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Originally Posted by CaptainHaplo
I will be presenting the side of scientific creationism. This means that I will bring forward evidence of a "young" earth, rebut as best I can challenges to such evidence with logic and fact, as well as demonstrate how evolution is a flawed theory lacking credible evidence.
How old is the earth? No one was alive to see its beginning, so there is no direct testamony to that beginning. However, a "Young Earth" - aka a planetary age somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old is demonstrated by a number of scientific facts.
#1 Let us look to the sky in the night and see our celestial neighbor - the Moon. The gravitational pull between the Earth and Moon causes the Earth’s oceans to have tides. The tidal friction between the Earth’s terrestrial surface and the water moving over it causes energy to be added to the Moon. This results in a constant yearly increase in the distance between the Earth and Moon. This tidal friction also causes the Earth’s rotation to slow down, but more importantly, the energy added to the Moon causes it to recede from the Earth. The rate of recession was measured at four centimeters per year in 1981, however, according to Physicist Donald B. DeYoung: "One cannot extrapolate the present 4 cm/year separation rate back into history. It has that value today, but was more rapid in the past because of tidal effects. In fact, the separation rate depends on the distance to the 6th power, a very strong dependence ... the rate ... was perhaps 20 m/year ‘long’ ago, and the average is 1.2 m/year.
Because of this, the Moon must be less than 750 million years old -- or 20% of the supposed 4.5 billion-year age of the Earth-Moon system theorized by evolution. |
First of all, this has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution does not deal with celestial bodies, the beginning of life, the beginning of space and time etc. It deals with the change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. That is all. I should ignore this, but will not.
Anyway, here is a response to why you are wrong.
1. The moon is receding at about 3.8 cm per year. Since the moon is 3.85 × 10 to the 10th power cm from the earth, this is already consistent, within an order of magnitude, with an earth-moon system billions of years old.
2. The magnitude of tidal friction depends on the arrangement of the continents. In the past, the continents were arranged such that tidal friction, and thus the rates of earth's slowing and the moon's recession, would have been less. The earth's rotation has slowed at a rate of two seconds every 100,000 years (Eicher 1976).
3. The rate of earth's rotation in the distant past can be measured. Corals produce skeletons with both daily layers and yearly patterns, so we can count the number of days per year when the coral grew. Measurements of fossil corals from 180 to 400 million years ago show year lengths from 381 to 410 days, with older corals showing more days per year (Eicher 1976; Scrutton 1970; Wells 1963; 1970). Similarly, days per year can also be computed from growth patterns in mollusks (Pannella 1976; Scrutton 1978) and stromatolites (Mohr 1975; Pannella et al. 1968) and from sediment deposition patterns (Williams 1997). All such measurements are consistent with a gradual rate of earth's slowing for the last 650 million years.
4. The clocks based on the slowing of earth's rotation described above provide an independent method of dating geological layers over most of the fossil record. The data is inconsistent with a young earth.
References:
1. Eicher, D. L., 1976. Geologic Time. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
2. Mohr, R. E., 1975. Measured periodicities of the Biwabik (Precambrian) stromatolites and their geophysical significance. In: Rosenberg and Runcorn, pp. 43-56.
3. Pannella, G., 1976. Tidal growth patterns in Recent and fossil mollusc bivalve shells: A tool for the reconstruction of paleotides. Naturwissenschaften 63: 539-543.
4. Pannella, G., C. MacClintock and M. Thompson, 1968. Paleontological evidence of variation in length of synodic month since Late Cambrian. Science 162: 792-796.
5. Rosenberg, G. D. and S. K. Runcorn (eds.), 1975. Growth Rhythms and the History of the Earth's Rotation. New York: Wiley.
Scrutton, C. T., 1970. Evidence for a monthly periodicity in the growth of some corals. In: Palaeogeophysics, S. K. Runcorn, ed., London: Academic Press, pp. 11-16.
6. Scrutton, C. T., 1978. Periodic growth features in fossil organisms and the length of the day and month. In: Tidal Friction and the Earth's Rotation. P. 7. Brosche and J. Sundermann, eds., Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 154-196.
8. Wells, J. W., 1963. Coral growth and geochronometry. Nature 197: 948-950.
9. Wells, J. W., 1970. Problems of annual and daily growth-rings in corals. In: Palaeogeophysics, S. K. Runcorn, ed., London: Academic Press, pp. 3-9.
10. Williams, G. E., 1997. Precambrian length of day and the validity of tidal rhythmite paleotidal values. Geophysical Research Letters 24(4): 421-424.
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#2 Oil Wells - When oil wells are drilled, the oil is almost always found to be under great pressure. This presents a problem for those who claim "millions of years" for the age of oil, simply because rocks are porous. In other words, as time goes by the oil should seep into tiny pores in the surrounding rock, and, over time, reduce the pressure. However, for some reason it doesn't.
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This has nothing to do with evolution, I get a feeling this thread should be named science vs young earth to be more accurate.
Anyway this is because every known substance is porous to a degree, but if it is dense enough it can still form a seal. Though my knowledge of the physics involved here is very limited.
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#3 Our Friend the Sun - Measurements of the sun's diameter over the past several hundred years indicate that it is shrinking at the rate of five feet per hour. Assuming that this rate has been constant in the past we can conclude that the earth would have been so hot only one million years ago that no life could have survived. And only 11,200,000 years ago the sun would have physically touched the earth.
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1. This assumes that the rate of shrinkage is constant. That assumption is baseless. (In fact, it is the uniformitarian assumption that creationists themselves sometimes complain about.) Other stars expand and contract cyclically. Our own sun might do the same on a small scale.
2. There is not even any good evidence of shrinkage. The claim is based on a single report from 1980. Other measurements, from 1980 and later, do not show any significant shrinkage. It is likely that the original report showing shrinkage contained systematic errors due to different measuring techniquies over the decades.
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#4 The Air We Breathe - Carbon-14 is produced when radiation from the sun strikes Nitrogen-14 atoms in the earth's upper atmosphere. The earth's atmosphere is not yet saturated with C14. This means that the amount of C14 being produced is greater than the amount that is decaying back to N14. It is estimated that a state of equilibrium would be reached in as little as 30,000 years. Thus, it appears that the earth's atmosphere is less than 30,000 years old. In fact, the evidence suggests it is less than 10,000 years old.
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This is the first time I hear this argument, but alas, this has nothing to do with evolution, again.
Anyway this argument is flawed because it assumes a constant conversion rate of N14 into C14, while it is everything but. (Strahler, Arthur N. 1987. Science and Earth History, p.158)
Tree-ring dating gives us a wonderful check on the radiocarbon dating method for the last 8000 years. That is, we can use carbon-14 dating on a given tree-ring (the 8000-year sequence having been assembled from the overlapping tree-ring patterns of living and dead trees) and compare the resulting age with the tree-ring date. A study of the deviations from the accurate tree-ring dating sequence shows that the earth's magnetic field has an important effect on carbon-14 production. When the dipole moment is strong, carbon-14 production is suppressed below normal; when it is weak, carbon-14 production is boosted above normal. What the magnetic field does is to partially shield the earth from cosmic rays which produce carbon-14 high in the atmosphere.
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#5 "Mother" Eve's DNA - In 1989 scientists said that they had compared the Mitochondrial DNA of various different races of people and concluded that they all came from a single woman (they called her Eve) who lived from 100,000-200,000 years ago.This story was widely reported in the press. A few years later scientists actually measured the rate of Mitochondrial mutations and discovered that they changed about 20 times faster than was earlier reported. This means that "Eve" did not live 100,000-200,000 years ago but rather only 5,000-10,000.
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Finally an argument that actualy has something to do with evolution, yay. Anyway the "mitochondrial Eve," to which this claim refers, is the most recent common female ancestor, not the original female ancestor. There would have been other humans living earlier and at the same time. The mtDNA lineages of other women contemporary with her eventually died out. Mitochondrial Eve was merely the youngest common ancestor of all today's mtDNA. She may not even have been human.
As of the mutation rate:
1. The claim is founded primarily on the work of Parsons et al. (1997), who found that the substitution rate was about 25 times higher in the mitochondria control region, which is less than 7% of the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA). Revised studies of all of the mtDNA find that the control region varies greatly in substitution rates in different populations, but that the rest of the mtDNA shows no such variation (Ingman et al. 2000). Using mtDNA excluding the control region, they placed the age of the most recent common mitochondrial ancestor at 171,500 +/- 50,000 years ago.
Gibbons (1998) refers to mutations that cause heteroplasmy (inheritance of two or more mtDNA sequences). This does not apply to mitochondrial Eve research, which is based only on substitution mutation rates.
2. A study similar to the mtEve research was done on a region of the X chromosome which does not recombine with the smaller Y chromosome; it placed the most recent common ancestor 535,000 +/- 119,000 years ago (Kaessmann et al. 1999). Since the population size of X chromosomes is effectively three times larger than mitochondria (two X chromosomes from women and one from men can get inherited), the most recent common ancestor should be about three times older than that of the Mitochondrial Eve, and it is.
Refrences:
1. Gibbons, A. 1998. Calibrating the mitochondrial clock. Science 279: 28-29.
2. Ingman, M., H. Kaessmann, S. Pääbo and U. Gyllensten. 2000. Mitochondrial genome variation and the origin of modern humans. Nature 408: 708-713.
3. Kaessmann, H., F. Heissig, A. von Haeseler and S. Pääbo. 1999. DNA sequence variation in a non-coding region of low recombination on the human X chromosome. Nature Genetics 22: 78-81.
4. Loewe, L. and S. Scherer. 1997. Mitochondrial Eve: the plot thickens. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 12(11): 422-423
5. Parsons, T. J. et al. 1997. A high observed substitution rate in the human mitochondrial control region. Nature Genetics 15: 363-368.
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#6 Look at all the People - Today the earth's population doubles about every 50 years. If we assumed only half of the current growth rate and start with one couple, it would take less than 4,000 years to achieve today's population.
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Back to stuff that has nothing to do with with evolution.
And this argument is plainly silly. Wars and plagues would have caused populations to drop from time to time. In particular, population sizes before agriculture would have been severely limited and would have had an average population growth of zero for any number of years. Then there is sanitation which affects attrition of humans. The kind of exponential population growth we see was impossible in the past due to the limitation of technology.
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#7 The Dead Sea - The Dead Sea is in Israel. It is receives fresh water from the Sea of Galilee via the Jordan River. The Dead Sea has a very high salt content. Even so, it continues to get saltier since it has no outlet other than by evaporation. Scientists have measured the amount of salt added each year by the Jordan River; and they have also calculated the amount of salt in the Dead Sea. From these it is possible to estimate how long this process has been going on for. Assuming a constant rate of salt/water flow, and a zero salt level at the beginning, then the age of the Dead Sea is only 13,000 year old.
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A comparison between the chemical composition of the water of the Dead Sea and its tributaries and that of other lakes and the ocean shows the average salinity of the Dead Sea water (31.50%) to be exceptionally high, concentration of the SO 4 ''-ion to be very low and that of Br (5920mg/1) to be probably the highest on record for any surface water. Most of the cationic calcium in the Dead Sea and its tributaries is balanced by chloride. A short summary of the geological history of the area shows that the Dead Sea is not a relict body of sea water; its salt assemblage is the result of accumulation in a closed inland basin under arid conditions. The salts originate from two main sources, about one third from the Jordan River and about two thirds from highly saline springs discharging into the Dead Sea. On this fact a method can be based for calculating the age of the Dead Sea leading to a maximum figure of about 70,000 and a minimum of 12,000 years, the latter being more probable. The annual amount of chemical precipitation in the Southern Dead Sea basin is calculated to 0.306 gr/cm 2 and it is shown that NaCl and CaSO 4 are the major and that CaCO 3 is a minor component. This result is in good agreement with observations on the present rate of chemical sedimentation in the Dead Sea. Volcanic and organic origins for the vast bromine reserve in the Dead Sea are rejected and the derivation of the bromine from fossil residual brines, formed during the Tertiary, is tentatively accepted.
Refrences:
Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, vol. 25, Issue 4, pp.239-240
Any aditional information available at
www.Talkorigins.org