The Pollen Problem

Conversation
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I don’t think you will get an answer out of him about this. I have now asked him pretty much the same question twice already, so let me ask for the third time.

UP/PP/Paul: just so we are on the same page, do you agree that there is a very strong signal of vertical zonation when it comes to fossil pollen and planktonic microfossils, or are you even disputing that? There is no point discussing the fossil distribution unless we start from the same observations and data.

If you don’t want to answer this question, can you tell us why not?

Thank you.

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You have proven beyond any doubt here that you are uninterested in any big pictures. An example of that is your punting when I challenged you to explain the simple, direct observations of differences in polymorphism between human populations. Your hand-wave, mutation differences, can’t come close to explaining these differences. Nor does claiming that another person who has zero integrity wrt evidence has addressed it.

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I’d call it an inference to the best explanation.

There is no evidence of evolution being cognizant of the future (why do mutations even happen that aren’t needed then?). It couldn’t possibly be, since evolution is just an emergent property of the underlying physics (electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear force, and gravity are all blind to the future too).

There is no evidence that evolution is guided. Similar to above, if there was guidance why do extinctions even happen?). If evolution is guided, why don’t entire swathes of mutation necessary to create stuff like flagella, or ATP-synthases just all occur at the same time in organisms that lack these features yet could use them to adapt and persist?

Purpose is an idea in the mind, not intrinsic to the process, so evolution literally logically cannot have purpose. Even if God created evolution intending it to achieve some ultimate goal, that would be an idea in God’s mind, not a property of the process of evolution. So that’s that silly idea out the window.

Like, there you go. Your never-ending crying about the nature of evolution and how scientists think abouth the process are embarassingly easy to refute, and just one minute spent thinking about what natural process actually are reveals that it just follows from everthing we know about the world that evolution is all of those things.

You’re the one actually living a fantasy.

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As an explanation of dinosaur eggs it’s pretty daft. As an explanation of the order in the fossil record it’s laughable. Are we to imagine that during the Flood the synapsids of the Permian strata all came out on to the fresh sediment - only to be drowned - while all the dinosaurs and large mammals stayed safe? And then the Triassic dinosaurs made the same mistake and then the Jurassic dinosaurs, and then the Cretaceous dinosaurs, all taking their turn? And even that would only be a start in solving the problem.

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Nothing false about it. That there are sandstone deposits world over that are aeolian, including the Coconino, and incompatible with YEC is absolutely true. Contra to Snelling, Coconino cross bed angles indicate aeolian deposits. Trenched modern dunes look the same, as has been repeatedly recognized since 1945 when Edwin noted the similarity to current dunes in Navajo country, and confirmed postulates of wind origin from 1907. YEC cannot even say where the sand came from to begin with, and how any appreciable amount accumulated over the short antediluvian period.

Hydrologist Timothy K. Helble replies to Austin and Snelling here:

Sediment Transport and the Coconino Sandstone: A Reality Check on Flood Geology

it should be realized that the absurdly high sediment transport rates needed to deposit a regional-scale layer such as the Coconino Sandstone in a matter of days will always be at odds with the slow water velocities and gradual sediment transport rates needed to form even the most basic cross-bedding structures.

Carol Hill, a geologist recognized for her expertise on the Grand Canyon, wrote an extensive critique here

The angle of repose for loose sand in a sand dune is about 33° to the horizontal, and if sand is piled any steeper than this, it will avalanche downhill. The cross-beds in the Coconino have been measured between 29–31°.

There are unmistakable preserved raindrop impressions, which cannot happen when submerged, documented by McKee since 1934, and studied in detail.

Rain pits in fine sand form thin, detached layers, or shells, roughly circular but with irregular margins resulting from cohesion of grains by the introduction of moisture. These detached shells of sand, when formed on sloping surfaces like those of the Coconino, have become reoriented with respect to the lamination plane, and each circular pit tends to face upward, or vertically, thus raising the downslope rim. Rain pits on sloping surfaces of fine dry sand are readily reproduced in the laboratory; they are very distinctive and are not likely to be confused with craters having other origin.

There are also lizard-like trackways which could only have been made on dry dunes.
Tetrapod ichnotaxonomy in eolian paleoenvironments (Coconino and De Chelly formations, Arizona)

While Snelling maintains that no sandstone was from deserts, he does not much like aqueous settings such as the inland sea either, and argues that geologists are wrong about reef formations such as the oil rich Permian basin or Redwall limestone of the Grand Canyon. Creationists are consistent only in their sweeping rejection of science.

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That’s factually wrong, but since you refuse to watch the experiments that prove that moving water sorts sediments into laminated layers by particle size, you’re at a dead end here.

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You performed experiments in that video??

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You make a fair point here, that isn’t really what I was trying to say. The BEDS model helps explain the dinosaur egg phenomenon, but not so much the general order of stratification vertically for different biological zonations.

To explain that, I think you need to realize that in a flood scenario you get not only the current of the water moving and burying things rapidly in sediment, but you also get very strong underwater turbidity currents that run downslope. So if you pick any given point, it’s going to get hit with more than one layer of sediment. First there will be the sediment that the advancing water was actually carrying when it hit that point. But next it will continue to get buried more and more deeply as sediment washes down the slope from higher up on land where things got buried higher up, but carried downslope in turbidity currents.

This can certainly be tough to visualize, I’ll grant that. This is not something we see every day.

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The problems go well beyond pollen. Spores (fern and lycophyte) show highly predictable patterns across the geological column. Diatoms show an especially problematic pattern since they only show up rather late in the geological column despite the fact that there are some 100,000 species and they are easily preserved making their absence in the bottom half of the fossil record extremely curious to say the least. Forams are also highly predictable with respect to position in the geological column. A short post of mine from many years ago. Forams and Diatoms: Testing Young Earth Flood Geology Hypotheses – Naturalis Historia

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It is not moving water per se that sorts sediments by grain size, but rather moving water that slows down (or speeds up). It is a simple matter of energy: higher energy flows can keep heavier particles in suspension than lower energy flows.

Now, how does the acknowledged presence of fining-upwards sequences in many places across the world demonstrate a global flood? All it shows is that at some point in time at that particular place there was a sediment loaded flow that slowed down.This flow may have been a deep water turbidite, or a shallow water estuarine flow, or a fluvial (river) flow, or a lake sediment close to the inflow of a stream.

In many, many cases that is not the end of it: such sequences are often overlain by more sequences that again may be fining upwards. Or, they may be overlain by entirely different sedimentary layers like carbonates. Or, they may be cut by an unconformity above which there are different, unrelated layers that can be anything: coarse conglomerates, or limestones, or even igneous flows. How does that fit in with your ‘model’?

TLDR: a particular sedimentary feature that is present in one location says basically little to nothing about what was happening elsewhere on the planet, let alone that it demonstrates a global flood.

Now that I have you on the line, can you answer a question that I have asked you three times now?

Just so we are on the same page, do you agree that there is a very strong signal of vertical zonation when it comes to fossil pollen and planktonic microfossils, or are you even disputing that? There is no point discussing the fossil distribution unless we start from the same observations and data.

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There are two appropriate responses to an illustration that vividly shows just how silly Oard’s idea is. One is laughter, lighten up. The other is a heavy sadness that people can actually buy into such a degree of nonsense.

There are neat dinosaur nests found in sedimentary layers. Anyone not threatened by the implications would reason that the dinosaurs there lived and nested, and there is nothing to call that into question. Without evidence, YEC claims antediluvian dinosaurs were buried in flood deposits, so of course zombie dinosaurs rising from beneath to make nest on top of the deposits which killed them suggests a problem.

So Oard suggests that flood deposits somehow created new high ground, but did so without harming the dinosaurs, who took the time to arrange neat nests. Then as the crust bobbed up and down , the - hold on, the crust bobbed up and down? physics please. Crust settles up OR down as tectonic stress is relieved. What was that on the Richter scale? how did the soft, freshly laid ground not liquify? - ok, the crust was bobbing and in a brief interlude, the eggs were laid. Then submerged. The end, because as Oard mentions, eggs are porous. When terrestrial eggs are submerged, the embryo soon dies. But embryo’s are found in every level of development, so they did not drown soon after being laid. One embryo grew to fully half a meter, only to meed its premature demise not by flood water, but by a predatory snake which was also unperturbed by the non-existent deluge.

So what is illustrated is not YEC vs some arcane ivory castle professor, but YEC incoherence against clear thinking by any reasonably aware layperson.

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No. In order to make such an inference, one must ponder all the possible explanations, including design.

This is just a statement of faith.

The pervasive phenomenon of convergence strongly suggests that your claim doesn’t hold.

This is akin to ask that if technological development is guided, why aren’t all cars equipped with the same equipments.

By the way, is there such a thing as a living being that lacks ATP synthase ?

Are you aware that your computer works according to the laws of nature but that by themselves these laws don’t explain your computer ? That what ultimately explains your computer is its idea in the mind of its creator?

After having carefully ponder the issue, some of the greatest thinkers in history have endorsed a teleological view of nature. On the other hand, after only one minute spent considering the same issue, you are able to refute them and affirm that their view is silly. Congratulations !

What is the Resurrection Hypothesis?
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And while we are at it, let’s ask him if he knows that foraminifera zones in marine rocks can be correlated horizontally over hundreds of miles. And that they are very reliable “pathfinders” that have let us find $ billions of oil and gas?

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Great timing! ICR just posted an interview with my good friend Dr. Chris Rupe, where he discusses how the Navajo Sandsone was clearly water-deposited, including a much higher quality view of a flume experiment:

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Science is way ahead of you, this is hydaulics 101 level, and there is nothing in your linked video which challenges any geological conclusions because hydraulics have always been accounted for. The quantified lift and carry thresholds of moving water is presented by the Shields parameter introduced by Albert F. Shields, published in 1939, and subsequently refined for various bedding conditions. The math is here if you feel like working it through. For a practical introduction on this and the Bagnold threshold for air, you can listen to University of California professor of paleobiology Matthew Clapham lecture on Aeolian environments.

You do not have to be a scientist or engineer to understand that the sorting capacity of moving fluid would not stratify fossils like your painfully misleading video presents. Think man. Pebbles and rocks sink, their density is higher than that of water. Carcasses drift and bloat and float, and eventually sink after releasing gas, because they are close to or lighter than water. Think harder. Animal epochs do not trend by density, there have always been animals of similar densities and size. And you can forget about segregating pollens and other microscopic index organisms which are slow to deposit even in stagnant water. Hydraulics cannot account for fossil sorting, but even if it did that would not sort by age. You should have been able to figure this much out on your own.

Sorting is thoroughly studied in sequence stratigraphy, and shoreline energies is an important part of that. The data is so far from anything resembling the energy of a global flood that anybody who has the slightest understanding of fluid transport would recognize its impossibility. Further, the behavior of fluid borne particles is one, among many others, of the reasons that we know for a fact that sandstone formations such as the Coconino was aeolian.

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It doesn’t even do a good job of explaining dinosaur eggs. Why, for instance, are all dinosaur remains in these assumed sediment beds that only appeared during the flood?

That doesn’t explain zonation either - you would need a selective effect which just happens to give the results that we see. But there is absolutely no sign of any difference that could be the basis for such an effect.

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After earning an undergraduate degree in biology, Chris Rupe teamed up with John Sanford to co-author a popular level book Contested Bones. Primatologist @GutsickGibbon did a detailed chapter by chapter take down of the misrepresentations that feature in their work. Rupe also helped develop Sanford’s Genetic Entropy argument.

Rupe then earned his geology Ph.D. at the Seventh-day Adventist Loma Lina Unviersity, the sect that was central in the rise of modern YEC, under the supervision of creationists including biologist Leonard Brand, Arthur Chadwick, and John Whitmore. As best I can find, he has never published in a journal or contributed to any geological survey beyond presenting his graduate work at a conference, foregoing the practice of geology to focus on apologetics.

If Rupe has something to say that overturns the work of hundreds of geologists, let him bother to publish in a journal - no one is obliged to entertain endless apologetic YouTube’s. The Geological Society web article states

The Navajo Sandstone is one of the most extensive and most exposed aeolian (wind-blown) systems known in the geologic record. This enormous sand sea was deposited in the Early Jurassic, approximately 190 million years ago, as a result of regional tectonics and mountain building in what is now the western United States.

If a competent video introduction to the Navajo Sandstone is desired, Myron Cook’s on location The Most Sand The World Has Ever Known is worthwhile.

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That was done.

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Yes. And we have.

Right. Organisms aren’t made of atoms obeying the laws of physics. Silly me. It’s just a statement of faith.

No organism experiences gravity. Their atoms don’t have nuclei composed of protons and neutrons, electrons aren’t attracted by the protons, bonds don’t involve outer shell electrons, they don’t experience forces when subjected to electric or magnetic fields, etc. etc.

… you hereby declare on no basis whatsoever. We just don’t see the kind of “strong convergence” the process should produce if it was, in fact, not blind to the future (meaning it could induce the mutations it needs instead of having to generate large numers of them them randomly in a population and letting selection retain the best ones). Even less so if the process was guided by God. If God could simply induce the necessary mutations, or otherwise intervene to zap entire systems and complexes into existence, why don’t we routinely see this in experiments?

That’s right. It’s because the process is not, in fact, guided or cognizant of the future. It’s because the process of evolution is emergent from reproduction and competition for survival. Organisms reproduce. Variation is introduced through mutations and recombination. Their effects on fitness determine their frequencies in coming generations. Rinse and repeat. There’d be no need for evolution in the first place in a world where guidance and foresight were possible or happening.

The most direct and obvious proof that evolution is blind and unguided is that evolution relies on a huge population of new variants arising every generation, in total blindness to which one(s) will be the adaptive ones, if any. And it is even further cemented as just an undeniable reality by the fact that most mutations are deleterious. It simply does not make sense to say the process is guided or has foresight, when it is generating large numbers of mostly bad variants in order to find a few that are adaptive.

It’s nonsensical. Your theology is NONSENSICAL.

No it is not akin to asking that because different cars have different manufacturers, yet you think life was designed by one and the same designer, and that literally nothing car-manufacturers do to build and assemble cars were involved in the design and manufacture of any living organisms.

Further, you don’t believe there was an actual flagellum-factory installing little flagella-encoding operons in the genomes of different bacteria that were queued up on conveyor belts waiting for their turn to hava a robotic arm install it inside them.

In fact, again, your response is completely nonsensical. You are attempting to defend the idea that EVOLUTION is guided and has foresight. Right? If not, why even complain when scientists describe evolution is blind and unguided?

You’re going to have to make up your mind here. Is evolution guided and has foresight, and therefore can do things that would be essentially impossible to the blind and unguided version (such as the completely de novo inducement of all the mutations required to create a flagellar operon in a single generation), or are you positing just straight up de novo creation by magical poofing? It’s not even clear what the hell your position is, besides obviously nonsensical and incoherent.

You defend it above with “strong convergence” (which, of the sort you need for your argument, we never see). This is exactly what I am saying SHOULD happen on your view: That organisms facing a challenge to adap and which could massively benefit from evolving their own flagella (or whatever other complex system or component) could then just induce exactly the types of mutations required to create that system de novo, in principle in as little as a single generation. No need to bother with a huge population of blindly arising variants and relying on selection to weed out the few good from all the bad ones. All the machinery that could do it (enzymes that cause mutations) basically exist in most organisms, so if the system can somehow know or predict what it needs in the future and can induce the right mutation, or if God is invisibly reaching into cells to induce the right mutations by his volition (the guidance part), why don’t we see it happen, ever? Why don’t we see flagella being insta-evolved in single generations in bacteria that lack them? Why do we instead just see minor gradual convergence on a few residues in protein sequences that otherwise diverge?

That’s because the process is blind and unguided, and it is only when the numbers of variants is sufficiently large that the same high-fitness mutations occur in parallel we even see convergence at all.

How the process works, how the process came to exist, and whether someone intends for
the process to reach some pre-conceived goal, are three different questions.

But it’s not clear that the laws of nature do not explain my computer. If by explain you mean it’s origin and coming to exist. The computer was designed by human beings performing cogitation with their brain matter (it’s all those pesky atoms obeying the laws of physics again. Disagree? Please violate gravity or shut up), controlling their muscles, and having to eat and breathe to survive and cogitate, and as best we can tell, humans and their cognition are natural entities and processes. It was then manufactured in different factories and later assembled by humans. At no point is it at all clear something supernatural was involved at all.

Your magical design by revelation (much less manufacture by willful spell-conjuring) just doesn’t seem to ever occur.

Got anything better than this blatant appeal to authority?

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Our ability to visualize what you are claiming is not the problem. The problem is that it does not conform to any reality.

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