In the endless comment thread in the post that dealt with the congressional hearings (262 comments and counting!), the original topic has long been forgotten and the discussion now deals with creationist theories that seek to reconcile scientific knowledge about Earth’s geology with a biblical-based chronology. These attempts at reconciliation have a long history and I dealt with this topic on pages 68-75 of my book The Great Paradox of Science. I reproduce that section below for those interested in the history of how these creationist beliefs came about, starting with Bishop Ussher’s influential calculation in 1650 CE that the age of the Earth was about 6,000 years old. It also shows the beginning of the convergence of studies from a wide variety of scientific fields to arrive at the current consensus that the age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years.
The acceptance of Ussher’s calculation for the age of the Earth had implications outside of religion, in particular for the embryonic field of geology. Early geologists were struggling to understand the origins of the major features of the Earth such as the existence of high mountains and steep canyons. The discovery of seashell fossils on the tops of mountains suggested to them that at one time the tops of mountains must have been below sea level and that either sea levels had once risen above them or that the mountains had got pushed up. Nicolaus Steno (1638–1687) and Robert Hooke (1635–1703) also found evidence for layers of geological strata that suggested that various sequential processes were at work in the creation of the Earth’s crust (Curler 2003).
Steno and Hooke did not try to use that information to fix the date of the Earth because it was assumed that that question had already been answered. Their focus instead was on how these major geological features could be consistent with Ussher’s calculation for the age for the Earth. Having only a few thousand years at their disposal, scientists of that period were led to the idea that mountains and valleys and fossils and sedimentary rocks had to be caused by sudden cataclysmic events such as earthquakes and floods, including the Great Flood of Noah. This model came to be labeled catastrophism, that the Earth’s features were shaped by one major catastrophe after another that enabled major geological features to emerge relatively quickly. Rene Descartes (1596–1650) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) were names closely associated with this idea (Burchfield 1975, 5).
But Ussher’s work coincided with the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment and that brought with it the beginning of a separation of scholarly thinking from religious dogma, enabling scientists to speculate more freely and broadly about all matters, including the age of the Earth. As the desire and need for conformity with biblical estimates weakened, scientists started devising alternative theories for the formation of the Earth and the universe that were not explicitly linked to biblical stories. Immanuel Kant (1724–1793) and Pierre Laplace (1749– 1847) created a new model of the universe called the nebular hypothesis that used Newton’s laws of mechanics and his theory of gravitational attraction to explain the formation and evolution of the solar system. This model said that stars and planets such as the Earth originated as clouds of gases that coalesced under gravity. In the process, their initial kinetic and gravitational energies were transformed into heat energy that resulted in, for the planets, initially molten bodies that over time had their heat dissipate to give us the relatively cool Earth (at least on its surface) with a solid crust that we now have.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), was one of the first to try to pin an actual number to the age of the Earth using only scientific theories and data. He used estimates of the initial internal heat of the Earth and its rate of cooling to arrive at a value of about 75,000 years, a result that he published in 1778 (Jackson 2006, 117). Although that number is wildly off the mark by modern standards, we must remember that he was working before the field of modern thermodynamics and its associated laws governing heat flows had been formulated, and at a time when thermometers were just coming into being. In order to estimate the parameters involved in cooling, Buffon did experiments involving the cooling of metal spheres that used the extremely crude method of actually touching objects with his hands to judge when two objects were at the same temperature. He was aware that his methods were crude and suspected that the actual age of the Earth could be much greater, possibly up to ten million years (Rudwick 2014, 66).
Despite these understandable shortcomings, Buffon’s result was a significant development in two respects: it used purely secular scientific reasoning to arrive at an age for the Earth; and the age he reported completely broke with a Bible- based chronology, going well over the roughly 6,000 years that people believed the Bible required. This caused the theologians at the Sorbonne to complain bitterly. This would not have bothered Buffon too much since he was an influential figure and thus immune from the dangers that ordinary heretics might face, though he was willing to make some conciliatory remarks in later editions of his book. Incidentally, Buffon had earlier published the first of his three-volume Histoire Naturelle in 1749 which, over a hundred years before Darwin’s Origins book was published, suggested that the descendants of ancestral organisms, aided by migration and geographic separation, could diverge thus leading to the creation of new species (Henig 2000, 97–98). He also made explicit the increasingly widespread idea that human beings appeared at a very late stage in Earth’s history, contradicting the biblical Genesis story that human history and the Earth’s history covered the same time span apart from the first five days before the creation of humans. This too had angered the Sorbonne theologians, suggesting that ruffling theological feathers with heterodox views did not unduly worry him.
This new freedom of thought stimulated interest in those areas of knowledge that we now label as geology and paleontology as scientists started to investigate the origins of the Earth and its fossils without the stringent constraints of biblical chronology. As mentioned before, people like Steno and Hooke had earlier observed the presence of seashells and other fossils on mountain tops and patterns in the layers of rock strata, and had used that information to create theories of geological formation in which rock layers were formed by sedimentation, with newer layers of rock settling on top of older ones. But they had not used this insight to actually try to date the Earth, because the biblical ages were the accepted beliefs in their time.
But now their early work formed part of the basis of the new sciences of geology and paleontology, combining the theory of slow sedimental formation with the ordering of fossils in the layers of rocks in which they were found. The clear pattern of evolution that emerged in the rock strata (with simpler fossils being found in the layers lower down and more complex ones in layers higher up) led paleontologists such as Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and Jean- Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) to suggest that the process of geological formation must have been quite slow, and required far more time than the Genesis story allowed, even though these early paleontologists were Christians. Steno, for example, was born into a Lutheran family and trained as an anatomist and geologist but later converted to Catholicism, became a monk, and gave up his scientific work in favor of theological studies, and Cuvier was religiously orthodox. But they all felt that the Bible should not be the source of empirical data for investigating the age of the Earth and that the evidence supplied by the Earth itself could reveal its origins. They felt that the truths revealed by the “book of nature” should be complementary to the truths revealed by the “book of God” and thus were untroubled by the possibility of any contradiction emerging.
A major development occurred when James Hutton (1726–1797) published a paper in 1785 that put into print ideas that had been circulating widely at that time that argued that catastrophes and great floods were not necessary to explain the features of the Earth; that they could have been caused entirely by the slow and steady accumulation of small changes (Rudwick 2014, 68). In 1788 he argued in another paper that not only was the Earth infinitely old, it would also last forever, saying: “The result, therefore, of our present enquiry is that we find no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end” (Jackson 2006, 92).
These events were markers of the decline of catastrophism and the birth of the model known as uniformitarianism, which was the label attached to the idea that major changes could and did occur because of the steady accumulation of infinitesimal ones, and the forces that were shaping the geological features at present were the same as they had always been. It was clear to this school of thinkers that adopting this perspective meant that the Earth had existed for a vastly longer period of time than even Buffon had suggested. Some thought it extended back infinitely far and may have had cyclic upheavals that led to the rising and sinking of continents, while others thought it was not infinitely old but just extremely old, so old that they were not that interested in pinning down an actual age or thought that it could even be done. They assumed that sufficient time was available for their model of a slow rate of tiny changes producing large effects to work.
In the early 1800s, geology became recognized as a formal professional discipline. Societies were formed (the Geological Society of London, the oldest national geological society, was established in 1807), university professorships were created, systematic surveys began to be done of geological strata, detailed classifications made, and studies published. It was during this period that Charles Lyell (1795–1875) published the first volume of Principles of Geology (1830). His book was a best seller, 15,000 copies being purchased in its first edition alone and going through ten subsequent editions, and he emerged as a leader in this new field. Significantly, as we will see later, Charles Darwin was aware of his work and they became friends later on.
Lyell too argued in favor of the uniformitarian position that the Earth was extremely old, old enough to be indeterminate even if not infinite, sufficient to produce all geological features through the process of very small but cumulative changes. He additionally argued that the present rate of geological change could be assumed to have been constant over time and thus could be used to extrapolate backward to find out when specific geologic features began to be formed. As Lyell put it, “the present is the key to the past” (Jackson 2006, 130), and that this implied a sort of steady state for a largely unchanging Earth. Lyell and other uniformitarians were successful in persuading all but the most biblically committed that the Earth was far older than earlier, purely textual, studies had estimated, and by around 1850 this idea was predominant though not unchallenged. The main debate was whether the present rate and intensity of geological events had remained the same for all time or whether those could have been greater in the past, thus shortening the estimates of the Earth’s age (Rudwick 2014, 171).
By now, Enlightenment values had taken firm hold, science and rationality were on the rise, and religion could no longer rely on dogmatic assertions to suppress ideas that it found unpalatable, such as that of a very old Earth. So the strategy of those who wished to preserve the idea of an Earth that was a few thousand years old shifted to creating alternative narratives that had a scientific veneer that would make their religion-based conclusions more acceptable. The subsequent debate is illustrative for the purposes of this book because it shows how it is always possible to construct alternative theories to salvage one’s beliefs or to promote a particular agenda.
Although this particular example involves those with a religious agenda, they are by no means unique in adopting this strategy and secular groups with an economic or political agenda have followed similar approaches. If you cannot dethrone science as the main source of reliable knowledge, the next best thing is to try to undermine trust in its conclusions by appearing to use science itself, or at least particular features of it, to advance a conclusion that is outside the scientific consensus. This is a practice that has continued down to the present day in the shape of some arguing that climate change is either not happening or is not caused by human activity, that vaccines cause autism, that smoking is harmless, and so on. The specific issues and groups may change but the pattern remains the same. It is important to not summarily dismiss these groups just because their conclusions lie so far outside the scientific consensus. Their ideas are accepted by large swathes of people and one must understand their reasoning in order to better counter them.
In reaction to the rise in the mid-nineteenth century of uniformitarianism in geology and its concomitant idea of an extremely old Earth with possibly no beginning at all, there was a resurgence of biblical literalism that manifested itself in an alternative school of thought known as Neptunism or Flood Geology, that argued that water was the main cause of changes in the Earth’s features. Because it was no longer sufficient to appeal to the authority of the Bible, this theory was advanced by those seeking to convince people that Bible-based estimates for a very young age of the Earth had a scientific justification. Some of the adherents of Neptunism were convinced that the Great Flood of Noah was sufficient to create the major geological features and thus preserve the biblical chronology; consequently this group steadfastly rejected any attempts to make the Earth older than 6,000 years or so.
One of the most well-known proponents of this theory was George McCready Price (1870–1963), who tried to make the case that scientific evidence supported a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. The numbers of people who supported Price and his Flood Geology theory remained small until the rise of the creationist movement in the United States that was facilitated by the publication in 1961 of the book The Genesis Flood that built on Price’s ideas (Whitcomb and Morris 1961). While John Whitcomb was a theologian, Henry Morris had a doctoral degree in hydraulic engineering with minors in geology and mathematics. He later founded the Institute for Creation Research in 1970 to advance these ideas, and that institution still exists with the same goals.
Even though scientists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were often religious, most seemed to accept the idea of an extremely old Earth and were willing to concede that a strictly literal acceptance of biblical chronology was too restrictive and required the existence of unrealistically strong forces to create its effects in such a short time. To meet the need to resolve the contradiction between religious and scientific beliefs, religious apologists who were more sophisticated than the Flood Geologists now sought to find ways to reconcile an extremely old Earth with their religious texts, something that happens repeatedly when scientific evidence contradicts religious beliefs. But while Price and others sought to change science to agree with the Bible, these new attempts went in the opposite direction and consisted of inventing new interpretations of the scriptures that were consistent with scientific estimates of an old Earth. After doing so, some even went further and argued that this new agreement showed that the Bible was correct because it predicted that the Earth was old.
One version of this new biblical interpretation is what is known as the “Gap” (or “Ruin-Reconstruction”) theory that arose in the early nineteenth century. This theory claimed to find a “gap” between Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”) and Genesis 1:2 (“Now the earth was form- less and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters”) that allowed for an indefinite amount of time, and that gap was used to insert a very old, unspecified age of the universe in which matter was first created, followed by nonhuman life and the formation of fossils. This gap allowed for multiple cataclysms and is flexible enough to accommodate most geologic evidence. But when it comes to the first appearance of humans, the model reverts to that of strict standard creationism with a Garden of Eden and the first humans Adam and Eve created in six 24-hour days in 4004 b.c.e. followed in 2348 b.c.e. by Noah’s flood, which in this model need not be a global flood but could be a local phenomenon, and so on (Numbers 1992).
A different reinterpretation of the Bible had an even more flexible structure and is known as the “Day-Age” model. This allows for a very old, unspecified age of the universe in which matter was first created, followed by life, the formation of fossils, and finally human beings. Noah’s flood is still a historical event in this model but it could be a local phenomenon. The six “days” of creation in the Genesis story are now interpreted allegorically as representing long but in- determinate ages in time, whence comes the name of this model, and hence all the major events in Genesis have unspecified dates that can accommodate values obtained using the standard dating techniques of science. Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden story are also interpreted metaphorically and not as actual historical people and events (Numbers 1992).
Nowadays one rarely finds people who believe in the Gap model. Christians, especially in the United States, seem to be either young-Earth Flood Geologists or some form of Day-Agers. Islamic creationists and some of the more sophisticated Christian apologists, including those in the so-called intelligent design movement, also adopt variants of the Day-Age model, because it enables them to finesse some of the contradictions between science and religion. William Jennings Bryan, a key player in the Scopes trial of 1925 that challenged the teaching of evolution in American schools, seemed to be a believer in the Day- Age model but under questioning during the trial, possibly for tactical reasons related to the specifics of that case, responded as if he was a believer in the more restrictive Gap model (Larson 1997; Singham 2009, 35–52).
As I said above, if one is determined enough it is always possible, by adding ad hoc hypotheses that are not required to make any testable predictions or be consistent with other theories, to construct alternative theories to salvage one’s beliefs or to promote a particular agenda. That is one major difference between scientific and dogmatic ways of thinking.
As per your first paragraph, the age of the Earth is not 13.7 billion years. The age of the Earth is 4.5 billion years. The age of the universe is 13.7 years. Yeah, brain fart, but worth fixing.
[Thanks! I have corrected it. -- Mano]
@ahcuah: “The age of the universe is 13.7 years.” I’m almost certain it’s older than that.
There’s also a “wscientific” and a ” form- less ” embedded hyphenation…
[Thanks! I corrected them. -- Mano]
@1 ahcuah -- It’s still on the same order of magnitude -- a factor of three, whereas the YECs are off by two full orders of magnitude -- a factor or roughly a million.
I know you meant to put that in billions of years, but leaving aside that, the figure is closer to 13.8 billion years.
Also, it’s better to describe that as the time elapsed since the Big Bang (in the sense meaning an event, not the whole class of models describing expansion, of course), because that fact is nonetheless consistent with the possibility that the world has an infinite past. Since these issues with religious claims really hang on the broader cosmological question anyway, the right thing to say is that we just don’t know yet but that it’s at least ~13.8 billion years.
@#4
Sorry, but I don’t think a single cosmologist anywhere in the world would agree with you. As Einstein used to say, “We measure time with clocks”. “Clocks” in this context means any process whose rate of change can be determined, such as the rate of decay of radioactive atoms in rocks, or the rate of galaxies expanding away from each other, or the rate of cooling of the cosmic background radiation. Without a clock, science can say nothing about time and there simply are no clocks older than the Big Bang.
I know it feels in your gut that there must have been stuff happening before the BB, I feel that way myself. But if you are going to use science to counter religious claims, you can’t then stir your own gut feelings into the mixing bowl because they are NOT science. Science says that time began at the BB, and that anything before the BB cannot be defined AT ALL.
Crap, I meant my post to reply to CR’s #5, not #4.
moarscienceplz, #6:
I have no idea where you got this, but plenty of cosmologists do in fact work on stuff like that, and those are tied up with theories of inflation, multiverses, and so forth.
I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said it’s possible, and that doesn’t come from a feeling in my gut.
I don’t actually care if it you call it metaphysics or whatever else. And it’s not really about countering religious claims, which are hopeless as far as I’m concerned. I just want to know things about the world, because I’m curious and interested.
At some point, relativity just breaks down and we can’t derive any valid conclusions from it beyond that breaking point. That’s what “science says” to the extent I understand it, and I don’t know of anyone studying it who believes there was actually an initial singularity. It doesn’t matter what you think Einstein said about clocks.
We measure time from the BB, but as I understand it, that is simply due to the fact that it’s not possible to see beyond that point with our methods. If the BB reset all the matter atomically, it implies that there was some form of the universe that precedes the BB.
Tethys @9:
Using the word ‘reset’ already implies something preceding, so that’s circular. We think we have a handle on what has happened from very shortly after the BB, but the rest (the BB itself, whatever you think that means, and ‘before the BB’) is speculation. A quantum theory of gravity could cast some light, but don’t hold your breath.
Some people claim there is no conflict between science and religion.
Yet Young Earth Creationists exist.
They’ll deny geology and hydrology and radioisotope dating and dendrochronology and paleontology and so forth, lest they are forced to accept the Bible is neither literal nor inerrant.
(As I’ve noted in the past, their puny God can’t work with forces such as those, and must merely ‘poof’ things into existence. Other theists manage to imagine a less puny God, the type of theists that helped originate the scientific disciplines YECs must wilfully reject)
Big Bang fits Genesis better; a formless void then Fiat Lux.
John @11:
The second sentence implies that what you meant by the first sentence was “Some people claim that no religious beliefs are in conflict with science”, which you know perfectly well is absurd. If you know of any such people, please name them.
It seems that, every few days at least, you feel compelled to write something ridiculous.
John @12: Funny story. The father of the Big Bang theory was indeed a father; a Catholic priest. Some atheist scientists refused to accept his theory precisely because it was too much like the biblical creation story. Oh dear, maybe atheism is incompatible with science (by your standards of evidence anyway).
Rob,
Duh. I already did: Young Earth Creationists.
(What exactly did you think the OP was about?)
Ridiculous perhaps, but indisputably true nonetheless.
<snicker>
(As I’ve noted in the past, their puny God can’t work with forces such as those, and must merely ‘poof’ things into existence. Other theists manage to imagine a less puny God, the type of theists that helped originate the scientific disciplines YECs must wilfully reject)
John, do you think people can’t read English?
If by that you meant that YECists think there is no conflict between science and religion, or even that they are a subset of those who do, you need more English lessons (whether or not YECists do think that). Because it says nothing of the sort.
“13.7 years”. I imagine there is some law that says correcting someone else’s brain fart will cause one’s own brain fart.
Rob:
Go read what txpiper wrote if you doubt me — far as they are concerned, all those sciences and more are wrong, because txpiper practices proper science.
Far as they are concerned, science shows the Earth is 9,000 years old.
Far as they are concerned, evolution is not a thing. At all.
Far as they’re concerned, the Grand Canyon was formed in historical times.
And so forth.
Again (to belabour the point): either one adjusts one’s religious beliefs to accommodate science, or one adjusts one’s scientific beliefs to accommodate religion.
Because the two are in conflict unless the proposed deity can supposedly exist within what gaps remain in science. Quantum indeterminacy, for example.
And their deity becomes ever more abstract and hands-off, because science marches on. Obviously, beliefs are easier to change than is the nature of reality.
Which is what impelled the popularity of Deism amongst the intelligencia around the time of the Enlightenment.
Hands-off deities are much more compatible with science.
Rob Grigjanis@ 10
I’m using it in the sense of a starting point from which we calculate the age of the universe, as was clear from my comment. The term reset is leaking over from the terminology that is used to discuss U-Pb and other forms of dating which use zircon or quartz crystals
What a bizarre thing to say. ‘Whatever I think’
is pretty clearly that we measure time from the BB. I don’t have a personal theory of creation that conflicts with physics.
Just as the universe is expanding into ‘“something”, there had to be “something” that went bang.
John,
Thanks for the sophomoric lecture. But how is quantum indeterminacy a gap in science? If you meant to say that some people see that as a gap, you have yet another meaning fail.
I’d still like to see an explanation of how what you wrote in #11, and I quoted in #13, implies that YECists think that there is no conflict between science and religion (again, whether or not they actually think that), as you claim (with a “Duh”) in #15.
Tethys @20:
Nothing bizarre about it. Some people include inflation in their definition of Big Bang, some don’t. I have no idea where you stand.
ahcuah, #17:
You were only off by nine zeros, though. That still fits on two hands, no? Not such a big deal. It happens to the best of us.
But I just couldn’t let it go with the missing 100 million years. That would put us in the Cretaceous period, looking something like this. (Or for txpiper, it was a somewhat dreary Tuesday with a chance of asteroid in the evening.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20090504025624/https://biologos.org/questions/evolution-and-divine-action/
(Page mysteriously went down a few years ago, but the Net remembers)
Excerpt:
“The mechanical worldview of the scientific revolution is now a relic. Modern physics has replaced it with a very different picture of the world. With quantum mechanical uncertainty and the chaotic unpredictability of complex systems, the world is now understood to have a certain freedom in its future development. Of course, the question remains whether this openness is a result of nature’s true intrinsic chanciness or the inevitable limit to humans’ understanding. Either way, one thing is clear: a complete and detailed explanation or prediction for nature’s behavior cannot be provided. This was already a problem for Newtonian mechanics; however, it was assumed that in principle, science might eventually provide a complete explanation of any natural event. Now, though, we see that the laws of nature are such that scientific prediction and explanation are ultimately limited.
It is thus perfectly possible that God might influence the creation in subtle ways that are unrecognizable to scientific observation. In this way, modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law breaking miracles. Given the impossibility of absolute prediction or explanation, the laws of nature no longer preclude God’s action in the world. Our perception of the world opens once again to the possibility of divine interaction.”
(Francis Collins’ Biologos)
Or eight zeros, really, if we’re including the digit right after the decimal point. You know what I mean.
Glad that silly fucker is gone from the NIH.
Rob I don’t know where you stand.
I think that I don’t know enough about the science involved to have opinions about whether inflation is separate from the actual BB, or if it was a singular bang, or multiple.
I do know that an asteroid strike will reset any native zircons, and also create a rain of new zircons which can yield very precise dating.
The Tanis site is truly a wondrous treasure trove of fossils, and hard evidence for the demise of the dinosaurs. It’s also proof that the earth is not anywhere close to 6,000 years old.
Rob, #10:
The claim was that P implies Q. That’s not circularity. That’s just implication (as you both agree), which is not a problem. The antecedent could be false, and there was nothing about deriving it from itself (or from anything else for that matter).
@17:
Yep, Muphry’s Law.
It’s hard to believe that someone as intelligent as Francis Collins can be so naïve about what motivates evangelical Christians. I REALLY thought I could get them to accept evolution! I don’t know what happened!
BioLogos wasn’t designed with sufficient intelligence, obviously. But what else could you expect? They’re doing God’s work, and he’s a fucking genocidal maniac.
@CR
Thanks for the confirmation that my initial comment was not circular, and the concise lesson in logic. Rob did have a point that the word reset was redundant.
Setat the BB would be more precise.
In the same way that zircons can be reset by the force of an asteroid impact, it seems analogous that the amount of energy in the BB would overprint anything that existed in the matter that it contained during expansion, if my reasoning is correct.
I’m always happy to learn more about the subject, as I’m truly curious about what exists outside the expanding edges of the universe, and if the Big Bang is a cyclical event much like the other natural process of creating stars, and galaxies.
I find it amazing today that people believe an old book more than facts they can see with their own eyes. Go to the Grand Canyon and believe that happened in 6000 years; one’s faith must be strong to deny reality.
I wonder what it was like for the early geologists, why did they believe an old book? That belief must have been so central to their culture and society that they couldn’t see past it, but even then they knew that millions of people around the world had different beliefs than theirs.
It’s just an old book. It was an early effort of pre-scientific people who didn’t differentiate between myth and facts to explain their history and justify their position in the world, but it’s just an old book.
I always loved that little segment in the history of geology, where they go over the various attempts past scholars had made to try and determine the age of the Earth with the info they had access to at the time. Personally, I find it a fascinating topic, to learn about how various people addressed a particular problem. Lots of errors and incorrect conclusions, in retrospect, but I think it’s pretty impressive the ways they tried to address the problem.
I also think it’s kinda amazing that plate tectonics and continental drift didn’t really become widely accepted until sometime in the 1960s, if I remember correctly. I feel like those are just as fundamental to modern geology as Darwin’s idea of evolution through natural selection is to biology. Except, that’s just a generation or two ago -- When I was briefly studying geology, I had a couple profs who had earned their degrees before Plate Tectonics was the standard, and I just think that’s fucking wild… To be participating in a field when such a fundamental idea spreads and gains acceptance…
Also, this fascination over learning how we learn things, and our current understanding of the universe, is offset by a sadness/pity for those so bound by religious dogma that they close their eyes to all this beauty and so many fascinating topics, and claim that the sum total of knowledge about the universe can be found in a mere thousand pages or so…
“Far as they are concerned, evolution is not a thing. At all.”
.
Creationists have to accept adaptation, even radical adaptation. The dispute is actually about direction, and processes.
Most creationists think, or should think, that the human genome began perfect, was modified to accommodate death, and is slowly deteriorating due to mutations. Jerry Bergman writes about this here: https://trueorigin.org/mutations01.php
Evolutionists think that random mutations/natural selection or raw chemical accidents produced, and are producing, absolutely everything biological, and pre-biological. Statistics and probabilities, gigantic chicken first/egg first problems, hyper-complex things like ribosome and other considerations that make evolution unpalatable for creationists.
Actually I think scientific ignorance, innumeracy, and motivated reasoning are far larger contributors. As you’ve ably demonstrated.
Is Mental Gymnastics an Olympic sport yet?
Nobody needs to read another inane comment by txpiper on the subject of evolution or his personal theories of ignorance. We invented the scientific method because the stupid ideas in his collection of stories were clearly wrong.
His belief system resulted in plague, colonialism, and assholes on the Supreme Court.
txpiper:
— Eggs came first, hundreds of millions of years ago.
— Much later, many bird species were among the survivors of the mass extinction about 66 million years ago.
— Then came Gallus gallus, which broke off from its cousins as a distinct species a few million years ago.
— Then came the chicken, Gallus domesticus, roughly eight thousand years ago, when humans began domesticating them…. Not long ago in the big scheme of things, but still significantly older than the universe (the whole thing), according to YEC.
Problem solved. Creationists are wrong (again).
Wait, what?
What happened to “sapient, clairvoyant, precognitive” DNA? Did you forget that you promoted that just a few days ago? On July 4, even — Independence Day for Independent DNA.
This kind of chicken first/egg first problem:
.
The Wikipedia entry for Ribosome says:
“Ribosomes…are macromolecular machines, found within all cells, that perform biological protein synthesis (mRNA translation). Ribosomes link amino acids together in the order specified by the codons of messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules to form polypeptide chains.”
On the other hand:
“In bacterial cells, ribosomes are synthesized in the cytoplasm through the transcription of multiple ribosome gene operons. In eukaryotes, the process takes place both in the cell cytoplasm and in the nucleolus, which is a region within the cell nucleus. The assembly process involves the coordinated function of over 200 proteins in the synthesis and processing of the four rRNAs, as well as assembly of those rRNAs with the ribosomal proteins.”
.
So, which came first? The synthesized proteins, or the protein synthesizer? It is not hard to understand why it is better to avoid getting tangled up in particulars, and just say that something evolved.
Neptunism and Flood Geology are different things, from different eras. Neptunism was the position that all rocks are sedimentary deposits (not that all rocks were deposited in the Noachian Flood).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptunism
You’re just not thinking fourth dimensionally, Owlmirror. When you modify it to accommodate death, whatever that means, then it needs to slowly deteriorate due to mutations. (Not too slowly, though. There isn’t that much time.) But the DNA knows how this will happen in advance, you see, since Jesus retroactively gave it those powers as he flew into the sky, and that’s what really matters. It’s all perfectly obvious and self-explanatory, assuming you’ve got a decent grasp of the basics that, scientifically speaking, (most) people in marginalized groups should burn in hell forever, along with anyone who doesn’t believe the right things.
Oh, I see. So what I said about chickens and eggs is not a problem for you? Okay then. Welcome to atheism, I guess. Now fuck off.
Bacterial cells are prokaryotes, which predate the eukaryotes. That quote mentions the nucleus because bacterial cells don’t have one.
“Prokaryotes are organisms whose cells lack a nucleus and other organelles. Prokaryotes are divided into two distinct groups: the bacteria and the archaea, which scientists believe have unique evolutionary lineages. “
@41
Read the entire article you linked to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome#Origin
txpiper, as larpar points out, you didn’t read your own source. You don’t even need to read the whole page to see the ‘origin’ subheading, just look at the contents panel directly under the opening paragraph. If you were genuinely interested in finding answers, I think you’d have seen that. Or you could do the other classic move when wanting to find something out: google it.
But you did neither of those, because you aren’t interested in finding answers. Your claimed interest in the matter only goes as far as finding shallow justifications for your wilful ignorance and no more.
”…may have…when amino acids began to appear…Studies suggest… could have…evidence strongly points to ancient ribosomes as self-replicating complexes…could have…amino acids gradually appeared…the driving force for the evolution of the ribosome…into its current form as a translational machine may have been the selective pressure to incorporate proteins into the ribosome’s self-replicating mechanisms…”
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This is exactly the kind of convoluted, nonsensical pulp that makes Holms swoon.
Natural selection removes organisms that are not suited for their environment. It is not a fairy that makes wishes come true.
txpiper @48: We’ve gone from the age of the Earth to biology. So how about cosmology? I’d love to hear your analysis of general relativity and its application to the age of the universe.
So can you tell us, @txpiper, what parts of that “convoluted, nonsensical pulp” are actually wrong?
Statistics and probabilities, gigantic chicken first/egg first problems, hyper-complex things like ribosome and other considerations that make evolution unpalatable for creationists.
Oh please. There’s only one thing that makes evolution “unpalatabie for creationists,” and that’s its failure to acknowledge their god. All those other things you mention are just rationalizations and diversions. Which, BTW, are not quite the same rationalizations and diversions they’ve been screaming about ten years ago; and probably won’t be the same as they’ll be screaming about ten years from now.
To adapt my favorite quote from one of the worst TV shows ever made: We know that you know that we know that you’re lying.
In the endless comment thread in the post that dealt with the congressional hearings (262 comments and counting!), the original topic has long been forgotten and the discussion now deals with creationist theories that seek to reconcile scientific knowledge about Earth’s geology with a biblical-based chronology.
Gosh, I wonder whose fault that is…
There isn’t any evidence of a world wide flood, so it doesn’t matter that one book claims that a god created earth, had a temper tantrum and murdered every living creature.
The Tanis site does have flood deposits, however they are full of dinosaurs, fish, and marine reptiles, so txpiper doesn’t want to discuss those flood deposits.
Scientists are also studying the flood deposits near the Sudbury impact site, and have recently published some very interesting papers on their results.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020M%26PS…55.2727G/abstract
Here is another paper on the biogenic carbon that was deposited within the Sudbury impact crater by marine life forms.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016703716301661
A lack of geological evidence of the biblical flood is only one ‘proof’ that the story is false.
What of all the endemic terrestrial animals ‘discovered’ in the new world such as the many species of gecko and skink found only in New Caledonia, the numerous flightless birds or giant flightless crickets known as Weta found in New Zealand, or the Dodo of Mauritius?
What about brookesia micra? How did noah even find this species to save it from the flood?
Did noah manage a quick santa-claus run in his magical unpowered boat to all these lands that were unknown at the time? Did he and his family row the damned thing around the world?
I don’t expect txpiper to profer anything useful about how all these species came to be located where they were found beyond some nonsense about mutational degeneration of his creator’s perfect DNA, even though according to txpiper mutations don’t produce new species.
#48 txpiper
I sure do love me an investigable hypothesis! By contrast, you’re much more of a ‘because the Bible says so’ kind of guy. And so you maintain your wilful ignorance.
“what parts of that “convoluted, nonsensical pulp” are actually wrong?”
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Nothing was stated about the actual origin of ribosome. Just standard, obligatory evo-prose, spiced up with crowd-pleasing stuff like this:
“evidence strongly points to ancient ribosomes as self-replicating complexes…”
Super-complex, functional, purposeful things like ribosome do not form for no reason, even in a mythical RNA world.
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By the way, did you guys see what all is involved in spider venom in Professor Myers Don’t panic, it’s just a spider bite post?
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”…cutting-edge approaches has been used to deeply characterise S. nobilis venom. Mining of transcriptome data for the peptides identified by proteomics revealed 240 annotated sequences, of which 118 are related to toxins, 37 as enzymes, 43 as proteins involved in various biological functions, and 42 proteins without any identified function to date.”
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Pretty impressive, huh? How many random mutations/generations of evolutionary tinkering and honing would you supposed it took to produce something like that? Maybe you could ask Professor Myers (but he can be rather touchy about such inquiries). If you do, ask him about another chicken/egg problem. Did these evolve simultaneously with the venom, or did that happen in a separate fairy tale?
The Chelicerata have a fossil record that extends to the Cambrian. Spiders in particular have feeding appendages which function as venomous fangs. Other members of the group have a venomous tail. I guess the divine tinker was feeling creative when deciding where to put the various appendages.
According to the Chelicerata wiki:
Venom has evolved three times in the chelicerates; spiders, scorpions and pseudoscorpions, or four times if the hematophagous secretions produced by ticks are included.
Venom predates fangs on terrestrial spiders by a few hundred million years. Sea spiders are distant relatives to land spiders despite their very similar appearance.
txpiper with another squirm, this time to spider venom!
They formed in much the same way everything else did: stochastic natural processes. Chemical reactions aren’t a matter of the atoms wanting anything, they do it as a result of attractive and repulsive forces. It is also worth noting the source used in PZ’s post accepts evolution as the source for that venom complexity, but of course your method is to quote selected bites of sources, just the bits that suit your current point.
(“For no reason” is a very strange wording, possibly coming from your seeing divine agency in everything.)
txpiper seems to have a remarkable reading level for someone who’s at about a 2nd grade level comprehension in every other subject. They may be reading at a 5th or even 6th grade level.
keep at it, txpiper, and you may learn something…
Many marine animals are venomous, and there are also multiple species of marine microbial life that are capable of horizontal gene transfer.
It’s entirely possible that the ancestors to cone snails got the genes for venom from eating something with venomous stingers, like coral or anemones. It’s impossible to reconstruct the origins of genomes, much less a genomic insertion, as they don’t fossilize.
txpiper, you evince your wilful and obstinate ignorance with every comment you make.
Um, you do know Wikipedia has many citations to its sources, and the actual article is just a synopsis, right? It’s basically a portal to knowledge.
If you look no deeper than the summary, I guess.
But you didn’t look at the actual evidence to which that phrase refers, did ya?
Here:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=origin+of+ribosomes&oq=origin+of+ribosomes
(About 201,000 results (0.03 sec))
PS
Heh. Again, you reveal your biases, particularly teleological mindset.
(tinkering and honing imply purpose; that’s not how nature (or evolution) works)
“you reveal your biases, particularly teleological mindset.
(tinkering and honing imply purpose; that’s not how nature (or evolution) works)”
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Evolutionists cannot help but use design language, and terms like tinkering, innovation and strategies. The phrase “razor-sharp honing of natural selection” is apparently a Professor Myers exclusive.
You’re right about teleological perspective. If you’re walking on the beach and you find a can opener, you don’t say “look what happened!”.
I might in fact say “look what happened.” Why are you claiming otherwise?
Also, a rock can be used to open cans. If we use one for such a purpose, then we can call it a can opener. If it were used to hold down some paper, it could be a paper weight. When used for driving nails, it’s a hammer. When two of them are struck together for the purpose of producing a sound, they are concussion idiophones in the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system. If used somewhat differently for a similar purpose of producing another kind of sound, it could be a scraper, part of a shaker, etc. We have tons of flexibility here, but notice how none it gets around to the point of telling us what rocks are.
In any case, you would have to reject the argument from design (aka teleological argument) since you’re implicitly claiming that the beach (e.g.) isn’t designed — you claim a distinction between existing things which are designed (by people, or are otherwise put to some such use by people as in the case of the rocks above) and those which are not. So, it’s not the case that the world as a whole is designed, meaning it doesn’t have a designer. So, this line of argument just can’t work, because it is self-refuting.
The only designers known to you are people, who have a very limited output in terms of the kinds of things they can design and the extent/scope of their designs. In particular, you know people didn’t design all living organisms (including themselves) much less the whole world. So what is supposed to be your basis for claiming that something else (a god) designed all living things or designed the whole world? It definitely can’t be can openers on beaches. So what is it? You’ve got nothing?
The only person who has used the terms tinkering and honing to describe natural selection is the creationist from texas.
This supernatural tinkerer must operate by sending comets and asteroids to impact earth.
Perhaps the stromatolites and algae were too sinful to be miracled back into their original godly perfection? Those ammonites and dinosaurs in the Tanis beds were all in thrall to satan?
“The only person who has used the terms tinkering and honing to describe natural selection is the creationist from texas.”
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I don’t have any reason to make stuff like that up.
“It was almost 30 years ago when François Jacob declared that evolutionary innovation (the emergence of novel form and function over time) occurred primarily via a process of “tinkering” “
Evolutionary tinkering with transposable elements
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“I’ve now read two novel attempts to explain the existence of junk DNA. To a lot of people, the very idea of junk DNA is offensive: whatever process built us, whether divine fiat or the razor-sharp honing of natural selection…”
Junk DNA must be…fractal ballast!
It does sound stupid, doesn’t it?
François Jacob is not commenting on this thread, but do go on with your feats of Olympic goalpost moving. It isn’t as if anyone here expects txpiper to engage with intellectual integrity.
Grossly oversimplified, but DNA is just a bunch of instructions for building proteins. And, it has “start here”, and “stop here” markers. The stuff in betwixt “stop here” and “start here” doesn’t much matter, because, well, it’s not part of the instructions for building proteins.
Are you old enough to remember “choose your own adventure” books? like, if someone ripped them apart, and glued in a bunch of blank pieces of paper betwixt the segements, it wouldn’t really change anything, aside from maybe you have to flip pages a bit longer to get to 167 or whatever.
I feel like your main problem is you insist on applying goals and intent to evolution. It’s not trying to go anywhere, it’s just a rock rolling down a slope, and for whatever reason, sometimes there’s a bump, sometimes there’s a ditch, but whatever path it takes is the one that guides it.
Aside from that, please explain loaloa, dracunculis, chagas, malaria, polio, or even toenail fungus. How in the fuck are any of those explained by a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent creator? and why would you continue to worship them? Like, for real, some shit in the natural world is horrible, and indefensible, and should be eradicated as soon as possible by anyone individual, institution, or organization with the means to do so.
Nah. It’s a molecule. An acid, actually.
BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing
“The stuff in betwixt “stop here” and “start here” doesn’t much matter, because, well, it’s not part of the instructions for building proteins.”
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Non coding dna is observed routinely, and not at all problematic if you don’t hobble your intellect with myths about perfect genomes that get corrupted by mutations.
Plenty of living things have duplicated their entire genomes.
@ 70 John Morales
To be clear, are you still claiming to not be a troll?
Because this idiotic comment is equivalent to saying the Merchant of Venice is not a play, but a collection of bound paper pages upon which appear some ink marks.
Silentbob, the irony of repeatedly interjecting yourself to call me a troll and focusing on me rather than on the subject at hand seems to have escaped you.
But sure, snipe away. I’m sure it pleases all the blog hosts where you indulge.
Nope. The distinction is that a set of instructions (or a play) is an abstract entity.
A molecule is not an abstract entity, it’s a physical thing.
So calling it a set of instructions is a category error.
If one literally thinks DNA is a bunch of instructions for building proteins, it surely implies that something intelligent created those instructions for something else intelligent regarding how to build proteins. It implies purpose.
In short, using that terminology (metaphorical/functional as it may be) to a creationist is not optimal, in that it reinforces their interpretation of purpose suffusing physics.
#72 txpiper
I wonder if you misread lochaber’s #69. DNA has the shape of a long strand, and a gene is a portion of that strand. All genes are oriented in the same direction, having a ‘start’ end and a ‘stop’ end in the same orientation. To visualise this, imagine a string laid out on a table starting near you and pointing away from you, with genes arranged linearly with gaps between them; if the ‘start’ end of a gene is the end pointing towards you, the ‘stop’ end is obviously the end pointing away from you -- and all genes are oriented the same way.
This means if we are travelling down that string in the direction required to transcribe a gene, we will meet its ‘start’ end first, then the body of the gene, then the ‘stop’ end, then a non-coding region, then the ‘start’ end of the next gene. With me?
Now we return to the portion you quoted of lochaber’s post. “The stuff in betwixt “stop here” and “start here” doesn’t much matter, because, well, it’s not part of the instructions for building proteins.” He is listing those in the sequence they are encountered in when moving in the reading direction.
Now I am curious. Did you not understand lochaber’s post due to a simple misread which hopefully I have corrected, or was it due to your lack of genetics knowledge? Hopefully the former, because then at least you will be able to reread and correctly parse his statement.
I don’t think any of txpiper’s misunderstanding is due to misreading or basic ignorance of genetics.
Their last comment about “Junk DNA being fractal ballast” sounding particularly stupid is actually ironic. That idea was proposed by a different creationist and proponent of intelligent design. Txpiper is very consistent at misrepresenting the info in his links.
I agree that fractal ballast is a particularly stupid creationist idea, though not quite as hilarious as gravity magnets.
Give a creationist a teleological inch and he’ll take a theological mile.
@txpiper:
First you’re recommending Nick Lane, next you’re agreeing with PZ Myers on Junk DNA. Truly we live in days of miracles and wonders.
Humans and mice share 99% genetic similarity but they are partly distinguished by gene regulation and expression. The stuff between the coding regions is where the regulatory mechanisms reside.
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“First you’re recommending Nick Lane, next you’re agreeing with PZ Myers on Junk DNA. Truly we live in days of miracles and wonders.”
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“Junk DNA must be…fractal ballast!” was just a link to the post where Professor Myers apparently coined the phrase.
“razor-sharp honing of natural selection” is what sounds stupid.
I said that I find Nick Lane likable, and I do enjoy reading some of the speculative things he writes. But I recognize his ideas as imaginary, conjectural and religious. There is not a thimble full of demonstrable science behind origin of life tales.
PZ is being amusingly sarcastic about the honing thing, because creationists all use the same tedious gotcha arguments.
Fractal ballast? Not a real thing, but at least it’s more creative than claiming that all of science is conspiring against biblical literalists.
I see that txpiper has now moved the goalposts to the classic “living fossils” line of nonsense in the other thread, in addition to circling back to their contention that organic tissues can’t possibly be preserved on the dinosaurs found at Tanis.
Such a rutabaga.
@txpiper:
I’m honestly curious — have you been diagnosed with some sort of language processing disorder or attention deficit disorder? Because reading the post carefully shows that:
1) PZ is critiquing two different ideas about junk DNA
2) The title humorously conflates the two different ideas about DNA that he is critiquing.
And that is the underlying misconception about natural selection that he is assuming is the driver for the second idea about junk DNA that he is critiquing.
Does having everything broken down and spoon-fed to you actually help you understand what people write, or are you perversely committed to misunderstanding?
Given your demonstrated problems with reading and understanding texts, I have to wonder if what you think Lane has written is what he actually has written.
“reading the post carefully shows that:
1) PZ is critiquing two different ideas about junk DNA”
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The issue was the unavoidable use of flamboyant design language. It happens all the time. Professor Myers has frequently used the word tinkering in regards to development. For instance:
“…evolution doesn’t just invent something brand new on the spot to fill a function — what we find instead is that existing proteins are repurposed to do a job. This is how evolution generally operates, taking what already exists and tinkering and reshaping it to better fulfill a useful function.”
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/02/cephalopod-venoms/
Of course, he doesn’t mention mutations, but that would be a sortof a buzz kill, wouldn’t it?
Heh. Not in that particular post (where it was otiose — that’s the basis of the “tinkering and reshaping” figuratively mentioned).
But yes in others, e.g. https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/02/14/the-state-of-modern-evolutionary-theory-may-not-be-what-you-think-it-is/
(You do remember any change in the genome is a mutation, no?
That’s the definition!)
I see that txpiper has now moved the goalposts to the classic “living fossils” line of nonsense in the other thread…
That’s not what txpooper does; he doesn’t have goalposts, or any sort of goal, except to distract, divert, misdirect, and goad others into responding to him, instead of saying anything useful in a coherent manner. That’s pretty much all creationists are doing these days: spout endless almost-random nonsense that kinda-sorta looks like reasoned objections if you squint at it right, then pretend it means he’s arguing with the big boys and forcing actual scientists and experts to take him seriously. And all the while absolutely nothing is accomplished and everyone in a discussion thread is dancing to his tune and the original topic of discussion is a distant memory.
txpiper is an idiot, and he knows it. Practically every coherent assertion he’s made, on any subject from evolution to US history and ConLaw, has been dead wrong. All he’s good for is gumming up discussion with diversionary nonsense; and when we try to address or refute any of it, all we’re doing is dancing to his tune, like clueless parents trying to argue logically with an eight-year-old who just wants attention and to stay up past his bedtime.
I do get some entertainment value from poking holes in Txpipers various theories of sentient DNA and flood geology, but his basic dishonesty in hand waving away all the physical evidence is tedious.
Radiometric dating is very accurate. Zircons don’t have any religious beliefs. Why would all geosciences misrepresent something like the rate at which Uranium is converted to Lead?
Having failed to present any compelling evidence to support the biblical creation myths or the a young earth, he is now obsessively combing through PZ’s posts for the word honing.
Of course, I originally pointed out the txpiper was the only person commenting in this thread to use the word honing, so his quotemining to misrepresent the use of verbs and adjectives is truly pointless bloviating. The earth is still ancient. Life evolved billions of years ago, in oceans that were very different from modern oceans, under a sky that lacked an atmospheric layer to filter out the various deadly rays of the sun.
I abhor Dawkins, who incidentally has had zero input in my observation that religion is culturally specific myth, as are supernatural gods.