Re: pollen test of Flood geology
David Campbell (bivalve@mailserv0.isis.unc.edu)
Tue, 9 Sep 1997 10:06:17 -0400>In the second place you should be aware that there were many reports in
>Science and Nature (ten or more papers) several decades ago of modern type
>pollen and spores ("Eocene") from the Cambrian strata of Punjab, by people
>of a variety of religions and ethnicities. A cadre of western geologists
>even went to investigate the situation and concluded that the strata from
>which Singh and others were getting pollen were indeed Cambrian. The
>Indian investigators insisted that they were Eocene based on the pollen and
>spores. The case has been settled by declaring the problem intractible and
>off limits to further exploration by the Indian paleobotanists.
The Silurian and Devonian paleontology of the Himalayas is a total mess
because a geologist at the University of Panjab, over a period of twenty
years or so, wrote papers claiming to find fossils that actually were
obtained from localities around the world (commercially available
specimens, etc.) Do you know whether different people have verified the
source of the samples? The locality data for the fraudulent material was
generally vague, inaccurate, and in remote, politically instable regions.
I would expect an apparent discrepancy such as this would get more work,
not a ban, similar to the supposed juxtaposition of Cretaceous and Eocene
shells here in North Carolina (Tuomey, 1853).
The problem with explaining the sequence of pollen, foraminifera,
radiolarians, dinoflagellates, calcareous nannofossils, etc. by any global
flood hypothesis is that all of them should have been alive at the same
time (before the flood) in the same place. A flood cannot sort them out
into a regular order, no matter what it does. A series of multiple floods
(as proposed in the early 1800's) with different organisms living between
them would be necessary.
David Campbell