ps418

Bait,

Maybe you should have actually looked at the link I offered you. The fish are not inconsistent with the couplets being varves, nor are they even evidence for rapid deposition. To quote from Henke again:

The Green River Formation contains some beautifully preserved fish and other fossils. However, except for microfossils, fossil-bearing laminae are uncommon in the formation (Fischer and Roberts, 1991, p. 1147).

Sarfati and other YECs are skeptical that dead fish could have laid undisturbed on the bottom of lakes where they were slowly encapsulated into varves over many years. YECs insist that the fish and other well-preserved fossils had to have been buried quickly by "Noah's Flood" or subsequent "post-Flood" catastrophe(s). Otherwise, they claim, the fossils would have been destroyed by decay and scavengers.

Drever (1997, p. 166-169) states that the bottoms of deep water (eutrophic) lakes may become very anaerobic if the cold bottom waters (the hypolimnion) remain dense and stagnant. That is, the bottom waters of lakes may not experience frequent seasonal mixing and aeration, especially in depositional environments like those of the Green River Formation, where the bottom waters were probably saltier and, therefore more dense, than the surface waters (Drever, 1997, p. 169; Fisher and Roberts, 1991, p. 1147). Fischer and Roberts (1991, p. 1147) and Strahler (1987, p. 233) further discuss in more detail the field and geochemical evidence on why scavengers were often absent in the Green River Formation.

Not only was the deep and quiet water too stagnant (low oxygen) and salty to support scavengers and aerobic decay-promoting bacteria, but the water probably had too much highly poisonous H2S to support scavengers, burrowing organisms, and most bacteria that would have destroyed organic remains and disrupted varve structures. Strong currents would also not have been expected in the stagnant water, so the fish corpses could have remained intact and undisturbed for many years until burial. Nevertheless, Ripepe et al. (1991, p. 1157) show photographs of varves that have undergone possible small-scale bioturbation, so varve disruption and decay may have occurred at some of the sites.

[ February 22, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>

Kosh

Go rent "Buckaroo Bonzai"... you'll get it.

lpetrich

One can collect the text to respond to, collect it into a file, and then write one's responses into that file.

Nice to see some humility.

Whatever a "kind" is supposed to be. And isolating mechanisms between species need not have always existed; different species can evolve in different directions with an isolating mechanism emerging as a way of avoiding the production of awkward hybrids.

And perhaps the Bible is just plain wrong. One gets the impression that some apologists believe that the Bible was written in a secret code that only they have succeeded in cracking.

Microbes can multiply VERY fast. For example, a well-fed Escherichia coli bacterium can divide every 10 minutes, becoming two E. coli bacteria. An individual bacterium has a mass of about 10 picograms, but if it divides for 129 generations with all the descendants being similarly well-fed, the result will be an Earth mass of E. coli bacteria! And this will happen in only 22 hours!

So what would happen is that the descendants of that early microbe would colonize the entire Earth and keep large quantities of primordial soup from forming *anywhere*.

Of course, it could have been that the early Earth had been seeded by time travelers or extraterrestrial visitors, but that would not explain very much.

Here's what's reconstructed: there was once a big stagnant lake, with vegetation and fish and so forth dropping into it. Microbes would eat the first decaying fish, consuming all the oxygen -- which would only be slowly replenished. Without oxygen, fish flesh becomes low-quality food and does not decay very much; thus a dead fish can get stuck undecayed on the bottom of the lake while several years of varves pile up around it. A similar mechanism ccounts for tree stumps that stick through several sediment layers in ohter places.

I remember from my childhood swimming in some lakes in central Pennsylvania that had nearly-undecayed dead leaves on their bottoms; so nearly-undecayed tree stumps and fish are reasonable possibilities.

Human-dinosaur coexistence simply DID NOT HAPPEN. Where are the human and dinosaur fossils found in the same place? Human ancestors like Australopithecus from a couple million years ago would sometimes become the victim of predators, as determined from the tooth marks on some of the finds. But what kind of predators? The tooth marks can tell us. Carnivorous dinosaurs and large reptiles like the Komodo Dragon have a mouthful of similar-sized sharp teeth. However, mammalian carnivores have four big sharp teeth, the canines, alongside their other teeth (look inside the mouths of pet dogs and cats for examples). And on some Australopithecine skulls one finds paired tooth marks that fit a leopard's canines, rather than a line of tooth marks, which is what a dinosaur would produce.

And indeed we find fossils of leopards at their age -- and none of dinosaurs.

However, dragons can easily be inspired by existing reptiles, such as lizards and snakes and crocodilians. In fact, dragon fire-breathing could be an exaggeration of the fierce pain of the bite of a poisonous snake (I've never been bitten by one, so I'm guessing a bit).

That "tail" could be a bowdlerization of "penis".

Why don't you point us to some pictures of dragons so that we can judge for ourselves?

Check out <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html" target="_blank">all these flood stories</a>. Only wishful thinking could make them essentially identical in plot to the story of Noah's Flood. And it's clear that some were copied off of some others; the Roman stories look copied off of the Greek ones, and Noah's Flood is not only a copy a Mesopotamian flood story, it has likely been copied many times.

Compare the Deucalion-Pyrrha flood story to the Mesopotamian/Noachic flood story. In the D-P one, the only survivors are those who reach the tops of high mountains, including D and P; afterwards, D and P repopulate the world by throwing stones behind them. In the M-N one, the only survivors are those who board a certain boat which survives the flood, and they repopulate the world in the normal way.

News to the whole profession of anthropology. Flood stories can simply be exaggerations of familiar sorts of floods. And I think that the ultimate origin of dragon and flood stories may be psychological -- our minds might be drawn to stories of floods and super reptiles for whatever reason.

There is abundant physical proof, which is as strong as anything that one can work out from the past. For starters, there is dendrochronology. Trees have been growing continuously in the US Southwest and near bogs in Germany and Ireland for over 9000 years, as determined from C-14 dating and tree-ring correlation. So why did all those trees keep on growing in all that time? Shall I continue with other evidence, such as ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica?

bluefugue

Dragons don't look much the same in the various cultures where we see them, however, and perhaps the only reason the word "dragon" is used for all of them is that it is a simplified translation. My friend has a book of various dragon images from around the world, and if memory serves there isn't much, anatomically speaking, to unify the different conceptions of what a dragon is. Some look repitilian, some look mammalian, some look like birds. Some have wings, some don't. Some are large, some are small.

Most mythical creatures are based on distorted or juxtaposed versions of everyday animals. A centaur is half-man, half-horse; a gryphon is half-bird, half-lion, etc. That is as far as the basis "in fact" goes. The mythological origin of dragons is not too hard to figure out: probably most dragon images are based on distortions of existing reptiles, or on the juxtaposition of reptilian and mammalian features (try a google image search on "dragon" and see what you come up with, excluding the Dungeons & Dragons-style pictures from the modern era. Do they really look like dinosaurs?). If you look at the classic Chinese dragon, you will note that it looks *nothing* like a dinosaur. It looks more like a snake with legs. There is a <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/raphael/nga-george.jpg" target="_blank">painting by Raphael</a> of St. George slaying a dragon. The dragon in this painting looks like a peculiar mishmash of mammalian and reptilian anatomy -- a doglike head at the end of a long neck, vestigial wings (nothing at all like the proportions that, say, a pterosaur would have), scaly skin. It's not even very big -- in fact it's about the size of a komodo dragon, which is a real reptile that *does* coexist with humans. I had the privilege of seeing a komodo dragon in a zoo in Indonesia, and I can assure you it is a large and fearsome creature, more than sufficient to be the kernel of a myth in times past. So is an anaconda, by the way.

Actual dinosaurs were probably rather birdlike in posture and behavior, and some may have had feathers. I haven't seen a classical image of a dragon that bears much resemblance to what we now believe dinosaurs actually looked like, nor have I seen one that cannot be more simply explained as an exaggerated version of a more mundane animal, or a combination of several animal types, which is how most other mythological creatures (the above-mentioned centaur and gryphon, as well as harpies, unicorns, mermaids, satyrs, chimeras, manticores, etc.) are most parsimoniously explained.

I'm not saying that dragon mythology *couldn't* be based on direct observation of dinosaurs. But as there are so many other ways to explain dragons, ways which better fit the biological data, it is an extremely weak piece of evidence for human-dinosaur co-existence, unless you can find an ancient image of a dragon with a strong anatomical resemblance to known dinosaurs -- and even then you must allow for the possibility that somebody in ancient times simply dug up some dinosaur fossils.

As for the Behemoth in Job, Robert Pennock, in his book Tower of Babel, asserts that, as lpetrich noted above, "tail" is a bowdlerization of "penis." I do not read Hebrew myself, so I cannot speak on this matter with authority; however, some folks who frequent this board do read Hebrew and might be able to offer insight.

[ February 22, 2002: Message edited by: IesusDomini ]</p>

bluefugue

That's a sly semantic trick you're pulling. In science, there is no "absolute" proof of anything. There is no absolute proof that the Earth is a sphere; no absolute proof that germs cause disease; no absolute proof that heliocentrism is true. There is simply an overwhelming body of evidence supporting these theories. Mainstream geologists consider there to be an overwhelming body of evidence suggesting that there was no flood. Personally, I consider that evidence to be of greater value than mythology, which is prone to exaggeration and distortion as it is passed down the generations. How could the ancients have known whether the flood was global, anyway, given the limited cartographic techniques of the time? (If you're going to say they knew it because God told them, then your veneer of "anthropological evidence" is rapidly slipping away.)

Incidentally, your argument that "many cultures" have flood myths hardly makes the argument stronger, from a Noachian perspective, anyway. The argument seems to suggest that these different myths corroborate one another, as if the different cultures were independently observing a global flood. But if the Bible is true, only Noah and his family survived, so there could only be one source for flood myths -- there were no other cultures. Thus, whether the flood were real or mythological, the story would *have* to have diversified from a single original source, and therefore any argument of corroboration, implying multiple primary sources, is misleading.

ps418

On the Green River Formation, one thing I have never seen YECs mention is the massive algal bioherms present in the shoreward facies. There are some excellent pictures of these in Scholle et al., Carbonate Depositional Environments, AAPG Memoir 33, chapter 2. See for instance their figs. 43, 44, 48, 49, and 51. These algal bioherms are very similar to the algal bioherms seen around the margins of Green Lake in Fayetteville, New York, or the dry lake Lake Winnemuca, Nevada.

See their figs. 69-71 for excellent photos of well-developed mudcracks and bird trackways. And fig. 9 shows two core sections taken 5km apart, with interbedded halite and nahcolite.

Leggitt and Cushman recently published an excellent paper documenting the morphology and distribution of some of these algal 'stromatolites.'

V. Leroy Leggitt and Robert A. Cushman Jr., Complex caddisfly-dominated bioherms from the Eocene Green River Formation, Sedimentary Geology 145 (3-4) (2001) pp. 377-396

Complex, caddisfly-dominated (Insecta: Trichoptera) carbonate mounds up to 9 m tall and 40 m in diameter formed in the nearshore environment of Eocene Lake Gosiute. The mounds outcrop for 70 km in reef-like geometries along the northern margin of Lake Gosiute in Wyoming. The relationships among the caddisfly larvae, the benthic microbial mat and physicochemical nearshore processes of Eocene Lake Gosiute resulted in unique external and internal carbonate mound morphology.

Externally, the large carbonate mounds are formed by the lateral and vertical coalescence of several layers of smaller columns. The smaller columns are generally 1-2 m tall and are 0.5-1 m in diameter. Each layer or generation of smaller columns tends to have a unique external morphology. This suggests that variable paleoenvironmental conditions produced subtle differences in tufa and stromatolite morphology.

Internally, each of the smaller columns is composed of a core of caddisfly larval cases surrounded by layers of tufa and stromatolites. The smaller column cores are characterized by centimeter thick microbial-caddisfly couplets in which layers or packets of calcified caddisfly larval cases are covered by microbial mat-mediated, microlaminated carbonate. The microbial-caddisfly couplets suggest that both metazoans and microbes were responsible for column height and shape. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for the growth of these caddisfly-dominated mounds.

The base of the Laney Member of the Green River Formation records a freshwater lacustrine transgression over the surrounding floodplains and mudflats of the Cathedral Bluffs Tongue of the Wasatch Formation. In nearshore areas of the lake's northern margin, carbonate hardgrounds developed in some areas of the softer, carbonate-rich, bottom muds. These hardgrounds provided nucleation sites for the carbonate mounds and columns by providing a stable substrate for the benthic microbial mat and for caddisfly larval case attachment during pupation. The larval cases became calcified, and became a new stable substrate for the benthic microbial mat during, or shortly after, pupation. The microbial-caddisfly couplets may record a yearly cycle in which caddisfly pupation and aggregation behavior regularly interrupted the microbial mat-mediated carbonate buildups in these unique carbonate mounds.

See also:

Leggitt, V. Leroy, and Cushman, Robert A., Jr., 1999, Massive caddisfly bioherms from the Eocene Green River Formation (abst.): Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Denver, CO., Abstracts with Programs, p. A-242.

ps418

BAIT:
And BTW…I really would rather not get into a “flood” debate here. This is one where we’ll agree to disagree..ok? We’ll stick to “creation”…plenty enough to debate right there.

Any theory which purports to explain the history of life on earth will have to explain the distribution of fossil groups in the geologic record. Therefore a discussion of the nature of the geologic record is crucially important to assessing the plausibility of special creation.

If one accepts that the geologic record really does represent accumulation over long periods of time, than the inference to evolution -- in the broad sense of life on earth changing over time -- is virtually inescapable.


Patrick

John Solum

I totally agree with Patrick. As Oolon suggested earlier, why don't we start a new thread devoted to geology. What do you say Ron?

Kosh

This unfortunately, sums up Rons approach to things. He WANTS to believe the bible, and wants
deparately to align it with modern science, so
he uses this this kind of (dare I call it)
"semantic limbo" to convince himself there
aren't any problems.

This isn't a problem for creationists. Remember,
the Tower of Babel incident which scattered people
around the globe and created all the different
languages (uh huh) occurred AFTER the flood.
So those various cultures are just remember back
to a time when they were all in the middle east
and descenced from Noah.

Ie, "Godidit"

Kosh

Ron:

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000117" target="_blank">http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000117</a>