Roller

Hello!

I was just studying gymnosperm life cycle when I saw that when megasporangium undergoes meiosis, four megaspores result. Three of those decompose and only one is left which then develops into a female gametophyte. From what I gathered so far, meiosis always results in four cells. Which then can be looked upon as an evidence of common ancestor, and that such mechanism is ancient. Creator could have circumvented this mess with decomposing. I have not checked Oolon's list of suboptimal design, so if this is already listed I apologize on my redundancy.

Another thing is that my textbook says that the oldest pine (Pinus longaeva) is 4900 years old. If I remember correctly, flood "happened" 2250 BCE. Would pine survive such flood? Those trees should exibit some kind of evidence if flood occured. I am suspecting they are not. As nothing else is.

(edit: corrected spelling errors)

Coragyps

I may be misremembering, but isn't the way that human ova get manufactured along those same lines?

judge

Hi there!

Christians using a flod date of 2300 b.c. seems a "recent" approach. The early church and Josephus (mostly) seemed to rely on a variation of the bible thast placed it in the 4th millenium b.c.

Our english bibles (and AIG for example) use a timeleine that comes from a hebrew variation of genesis that comes from massoretic jews from the middle ages.

Ad Astra

Exactly. If I remember my biology correctly, after the oocyte undergoes meiosis I and meiosis II, four cells are created: three small polar bodies (which then die off) and one large ovum, usually refered to as the egg.

Roller

Then it seems that this pine tree is just another proof how silly YEC's are

Roller

If this constitutes poor design, I hope I'll get into Oolon's subsection of poor design named: "Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Sex but Have Been Forced to Find Out."

Nic Tamzek

Yeah, I think human ova are produced in a similar way. One gets all the cytoplasm and the other three get screwed.

'Course from an energetic perspective the "waste" is trivial but its the principle of the thing.


Regarding the oldest tree, it's Bristlecone pine. I've been to the USFS park where they have the 4,723 year-old Methuselah tree, (the White mountains in California) although they don't tell you which one.

Can't find a USFS site but here's another one.
http://www.nps.gov/brca/bristlecone_pine.html

So, the oldest tree is probably not as old as the supposed flood -- but when trees die up at 12,000 feet they take thousands of years to decay. So the dendro people have cored snags and dead logs, and found ring patterns in dead trees that match up with the ring patterns in live trees. By such methods they've extended the continuous ring record back a long ways:

...and guess what, no flood discovered...

http://www.botanik.uni-bonn.de/conif...n/longaeva.htm