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StAnastasia
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Primates evolved 50-55 million years ago; the most recent common ancestor between humans and the other great apes was 5-7 million years ago.
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StAnastasia
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So this Irishman walks out of a bar. Hey, it could happen.
You really believe all that stuff?
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StAnastasia
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Of course! I’m a Roman Catholic theologian who works with cosmologists, physicists, chemists, geologists, paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, and geneticists!
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rossum
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Yes. The youngest non-avian dinosaur fossil, from any continent, is 65 million years old. The oldest Hominid fossil is around 4 million years old, from Africa.
There is a 61 million year gap. What more evidence do you need? We can show this beyond reasonable doubt. We cannot show it beyond unreasonable doubt.
What if the New Testament was not written in Greek but in an otherwise unknown language called Krogtowi, in which it translates into a recipe for a delicious stuffed camel (feeds 150). However, when written in Greek characters, this recipe also happens to makes sense in Greek as the text we know. What evidence do you have to show that I am wrong beyond unreasonable doubt?
rossum
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rossum
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StAnastasia
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The passive periphrasitic in Krogtowi renders it difficult to discern Hebrew cognates in the creation stories.
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nonanon
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And the oldest known human (homo sapiens) fossil is only about 200,000 years old.
Putting this in perhaps more tangible terms, if the first human appeared 1 year ago, the last known dinosaur would have died in 1686. Or, put another way, the gap between the last dinosaur and first human is about 324 times longer than humans can be shown to have lived on earth.
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You
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Is that a point; you are right in the absence of evidence and I am wrong in the absence of evidence…
You want evidence for the abscence of evidence?
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You
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This is just assuming dating is correct. Of course I am ignoring current dating for the mo.
It would be more interesting to view this as a question of the continuum of strata across areas, deposition rates and significant events, etc.
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StAnastasia
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I am interested in your interest in this question. Is it merely a way to while away your time at work? Because your opinion about dinosaurs and human coexisting is monumentally irrelevant to the scientific world. Arguing back and forth like this can be an entertaining hobby, but it will not change one iota the daily work of scientists.
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Catholic90
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You want evidence for the abscence of evidence?
It could…but is not likely!
Evolution and Catholicism coexist very nicely. One can believe in both.
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Catholic90
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StAnastasia
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I’m afraid no amount of paleontological information will make one whit of difference…
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Catholic90
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Sadly, I think you are correct.
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rossum
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YEC sites are lying to you. We do not assume that the dating is correct, we check that the dating is correct by performing experiments and looking at the results. Radiometric dating is accurate to within the limits stated on each measurement.
The defendant is guilty, provided we ignore all the evidence of her innocence. This is hardly a convincing argument you are putting forward here. It comes right out of AiG’s Statement of Faith.
Why? If you are going to ignore dating then all you have is an uninteresting mish-mash with an occasional “Oh, look at that pretty rock”. How can you know deposition rates if you don’t know the dates? How would you measure deposition rates in the Green River Formation if you didn’t have radiometric dating?
You appear to be confused, and thrashing around for a sensible argument here.
rossum
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You
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When the dinosaurs were around they had big appetites which were satisfied by something unusual. That something was an extremely unusual climate. There was a tropical humid climate from pole to pole and the land was covered by massive forests of giant tree ferns over 100 feet high and three feet in diameter. These were dinosaur food. They are also our coal measures.
When this food disappeared the large herbivores died and their large predators also died. So, how did the tree-ferns die. At one moment you had global tropical humid climate, next moment you had cold or temperate climate, bad for tree ferns. Bad for dinosaurs.
But it could not really happen that fast, the climate changed because the continental plates moved across the globe changing the ocean currents and gradually cooling the climate to more temperate and in the poles, arctic temperatures.
So this continental plate movement was exceedingly gradual and the climate change also from tropical, humid, was also exceedingly gradual. And the disappearance of the giant tree fern forests was also exceedingly gradual. How long did this gradual change take? Millions of years?
Lets ask the coal measures. One of the largest coal seams, in area, in america is 6 feet thick. This seam represents a tree fern forest. A tree fern forest which must have been covering the land for how long? Tens of thousands of years, hundreds, millions?
In fact a 6 foot thick coal seam expressed in a cubic way, for example, a six foot cube of solid coal is the same weight as one 100 foot high tree fern. So a tropical humid tree fern forest ideal conditions for tree ferns could produce a tree density of, lets say, 1 tree per 6 square feet at a maximum.
That density would give us 6 feet of coal, as we now have today, but, it would mean that only one tree grew in that forest area over a period of ideal conditions which may have lasted 10’s of thousands of years or 100’s of thousands of years or a million years. If the forest existed for only 10,000 years and a tree-fern lived for 100 years then that means 100 trees lived and grew and died on our 6 foot area of soil producing a coal seam 600 feet thick.
Instead we have a coal seam only 6 feet thick which we are told possibly represents 10’s of thousands of years of the geologic timeline.
When this food disappeared the large herbivores died and their large predators also died. So, how did the tree-ferns die. At one moment you had global tropical humid climate, next moment you had cold or temperate climate, bad for tree ferns. Bad for dinosaurs.
But it could not really happen that fast, the climate changed because the continental plates moved across the globe changing the ocean currents and gradually cooling the climate to more temperate and in the poles, arctic temperatures.
So this continental plate movement was exceedingly gradual and the climate change also from tropical, humid, was also exceedingly gradual. And the disappearance of the giant tree fern forests was also exceedingly gradual. How long did this gradual change take? Millions of years?
Lets ask the coal measures. One of the largest coal seams, in area, in america is 6 feet thick. This seam represents a tree fern forest. A tree fern forest which must have been covering the land for how long? Tens of thousands of years, hundreds, millions?
In fact a 6 foot thick coal seam expressed in a cubic way, for example, a six foot cube of solid coal is the same weight as one 100 foot high tree fern. So a tropical humid tree fern forest ideal conditions for tree ferns could produce a tree density of, lets say, 1 tree per 6 square feet at a maximum.
That density would give us 6 feet of coal, as we now have today, but, it would mean that only one tree grew in that forest area over a period of ideal conditions which may have lasted 10’s of thousands of years or 100’s of thousands of years or a million years. If the forest existed for only 10,000 years and a tree-fern lived for 100 years then that means 100 trees lived and grew and died on our 6 foot area of soil producing a coal seam 600 feet thick.
Instead we have a coal seam only 6 feet thick which we are told possibly represents 10’s of thousands of years of the geologic timeline.
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You
Guest
The Green River Formation: 10,000,000 layers of sediment a couple of millimeters thick each. And each layer representing one years deposition on a lake bed.
But can a lake survive continuously, undisturbed totally, as a lake for 10 million years. No ice-ages, no glaciers or ice sheets gouging the lake bed during all of that 10 million years.
How would I measure the deposition rates in the green river formation. Well, I might question the probabilities of a lake remaining as a lake continuously for 10 million years. And also it being undisturbed during all of that time.
I might look for other mechanisms for depositing sediment in regular consistant layers, other than as annual layers.
I might think they represent the tide flowing into a brackish lake carrying in calcarious sediment twice a day at high tides.
So that now you have 2 high tides a day or 730 high tides a year divided into 10,000,000 layers of sediment gives you an age for the lake of 13,699 years.
And as these layers are occasionally interspersed with interlocking layers of sediment from the shore I can then estimate the amount of time, in years, it took to lay down x amount of sediment on the shore.
Then I might find mammalian fossil jawbones in the shoreline sediment. The lower fossil I used to think was 5 million years older than the top fossil and that these fossils represented the evolution of a mammal over 5 million years.
But now I might see that the fossils were only 6,500 years apart and as a consequence they either showed remarkably speedy evolution or they did not show evolution at all.
That is if I were allowed to think about these things, that is.
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