

DaveK — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 20:19:03 +0000

As a fundamentalist in my youth, I became more and more uneasy about the huge discrepancy between modern geology and the Genesis account of a global flood. I read the literal Young-Earth (YE) view by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris (”The Genesis Flood”), but it raised more questions than it answered. Frankly, it made me even more suspicious that I was being sold a bill of goods. I decided it was time to compare Morris’s claims directly with evidence from the rock record and went to college as a geology major. It didn’t take long to see how I’d been duped; Morris and other YE creationists were outright lying about rocks! Why would they do this? Why would they lie to support a religion that forbids lying? Perhaps a private quote from Martin Luther can shed some light here:

“What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.”

I’m sure not all believers would subscribe to this version of end-justified means, but many fundamentalists do seem to believe their theological views are above any kind of empirical fact checking. I was not one of these. A deity that must be defended by a lie, whether literal or virtual, is not worth believing in. To do so is classic delusion and is all-too prevalent in today’s world. To their credit, many “Old Earth” creationists have rejected Morris’s geology for this very reason.

Russ Miller again confirmed his role as a disciple of Henry Morris by claiming in his Cline Library lecture that Earth’s crustal rocks originated literally in a global flood that wafted Noah’s ark. He left out details, but some are available in his online seminar about the Grand Canyon. Here he claims the entire Paleozoic sequence - from Cambrian Tapeats Sandstone to Permian Kaibab Limestone (consistently misspelled as “Kiabab” in his slides) - was laid down in the Genesis flood. Further, he claims that washing away of the overlying Moenkopi and Chinle formations constitutes “absolute proof” for a global flood (huh?). No notice is made of the preservation of these formations to the north, together with 1,000’s more feet of Mesozoic and Cenozoic rock in Zion, Bryce, and Grand Staircase National Parks (see below).

The Genesis-flood “theory” of Earth’s crustal rocks is refuted countless times by the rock record in the Grand Canyon and elsewhere (not to mention the problems of mythic preservation of a global biosphere on a single boat). Grand Canyon Paleozoic rocks represent a relatively small period of Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, from about 525 to 260 million years ago. They bracket the appearance of trilobites, for example, but predate the arrival of dinosaurs and large mammals. By studying the size, sorting, shape, chemical composition, and arrangement of grains in sedimentary rocks, sedimentologists can get a pretty good idea of the environment of deposition at the time these rocks were formed. Fossils help confirm the nature of the paleo-environment. Were sediments deposited in deep ocean, coastal waters, streams, flood plains, or desert dunes, etc.? Sedimentary geologists can give you the answer. The overall picture for earth history comprises a complex assortment of diverse and evolving environments, but there is evidence for a great deal of dry land somewhere during all eras of the geological time column!

A cursory look at regional geology for the Grand Staircase shows that a global flood is not a viable explanation for any of the Grand Canyon formations, much less all of them. For example, the Coconino Sandstone is the remnant of a wind-blown Sahara-like desert that somehow managed to exist right in the middle of Miller’s global flood. Grand Staircase Paleozoic rocks and fossils generally match a wide range of marine, coastal, and even desert dune environments associated with the shifting coastline of a Paleo-North America that remained high and dry (largely to the current NE - see NAU/Professor Blakey’s Paleogeographic Maps for the Paleozoic). Miller’s (and Morris’s) claim that all these rocks were laid down in a global flood implies either abject ignorance of the relevant geology or downright deceit (or both?). I’m not entirely sure which is the case for Miller, but the level of scholarship exhibited in his slides suggests the former.

In AST184L (”Life in the Universe” Lab), we study the above rocks in the field. NAU students are welcome to sign up and see the evidence for themselves!

Evolution and the “Law:” Creationist abuse of physics

DaveK — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 22:55:57 +0000

The “Law,” of course, is the second law of thermodynamics, and the faux controversy between it and evolution was cooked up half a century ago by creationists and repeated almost verbatim by Russ Miller in his NAU/Cline lecture. Never mind that, in all that time, virtually no serious physicist thought there was a genuine conflict here! The idea was championed back in the 60’s by hydrologist/creationist Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research. I first became acquainted with it in 1963 at about the age of 8 when my father handed me a copy of Morris’s “Twilight of Evolution” to counter my enthusiasm for plastic dinosaurs and children’s books about the history of life. At 8, I couldn’t understand thermodynamics or the flaws in Morris’s inferences from it, but neither can a large fraction of adults in our culture. This is probably what has led creationists to continue using this argument long after it has been soundly refuted. Thermodynamics flourished in the 19^th century in support of theoretical efforts to define how to obtain maximum usable energy from heat flow. The second law has been articulated as, “The Entropy Inventory of the World Tends to a Maximum.” But what is entropy? The classic high-school chemistry answer – “disorder” – disguises a philosophically and mathematically sophisticated concept (see the entropy link for more). In a closed system (no exchange of matter or energy with anything outside), entropy either stays the same or increases. Miller repeated the creationist claim that evolution violates this principle, since it implies that entropy decreases. But every physicist knows that this is an incorrect inference. Life is not in a closed system! It is far from chemical equilibrium embedded in a system of heat flow from the Sun. Entropy reductions in evolution take place locally and do not completely compensate for large global increases. Indeed, nobelist Ilya Prigogine showed that all you need to produce spontaneous order in dissipative systems (like life) is an influx of energy. Miller did seem to try and address the fatal flaw in his own argument by claiming that the “raw energy” (as opposed to “cooked” energy?) of the Sun was of a type that could not produce local entropy decreases. In support of this creationist fiction, he gave no theoretical explanation, but provided suggestive and hand-selected examples of the destructive power of solar energy. Of course he left unmentioned any of myriad examples of local entropy decrease under solar energy, such as the spontaneous organization of cyclonic weather patterns. Alas, the Sun’s radiation is no different from any other type of energy flow with regard to its ability to drive local entropy changes. As the zoologist Dawkins wrote in the 70’s, “Morris’s point about the second law of thermodynamics is pathetic. Surely any chemist would accept that there can be local increases in order fed by energy from outside the local system. This is what happens when you synthesize something over a Bunsen burner.” Miller’s faulty reasoning prohibits not only evolution but life itself! Living systems routinely make use of the fact that, in an open system, local decreases of entropy take place in energy flow as long as they do not exceed total increases. Complexity increases dramatically in development from embryo to adult mammal. How does life do this without violating the second law? “Living organisms are open systems since they both take in and expel matter; further, they exchange heat with their surroundings…The organism discards matter with a greater entropy content than the matter it takes in, thereby losing entropy to the environment to compensate for the entropy produced in internal irreversible processes.” (Levine, Ira N. 1978; Physical Chemistry, New York: McGraw-Hill). The entropy deficit life gains for itself is clearly available to fuel one of its fundamental properties: evolution!

“Origin of Life” - Miraculous or Natural?

DaveK — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 00:02:04 +0000

First things first. Whether the first cell arose from a natural or supernatural cause matters not one whit to Darwin’s theory of the subsequent evolution of life. And yet, creationists routinely criticize theories of the origin of life as if these constituted some flaw in Darwin’s theory. Miller was no exception in his NAU/Cline Library talk. As one of his “Fifty Facts against Evolution,” he trotted out a “Law of Biogenesis ” to assert that life from non-life is naturally impossible. But this law refers only to Louis Pasteur’s refutation of spontaneous generation, an ancient belief that such things as micro-organisms in broth, maggots in meat, and mice in haystacks arise continually from inorganic substances. We now know that all these proceed from biological processes that are difficult to observe. Such events have nothing to do with the origin of the very first cell! It used to be thought that even simple organic compounds could be made only by living things. A few had been synthesized in the lab inorganically by the 1950’s when Harold Urey directed his grad student, Stanley Miller, to carry out laboratory simulations of the early earth environment. But it was a great surprise when the Miller-Urey experiment yielded a host of organic compounds, including some of the amino acids that make up proteins. Russ Miller spent time informing us that the products in this half-century old experiment were not “life.” True enough! Although a great deal of progress has been made that went unmentioned by Russ Miller (including the synthesis of viruses), the polymerization of organic compounds to form the biomolecules of life acting within a cell represents an outstanding problem in a scientific theory of life’s origins. Of course, the creationist God of the gaps lives wherever we are ignorant. Miracles are invoked wherever gaps appear in human knowledge. Unfortunately, these gaps have a way of closing with time, so this particular god lives a life of repeated evictions. Bottom line - we don’t yet know precisely how to make life or how it first arose. But there is no reason to believe the process required a miracle, and Russ Miller’s depiction of current theory was a gross misrepresentation. To learn more about recent research in the origin of life, see the early chapters of my book (with Simon LeVay), “Here Be Dragons.”

“Operational Science?”

DaveK — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:53:17 +0000

In his NAU Cline Library lecture, Russ MIller tried to redefine science in ways that excluded virtually all of astronomy and geology. No wonder, since these powerfully contradict his views of how we got here. His “operational science” is apparently confined to topics that can be studied in the laboratory by direct experiment. He derided “Big Bang” theory, for example, by rhetorically asking cosmologists, “Were you there?” This provoked hoots and hollers from fundamentalists in the audience. But is this a valid complaint? Especially since the Cosmic Microwave Background represents light that originated early in the Big Bang; we are literally seeing events from over 13 billion years ago! We can also study planet formation that is happening right now in neighboring star-forming clouds. In these cases, we really are/were there! But are scientific theories about the unwitnessed past somehow illegitimate as Miller implies? No! We can predict from theories what we ought to find in the geological record (for example) if our picture is correct. Then current experiments can be conducted on the rock record to falsify or confirm our theory. So the ideas of an ancient Earth and the evolution of life from a common ancestor are very “testable” in principle and in practice. J.B.S. Haldane once said: “I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.” And of course, no one ever has! Even our legal system will convict a criminal on the basis of DNA evidence, though no one may have been there to witness the crime. Working scientists view this all as perfectly legitimate, but of course Miller is not and never has been a working scientist.

“Operational science” is an idiosyncratic construction devised originally by Miller’s true messiah, the recently deceased Henry Morris. Miller uses it as Morris did, to deceive the unknowing into believing that events of the ancient past have so little evidence supporting them that YE creationism works just as well to explain them. Nothing could be further from the truth! YE creationism has a good deal of evidence against it. If you take it as a scientific theory and predict what you’d find in the geological record and in astronomical observations, you will find it contradicted immediately and repeatedly in countless instances.

Creationism vs. the Origin of Planetary Systems

DaveK — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 17:22:06 +0000

In his NAU Fifty Facts talk, Miller continued to confuse Big Bang cosmology with a theory of planetary origins by criticizing “cosmic collisions” as an explanation for things like the high density of Mercury, Venus’ retrograde rotation, and Uranus’ high obliquity. He said that the need to invoke collisions was an example of how the Big Bang theory was in trouble. But the origin of the solar system from a circumstellar disk around the early Sun has nothing to do with Big Bang theory. It is a separate theory that is strongly supported by observations of craters on planetary surfaces and disks of dust and gas around very young stars. Protoplanetary disks of gas and dust are detected around virtually all of the youngest stars. I have carried out observations of these disks myself with the Owens Valley Millimeter Array, Keck Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and the Very Large Array. Currently I have a project to observe debris disks in the last phase of planet formation with Spitzer Space Telescope. Debris disks are composed of dust generated by the planetesimal collisions that Miller ridicules. Computational studies by George Wetherill contributed to our understanding that terrestrial planets, the presence of asteroids and comets, and crater density on old planetary surfaces like the moon are consequences of a similar period of heavy bombardment in the early solar system. For further proof of the prevalence of impacts, one need only travel about 40 miles down I-40 to see a very fresh meteor crater. Flagstaff’s own Eugene Shoemaker played a key role in its intepretation and in our understanding of the importance of impacts. Miller’s criticism of impact explanation for solar system features flies in the face of mountains of evidence. His use of this criticism to refute the Big Bang is logically absurd. His undue criticism of distinctly Flagstaff science (both Slipher and Shoemaker) strikes me as strange for a Flagstaff native! What do you think?