The basic problem with the argument is that it is an unjustified uniformitarian extrapolation. The reality is that there are a lot of different environments out there, some really lousy for preserving bones (e.g., a rainforest floor) and some really good for preserving bones (e.g., a low-oxygen area on the ocean floor with a moderate rate of sedimentation.) Over millions of years, some skeletons end up getting preserved and many don’t.
Many shallow-water areas have high rates of sedimentation, so bones get buried relatively quickly.
Note that the wording is “destroy and disperse”. Dispersing does not destroy the bones, but merely scatters them. And in fact, most fossil whale bones, like the boxes I have in the lab downstairs, are scattered around. There’s quite a lot of research on taphonomy - the process from death to preservation as a fossil.
The fact that archaeologists find bones while excavating biblical sites is a problem for the claim that bones always decay rapidly under ordinary circumstances. Whales are big, and getting rid of a dead one is challenging (e.g., Oregon's Exploding Whale - 2012 KATU AM Northwest (KATU's 50th Anniversary) - YouTube ). Even with a bunch of bone-eating scavengers around, bones are not necessarily completely lost. A classic example of this is Buckland’s hyena den. Kirkdale Cave, discovered in 1821, had lots of animal bones. William Buckland noticed that a lot of the bones were chewed on, that there were a lot of hyena bones, and that there were phosphate-rich lumps on the cave floor. With comparison to modern hyenas (including persuading a chemist to analyze the fossil and modern excrement), Buckland was able to convincingly show that the cave had been a den for hyenas; it would now be assigned to the Pleistocene. But lots of bones remained recognizable even though a hyena pack was feasting on them.
More generally, the foundational error of modern young-earth creationism is treating parts of the Bible as if they were modern-style historical and scientific narratives, not connected to the rest of the Bible. Ironically, that is also the approach of most hostile skeptics. In reality, the Bible is a unified theological treatise, written by people in a very different culture about 2000-3000 years ago. The Bible needs to be read in the overall context rather than as isolated parts, and we need to understand how people then wrote and thought to see where modernistic ways of interpretation might be incorrect.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5789 has a detailed analysis of the processes evident associated with a fossil ichthyosaur. Note that the various steps each take a while and could not happen during a flood geology-style global flood rapidly burying everything.
So, the hypothesis that marine fossils formed at the bottom of ancient seas can still be “valid, but in practice is rarely consistent or stands up to scrutiny. This is the case here.” Are you acknowledging that it’s “rarely consistent” or “rarely stands up to scrutiny” that marine fossils were formed at the bottom of ancient seas? If not, please explain exactly what you are saying in this comment.
My hypothesis is that you can never win the lottery. To test this hypothesis I buy 10 tickets. None of the tickets win. Have I supported my hypothesis?
In using whale bones as a test case (for which there is an abundant amount of evidence, due to the many current studies of whale falls), I am arguing from the greatest to the least concerning what happens to bones that are deposited in an ocean or sea. If such large bones are gradually, yet completely, consumed in less than 100 years–and so, unable to fossilize in the ocean depths, as is popularly hypothesized–then what would the probability be for the rest of animal bones, much smaller in size, of reaching ocean depths intact enough to be fossilized over millions of years, as is claimed?
In fact, I’ve given a very real example of such smaller bones that also drifted down into ocean sediments–namely, the bones of the 1500 men who went down with the Titanic in 1912. The Titanic wreckage, of course, was discovered recently. Yet, all the bones of these 1500 men were no where to be found. In fact, in some cases, their trousers were found–but no bones inside them.
But think beyond this. If the hypothesis is correct that the bones of marine animals drifted down into the ocean sediments and were fossilized there, shouldn’t we be finding their bones all over the ocean floor, at various depths (the ancient inland seas were supposedly “shallow seas”–and BTW, whale fall studies show that in shallower seas, whale bones are completely consumed even faster)?
So, where are all these bones? In fact, why don’t we find them along with fossilized–or at least fossilizing–bones? The oceans certainly qualify as “ancient seas.”
Of course, we can find old bones that are unfossilized lots of places. I remember a bison skull my dad found in an old creek bed in West Texas, probably buried in a flash flood 150 years ago or so. If undisturbed, it may well have fossilized in 10,000 years or so. so not everything is degraded. On the other hand, tens of thousands of buffalo roamed over those prairies and disappeared without a trace, as you might point out. If rare events are common, that points to long periods of time.
It seems one question young earthists have to answer is why are the animals we find in fossils beds not walking around now, and why are animals walking around now not found in fossil beds, with a few obvious exceptions.
I’m not sure what you have in mind when you say “firm sediments.” But I’m sure you know that sediments can be “several tens of kilometers” thick, according to Wikipedia.
And you are mistaken about whale bones today remaining “exposed to oxygenated water.” According to studies, there are four stages of bone breakdown in whale falls. And in the third stage…
First, thanks for the supernova/neutrino example relating to empirical evidence. I’ll give this some thought.
The hypothesis concerning the origin of marine fossils is basically “Marine fossils resulted from the bones of marine animals sinking into the sediments of ancient inland seas.” And I am arguing that this hypothesis has been tested repeatedly–and, o.k., I won’t say “falsified,” but at least strongly made suspect–in whale fall studies, where even the largest marine animal bones are found to undergo four stages of deterioration (and in the process, spawning ecosystems around the bones), until completely consumed (in less than 100 years)…and so, unable to fossilize…
And the implications should be obvious: if even these massive marine bones were consumed rather than fossilized, what is the likelihood that all other–much smaller–bones were fossilized in sea sediments?
In fact, I have given the example of the 1500 men who went down with the Titanic. The wreckage, of course, has recently been discovered–but not the bones of the 1500 men; even the trousers of several of them were found down in the wreckage…but no bones in those trousers… They had–like the whale bones–been completely consumed…with no prayer of ever becoming fossilized in these sea sediments.
You dismiss the whale falls as having no significance since there were only a “handful” of cases. Yet, actually there have been much more than a “handful” of such studies–and they have all been consistent in their findings: complete consumption of the bones. Wikipedia (under “Whale Falls”) even says, “Researchers estimate that 690,000 carcasses/skeletons of the nine largest whale species are in one of the four stages of succession at any one time.” Much more than “a handful,” wouldn’t you agree?
In fact, if marine animal bones fossilized at the bottom of ancient inland seas, then why don’t we find fossilized marine animal bones at the bottom of any present-day ancient sea or ocean–like the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian–or even shallower seas (the ancient inland seas were supposedly “shallow seas”)?
In other words, where is the present-day “supernovas/neutrino”-type data we can observe that would supply “empirical evidence” that marine animal bones have ever fossilized in sea sediments? Do you see what I’m saying?
I hope you realise that the 1500 who went down with the Titanic would have been spread over a very wide geographical area? Only a relatively small number of them could have landed close to the ship itself.
I hope you also realise that underwater landslides are a thing even today?
What you are doing here is presenting a very small (and incomplete) sample that only tells us about one particular place in the ocean. From that you are generalising it to everywhere in every ocean, sea, lake and river everywhere. You are also trying to debunk an unrealistic straw man uniformitarianism (one where slow sedimentation is the only thing that happens) that does not accurately reflect what we actually see happening today.
But “strongly making something suspect” is not sufficient when you are dealing with large numbers of events, whether because they happen very frequently or because they happen over a long period of time, or both. As I pointed out above, when you are looking at millions, billions or even trillions of events, very rare sets of circumstances become surprisingly common.
As Larry Osterman of Microsoft said, “One in a million is next Tuesday.”
So, radioactive decay rates have only been measured since–about 1906? A little over 100 years. They have not been observed to vary for 100 years. And so, from this, you "empirically" know that this rate has remained constant for 4.6 billion years?
But I appreciate the specific points and examples you took time to list here. And I will continue to give them some thought.
With starlight, we can observe constant decay rates going back billions of years. On top of that, decay rates are a direct result of the fundamental forces, so you would have to change physics itself in order to get different decay rates.
In more scientific terms, if the rates of radioactive decay were different in the past we would see evidence of it in the present. We do not just assume decay rates were the same in the past. We conclude that decay rates were the same in the past because that is what the evidence is consistent with.
But if you want to stay consistent, you would also have to abandon scavenging of whale bones. Afterall, that has only been observed for a few decades.
Excellent example of why you need to reconsider your line of reasoning. While we don’t actually know whether there are any skeletal remains left from the Titanic, none have yet been found. From this you draw the sweeping conclusion that no bones on the sea floor, anywhere, will survive for long. Which then makes it hard to explain why the skeletons of the entire 8 man crew of the H.L. Hunley, which sank during the American Civil War, have been found intact at their stations in the sunken vessel. Or why skeletal remains from four or five individuals have been recovered from the Antikythera wreck, even though that ship sank more than 2000 years ago.
In short, the evidence is that skeletons on the sea floor do not usually last long but at some appreciable frequency survive more than long enough to be completely covered with sediment.
It’s not just nuclear decay rates themselves that have been studied over the past hundred years or so, Don. It is the underlying mechanisms that determine why they take the values that they do. Nuclear decay rates are not arbitrary. They are determined by the fundamental laws of physics such as quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, conservation of mass-energy, and so on and so forth.
This means that if nuclear decay rates had ever varied in the past, a whole lot of other things would also have to have varied with them. The speed of light. Planck’s Constant. The masses of the electron, the proton, or the neutron. The strength of the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force or the weak nuclear force. And so on and so forth. Such changes would have very, very dramatic and far reaching effects. We would see clear and unmistakable evidence in the heavens above and the earth below if these changes had ever happened. But we don’t.
Actually, it is correct–at least of Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta. The Bearpaw Formation in this park does contain marine fossils–for example, ammonoids and sharks.
Also worth mentioning is the impact changing decay rates (in isolation) would have on the modern world. Nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons are kept dangerously close to runaway nuclear fission reactions. If decay rates suddenly increased all of our nuclear power plants and weapons would go off all at once. If decay rates slowed then all those weapons would be inert, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but we would lose those power stations. We would have to rebuild our entire stockpiles with a new isotope.
If radioactive decay rates did speed up to the rates needed by YEC then exploding nuclear weapons would be a mercy. That would probably be better than our own bodies cooking themselves as the 40K in our bones and tissue killed us off, not to mention the quickly growing heat wave that would melt the entire Earth in a matter of minutes to hours.
A few observations:
On the Pacific plate are many island/seamount chains oriented at different angles.
The ages of the Hawaiian/Emperor volcanoes increases from NW to SE. Has anyone besides McDougall measured these ages? Have these ages been double blind tested?
The change in angle between the two is interesting.
There are two other chains of seamounts just north of Hawaiian chain at angles different than Hawaiian/Emperor chains
In the Line and Marshall islands the same age progression is not observed.
Were the Line, Marshall and the two chains north of the Hawaiian chain formed in the same way as the Hawaiian/Emperor chains?
It was Andrew Snelling himself who came up with the figure of 22,400°C as the temperature that the earth would have reached if his accelerated nuclear decay had actually happened. It’s all there on page 183 of the final RATE report.
Yet he insists that it actually happened. Methinks he must be high on LSD.