Questioning the Ice Ages

[knomegnome]

You need to look at Talbott's work in toto to get what he saying. I do wish he wouldn't be as 'grandstanding' about his detail and just get to the meat of things, sometimes

I will come right out and say that I am an Atheist/Buddhist type person, and I most definitely do not believe there is any supernatural force governing The Universe, because there is no convincing evidence for it. So, it goes without saying that I will reject any arguments coming from Faith. I am interested in evidence and discussion of that evidence, as well as conjecture based on intuition as arising from human experience.

That being said, the evidence for Evolution is overwhelming, interdisciplinary, and complete. Microbiology alone gives us a long chain of ancestors going back millions of years. I don't believe any discussion of Evolution as 'wrong' is fruitful at this point, unless you can point to multiple failures in numerous disciplines, including genetics, microbiology, chemistry, nuclear science, and so on. The EU doesn't do that, taken entire.

I would be very happy to talk about 'how' things may have evolved. That subject is very much in question in all disciplines. Darwin's theory of Natural Selection was but one (not the first, but certainly the one with the most impact) idea of how evolution may have happened.

As far as the topic of this thread is concerned, there is a good amount of evidence for multiple ice ages in the past, not only talking about geological interpretations, but fossil deposition, diatom, bacteria, algael, and so on. I would completely agree that the 'how' and 'when' and 'why' have not been found out, but the 'if' question seems fairly settled at this point. We should never overlook things, of course! But I don't think we would even stand a chance of finding out kinks in an 'if' question, unless we show that the other three don't have any rational answer. Either way, its a very good way to spend your time and research efforts, because whether or not an Ice Age happened, you will get good data and results.

[GaryN]

geological interpretations

Yes, that, for me, is the problem. Where the standard model proposes millions or billions of years to produce the present surface features, I see very brief, intense energy level alterations. Perhaps there were long stable periods in Earths history, but as dating of inorganic and organic matter has been shown to be made useless by such energetic events, we really have no idea.
Textbook evolution and global catastrophe can't both be true in my view, and I think the evidence for catastrophe outweighs that for evolution, regardless of the implications of that view.

[upriver]

"To pry climate clues out of the ice, scientists began to drill long cores out of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica in the late 1960s. By the time Alley and the GISP2 project finished in the early 1990s, they had pulled a nearly 2-mile-long core (3,053.44 meters) from the Greenland ice sheet, providing a record of at least the past 110,000 years. Even older records going back about 750,000 years have come out of Antarctica. Scientists have also taken cores from thick mountain glaciers in places such as the Andes Mountains in Peru and Bolivia, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and the Himalayas in Asia."
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Featur ... _IceCores/

[knomegnome]

You're not disagreeing with Evolution, you're disagreeing with Natural Selection, as laid out. As I have mentioned elsewhere, with or without catastrophism, we have Evolution as a fact laid out from many sources, not all of which would have much to do with EM levels or electrical events. The evidence is massive, multidisciplinary, and complete.

There are many methods of dating.. C14 is only one way. We don't yet know enough to start doubting all methods of radiological dating. And even if we did, there is tremendous evidence in (for example) Molecular biology which shows us that cell lines and DNA have been around for a VERY long time.. a method that has nothing to do with The Standard Model, per se. Then there is evidence in structural biology that many of the features that we have in our bodies evolved from fish. Take the Laryngeal nerve, for example. This nerve tracks all the way down to our heart, loops round some blood vessels, then comes back up to connect to our voice box (its true for giraffes as well.. talk about horrible design!). This can only be explained by the idea that our structure evolved from one that was "all in a line" (as in fish, whose laryngeal nerve is in a straight line) to the form it is today, bit by bit in some fashion.

So I must fundamentally disagree with you that we can't have catastrophe and evolution or selection of some kind. There is far too much good evidence to the contrary. I am fully on board that the sciences have not paid enough attention to EM in cosmology, and agree it is possible that we have suffered a recent catastrophe given the evidence, but I don't see any conflict with evolution or selection. Our habitat is still very old. We still evolved.

PS: and ice cores too

[moses]

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Featur ... _IceCores/
upriver
You have me worried here, upriver. Are you agreeing with the findings in this article.

I feel that the ice formed lamination through a natural process not related to how the snow was deposited. So the datings go out the window. There are interesting features in the ice cores, but conclusions are doubtful.
Mo

[knomegnome]

What "natural process" are you referring to that would have deposited miles of ice in layers that each have different gas and particle morphology, indicating that they are probably yearly deposits of snow pack? What is your falsifying evidence or theory?

[moses]

What "natural process" are you referring to that would have deposited miles of ice in layers that each have different gas and particle morphology, indicating that they are probably yearly deposits of snow pack? What is your falsifying evidence or theory?
knomegnome
The Mt St Helens laminated rocks formed in the eruption show the tendency to form laminations. Many experiments have been done on flowing sediments that produce laminations. The ice at the poles may or may not have flowed much, but there is considerable pressure which may produce lamination by itself.

Each layer does not have different gas morphology, as it has been clearly shown that there is dispersion of the gas through the layers. The Creationists do great work on this sort of thing and I point you in that direction.
Mo

[Lloyd]

* EM effects may include rapid evolution.
* Here are some creationist articles about ice core data, which I think are rather good:
http://www.icr.org/article/355/
http://creation.com/wild-ice-core-inter ... scientists
http://creation.com/greenland-ice-cores ... deposition
http://creationwiki.org/Ice_age
* And here's a source of original ice core data, which can be searched:
http://hurricane.ncdc.noaa.gov/pls/pale ... 236::NO:::
* This is one of the sources of data I found at the previous link:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/ ... 011iso.txt

[webolife]

Knomegnome,

"Microbiology" does not "give[] us chains of ancestors" in any way, shape or form, let alone "going back millions of years"... Are you talking about fossil bacteria? Mitochondrial drift? The "Eve" hypothesis? "Junk" DNA? What line of microbio evidence do you think gives us any kind of chain of ancestry?

On the contrary, the process of protein synthesis [ie. transalation and transcription], is a remarkably and irreducibly complex sytem in place at the very root of what it means to be "alive". Fossils regularly and prevalently show forms which are either distinctly identifiable with presently living organisms, or are extinct forms of their own distinction. Alleged "vestigial organs" fall by the wayside regularly as medical and biological research uncovers new function and interdependent sytems in humans and other organisms.

You believe that it is possible for random deleterious [the only kind ever observed] mutations to accumulate and somehow increase the information bases of DNA in bacteria all the way thorugh millions of transitional structures [for which there is no longer any evidence in the fossil record] to humans, and I call that FAITH of the extremest sort. Your eastern mystical belief set simply adds to your own faith base, which you are of course entitled to. But it gives you no platform whatsoever to demean others' approach to scientific study. Every scientist is a human being with the same predisposition as you to hold to a core faith base from which to sort and interpret the evidence we all have before our eyes.

Also, you make the common Darwinian and neo-Darwinian mistake of confusing the strong case for microevolution [natural selection] within geni or families, with virtually non-existent evidence for macroevolution [your Aristotelian chain of being]. By simply muddling them together under the heading "evolution" you befuddle yourself and delude those who would take your statements of "fact" to be honest science.

But this is now way off topic, so I would encourage the administrators to wend this warp to the appropriate thread.

[knomegnome]

Webolife,

as soon as you say "irreducibly complex" I know you haven't studied the gene line mutation evidence for millions of years of evolution. Its easy enough to show that we have an ancestor in common with the Gorilla and chimpanzee, as has been done repeatedly,with no controversy, and that ancestor existed millions of years ago. There are literally mountains of evidence to show this sort of thing, and the EU has no trouble with it. For example, punctuated equilibrium has an idea that we have suffered many near extinction events, and that these events are where the species lines were created.. under the unimaginable pressures of high radiation and EM. The extinction events would have had to occur many times, over millions of years, for us to reach our current state. That explanation is compelling and interesting, and has some basis in evidence, as well as points to EU theory.

When you also state that no information increase has ever been witnessed in a gene line mutation, I also know you haven't read the literature, and so don't know that this is simply not so.

I point to this: " the bacterial flagellum is not irreducibly complex" for one treatment of why: http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/ ... ticle.html. Dembski is wrong. I'm not trusting just this one treatment.. I have a math degree, so I verified the statements. They are correct.

This is an important point here. Some people who are questioning the ice age are doing so from a standpoint of intelligent design, so they are introducing the topic, not I. If you are going to question the ice age, and you don't want to invoke ID principles, then please don't bring up "irreducible complexity" or posit that it just couldn't have happened from a obvious stance of ID.

To bring it back to topic, I am strongly convinced by the evidence that Ice Ages happened many times over the planet's history. How they happened, when, and so on is something I would sincerely like to talk about.

[knomegnome]

What "natural process" are you referring to that would have deposited miles of ice in layers that each have different gas and particle morphology, indicating that they are probably yearly deposits of snow pack? What is your falsifying evidence or theory?
knomegnome
The Mt St Helens laminated rocks formed in the eruption show the tendency to form laminations. Many experiments have been done on flowing sediments that produce laminations. The ice at the poles may or may not have flowed much, but there is considerable pressure which may produce lamination by itself.

Each layer does not have different gas morphology, as it has been clearly shown that there is dispersion of the gas through the layers. The Creationists do great work on this sort of thing and I point you in that direction.
Mo

Mo,

The dispersion evidenced, when I looked at the papers, is what would be expected through thousands of years of osmosis, and other natural processes. This is corrected for in the analyses of the layers and gases, and after some simple physical assumptions about gas drift through ice, the layers snap into focus. The particulate and bacteriological evidence does not, for example, drift like this through layers.. which is one of the reasons the layers are considered yearly.

I have yet to see work done by creationists that did not have the overlying assumptions built into it of "it MUST have been designed". I'm open to it, and I've looked at it in detail, but it always disappoints.

[moses]

knomegnome,
The lamination process could account for bacterial or particulate differences between layers. Also, the layers have not been counted down to the 20,000 th layer. Rather datings are determined through the usual element isotope profiles. So the ice cores don't seal the issue.

If you feel that things in the past were rather different to the standard story, then to determine the real facts one needs to radically review one's beliefs. Science is wank, and we have all been conditioned by this. Truth is so very extremely different from the standard story that one feels that the people around one are somehow unreal. So to see reality one needs a commitment that threatens one's sanity and social standing.

I find debating these things only tends to reinforce one's stable state, whereas finding the truth threatens that stability. It is surprising the depth that truth hunting leads one to. The very basics need challenging.
Mo

[webolife]

Knomegnome,
It is rather ignoble of you to write off a valid argument just because someone you don't respect makes it, eg. professor Michael Dembski, or advocates of ID. I have both Science and Math degrees and have been teaching in the public sector for thirty years [more if you add my private sector teaching]. There is no time frame inherent in gene line mutation studies, nor has any information increase been ever observed to happen in the case of a mutation, other than one cleverly designed by a medical researcher doing gene splicing; rather information loss or destruction is regularly observed. The information increase you speak of is only inferred by the overlay of the evolutionary paradigm you hold. The rate of observed genetic drift for certain proteins gives no account for it's original state, except as presumed by the researcher. Epigenetics has demonstrated that rapid changes in phenotype are environmentally influenced, while genotype remains remarkably stable. Retrovirus behavior shows a "horizontal" transfer of information, but no supportable overall increase. None of these fields supports millions of years of phylogeny, which remains as much an enigma to modern scientists as it was to Darwin. While you may hold that the bacterial flagellar motor is not irreducibly complex, you cannot [without exercising a high level of FAITH] believe that the over three dozen proteins needed for its assembly arranged themselves spontaneously over millions of years. The bacterial membrane pump that is alleged to be a reduced and less complex form of the flagellar motor is itself an electrical machine of remarkable efficiency and specialization, with no "reason" to evolve into the amazingly more complex and specialized flagellar motor. You are confronted at every turn, perhaps without realizing it, that the very process of protein synthesis is dependent upon the existence and efficient presence of specific and specialized proteins which are themselves products of the transcription/translation process. If you've become aware of this, you may ignore it in the name of "evolutionary magic" if you wish. As for common ancestry, this is circular argumentation. The evidence for similarity of genome between say chimpnzees and humans is statistical only, and is equally an argument for commonality of structure and function [aka common design]. The fact that even bacteria share many of our same genes attests to the complexity of life at all levels, and is not a good case for common ancestry, unless you are willing to believe in the evolutionary magic of randomly assembling proteins and interdependent systems over long eons, despite the clear observation of complex, specialized information at every level. It's not like bacteria are just randomly organized unspecialized life forms, leading by some imagined chain of intermediaries to highly complex ordered forms just by accident. No mechanism for such a random process of increased information is imaginable [natural selection can't account for it, because NS only acts upon information that is already available], no confirmed intermediaries are known from the fossil record, and the high degree of specialization and complexity we observe in every livng organism at all levels leads only to further speculation of what "must have come before" in the millions of years of PreCambrian hiatus.

Sorry for this totally off topic post -- administrators, feel free to remove it to an appropriate thread, perhaps one of the old Evolution threads.

[GaryN]

A good image showing a glacier flow on Mars. There is probably next to no movement at the edges or base, but still responsible for forming the landform, they think.

Science of global climate modeling confirmed by discoveries on Mars

Closeup view shows chevron texture on riverbed floor, indicating how the ice-rich material flowed fastest in the middle and was retarded along the channel walls.

http://phys.org/news/2012-10-science-gl ... -mars.html

Meanwhile, back on Earth...
My emails to our local University Geosciences department, with photos attached showing what can only be interpreted as pebbles/rocks attached to bedrock, and asking, from a puzzled amateur geologists perspective, how that could happen (no plasma/electricity mentioned) has brought zero response. Perhaps academia operates at bureaucratic (glacially slow?) speed, or perhaps they can offer no explanation? Will try Vancouver and Seattle next.

[webolife]

Gary, do you know if there's a similarly "plucked" glacial valley on Earth for comparison?