On Wed, 12 Jul 1995 20:14:48 -0400 you wrote:
>Abstract: Its about time.
>
>Stephen wrote, quoting Gearge Wald:
SJ>"..Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we
>have to deal is of the order of two billion years...Given so much time,
>the "impossible" becomes possible, the possible probable, and the
>probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs
>the miracles." (Wald G., "The origin of life'. Scientific American, vol.
>191 (2), August 1954, p.48).
BH>Two billion years, HA ;-). My how things have changed in the last
>40 years. If I remember correctly, Dawkins throws out the number
>one billion years in _TBW_, going on to explain to us poor ignorant
>souls who can't grasp what a big number this is ;-). In a recent paper,
>Stanley Miller placed the allowable time for the origin of life at 10
>million years max and perhaps much less. Hey, Dawkins is only off by
>2 orders of magnitude ;-).
When radiometric dating revealed that the earth was probably 4.6BY
old, Darwinists thought they had plenty of time. But then they
discovered microfossils 3,500 years old. Since the earth must have
taken most of the intervening billion years to cool, this means that
life arose within a few hundred million years or less:
"Studies of the earliest sedimentary rocks have also produced another
difficulty which tends to mitigate against the traditional picture.
Thirty years ago, the earliest signs of life on Earth were the fossils
of metazoan organisms in rocks no older than seven hundred million
years. As the Earth was reckoned to be in the order of several
thousand millions years old, there seemed therefore to be an immense
interval of time for the formation of the prebiotic soup and the
gradual evolution of the cell . However, since the early 1960s, the
time interval has successively shrunk as evidence of life has been
discovered in increasingly older rocks. Recently, an Australian group
reported the remains of a simple type of algae in rocks at least 3,500
million years old, and other rocks almost as ancient in other parts of
the world have also yielded evidence of life over the past few years.
In the time interval available for the formation of, and evolution of,
the cell from the prebiotic soup has thus dramatically shrunk from
thousands to at most a few hundred million years; and, worse still,
while the time interval has shrunk the earliest rocks have failed to
yield any evidence of a prebiotic soup." (Denton M., "Evolution: A
Theory in Crisis",1985, Burnett Books, p262).
So Wald's "two billion years" for the origin of life was out by a
factor of 10, and if Miller is right, by a factor of 100. But the
time
problem gets worse for Darwinism. The origin of all phyla took only
5 million years (or less):
"The Cambrian then began with an assemblage of bits and pieces,
frustratingly difficult to interpret, called the "small shelly fauna."
The subsequent main pulse, starting about 530 million years ago,
constitutes the famous Cambrian explosion, during which all but one
modem phylum of animal life made a first appearance in the fossil
record. (Geologists had previously allowed up to 40 million years for
this event, but an elegant study, published in 1993, clearly restricts
this period of phyletic flowering to a mere five million years.)"
(Gould S.J., "The Evolution of Life on the Earth", Scientific
American, October 1994, p67).
If the "mitochondrial" Adam and Eve theories are right, then homo
sapiens is incredibly recent - only 100,000 years old!
These time troubles are just part of the consistent disconfirmation of
Darwinism's "slow, gradual, cumulative selection" mechanisms, since
its beginning in 1859 and more particularly since its rebirth as
Neo-Darwinism in the 1930's. The result is a hodge-podge collection
of self-contradictory sub-theories, such as Dawkin's slow phyletic
gradualism and Gould's rapid branching, as even Glenn's reliance on
eclectic mathematical models and genetic engineering experiments,
attests.
Koestler notes:
"A number of corrections and amendments to neo-Darwinian theory have
been proposed by evolutionists over a number of years; and if these
were to be put together, there would be little left of the original
theory-as amendments to a Parliamentary bill can reverse its emphasis
and intent. But, as already said, each critic had his particular axe
to grind, with the result that `Tis all in pieces, all coherence
gone'-as John Donne lamented when medieval cosmology was landed in a
similar crisis." (Koestler A., "The Ghost in the Machine", 1967,
Arkana, London, p117).
God bless.
Stephen