Thanks for this, I found its coverage of the development of YEC between Whitcomb/Morris and Snelling et al to be fascinating. I was particularly interested in this comment:
Appealing to a change in the laws of nature marks a remarkable change in YEC strategy, and in many ways it also makes a significant admission. As a strategy, it indicates an end to any real attempt to empirically establish the historicity of a global flood. Miracles, by definition, cannot be scientifically examined. The appeal also admits that the scientific evidence does not support the YEC model.
This has led to the response (quoted in the article):
The only recourse that flood catastrophists have to save their theory is to appeal to a pure miracle and thus eliminate entirely the possibility of historical geology. We think that would be a more honest course of action for young-Earth advocates to take. Young-Earth creationists should cease their efforts to convince the lay Christian public that geology supports a young Earth when it does not do so. To continue that effort is misguided and detrimental to the health of the church and the cause of Christ.
Hmmā¦so now I had to look that upā¦am I just really confused, or correct: If we eventually observe stars 15-16 billion light years away and they remain observable then the expansion of the universe will be falsified?
Right now, galaxies beyond a distance of approximately 15-to-16 billion light years from us are already receding away faster than the speed of light.
The second part is correct, but think whether itās what you deserve.
Sure. Jeanson was only an example. All creationists ignore everything except the little bits of data they want to concentrate on for the moment. Each little fact, at the time, is supposed to overthrow all the rest of science.
Iām not sure why that would be a test. But itās the fact that we can see such distant objects good enough?
I donāt think youāve learned anything yet, if your garbled descriptions that follow are any clue.
Creationists deny the fact that nuclear decay rates used in radiometic dating are constant under all physically realistic conditions, and that this can be inferred (yes, the fact of it is based on an inference) by cross-correlating different decay chains.
The way in which creationists deny this fact is by asserting that different decay-rates can only be cross-correlated because scientists are deliberately hiding and excluding radiometric dating data that does not conform to expected results.
So creationism here has an absurd conspiracy theory invented to explain away evidence against their beliefs.
That is a form of denialism, no less ridiculous than when flat Earthers reject satellite pictures as evidence of the spherical Earth by inventing a conspiracy theory that the satellite pictures are produced in photosphop or other forms of CGI in secret NASA bunkers.
The interesting thing is that by invoking accelerated decay the YECās are implicitly endorsing that the actual measurements do prove old ages. Since there is zero independent evidence for variable decay rates of the magnitude required to give you ages of 6000 years, they are clearly using an entirely made-up ad-hoc hypothesis to fit the data into a non-scientific model. Their conclusion comes before they have even looked at the geological data.
I seeā¦that you donāt see what you donāt want to see:
6. Allegations regarding the research into the H1N1 virus by Sanford and Carter
The problems with C&Sās 2012 H1N1 paper (A new look at an old virus: patterns of mutation accumulation in the human H1N1 influenza virus since 1918 - PubMed) are myriad. They claimed fitness declined, but didnāt measure fitness directly. The two proxies they used, virulence and codon bias, are completely inappropriate as measures of viral fitness. They ignored pandemic dynamics and the different selection pressures imposed by intrahost and interhost competition. They asserted with no evidence that the mutations they documented were responsible for the changes in virulence, and further asserted with no evidence that these mutations āattenuatedā the virus in some way (i.e. disrupted its replication mechanisms in such a way that hampered its ability to reproduce). Oh, and for good measure, the virus they claim went extinct continues to circulate.
But putting all of that aside, here weāre talking about a different problem: That for the purposes of documenting mutation accumulation in the 1918-2009 H1N1 lineage, C&S used as a reference strain a 2009pdm H1N1 genome. āpdmā here stands for āpandemicā, as in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
The problem is that the 2009 pandemic H1N1 lineage was unrelated to the 1918 H1N1 lineage. They do not share common ancestry as H1N1 in humans. The 2009 strain was the result of reassortment between several swine and avian influenza strains and human H3N2. So the differences between the 2009 strain and the 1918 lineage are due to recombination, not point mutations. So you canāt just count all the differences and say ārelative mutation countā ā a huge chunk of those differences were from a different process, and in any event, you canāt just treat two different lineages as though they are a single lineage .
PCS show part of an alignment to defend their conduct, but actually illustrate the problem:
Here is a screen shot of one of the worst sections in the alignment. This is part of the hemagglutinin (HA) gene. Strains from 1918 through 1936 are shown. The human and swine H1N1 reference genomes are also there. We see one three-letter deletion (keeping the downstream codons in-frame) and many single-nucleotide changes. There is no evidence for large-scale rearrangements, either within or among the eight segments of the H1N1 genome.
Yes, because 1918 to 1936 reflects a single lineage, and nobody has said otherwise. The problem is the 2009 pandemic clade, which is distinct from the 1918 lineage. Iām not sure why PCS thought the above quoted paragraph would address that problem.
When you do this correctly, you actually have to detect and remove recombinant and reassorted sections from your genome alignments, so the recombination doesnāt mess with your mutation calculations. There are lots of ways to do that, but despite PCS saying everyone involved was well aware that reassortment occurred, they didnāt do anything about it! Just treated those differences like any other mutations, whichā¦no! You canāt just do that.
So the mutation counts, a foundation of that paper, are wrong.
There are fossils with a mixture of modern human and ape features which makes those fossils transitional by definition. Transitional fossils are a fact.
The nested hierarchy is also a fact, one that many creationists try to deny.
It is also a fact that more than 99% of 200,000+ endogenous retroviruses in the human genome are found at an orthologous position in the chimp genome, a fact denied in this article:
How many school children have counted the rings of a tree slice to arrive at an age? They have fun doing it. They immediately grasp the concept, and then you cannot hold them back.
It takes YEC to be confused. You do not need differential equations. You do not need calculus or algebra, not even arithmetic. One only need be able to count and match the patterns
YEC harps on and on about missing and false rings. False rings are rare and easily recognizable, and if misidentified would be corrected by cross correlation. Missing rings are also rare, also corrected by cross correlation, and if still missed would just serve to make the chronology is older.
Individual bristlecone pines have been reported up to 5,062 years old. Overlapping chronologies extend the range; the German oak chronology is built from 7,775 samples and is continuous back to 8480 BC. Despite differences in weather, the German chronology synchronizes with the Irish oak 7,272 year chronology. The bristlecone chronology extends to 6827 BC.
You can carbon date individual rings from a given treeās pith to the bark, and the results yield a progression showing progressively more C14 as you progress to the outer rings. This is a fact, not an interpretation. Stable isotope analysis of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen is also increasingly utilized. A great deal of information, not just concerning elapsed time, but detailed history can be so extracted, and adds confirmation of sample overlaps.
YEC denies the fact that tree ring counts represent years. YEC denies the fact that consilience exists between ring dates and carbon dating and stable isotope analysis, not to mention varves. This is a clear cut case of lying for God.
Seems like you posted in the wrong thread? Unless you posted this to show another thing creationists deny: The age of extremely distant cosmological objects.
What do you mean by answer? Itās a cool finding.
Chemical signatures give away the distance to the most distant galaxy.
A team of astronomers used the Keck I telescope to measure the distance to an ancient galaxy. They deduced the target galaxy GN-z11 is not only the oldest galaxy but also the most distant. Itās so distant it defines the very boundary of the observable universe itself. The team hopes this study can shed light on a period of cosmological history when the universe was only a few hundred million years old.
Extremely fascinating. In a few years when the James Webb telescope is launched, it should be possible to detect even father and older galaxies.
Sure, the age of the universe is. It must then be even older, right? Since the age of the universe is established in part by measuring the ages of the oldest and most distant objects and extrapolating even further back from those, it must be even older than they are. Right?
But are they older than the universe itself? Nothing in that article says they are. It says:
Here we report a probable detection of three ultraviolet emission lines from GN-z11, which can be interpreted as the [C III] Ī»1907, C III] Ī»1909 doublet and O III] Ī»1666 at z = 10.957 Ā± 0.001 (when the Universe was only ~420 Myr old, or ~3% of its current age).
Only 420 million years old leaves four hundred and twenty million years for the development of that galaxy.
Sure, I suppose you may keep saying itās older, but since the galaxies are receding faster we should come to a point where the expansion of the universe is falsified.
I need to brush up on my cosmology to know whether itās going to be the age of the universe or the expansion thatās falsified or both. Or neither and Iām just confused.
But anyway, my brain is failing me lately. I got confirmation itās working on my fitness (I just really wanted to save that joke for you. ) It seems like increasing relative fitness not only makes a person sleepy and sick feeling but it also reduces brain capacity by half. Not that I ever had much anyway.
We only need to go out 10,000 light years to falsify YEC. That doesnāt get us out of our own galaxy, much less to other galaxies. The fact we can see galaxies billions of light years away falsifies YEC.
Or neither and Iām just confused.
) It seems like increasing relative fitness not only makes a person sleepy and sick feeling but it also reduces brain capacity by half. Not that I ever had much anyway.