Piltdown man was indeed shown wrong, but over forty years after the fact. And while Nebraska Man was not a deliberate hoax, the construction of exhibits showing a male and female in an environment based on one tooth is a bit of a stretch. Particularly when it turns out the tooth was from a pig extinct in the area (although that type of pig is still found in South America). Point being, unwarranted extrapolation is error on whichever side does it.
though there are a lot of other thing that would seem to show an older earth, like radioactivity-dating
Radiometric dating has so many anomalies that it isn't anything like a reliable test. Although if you think it is, it's a great proof of a young earth. For example, C14 has a half-life of roughly 5730 years. So past 50,000 or 100,000 years back, the amount of C14 should be unmeasurable to zero.
So why do all known coal deposits have C14 activity? Evolutionist science says these deposits are from the carboniferous era, roughly 320 million years ago.
And while you certainly have a good point that starting from an assumption and moving toward it by picking facts is not good science, that's human nature. It happens in evolution science as well as in creation science. For example, the forward to the 100-year anniversary edition of Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" has this to say
"Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable." -Sir Arthur Keith
So evolution also, as you put it, "picks a full-blown story and looks for evidence to support it". That's a failing of both sides of this controversy; and that makes it hard to use that as a point of dismissal for either one.
I beg to differ with your cavalier dismissal of creation science - it is not as you characterize it. Of course there are charlatans in all areas of science, and creation science is sadly not free of them either. But then again neither is evolution science (can you say Piltdown Man?).
How about science based on articles published in Science and Nature - would that qualify as main-line enough for you? One now-revealed creation scientist did so for about twenty years or so; and his experimental results showed that the earth was formed very rapidly, not over (m|b)illions of years.
Check it out here if you are willing to open your mind and see that there is something to investigate and learn from.
This is all based on the NTSC standard, I have no idea about PAL/SECAM...
It works (like mine did when I watched the tube, gave that up a few years ago due to being an immense useless time sink) by looking for the signals the networks use to indicate to the affiliates "hey here comes a commercial" which is encoded in the "back porch". That's the area of the signal when the CRT beam is repositioning itself from the bottom to the top of the screen. During that period, there is a fair bit of information sent. The "Commercial Advance" VCR's just rely on the idea that for the networks and affiliates to change their codes would take so many bucks that it's not likely to happen.
Some of them also look for black screens around the time of the back porch signal; that can fool them into cutting into the program content on the leading or trailing edge.
And when it's not networks but others, the ads are still encoded with the signalling and the equipment still generates the signal; once it's the standard it's easier to have all cases covered.
Someone moderated me flamebait - must be one of those "young earthers".
Wasn't this young earther, clearly, since I'm posting here and your score didn't change. Could just be someone looking to start a flamefest perhaps. Since it's a highly unfair mod, you would IMHO be justified to complain about it.
From this page, a very nice history of the column in SciAm (though it was apparently a bit optimistic at the end of the piece):
A Brief History of "The Amateur Scientist"
Albert Ingalls "The Amateur Scientist" traces its pedigree to 1928, when famed astronomer Albert Ingalls began the column as "The Backyard Astronomer." Ingalls told amateurs how they could get personally involved in astronomy by building professional-quality instruments and carry out cutting-edge observations. Eventually Ingalls chose to broaden the column's scope to include "how-to's" from all fields of science. When he did, he also changed the department's name to "The Amateur Scientist."
C. L. Stong Ingalls wrote his column for almost 30 years. When he died in 1954 the publisher selected C. L. Stong to continue the feature. Stong was an electrical engineer for Westinghouse and a master tinkerer who brilliantly extended the column, frequently peppering it with extremely sophisticated projects including home-built lasers and atom smashers. Many working professional scientists say that they first got hooked on science through Stong's amazing columns. In 1960 Stong compiled a book titled The Amateur Scientist, (Simon and Schuster) the only collection of articles that has ever been published from this column. However, limited to paper and ink, Stong could only fit in 57 projects. Despite being only a partial anthology, never being advertised in Scientific American , and appearing long before the rise of home schooling, Stong's book sold over 10,000 copies. It went out of print in 1972 and is much sought after today by amateur scientists.
Jearl Walker Stong ran the department for over 20 years until he died in 1977. In 1978, Scientific American hired Jearl Walker, Ph.D. to take over. Walker had caught the publisher's attention thanks to The Flying Circus of Physics, a book Walker wrote which highlighted the fascinating physics of the everyday world. Under Walker's stewardship "The Amateur Scientist" presented fewer how-to projects, and instead focused on the physics of common phenomena. Walker's columns are still frequently consulted by educators and students alike. Walker resigned from Scientific American in 1990 after 12 years. Collectively, Ingalls, Stong and Walker account for 90 percent of all articles.
Forrest Mims After Walker left, Scientific American decided to rededicate the column to hands-on projects and so they hired Forrest Mims III, a renowned writer of books for Radio Shack and an accomplished amateur scientist. They quickly learned, however, that Mims was an supporter of so-called Scientific Creationism, a movement that attempts to include the creation story of Genesis in biology curricula as a scientifically viable account of human origins. Not wanting to be perceived as supporting Creationism, Scientific American fired Mims. Mims charged religious discrimination and the story was carried through most major US news outlets. Although the incident didn't diminish Scientific American's commitment to the column, it did make them gun-shy about hiring another amateur scientist to write it. But professionals tend to be too narrowly focused in their own disciplines. The publisher invited many potential columnists to submit individual articles, and most of these were published under "The Amateur Scientist." But the magazine was unable to find anyone with both professional credentials and the incredible breadth of science knowledge necessary to recapture the popularity the column enjoyed under Stong and Ingalls. And without a regular columnist, the department languished, appearing only sporadically between 1990 and 1995. Most Scientific American readers stopped looking for it when they got a new magazine.
Shawn Carlson In 1995 the editorial staff discovered the Society for Amateur Scientists. It's Founder and Executive Director was Dr. Shawn Carlson, a physicist and established science writer who had left academe a year earlier to devote his career to helping amateur scientists. Dr. Carlson took over the column in November of that year and immediately returned the column's focus to cutting-edge projects that amateurs can do inexpensively at home. Today, over 1 million Scientific American readers turn to "The Amateur Scientist" every month. The column has never been more popular.
Seems to me that the issue is citing known false, scientifically proven incorrect issues (Haekel, vestigiality) should be anathema to science in any form. That was the entire point I was making. It only raises doubts, quite validly in my opinion. Trying to turn the issue into a discussion of Relativity (observed fact: light is subject to gravity; therefore Einstein's theories are given higher credibility) or of Newtonian (large-scale) mechanics is a not a productive tactic.
And from the article you pointed too, isn't it interesting that one of the cited "proofs" of evolution is embryonic development (remember the mantra "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), which was put forward by Ernst Haekel in the 19th century. He was exposed as having fraudulently drawn the images in 1874; yet even today, as you cited, it's still used as "proof" of evolution.
Another is vestigial organs etc. - another discredited concept long ago. Your appendix (the classicly cited case) is actually a key part of your immune system. Yes there is sufficient redundancy to deal with the loss of it, but you're better off with it than without it. It's the mirror image to the tonsils, really.
"Nature has evolved strategies to cope with dynamic, unpredictable environments,"
which brings up an interesting point. Why is it that when people see an elegant piece of software, they say "what a great design". If a recognizable pattern appears to be coming from a point in space some day they'll say "yippee! intelligence has been found in space!". Yet when incredible things like how fruit flies develop or this are not considered designed? {That's an ATP Synthase animation.}
For those who are unaware, the Abit website is NOT www.abit.com; that reroutes you to motherboards.com. The site you want is www.abit-usa.com or www.abit.com.twinstead.
Apparently the state of Washington is already going after this Walker guy, as of last October. So the feds are a little slower, at least they've jumped on the bandwagon...
I tried clicking on the link in the story, and got
To fully experience the Sharp USA site, you need to have Version 4 or above of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator Version 4.x. Download Internet Explorer
The irony of this is that the Zaurus has Opera built in to it..
I was making the point that Haekel's embryo drawings (or equivalent) are in those textbooks; sorry if I implied that all of them indicate that "ontogeny recaptiluates phylogeny". As you clearly pointed out, some don't. Rebuke accepted.
However, there are others that do so; and just showing those diagrams without a clear explanation of their distortions can lead a reader of the texts to incorrect conclusions.
Further, unless the drawings are shown with a clear explanation in the text that they are faked, that the choice of embryos was non-representative, and that the drawer of the embryos was convicted of fraud by his school over a hundred years ago, and that the true developmental stages are quite different, it is incomplete and inaccurate. Not what a textbook should be.
The point I was making and apparently did not carry across is that presenting known false "proofs" makes it look like it's not science. It really should be just plain facts not fancy in textbooks. And while you are clearly smart enough and well enough educated to recognize the problem with Haekel, kids in high school around the US are being taught that as a proof of evolution.
Okay, examples for Haekel's embryos: Biggs, Kapicka, Lundgren, "Biology, the dynamics of life", 1998, ISBN 0028254317. Also Futuyama, "Evolutionary Biology", 1998, ISBN 0878931899. And Guttman, "Biology", 1999, ISBN 0697223663. And Miller & Levine,"Biology", 2000, ISBN 013334362659.
There are more but I think that makes the point rather clearly. Your statement
No one believes in "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" anymore. No one. No one even remotely mainstream claims that the fact that embryos sometimes look like earlier evolutionary forms "proves" evolution, or even means very much of anything at all.
is not borne out by the facts - the above and other textbooks are teaching this and other lies every year. As long as lies like this are being taught, what can you expect people who find out the "proofs" they were taught are lies to believe after the exposing of the falsehoods?
Evolution is currently taught in government schools in the US using, in too many cases, bogus and disproven examples. That does not help anyone; science should be taught as facts, not as a belief system.
Examples: peppered moths. Kettlewell faked his experiments, heating the moths on the hood of his car, then placing them on tree trunks. Peppered moths don't perch on the trunks. The ones you see pictured in textbooks on the tree trunks are glued there for the pictures.
Another: Haekels' embryos drawings, the old "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Haekel was convicted of fraud by his University over these synthesized drawings in the late 1800's, yet textbooks published in the last five years still use them as "proof" of evolution. And what they label as "gills" in the embryos of fish don't become their gills, and the folds labelled as "gills" on human embryos actually become the bones of the inner ear.
Yet another: the Miller-Urey experiments as a way of showing abiogenesis. The atmosphere of early earth was oxygen-rich according to the last 20 or 30 years of geology research; and that was the opposite of the atmosphere Miller and Urey used. They also got only a very few amino acids, and those they got were racemic. And they were in a bath of acid that would kill the proto-life they were supposed to lead to. Yet that experiment is still in textbooks written very recently.
And another: fruit flies with four wings. That mutation (actually three defective genes combined in one organism) causes the flies to be barely able to fly, and completely unable to breed in a natural environment. Yet some current textbooks use that as an example of a positive mutation.
Until the textbooks provide non-bogus examples, don't expect total acceptance of evolution to be something rational people do.
Oh please, this has gone on far enough. Nebraska man was a figment; starting from a tooth an entire fantasy was concocted. Only it turned out it was an extinct pig's tooth. Even your favorite site admits that. If you're going to be that sloppy, it's not worthwhile to continue this.
If you're going to continue, let's get back to Gentry, the topic that started this thread. Otherwise it's not going to get anywhere.
DNA studies are really fascinating. You cite them as evidence, but counter-examples are rife. If you would like I can produce them (I'm not where I can get them at the moment). Amusing things like humans are closer to flowers in some things than to apes. And there are cases of similar homology (forearms/forelegs) that look quite closely related that are actually on completely different genes in different species.
Vestigial structures - yes a lack of them does harm the theory of evolution. Did you know that 186 vestigial structures were thought to be in the human body in the late 1800's - and that every one of them has now been shown to have a significant role in life. The appendix, for example, the classic case cited by evolutionists in time past, is now known to be a major help to the immune system. Yes you can live without it, but you can also live without your eyes. Doesn't mean they're not real useful.
Of course biochemistry is compatible across species - if it weren't, we couldn't all eat the same foods, live in the same world, breath the same air.
As to fossils - how about frozen, unfossilized dinosaur bones? They should not exist, millions of years or not. Yet they do, in Alaska and Siberia.
I think you may be mixing neo-Darwinian (Mendelian genetics mixed with natural selection) with pure Darwinism. I can't parse the rest of your statement about Darwin; could you rephrase?
True, neo-Darwinism could indeed still work with a young earth, point well taken. However nothing much would have happened in the short time frame, so it wouldn't matter a whole lot.
Proto-humans. Ignoring the mass amounts of fakes (Piltdown, Nebraska, Java, etc.), we get to things like Neandertals. Did you know that they are just heavily arthritic, very old people? An orthodondist examined the fossils and found that their maxillofacial development is just an extended version of what happens to us now. Kind of like humans that lived to be hundreds of years old. Not proven but interesting.
The rate of genetic change in the lab is, sadly for evolution, only in the negative direction. No new organs, enzymes, or structures have come forth - only damaged genes.
I don't hold to the second law of thermo way of saying evolution doesn't happen, I personally think that's a weak argument. I don't disagree with you on that.
Realize one thing please - I don't ask you to believe in creationism; I just ask that you consider that evolution is broken as a theory. Something better needs to replace it. Time to move on and admit it's over. Science has done that in the past, always after a long period of denial. It was 50 years after the speed of light was measured as roughly correct (by timing Io's eclipsing around Jupiter) before it was accepted. If something as easily repeated as that took that long, then evolution will take longer I fear.
sigh... I wish you'd actually read my above post, where I cited the fact that Gentry's counter-evidence of Odom and Rink's 1989 article was done prior to their publication. Gentry, in experiments reported in Science in 1968, 1971, and 1974 dealt with all the issues that Odom and Rink presented in 1989. All his rebuttal in 1989 would have done was to draw attention to the particular points in those experimental reports to show how they disproved Odom and Rink's questions about Po halos.
Again, why Gentry did not get to publish in Science was covered in the above post. To repeat - Science flat refused to publish either of his defenses. You seem to ignore the fact that Odom wrote a letter to Gentry after the article was published, a letter in which he not only stated that he had no Po halos, but in which he also stated that Science had dictated that he remove portions of his article that mentioned instantaneous creation as an alternate explanation. Science censored Odom's article, so what were the odds that they'd allow Gentry a fair chance to rebut? Also in the letter from Odom to Gentry is: "Jack and I would be very happy to see you investigate these halos, and if possible test our model."
Gee, doesn't sound like Odom thought poorly of Gentry does it. In fact it sounds like Odom is looking to Gentry as the acknowledged expert in the field (which he certainly is).
I understand that it's disturbing to see hard evidence against something that you believe strongly; are you willing to possibly consider looking into it rather than just throwing words around?
Proven because it's the establishment, orthodox position?
A proven scientific theorem, which it appears you are claiming macro-evolution is, has by convention a requirement that it provide not only predictions of outcomes of repeatable experiments, but also a parameter or set of parameters by which it could be falsified. For example, Einstein stated in his relativity papers that if light were not bent by gravity, that his theory would be shown false. But of course the eclipse of the sun showed that light was bent by gravity.
So what are the repeatable experiments you can cite for macro-evolution?
Addition is addition; changing the terms only shows that it is symbolic in nature. Wrangling words to make micro-evolution the same as macro-evolution is not going to happen just because that's the orthodox, establishment viewpoint. One is easily observed, the other is speculation. One is easily proven, the other is not. Selective breeding in dogs makes it pretty unlikely that a Chihuahua will interbreed with a Great Dane, although it is biologically possible, it's not awfully realistic. Both breeds have lost some genetic information to get into that situation.
But that is not evolution; it's a loss of genetic diversity and information that happened.
Gentry has published in Science, in Nature, in Geophysical Research Letters, in Physics Today, and other presitigious, evolutionist first-tier publications on the subject of pleochroic halos. Only when his non-establishment views were widely publicized did he get shut out by closed-minded editors. His papers were peer reviewed and accepted for decades. He was a scientist at Oak Ridge National Labs.
What further qualifications are you suggesting he should have?
It seems the citations you offer, particularly about Gentry, are quite easily refuted if you just look into the source material.
First, you claim that Gentry has never published a rebuttal. That is an inaccurate claim. He did not publish in the same journal as the source materials for his refutation, the same journal as published Odom and Rink, Science.
If you read Gentry's book, you can see (pages 327-330) the letters from Science where they refused to publish either of rebuttal papers Gentry offered to Odom and Rink's 1989 paper, despite the fact that the rebuttal was based on papers previously published in Science. The anti-creationist bias in their refusals is clear.
Gentry's answer, which was refused publication for clearly specious reasons, was based on his 1968, 1971, and 1974 papers in the exact same journal. He had already foreseen that counterpoint and had experimentally disproven it. Of course when the originating journal (Science) refused to allow him to answer, he chose to publish in an alternative. The answer had to be made - it was certainly not his choice to do it in an alternate.
In addition Odom's letter to Gentry (which you can also read in Gentry's book), dated 10/27/89, clearly states that he did not have a Po halo. Odom additionally mentions that he has only two Al halos. So you're basing your counter-argument to Gentry's decades of exhaustive research on the interpretations of someone who has not even observed what Gentry's research is all about! That is far from, to use your word, Gentry's theory being "supplanted". If you are open to investigating this for yourself, I suggest you read Gentry's articles or his book for yourself, don't rely on the summaries done by others such as the link you provided.
Why did Science refuse to allow the rebuttal to be made in their pages (they as a rule do allow an author to answer a counter-paper)? Can you say "bias"??? When Gentry wrote in Science and Nature in the 60s through early 80s, he did not advertise his data as supporting a creationist view. Once he started to do so, the journals started shutting him out.
Your statement that you weren't attacking him personally, but then including a link to a site which does so, does raise some issues, left as an exercise for the reader to interpret.
As to excess He (not hydrogen as you stated), the issue again is thoroughly dealt with in Gentry's published research. It was published in Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 9, No. 10, Pages 1129-1130, October 1982, and was co-written with Glish and McBay, scientists at the analytical chemistry division of ORNL. A paper was also published in Science about it. Your bold assertion that he did no more that show the levels were "just right" for evolution doesn't make it so; the amount of He in deep zircons is far higher than billions of years allow. Again I suggest you read the original papers.
Now to K-Ar dating. Let's just ignore the seabed case - there are still the Mt. St. Helens and the Mt. Etna data to look at. Those two provide hard evidence that in at least those two cases that K-Ar does not work as a reliable dating method when the age of the rock is known. I'm sure lots of theories could be advanced as to why (and may have been), but the bottom line has to be: when the age of a rock is known, the results aren't what was predicted. So why then accept the results when the age is unknown? What unforeseen events could make dating anything else with K-Ar magically more accurate?
I find it so interesting to see you cite index fossils as proof of radiometric dating. Particularly since if you ask geologists, you'll usually get an answer that dating is done in a layer by looking at the fossils. Then ask a biologist and he/she will tell you that the dating is done by the rocks in the strata. Round and round we go, where we stop, nobody knows - circular reasoning, anyone?
As for the U-Pb, Ru-Sr, and isochron dating methods, if you are really interested, I suggest the book "Mythology of Modern Dating Methods". It's a ponderous read, but does a far better job of addressing your concerns than I could ever do in a/. comment.
So I stand by my comment that it takes more faith to believe in radiometric dating, index fossils determining age, and billions of years than it does to accept the hard, unrefuted evidence of things like Po halos and admit the earth is young, not old. Believing something in the face of contrary facts, such as thinking that K-Ar is reliable as a dating method, has to take a huge amount of faith. I don't say there's anything wrong with faith; I just wish it would be admitted that evolutionism is as much a religious viewpoint (look at the vehemence of its defenders!) as creationism.
May you be as happy in your faith as I am in mine.
Asimov's Foundation series (it's a lot more than a trilogy now, I think he got it to 6 books) shows his background as a chemist. His "psychohistory" or mathematics of societies is really just the branch of chemistry called statistical mechanics (or stat mech to those of us who took it) applied to human cultures instead of molecules. As you stated, its basis is that the individual molecule can't be well predicted, but the aggregate can be.
The testing of the Mt. St. Helens lava dome rocks was done using the exact same labs as other scientists use; please don't suggest that the labs knew the philosophy of the submitters of the rocks and altered data based on that... The fact that orthodox publications wouldn't accept it for publication tells more about their prejudice than the veracity of the facts.
But let's look at other problems with age issues: pleochroic halos of Polonium in granite. Don't bother trying to cite Brawley's weak counter to it on talkorigins, that is so full of already experimentally closed holes that it isn't worth the bandwidth to send people to look at it. Gentry experimentally proved, in a set of peer reviewed publications (Science, Nature, Geophysical Letters) that the halos could only have come from primordial Po.
And that means that the bedrock granite of the continents formed in seconds or minutes, not in millions of years. Gentry has repeatedly issued a challenge, a way to falsify his model, but no one has been willing to publish results of trying.
And then let's consider the issue of Helium; if the world were as old as evolutionists need it to be in order to believe in abiogenesis and "goo to you" evolution, then the amount of Helium in the atmosphere would be way higher than it is. And the amount of He in bedrock deposits would be a lot less, it would have diffused out millions or billions of years ago. But it hasn't, it's still in the rocks.
Radiometric dating, whenever an object of known age (Hawaiian volcanoes, Mt. Etna, Mt. St. Helens) is tested, comes up with big errors. By any reasonable standard, that shows that method is broken or falsified. Certainly not that it's reliable enough to base your belief system on, unless you are willing to make a leap of faith much greater than I would be willing to make.
Natural selection is obvious, it's visible to all. And micro-evolution is the clear outcome of it, things like antibiotic resistance. But in most cases that's due to a loss of genetic information. Think about it - if you have your limbs removed you're resistant to handcuffs. But you lost something to achieve that.
That's why once the antibiotic is removed the population drifts back to the norm - the un-selected bacteria are more fit, have more diversity to draw on, in other situations..
Slashdot Mirror
So why do all known coal deposits have C14 activity? Evolutionist science says these deposits are from the carboniferous era, roughly 320 million years ago.
And while you certainly have a good point that starting from an assumption and moving toward it by picking facts is not good science, that's human nature. It happens in evolution science as well as in creation science. For example, the forward to the 100-year anniversary edition of Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" has this to say So evolution also, as you put it, "picks a full-blown story and looks for evidence to support it". That's a failing of both sides of this controversy; and that makes it hard to use that as a point of dismissal for either one.
I beg to differ with your cavalier dismissal of creation science - it is not as you characterize it. Of course there are charlatans in all areas of science, and creation science is sadly not free of them either. But then again neither is evolution science (can you say Piltdown Man?).
How about science based on articles published in Science and Nature - would that qualify as main-line enough for you? One now-revealed creation scientist did so for about twenty years or so; and his experimental results showed that the earth was formed very rapidly, not over (m|b)illions of years.
Check it out here if you are willing to open your mind and see that there is something to investigate and learn from.
This is all based on the NTSC standard, I have no idea about PAL/SECAM...
It works (like mine did when I watched the tube, gave that up a few years ago due to being an immense useless time sink) by looking for the signals the networks use to indicate to the affiliates "hey here comes a commercial" which is encoded in the "back porch". That's the area of the signal when the CRT beam is repositioning itself from the bottom to the top of the screen. During that period, there is a fair bit of information sent. The "Commercial Advance" VCR's just rely on the idea that for the networks and affiliates to change their codes would take so many bucks that it's not likely to happen.
Some of them also look for black screens around the time of the back porch signal; that can fool them into cutting into the program content on the leading or trailing edge.
And when it's not networks but others, the ads are still encoded with the signalling and the equipment still generates the signal; once it's the standard it's easier to have all cases covered.
From this page, a very nice history of the column in SciAm (though it was apparently a bit optimistic at the end of the piece):
A Brief History of
"The Amateur Scientist"
Albert Ingalls
"The Amateur Scientist" traces its pedigree to 1928, when famed astronomer Albert Ingalls began the column as "The Backyard Astronomer." Ingalls told amateurs how they could get personally involved in astronomy by building professional-quality instruments and carry out cutting-edge observations. Eventually Ingalls chose to broaden the column's scope to include "how-to's" from all fields of science. When he did, he also changed the department's name to "The Amateur Scientist."
C. L. Stong
Ingalls wrote his column for almost 30 years. When he died in 1954 the publisher selected C. L. Stong to continue the feature. Stong was an electrical engineer for Westinghouse and a master tinkerer who brilliantly extended the column, frequently peppering it with extremely sophisticated projects including home-built lasers and atom smashers. Many working professional scientists say that they first got hooked on science through Stong's amazing columns.
In 1960 Stong compiled a book titled The Amateur Scientist, (Simon and Schuster) the only collection of articles that has ever been published from this column. However, limited to paper and ink, Stong could only fit in 57 projects. Despite being only a partial anthology, never being advertised in Scientific American , and appearing long before the rise of home schooling, Stong's book sold over 10,000 copies. It went out of print in 1972 and is much sought after today by amateur scientists.
Jearl Walker
Stong ran the department for over 20 years until he died in 1977. In 1978, Scientific American hired Jearl Walker, Ph.D. to take over. Walker had caught the publisher's attention thanks to The Flying Circus of Physics, a book Walker wrote which highlighted the fascinating physics of the everyday world. Under Walker's stewardship "The Amateur Scientist" presented fewer how-to projects, and instead focused on the physics of common phenomena. Walker's columns are still frequently consulted by educators and students alike.
Walker resigned from Scientific American in 1990 after 12 years. Collectively, Ingalls, Stong and Walker account for 90 percent of all articles.
Forrest Mims
After Walker left, Scientific American decided to rededicate the column to hands-on projects and so they hired Forrest Mims III, a renowned writer of books for Radio Shack and an accomplished amateur scientist. They quickly learned, however, that Mims was an supporter of so-called Scientific Creationism, a movement that attempts to include the creation story of Genesis in biology curricula as a scientifically viable account of human origins. Not wanting to be perceived as supporting Creationism, Scientific American fired Mims. Mims charged religious discrimination and the story was carried through most major US news outlets.
Although the incident didn't diminish Scientific American's commitment to the column, it did make them gun-shy about hiring another amateur scientist to write it. But professionals tend to be too narrowly focused in their own disciplines. The publisher invited many potential columnists to submit individual articles, and most of these were published under "The Amateur Scientist." But the magazine was unable to find anyone with both professional credentials and the incredible breadth of science knowledge necessary to recapture the popularity the column enjoyed under Stong and Ingalls. And without a regular columnist, the department languished, appearing only sporadically between 1990 and 1995. Most Scientific American readers stopped looking for it when they got a new magazine.
Shawn Carlson
In 1995 the editorial staff discovered the Society for Amateur Scientists. It's Founder and Executive Director was Dr. Shawn Carlson, a physicist and established science writer who had left academe a year earlier to devote his career to helping amateur scientists. Dr. Carlson took over the column in November of that year and immediately returned the column's focus to cutting-edge projects that amateurs can do inexpensively at home. Today, over 1 million Scientific American readers turn to "The Amateur Scientist" every month. The column has never been more popular.
Seems to me that the issue is citing known false, scientifically proven incorrect issues (Haekel, vestigiality) should be anathema to science in any form. That was the entire point I was making. It only raises doubts, quite validly in my opinion. Trying to turn the issue into a discussion of Relativity (observed fact: light is subject to gravity; therefore Einstein's theories are given higher credibility) or of Newtonian (large-scale) mechanics is a not a productive tactic.
And from the article you pointed too, isn't it interesting that one of the cited "proofs" of evolution is embryonic development (remember the mantra "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), which was put forward by Ernst Haekel in the 19th century. He was exposed as having fraudulently drawn the images in 1874; yet even today, as you cited, it's still used as "proof" of evolution.
Another is vestigial organs etc. - another discredited concept long ago. Your appendix (the classicly cited case) is actually a key part of your immune system. Yes there is sufficient redundancy to deal with the loss of it, but you're better off with it than without it. It's the mirror image to the tonsils, really.
For those who are unaware, the Abit website is NOT www.abit.com; that reroutes you to motherboards.com. The site you want is www.abit-usa.com or www.abit.com.twinstead.
Apparently the state of Washington is already going after this Walker guy, as of last October. So the feds are a little slower, at least they've jumped on the bandwagon...
The irony of this is that the Zaurus has Opera built in to it..
I was making the point that Haekel's embryo drawings (or equivalent) are in those textbooks; sorry if I implied that all of them indicate that "ontogeny recaptiluates phylogeny". As you clearly pointed out, some don't. Rebuke accepted.
However, there are others that do so; and just showing those diagrams without a clear explanation of their distortions can lead a reader of the texts to incorrect conclusions.
Further, unless the drawings are shown with a clear explanation in the text that they are faked, that the choice of embryos was non-representative, and that the drawer of the embryos was convicted of fraud by his school over a hundred years ago, and that the true developmental stages are quite different, it is incomplete and inaccurate. Not what a textbook should be.
Okay, examples for Haekel's embryos: Biggs, Kapicka, Lundgren, "Biology, the dynamics of life", 1998, ISBN 0028254317. Also Futuyama, "Evolutionary Biology", 1998, ISBN 0878931899. And Guttman, "Biology", 1999, ISBN 0697223663. And Miller & Levine,"Biology", 2000, ISBN 013334362659.
There are more but I think that makes the point rather clearly. Your statement is not borne out by the facts - the above and other textbooks are teaching this and other lies every year. As long as lies like this are being taught, what can you expect people who find out the "proofs" they were taught are lies to believe after the exposing of the falsehoods?
Evolution is currently taught in government schools in the US using, in too many cases, bogus and disproven examples. That does not help anyone; science should be taught as facts, not as a belief system.
Examples: peppered moths. Kettlewell faked his experiments, heating the moths on the hood of his car, then placing them on tree trunks. Peppered moths don't perch on the trunks. The ones you see pictured in textbooks on the tree trunks are glued there for the pictures.
Another: Haekels' embryos drawings, the old "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Haekel was convicted of fraud by his University over these synthesized drawings in the late 1800's, yet textbooks published in the last five years still use them as "proof" of evolution. And what they label as "gills" in the embryos of fish don't become their gills, and the folds labelled as "gills" on human embryos actually become the bones of the inner ear.
Yet another: the Miller-Urey experiments as a way of showing abiogenesis. The atmosphere of early earth was oxygen-rich according to the last 20 or 30 years of geology research; and that was the opposite of the atmosphere Miller and Urey used. They also got only a very few amino acids, and those they got were racemic. And they were in a bath of acid that would kill the proto-life they were supposed to lead to. Yet that experiment is still in textbooks written very recently.
And another: fruit flies with four wings. That mutation (actually three defective genes combined in one organism) causes the flies to be barely able to fly, and completely unable to breed in a natural environment. Yet some current textbooks use that as an example of a positive mutation.
Until the textbooks provide non-bogus examples, don't expect total acceptance of evolution to be something rational people do.
Oh please, this has gone on far enough. Nebraska man was a figment; starting from a tooth an entire fantasy was concocted. Only it turned out it was an extinct pig's tooth. Even your favorite site admits that. If you're going to be that sloppy, it's not worthwhile to continue this.
If you're going to continue, let's get back to Gentry, the topic that started this thread. Otherwise it's not going to get anywhere.
DNA studies are really fascinating. You cite them as evidence, but counter-examples are rife. If you would like I can produce them (I'm not where I can get them at the moment). Amusing things like humans are closer to flowers in some things than to apes. And there are cases of similar homology (forearms/forelegs) that look quite closely related that are actually on completely different genes in different species.
Vestigial structures - yes a lack of them does harm the theory of evolution. Did you know that 186 vestigial structures were thought to be in the human body in the late 1800's - and that every one of them has now been shown to have a significant role in life. The appendix, for example, the classic case cited by evolutionists in time past, is now known to be a major help to the immune system. Yes you can live without it, but you can also live without your eyes. Doesn't mean they're not real useful.
Of course biochemistry is compatible across species - if it weren't, we couldn't all eat the same foods, live in the same world, breath the same air.
As to fossils - how about frozen, unfossilized dinosaur bones? They should not exist, millions of years or not. Yet they do, in Alaska and Siberia.
I think you may be mixing neo-Darwinian (Mendelian genetics mixed with natural selection) with pure Darwinism. I can't parse the rest of your statement about Darwin; could you rephrase?
True, neo-Darwinism could indeed still work with a young earth, point well taken. However nothing much would have happened in the short time frame, so it wouldn't matter a whole lot.
Proto-humans. Ignoring the mass amounts of fakes (Piltdown, Nebraska, Java, etc.), we get to things like Neandertals. Did you know that they are just heavily arthritic, very old people? An orthodondist examined the fossils and found that their maxillofacial development is just an extended version of what happens to us now. Kind of like humans that lived to be hundreds of years old. Not proven but interesting.
The rate of genetic change in the lab is, sadly for evolution, only in the negative direction. No new organs, enzymes, or structures have come forth - only damaged genes.
I don't hold to the second law of thermo way of saying evolution doesn't happen, I personally think that's a weak argument. I don't disagree with you on that.
Realize one thing please - I don't ask you to believe in creationism; I just ask that you consider that evolution is broken as a theory. Something better needs to replace it. Time to move on and admit it's over. Science has done that in the past, always after a long period of denial. It was 50 years after the speed of light was measured as roughly correct (by timing Io's eclipsing around Jupiter) before it was accepted. If something as easily repeated as that took that long, then evolution will take longer I fear.
sigh... I wish you'd actually read my above post, where I cited the fact that Gentry's counter-evidence of Odom and Rink's 1989 article was done prior to their publication. Gentry, in experiments reported in Science in 1968, 1971, and 1974 dealt with all the issues that Odom and Rink presented in 1989. All his rebuttal in 1989 would have done was to draw attention to the particular points in those experimental reports to show how they disproved Odom and Rink's questions about Po halos.
Again, why Gentry did not get to publish in Science was covered in the above post. To repeat - Science flat refused to publish either of his defenses. You seem to ignore the fact that Odom wrote a letter to Gentry after the article was published, a letter in which he not only stated that he had no Po halos, but in which he also stated that Science had dictated that he remove portions of his article that mentioned instantaneous creation as an alternate explanation. Science censored Odom's article, so what were the odds that they'd allow Gentry a fair chance to rebut? Also in the letter from Odom to Gentry is: "Jack and I would be very happy to see you investigate these halos, and if possible test our model."
Gee, doesn't sound like Odom thought poorly of Gentry does it. In fact it sounds like Odom is looking to Gentry as the acknowledged expert in the field (which he certainly is).
I understand that it's disturbing to see hard evidence against something that you believe strongly; are you willing to possibly consider looking into it rather than just throwing words around?
Proven because it's the establishment, orthodox position?
A proven scientific theorem, which it appears you are claiming macro-evolution is, has by convention a requirement that it provide not only predictions of outcomes of repeatable experiments, but also a parameter or set of parameters by which it could be falsified. For example, Einstein stated in his relativity papers that if light were not bent by gravity, that his theory would be shown false. But of course the eclipse of the sun showed that light was bent by gravity.
So what are the repeatable experiments you can cite for macro-evolution?
What are the falsifiablility criteria?
you said "when natural explanations do exist".
The above long post of mine showed that every counter to Gentry has been experimentally disproven in peer-reviewed journals.
So what natural explanations, held to the same level of scrutiny and peer review, do you have to cite to explain the halos?
Addition is addition; changing the terms only shows that it is symbolic in nature. Wrangling words to make micro-evolution the same as macro-evolution is not going to happen just because that's the orthodox, establishment viewpoint. One is easily observed, the other is speculation. One is easily proven, the other is not. Selective breeding in dogs makes it pretty unlikely that a Chihuahua will interbreed with a Great Dane, although it is biologically possible, it's not awfully realistic. Both breeds have lost some genetic information to get into that situation.
But that is not evolution; it's a loss of genetic diversity and information that happened.
Gentry has published in Science, in Nature, in Geophysical Research Letters, in Physics Today, and other presitigious, evolutionist first-tier publications on the subject of pleochroic halos. Only when his non-establishment views were widely publicized did he get shut out by closed-minded editors. His papers were peer reviewed and accepted for decades. He was a scientist at Oak Ridge National Labs.
What further qualifications are you suggesting he should have?
It seems the citations you offer, particularly about Gentry, are quite easily refuted if you just look into the source material.
/. comment.
First, you claim that Gentry has never published a rebuttal. That is an inaccurate claim. He did not publish in the same journal as the source materials for his refutation, the same journal as published Odom and Rink, Science.
If you read Gentry's book, you can see (pages 327-330) the letters from Science where they refused to publish either of rebuttal papers Gentry offered to Odom and Rink's 1989 paper, despite the fact that the rebuttal was based on papers previously published in Science. The anti-creationist bias in their refusals is clear.
Gentry's answer, which was refused publication for clearly specious reasons, was based on his 1968, 1971, and 1974 papers in the exact same journal. He had already foreseen that counterpoint and had experimentally disproven it. Of course when the originating journal (Science) refused to allow him to answer, he chose to publish in an alternative. The answer had to be made - it was certainly not his choice to do it in an alternate.
In addition Odom's letter to Gentry (which you can also read in Gentry's book), dated 10/27/89, clearly states that he did not have a Po halo. Odom additionally mentions that he has only two Al halos. So you're basing your counter-argument to Gentry's decades of exhaustive research on the interpretations of someone who has not even observed what Gentry's research is all about! That is far from, to use your word, Gentry's theory being "supplanted". If you are open to investigating this for yourself, I suggest you read Gentry's articles or his book for yourself, don't rely on the summaries done by others such as the link you provided.
Why did Science refuse to allow the rebuttal to be made in their pages (they as a rule do allow an author to answer a counter-paper)? Can you say "bias"??? When Gentry wrote in Science and Nature in the 60s through early 80s, he did not advertise his data as supporting a creationist view. Once he started to do so, the journals started shutting him out.
Your statement that you weren't attacking him personally, but then including a link to a site which does so, does raise some issues, left as an exercise for the reader to interpret.
As to excess He (not hydrogen as you stated), the issue again is thoroughly dealt with in Gentry's published research. It was published in Geophysical Research Letters, Vol 9, No. 10, Pages 1129-1130, October 1982, and was co-written with Glish and McBay, scientists at the analytical chemistry division of ORNL. A paper was also published in Science about it. Your bold assertion that he did no more that show the levels were "just right" for evolution doesn't make it so; the amount of He in deep zircons is far higher than billions of years allow. Again I suggest you read the original papers.
Now to K-Ar dating. Let's just ignore the seabed case - there are still the Mt. St. Helens and the Mt. Etna data to look at. Those two provide hard evidence that in at least those two cases that K-Ar does not work as a reliable dating method when the age of the rock is known. I'm sure lots of theories could be advanced as to why (and may have been), but the bottom line has to be: when the age of a rock is known, the results aren't what was predicted. So why then accept the results when the age is unknown? What unforeseen events could make dating anything else with K-Ar magically more accurate?
I find it so interesting to see you cite index fossils as proof of radiometric dating. Particularly since if you ask geologists, you'll usually get an answer that dating is done in a layer by looking at the fossils. Then ask a biologist and he/she will tell you that the dating is done by the rocks in the strata. Round and round we go, where we stop, nobody knows - circular reasoning, anyone?
As for the U-Pb, Ru-Sr, and isochron dating methods, if you are really interested, I suggest the book "Mythology of Modern Dating Methods". It's a ponderous read, but does a far better job of addressing your concerns than I could ever do in a
So I stand by my comment that it takes more faith to believe in radiometric dating, index fossils determining age, and billions of years than it does to accept the hard, unrefuted evidence of things like Po halos and admit the earth is young, not old. Believing something in the face of contrary facts, such as thinking that K-Ar is reliable as a dating method, has to take a huge amount of faith. I don't say there's anything wrong with faith; I just wish it would be admitted that evolutionism is as much a religious viewpoint (look at the vehemence of its defenders!) as creationism.
May you be as happy in your faith as I am in mine.
Asimov's Foundation series (it's a lot more than a trilogy now, I think he got it to 6 books) shows his background as a chemist. His "psychohistory" or mathematics of societies is really just the branch of chemistry called statistical mechanics (or stat mech to those of us who took it) applied to human cultures instead of molecules. As you stated, its basis is that the individual molecule can't be well predicted, but the aggregate can be.
The testing of the Mt. St. Helens lava dome rocks was done using the exact same labs as other scientists use; please don't suggest that the labs knew the philosophy of the submitters of the rocks and altered data based on that... The fact that orthodox publications wouldn't accept it for publication tells more about their prejudice than the veracity of the facts.
But let's look at other problems with age issues: pleochroic halos of Polonium in granite. Don't bother trying to cite Brawley's weak counter to it on talkorigins, that is so full of already experimentally closed holes that it isn't worth the bandwidth to send people to look at it. Gentry experimentally proved, in a set of peer reviewed publications (Science, Nature, Geophysical Letters) that the halos could only have come from primordial Po.
And that means that the bedrock granite of the continents formed in seconds or minutes, not in millions of years. Gentry has repeatedly issued a challenge, a way to falsify his model, but no one has been willing to publish results of trying.
And then let's consider the issue of Helium; if the world were as old as evolutionists need it to be in order to believe in abiogenesis and "goo to you" evolution, then the amount of Helium in the atmosphere would be way higher than it is. And the amount of He in bedrock deposits would be a lot less, it would have diffused out millions or billions of years ago. But it hasn't, it's still in the rocks.
Radiometric dating, whenever an object of known age (Hawaiian volcanoes, Mt. Etna, Mt. St. Helens) is tested, comes up with big errors. By any reasonable standard, that shows that method is broken or falsified. Certainly not that it's reliable enough to base your belief system on, unless you are willing to make a leap of faith much greater than I would be willing to make.
Natural selection is obvious, it's visible to all. And micro-evolution is the clear outcome of it, things like antibiotic resistance. But in most cases that's due to a loss of genetic information. Think about it - if you have your limbs removed you're resistant to handcuffs. But you lost something to achieve that.
That's why once the antibiotic is removed the population drifts back to the norm - the un-selected bacteria are more fit, have more diversity to draw on, in other situations..
Yet another headline that is a bit over the top