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The real Noah's ark!

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Flann 5
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Re: The real Noah's ark!

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Interbane wrote:

Flann wrote:
It seems reasonable that if 99.9% of all species that ever existed have become extinct their fossil remains should vastly outnumber the .01% of currently living species in the record.




Sure, if the world worked in a perfectly logical fashion that would be reasonable. But we know the world is quirky, so you need evidence. What evidence do you have that says the ratio should be prima fascia reasonable?
Of course it's reasonable Interbane. Are you kidding me? You guys are supposed to be the skeptics but you are not sceptical of this theory because it's suits your materialistic philosophy. That's obvious.
No, you need evidence to substantiate your claim that 99.9% of all species that ever existed went extinct though of course you can believe it on faith.

You are perfectly free to believe in "Granma Fish" if you want to also. Or that dumb matter made intelligent thinking moral beings and that it just stumbled upon the incredibly complex genetic codes and biological systems and that beauty in nature is just an incidental illusion this entirely functionally adaptive process tagged on etc.
All so easy really. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zQXgJ-dXM4&t=156s It's your obligatory faith that life somehow started itself no matter how utterly contrary to known laws of biogenesis or the stupendous improbability that such could ever happen by chance. But keep on believing Interbane.
It's rather tiresome to be constantly fed theories about origins supposedly science based complete with Computer generated graphics as if they were actually there and saw all this.

Those who actually question this stuff for the most part are creationists and even if you disagree I think they make many valid objections to these theories which are passed off as scientific facts.


http://www.crev.info/2016/12/cassini-saturn-youth/
Last edited by Flann 5 on Fri Dec 23, 2016 6:33 pm, edited 7 times in total.
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geo

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Re: The real Noah's ark!

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Flann wrote:No, you need evidence to substantiate your claim that 99.9% of all species that ever existed went extinct though of course you can believe it on faith.
I wasn't going to respond to this because Flann is cherry-picking data points only to bolster his denial of evolution. It's pointless to focus on this or that minutiae when someone is missing the big picture on purpose. For example, there's vast amounts of evidence that show the age of the earth in the billions of years, and Flann is focusing on the discovery of "soft tissue" in a T-Rex bone? What Flann is missing is that the age of the earth in the billions of years is fact. So the discovery of "soft tissue" is not seen by actual scientists as incompatible with an old universe. Conventional wisdom suggests that old tissue can’t survive, but obviously it can under certain circumstances.

I'm personally not aware of this 99.9% percent claim, but it's obviously not an exact figure and it's not a scientific theory in of itself. There's simply no way to know about every life form that ever existed in approximately 3.5 to 3.8 billion years of life on this planet. But we do know that the vast majority of fossils discovered represent species that no longer exist. We also know that the fossil record is sporadic at best. For almost 85 percent of earth’s geologic history (from 3.5 billion to about 650 millions years ago), there were no creatures large enough to make visible fossils. Which is why stromatolites are so prominent of the earliest fossils because they are the only life form large enough to be seen without a microscope. In the preCambrian era, most of the life forms were soft-bodied, so fossil evidence is understandably very hard to come by. The only fossils are impressions in the sandstones or mudstones on the sea bottoms, so there are no actual complete fossils as there are of, for example, the later trilobites, which had hard shells (like crabs) and were therefore much more likely to be preserved as fossils. Think of the modern day jelly fish. How would something like that be fossilized?

Paleontology is a relatively new field and we have only been searching for fossils in earnest for a hundred years or so. We have limited our search for fossils to a handful of places in the world that are conducive to fossil digging. And the fossil record itself is greatly biased to certain forms of life that lend themselves to fossilization.

So again, I don't know where this 99.9% figure comes from. it’s just a rough guess and probably accurate as such generalizations go.
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Re: The real Noah's ark!

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LOL I wrote a disclaimer in small text after posting the 99.9% number above, "OK I'm winging this number, but you get the point." :P I think there are several sources claiming 99%...
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Re: The real Noah's ark!

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LanDroid wrote:LOL I wrote a disclaimer in small text after posting the 99.9% number above, "OK I'm winging this number, but you get the point." :P I think there are several sources claiming 99%...
(Laughing) Yes, I recall your disclaimer. And apparently it's an often quoted factoid—"99.9 percent of all species are extinct, gone forever." I Googled it and it comes up a fair amount.

As you say in your disclaimer, you get the point. And the point is that the "vast majority" of species that ever lived have gone extinct. No one is claiming that literally 99.9 percent of all species have gone extinct.
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Interbane

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Re: The real Noah's ark!

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It's an estimate. I believe it as far as my trust in the experts goes. Which isn't perfect, but I'm going to believe them over Flann. Especially since it makes sense. If we know the majority of species aren't prone to fossilization, our trust doesn't need to extend very far.
Flann wrote:You are perfectly free to believe in "Granma Fish" if you want to also. Or that dumb matter made intelligent thinking moral beings and that it just stumbled upon the incredibly complex genetic codes and biological systems and that beauty in nature is just an incidental illusion this entirely functionally adaptive process tagged on etc.
You're appealing to incredulity again.

I'm tempted to sink to the same level and ask if it's better to believe that some infinite man-like being suddenly decided to create everything after sitting alone for an eternity in infinite solitude, and even though he's infinitely good he created man in a way that would ensure he suffered, but he couldn't do any better even though he was infinitely powerful.

A tone of incredulity does nothing, but you keep going there Flann.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
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Re: The real Noah's ark!

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I know that I'm beating a dead horse here, but my son gave me a college biology textbook for Christmas, knowing how pedantic I am when it comes to science. I will continue to make my point that if one is peculiarly hostile to the idea of evolution, one should consult scientific sources. Sounds rather obvious!

Here's a passage from the Campbell Biology textbook (9th edition), which is in used in universities all over the world. It summarizes very well why the fossil record is sporadic and, yet, yields a remarkably detailed picture of life over billions of years (but mostly in the past 650 million years). How Noah's ark fits in here, I am not sure.
The fossil record documents the history of life

Starting with the earliest traces of life, the fossil record opens a window into the world of long ago and provides glimpses of the evolution of life over billions of years. In this section, we’ll explore what the fossil record reveals about the major changes in the history of life—what those changes have been and how they may have occurred.

The Fossil Record

Recall from Chapter 22 that sedimentary rocks are the richest source of fossils. As a result, the fossil record is based primarily on the sequence in which fossils have accumulated in sedimentary rock layers, called strata (see Figure 22.3). Useful information is also provided by other types of fossils, such as insects preserved in amber (fossilized tree sap) and mammals frozen in ice.

The fossil record shows that there have been great changes in the kinds of organisms on Earth at different points in time (Figure 25.4). Many past organisms were unlike today’s organisms, and many organisms that once were common are now extinct. As we’ll see later, fossils also document how new groups of organisms arose from previously existing ones.

As substantial and significant as the fossil record is, keep in mind that it is an incomplete chronicle of evolutionary change. Many of earth’s organisms did not die in the right place at the right time to be preserved as fossils. Of those fossils that were formed, many were destroyed by later geologic processes, and only a fraction of the others have been discovered. As a result, the known fossil record is biased in favor of species that existed for a long time, were abundant and widespread in certain kinds of environment, and had hard shells, skeletons, or other parts that facilitated their fossilization. Even with its limitations, however, the fossil record is a remarkably detailed account of biological change over the vast scale of geologic time. Furthermore, as shown by the recently unearthed fossils of whale ancestors with hind limbs (see Figures 22.19 and 22.20), gaps in the fossil record continue to be filled by new discoveries.

Although some of the new discoveries are fortuitous, others illustrate the predictive nature of paleontology. For instance, researchers seeking to discover a close ancestor of early terrestrial vertebrates predicted that such a fossil would most likely be be located in a river bed (which would have sedimentary rocks) containing rocks that were 375 million years old (an age based on previously known fossils). After digging for several years in one of the few places on Earth, their predictions bore fruit with the discovery of Tiktaalik, an aquatic organism closely related to the first vertebrates to walk on land (see Figures 25.4 and 34.20).
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Re: The real Noah's ark!

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DB Roy wrote:Image
Ken Hamm's re-creation of Noah's ark built with a half dozen diesel-powered hydraulically-operated cranes and cement mixers for the rebar reinforced concrete hull. Needless to say, the ship doesn't float and neither does the validity of the story. That doesn't bother Hamm, though. When confronted about his inability to build the ark exactly as described in the bible, Hamm responds in presuppositional fashion: "Were you there?"

Gee, did we need to be when we have the bible right in front us telling us how this thing was built? And even if we accepted that crazy story as historical, this is yet more proof that Hamm is not following the bible since Noah's boat supposedly floated and Hamm's doesn't. Gotta be doing something wrong, son, and I didn't need to be there to know that. Just like I didn't need to be there to know Noah wasn't using diesel-powered cranes or mixing concrete.

Now what more proof do you need that the bible stores are physically and historically impossible than when you can't build an ark even when given explicit instructions? God's word? Don't bet on it.
Great, now let's see Hamm gather two of every living animal and crowd them into that contraption to prove the Bible correct!

What an absolute moron....
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Re: The real Noah's ark!

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A moron indeed.
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