This video is one of the most effective criticisms of Ham’s horrible little monument to ignorance in Kentucky — it’s a geological tour of the rocks the “museum” is built upon. It seems the creationists chose to build on some beautifully fossil-rich Ordovician layers.
It convinces me that if I were in the Cincinnati area I’d rather kick around in the hills around the area than to waste my time in a pile of bunk.
Wow, those are some nice fossil beds. To think how happy I was with my little patch of shale in sountern Minnesota — the kids around Cinncy have it great… assuming parents ever let kids roam around picking up rocks anymore. Course, with those roving gangs of creationists there (with their purple pistols, I hear), parental supervision might be a good thing.
Note to self – go fossil collecting when in the Cincinnati area. No fossils under my feet, though I have snagged some garnets from the schist.
So when will the multitude of Pharyngula readers get to meet up with PZ at the Creation Museum and see how long it takes before we get kicked out?
Very nice fossil site. Superb video.
Dugg and Reddited.
I loved how well the day’s find matched the poster.
It must be so hard to close one’s so entirely so as not
to be struck by the amazing evolution creatures have
undergone and the evidence under our feet.
Someone dredged a lagoon where I grew up and created piles
of dirt with many fossils. Not so many trilobites.
They were a rare find for us.
What we should do is put up a couple billboards along roads that lead to the creation museum explaining to the public that the “evolution museum” is free and can be found simply by stopping at one of the many road cuts in the area and looking at the rocks. If someone knows how much billboard rentals are in the area, maybe we could take up a collection? Seriously, is anyone from that area who might be willing to find out what this would cost?
Great video, excepting the heinous grammatical errors at the end.
I remember finding all sorts of fossils along the Hudson River and in the Catskill Mountains. Is there a map to find out the age of the rocks there?
There were also interesting glacial traces.
They’re starting to pour in to this video’s comments on YouTube and post their little “This supports the flood story” silliness. : Bleh!
We need to see a lot more of this kind of thing. This is exactly what we need to be doing.. the raw evidence with as little interpretation as possible. To be even more effective, I would like to have seen the following emphasized more:
– the multiple layers are shown briefly from a distance and talked about, but what the audience really needs to see is how there are shells in each layer, and that the layers alternate in rock types. A close up of a vertical cross section and how each layer contains shells would have been useful. Also, some examples of how such rock is formed today in living environments.
– I would like to have seen the fact empahsized that many types of organisms are completely missing in these layers rather then mentioned in passing at the end. Examples of modern environments creating similar rocks and what organisms those contain would have been a great comparison
@3: Who’s bringing the beer?
i always see those silly “this supports the bible” arguments on youtube
its good practice to answer them because creationists NEED short easily understood answers …and youtube sorta forces you to do just that
my no-punctuation, ee-cummings-typing style does come in handy there
Far more productive that the reviews of the museum. I was rather disappointed at their content – just glitzy art and wishy-washy “different point of view” statements. Great video – very hands-on and informative.
How could anyone confuse the observed fossils with debris from a flood? I know creationists have invented some sort of explanation for how animals got sorted by size in sedimentary layers, but the cephalopod is at least as big as a mouse or a lizard. Why aren’t there dead rodents mixed in with the fossils? Or pollen grains? Or seeds? Or the skeletons of frogs? Acorns? Imprints of leaves? Where’s all the debris in their debris? The fossils clearly record a marine ecosystem, not flood debris.
The guy kind of makes this point at the end, but I think he should have made it more forcefully (as I guess SMgr is also saying).
The fossil beds around here are great. Ohio was under a shallow sea for a long time, so we have tons and tons of the stuff. There are a lot of hills in the south and east parts of the state, so lots of road cuts–you can just pull off the highway and grab horn coral and trilobite fossils in many places. It’s a lot of fun, and if anyone’s ever in the Dayton/Cincinnati area you should really check it out. Caesar’s Creek state park is one of the better spots to look.
Big Bone Lick State Park isn’t far from Ham’s crackhouse; I’d much rather visit the fossil site than contribute to AiG.
Grand Fromage is not lying. It may be the only good thing about Ohio but the fossil hunting is tremendous, especially in road cuts. Coral and shells litter the stream beds. Also check out Falls of the Ohio State park in Indiana. There are places near Jeffersonville Indiana where you can walk on six foot diameter brain coral fossils.
The coral-like bryozoans mentioned are of a genus called Batosoma
I’ve noticed that the creos post lots of lame videos on youtube and frequently repost links to them. My interpretation is that videos are easier for them than written posts because they are not too bright and barely literate.
When they do post stuff, most of the time their grammar, spelling, and word usage are pretty basic. Sad comment on a cult that attracts inordinate numbers of the dumb.
We need more videos like this. Children need to be exposed to the truth as it really is and not as Ham and his idiot cohorts want them to believe. I was fortunate that as a child I was exposed to the truth and not to myths about man and nature. I remember going on field trips on Saturday mornings with a Mr Thompson I think his name was from the Minneapolis Public Library. It was these trips that formed the foudatiion of what I believe still today about the development of life on earth. This was a long time ago by tne way
Some creationists can dismiss such evidence as being falsified. When I was in about the third or fourth grade in southwest Georgia, I gave a friend of mine a couple of fossils that I had found. He later reported to me that his daddy had cut one of them open with a special knife that he had – a knife that could cut concrete. His daddy had told him that the fossil was made of concrete, and my friend passed that information on to me. I was horrified to hear of at the mutilation of one of my fossil gifts. With hindsight, I can see some twisted human curiosity within the story, but also twisted falsehoods believed and promoted by adults to children.
This is a memory that I had not resurrected for a long time (45 years or so). I wondered at the time about that knife, but not about the nature of the fossils.
Those secularists sure have been busy in Ohio, faking the fossils in those road cuts, along with scattering their fake concrete fossils around the sand dunes of southwest Georgia for who knows how long.
I’ve also just provided a bit of prime property for quote mining, I think. I’ll hope not to have my 15 minutes from this post.
Science is so much more fun than religious indoctrination. Not long ago we took our 9-year-old to the Mogollon Rim here in AZ and collected fossils and crystals.
Parents who drag their kids to church and that crappy museum are cheating their children out of wonderful experiences.
Rates aren’t really *that* bad:
http://www.lamaroutdoor.com/StateRates.aspx?State=OH
Looks like $600 for a month on a billboard. Maybe NCSE or another related educational foundation would be interested in collecting the monies required to rent a billboard?
Calling Ordovician fossils “some of the earliest lifeforms” is a major blunder.
Calling Ordovician fossils “some of the earliest lifeforms” is a major blunder.
I recently went to a lovely museum in BenXi, China, which contains four of the recent dinosaur-bird transitional fossils found in Liaoning.
None of this politico-religionist paddywhackery there.
And just think — these wonderful fossil beds are within a day’s drive of two-thirds of America!
How do we know that maybe God didn’t put those fossils there to trick / test Ken Ham?
Who needs to make up shit about floods, dinosaurs on the Ark and Evilutitonists planting manufactured fossils when the REAL history of how life evolved on our planet is so complex and fascinating that it blows you away?
But that’s just the point – they don’t want to be blown away. Hence the production of comforting fiction.
Max and SMgr, I think the problem is, he *was* very clear in the video and creation advocates still don’t get it. It’s because they’re not seeking the truth; they’re only seeking to reinforce what they believe. So no amount of argument will convince that type of person .I know how that works because I was raised fundamentalist, but fortunately, I was a doubter and skeptic by nature.
As for the video: stellar work. Someone should burn this to a stack of CDs and drop them off on a table inside the Creation Museum, next to whatever literature they have to give away there. You’d be doing the visitors there a great service!
Here is an interview with science writer Natalie Angier that I am sure you won’t want to miss. Another good one to invite onto talk shows.
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/
“I’m personally a really radical die-hard atheist”.
“What’s the evidence for being otherwise.”
Robert S said:
> he was very clear..
Good, but could have been better. We can’t address every possible “problem” the creationists may raise in a short video, but we need to provide raw evidence with as little wiggle room as possible, and with an eye toward addressing the most common misunderstandings. Example: The audience needs to see what a real flood deposit looks like for comparison. They need to see that existing modern environments can produce similar rock layers to those shown in the video without a flood (e.g. an off-shore drill core?).
We won’t convince all creationists. We do need to give borderline individuals reasons to doubt what they are being told as effectively and quickly as possible. The amount of time available to make an impact is small compared to their exposure to contrary ideas.
Regarding billboards: The creationists are already doing this. Example: I’ve seen several of these here on the west coast. http://www.christianpost.com/article/20070517/27466_Anti-Evolution_Billboards_'Evolve'_Man_into_Monkey.htm
PZ, this award doesn’t include a cash prize or a cruise for two to Jamaica, but it’s the one way we knew how to help get some great smaller blogs the recognition they deserve. Phoenix Woman, MEC, and me unanimously voted to give you a Thinking Blogger Award.
Um, sorry about the delay in notification. It’s been hectic.
I appreciate the effort and spirit in the video, but it needs to be better. At least some of the limestones there are tempestites (storm deposits) of shells and so forth smashed up and flung around by violent waves. The creationists can relatively easily present this as violent currents tossing stuff around and leaving billions and billions of dead things lying scattered all over the place. The answer for this set of beds lies in explaining the creationist “hydraulic sorting” explanation, and asking how come every last modern coral, none of which can move, happened to get buried in the flood deposits until after the Paleozoic, while none of many types of Paleozoic corals happened to get swirled up above the Paleozoic beds. Show that lovely bryozoan colony, note that modern and ancient bryozoans live fized in place, and note that not even a single modern bryozoan colony got buried below the Paleozoic, not even the ones that had died in the natural course of events before the flood, nor even the pieces that break off really easily. Demand that the creationists explain how none of the passively floating graptolites of the Paleozoic and early Mesozoic managed to float up into Cenozoic strata. Then talk about how other parts of the geological column show buried ancient soils, mud cracks, salt flats, desert dunes, fossilized termite colonies, dinosaur bests, subaerial lava flows, dinosaur footprints, freshwater lake deposits, hypersaline lakes, fossil roots, huge coral reefs, mounds of spring travertine, and so on and so forth, all supposedly somehow forming in the middle of a global flood.
I agree with those who say that the video is a nice effort. But then, this kind of info is so widely available in so many attractive forms it’s hard to believe anyone could be unaware of such basic facts. This is why I agree more strongly with those who suggest that for creationists to comprehend what the rocks have to tell, they would first have to remove their heads from the sand.
So does this mean geologists are to blame after all, not for failing to make geology appealing, but for not keeping tabs on the even more enticing sand!?!
Good Post, PZ
I happen to live in Ohio and grew up finding indian arrow heads while climbing rocks with grooves made from the glaciers that made the Great Lakes. And, yes, playing around shale formations like those in the video. Of course they had fossils in them, we all knew that. We also knew they made for the perfect skipping stones. If you threw them just right and you could get them to skip ten, eleven and, even, twelve times before the rock, possibly containing a 500 million year old fossil, once again found itself under water.
This video brings into focus how much I take for granted why I am comfortable knowing the earth is old, I grew up seeing it that way.
In response to Heterocronie (#7):
We haven’t looked up the billboard rates yet, but over at This Week in Science we are having a contest to design a billboard for our Unicorn Museum. We want to install the winning billboard across the street from the Creation Museum. We’re currently working on the Unicorn Museum’s website, and any suggestions, assistance, and/or billboard entries are welcome.
mojojojo said:
> But then, this kind of info is so widely available in so many attractive forms it’s hard to believe anyone could be unaware of such basic facts.
Actually this is exactly the problem. Creationists are NOT aware of such facts because they live in a bubble world where such facts are systematically removed and replaced with junk and suspicion. The brief occasions we make forays into that bubble must be as brief, compelling, and rooted in the actual evidence as possible.
>So does this mean geologists are to blame after all, not for failing to make geology appealing, but for not keeping tabs on the even more enticing sand!?!
I don’t see this as an issue of “blaming geologists”. Nor do I see this as making the information “enticing”. Its about establishing a modicum of trust. They do not trust what we are saying because they have been told it is all made up and they are ignorant of the facts. That is why videos like this are important. They can see it for themselves.
This video is a good start, but I’d like to see it taken to the next level.
I think its funny watching everyone freak out when there belief is challenged. If you dare watch one of these professor collage debates between a creationist and an evolutionist. One debate actually has 3 on 1
http://shopping.drdino.com/view_item.php?id=625
but thats only if you want to think for yourself instead of believing what your told. These debates are what opend my eyes.
“It seems the creationists chose to build on some beautifully fossil-rich Ordovician layers.”
Well, they HAD to, in order to be within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the nation. Duh.
Seriously, though, we find fossils hiking all the time out here. Usually it’s just shells, but they’re still awesome.
like creationists are going to understand what a bryozoan or a brachiopod is.
i can see it now. “they’re just shells… what the heck is that supposed to prove?”
The biblical flood story reveals god to be a petty, vindictive, sociopathic, asshole whose only means of dealing with conflict is to kill everyone on the planet (even the blastocysts). Christians should be keeping quiet about the whole food thing and hoping people don’t notice – not using it as supporting evidence for their other beliefs.
SMgr: thanks for restating my point. As you say, in this case the evidence for evolution is right under the creationists feet. It’s fair to say that creationists do not trust science, but the real issue is that they don’t even trust the evidence of their own senses.
I guess what I meant to say was that what the videographer has really unearthed is a mother lode of Irony. But I don’t expect creationists to recognize irony any more than a fossil brachiopod.
Ooh! I want a trilobite!!
But…did he actually say “warsh”?
jay, you’re suggesting that a self-professed propaganda film is a reliable source of information on this topic?
For those who don’t want to click on the link, it’s hosted by Creation Science Evangelism, and the review ends with “After watching this debate, you will be able to take on anybody who believes in evolution.”
The thing is, jay, that debates aren’t really where the best information comes out on these sorts of things. That may sound like a cop-out, but the fact is a debate is won by being light on your feet, regardless what the facts of the matter are. It works well for things like politics, but not so well for science vs. nonscientific things like astrology, moon hoax, or creationism. Debates are won by rhetoric, and it’s easy for someone who’s good at rhetoric to steamroll someone who’s actually right, but isn’t good at looking like it.
Maybe I should clarify my last comment. What I’m talking about, if I wasn’t real clear, was that what goes over well in a debate is snappy comebacks and answers that sound good. Long, careful explanations go over very badly in debates–but science is based on meticulous, well-thought-out explanations (contrary to the way it’s usually portrayed in the movies).
CBC TV Newsworld’s The Lens tonight is showing Cross and Bones about Canada’s embarrassing version of the Flintstone Museum.
What we should do is put up a couple billboards along roads that lead to the creation museum explaining to the public that the “evolution museum” is free and can be found simply by stopping at one of the many road cuts in the area and looking at the rocks.
I like this! And $600/month would be cheap for the publicity it’d get. I can see it now:
“Hey Parents! The Evolution Museum is FREE! Visit http://www.FreeMuseum.com for details. Use the money you save to take your kids to Six Flags instead.”
You all make me laugh. Funny. As Yoda might say, “Idiots you are.”
So how do creationists account for geological formations on other planets within our solar system? God forbid if they ever find fossilized organisms on another planet. Perhaps a really a big flood?
google is your friend:
http://creationanswers.net/astron/REVSS2.HTM
not right on target, but I think you might get some idea of the “source material” a direct answer to your question might be based on.
in fact, your answer will likely resemble this one, found in the claptrap I just linked to:
so the answer is, “we don’t need to: each planet is uniquely designed by Gawd!”