Entries in the Category "Evolution"
"............Not the Mama"
RADIOMETRIC DATING (PART 2)
In almost every basic book about dinosaurs or paleontology I could find when I was little there was always the section with the picture of the clock showing that if the earth’s history was a 24-hour day, man only appeared within the last couple minutes. I’ve seen this picture so many times I’m beginning to think I have that image imprinted in my mind. But as annoying as that analogy has gotten for me it is a good example that shows just how old the earth is at 4 and a half billion years. Or at least that is how old it is according to science. Attempts have been made for hundreds of years to find out the age of the earth and none of the earlier estimates have come even close to even a billion years, not alone four and a half. Lord Kelvin performed one of the first relatively recent scientific calculations on the age of the earth in 1862 and came up with an age range of 20-400 millions years. This was the range of many of the calculations done over the next 50 years such as an age based on the contraction of the Sun at 100 million years and another based on the rate at which salt as been carried into the oceans which gives 90 million years old. But none of these turned out to be remotely accurate. The Sun does contract (extremely slowly over billions of years) but it was assumed that was the only way the Sun gave off heat. They did not know about fusion yet. The theory involving the deposition of salt is also flawed because of the absence of information we have learned since then. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new method was discovered that Lord Kelvin had not known to consider: radioactive dating.
In the last entry (I apologize for the length of time since the last entry) I described how carbon dating works and hopefully showed that it is an effective and accurate method. But carbon dating has a half-life of 5,730 years, which means that it can only date things to about 60,000 years old. After this time so much of the carbon has decayed that there is no measurable amount of carbon left. The reliability of carbon-dating even become more inaccurate as it comes closer to 60,000 years so that truly reliable dating involves measurements of less than 60,000 years. When most people argue against radiometric dating, they argue against the accuracy of carbon-dating. But what many people don’t realize is that there are over 40 different kinds of dating. Just to get an idea of all the different kinds here is a list of some of the more common elements used in radiometric dating (the numbers represent the weight of the atom):
H-3 Be-10 Na-22 Al-26 Si-32
Cl-36 Ar-39 Ca-41 Mn-53 Kr-81
I-129 Common Lead Chemical Lead
The rest show the atom before decay followed by the atom it decays into:
K-40/Ar-40 Ar-39/Ar-40 K-40/Ca-40
Rb-87/Sr-87 La-138/Ce-138 La-138/Ba-138
Sm-147/Nd-147 Lu-176/Hf-176 Re-187/Os-187
Pb-207/Pb-206 Uranium/Xenon Th-230/U-234
Pa-231/U-235 Pa-231/Th-230 U-234/U-238
U/He
Not all of these elements decay in the same way that carbon does. There are over a dozen different ways an element can decay so I will not describe them all. But most elements that decay will periodically eject some particle from its nucleus.
One of the more commonly used methods of dating involves potassium-40. It decays into rock that is 11.2% Ar-40 and 88.8% Ca-40. It is too difficult to determine the age for the Ca-40 so Ar-40 is used, which is much more reliable. The potassium has a half-life of 1.26 billion years. I should note here that while it is impossible to measure exactly one half-life of potassium-40 through direct observation, there are so many atoms in any sample that over just one year, millions upon millions of atoms decay and can be counted. Counting decays is like putting dots on a graph. Even with only two dots you can draw a straight line. Following this straight line, with all the dots somewhere along the line, you can calculate the half-life, in this case 1.26 billion years. Another element commonly used is Rubidium-87, which decays into Strontium-87 over a half-life of 49 billion years. Uranium-lead dating is one of first methods of dating discovered. It is the most interesting to me because you have different kinds, or isotopes, of Uranium in the same sample. Uranium-235 decays into lead-208 along with uranium-238 decaying into lead-206. Each has a very different half-life, 4.5 billion years for uranium-238 and 700 million years for uranium-235. The huge difference in half-lives of the isotopes makes verification of the age of a rock even more certain. Many of these elements do not directly decay into daughter rock. To make this clearer, let’s use uranium-238 as an example. While it does eventually decay into lead-206, it does so after decaying into many other elements. Just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about here is a list of elements that uranium decays into before becoming lead-206:
U-238 Th-234 Pa-234 U-234 Th-230
Ra-226 Rn-222 Po-218 At-218 Rn-218
Pb-214 Bi-214 Po-214 Tl-210 Pb-210
Bi-210 Po-210 Tl-206 Pb-206
Each stage has a different half-life that makes up the 700 million years. Some take thousands of years, but others are much shorter. The half-life of Th-234 is only 24 days and the half-life of At-218 is a miniscule 1.5 seconds.
Besides radiometric dating, there are other ways to be able date objects but I will only summarize them. One is by what is called ice cores. In areas covered by snow year-round there are differences in the snow with each season such as larger crystals in the summer, the chemistry of the ice, and dust that is deposited in the summer. Varves are another method. Among other factors, the amount of algae and pollen in sediment will cause variations among different layers laid by streams. Other methods include using coral reefs, thermoluminescence (light given off by electrons as they drop to another orbit), the changing of an electron’s spin, paleomagnetism (changes of charges in the earth’s poles over time), and dating involving the exposure of certain isotopes to cosmic rays from the sun.
Now you may be wondering why I am practically listing all these different methods to date fossils. But hopefully I have expressed the point that there are numerous methods, not just carbon-dating, which is the only one many people have heard of. Any combination of methods has been used to date any given rock. One estimate I’ve heard is that around one thousand scientific papers are written each year from hundreds of labs concerning and verifying radiometric dating. Over the 50 years that radiometric dating has been used, there has been 100,000s of papers written.
In contradiction to an earth that is billions of years old is the Creation belief that the earth is only thousands of years old. So there remain objections to the research done in radiometric dating. One argument is that the decay rate of elements is not constant, but it gradually speeds up so that when we calculate a half-life to be billions of years old it is actually only thousands of years old. But all the measurements that have been done on long-period half-lives and short-period radioactive isotopes have always been constant, never an indication that their rates change. Other objections state that processes like weathering and metamorphism (rocks undergoing very high pressures) or that there are daughter atoms in the sample or rock along with the parent atoms when the rock is first formed (it should contain only parent atoms at that time). These objections are quite valid but it is not right that all radiometric dating is false because these conditions are present. What those people who argue dating do not realize is that all these factors are already taken into consideration. Either necessary calculations are made to fix these problems or the rocks are simply thrown out. One last objection I would like to discuss is that geologists only publish those few times that radiometric dating works and ignore those times that it doesn’t. At first glance seems possible, and seriously did make me wonder at first. But when I looked into it more I saw that it takes hundreds of dollars to just date even one sample. From what I see with the costs of equipment and experimentation in undergraduate school alone, it makes very much sense that it would cost a lot of money to date just one sample. Now if only a small fraction of tests yield the results I’ve been describing, then hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars have been wasted on dating samples. For labs that most likely done receive enough funding in order to afford to waste thousands of dollars, this seems extremely unlikely if not impossible.
The argument I have made describes my search between different arguments concerning radiometric dating. The large amounts of data show at least to me that it is much more likely that the earth is billions of years old. But the next thought in my head concerned the implication of this on Creation and on the Bible, which apparently tells a very different story. That has been the object of much hatred and arguments for over a hundred years. As it was when I was younger I have concentrated only on evolution thus far. But now there is only one more major thing I must discuss on evolution before changing gears toward something that I have been researching more recently, which are the implications that evolution has on Christianity. What I have found is different from most anything at least that I have seen argued before.
"I'm the Baby....Gotta Love Me"
Being interested in dinosaurs when I was younger, naturally some of my favorite TV shows had dinosaurs in them (not all shows…I wasn’t that bad). Personally my favorite show was Dinosaurs, which most may not heard of (but if you have you probably recognize the title of this entry as a popular quote from it). It was early 90’s and one of the first shows to use animatronics. But there were others……..an old television show called Land of the Lost or the classic that everyone has heard of………the Flintstones. Then you have all the movies…old ones like One Million Years B.C. and King Kong (ok new with the emake)…and books turned into movies like The Lost World and of course who can forget Jurassic Park. Now I’m sure if you’ve watched or read any these, it’s obvious that all of them have to deal with humans and dinosaurs interacting. It’s always been an appealing to imagine dinosaurs walking among us ever since the first dinosaurs were discovered. Either the dinosaurs were around when people first came about, like with the Flintstones, Dinosaurs, or One Million B.C. or if somehow dinosaurs still live in some unknown area of the world like in King Kong or Lost World. Whether or not it was thought to be true at the time or it was meant purely as fiction it still made people hope for dinosaurs to still be around. Could it be possible that they still roam around now or did we at least walk the earth with them at some point in the past? Now I don’t know how many people would look at this question, laugh at it and say that it is ridiculous for it to be possible but for any of those who believe the Lock Ness Monster exists or who believes literally in the Bible, the question is not so ridiculous. And for that sake it should be taken seriously. So to start we deal with the question when did dinosaurs exist and when did humans arrive? But the answers could be 6,000 years ago for both, according to Creationists or 65 millions years ago for dinosaurs and around 4 million years for people according to scientists. But how can scientists get values that are so different than what Creationists believe. Well this brings what I am convinced to be the biggest controversy that has to do with evolution and one that is much to big to be dealt with in only one entry: radiometric dating.
Ok so radiometric dating in a nutshell. By far most nuclei of atoms are perfectly stable but there are some, of which I will describe later, that aren’t and so try to become stable. The atom either ejects or captures particles, which turns it into another element. From there it either becomes stable or goes through the process over and over until it does become stable. Now let’s take a bigger sample. It is impossible to tell exactly when any individual atom will decay because any one of them could decay at any given time. Now if there are a few atoms then they all decay at random unpredictable times, but in a sample there are countless billions of atoms so just by chance alone, the atoms will decay at a steady constant rate. It’s just like flipping a coin. We all know that it’s a 50/50 chance to get either heads or tails. But if you ever actually tried flipping a coin, that doesn’t happen too often. I just now flipped a penny 30 times and actually got tails 20 of those times. But the more times you flip the coin the closer it gets to 50/50. It shouldn’t actually hit 50% exactly but after enough time it will come within a small margin of error and stay there. Unstable elements do the same thing. The time an element takes to decay is measured by its half life, or the length it takes for half of the element to decay. So if an element has a 1-year half life, ½ will be left after one year, ¼, or half of what’s left, will be left after two years, 1/8 after three years, 1/16 after four, and so on. So based on this you can tell how old something is just based on how many atoms have changed.
By far the best known and most controversial radiometric dating is carbon dating. The way it starts is when gamma rays from the sun hit nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere. A reaction occurs and a proton goes flying off. 14C is left behind, which is a regular carbon atom with two additional neutrons. It then travels down to earth in the form of carbon dioxide where of it enters into plants and then animals. The 14C is replenished throughout the animal or plants life and then upon death, the carbon begins to decay. The 14C actually decays when a neutron breaks up into a proton, an electron, an anti-neutrino turning it back into a nitrogen atom. As it decays 14C has a half-life of 5,730 years.
So what’s so important about carbon dating? Well it can be used in anything that has living tissue left, which means anything that hasn’t fossilized yet, which actually take millions of years. Most importantly however is that it can be found in large amounts, which is very important when it comes to dating. So if this is so great what’s wrong with it? Well first is that the amount of 14C in the atmosphere never stays constant over time which changes the date by quite a bit. Then you have cases where animals just killed give a carbon dating of thousands of years old, ancient deposits of coal are only thousands of years old, different parts of mammoths are dated thousands of years apart, or a case that brings us right to my original question…a dinosaur bone found with living tissue. Well once you hear about enough of these examples you start to wonder about how valid it really is and let me add that when I did look into these, the examples are not outright lies. But let’s go through them. The animal just killed, a seal in the example I saw, tested to be 1000 years old. Well most marine animals tested by carbon dating are thrown out because of what’s called a reservoir effect where older carbon from the surrounding water mixes in with the animal and makes it appear older. Then the coal, where the tested carbon easily could have been put there by several ways including bacteria or groundwater. The mammoth, which in a classic example I found, was dated to be 29,500 and 44,000 years old. For any similar animal that was found like this the problem usually comes that the bones are rarely ever already assembled when found and are usually from different animals that lived thousands of years apart. Or there was contamination at a point and the date has to be thrown out. In this case part of the mammoth was soaked in glycerin which gave that part a date of 29,500 years. For the dinosaur the reports apparently turn out to be slightly over-exaggerated. While tissue was found, it was fossilized and from what was there it is unknown to exactly what animal it came from.
From the examples I have found there seems to be a common theme, either they were over-exaggerated or the fossils have been contaminated at some point, and many are thrown out by scientists. As with anything else, carbon dating isn’t perfect but it has been tested on items from which we already know the date and they do match. And the examples that I have come across seem to be misunderstandings, over-exaggerations, or cases that have been already thrown out because of contamination. At least to me any argument that uses a case like this loses a lot of credibility when it can be shown that it comes from either a misunderstanding or from intentionally misleading. But even beyond these examples there are skeptics and I can understand why. How do we know that carbon dating is steady and doesn’t become accurate beyond those dates we can already measure? How bout when 14C levels change over time…like how I stated earlier or by any other method? Just because we can date things back hundreds or a couple thousands years doesn’t mean something can’t happen beyond that which can raise the possibility that we do live on a younger earth and that we do or have lived with dinosaurs. Well there is a way we can find out for sure which I will show in my next entry: part two of radiometric dating.
Is That Girl Wagging Her Tail At Me Again?
A couple of years back I was walking through the zoo, actually the aquarium area to be specific and I came across what I thought was the most peculiar thing. And to get perspective on this just remember that this is after I have read about prehistoric animals for a while and even churned out a project or two about them in school. So I had a general idea of how absolutely weird some animals looked in our history. I mean just look at some of the life during the Cambrian, which was the first period of earth’s history to have anything other than cellular life. Looking at any fossils or even an artists drawing shows this alien landscape with little animals walking around on what looks like half a dozen sets of crossed stitching needles or a segmented animal with who-knows how many eyes and a feeler coming out of its “mouth.” Well we are dealing with invertebrates and I never have been much of an expert or taken an interest in them but I mean for anyone it’s just weird to see. Oh and don’t worry most of these animals were gone by the end of the Cambrian anyway during a considerable but little-known extinction. But what I saw at the museum wasn’t that kind of weird. It was the kind of weird where your reaction is “That just can’t be right, it makes no sense.” What I saw was only a cave fish, doesn’t exactly grab your attention at first well until I noticed that the fish are completely blind since there is no light at all under the water inside a cave so any sense of sight is useless. Ok makes sense, well until I looked at them more closely. There was something there. It wasn’t exactly an eye but there was something that looked to me like an eye. But it was covered with skin so obviously the fish couldn’t see with it. Then came a very curious, possibly obvious thought…If cave fish have no light in their habitat and are blind then why do they have eyes or something that looks a lot like it that are completely useless?
Well apparently there are salamanders that live in caves that have the same thing. They have eyes but also eyelids that have grown over and fused shut. What made this even more confusing was that salamanders actually have a complete retina and lens, and yet cannot use them since that eyelid is fused. Also with the fish, they don’t have fully developed eye parts but they have a lens with degenerated retinas and optic nerves. Or let’s go to more common animals. Ostriches have quite large wings but are useless when it comes to flying. Certain types of snakes, especially pythons have a pelvis under their skin which is weird considering that a pelvis is only there if you have legs. Then there are dandelions. Obviously dandelions have flowers and pollen but they reproduce by themselves, they don’t need to attract insects or be pollinated. And then there are a couple with people that I think most people can agree we can definitely use without, the appendix, wisdom teeth, and the tailbone.
All the examples I stated are called vestiges. To be technical they are some sort of structure that either has been reduced or undeveloped compared to the same structure in other organisms. These features are part of evolutionary theory because the features are the remnants of what a recent ancestor had. For instance, the ancestors of cave fish and cave salamanders had eyes and have just been reduced, snakes have evolved from lizards that did have legs so some snakes still have remnants of what is left, dandelions came from flowers that did reproduce, and the tailbone……..well we evolved from primates that did at one point have tails. But these features may have no purpose anymore but many perform other functions, like the ostrich. Their wings are not used for flying but do have uses for balance while running and for mating rituals. So as with any part of evolutionary theory I discuss, there must be a way to potentially disprove it that these vestigial organs are not part of evolutionary theory and/or disprove it. Well all you would have to do is find a vestige that is representative of an animal that comes later then the animal that has it. For example you will never find vestigial wings (like that of some types of beetles) on a reptile or primates. Reptiles evolved much earlier than birds and are obviously much too distantly related to insects. Primates are also much too distantly related to birds to have any vestigial wings. So if you were to ever find one with vestigial wings then that would be solid proof against evolution. Or for more proofs against evolution, if found, you could also include arthropods (type of invertebrate) with backbones, primates with gizzards (found only in birds), nipples (only for mammals) on amphibian, birds, reptiles, or on pretty much any other animal. I’m sure that anyone could come up with countless possibilities that would make no sense to evolutionary theory if they were found. Any of these are possible proofs against evolution.
The one vestigial organ that has brought up the most controversy, from what I’ve seen, is the appendix. Many creation arguments I’ve heard use this as their example for why vestiges aren’t possible and therefore another reason why evolution is false. In a nutshell it is argued that the appendix has a function and so can’t be labeled a vestigial organ. Well first let me say that when it comes to whether or not it has a function...no one has the slightest clue. I mean sure you’ll see arguments here and there about either yes it has this function or no it doesn’t have any, but there is nothing that anyone can actually agree upon. But for the sake of argument let’s assume that there is one like one that sounds like a convincing argument is that it helps with the immune system. Ok, sure why not. But then there’s the part where I think anyone knows that if you take the appendix out that it really doesn’t impair you at all. And that is what a vestigial organ actually is…an organ that used to have some function and has been reduced to something that performs an action that’s either useless or can be easily replaced by other parts of the body if it were removed. And the appendix is the perfect example of this…I mean it definitely doesn’t do anything so useful that we must have it and actually it causes a lot of pain, disease, and even death. If this were an organ that was actively designed well I think it’s the worst mistake anyone has come up with.
The argument about the appendix brings up a problem I have with the far majority of creation arguments in general. Well the first thing I noticed is that they are full of quotes of articles and books. Well usually there’s nothing wrong with that until you start looking at the references. Most of them, if not all, are quite old. One site used references from 1982, 1947, 1912 but while that was the most drastic the far majority of them were no younger than 20 years old. Another problem I came across, that wasn’t as common, is that some of the basis for these arguments is made by doctors. That is fine if you want to know about the appendix but they are not evolutionary biologists and most likely don’t know enough about evolution to come to a conclusion about it. The last problem I get is one that could easily fool anyone despite how much you know about the issue. It fooled me quite a bit too until I came across this one article on talkorigins.org. What I am referring to is a statement reference made by many creation sites from SR Scadding in 1981 that essentially says that vestigial organs do not provide any evidence for evolution at all. Well the whole statement itself might make for a good argument against evolution… if you don’t read what Scadding really did write. Only one page before that statement is one where he states that he does believe that vestigial organs in fact do provide proof for evolution but only because they are homologous (similar in size, function, etc. to something else), although now there are clearly more reasons than that. But this brings up a huge issue with creation arguments. I cannot say that all misuse quotes like this and I have seen some original, credible references and arguments. But many of the arguments do have this problem and I have seen more then just Scadding’s quote. In my opinion, and I hope yours too, that whenever someone misquotes like this that either they are very careless or can’t find an actual reason to make an argument and thus loses a lot of credibility. It is my hope with this entry that for anyone of interest in this issue will be aware of such misleading arguments as these and point you in the direction of what the truth is, not just in this issue but in any that you take an interest in.
P.S. I apologize for the amount of time between this entry and the last and I also apologize ahead of the time for the time it may take me to write my next. But I will begin with what I believe to be the most controversial arguments concerning evolution. Because of that I must take extraordinary care in my research and in my arguments for my next entries.
A Flock of Dinosaurs Flies South for the Winter
Now when you’re as young as I was when I first got interested in dinosaurs there was this one crazy theory that made absolutely no sense but sounded very appealing. Dinosaurs evolved into birds. Even most scientists at the time thought the idea was crazy and gave it little attention. But the idea of that the descendants of dinosaurs are still around now was great for the imagination of a grade-schooler. I always imaged the Velociraptor from Jurassic Park growing feathers and somehow becoming this large bird that survived past the extinction of the dinosaurs and gave rise to the birds we have today. Well obviously millions of gigantic birds didn’t walk around unaffected by the meteor impact while all the dinosaurs died. The first question this brought for me was how it happened. But in the end, two more important questions should be realized, one that is crucial to evolution and science in general. What exactly is a theory and how does a question develop into a theory?
To most people a theory is a guess, or at least that is the image I have noticed given out by those who argue against evolution. But a theory is more than that. It begins with a hypothesis, which is a guess that attempts to explain something that happened. After a period of time of being tested against, it becomes a theory. The best theory is one that not only explains something but also makes predictions that have been proven and it must be open to testing, meaning that it can’t be so broad that nothing can prove it wrong. A theory can’t always be proven right or wrong by seeing whether or not it’s there. Atoms, viruses, bacteria and energy all have never been directly observed. Upon that, direct proof that the earth was round was never found until 1961, even though it was known for long before that. So what kind of evidence does evolution provide? Well let’s begin with birds.
Ok so we have a hypothesis that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Well evolution predicts that there must be transitional fossils showing a gradual progression from dinosaurs to birds. The earliest known fossil comes from Protoavis. It arrived soon after the dinosaurs did. It had a bigger brain, had large eye sockets like many birds do today, but it could only cruise through the air. Another early one is the popular Archaeopteryx, who also could not fly but could glide and fly very short distances. Later was a bird called Sinornis. While lesser known than Archaeopteryx, it had separated fingers in its wings that allowed it to do more than just glide. It was capable of sustained flight and maneuvering. As you can see in the pictures attached, even Sinornis looks like a dinosaur in some ways. However during the Cretaceous in Antarctica there was Polarornis. It was a loon that looked very similar to a modern bird.
Now if this were all black and white though I could say this argument is over. Evolution is clearly right and everything else is clearly wrong. But it isn’t. What I just described was once believed to be the way birds evolved but it is wrong. Protoavis was more sophisticated than Archaeopteryx and Archaeopteryx is generally believed not to be a link but more of a side branch to the evolution of birds. So the original argument isn’t completely true. But does this mean that evolution is false? That is the response that I hear quite often. Because one part of the theory cannot explain every detail it must mean that all of evolution is flawed. But the truth is that while the original argument is wrong it does nothing to the theory as a whole. All it means is that we chose the wrong species. Since then a long list of intermediate species has been known, of which I will not go through the boring process of listing them all, which would make this entry twice as long, but if you would like to know send me an email at jxk155@cwru.edu and I’ll be glad to help.
So if the previous explanation was erred and didn’t provide proof against evolution is that a confident way of implying that nothing can disprove evolution or that it would be nearly impossible to? No. Actually it could be much easier for a fault in the theory of the evolution of birds to be used to disprove evolution than one might think. For instance what if a modern-like bird was found in the Triassic? This would mean that birds appeared fully developed and either stayed that way or varied in ability since then. It would put a huge hole in the theory, especially since no bird-related species have been found prior to the Triassic. Something else that could disprove the theory has to do with the order of animals that evolution predicted. In the broadest sense, evolution predicts that fish were first, then amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals, and lastly birds. So if for example, bird fossils were found prior to the Triassic, before dinosaurs ever appeared, it wouldn’t just put a hole in the theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds, it would completely demolish it. It would also put evolution in doubt, same as it would if any of the other groups of animals were found out of order. These are only two of the ways that could disprove both the theory of birds evolving into dinosaurs but also of evolution in general. But even with these two I’m sure we can say that it is quite possible to provide some proof against either theory if one is indeed false.
Even given all this I hear stuff like “well this person found human bones with dinosaur bones at this one place so evolution must be false.” Many people against evolution accept this as a kind of smoking gun to disprove evolution. But that is not the way science works. One or two examples are not enough to disprove a theory. First of all it has to be considered that it can happen geologically along with evolution. And even if it can’t be explained, you need enough examples to support another hypothesis, and I mean many more then a few. But as I have shown, parts of evolutionary theory have holes and other parts have been proven wrong. Realistically we must be aware of that. But there is enough evidence to show that dinosaurs did indeed evolve into birds. It’s only a matter of how it happened.
In future entries I will get into other predictions made by evolution, how they can be proved correct and how they can be proved false. I will also talk about some of the oddities of the world like snakes found with legs, people found with tails, or cave fish, which never see any light during their lives and have no use for eyes, still have primitive eyes. I hope it captures your interest and imagination like it has mine for so many years now.
The Beginning
Of course I could just go about like any textbook and start with the first signs of life on earth 4.6 million years ago, explaining what science is, or how animals are classified. But outside of learning straight out of a textbook, very rarely does anyone actually learn in that order. So I am going to begin where I first began learning…dinosaurs. To me there is no better thing for a kids’ imagination then dinosaurs. I mean they can be anywhere from the size of a chicken to the size of a large building, sluggish or swift, caring for young or stealing others’, armored for defense or equipped with weapons for offense. Most people are familiar with dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus Rex or Velociraptor but there are others that less likely to be known that caught my attention like (pictures on attached file)…
Ankylosaurus – imagine a 15-20 foot long tank; sluggish, back covered with armor, large spikes coming out the sides, and a bony club at the end of its tail
Pachycephalosaurus – what I like to call the prehistoric mountain goat; around 8 feet long; rounded dome on the top of its head that could have been used for ramming each other for competition.
Troodon – 2 foot long carnivore; large brain, excellent eyesight to the point where possibly had depth perception unlike other dinosaurs
Oviraptor – 6 feet long; crest, beak; omnivore most likely stealing eggs from other dinosaurs; ugliest animal I have ever seen
After learning the names of dinosaurs I became interested in knowing which dinosaurs lived together at the same time in the same place. For example all six dinosaurs I named all lived around the same time at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Oviraptor and Velociraptor lived together in China while the others lived together in North America right before the Cretaceous extinction. While most of the dinosaurs we know lived toward the end of the Cretaceous, they lived anywhere from the mid-Triassic Period 230 million years ago to the end of the Cretaceous 65 million years ago. They lived in every corner of the world. I could go on for weeks about what I have learned from other time periods before and after the dinosaurs and some I will get to later but none ever held the fascination as dinosaurs had.
All this is basic interest but one thing really started getting my attention…climate. It started with finding fossils found in Antarctica. To my knowledge there are two dinosaurs (others are not recognizable) called Cryolophosaurus (Jurassic; moderate-sized carnivore with a crest) and Antarctopelta (late Cretaceous; related to Ankylosaurus). Beyond that there are numerous invertebrates from any time periods and other fossils such as trilobites (arthropod…like a crab), which are the longest-living group of animals ever (294 million years). But what caught my attention were the fossils of ferns, conifers and beech trees being found in Antarctica. Obviously Antarctica was not only had a warmer climate, but had to be much closer to the equator at one time. Actually every continent showed signs of this but Antarctica is the one that stood out the most to me. As a whole the world at the beginning of the Triassic were mostly arid, dry deserts. The same processes took place as they do over our western deserts like Death Valley or Nevada today – any moisture in the clouds is quickly absorbed by the mountains leaving a dry, hot air. In the Triassic, all the continents were joined together into one super-continent Pangea so all the moisture would’ve easily been absorbed along the coasts leaving most of the inland areas as one huge desert-like continent. Pangea broke up during the Triassic allowing much more rainfall in the mid-latitudes but still a much warmer climate than we have today. Even the poles weren’t as cold since there were no icecaps at all. This remained so through the Jurassic and into the Cretaceous. By then the climate was similar to what we know today, especially around the equator but varied little leaving the polar caps much warmer. However a cooling climate caused the polar caps to form by the end of the Cretaceous.
So how do we know what the climate was at whatever period? Fastovsky’s Evolution and Extinction of Dinosaurs gives good examples of indicators. One is the amount of iron, since rocks have more iron when the climate is warmer. Conversely calcium carbonate nodules form when the climate is more arid. Isotopes are a huge indicator of past climates. Stable isotopes are present when the climate is warm and dry. An increase in volcanic activity during the Cretaceous Period, while leaving volcanic ash, increased the overall temperature and leaving less that more uniform climate than we have now. The presence of ice caps could be deduced when the ocean recedes worldwide.
All that I’ve learned about dinosaurs and the climate confused me compared to what I knew of the Bible. I mean on one hand you have our interpretation of the past based on what we see through ancient remains and modern processes with an earth that must be very old in order to have gone through massive changes in climate, much older than several thousand years. Knowing that I didn’t know what to think especially when I saw the Bible saying that everything we see and know is wrong. I couldn’t turn from the Bible either because I did believe in it and it instinctively then I knew that it couldn’t have been wrong. What confused me even further is that the Bible never made a definite mention of dinosaurs. The closest is a mention of a behemoth and a leviathan but calling either one a dinosaur is a stretch. Job 40:15-24 describes a behemoth as having powerful muscles in its stomach, a tail that sways like a cedar, and very strong bones like bronze. The interpretation I’ve seen by many is that this is a large, four-foot, long-necked dinosaur such as Diplodocus or Brachiosaurus. Both dinosaurs are at least 90 feet long and can reach up to heights of more than 40 feet above the ground. But I find these and other similar dinosaurs unlikely because of the mentions in Job that the behemoth feeds on grass and that marsh reeds and lotus plants can hide it. The leviathan is definitely a fierce animal of the sea that has strong limbs, and gives me the impression on have a very thick hide like a lizard. But even with that, it gives no indication to me that it must be a dinosaur and not a modern lizard, like a crocodile. The concern I had was how many dinosaurs there were: almost 1100 species, and not one direct mention.
What I learned about dinosaurs made no sense to me compared to what I learned about the Bible at the same time. I didn’t know what to think. It seemed so different that I thought one side had to be right and one had to be wrong. No matter which side was wrong, even then I knew it meant that thousands of people for hundreds or thousands of years were extremely mistaken. But as I will show in my next entries, things will slowly come together in ways that I could have never known.
As with any entry any comments or questions are welcome.
Continue reading "The Beginning"
Evolution & Creation: Intro
Concerning the evolution-creation debate, most people either don’t care or their decision has already been made and in stone. Whatever the reason for that, it is not the case with me. For me it started as a small child interested in dinosaurs. Even then I was confused about how religion and science could fit and which one was right. Evolution made sense to me and, even with my faith, creation seemed like a fairy tale. My confusion compounded even further when I became a geology major and had to begin defending either my major or my faith. Meanwhile I watch the controversy it caused, especially in school where those who don’t understand evolution want it either out of school or at least have equal time with intelligent design and those who do understand want it to be the only thing taught. But this normally wouldn’t be a problem if not for the damage this could cause in general by each side alienating the other. The excessive bashing alienates science from anyone who doesn’t understand science and creates just that much more of a drift and hatred among those non-Christians towards creation. But as I’ve learned over the years, creation isn’t the fairy tale I always thought it was and all the controversy is not only unnecessary but quite foolish, which I will attempt to show.
Personally when I first looked into the debate, the hardest part for me was trying to get past the bashing and the opinions and down to the truth. For example, one is by Futuyma in Science on Trial when he says that the message of evolution seems to be that humans have no purpose or in a CBS Sunday Morning on Nov. 29, 1998 by Rita Braver where it was said that religion is nothing more than a warm and fuzzy way story that comforts us. Both of these are just opinions, but they have give people the impression that they must choose sides on a black-and-white issue. On the other hand, one of the most misleading statements concerning evolution is that it is just a theory. The common perception of a theory is nothing more than a guess, or some unproved statement. If this were true then evolution would have as much credibility as every other guess anyone in any field has come up with. The scientific view of a theory is much different. A good theory must be able to explain some fact, event, or observation with very few assumptions, make testable predictions, and have the possibility of being proven wrong. Plate tectonics is one example. In a nutshell, it predicts that there are floating plates that move around, their interactions causing earthquakes and creating features such as mountains, volcanoes, and rift valleys. The theory explains the creation and location of these features and can be disproved if, for example, it is found that the crust is immobile (like that on Venus) or that mountains and valleys aren’t found where the theory predicts.
Clarification on what a scientific theory is extremely important in my understanding not because I found that evolution fits the criteria, but that evolution does so better than any other theory found so far. That is why evolution is given an enormous amount of respect among the scientific community. It may not a proven fact, but it is much more then other theories. In my next entries I will talk further on why I believe everything that I have argued is true and how I believe creation fits into all this.