Noah's Ark

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

1) Not sure what you mean by "fully formed". Full fossils are actually quite rare, as fossilization requires almost perfect conditions to preserve the characteristics, both in the death, protection from scavengers and other forces, and then the actual fossilization process. Actually, if it was just a matter of them getting swept up and buried like you think they were, we'd likely find a lot more than we do.

2) "Same creatures of today" - You account for dinosaurs, but you might want to research the thousands(millions?) of other species we've found that don't exist today. Aside from the many, many dinosaurs, we don't find mammals, insects, amphibians, plants, arthropods...there's a lot. And how could you have nor forgotten the trilobite?

3) Missing link - we do find them. Given what I said about fossils and their rarity, we're not going to find a completely perfect record laid out for us. It's the ultimate jigsaw puzzle, and a LOT of pieces are missing, or worse, duplicated and/or replicated. Piecing together a creature from various sets of half mangled jaw bones and legs is no easy task. And yes, we've made mistakes and used the wrong pieces for the wrong thing...but we're still learning, and as we get better, we figure those mistakes out.

But back to the missing link part...think about this. What if your only family record was your parents, and then your 5th great grand parents? You can see some resemblances, but because you don't have evidence of the people in your family tree between, does that invalidate the heritage? Of course not. Recreating genetic trees from incomplete fossils is a lot more complicated, but it's basically trying find certain characteristics that are shared and grouping them together, and when some are very much alike and from the same time frame, we create our human category that we call "species". Some fossils we put together might actually not be exactly the same, but we have to work with what evidence we do have, and when we learn more, we can adjust. That's how science works.

There will always be missing links, because every link is a creature, and almost all creatures in the past did not get fossilized. That's right, 99.99...% are lost to us.

To finish out the missing link thing...we've found many creatures that bridge gaps, that share characteristics of two different species. The ancestor of whales, the evolution of the horse, the proto-mammals, the start of flowering plants...and of course, the ascent of hominids to current man, which bothers some religious types, and is a primary reason why evolution is so attacked by believers. It shakes their faith's foundation...if they discarded the first part of the Bible as a myth, what's to prevent the rest of it from following?

As posted to Aq, I already know most rebutals to my comments and you are right about those who reject the first chapters of the Bible, the rest goes down with it, that's a very wise statement.

If you dare to look at the other side of the coin, then you can compare notes with what you know. I have seen both sides of the argument.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

No, it's a myth. it never happened. Your story comes to you in Hebrew, a language younger than others in the region. The older version of the story is from Mesopotamia, and it has nothing to do with Yahweh, Elohim, or Noah. Your own book tells you the Canaanites came out of Ur, one of the Mesopotamian cities buried by local river flood waters long before the myth took root among the Hebrew people. Of course you're reading it literally, while disregarding all the artifacts and historical knowledge that is needed to make a reasonably informed conclusion. This is why all of you conclusions are so unreasonable. It's by design.

That's not a good idea. The more stuff you invent in your mind, the further you deviate from reality. If you want truth, you need to seek it. You have to start by studying the evidence. Avoiding the evidence dooms all of your conclusions. The layers in the canyons are the same as layers everywhere else. They were laid down one on top of the other over long periods of time.

That's one of the bogus statements that comes from refusing to look at the evidence. I just showed you an incomplete skull. I have no idea why you persist in misrepresenting facts. Fossils are found at the layers in which they lived, died and fossilized. To say otherwise is ridiculous.

Nonsense. The fossil record is full of extinct taxa as well as others that survived until present. There are many species nnot found throughout. Humans are nor found, for example, until the most recent of eras.

This has nothing to do will fossil evidence. It's just a fabrication.


This makes no sense.


The bacteria or viruses that will bring you your next cold will have already have adapted to the immunities your body produced last season. That is, they are evolving in real-time.



Fossils are often marked by shifts in genera.



No, that's absurd.

Nothing you've said so far can be explained by anything other than your refusal to acknowledge the real world, by examining real specimens and the studies that explain them, and all the wealth of information that's available at your fingertips.

As long as you rely on garbage in, you will produce garbage out. You need facts, not wild ideas.

If waters full of debri, animals, mud, rocks, plants etc, were moving while depositing, what would the sedimentary layers reveal?

Would the little molluscs settle first or the dinasours?

 

[Captain Kremmen]

The sedimentary layers are a problem for flood theology in themselves.
There is too much salt..
This can be explained in Geological terms as due to the real floods which occurred the Mediterranean.
This was long before men arrived,
at first killing and exploiting each other and inventing religions,
and later arguing on sciforums.

The amount of Messinian salts is larger than 4·1018 kg (Ryan, 2008, Sedimentology), exceeding by a factor of 50 the amount of salt normally contained in the Mediterranean waters. This suggests either a succession of desiccations or a long period of hypersalinity during which incoming water from the Atlantic Ocean was evaporated with the level of the Mediterranean brine being similar to that of the Atlantic

A good theological explanation would be that God cried over man's sins.
Big salty tears, so causing the huge salt deposits.
Alternatively, the story of Lot's wife could explain the deposits.
She was turned into a pillar of salt, if you remember.
If that pillar was a few million miles high, that could explain the excess of salt.

 

[Rhaedas]

If waters full of debri, animals, mud, rocks, plants etc, were moving while depositing, what would the sedimentary layers reveal?

Would the little molluscs settle first or the dinasours?

I know what you want to hear. But if that was true, then it would apply to all organisms, right?

Unfortunately, the layers speak a different story. Plenty of the opposite of what you want to see.

 

[Aqueous Id]

If waters full of debri, animals, mud, rocks, plants etc, were moving while depositing, what would the sedimentary layers reveal? Would the little molluscs settle first or the dinasours?

Don't ask me, ask the fossil record.

Ask how entire genera of marine plants and animals were wiped out by a global flood, or why trees didn't float to the top. This critter was deposited after the era of the dinos (i.e., above dinos):

And this lungfish was deposited in the Devonian, before dinos (i.e., below dinos):

You really need to be addressing the fossils, instead of talking around them.

 

[Aqueous Id]

The sedimentary layers are a problem for flood theology in themselves.
There is too much salt..
This can be explained in Geological terms as due to the real floods which occurred the Mediterranean.
This was long before men arrived,
at first killing and exploiting each other and inventing religions,
and later arguing on sciforums.

The amount of Messinian salts is larger than 4·1018 kg (Ryan, 2008, Sedimentology), exceeding by a factor of 50 the amount of salt normally contained in the Mediterranean waters. This suggests either a succession of desiccations or a long period of hypersalinity during which incoming water from the Atlantic Ocean was evaporated with the level of the Mediterranean brine being similar to that of the Atlantic

A good theological explanation would be that God cried over man's sins.
Big salty tears, so causing the huge salt deposits.
Alternatively, the story of Lot's wife could explain the deposits.
She was turned into a pillar of salt, if you remember.
If that pillar was a few million miles high, that could explain the excess of salt.

Your mention of the Mediterranean brought the following to mind: we invariably link pseudoscience to Creationists. But their Geography sucks, too. A couple of fun exercises: (1) find the general vicinity of the Garden of Eden based on the four rivers that flow out of it, and (2) figure out how a fish that swallowed Jonah (in the Mediterranean?) made it to the vicinity of Nineveh (Mosul, Iraq).

I'd also like to see Noah's itinerary for fetching all the critters of the world and how they got back home after being stranded in Turkey. The alpaca sure had a long way to go. Maybe Jonah's whale (ok, fish) ran a taxi service, swallowing them in nearby Nineveh and vomiting them out near their destination. Piece of cake for a fish that could take a swallowed man from the Levant to Iraq by circumnavigating Africa and the Arabian peninsula.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

Don't ask me, ask the fossil record.

Ask how entire genera of marine plants and animals were wiped out by a global flood, or why trees didn't float to the top. This critter was deposited after the era of the dinos (i.e., above dinos):

And this lungfish was deposited in the Devonian, before dinos (i.e., below dinos):

You really need to be addressing the fossils, instead of talking around them.

Lung fish - still the same creature, no half sponge half worms, or half mullusc half fishes etc.

Trees floating on top, whole forests did, whole forests did not. There were many different scenarios at the beginning of the flood.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

I know what you want to hear. But if that was true, then it would apply to all organisms, right?

Unfortunately, the layers speak a different story. Plenty of the opposite of what you want to see.

No, one rule does not work for all situations, let alone in catastrophies. Even if you were steeped in Darwinism you have to consider that principle.

 

[Captain Kremmen]

No, one rule does not work for all situations, let alone in catastrophies. Even if you were steeped in Darwinism you have to consider that principle.

Could you expand on that, and explain exactly how it counters the argument.
The argument that fossils are repeatedly found in the same geological layers, independent of their weight, size or location.

You are stumbling on this question aren't you?
Admit it.

 

[Rhaedas]

Lung fish - still the same creature, no half sponge half worms, or half mullusc half fishes etc.

You know, finding split species like you suggest would invalidate evolutionary theory. Because that's not how evolution works. It's a pretty strawman though. Gradual changes, over eons, and through fossils we get brief frames of this change over time. Once you get how old things really are, then even small things like wind and rain can reduce mountains, or a small river can carve out a huge canyon, or one species can change into something different.

 

[sideshowbob]

No, one rule does not work for all situations, let alone in catastrophies.

That's your problem really. If there was a global flood, we would expect catastrophic evidence to be global - and it isn't. You can easily point to little catastrophes, local examples of your "many scenarios" - but you're trying to extrapolate from that to One Big Catastrophe. The evidence does support catastrophes but not one big one.

 

[Grumpy]

Gerhard Kemmerer

Lung fish - still the same creature, no half sponge half worms, or half mullusc half fishes etc.

No Crocoducks?

Fish species evolve into other fish species, lungfish are able to breath air and likely led to ALL species with a backbone that can breath air, you breath air, ipso facto, you are a species of fish(in a skewed kind of view). But then all air breathing, land dwelling creatures with a backbone are actually a kind of fish. Since this view ignores most of the differences between creatures we draw arbitrary lines between groups of species based on their traits, but at the core we are all forms of bacteria(the creatures that led to fish in the first place)and if you go back further, all creatures and plants, molds, etc. are simply support systems for the reproduction of the DNA molecule, itself the result of chemical evolution.

Grumpy

 

[Grumpy]

By the way, this is more like a Crocoduck would look like.

Grumpy

 

[Rhaedas]

That picture reminded me of the recent XKCD, had to post it.

 

[Aqueous Id]

Lung fish - still the same creature,

No, this creature is extinct. You're confusing phenotype and genotype, and you're ignoring natural history altogether.
Research the Devonian era lungfish Dipterus valencienne if you need more information.

no half sponge half worms, or half mullusc half fishes etc.

That's gibberish. What do you call a fish with lungs? A half-salamander?

Until you at least begin to study nature, you're not in a position to make declarations about how it works. Or doesn't.

Trees floating on top, whole forests did, whole forests did not. There were many different scenarios at the beginning of the flood.

My statement was to show the absurdity of your fairy tale scenario in which the fossil layers are created from a single cataclysm, and after you tried to inject something about density of dinos vs mollusks. I showed you two fish to show they lie both above and below dinos. My point about trees is that they would all have floated to the top, and then been deposited at the top most layer when the underground ocean mysteriously disappeared back into its pressurized tomb, just before it magically sealed itself up. Of course all of this is pure malarkey based on a myth and completely contradicting all the vast evidence which you are simply ignoring.

At some point you really have to stop inventing all this nonsense and address the facts of science. Until then you're just being dishonest.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

Could you expand on that, and explain exactly how it counters the argument.
The argument that fossils are repeatedly found in the same geological layers, independent of their weight, size or location.

You are stumbling on this question aren't you?
Admit it.

Yes, I would not know, because the flood left behind many scenarios, some of which you can draw evidence from in favour of evolution, other areas not, but the flood claims them all.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

You know, finding split species like you suggest would invalidate evolutionary theory. Because that's not how evolution works. It's a pretty strawman though. Gradual changes, over eons, and through fossils we get brief frames of this change over time. Once you get how old things really are, then even small things like wind and rain can reduce mountains, or a small river can carve out a huge canyon, or one species can change into something different.

Yes, a long duration of time probably would produce those effects in this world, if it did happen.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

Gerhard Kemmerer



No Crocoducks?

Fish species evolve into other fish species, lungfish are able to breath air and likely led to ALL species with a backbone that can breath air, you breath air, ipso facto, you are a species of fish(in a skewed kind of view). But then all air breathing, land dwelling creatures with a backbone are actually a kind of fish. Since this view ignores most of the differences between creatures we draw arbitrary lines between groups of species based on their traits, but at the core we are all forms of bacteria(the creatures that led to fish in the first place)and if you go back further, all creatures and plants, molds, etc. are simply support systems for the reproduction of the DNA molecule, itself the result of chemical evolution.

Grumpy

It's an awful theory.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

That's your problem really. If there was a global flood, we would expect catastrophic evidence to be global - and it isn't. You can easily point to little catastrophes, local examples of your "many scenarios" - but you're trying to extrapolate from that to One Big Catastrophe. The evidence does support catastrophes but not one big one.

You don't see any evidence for the flood, neither do millions. What's new?

Go to any road cutting and what do you see? Why would an earth which was supposedly created by molten rocks, have so many layers.

No one seems to know where the dirt came from to BUILD UP one layer on top of the next.

 

[Gerhard Kemmerer]

No, this creature is extinct. You're confusing phenotype and genotype, and you're ignoring natural history altogether.
Research the Devonian era lungfish Dipterus valencienne if you need more information.


That's gibberish. What do you call a fish with lungs? A half-salamander?

Until you at least begin to study nature, you're not in a position to make declarations about how it works. Or doesn't.

My statement was to show the absurdity of your fairy tale scenario in which the fossil layers are created from a single cataclysm, and after you tried to inject something about density of dinos vs mollusks. I showed you two fish to show they lie both above and below dinos. My point about trees is that they would all have floated to the top, and then been deposited at the top most layer when the underground ocean mysteriously disappeared back into its pressurized tomb, just before it magically sealed itself up. Of course all of this is pure malarkey based on a myth and completely contradicting all the vast evidence which you are simply ignoring.

At some point you really have to stop inventing all this nonsense and address the facts of science. Until then you're just being dishonest.

I can understand why you follow evolutionary theories, you have a wealth of info that all ties in,
and I like the fact that you remember some of the stuff I posted even though you don't agree with it.

I have never seen any evidence for evolution. Every animal is just a result of variation in principles of design. I don't conclude that they all evolved from common ancestors. Sure some look similar, but even the DNA is incompatable for interbreeding.

I see variations and adaptations within a few generations, but not over endless times.

The fact is that all forms of life are made within weeks and reach maturity in years at most, but never eons of time.

Adaptations and mutations create different species but not different animals. Once again in a very short time, from hours to weeks in insects, a few generations in mammals.

You and I were developed within a few months before birth. There is no magical rising out of a swamp.

You can't have faith in something that does not happen in our world.