Earth: The Alternative Story

I look at my posts for the last week and I see that I have been on quite a rampage of "munching Cheetos in the basement" blogging, complaining about treatment of geologic topics in the media. It was set off when I experienced the full brunt the appalling coverage of the impending tsunami in Hawaii (and the aftermath), and soon after came comments on headlines about the demise of the dinosaurs, the continuing lack of full opportunity for women (and minorities) in geology-related industries, and finally a bit on the manufactured doubt industry and climate change deniers.

Truth be told, people who know me well know that I am a pretty even-tempered person in person, and very few of my students have ever seen me angry. Those who have seen me angry have remarked about what a quiet experience it is. Very...quiet. But a couple of things brought me to a slow simmer and the tsunami business just caused my temper to boil over. I am reminded of an old Gary Larson Far Side cartoon about a herpetologist that gets an accumulated case of the willies after working for decades in the reptile house of a zoo. Or even better, the famous XKCD comic "Someone is wrong on the Internet". One doesn't want to be shrill, but things have just gotten so...ridiculous.

Like the denizen of the insane asylum who is "feeling MUCH better now", I'm beginning to think about returning to the Other California series, but I just wanted to deal with one more of THOSE topics. It's like I want to kick the beehive one more time...it has to do with the value of a good science education.

A poll by the University of Texas/Texas Tribune published a couple of weeks ago indicated that 30% of Texans believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and another 30% don't know. This is a sad commentary on the state of education in Texas, not to mention the rest of the country, and is obviously a religious issue as well (people who reject basic scientific knowledge on this topic generally do so because of a conflict with their religious beliefs).

We discussed this topic in my historical geology class this week. We've had seven weeks of basic stratigraphic principles, rock identification, analysis of sedimentary structures and environments, and some background material on paleontology. Evolution was the topic at hand, and being that I live in an exceedingly conservative part of California, I am quite sure I have some religiously conservative students. I've never tried to squelch their questions, nor have I attacked their beliefs, but I do insist that they at least understand why geologists, biologists and paleontologists accept evolutionary theory (and that's theory, mind you, not hypothesis). Our interactions are generally congenial.

I did try something new this week though. In an act that would make a creation-scientist proud (or perhaps very nervous), I presented the entire creation-science model to a classroom full of students with a certain level of geologic expertise. This has always been the wish of the creation-science community, that teachers "teach both sides of the issue". I don't think they've ever fully considered the ramifications of what happens when people with just a minimum of geologic knowledge hear the whole story. Keep in mind, we aren't "introducing God" into the science classroom, this is all "science".

Let's see, the earth starts. That's right, it starts, because it all happened only 6,000 years ago, and there was no evolution of the crust or anything like that. Life is present from the very beginning, and all life is living under a cloud. Well, actually a canopy of lots and lots of water vapor. The vapor prevents bad energy rays from the sun from striking the living things, so the living things live much longer, the humans for nearly a thousand years. There weren't any carnivores; T-rex ate leaves, and so did every other creature that we think of as animal devourers. The canopy also screws up radioactive carbon, so carbon-dating is inaccurate (unless it gives the right dates, that is). It's not clear how uranium, rubidium and potassium dating methods were affected. The surface of the earth is very smooth and covered with vegetation. If there are any seas at all, they are shallow. No major mountains to speak of.

Then something goes very wrong, and, well, all hell breaks loose. The canopy collapses into an incredibly vast rainstorm that goes on for several weeks (40 days maybe? Can't say for sure). A vast amount of water that was stored within the earth becomes superheated and blasts to steam at various seams in the crust as supersonic geysers shoot even more water in the atmosphere. The earth's crust destabilizes, and vast amounts of basalt come pouring out, producing what would become oceanic crust at a rate of around 3 feet per second, roughly 50 miles a day. In just a few months, this is enough to form our ocean basins. The smooth crust is broken up, and lots and lots of mud swirls around in the maelstrom of water, laying down tens of thousands of feet of sediment in just a few weeks or months. The continents rise, crash into each other, form giant mountain ranges, and deep subduction zones start swallowing up the crust. Water drained off the higher areas, carving deep canyons (like the Grand Canyon) in a few days, while the mud and lime layers were still soft.

Meanwhile, everything and everyone dies. All those things that died were left behind as fossils. The fact that there seems to be an order to the appearance of species in the rocks (fish first, amphibians later, reptiles after that) is an artifact due to the fact that the more intelligent species knew to climb hills while the water was rising, so they didn't get entombed until later in the flood. Of course, life still exists on the planet, so somehow all the species survived the "hydraulic cataclysm". One suggestion is that some humans gathered all the species on a big boat of some sort, and released the animals after the water drained away from the higher parts of the continents. The strange distribution of animals (marsupials in Australia, giraffes in Africa, llamas in South America) resulted from various humans taking their favorite animals with them as they repopulated the earth.

Now, a boat containing all the millions of species on the planet is an impossibility that even a young child can figure out. So it wasn't "species" that went on the boat, it was "kinds". Species are an artificial human convention anyway; they don't have meaning in the real world. These "kinds", or baramin, included a dog kind, a cat kind, a sauropod kind, and so on. In the aftermath of the flood, the dog kind diverged genetically (but not evolved; this isn't evolution) into foxes, wolves, coyotes and...good ole dogs. The cats changed into tigers, lions, and jaguars. And so on. This happened in a few centuries after the "hydraulic cataclysm". The dinosaurs lived on, too, but then there was another disaster.

Because the vapor canopy was gone, the sun was shining on the earth surface and the climate became exceedingly unstable. Within a few hundred years of the flood, an ice age covered much of the planet, and wiped out the dinosaurs and a whole bunch of other strange beasts that we only find as fossils today. Other incredible canyons in the world, like Yosemite, were carved by the glaciers in a few tens of years through solid granite.

Finally things settle down, maybe 3,500 years ago. Volcanoes slow down, earthquakes happen less often, sea-floor spreading declines to a few inches a year. And that's all you need to know.

If I have gotten some minor details wrong, don't bother me about it because life is too short to argue endlessly. It it seems fanciful, you can check out the details with groups like the Institute for Creation Research. But for some reason, they never seem to put the whole story in one place. It might draw too much attention towards the conflicts this story has with the basic laws of astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, and logic. And it will draw lots of derision too, just like it did in my historical geology class last week. You have work very hard to "believe" this model, much less accept the so-called evidence.

If you feel I have insulted your religious beliefs, you would be wrong. This isn't about religion. This is about an alternative "scientific" history of earth and life that would be taught in public schools under the banner of "equal time" if local governmental entities like the Texas Board of Education had free rein on their collective desire to stop the teaching of evolution (I am happy to hear that the worst member of the creation-science faction lost his primary race to someone else a few days ago).

Once again, this is also a rant of sorts about media treatment of science. I have grown accustomed to seeing stories of evolution "balanced" by an interview with a creation-scientist as if their model has some kind equivalency with actual science. It doesn't. Not even close. And believing really, really hard won't make it so either.

UPDATE: One of my students (commenting on my Facebook version) makes a really good point: "You know how little kids sometimes play pretend, and as they get more competitive with one another, they backtrack and add stuff to the game, changing the original 'rules'? Creation 'science' reminds me a lot of that... "

Geologic Evidence Points to a Giant Worldwide Flood...oh, and Cigarettes Don't Cause Cancer

A few weeks ago, Pascal at Research at a Snail's Pace provided an in-depth look at a GSA field trip to Mount St. Helens led by young-earth creationist (YEC) Steve Austin. It has five parts, and is well worth your time, especially on issues relating to the quality of research being presented as abstracts at GSA and other organization meetings. As is well-known, abstracts cannot undergo the kind of rigorous peer-review that is typical of published journal and research articles, and this is how it should be, as often they deal with preliminary results and controversial new ideas.

Pascal was quite curious about how the creation-scientists would present their ideas on the field trip. Except for some strange questions and occasional references to processes not noted in most geology texts, the trip would not have seemed out of the ordinary to a normal geologist. Pascal discusses the issue of creation-scientists presenting data at science conferences and noted that:

Yes, the YEC crowd will put this as a shining feather in their caps [ironic, since they claim all of our work is wrong yet they view interaction with us as "proof" that their ideas have merit].

The "feather in the cap" has been published by the Institute of Creation Research, and it has some interesting perspectives. I am mostly struck by the way the ICR crowd feels it must hide its motives in their abstracts and field trips. Sure, being labeled a young-earth creationist at a GSA meeting would lead to perception problems, but labels have a reason sometimes.

I often start my classes with the statement that "recent research" indicates that cigarettes don't cause cancer after all. The students catch on pretty fast and ask "who did the research, and who paid for it?" They understand that if the research was presented by the tobacco lobby, that's one thing, but if it was published in a peer-reviewed journal by oncologists supported by the American Cancer Society, that is something else altogether.

So take their statement about two of the abstracts (here and here) presented this year:

Two of these papers were on the petrology of the Coconino Sandstone of the Grand Canyon... (the) Authors ... presented evidence that ocean water, not wind, deposited the distinctive crossbedding of the Coconino Sandstone. The evidence of ocean water currents was argued technically from the dolomite beds, dolomite grains, ooids, mica grains, microfossils, and bimodal texture.

The Coconino Sandstone in the Grand Canyon region is a real problem for young-earth creationist, as are most of the other sedimentary layers on the Colorado Plateau. By their "model" (giant world-wide flood 4,500 years ago), all 12,000 feet of the sedimentary layers of the region HAD to form in ocean environments and under extraordinary conditions at that. All of them. If one of them clearly formed on land, then their "model" is disproven. So the Coconino, generally recognized as a desert sand-dune deposit, had to form underwater. So ask yourself: would these people EVER find evidence of a land-based origin for this layer, or any other layer for that matter? Their researchers must agree with ICR doctrinal statements and tenets just to do research for ICR.

I also take issue with another of their claims. They seem to "take ownership", in a sense, of an organization called the Affiliation of Christian Geologists:

Christian geologists also expressed themselves through an organization within GSA called Affiliation of Christian Geologists. Around 40 GSA members attended the evening meeting ... approximately one third of whom were young-earth creationists. This shows that there are many within the GSA that take seriously the creation and Flood narrative text of the Bible. Their numbers and prominence within GSA appear to have been growing over the years (italics mine).

If you peruse the ACG website, it is apparent that they are reputable geologists who have serious issues with the young-earth creationists. I also have a slight problem of calling the 13 or 14 young-earth creationists "many" when compared to the thousands of geologists in attendance at the meeting.

I don't think creationists should be excluded from venues like GSA. On the contrary, I wish they would present more of their "research". But I would hope that their work will receive the same scrutiny that any poorly designed research would get. If they are trying to prove a worldwide flood 4,500 years ago, then present the evidence to the people who know the science, and be ready to get challenged. Don't hide your motives.

Today's photo is a slab of the Coconino Sandstone showing trackways of an animal walking across the surface of the sand dune. Several dozen different kinds of tracks are commonly found in the unit.

That's reasonable...hey, wait a minute! How to write a Creation Science narrative

Was this done in a few weeks?

Thanks to everyone for the kind (more or less) responses to my previous post regarding, ahem, research in California. I have been the victim of several such articles in past April issues of Discover Magazine, including one on the discovery of arctic moles who tunnel through ice by having an extra warm nose or something like that. Ron Schott expressed a bit of concern about how much pseudoscience exists on the Internet, and that is the purpose of this latest missive.

Writing a devious April Fool's joke involves taking a germ of truth, depending on a certain amount of trust on the part of the reader, and then letting loose with an outrageous distortion that, uh, can't be true, uh, but everything else was so reasonable...and such is the way that so much misinformation becomes part of the pop culture narrative.

In this instance, I started with an appeal to authority (link to a 'journal' and important sounding names of people who probably have PhD's), and then I took some known facts about the Sierra Nevada (rapid Cenozoic uplift; mantle drip) and mixed it up with some geological terminology that quickly zoomed off into ridiculous territory (magnitude 10.5, a salute to a very bad TV movie). What's the problem with a little fun amongst geological friends?

But this is the way it is done on the battleground of public perception in geology and evolution, and the stakes are a great deal higher than an April Fool's prank. Consider...would a person without a geological background be able to recognize the prank? And what if I changed the word "millions" to "thousands" of years? This suddenly becomes a reasonable-sounding creationist explanation of the origin of the Sierra, Central Valley and Coast Ranges from a young-earth perspective. If it were presented as such, could you refute it succinctly, quickly and clearly, without going into a long winded explanation? It isn't necessarily easy, especially if your client doesn't trust you in the first place.

This is what we face in Creation-Science world. This is a place where all of the sedimentary layers of the Grand Canyon were deposited in weeks or months, and were eroded just as quickly when Noah's flood drained from the continents. It is a world where fossils were formed in a matter of days as the flood swept all life away, and where dinosaurs like T-Rex munched on fruits and vegetables until Eve bit the apple. It is a place where evolution doesn't occur. At all. Except in small bits within "kinds". Oh, and the relatively few "kinds" on the ark (e.g. dog, cat, mouse, deer, cow, and antelope) changed into the thousands of species in the world today during the last 4,000 years since the flood subsided. The dog 'kind' for instance, became all the wolves, coyotes, foxes and domestic dogs (but this wasn't evolution because it happened too 'fast'). And so on, and so on, and so on. These kinds of statements are transparent and ridiculous to those educated in geology, but they are perfectly reasonable to someone whose religion seems to demand belief in a worldwide flood around 4,000 years ago. It supports their faith. And the people providing these stories have their trust because they say they are Christians too. And Christians don't lie or deceive about these things.

I realize that many of you are aware of the kinds of thing that organizations like the Institute of Creation Research are up to, and the kinds of deceptive articles they publish. But if you haven't seen what they do, you should check it out, starting right here http://www.icr.org/aaf/. And keep in mind: the people they write for are predisposed to believe every word they read.

This is the challenge that geologists and teachers must face in the public arena. It is important to know where people are coming from when they ask strange questions about our science.

What's the strangest thing you've come across in Creation-Science World?

So, What's Been Happening in the World? And Why is it always Florida?

Sort of like Lois Lane in Superman II, after she had her memory wiped by the Man of Steel, I re-enter the world after five days in the wilds of Death Valley blissfully ignorant of world news (the picture above is from deep in Titus Canyon; you must see this place!). I go on the internets and find that there have been elections and primaries, $100/barrel oil prices, earthquakes, and Florida education officials thinking they are cute by linking the word "theory" with the word "evolution" (as was pointed out in Princess Bride..."You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. "). Check out some of the updates on this issue at http://www.flascience.org/wp/.

The contributors at the Panda's Thumb (http://pandasthumb.org/) have been on top of the Florida evolution controversy. On the one hand, the state education standards for the first time include the words "theory of evolution", instead of the timid "change over time". This could be considered a victory of sorts, except that as always there is a huge difference in what "theory" means to scientists, and what it means to laypeople. Evolution is indeed a theory, in that it has been confirmed by loads of evidence, it explains the origin of many diverse phenomena, and competing hypotheses have fallen by the wayside over the last century or two. On the other hand, when I ask students to use the word "theory" in a sentence, I tend to get "We don't have to believe that, it's just a theory".

You can be sure that this perception will exploited by the creation-science crowd. We have a great deal of educating to do....