Another post from Amazon

>>>First, how do creationist expectations have anything to do with what does, or does not, constitute a valid test of evolution? (i.e. The fact remains that rabbits in the Precambrian WOULD disprove common ancestry, regardless of _anyone's_ beliefs or expectations. What could possibly EVER disprove omphalos-hypothesis-coupled creationist ideas?) <<<

It was a pretty simple point. A rabbit WON'T be found in the lower strata because as we all know there is a pretty consistent hierarchy of life forms in the strata, to the extent that evolutionists claim that the higher evolved from the lower and creationists interpret the pattern roughly in terms of lower = marine and higher = land animals. That's how they sort themselves in reality, no?

No idea what you mean with your reference to omphalos.

>>>Second, how does living on the land vs the sea have anything to do with how deep you'll be buried by a catastrophically violent _global flood_? (At that point, wouldn't *everything* be "sea dwelling", and rather mixed-up? If anything, I'd expect the rabbits to be UNDER the water-dwellers, simply because they'd die almost immediately (drown), whereas the aquatics would be at least semi-at-home. And, if you're going to claim the violence of the event as a culprit for the earlier death of the aquatics... then why the nice, neatly-layered deposits? That doesn't mesh.) But, there are other questions to answer, under such a paradigm, too. <<<

I'm content to observe that layering of sediments is known to be caused by water and that identifying millions of years of time by a single particular sedimentary rock is ridiculous. Not to mention that if any of it were ever exposed as surface, which I believe evolutionists think happened, then erosion such as we see in our time would have defaced the surface with such deep grooves, streams, rivers, canyons that their horizontality would have been broken up. But no, where they are visible we see a neat stack of rocks all nicely horizontal or at least parallel, with a bit of scraping discernible between some of them, not enough to disturb their horizontality, from the "Precambrian" all the way up to recent "time" at which time and ONLY at that time we suddenly get the canyons and the rivers cutting deep gorges exposing all the layers, and the buckling of whole blocks of layers all over the earth. Why didn't this ever happen before? How could the earth be billions of years old and these typical disturbances of the surface only happen after the whole stack was in place? Why don't we see deep river gorges cutting through all the earlier layers before subsequent layers were laid down over them?

As for your questions, observations such as the above and the KNOWN fact that ocean water does have layers and currents and that water DOES sort sediments into layers and the fact that they ARE arranged roughly marine-to-land give a lot of support to the Flood scenario. WE might naturally expect things to be all mixed up but there's good reason from these facts to think that in a flood of a worldwide scale they wouldn't have been.

Being able to answer ALL the questions isn't necessary when there is so much that fits the Flood and so little that fits evolution. And I seriously do believe that the argument that natural selection inevitably leads to genetic depletion makes evolution absolutely impossible, and if that is the case then we'll sort out the other questions after it is acknowledged. (Although I say "natural selection" I include all the processes that "select" or isolate a portion of a population. It doesn't matter whether the type of "speciation" is allopatric or simpatric or polyploid or any of the rest, whenever a part of a population becomes isolated so that new phenotypes are produced, genetic diversity is concomitantly reduced, and after a series of these portion-isolations, or a bottleneck, very seriously reduced indeed. That's how "speciation" becomes possible at all -- at the expense of genetic diversity, through natural selection itself, which is supposedly the engine of evolution. I've discussed this more thoroughly over on the thread of my own review of Coyne's book)

"Violence" probably wouldn't have killed the marine animals, but water full of dissolved sediments could certainly kill them by suffocation.

>>> For example, why are NONE of the organisms that are fossilized in the older (deeper) layers alive today (e.g. circa Cambrian Explosion)? And vice versa (of course)? <<<

I don't know. But aren't there MANY organisms all the way up the strata that aren't alive today? Dinosaurs for sure. Mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Archaeopteryx. In fact aren't those that ARE related to modern types rarely all that similar anyway? Very different antediluvian world explains it pretty well. Most of all life died in the Flood, most of the genetic code died in the Flood. Then there's the fact that the primitive marine animals wouldn't have been preserved on the ark and the vast majority of them would have died in the flood, whereas the species that were preserved went on to repopulate the earth -- with many many varieties of each "kind" that hadn't existed before -- and of course versions of their types can be found in the fossil record. So maybe I've answered your question after all.

>>>And, why is there ZERO evidence of flower existence--not even pollen grains--in those same (and much more recent, i.e. shallower) layers? The empirical evidence points to flowers having existed for only about 1/4 to 1/3 of the total time that land plants, in general, have existed--originating 125My vs 425My ago, respectively. Today, flowering plants exist virtually everywhere that plants are found, regardless of elevation or climate. So, why the enormous discrepancy in the geologic strata? By way of example, flowers don't show up in the strata until the final third of the "Age of Dinosaurs" (248My-65My ago; again, 125My ago). In other words, flowers are newer developments than (ancient forms of) reptiles, insects, fish, amphibians, birds, and even mammals. Or, in terms of your idea of the strata: there isn't even TRACE evidence of flowers in a huge majority of the layers containing _land-based_ fossils. (And, this correlates perfectly with the radiometric dating of the layers: newer ones have them, older ones don't.) Given flower ubiquity today, WHY is there not even pollen to be found? It's not as if they could run from the flood waters, gathering all their pollen grains first... whereas, the animals actually COULD have run... (Yes, I've heard this ridiculous running "explanation" posited for differences amongst layers. It pays no attention whatsoever to what's actually in those layers.) <<<

Has something to do with how the water sorted things, what can I say? Sure, there are some facts about the fossil record that do seem to fit the evolutionist interpretation, of course. It sure LOOKS like flowers just didn't come along until "later" -- but really only if you assume the strata represent the geological time scale. Otherwise it would just be a case of their having been carried there according to some principle of water sorting.

But actually considering what is in those layers, as you say, I wish it were possible to find out exactly what IS in them. Do you have a source for this? Usually mere schematic lists are given that identify life forms that can be thought of as "more recent" than the "older" forms. It strikes me that the emphasis always falls on what appears to be "new" as you go up the strata, while all sorts of things that appear below just no longer appear at all. Is this the case or is it just the way evolutionists describe things? I mean, shouldn't we see lots of versions of everything that came before ALONG WITH the new creatures if evolution is true? Today we see an enormous range of living things. Why wouldn't that have been the case at each subsequent previous time period, an accumulation in each layer of ALL the types of life forms that had "gone before" PLUS the supposedly "new" ones? Just off the top of my head, I gather that ferns appear fairly "early" in the strata, but do they show up anywhere in the strata above that one? If not, how do you explain why not? We certainly have a big variety of ferns on earth today so we know they didn't encounter extinction. But each layer is usually described in terms of a select collection of fossil forms, all apparently new to the earth and not appearing any more after that. If that really describes the geological facts, it doesn't support evolution very well at all, it supports much better some kind of mechanical sorting and layering process instead, despite the suggestion of a hierarchy of life forms in that sorting.

SO I would also ask to what extent flowers are represented in the strata above where they first "appear." Is this one of those cases where something "appears" in a supposed time frame, but then is hardly represented at all above that point? Again, if evolution is right they should appear more and more profusely on up the strata from that point of "origin." Is this the case or not?

>>>>I also haven't yet seen you address the question of footprints in the intermediate strata (of the Grand Canyon, since you broached the topic). How would that be possible, given the notion that a single global flood laid-down all those layers almost simultaneously? <<<<

I don't address lots of questions that evolutionists raise because I think the observations I've made already are sufficient to show that evolution can't happen. All questions don't have to be answered if there's enough evidence already against evolution, they can be answered later, and in the middle of a discussion like this they merely detract from the main points I've been trying to keep in view.

But a speculation about the footprints is that the sediments came in on waves as the water overtook the land and there were animals still living that only finally drowned just before the flood reached its final height. The biggest waves could have come quite far apart but the dumping of the fossil-laden sediments must have occurred pretty rapidly to preserve so many living things and fossilize them so perfectly; so apparently it did the same with some fresh footprints. Best guess at the moment.

But the observations I've raised above about how absurd it is to think that billions of years would have played out in layers of particular sediments laid down exclusively over periods of millions of years each, have more weight than the question of how a footprint was preserved by the Flood. (By the way, how would it have survived on the surface of the earth as we know it now? Had to be rapidly buried in order to be preserved, right?)

-------------
>>>>>In a short response to your earlier post, I clarify: my questioning your scientific expertise was not a means of trying to "bar you from the club". It was a matter of simple practicality. Do you think it would be productive for us to try to discuss differential equations, or the pros and cons of different types of transistors (e.g. BJTs, MOSFETs, or whatever), if you are uninformed on those topics? <<<

No. I presented enough reasonable thinking against evolution that THAT should have been the topic and should still be the topic. There is no need to plumb every science in order to show that evolution is true or false. But oddly enough nobody here addresses my actual arguments. Including you. Changing the subject seems to be the M.O. Although I do thank you that you stick to the scientific questions at least, instead of attacking my character which seems to be the main concern of some others here.

>>>>Jacques Monod said that a "curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it". That is a MAJOR problem when it comes to attempts at discussion, because some people really DO understand it, and others do not (even though they think they do). <<<

Uh huh, well, isn't it your job to SHOW that I've failed to understand it, and challenge what I've actually said rather than keep changing the subject?

>>>>"For the typologist, the type (eidos) is real, and the variation an illusion, whilst for the populationist, the type (average) an abstraction, and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different." -Ernst Mayr (1955) <<<

Uh huh, and how does this apply to anything we're discussing?

I believe I have a strong sense of the reality of the variations.

>>>> "Typology" is the naive (i.e. wrong) view of evolution, and I have yet to meet a creationist who does not "understand" it in that way. And yet, the theory of evolution by natural selection has always been populationist.

[Darwin himself expressed this in the Origin, 6th ed., chapter 2:
* "No one supposes that all the individuals of the same species are cast in the same actual mould. These individual differences are of the highest importance for us, for they are often inherited, as must be familiar to every one; and they thus afford materials for natural selection to act on and accumulate"
* "The term species thus comes to be a mere useless abstraction... I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience, to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, for convenience sake."] <<<<

Yes, it is tricky trying to employ these terms, species, variety, etc., because there are so many levels on which any of the terms is appropriate, but we need to make distinctions to have this discussion and it can get confusing.

If these ruminations have anything to do with our discussion, it seems to me you should be addressing the actual arguments I've made with them instead of throwing out abstractions and generalizations that insinuate who knows what.

-----
Reading through your original review again, just feel like answering that there's no use having a chapter on sexual selection as Coyne does, as it isn't evidence for evolution (but then little in his book is). It may be the cause of some very odd variations in nature, but nothing beyond "microevolution" is needed for this to occur.