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evolution-digest Friday, February 19 1999 Volume 01 : Number 1311
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Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 19:06:58 -0700
From: "Kevin O'Brien" <Cuchulaine@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: Flood Model, batholiths, and science
>>>It's not a matter of being close-minded; it's a matter of recognizing
that
>>>your unknown "major factors" would violate the known laws of
>>>thermodynamics
>>>and physics, and so are going to be virtually non-existant.
>>
>>Isn't that what they were saying when Wegner and a few before him
suggested
>>continental movement? And in physics when they thought that they had the
>>laws described, and there was little to do but confirm them? They had no
>>idea that there could be any other way to look at things, and basically
>>denied the possibility.
>>
>>New data, unexpected experimental results, changed the picture. What that
>>teaches me is that we probably don't know everything right now, either,
and
>>perspectives may change still.
>
>Right. Just as unexpected observations in physics led to finding a whole
>new realm (QM), and in geophysics a whole new way of looking at the history
>of the lithosphere (plate tectonics), explaining the observed parallel
>coastlines with the addition of the mid-oceanic ridges, so new experimental
>results may come to light that explain the batholith problem in an
>unexpected way.
>
Not if you have to violate certain laws to do it, it won't.
>
>>
>>
>>Right, anything may change but wishful thinking is the last one to achieve
>>such a change. Especially if your "unknown factors" are in violation of
>>known laws.
>
>Wegner suggested continental movement without detailing a mechanism (and
>really today the proposed mechanisms are still debated and not very
>detailed). He was ridiculed and ignored. Same with Bretz, and many
>others. It's OK. Happens frequently in science.
>
See _The Mid-Oceanic Ridges_ by Adolphe Nicolas (1995) for a readable and
up-to-date source on plate tectonics, including the latest version of the
mechanism. The mechanism is in fact well detailed, and while some of these
details are debated, the basic mechanism has been largely verified.
By the way, no one was ridiculed because the mechanism they proposed
violated known laws.
>
>By the way, how did the oceans keep from filling in as they opened? If you
>calculate the speed at which the oceans, say the Atlantic, opened in the
>long-ages model, it is so slow that the crack would have filled with
>sediment each year.
>
It's not that slow. There are in fact several places in the world where
separating plates are creating rift valleys, places like the Great Rift
Valley in East Africa and the Jordan River valley in Israel. The plates
spread fast enough to be measureable, and as they spread the valley floors
sink. At present the valleys are sinking faster than sediment can fill them
up. In fact, the valleys are more likely to be filled up with basalt
emerging from the floor of the rift than by erosional sediment. Besides,
even if sediments did manage to fill in spreading rifts, as the rift spreads
the sediments would thin and spread as well. Eventually, the rift would
still sink low enough to admit in water from a nearby sea or ocean. By the
way, that's how the Atlantic formed. The rift simply dropped deep enough
that the existing ocean water could flow in and flood it. That's what's
happening in the Red Sea now.
Kevin L. O'Brien
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Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 19:25:27 -0700
From: "Kevin O'Brien" <Cuchulaine@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: Flood Model and dinosaur tracks
>>
>>Actually, one of the most serious problems for flood geology has yet to be
>>brought up - nesting sites. There are spots in Montana, Argentina, China
and
>>many other places that have large dinosaur nesting sites, inclusing
multiple
>>nesting sites in different strata. So we are to imagine, somehow, that in
the
>>midst of this global flood, after the deposition of thousands of feet of
>>sediments already, large groups of dinosaurs managed to congregate and
>>mate,
>>build nests, lay eggs, hatch them and raise them, then return there
>>several more
>>times to complete the process all over again. Obviously this cannot be
>>explained
>>by saying that all of the land had not yet been scoured clean, because the
>>sites
>>lie on top of sediments that were supposedly laid down from the PC/C
>>boundary to
>>the jurassic and triasic. It also cannot be explained by any hydrological
>>sorting hypothesis like size and differential mobility. It simply cannot
be
>>explained using flood geology.
>>
>
>Unless you recognize that pregnant female dinosaurs would have to drop
>their eggs at some time during a stressful year....
>
These arm-chair, ad hoc refutations will not do. Three pieces of evidence
contradict this first point. First, the dinosaurs did not use just any old
hollow in the ground, but excavated their own with great care, even lining
them with vegetation. Second, the eggs were laid in careful spiral patterns
in upright positions, not simply dumped as if in a hurry. Third, many of
these nests contained fossils of young dinosaurs that had hatched, but were
not yet developed enough to leave the nest. This indicates that the babies
had to be cared for. Together these three pieces of evidence demonstrate a
level of patience and care that indicates the nest sites were being used to
hatch and rear young dinosaurs year after year, possibly for generations.
They were not simply dumping grounds for desperate females trying to escape
a flood.
>...that the nest sites were water-laid....
>
Some nest sites are located on top of water-born sediments, but others are
not. Besides, the evidence indicates that at the time they were being used
the sites were dry, even arid, not muddy or marshy or boggy.
>
>...indicating inundation of the areas....
>
To my knowledge, no (or at least very few) nest sites were covered by
water-born sediments; virtually all were covered by volcanic or wind-born
sediments.
>
>...and that the multiple layers show repeated inundations.
>
To my knowledge any multiple layers within the sites (not above or below
them in the strata, but at the same stratigraphic level as the sites) simply
represent generations of continuous use, coupled with occasional volcanic or
wind-storm disasters.
Sorry, but nesting sites are more evidence that the global flood as you
envision it is impossible.
Kevin L. O'Brien
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 20:52:30 -0700
From: "Kevin O'Brien" <Cuchulaine@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: Archaean life
Kevin O'Brien wrote on 17 Feb 1999
> I do not deny that researchers in the past tried to push the reducing
> atmosphere out to several billion years, but as I posted a couple of
months
> ago, the best evidence indicates that it lasted only 500 to 800 million
> years, roughly between 4.5 and 4 billion years ago. As such, this latest
> research comes as no surprise to me, and actually helps to support the
data
> I cited.
DJT: As was explored last year, this "best evidence" is not based on
rocks, as we do not have them from this "window" of earth history.
KLOB: Since you admit that these rocks do not exist, it is rather
disingenuous to imply that only these would provide the best evidence.
However, we do have rocks from that period; they are called meteorites, and
they establish that planetesimals from that time would have had the right
composition to form a secondary reducing atmosphere when they were
sufficiently heated.
DJT: It is based on the adoption of a certain theory of planetary
formation....
KLOB: Which is about as well verified as it can be without direct sampling
of asteroids or comets, or watching the process in other solar systems (both
of which we should be able to do sometime in the next century, probably
earlier than later).
DJT: ...by analogy with the Jovian planets....
KLOB: Actually, Mason made no such inference. What he said was that the
primary atmosphere that would have been similar to Jovian atmospheres was
blown away by the solar wind; the reducing atmosphere that was present prior
to 4 billion years ago was a secondary atmosphere produced by outgassing
from the mantle.
DJT: ...and by various other inferences based on observed isotopic data.
KLOB: Mason made only one inference based on isotopic data, and that was
when he stated that the outgassing stopped sometime shortly after 4 billion
years ago. Which is supported by paleosol data and the data you described
at the beginning of this thread.
DJT: (I've just reread Brian
Harper's post to you on 23 November which reviews some of these
points.)
KLOB: Yes, well, I never responded to that post because it was simply a
rehash of what he had posted before, which I had already dealt with.
Brian's sources do not support his claims, mainly because they do not
discuss the period in question, except by implication. The data they
discuss applies to the time after 4 billion years ago, not before. Besides,
his sources are from the Eighties and early-Nineties, and so are at least
out of date, if not obsolete. And he ignored more recent evidence that I
cited which contradicted his own sources. Some of that new information even
came from one of his own source authors, indicating that these people may be
changing their minds in light of new information.
KLOB: Even so, my dispute with Brian is over whether a reducing atmosphere
had a significant impact on abiogenesis, not over the validity of
abiogenesis itself. And the mechanism he supports would actually be far
less vulnerable to degradation and meteoritic bombardment than the reducing
atmosphere mechanism would be.
> As for the implied need for "unlimited time" I would remind everyone that
> 800 million years covers virtually the entirety of metazoan evolution,
from
> the simplest hypothetical organisms through the Cambrian explosion on up
to
> modern times. That is a heck of alot of evolution for so short a time.
DJT: And if you consider that most of it was stasis, this is an even more
remarkable situation!
KLOB: That statement implies that evolution for all species throughout the
entire world occasionally just stopped. That's not what happened. Once a
new species evolved evolution made little changes in it sometimes for
millions of years, until the habitat changed, at which point the species
evolved again, went extinct, or produced a daughter species that fit the
changes. However, this process went on for each species individually. As
such, while at any time in the past you had species that exhibited stasis,
they were others that were rapidly evolving. Evolution as a whole was
continuous over this entire time, even if the individual evolutionary
development of certain species was not.
> Considering the ease with which biomolecules, including catalytic proteins
> and RNA, plus vesicles with lipid bilayers, can form, I don't consider 500
> million years to be any serious limitation to abiogenesis.
DJT: "Ease" is not the word I would use.
KLOB: I know, but that doesn't mean it's not correct.
DJT: They can form under certain specific conditions....
KLOB: And those conditions are relatively easy to reproduce and would have
been present on the early earth.
DJT: ...and they are also very quickly destroyed.
KLOB: Not that quickly, but all you would need is for synthesis to be
faster than degradation (which it almost certainly was at certain times and
in certain places), to sequester the newly formed biomolecules and to
protect them (mechanisms for both of which are well known and were also
probably present on the early earth).
DJT: However, the main point I would wish to make is that the challenge
for abiogenisis advocates is to form a replicating bio-structure.
Without replication, there is nothing for selection forces to act on
and whatever structure is formed is quickly degraded.
KLOB: Since self-replicating systems have not been abiotically made in the
lab yet, we cannot say whether they would have been quickly degraded,
wishful thinking aside.
DJT: This is my
understanding of why abiogenesis needs time: the hypothesis is that
the more time there is, the greater the probability of arriving at a
replicating structure.
KLOB: And 500 million years is certainly ample time to accomplish this,
based on what we know from the fossil record has been accomplish in that
time period.
DJT: This is also my answer to Pim's comment:
"Then again the question really is, is such "unlimited time" really
required ? The remaining time is still quite long."
KLOB: Ditto what I said above.
DJT: One last point: Kevin says that 500 million years is not a serious
limitation. But have you got 500 million years? For most of this time, the
Great Bombardment of the Earth is thought to have occurred and few would
wish to invoke abiogenesis in that environment. (No warm little ponds
during this time!).
KLOB: Actually, the "Great Bombardment" ended at about 4.5 billion years
ago. What bombardment continued after that was sporatic, short-lived and
often less than global in its effects. It may have even helped in some
cases, by infusing the biosphere with fresh organic material and by
providing the energy needed to accelerate certain abiogenetic processes.
DJT: (Maybe this is the
breakthrough abiogenesis is looking for: introduce extreme energy
sources from bolide impacts and up pops a self-replicating cell!
KLOB: Why are creationists always characterizing naturalistic events as
magic tricks or miracles? Is it perhaps because they cannot explain any
kind of phenomena without recourse to supernatural powers? Whatever the
reason, it makes them look ridiculous.
DJT: Perhaps Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were way out in their 'tornado
forming a plane out of scrap' story!)
KLOB: I find it amazing that two such intelligent men would use such hoary
crap. It's been refuted so many times you would think creationists would
get the idea by now that this is yet another one of those things that make
them look ridiculous. By the way, did you know that Wickramasinghe says
that anyone who doesn't believe that the earth and the universe are billions
of years old is an idiot?
Kevin L. O'Brien
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 19:55:21 -0700
From: "Kevin O'Brien" <Cuchulaine@worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: The Deep Hot Biosphere
Art Chadwick wrote:
>From another listserve:
>
>Long before Stuart Kauffman proposed his
>idea of spontaneous organization, perhaps by some as yet undiscovered law
>of nature by which life would form spontaneously....
>
You don't need some mysterious undiscovered law; the known physiochemical
laws do very nicely, thank you. And life did not form spontaneously, but as
the result of a process controlled by a series of mechanisms.
>
>...Fred Hoyle & Chandra
>Wickramasinghe had already disposed of it. After estimating that the
>chances of a primitive cell forming from abiotic material is about 10^
>-40,000...
>
Assuming that all the molecules came together at once to spontaneously form
a cell out of "nothing", which of course is not what would have happened.
But then what is the chance that you would get one functional protein by
taking six genes, randomly cutting them up into at least a dozen pieces,
then randomly mixing and reassembling these pieces into millions of new
genes? I don't know, but it must be better than we might suppose,
considering that the researchers who do it can get hundreds of functional
proteins, about a dozen of which have superior or novel catalytic abilities.
>
>...they said the following.
>
>"If there were some deep principle of nature which drove organic systems
>toward living systems, the existence of the principle should easily be
>detectable in the laboratory.
>
It is; it has been; and we are steadily working out the details.
>
>This applies whether the principle is one of
>'seeing' and 'recognition' in the sense described above, or of concealed
>intelligence in other forms. One might seek for instance to claim that when
>amino acids polymerize into chains their orderings are not random, and
>likely enough it is true that the orderings are not completely random.
>
Except that frameshift mutations randomly scramble amino acid sequences, yet
you occasionally get functional proteins that catalyze novel reactions.
Except that you can randomly cut related proteins into pieces, randomly mix
and reassemble those pieces, and still get functional proteins with superior
catalytic ability or novel catalytic ability.
>
>But
>orderings that are not completely random remain a far cry from supposing
>that amino acids 'know' how to link themselves together so as to produce
>the enzymes and other critical polypeptides.
>
Except that thermal copolymerization of mixtures of amino acids produce
polypeptides with catalytic capabilities. As such, either random assemblies
of amino acids have a better chance of creating functional polypeptides than
we suppose, or the amino acids do "know" how to polymerize to produce useful
catalysis.
>
>Such a notion of
>self-instruction by amino acids is an obviously wild proposal, but to
>disprove it decisively one must again turn to experiment. The ratio of the
>volume of the whole ocean to a chemist's test-tube is a number with only
>some 22 digits, so that using a test-tube of organic soup instead of the
>whole ocean of organic soup postulated in conventional biology, should
>merely lop 22 digits off the 40,000 digits which represent the information
>content of the enzymes, leaving 39,978 digits, essentially the same number
>as before. Nor does the length of time of an experiment matter
>significantly, even if the process of the origin of life were very strongly
>accelerating, say like the hundredth power of the time, (time)^100. Thus
>the reduction in the information accumulated in an hour instead of 1,000
>million years would then be a number with some 1,300 digits, which would
>merely reduce the original 40,000 digits to 38,700, an information content
>that should be overwhelmingly detectable. An experiment done in
>half-a-morning, starting from simple organic ingredients, should therefore
>generate most, if not all, of the explicit structures of the enzymes.
>Needless to say, no such experiment has been successfully performed....
>
Not the kind they specify, no, because they demand that the experiment
produce a large majority of all the modern enzymes known. However,
experiments like they describe have produced a far more limited number of
catalytic polypeptides or RNA molecules, so we benighted atheist
evolutionists must being something right.
>
>...showing that the enzymes did not arise by self-instruction or self
>recognition, if indeed a disproof of these rather absurd ideas were
needed."
>
More appeal from ignorance fallacy, with a healthy dose of appeal from
personal incredulity fallacy thrown in for good measure. Fortunately, the
universe doesn't have to operate the way they claim it should, so the rest
of us can continue to successfully investigate abiogenetic mechanisms if we
so desire. Stay tuned for further developments.
Kevin L. O'Brien
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 21:26:03 +1100
From: Jonathan Clarke <jdac@alphalink.com.au>
Subject: Re: Halite layers, and GVS
Karen G. Jensen wrote in part:
> I'll be interested in more on Lake McLeod if you find the book.
>
It has been returned! The book is "The MacLeod evaporite basin, by B. W. Logan
and published in 1987 as AAPG Memoir 44. The book consist of four sections.
They
are on evaporite chemical and hydrological models, geological framework of the
basin, the modern environmental system, and the evolution of the basin.
Lake MacLeod formed in a Late Miocene graben filled by 70 m of redbeds. A horst
forms the sill between it and the Indian Ocean. Closure of the sill has been
aided
by development of coastal aeolianites in the Pleistocene. The bed of the lake
lies
between 0 and more than 4 m below sea level. Sea water percolates through the
barrier and under the impermeable lake sediments. Discharge occurs mainly round
the margins, especially on the western side nearest the barrier. The modern lake
is
about 130 km long and 45 km across.
The evaporitic fill of the basin is up to 8m thick. Most of this is halite,
underlain and capped by gypsum ands carbonate. The halite is coarsely
crystalline
with thin gypsum layers. The gypsum is bedded to laminated with some coarsely
crystalline units. The evaporite basin is driven by a complex interaction
between
influx of water though the barrier and evolution of the brine. Currently it is
near equilibrium with sea level. Carbonate and possibly minor gypsum deposition
is
still taking place.
Logan regards the basin fill as entirely Holocene and occurring in 6 stages.
Sedimentation began at 9400 BP when rising sea level at the end of the last
glacial allowed seepage across the barrier to enter the basin. The sea flooded
the basin at 7900 BP resulting in a lagoon about 13 m deep. The basin was
isolated from 5100 BP and reached equilibrium about 1500 BP. The bulk of
evaporite
deposition occurred between 5100 and 1500 BP.
Lake MacLeod is significant because it represents one of the best examples of a
Holocene barred basin that became isolated from the sea and deposited a
relatively
thick evaporite sequence. It is a processes analogue for many larger evaporite
systems and illustrates the complex interplay of climate, geomorphology, and
hydrology that forms such system. It nicely complements other Holocene halite
depositing systems like the Gulf of Karbogaz , the Dead Sea, and the Andean
Salars.
God bless
Jonathan
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End of evolution-digest V1 #1311
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