Freethought & Rationalism Archive

LP675 · 12-21-2004, 02:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sven

Others already answered this, but since you mentioned me:

I didn't say that it's illegitimate. You read this into my words.
My position is rather that ignorant goat herders making up the story over the centuries, based on a (probably large) local flood, is a much more reasonable explanation than a global flood which
(1) left no evidence
(2) left lots of problems to be explained which simply are not mentioned at all in the bible - there are only a few verses about this Earth-shattering event, none of which stop for a second and present some explanations for questions which would be obvious pitfalls for people later

Or in five words: It does not make sense.

Saying something is more plausible in your opinion than something else is a very different thing to saying ‘it does not make sense’.

Quote:

Woodmorappe is a not even worth a laugh.

Perhaps he doesn’t think you are funny either.

Sven · 12-21-2004, 05:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LP675

Saying something is more plausible in your opinion than something else is a very different thing to saying ‘it does not make sense’.

It does not make sense to me - and billions of other people. Better?

flintknapper · 12-21-2004, 06:38 AM

Written by Mark Bakke:

It has been claimed (through quotes from Henry Morris) that there was
more than enough room on the Ark for all of its passengers since only
about 35,000 animals needed to be on board. It has further been
claimed that all of these animals ate "hay" or other vegetation during
their trip. But, could this really have been possible? We have
already provided arguments against the ability of certain animals to
survive on such a diet, but let's assume that they could have done so.
How much food would have had to be stored on the Ark to accomodate
those animals?

1) How long were all of the animals shut up within the Ark? According
to Genesis 7:11, the rain began falling on the second month and
seventeenth day. According to Genesis 8:14, the Earth was dried on
the second month and 27th day of the following year -- at which point
God commands Noah to disembark and bring the animals with him. This
gives a stretch of 375 days to which we should add seven more days
since Genesis 7:9-10 says that the Ark was loaded seven days before
the rains began to fall. This gives 382 days of confinement aboard
the Ark for its passengers during which they must eat from the food
stored aboard the vessel.

2) How much space does hay occupy? While it's quite possible that
there were forms of vegetable food other than hay on board, hay bales
are the most efficient way of storing such food. In my youth on the
family farm, I often helped haul hay bales to feed cattle and horses.
Hay bales vary in size and weight but average about 16 cubic feet and
60-80 pounds each (depending on the moisture content of the bale).
Let's assume an average weight of 70 pounds per bale. We must also
realize that this is a hay bale as made by modern baling equipment
that Noah would not have had. Noah would most likely have stored hay
in the much less efficient form of loose haystacks, but let's give him
the benefit of the doubt and say that he could make standard hay
bales.

3) How much hay would be consumed each day by the Ark's passengers?
Elephants can eat several hundred pounds of food a day. Other large
animals can eat similarly large amounts. Smaller animals would eat
less. Let's be very generous in granting the benefit of the doubt and
assume that the average animal aboard the Ark ate only one pound of
hay each day. This would mean that 35,000 pounds of hay would be
necessary for one day's feeding requirements.

4) How large was the Ark? Genesis 6:15 gives the Ark's dimensions as
being 300x50x30 cubits. This translates to 450x75x45 feet or
1,518,750 cubic feet in which to store its entire complement of
passengers plus all of the food needed to feed them.

5) Do the math. 35,000 pounds of hay per day divided by 70 pounds per
bale gives 500 hay bales per day being consumed. 500 bales x 16 cubic
feet per bale gives a total of 8000 cubic feet of storage space
required for one day's food. 8000 cubic feet per day x 382 days of
feeding gives a total storage requirement of 3,056,000 cubic feet for
the food necessary to maintain the lives of the Ark's passengers.
This is almost twice the size of the Ark.

Conclusion) Even giving the Creationists every benefit of the doubt,
we see that the amount of food necessary to feed the relatively few
animals that the Creationists say were aboard the Ark would still
require twice as much storage space as was available. This doesn't
even include the space which would have been required for air, water,
and the animals themselves. Therefore, the only reasonable conclusion
is that the Ark story has yet again been proven to be impossible --
even by using Creationist arguments in its favor!

flintknapper · 12-21-2004, 06:40 AM

Flood Zonation and Noah, a reply written by Michael Suttkus:

> One creationist has offered the zonation argument for evolutionary
> sorting in fossil record. That is higher first appearance is due to
> further distance from the sea. I'd like to compile a list of reasons
> why this doesn't work.

Land ancestors of whales appear before fossil swimming whale ancestors.

Ask him why mangrove trees (which live right at the sea's edge) are
higher in the fossil record than pine trees (which dominate inland
mountains and tundras and which are killed by salt water).

Here are some of my favorite ecological zonation refuting examples:

Any sorting of pelagic marine fauna (that is, stuff that swims around
rather than sticking to the bottom) will do for a refutation. Why do
jawless fish preceed jawed forms? Why do modern teleost fish appear
last among the major fish divisions (despite the fact that they've
got the lowest parts of the ocean basically cornered today)? Why are
ammonites sorted narrowly while nautilus are sorted broadly?
Dolphins and icthyosaurs live in identical zones (unless you think
that there are a lot of air breathing marine animals that live
anywhere other than near the top...), but are *never* found in the
same layers.

Fixed life forms pose a very serious test to the idea, and one it
fails with flying colors. While reefs of one sort or another occur
almost as far back as we have fossils at all, modern coral reefs
don't appear until after terrestrial mammals and most dinosaurs. The
oldest reef formations are photosynthetic bacteria, and thus the
lowest fossil layers (the sea depths, according to creationism?) have
to be at the ocean's surface! The lowest of all plants are the
flowering plants (sea grasses and mangroves), but they are found only
at the top of the fossil record. Likewise, the sorting of fossil
sponges shows an evolutionary development and isn't even remotely
consistent with the modern zonation shifting of sponges. Oysters,
usually used as an defense of the idea refute it badly. Bivalve
mollusks don't appear until well after the Cambrian, and then persist
right up until the highest layers.

An effective prediction of the ecological zonation claims is that
organisms will be found where they live. Contrawise, Evolution
claims that they'll be found *when* they lived. Evolution predicts
that modern organsisms will be come more common as you progress up
the fossil record. Ecological zonation predicts that modern
organisms would appear throughout. (Wait a minute while the
creationist tries to use living fossils as an argument here, then
move in for the kill.) But no matter how many "living fossils" the
creationist brings up, they cannot effectively deny that the fossil
layers become more and more modern as you come up. Worse, they
clearly are *not* found solely, or even primarily, in the ecological
layers. Nautilus, for example, reach their greatest fossil diversity
below oysters!

Aquatic dragonfly larvae are found above terrestrial dragonfly
larvae. All marine vertebrates other than fish are found with their
terrestrial ancestors first. Even leaving out the ancestors part,
the fact is that whales are found above dinosaurs, while EZ theory
suggests the opposite. Seals, marine turtles, manatees and otters
continue the same pattern. Meanwhile, any explanation the
creationist attempts to use to explain this must get around the fact
that many marine vertebrate groups (placodonts, icthyosaurs,
plesiosaurs, and the long extinct marine amphibians) fail entirely to
have been effected by the same phenomena.

Oh, and moles, which if this theory has any validity, should be found
beneath nearly all other terrestrial life forms, are up with the
mammals, not down beneath the first terrestrial arthropods. Ooops,
sorry creationism.

How much more do we need...

Birds extend well above pterosaurs. Not a single human skeleton has
ever been found low. Swamp living dinosaurs and mammals aren't found
with swamp living Paleozoic reptiles and amphibians. (Ditto for
every other habitat you care to mention.)

But just stick with the mangroves. Every creationist attempt to
explain the sorting of fossil flowering plants ends up laughable.

Plognark · 12-21-2004, 06:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by flintknapper

Flood Zonation and Noah, a reply written by Michael Suttkus: <snip>

:notworthy

JLK · 12-21-2004, 02:23 PM

Hi LP675, still worried about those bonobo's?

Quote:

Originally Posted by LP675

Perhaps Woodmorappe doesn’t think you are funny either.

No "perhaps" about it. Woody is a pretty humorless fellow.
In his book, Plimer is a "parrot" (p. 21), an "echo" (p. 37). Moore is "naive"; has "fantasies" and displays "ignorance." Opponents "imagine" their arguments. Morton is "absurd", "naive", "compromising", "abysmally ignorant", "sloppy", "reckless disregard", "extremely inaccurate", "misleading", "tomfoolery" and "intentionally deceitful".

"Woodmorappe" (who lives 90 miles to the south of me) was a Chicago highschool teacher whose real name is Jan Peczkis. He is a very bitter man with a severe stutter.

Quote:

Saying something is more plausible in your opinion than something else is a very different thing to saying ‘it does not make sense’.

Does this "make sense"?
Among the numerous nonsensical ideas in his "feasibility study" is the one that most of the 15754 creatures eat basically the same diet. He needs this so that the frantic family can manage to feed all of them without excessive food preparation time. Noah not only trained animals to defecate/urinate on command into buckets, but leave their pens for exercise and return to their cages on command. Assuming that the largest 3939 of the animals could be trained to urinate and defecate upon command while someone holds a bucket behind and that they need to be serviced three times per day, each of the 8 persons must service 125 animals per hour, 2 animals a minute.
What a fun job that must have been.

No amphibians and invertebrates like terrestrial snails are on Woody's ark. Woody's snakes and bats can be coaxed into eating inert food by stuffing snake skins. Pandas' alleged replacement diet is more time-consuming to create than bamboo. Noah was engaged in modern breeding in order to "maximize the heterozygosity of the recessive alleles" to avoid inbreeding depression after the flood (p. 194). Noah was able to acclimatize reptiles to the temperatures they would find on the ark ( p. 124) and breed a pair of Koalas who would accept dried Eucalyptus leaves.

"Narcotized by carbon dioxide, seeds which die quickly under water can survive in a viable state for at least several weeks and, if present in sufficient numbers, a few individual seeds out of a great number of initially buried may have survived the Flood year." p. 156.

CO2 just appears to save all vegetation.

More from Glenn Morton, a Christian:

Quote:

Some of the stranger claims of Woodmorappe's book:

On page 43 and p. 93 he claims that hydroponic vegetables can be grown in total darkness on the lowest level of the ark.
On page 44
"I now consider non-biological sources of flameless illumination. There are many references to 'luminous gems' in ancient literature, along with an apocryphal account of luminous pearls being used on the Ark."

On page 188 he writes:
"Furthermore, a single pair of founders most definitely can have the same genetic diversity as fifty founders, and without any miraculous or unusual procedures."

In Table 1 he divides the animals on the ark into 8 weight divisions for each class: reptiles, birds and mammals. Thus one would think that there are 24 categories (3 X 8). Table 2 lists the same data for 25 orders, then abridges the remaining 61 land vertebrate orders (which means 61 categories). One can not figure out why this table is published. By the time the reader gets to Table 4, which calculates the amount of food required to feed the animals for 371 days, Woodmorappe, giving only a reference, uses a totally unexplained equation (and we discover that there are 32 categories of animals. But these 32 categories are not explained and why there are now more than 24 categories, is also unexplained). Table 5, which calculates drinking water requirements, adds to the confusion by citing only 27 categories of animals which drink water. Either three categories don't eat food or five don't drink water.

Woodmorappe states (p. 27) that all the urine could be drained overboard by gravity. He does not tell how this is possible from the lowest floor level which was below the water line.

Woodmorappe's treatment of the heat generated up by the animals is quite unworkable. He claims that reptiles give off no heat. This is not true. Their metabolism, while slower than mammals and birds does indeed give off heat. He uses units no physicist would approve of -- Kg heat-producing biomass per cubic meter.
If he gives a definition of how much heat is generated by such a unit, I have been unable to find it. Thus, it is impossible to verify his assertion that the animals would not overheat the ark. He relies on wind entering the tiny windows in the upper level to cool and ventilate the ark. His calculation is merely wind speed times the window area. But anyone who has ever performed a fluid flow calculation will know that you can not calculate the problem in this fashion. Hydrodynamic equations must be used and friction and dynamic pressure taken into account. His method for calculating air flow is far too simple.

Woodmorappe claims that the animals respire 6 to 12 tons of airborne water vapor each day. He implies that the inside of the ark would have low humidity (another inconsistency). He writes:

"Even if Morton (1995) were correct about the wetness of the interior of the Ark, it need not have doomed the feedstuffs and seeds to ruin, as the materials could have been stored in water-tight containers." (p. 92)

Woodmorappe forgets that during the first 40 days and nights, when he opens the windows to ventilate the ark, he opens it onto a world which is raining. Rain only occurs when the relative humidity is 100%. Thus, the fact that 6-12 tons of water were exhaled into the already saturated air inside of the ark, requires that 6 to 12 tons of water per day during the 40 days of rain would condense onto the walls of the ark. Since this condensation would drip to the bottom floor. Without the water being pumped overboard, this would represent a 7 centimeter (3 inch) slosh of water on the bottom deck of the ark, where Woodmorappe stores the food. The Ark, even under Woodmorappe's scenario, would have been "anything but dry".

Animals outside of the ark were supposed to have survived in pockets of floodwater suitable to their requirements (whatever those requirements were). He appeals to gradual acclimatization of amphibians and fish to the salinity of the flood waters. But exactly how a global flood was able to gradually occur is unexplained. He has plankton be buried and then re-excavated to survive the flood.

Why, when the carnivores where released, would they not start eating the other few survivors of the Flood? Woodmorappe suggests that large numbers of carcasses which had been buried early in the flood were re-excavated and used as food for the carnivores. This would allow the prey species enough time to replenish their numbers. He cites several studies of carnivores eating carrion, but none citing cases of carnivores eating year-old waterlogged carcasses. Especially with fresh-smelling, living creatures running from the Ark.

The most interesting post-ark problem Woodmorappe discusses concerns the genetic diversity. Unfortunately, Woodmorappe appeals to a period of rapid mutation after the flood to restore genetic diversity. Very little justification for this is given. Having rejected the accepted rates of molecular clocks Woodmorappe is forced to talk about "mutator genes" which cause mutations, radioactivity and the mutagenic effects of a stressful environment (citing a creationist source). He refers to a "burst of mutations among Noah's immediate post-Flood descendants". This appeal to phenomenon with no apparent cause occurs far too frequently.

To his credit, Woodmorappe is the first creationist I know of to actually discuss the pseudogene problem. His attempted solution is that a retrovirus can turn a normal gene into a pseudogene. However, he does not explain why, for example, processed pseudogenes are found at the same locations in chimp, gorilla, gibbon and man but not on other species.

Stick with the bonobos.

LP675 · 12-21-2004, 05:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JLK

Hi LP675, still worried about those bonobo's?

Sometimes I can’t sleep at night, imagining those hairy fingers tapping on keyboards, beady yet resolute eyes purposefully and relentlessly monitoring the web…

Quote:

No "perhaps" about it. Woody is a pretty humorless fellow
In his book, Plimer is a "parrot" (p. 21), an "echo" (p. 37).

Plimer only got “parrot�? and “echo�??!

Quote:

Moore is "naive"; has "fantasies" and displays "ignorance." Opponents "imagine" their arguments. Morton is "absurd", "naive", "compromising", "abysmally ignorant", "sloppy", "reckless disregard", "extremely inaccurate", "misleading", "tomfoolery" and "intentionally deceitful".

They are all fairly standard rhetorical adjectives. If they deserved them I can’t see the problem. If that’s all that was in his 306 page book I think he would be showing remarkable reserve. But I suspect at least some of those words are describing behaviour not the person themselves, for example how can “Morton�? be “tomfoolery�?, or “reckless disregard�??

Quote:

"Woodmorappe" (who lives 90 miles to the south of me) was a Chicago highschool teacher whose real name is Jan Peczkis. He is a very bitter man with a severe stutter.

Having a stutter is neither here nor there, it’s probably not good form to discriminate (I am not saying you necessarily were) against someone because of a disability (a fairly terrible one too, one of my friends battled it).

As for all these bitter creationists out there, I haven’t met or seen one yet (I have met a few creationists). All those adjectives you pointed out above I certainly don’t think is a sign of bitterness.

He may well be ‘bitter’, I haven’t met him, so I wouldn’t know.

Quote:

Does this "make sense"?
Among the numerous nonsensical ideas in his "feasibility study" is the one that most of the 15754 creatures eat basically the same diet… manage to feed all of them … they need to be serviced three times per day, each of the 8 persons must service 125 animals per hour, 2 animals a minute…No amphibians and invertebrates like terrestrial snails are on Woody's ark. Woody's snakes and bats can be coaxed into eating inert food by stuffing snake skins. Pandas' alleged replacement diet is more time-consuming to create than bamboo. Noah was engaged in modern breeding in order to "maximize the heterozygosity of the recessive alleles" to avoid inbreeding depression after the flood (p. 194). Noah was able to acclimatize reptiles to the temperatures they would find on the ark ( p. 124) and breed a pair of Koalas who would accept dried Eucalyptus leaves.
…

More from Glenn Morton, a Christian:

That is from the first article I provided a link to in post 22! (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...12#post2044112 )

Quote:

Stick with the bonobos

Hey from memory it was you who unearthed their wicked scheme.

BTW, was it you who was arguing in that thread there is no such thing as ‘supernatural’ in the sense that you can’t define it? (i.e. if angels exist, they are not supernatural). It was an interesting point, I should try to find that thread.

LP675 · 12-21-2004, 05:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sven

It does not make sense to me - and billions of other people. Better?

Wonderful.

Hey, that reminds me of the first thread that I responded to at iidb, which was one you started in this very channel, on the very topic of Noah’s flood! Ahh memories.

All these people have you to thank for drawing me in

. I think it was ‘how could an omni benevolent God that the Christians believe in send such a flood’?

Sheshbazzar · 12-21-2004, 09:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BeamMeUpScotty

This is my first time starting a thread. I wanted to do a mathematical refutation of the possibility of Noah’s Ark. The math isn’t too difficult, but please let me know if I made any mistakes.
3. Mathematics, geometry, and physics shall be considered to be the same in Noah’s time as they are today.

Is the math indeed not too difficult for you?
You just can't 'make it all fit'?
Have you really mastered all of Mathematics, all of geometry and all of physics?
Do you comprehend all of the dimensions? even fully understand string theory?

Today, even this day,
Can you proclaim the number of 'fingerbreadths' in the common cubit?
and how many 'fingerbreadths' are in the cubit of the Sanctuary?
and how many 'handbreadths' are in each?
And can you declare the measure of a measuring reed of six cubits,
by a cubit and an handbreadth?
What is the difference between this reed, that reed, and another?
Can you 'grasp it'? Or does the measuring reed slip right through your fingers?
I stretch forth my line upon the earth, I measure the measure with the measure, My measure is from everlasting to everlasting
For judgment, a line and a plummet, to determine the upright, and to cut off the crooked.
Do you indeed fathom the fathom? What is fifteen fathoms, and twenty fathoms?
what do you fathom?
Will you walk a mile with me? and will you walk two miles with me?
How far is a mile? How shall we measure the distance?
And how shall two walk together, except they be agreed?
If you cannot find the answers to such 'small' and 'foolish' things, how think you to find answer to the 'great' and the 'wise' things?
Do I indeed prophesy the past today?
"For who has dispised the day of small things?"
What is this flying roll? Behold, how small is its measure in all of the earth! and who shall escape its curse?
A fool considers himself wise, but a wise man will consider his foolishness.

Sheshbazzar

LP675 · 12-21-2004, 11:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JLK

Hi LP675, still worried about those bonobo's?

LOL!

I was trying to find that thread, it looks like after I left they turned it into a “creepy offshoot�? and sent it ‘Elsewhere’.(http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...97#post1796997 ).
That was a classic post of yours (took me like 10 minutes at first to work it out, I am a bit slow

), you have quite a vivid imagination. Probably helps you accept wild stuff like evolutionary theory

.

That thread was chopped up horribly into like 3 separate threads. But I am interested in what you said in this post (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...43#post1789943 ). A supernatural being is in theory a different thing to beings accepted by materialists, or philosophical naturalists (human beings for example).

Where would a good place be to argue along these lines do you think? Philosophy?

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12-21-2004, 06:38 AM	#33
flintknapper Veteran Member Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: A Windswept Hill on the Prairie Peninsula Posts: 1,073	Written by Mark Bakke: It has been claimed (through quotes from Henry Morris) that there was more than enough room on the Ark for all of its passengers since only about 35,000 animals needed to be on board. It has further been claimed that all of these animals ate "hay" or other vegetation during their trip. But, could this really have been possible? We have already provided arguments against the ability of certain animals to survive on such a diet, but let's assume that they could have done so. How much food would have had to be stored on the Ark to accomodate those animals? 1) How long were all of the animals shut up within the Ark? According to Genesis 7:11, the rain began falling on the second month and seventeenth day. According to Genesis 8:14, the Earth was dried on the second month and 27th day of the following year -- at which point God commands Noah to disembark and bring the animals with him. This gives a stretch of 375 days to which we should add seven more days since Genesis 7:9-10 says that the Ark was loaded seven days before the rains began to fall. This gives 382 days of confinement aboard the Ark for its passengers during which they must eat from the food stored aboard the vessel. 2) How much space does hay occupy? While it's quite possible that there were forms of vegetable food other than hay on board, hay bales are the most efficient way of storing such food. In my youth on the family farm, I often helped haul hay bales to feed cattle and horses. Hay bales vary in size and weight but average about 16 cubic feet and 60-80 pounds each (depending on the moisture content of the bale). Let's assume an average weight of 70 pounds per bale. We must also realize that this is a hay bale as made by modern baling equipment that Noah would not have had. Noah would most likely have stored hay in the much less efficient form of loose haystacks, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he could make standard hay bales. 3) How much hay would be consumed each day by the Ark's passengers? Elephants can eat several hundred pounds of food a day. Other large animals can eat similarly large amounts. Smaller animals would eat less. Let's be very generous in granting the benefit of the doubt and assume that the average animal aboard the Ark ate only one pound of hay each day. This would mean that 35,000 pounds of hay would be necessary for one day's feeding requirements. 4) How large was the Ark? Genesis 6:15 gives the Ark's dimensions as being 300x50x30 cubits. This translates to 450x75x45 feet or 1,518,750 cubic feet in which to store its entire complement of passengers plus all of the food needed to feed them. 5) Do the math. 35,000 pounds of hay per day divided by 70 pounds per bale gives 500 hay bales per day being consumed. 500 bales x 16 cubic feet per bale gives a total of 8000 cubic feet of storage space required for one day's food. 8000 cubic feet per day x 382 days of feeding gives a total storage requirement of 3,056,000 cubic feet for the food necessary to maintain the lives of the Ark's passengers. This is almost twice the size of the Ark. Conclusion) Even giving the Creationists every benefit of the doubt, we see that the amount of food necessary to feed the relatively few animals that the Creationists say were aboard the Ark would still require twice as much storage space as was available. This doesn't even include the space which would have been required for air, water, and the animals themselves. Therefore, the only reasonable conclusion is that the Ark story has yet again been proven to be impossible -- even by using Creationist arguments in its favor!

12-21-2004, 06:40 AM	#34
flintknapper Veteran Member Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: A Windswept Hill on the Prairie Peninsula Posts: 1,073	Flood Zonation and Noah, a reply written by Michael Suttkus: > One creationist has offered the zonation argument for evolutionary > sorting in fossil record. That is higher first appearance is due to > further distance from the sea. I'd like to compile a list of reasons > why this doesn't work. Land ancestors of whales appear before fossil swimming whale ancestors. Ask him why mangrove trees (which live right at the sea's edge) are higher in the fossil record than pine trees (which dominate inland mountains and tundras and which are killed by salt water). Here are some of my favorite ecological zonation refuting examples: Any sorting of pelagic marine fauna (that is, stuff that swims around rather than sticking to the bottom) will do for a refutation. Why do jawless fish preceed jawed forms? Why do modern teleost fish appear last among the major fish divisions (despite the fact that they've got the lowest parts of the ocean basically cornered today)? Why are ammonites sorted narrowly while nautilus are sorted broadly? Dolphins and icthyosaurs live in identical zones (unless you think that there are a lot of air breathing marine animals that live anywhere other than near the top...), but are never found in the same layers. Fixed life forms pose a very serious test to the idea, and one it fails with flying colors. While reefs of one sort or another occur almost as far back as we have fossils at all, modern coral reefs don't appear until after terrestrial mammals and most dinosaurs. The oldest reef formations are photosynthetic bacteria, and thus the lowest fossil layers (the sea depths, according to creationism?) have to be at the ocean's surface! The lowest of all plants are the flowering plants (sea grasses and mangroves), but they are found only at the top of the fossil record. Likewise, the sorting of fossil sponges shows an evolutionary development and isn't even remotely consistent with the modern zonation shifting of sponges. Oysters, usually used as an defense of the idea refute it badly. Bivalve mollusks don't appear until well after the Cambrian, and then persist right up until the highest layers. An effective prediction of the ecological zonation claims is that organisms will be found where they live. Contrawise, Evolution claims that they'll be found when they lived. Evolution predicts that modern organsisms will be come more common as you progress up the fossil record. Ecological zonation predicts that modern organisms would appear throughout. (Wait a minute while the creationist tries to use living fossils as an argument here, then move in for the kill.) But no matter how many "living fossils" the creationist brings up, they cannot effectively deny that the fossil layers become more and more modern as you come up. Worse, they clearly are not found solely, or even primarily, in the ecological layers. Nautilus, for example, reach their greatest fossil diversity below oysters! Aquatic dragonfly larvae are found above terrestrial dragonfly larvae. All marine vertebrates other than fish are found with their terrestrial ancestors first. Even leaving out the ancestors part, the fact is that whales are found above dinosaurs, while EZ theory suggests the opposite. Seals, marine turtles, manatees and otters continue the same pattern. Meanwhile, any explanation the creationist attempts to use to explain this must get around the fact that many marine vertebrate groups (placodonts, icthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and the long extinct marine amphibians) fail entirely to have been effected by the same phenomena. Oh, and moles, which if this theory has any validity, should be found beneath nearly all other terrestrial life forms, are up with the mammals, not down beneath the first terrestrial arthropods. Ooops, sorry creationism. How much more do we need... Birds extend well above pterosaurs. Not a single human skeleton has ever been found low. Swamp living dinosaurs and mammals aren't found with swamp living Paleozoic reptiles and amphibians. (Ditto for every other habitat you care to mention.) But just stick with the mangroves. Every creationist attempt to explain the sorting of fossil flowering plants ends up laughable.

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