When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the island remnant remained lifeless for some years, but was eventually recolonized by a surprising variety of creatures, including not only insects and earthworms, but birds, lizards, snakes and even a few mammals. One would not have expected some of this surprising array of creatures to have crossed the ocean, but they obviously did. Even though these were mostly smaller, it illustrates the limits of our imaginings on such things. Land bridges Evolutionists acknowledge that men and animals could once freely cross the Bering Strait, which separates Asia and the Americas.1 Before the idea of continental drift became popular, evolutionists depended entirely upon a lowering of the sea level during an ice age (which locked up water in the ice) to create land bridges, enabling dry-land passage from Europe most of the way to Australia, for example. The existence of some deep-water stretches along the route to Australia is still consistent with this explanation. Evolutionist geologists themselves believe there have been major tectonic upheavals, accompanied by substantial rising and falling of sea floors, in the time period with which they associate an ice age. For instance, parts of California are believed to have been raised many thousands of feet from what was the sea floor during this ice age period, which they call ‘Pleistocene’ (one of the most recent of the supposed geological periods). Creationist geologists generally regard Pleistocene sediments as post-Flood, the period in which these major migrations took place. In the same way, other dry land areas, including parts of these land bridges, subsided to become submerged at around the same time.2 There is a widespread, but mistaken, belief that marsupials are found only in Australia, thus supporting the idea that they must have evolved there. However, living marsupials, opossums, are found also in North and South America, and fossil marsupials have been found on every continent. Likewise, monotremes were once thought to be unique to Australia, but the discovery in 1991 of a fossil platypus tooth in South America stunned the scientific community.3 Therefore, since evolutionists believe all organisms came from a common ancestor, migration between Australia and other areas must be conceded as possible by all scientists, whether evolutionist or creationist.
How to stump someone that believes the noah's flood happened.
by 5go 61 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Roddy
So if they believe the flood happened because so many cultures have flood stories. Then by the same stroke they most also believe that dragons walk the earth.
Why not dragons? No one seriously denies that dinosaurs walked the earth.
Besides, let's suppose that smaller dinosaurs -- about the size of the very large mammals of today -- were represented in Noah's ark too. If we don't see these repitles today that means a number of reasonble things anywhere from they failed to adapt to their environment to they were all finally hunted to extinction by humans; perhaps by knights and other similar men seeking to prove their manhood by one of the most primordially fearsome creatures they knew of.
Too bad, really. Maybe if we had more dragons to slay today we'd spend less attention at killing each other.
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Awakened07
- I have an assignment for you, Perry: For every creationist claim you find, you should try to Google up a claim from the other side. I have already done the same (only in reverse) back when I was 'researching' these things and needed to hear the creationist views so that I could debunk the scientist's claims, and thereby could breathe a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out for me.
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Seely.pdf
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AWAKE&WATCHING
MARK FOR LATER
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Perry
An optical illusion. Square A is exactly the same shade of grey as square B. See Same color illusion People sometimes see the same things and interpret them differently according to their predisposition. It is part of our limited human nature.
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moshe
I recently had my dna tested and you might find the origins and migrations of human over the last 100,000 years of interest- https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/
The mutations of our dna do not prove we all are descended from the survivors of Noah's ark, but rather from ancestors in Africa over 100,000 years ago.
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Perry
Evolutionists, aware of the way in which the mitochondrial Eve discovery could be seen to have vindicated the Bible, have long countered by saying that their ‘Eve’ lived far too long ago to be the biblical Eve. How do they calculate this? The answer has to do with why this scenario came about in the first place. MtDNA is known to be much more transparent to selection than nuclear DNA. In other words, there are many places where a genetic ‘letter’ can be replaced with another by way of a mutational ‘copying mistake’ without causing any problems to the organism. Comparisons between various groups of people alive today can be made on the basis of the number of letters which are ‘different’, having been substituted by mutation. Modern humans were much closer to each other than standard evolutionary theory had predicted, hence the out-of-Africa theory.
Evolutionists have guessed at when their mitochondrial Eve lived via the idea of the ‘molecular clock’—i.e., that there is a more or less fixed rate of mutational substitutions per year in any population. How do they know what this rate is—in other words, how is the ‘molecular clock’ calibrated? By using evolutionary assumptions about the timing of events based on their interpretation of the fossil record. For example, if it is believed that humans and baboons, for example, last shared a common ancestor ‘x’ years ago, and if the number of differences between baboon and human mtDNA is y, then the substitution rate per year is y/x. In this way, estimates of when ‘Eve’ lived have varied from as low as 70,000 to 800,000 years ago, more commonly in the range 200-250,000 years.
Creationists have correctly countered Eve’s ‘age’ and by saying that the molecular clock calibrations are way off. Since, for example, the creationist’s (true) Eve lived only a few thousand years ago, the mutational substitutions in mtDNA must have happened at a much faster rate than assumed by evolutionists to dateIn fact, a number of recent studies on living populations have indeed come up with results which indicate a much higher rate of mutation in human mtDNA.
Although not all studies to date have found the same high rate, at least two studies, looking directly at substitutions occurring today, have found rates as much as 20 times higher than previously assumed.5 Studies on the bones of the last Tsar of Russia also showed that he, along with 10–20 % of the population, actually had at least 2 types of mtDNA, a condition called ‘heteroplasmy’, also caused by mutations. This, too, throws off the ‘molecular clock’ calibrations.
According to one review of the data, these recent results would mean that mitochondrial Eve ‘lived about 6500 years ago—a figure clearly incompatible with current theories on human origins. Even if the last common mitochondrial ancestor is younger than the last common real ancestor, it remains enigmatic how the known distribution of human populations and genes could have arisen in the past few thousand years.The review in Science’s ‘Research News’ goes still further about Eve’s date, saying that ‘using the new clock, she would be a mere 6000 years old.’ The article says about one of the teams of scientists (the Parsons team5) that ‘evolutionary studies led them to expect about one mutation in 600 generations ... they were “stunned” to find 10 base-pair changes, which gave them a rate of one mutation every 40 generations.
Evolutionists have tried to evade the force of these results by countering that the high mutation rate only occurs in certain stretches of DNA called ‘hot spots’ and/or that the high (observed) rate causes back mutations which ‘erase’ the effects of this high rate. Therefore, conveniently, the rate is assumed to be high over a short timespan, but effectively low over a long timespan. However, this is special pleading to get out of a difficulty, and the burden of proof is on evolutionists to sustain the vast ages for ‘Eve’ in the face of these documented, modern-day mutation rates.
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Satanus
Another commonality is the immortality of the human soul. Most pagan religions and cultures also have this belief. Most christians have retained it. To a jw, a good stumper.
Interesting map, moshe. It gives a good basic understanding about origins and migrations.
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B_Deserter
Interestingly enough, the Noah special was on the Discovery Channel this evening and provided a lot of insight on why the literal Genesis flood story cannot be true.
1. It is not possible to build a floating object 450 feet long entirely out of wood. The ark's biblical dimensions were almost the size of the Titanic. A wooden structure that large would be subject to intense pulling and twisting stresses. It would develop multiple leaks per second as the joints separated and adjusted, and the whole ark would sink like a stone.
2. Noah would have trouble fitting the 30 million different species aboard a fleet of arks, let alone one. If one goes by the supposition that Noah only loaded some 250 animals specified as "clean" and "unclean" in the Old Testament, then how do we get the 30 million species we have today? The only answer to that is an extremely rapid evolutionary process that abruptly ended. Such an idea is utterly absurd.
3. Some have floated the idea that the earth was covered by a "cloud canopy" that provided enough water to cover the entire earth. The problem with this idea is that it is always presented by people with no background or understanding of meteorology. The sheer amount of water vapor needed to cover the earth would have exerted so much pressure and heat on the earth that it would been uninhabitable, having Noah and the rest of the world living in a 13,000 psi pressure cooker.
4. Archaeological evidence states that the Noah legend was first written by Jewish priests and scribes in the 6th century B.C.E. during the Babylonian captivity. It is most likely that they got the idea for their own version of the story from the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian epic with many of the same story elements.
That said, the Noah story (i.e. the Jewish Epic of Gilgamesh) was most likely based on a true story. Unfortunately for Biblical literalists, it was probably a much more mundane one than they want to realize. -
moshe
Not all dna is created alike- it depends what sections you are looking at. Y (male) dna is more fragile and does not survive long after death- Mtdna can survive in the center of tooth pulp for thousands of years. Obviously, scientists have to decide what pieces out of millions of base pairs they want to look at. The point is that in studies of native population group's dna do not point to a common origin in the middle east where Noah's ark supposedly ended up.
How many people does it take to run a zoo? Think about that. They have tractors, trucks and electric motors that Noah did not have.
