Not suprising to me…uniformatarianism under attack from within
This is not evolution eating itself; it is evolution doing what mature sciences do—tightening models when new data demand it. If uniformitarianism is being “attacked,” it is only the naïve caricature that evolution proceeds like a metronome. Serious evolutionary biology abandoned that idea long ago.
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Sounds more like tabloid sensationalism. A little hyperbole never hurt anyone?
Richard
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From the Author’s bio…
Now I live in Portland, Oregon, and write on topics spanning energy, physics, space, and conservation. I’m always looking for that next inspiring story that showcases why our world is worth protecting.
…in other words, Darren Orf is a generalist science popularizer, which is not a slur, but his phrasing of headline bears no more weight than, say, most any random layman opinion. As Terry noted above, pacing of evolution has long been recognized as not uniform, as would be expected exploiting environments and niches which undergo material change.
The underlying paper, Evolutionary Tempo, Supertaxa, and Living Fossils, states:
Here, we develop a new model, the Covariant Evolutionary Tempo model, with the aim of integrating patterns of diversification and molecular evolution within a framework of a continuously changing “tempo” variable that acts as a master control for molecular, morphological, and diversification rates.
Glancing through the paper, I do not think their approach looks very fruitful, but others with more qualification will judge.
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“The famous analogy goes that if all of Earth’s geologic history was compressed into a single calendar year, modern humans wouldn’t make an appearance until around 11:50 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. Recorded human history appears even later than that. Considering our planet’s immense past, it’s downright remarkable how much our humble species has learned with those last few minutes before midnight.”
The reality is, scientists admit that the fossil record and the uniformatarian timeline are grossley mismatched…they do not line up and this is a significant problem for the authenticity of darwinian evolution
Add to thjs the religious dilemma that if God is capable of creating from nothing, why twist what is clearly written in scripture such that a powerful God capable of instantaneous and unscientific miracles, would wait 4.54 billion years for something to radomly occur…the fact us, this doesnt align with biblical themes particularly the second coming prophecy where dead people come back to conscious life, rise up into the sky against gravity, and head off into the vacum of outerspace! It also ignores the fact that spirits cannot interract physically with air to produce sound/speech!
I glanced through the paper. It seems to suffer from a too narrow perspective. The focus is on the rate of molecular evolution and diversification but what gets neglected is the question: in what conditions are such elevated rates of speciation observed?
The basic conditions for rapid diversification are after a massive extinction event or period. For example, when the large space rock killed the dinosaurs, there were plenty of resources that were not anymore used by the dinosaurs and less threats because the hunting dinosaurs were gone. That favoured those individuals that could utilize the unused resources. Without intense competition and predation, the individuals utilizing the resources could survive even if they were otherwise ‘suboptimal’ mutants. That promoted radiation: new species formed from the subpopulations that specialized in using the ‘free niches’.
After the scene was again filled with species that utilized the available resources, including a more diverse set of predators, competition for resources and predation pressure intensified to the point that ‘mutants’ had less opportunities to survive. That probably led in many cases to stabilizing selection or such ‘runaway’ selection that changed populations but did not necessarily lead to many new species.
This development would have lead to the diversification patterns that were observed and analyzed in the paper.
These patterns were observed at the scale of tens or hundreds of millions of years, so the findings do not support YEC.
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That or the opening of a new set of niches and/or environments (e.g., burrowing and carnivory as major new niches helping drive the Cambrian Explosion; or the massive diversification of cichlids in the African rift lakes).
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The actual paper does raise problems for molecular clock calculations, not that there weren’t problems known already. Like many YEC claims, molecular clocks tend to be unjustified uniformitarianism.
There is no conflict between the timeline developed by a biblical approach to geology, which gives the age of the earth as 4.56 billion years, and the fossil record. Nor is the fossil record compatible with flood geology. The modern understanding of the geologic column was built by catastrophists; calling it “uniformitarian” is merely looking for an excuse to ignore it. As God does not change, His creation should behave in uniform ways, but we must study the evidence of creation to determine what trends are consistent.
The fact that God does work miracles is no excuse for making up claims of miracles that didn’t happen. YEC should not be rejected because it claims that miracles happen nor because it claims that the earth is young, but because its claims are false. By making believing what creation science says an essential part of salvation, the teaching of modern creation science has fallen into a false gospel of legalism, like the error of the Galatian judaizers.
How do you know that spirits cannot interact physically with air? Of course, to convey speech they could also interact physically with the ears or brains of the listener. (C. S. Lewis makes the point somewhere in the space trilogy, in discussions at the end of one of the volumes as I recall.)
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It’s at the end of the second one, I think.
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The first people to notice a problem with 6 days of creation were the geologists….
generations before Darwin.
God does not wait for random occurrences; He puts millions of years into a planned & guided instant.
G.Brooks
Have you ever considered actually studying science before making these wild claims? People already “rise up into the sky against gravity and head off into the vacuum of outer space”.
Oh, and just BTW, the Bible doesn’t say anything about the vacuum of outer space – that’s adding to the text.
Definitely! Especially when the proposed miracles are pointless.
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The scientific consensus is that the fossil record aligns just fine with geological time. The same is not true for YEC, which has no credible explanation as to why fossils are found unique to formations of specific age.
It is one thing to dispute that a given conclusion flows from the evidence. It is quite another to misrepresent what scientists actually say; that just demonstrates that YEC is blather and you cannot cope with the actual evidence.
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I just love reading fiction promoted as fact. The narratives are nearly as convincing as those in mythology or even Scripture. But they are still narratives designed to illustrate what Scientists have concluded from their “data”.
Very entertaining.
Some people believe in Star Trek as well.
Richard
I ain’t gonna deny it, I would love to be a YEC. It’d be SO much easier to make sense of…well, everything.
Unfortunately there are too many evidences that point towards an incredibly older earth and universe than what was previously believed and every objection made on the subject has been convincingly refuted, so far.
I said that everything would be much easier because it’d be much easier to believe in a loving God that loves humans if the earth wasn’t 4.5 billion years old, a 4.5 billion years old rock floating in a peripheral galaxy amongst billions (actually trillions) of galaxies in a 13.7 billion years old universe.
The sheer enormity of this time span makes us feel so insignificant.
Even the existence of dinosaurs if you think about it it’s very hard to make sense of in a divine plan. I mean, God wanted and loved humans since the beginning, yet he allowed dinosaurs to roam the earth for what? 180 million years? We as Homo sapiens sapiens haven’t been around for more than 300.000 years, to put things into perspective. Hell, the T-Rex is closer to our time than it is to the Allosaurus!
When you think about all of this it’s mind blowing and very frightening and I fully understand why some people want to reject evolution and believe in a young earth.
I would more than happily reject evolution and old earth too if the evidences weren’t so convincing and the objections so…weak and easy to refute.
I believe in God because of the historical existence of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, for the fact that his Resurrection is by far the most convincing way (and I’m saying this after having studied the historical Jesus for more than 10 years) to make sense of the sudden explosion of Christianity and the change of heart of the disciples who went from betraying Jesus to dying in order to bear witness to the Resurrection. Another thing that allows me to believe are the many miracles that still happen through His name, and like I said before the human consciousness which I fully believe has no naturalistic explanation and points towards an immaterial and spiritual origin (which is why I believe human consciousness survives physical death). Last but not least some experiences with the spiritual realm that took place in my family).
These are the only things that allow me to believe that this whole shitshow has some kind of meaning and that death has indeed been defeated and conquered.
But everything would have been so much easier if we didn’t know about the things mentioned before.
We go back to Ecclesiastes 1:12-18 I suppose.
I think you have hit the nail on the head.
There is a simplicity both of faith and beliefs in YEC, as there is in Inerrancy or God authored. It makes decision making null. You do and believe what you are told.
Unfortunately it leaves little room for the Hoy Spirit, but hey, that’s just a subjective excuse for believing something else! (Anything else!) Sarcastic font
As such I find my opposition to such beliefs tempered by thoughts of children and millstones and stumbling,
It is one thing to disagree, even argue, but it is another to start condemning, judging and belittling.
Richard
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Yeah Richard, I agree, I would really love to be able to have that kind of simple and genuine Faith. Really. I can’t have it because I simply cannot look past all the evidence, but I would love to. And I respect (and kind of envy, in a good way) those who really manage to have that kind of pure childlike Faith.
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Yes and no. There are those that just believe YEC and never look at biology or geology in any depth. Then there are those who are armpit deep into YEC, and they talk about any number of hugely convoluted and extrabiblical YEC explanations for this or that (e.g. accelerated nuclear decay, distant starlight). It’s similar to the type of hugely convoluted explanations one would need to explain a Flat Earth given the observations we have made.
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That’s not fiction. That’s a well-evidenced explanation–there are a lot of specific examples of rapid radiations correlating very closely with newly opened niches or habitats. For instance, predation (and, going along with it, having shells) and burrowing in the early Cambrian; any large radiations on volcanic islands (Hawaiian honeycreepers or silverswords, Pacific island rails, Caribbean anoles, Galapagos “Finches”, etc.); just about anything in African rift lakes (cichlids, snails, clams, etc., etc.); New World Warblers (with lots of new habitat appearing as glaciers retreated); South American ungulates; mammals just after the K-Pg boundary; bivalves replacing brachiopods after the P-T boundary; and many more that I can’t list just off the top of my head.
For the ones that aren’t very recent, the rate of diversification slows a lot at some point, suggesting that taxa have filled the newly-available niches, and thus that the approach of “keep doing what works” shifted to being more advantageous than “do lots of novel things, since there are few restraints”.
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