Flood Geology Cannot Explain Sedimentary Formations. Here's Why

I’m opening this as a thread to discuss the failure of flood geology to get the facts straight in regards to sedimentary formations, and why that poses such an insurmountable problem for YEC. I will edit this top post to list additional issues which might get discussed. Here is a start.

  1. A great deal of the sedimentary record displays periodic and alternating long term changes in depositional environment, resulting in layered rock which cannot result from a single high energy event, but is entirely consistent with geology.

  2. Flood geology insists that the preflood world was buried under deep sediment, but in much of sedimentary rock of various ages normal activity of life is found to be present, including burrowing, bioturbation, footprints and other traces of locomotion, and in the case of dinosaurs, building nests and laying and incubating eggs. These activities cannot happen while drowning, but is entirely consistent with geology.

  3. The stratification of the fossil record defies any plausible flood geology explanation. A single, high energy event would not leave a globally consistent succession of fossils. While microfossils do not have the public recognition of dinosaurs, they are even more conclusive evidence against a single event global flood.

  4. A single year cannot even come close to accounting for the quantity of biogenic limestone, dolomite, and chalk present on the earth.

  5. Flood geology cannot account for the consilience of radiometric dating of igneous incursions ash, and flood rock, with the bracketed fossils that appear in expected epochs of Earth history. For lake sediments, flood geology offers no explanation for the correlation of 14C dating and depth of varve.

  6. Mudstone, which YEC considers to have been deposited in the flood, abounds as fully lithified rock. However, far more time would be required for compaction and dewatering of deposits to produce dry and solid material than is allowed in the YEC timeline.

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A high energy event can not sort fossils and igneous rock in such a way that differences in ratios of parent and daughter in the rocks will correlate with the fossils above and below them. For example, a high energy event can not sort both dinosaur fossils and zircons so that dinosaur fossils are never found above zircons that have a ~15:1 ratio for 235U/207Pb.

In the same vein, a high energy event can not sort insect and leaf debris by tiny, tiny differences in 14C so that we see an ever decreasing amount of 14C as we go deeper into varved lake sediments. More to the point, all of the organic debris should have the same amount of 14C which is itself makes up just 1 trillionth of the carbon isotope makeup in organic debris.

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From @Burrawang

here is some bioturbation in some sediments in places, generally in some marine sediments but I’m talking about the vast majority of sedimentary rock all over the planet with enormous lateral extents across continents and vertical extents that are often many thousands of feet deep

Did you read Morton’s work? North Dakota covers several deep formations which contain display bioturbation.

This is from a book chapter for the Grand Canyon - Paleozoic Invertebrate Ichnology of Grand Canyon National Park.

Trace fossils indicate varying organism responses to changing environmental conditions over time and space and give insight into their paleoenvironments represented by ichnofacies, which are recurrent associations of trace morphologies. This highlights the importance of ichnology in the Grand Canyon, where almost every Paleozoic geological unit contains trace fossils. The majority of reported ichnofossils include worm burrows, arthropod tracks and trails, and dwelling or feeding structures.

From the National Center for Science Education

the strata of the Grand Canyon are replete with examples of bioturbation and animal tracks. A well-known example is the abundance of invertebrate and vertebrate trace fossils in the eolian deposits of the Permian Coconino Sandstone. These dune-bedded desert sands even have well-preserved raindrop impressions (Beus and Morales 2003).

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I don’t know which cliché is more apropos to this subject:

Shooting fish in a barrel?

Flogging a dead horse?

Try getting one of the proponents to debate you in public. He/she won’t benefit, but the audience might.

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Calculating it is beyond me, but looking at the miles of sediment layered about brings to question how much energy, and how much time did it take to grind the basement rocks to sand and silt in the first place? I have been around long enough to see coastlines battered by constant waves that have hardly changed over my lifetime, much less forty days.

The only explanation I can think of that a young earthist could have, would be that God created the sand and silt in situ, which brings up the question of why he made it match the mineral composition of the mountains a thousand miles upstream.

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YEC, and prominently Timothy Clarey, have been vocal in bandying the idea that the Flood scooped up sediment from the ocean and deposited it across the continent. There are endless flaws in this proposal, starting with one baseless assumption they make that seems to escape their attention, being that there would be sediment in the ocean to begin with.

In the normal course of things, most ocean sediment is created from wave action, biological action, wind blown dust, and transport by rivers and rain. This all takes time, and the preflood period would be nowhere near enough. Where was all this oceanic sediment which they claim covered the continents to kilometers deep, supposed to have come from?

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Glad you are looking into this. I have as well. There is no evidence for a worldwide flood. In fact there is no evidence for a Genesis flood of the magnitude, at the time (2400 BCE) and location mentioned in Genesis. However there was one that fit the description but again not worldwide. It was th Black Sea Deluge (5600 BCE).Because we cann confirm Genesis flood does not effect theology that Jesus saves.

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I’ll address your five points in order.

  1. A great deal of the sedimentary record displays periodic and alternating long term changes in depositional environment, resulting in layered rock which cannot result from a single high energy event, but is entirely consistent with geology.

Dr. Kurt Wise just released his findings in his data taken from The Paleobiology Database, a public database of paleontological data that includes the ability to filter fossil occurrences by time, space, and taxonomy. He organized this data with a metric called NLSSS (Number of Local, Stage-boundary Straddling Species). This measure tracks species found within tight geographic ranges (2 degrees longitude and latitude) that appear in rock layers from different geological stages.

He found, and you can easily do this yourself, that species continuity across boundaries—those points in the rock record that geologists associate with evolutionary transitions—does not align with the geological system or stage boundaries. This finding means that species often survive across so-called mass extinction boundaries, challenging the narrative of evolutionary paleontology. Of course, the one boundary that does correspond to a mass extinction is the K/Pg, which you’ll have no disagreement with your creationist brothers and sisters.

What this does is call into question the very foundation of sequence stratigraphy—the widely-accepted framework that links the Earth’s sedimentary layers to slow, cyclical changes in sea level, sediment supply, and tectonic activity over millions of years. This is what you are essentially alluding to. According to this model, layers of rock correspond to distinct periods in Earth’s history, punctuated by evolutionary shifts and mass extinctions.

But another important pattern was discovered. Each mega-sequence begins with high-energy conglomerates—coarse, large-grained sediments requiring significant water force to deposit. As the sequence progresses, the energy decreases, with sands, shales, and then limestones being deposited in turn, each layer representing less turbulent conditions. This pattern repeats across multiple mega-sequences (of which there are five clear mega-sequences), pointing to a series of catastrophic energy pulses, not the slow, steady processes described by mainstream geology.

This is not an “insurmountable problem” at all.

  1. Flood geology insists that the preflood world was buried under deep sediment, but in much of sedimentary rock of various ages normal activity of life is found to be present, including burrowing, bioturbation, footprints and other traces of locomotion, and in the case of dinosaurs, building nests and laying and incubating eggs. These activities cannot happen while drowning, but is entirely consistent with geology.

Fossils require deep sediment to be formulated, that’s not controversial amongst the fluvial geomorphology community. I hate to be nick-picky here, but bioturbation includes burrowing.

I would like to see where this bioturbation is? In fact, there is a stark absence of any meaningful ecological signature within the vast majority of sedimentary rocks. Apart from this, you have vast planation surfaces with no topography, and all the indicators of rapid burial. This last point brings me to these delicate fossils off building nests, laying eggs, footprints and tracks.

This is clearly a strong indicator of rapid burial. There is no plausible reason for such articulated impressions and action to be preserved over gradual processes. What we’re looking at is turbidity flows moving mile-high deposits and quickly screenshotting ecology. This is not a slow process by any stretch. Modern experiments have repeatedly shown fossilization within days/weeks. This is simply not something that could have been preserved over deep time.

Not remotely a problem.

  1. The stratification of the fossil record defies any plausible flood geology explanation. A single, high energy event would not leave a globally consistent succession of fossils. While microfossils do not have the public recognition of dinosaurs, they are even more conclusive evidence against a single event global flood.

One mistake being made here is the assumption of a single event or a single process. The flood consisted of a series of processes that involved a year of submersion and recession, but that only accounts for about a half to 3/4ths of the total catastrophe. There was the freezing of rapid rains in the northern and southern poles causing great glaciers and ice sheets to spread over much of the continents. There were great lakes such as what secularists now recognize as Lake Missoula that broke fourth and eroded massive terrestrial regions.

I would like to see this globally consistent succession of fossils. I was under the impression that even folks at BioLogos subscribe to the notion that great explosions of biodiversity which novel body plans are present at almost every turn in the paleontological record. There are some transitional fossils, I’ll grant you, but those are not impressive when we have a rather comprehensive understanding of the fossil record and they represent an exception to the rule.

You make many unsubstantiated claims which I can’t respond to. For instance, how are microfossils or dinosaurs conclusive evidence against a flood? In order to present an insurmountable problem, you must posit a problem first.

  1. A single year cannot even come close to accounting for the quantity of biogenic limestone, dolomite, and chalk present on the earth.

A global flood can. There is actually a lot of interest in this area amongst the secular world due to the fact that it represents a solution for an energy source that is renewable with virtually zero carbon footprint. Look up CarbFix, which is lead by a Hellisheidi power station in Iceland that captures carbon dioxide (CO2) and turns it into stone, with the purpose of permanent storage. Dr. Tim Clarey has also done work on demonstrating that limestone deposits can form quickly in flume experiments. As Dr. Michael J. Oard has pointed out, dolomite has actually been a problem for secular science for about 200 years. Our solution is simple, we observe dolomite forming only in warm saline water in the present. To quote Dr. Oard:

It is estimated that 1,000 units of fluid flow is needed to dolomitize one unit volume,5 and 350 kg of Mg is needed to dolomitize 1 m3 of limestone with a porosity of 7%.11 Of course the fluid flow of magnesium ions decreases away from a potential source—one of the many problems with dolomitizing a huge limestone formation. This is one reason why it supposedly takes millions of years for dolomite to form. The problem with primary precipitation is that a tremendous kinetic barrier exists.12 Presently seawater is 10–100 times supersaturated with magnesium,10 yet dolomite is not precipitating today. Land discovered that dolomite would not precipitate even at 1,000-fold supersaturation at temperatures of 25°C after 32 years.13 This kinetic barrier can be overcome by increasing the temperature of the fluid…
…the massive scale of dolomite deposition matches the scale of deposition during the global Flood, laying down these carbonates over vast areas with one deposit forming on top of the other in quick succession. This is exactly what we see today in the layers of sedimentary rocks.20 These huge formations defy uniformitarianism, which should produce only small-scale local horizontal and vertical sedimentation patterns

As for the chalk, what we find in these chalk layers are fossils of clams, coral, snails, shells, etc. The conventional explanation actually cannot account for this. There’s an exceedingly span in which the smallest changes to the chalks would be made on the order of 0.008 and 0.08 inches per year for about a million years. This is not the environmental tapestry in which we would expect these kinds of fossils.

Let me just ask you a forrest question (since we’ve been talking trees): How do you account for these massive stretches of sediment deposited transcontinentally that are hundreds of feet high if these layers all individually take millions of years? Should expect no other geological processes to interrupt these sediment deposits for such aforementioned lengths of time? Why is there order and consistency to them that defies ecological systems?

Yeah, this is another non-problem for creationism.

  1. Flood geology cannot account for the consilience of radiometric dating of igneous incursions ash, and flood rock, with the bracketed fossils that appear in expected epochs of Earth history. For lake sediments, flood geology offers no explanation for the correlation of 14C dating and depth of varve.

I just chuckle when I hear the term “Gish-Galloping” thrown around. I wouldn’t do it here, but that’s because Gish would usually have an argument.

Radiometric dating methods, particularly those using long half-lives (e.g., potassium-argon, uranium-lead), often assume a constant decay rate and initial conditions. Many creationists have challenged this assumption and have gotten no serious rebuttals. Dr. Snelling points out the anomalies such as discordant dates (where different methods give conflicting results). These occur in a consistent manner, with radioisotopes that date older consistently dating older and conversely the younger dating younger (with a divergence of hundreds of millions of years in many cases).

In the context of the Flood, rapid burial, volcanic activity, and varying environmental conditions would have altered radiometric signatures. Flood geology posits that much of the fossil record and associated igneous layers were laid down in a short time, which could explain discrepancies and misinterpretations in radiometric dating. Furthermore, accelerated nuclear decay (as suggested by the RATE project) could explain the inflated radiometric ages.

Finally, I see no reason why the earth can be old AND we can have a recent humanity and flood. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but really. Danny Faulkner has some great insights on how God may have accelerated all of creation during the creation week. That’s possible and not a weak Biblical interpretation at all. I have no reason to think that the universe wouldn’t appear old due to mature trees and ecology, mature galaxies and light that reaches man, mature geology and, yes, some decay into daughter elements. However, this doesn’t negate the facts of radio halos and helium ratios.

Further, C-14 dating is only accurate for tens of thousands of years and should not detect C-14 in samples older than about 50,000 years. However, C-14 has been found in fossils, coal, and diamonds supposedly millions of years old. Rapid sedimentation during the Flood could produce varve-like layers much faster than the uniformitarian model suggests. Laboratory experiments and observations of catastrophic events show that multiple varves can form in a single year under the right conditions. These are non-starters for you, my friend.

I certainly appreciate your taking the time for present these challenges, and I hope you appreciate my exegesis and measured response as a brother in Christ.

I would love to hear a response, but do not feel obligated to (especially a comprehensive one). I would like to know how you understand this evidence and where I am in error.

Thank you,

Wesley C

Jesus saves, and I will say amen to that! I have a pet peeve when one says there is not evidence for something. That seems a little disingenuous to me, as I wouldn’t say the same about the conventional model of geology, evolution, a Ptolemaic model, Newtonian gravity, even the vast majority of conspiracies and cults have evidence. Evidence is agnostic to beliefs, but what becomes evidence changes based on one’s lenses of the world. For example, what is the evidence that someone with a geocentric vs heliocentric worldview can agree on? You might say, “we both see the sun rise over the horizon.” That has already embedded a lot of assumptions. Does the sun “rise”? A heliocentric worldview would fundamentally disagree. So although, I’d argue evidence (I mean empirical data) is agnostic, certainly what we believe will be evidence will be different. In that case, I cannot honestly say you or anyone else has no evidence for their beliefs.

I hope you take this in the way that it was meant, as constructive and loving. I strongly believe in dialogue between our two opinions on Genesis, and that can only be slowed by this kind of rhetoric. I can assure that you will not convince an Old Earth or Young Earth believer by suggesting they have no evidence. They will think to themselves, “that’s clearly a false claim (if it is),” and that fact will dissuade them from being persuaded by you. It’s a kind of poisoning the well. I know your intentions are good, I’m just letting you know where I’m coming from.

Thanks,

Wesley C

Hello Wesley, welcome aboard.

You have provided an extensive and on topic reply. There is lots of relevant good discussion material there to get to as time permits. Many of us are pretty familiar with Snelling, Wise, Clarey, and company, and many responses are already archived in the forum.

To introduce myself, I am a Christian who believes all truth is God’s truth, and that God used a parsimony of laws and constants to give us a wondrously varied universe. In my youth, I was a pretty ardent creationist (OEC), but I became very disillusioned with apologetic organizations. I do not have a really tidy doctrine of special, natural, and incarnational revelation, so I will just have to trust God with any loose ends.

If you wish, please feel free to tell us a little of yourself.

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Thank you kindly for your hospitality!

I would not at all be insulted if you pointed me towards archived responses in the forum, as far as you believe they’re relevant. What I will say is we are, admittedly, barely scratching the surface of these topics and there’s never an end to learning and growth.

I praise God for keeping you through what sounds like a difficult time in your youth. It’s good to share and I will affirm as well, I love the Lord Jesus who died for the sins of all the world! I can understand that disillusionment, as well. I have felt that way in various moments in my faith, relying on teachers who I trusted in some respect. I have held similar positions to John Lennox, Hugh Ross, and Ken Ham at some point in my life. I believe God put people in my life as they were important for me to hear them. I separate myself from the views of these three gentlemen, but of course I still have much respect for each (especially Dr. Lennox).

Some facts about myself include that I had a classical liberal education in college and have been a massive science enthusiast. I am big on philosophy, history, and music as well (I am a hobbyist composer). I specialized in Western History and Philosophy. I think a lot can be learned through immersing in the great books and the authors who have thought deeply and have come to different conclusions. There’s something to glean from everyone.

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This may be a good place to start, as the global stratification of the fossil record leads to an intuitive and accessible understanding of the history of life over geologic time. The following is from a prior post I made concerning macrofossils.

The fossil record is progressive and stratified. The global flood as described by YEC reshaped the planet. A flood of that power would jumbo everything together.

The identifiable geological eras from the Cambrian forward are identifiable by geological characteristics but also by their fossil inclusions. The fossil record displays a general progression from more primitive organisms, extinction boundaries, and sorting of creatures into their associated epochs. This is precisely what would be expected given life evolving over a span of hundreds of millions of years.

Given that YEC holds that all the animals that ever breathed coexisted together before the deluge, this presents a challenge - if they lived together why did they not die together? The entire geologic column constituting most of the fossil bearing sedimentary rock found on the planet, would have been laid down roughly over the course of a year.

No humans and dinosaur fossils have ever been found together, but that is only the thinnest sliver of the problem. Bear in mind that YEC believes that pretty much every creature that ever lived was present in the days leading to the flood. So we should find not just people with dinosaurs, but trilobites with crabs, dimetrodons with velociraptors, plesiosaurs with whales, triceratops with elephants, pterosaurs with buzzards - one could go on all day.

If the animals lived together, perhaps they segregated as the flood waters arose. Could it have been by the size of the animal? Only a minority of dinosaurs grew to the size of large sauropods or T. Rex, most were comparable to elephants and buffalo, and many down to the size of badgers. There is also no reason to believe that dinosaurs moved particularly faster or slower than an assortment of other animals. There are over a thousand identified species of dinosaur of many shapes and sizes; if they lived at the same time there is no reason to expect there would be no inter-sorting between Permian amphibians, cretaceous reptiles, and Holocene mammals. Finally, could they have sunk at different rates? That makes no sense for sorting either, some animals would be tangled up or suffer trauma and not even float to begin, and again, many amphibians, dinosaurs, and mammals are about the same size and would bloat and sink randomly. These things are not like clockwork.

So it makes little sense that if animals from the various epochs were all alive at the time of the flood, that there would be any effective mechanism that would result in any sorting whatsoever. But the fossil record is screaming clear. There has never been a solitary dinosaur found above the KT boundary, and never a modern mammal from below.

Flood geology holds that the deluge was an extraordinarily violent affair, spreading the continents apart, grinding primal rock to massive sedimentary formations, and jutting mountain ranges skywards. It is inconsistent that all this fury would reshape the planet but placidly lay each animal to rest in peace in some well ordered sequence followed the world over. That would be like, …what would be a good analogy? Well, it would be like the familiar tornado in a junkyard assembling a 737 jetliner without anything out of place or in the wrong order. No Cambrian pieces after Jurassic, no Paleocene pieces before Triassic; nothing at all out of place.

The fossil record confirms a succession of ecologies, and contradicts a global flood.

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Hello @Wesley_Coleman and welcome. Tangential to the discussion, I know. What do you mean by “classical liberal education?”

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Hello, and welcome. I’m a Christian undergraduate student at present, specializing in studying fossil mollusks. My theology is generally at the conservative end of the regulars here.

How much filtering did he do of bad data in the PBDB? Using raw PBDB data for an analysis like this is not going to produce reliable results, no matter what the author’s ideas about what this ought to imply.

There is still succession of species, whether vertebrates, mollusks, or planktonic foraminifera. This has been known for over 250 years now. Lyell’s definitions of Cenozoic epochs were based on changes in extinction rates of mollusks in European deposits.

“Significant” as in beach face or riverine, not tsunamis of boiling mud.

There are fossils that have never been buried under more than a few tens of meters of material sitting all around me right now. Many fossils have had that happen, but it is not a requirement.

At every single fossiliferous Cenozoic shallow marine deposit, for a few thousand.

Yes there is–falling into anoxic water, landslides, river floods, changes in sediment type soon after deposition, etc. Also, such fossils are rare, indicating that conditions which would preserve them are also rare.

That would smash every fossil in the deposits.

Under conditions that are extremely rare.

That’s better, but still doesn’t work:

Read any paper on global planktonic foraminiferal dating for a start.

It would require animals with lifespans of years to live, grow to adulthood, and die within hours to produce the volumes observed.

What is this about, exactly?

They often do–deposits that extensive are rare.

There isn’t, unless something strange has been discovered recently.

Yes, because if the decay rates were not constant, then either every atom fell apart, or Earth turned into a ball of plasma.

Of course they do! That’s called “contamination” and “noise”. A value of “100,000 years” from C14 is background noise. Under this same logic, I could assert that the earth is less than a millennium old using ages based on Tritium.

No, it would either make all atoms larger than hydrogen fall apart or turn the earth into a ball of plasma.

God wanted to do it that way because his ways are higher than ours?

As contamination and/or background noise.

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For all you citizen scientists out there, here it is:

The Paleobiology Database

I’ve heard complaints that the curating leaves something to be desired, but it is a far cry better than the alternative, which is pretty much nothing.

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When I read things like this my reaction is, “Well what would constitute a serious rebuttal?” Many young earthist challenges to radiometric dating can be refuted with nothing more than an explanation of the basic rules and principles by which measurement works.

Take for example the claim about carbon-14 in fossils. As @Paraleptopecten has rightly pointed out, we would expect to see trace amounts of carbon-14 in ancient samples because of contamination from modern carbon-14. This is simply one of the most basic, fundamental rules of measurement that applies to every context: you must take into account all possible sources of error, and contamination is one such source of error. Yet young earthists dismiss contamination as some sort of “rescuing device.” By dismissing it as a “rescuing device,” they are demanding that the basic rules and principles of accurate and honest measurement do not apply to them.

Sorry, but no. Accelerated nuclear decay is science fiction. Accelerated nuclear decay on the scale required for a young earth would require the fundamental constants of physics to have changed, and if that had happened then everything would have changed in ways that would have destroyed the Earth.

In any case, it was the young earthists themselves who admitted that the amount of accelerated nuclear decay they needed would have raised the Earth’s temperature to 22,400°C – four times hotter than the surface of the sun and hot enough to vaporise the entire planet. Don’t believe me? Here’s a link to the page in the RATE report itself where they did the calculations.

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If you want to invoke accelerated nuclear decay remember all humans contain small quantities of radioactive elements. Enough that if the decay was accelerated as needed to get to 6,000 years the heat generated would kill Noah and his family.

In addition to the heat generated by accelerated nuclear decay there are many other sources of heat that must be dissipated, such as the heat generated by limestone formation and the cooling of magma intrusions. The YEC folk have slowly come to the point where they have to just invoke a miracle to handle the problems.

And a problem I haven’t seen brought up yet is the amount of time needed for the formation of mud rock. Scott Dunn has a paper in Creation Research Society and there is an open discussion of the problem in New Creation.

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Added to OP.

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Interesting article. it would be refreshing if all young earth creationists were all as honest as that in their writings.

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I did some digging around for the thing by Wise that @Wesley_Coleman referenced. I have an aversion to vague references. Being able access and asses the original for oneself is essential.
I think this is probably the source. If not, I hope he would provide the actual item he referenced above:

The table of contents is fascinating.

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