I would assume it has not been updated because there has been no reason to update it. The fact that it was written in 2014 is not a reason to dismiss it. It’s worth pointing out that it has also not been retracted.
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Replication would be useful, and under Flood Geology presumptions it ought to be easy to do. Resolving questions about plausible alternative explanations is the obvious next step in that line of research.
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Just another repitition of the false claim of consilience or overwhelming evidence. The evidence is only overwhelming because you have been conditioned through a lifetime of media exposure to think it is. Each time when you dig into the details, the picture becomes a whole lot murkier than you were told to expect. I’ve done it.
This particular consensus is based on nothing more than the need for it to be contamination in order for evolution to be true.
I genuinely want to have a good faith dialogue with you, but it seems like you’re ignoring what I said. If you think this example overturns the global pattern of evidence, how do you explain the pattern?
Also I think “nothing more” is incorrect. An AI summary says:
> The author’s claim that the hornfels is too impermeable for contamination is contradicted by van der Hammen’s own observation (quoted in Stainforth 1966) that the pollen concentrated along cleavage planes while the rock matrix was “practically barren,” and by detailed 2014–2015 studies (Mecchia et al.; Beyer et al.) showing pervasive fracturing, acidic groundwater, and late lateritic weathering throughout the Roraima Basin.
So basically, it looks like pollen ran down into cracks in the rocks. It wasn’t found through, IIRC.
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I spoke (wrote) too soon …
… because it looks like that follow up work has already been done.
You are twisting what was said. You need precambrian rabbits well established enough to constitute signal, then the accepted history of life would indeed be upended. You are not seeking a pattern or signal, but a pinprick, all while willfully ignoring the very same systemic falsification of YEC.
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Or it could just be that it’s simply an obvious outlier and a product of contamination.
A single one probably not. But systematically finding Holocene animals in many different several hundred million year old strata would amount to a signal that could not be ignored or explained away.
Remember the analogy with evidence placed on two sides of a scale. When there is a huge amount of evidence on one side, then in the context of that already existing evidence finding something ostensibly not fitting makes it better explained as a product of some sort of fluke (a geological event produced cracks in the strata and some pollen flew in, or heck it’s even possible someone could have attempted a work of fraud just to pick some possibilities).
Of course that is not to say there aren’t ways of demonstrating, or at least making it highly probable that the fossil truly is native to the strata. Finding a recently consumed and partially digested rabbit in the belly of a large Devonian surface fish couldn’t easily be dismissed as some sort of geological event having transported a fossil a diffent sidementary rock layer.
As usual your treatment of these cases is simplistic.
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Deal with the signal and explain where it comes from.
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I partly disagree. Even the pinprick of evidence might have some plausible explanation leading to new discovery. The problem is the lack of any plausible alternative explanation with more than a single data point.
Also, not reporting that the pollen was found along the fractures in the rock and not the matrix is a wee bit dishonest.
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The flipside of this is zooming out and taking a 20,000 foot view of things.
The only people advocating for an overturning of conventional geology for a young-Earth perspective are those with ideological commitments to a young Earth based on theological beliefs. And in the case of some organizations, such commitment is baked right into faith statements that preclude anything else (a point I’ve repeatedly raised with you, btw).
Further, these particular beliefs re: a young Earth tend to have a strong geographic and cultural bias, as opposed to being more evenly distributed across countries, cultures, and belief systems.
Conversely, when you look at those with the most invested interested in geology (e.g. industries like oil & gas exploration), the young Earth creationist view of geology is completely absent.
Do you ever wonder about why that is the case?
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Nested heirarchies can be created from designed things, not just evolved things. That’s not proof of anything.
Your claim that such occurrances should be the rule is based upon a litany of assumptions, one of which is usually a caricature of the concept of a global flood in which we should expect everything all throughout the whole rock record to be randomly jumbled up as if tossed about in a jug. That is an assumption I do not for a moment think is realistic. Have you ever stopped to consider that the flood didn’t happen all at once instantaneously, but had to gradually increase over the land, going from biome to biome, over a period of many days before reaching its zenith? Finding an order in the fossil record is something both creationists and evolutionists should expect. But the difference is, finding local outliers and perturbations of that order is much more explicable on a creationist framework than it is an evolutionist one.
Thanks! I originally made it for the Hancock debate.
I have serious doubts about the truth of that claim. It seems to be available to us only secondhand (Stainforth quoted van der Hammen). But notice the phrase “practically barren”. That is an admission that at least some pollen was indeed found in the rock matrix, just not as much! Without knowing all the details and being able to examine the actual samples, it’s hard to say if the pollen was concentrated on certain planes, and if so, why that might be. You’re still looking at an admission that it wasn’t all located there.
Seeing as you feel free, in more than one post, to attribute to brainwashing the judgement of others and myself…
It is much more likely it is you who has been conditioned by living in a sectarian bubble under the same social reinforcements as apply to other cool aid drinking movements. My own questioning of creationism started not in biology class, but sociology, when I saw common elements of my own upbringing in the study of the mores and controls of various other religious communities.
Not at all. In my link above, Henke discusses the Roraima formation specifically and at length, and as usual the YEC argument does not withstand critical analysis.
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I have my doubts, based on your observed behavior here. You don’t dig into the details. You search for needles of creationism in the haystack of the data. Those familiar with the full haystack can see this. And note that you raise this point about one bit of pollen (the needle) in response to a post about the entire pattern of fossil pollen (the haystack). Selective blindness is not a good look.
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Just another repitition of the false claim of consilience or overwhelming evidence. The evidence is only overwhelming because you have been conditioned through a lifetime of media exposure to think it is. Each time when you dig into the details, the picture becomes a whole lot murkier than you were told to expect. I’ve done it.
I assume you didn’t intend to be insulting here, but you imply that you know my background and that I have not “dug into the details” for myself, like you have. Quite the contrary. I grew up with a fair bit of YEC material and to this day most of my evangelical Christian friends and family are YEC. Disagreeing with the people I love most - and with whom I agree on almost all other matters of Christian faith - is uncomfortable. But I have dug into the details a lot (for a non-scientist), and I can’t unsee the evidence.
And again, you have not responded to my question, which is the whole thrust of this topic: why is there this pollen pattern in the worldwide strata? If that’s a false claim, YECs should be able to present a large number of counterexamples. If it’s a true claim, YECs need to explain how the flood could produce it.
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There is a way to refute evolution: leave the noise for later, first demonstrate that there is no signal in any of the data used to establish evolution and an old Earth.
Good luck with that. Even the RATE group agreed that there is a signal (a pattern) in the radiometric data that needs explaining.
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He’d claim it was a pre-flood artefact.
That’s what happened with the spark plug.
I’ll add to my previous response after having done some more reading that the report of pollen in the Roraima formation was from 1966 and was a preliminary report that did not provide details. Nothing has been done since and there were clear reasons that what they observed was likely contamination with modern pollen/spores. Yet CMI (notably not ICR of AIG) have more and more boldly used this preliminary report without any additional work being done to confirm. To make a statement that something invalidates the evolutionary story based on such flimsy data that YEC have had 60 years to do their own research on and confirm is certainly no firm foundation.
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It was mentioned that the rock was heat-deformed but the pollen wasn’t. Which screams ‘contamination’ to me, but only whispers it to them.
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I’ve seen this claim from creationists a lot, but what I never see is an attempt to put it in practice.
If you were actually try to create a nested hierarchy based on designed objects, do you think it would follow the same pattern as living organisms based on genetic inheritance?
Many years ago I tried this myself using designed objects (specifically vehicles). What I found is that the lack of constraints around inheritance means that the patterns you get are almost arbitrary based on the characteristics you choose to incorporate.
I think it would be an interesting exercise for creationists to try this themselves. Though I suspect if any did, they probably wouldn’t want to publish the results.
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Of course it’s not proof, but even a Designed hierarchy is going to get jumbled about in a Flood - which it didn’t - once again falsifying a Young Earth.
My litany of assumptions are all consistent with the laws of physics. The same cannot be said of your litany of assumptions.
… one of which is usually a caricature of the concept of a global flood in which we should expect everything all throughout the whole rock record to be randomly jumbled up as if tossed about in a jug. That is an assumption I do not for a moment think is realistic. Have you ever stopped to consider that the flood didn’t happen all at once instantaneously, but had to gradually increase over the land, going from biome to biome, over a period of many days before reaching its zenith? Finding an order in the fossil record is something both creationists and evolutionists should expect. But the difference is, finding local outliers and perturbations of that order is much more explicable on a creationist framework than it is an evolutionist one.
Kudos for the effort to lay out a specific Flood scenario, that is far more than most would attempt.
But a Global Flood cannot be subtle.
You have ~40 days to get all that water in place, and a massive Heat Problem that comes along with it. Then another 300+ days to make most of that water go away, shuffle the continents around (another Heat Problem), and put most of those carefully ordered geological layers back in order. What sort of Flood scenario scoops up biomes one by one, keeps them suspended separately while other biomes are being scooped up, then lays them out gently on top of the continents so the fossils display a nested hierarchy that did not exist before?
And then you have the gall to claim everyone else is “conditioned through a lifetime of media exposure”, which is conspiracy theory on a level exceeding the imaginations of Wilson and Shea.
No. Just no. If you want to be taken seriously then you need to have some constraints that keep you inside the same reality where everyone one else lives. If you want people to respect your religious beliefs, then some minimal level of respect for the beliefs of others is required, and that others are at least as capable of independent thought as yourself. I would set that bar at “the laws of physics are foundational to all other beliefs”, starting with “Let there be light”. If you cannot deal with that very minimal constraint, then no one else should be expected to give your ideas any consideration at all.
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