The Biblical Flood and its Nature

Oooo . . . a Velikovskian catastrophist web site . . . that's a lot more convincing than Answers in Genesis . . .




















. . . not.

Gunga Dim has given us a page from a mirror site . . . i suspect he would be too embarrassed to have us go directly to "saturniancosmology.org." The Saturn in this "saturniancosmology" refers to a claim that Saturn was located directly "above" the Earth's north pole:



Oh yeah . . . Gunga Dim's givin' us the really good stuff now . . . we asked for evidence, and GD doesn't intend to disappoint.

For those with a little time on their hands, and a penchant for self-amuse, try a view of Saturnian Cosmology-dot-org

Setanta now on ignore along with Parados; adds nothing to discussion...

Oh GOD ! ! !

My social life is at an end . . . there's nothing left for me now ! ! !

So . . . like . . . if Gunga Dim puts everyone who doesn't buy his bullshit line on ignore, doesn't that mean that eventually, he'll be coming here to talk to himself?

No more snake oil for you

(actually you get to read all the snake oil you want, but gunga doesn't have to listen to any more of your damn annoying FACTS)

I'm . . . i'm devastated, Roswell . . . i can't really talk about it right now . . .

I understand. A truly shocking turn of events. We're here for you if you need us.

Parados is one of the more careful debaters at this site. He always takes care to get his facts straight, and he will go for the links to back up what he posts. If Gunga Dim has him on ignore, he must have really lambasted the boy.

So, Gunga is telling us that Africans and Chinese were CURSED!!! I suppose that's as good an explanation as any. When you can't find any facts just make something up! That's the way the Bible was written!

No, try reading a bit more carefully. What I'm saying is that you had a case of microevolution bright on by radiation and the people of the day INTERPRETED what they were seeing as a curse.

Careful, Nick . . . it's just a matter of time before he puts you on "ignore" as well . . . one can only hope . . .

Notice also that there's nothing in the bible (or any other sort of antique literature) about anybody immediately rounding up all the blacks and making slaves out of them or making any sort of a global business out of slavery; that had to wait for the invention of I-slam.

Youve gotta be simply stupid to believe that these guys provide ANY evidence. Cmon, try to pull something up that evidences a worldwide flood and Ill destroy it without any googling.



PS-great scholarship set,Be certain that the 'snake will be deaf and dumb on any realfacts.

Biologiclly,ALL speciation derives from sexual isolation in wild populations. The definition of species,has exchange of genetic material in freely breeding populations. The rst is just hoohaw thats been added by non-scientific philosophy types

Continental shelves and slopes DO have a reason for existence. They are the terminal drainage points of the last glacial ice sheets. The sediments are prograde materials that contain the last chunks of glacial gravels. There have been several hundred mineralogical studies done of the materials within continental shelves and all are localized distributary sediments made up of subangular gravels and flysch sediments associated with post glacial meltwaters. Some sections pof the world(peri-equatorial) dont have continental shelves , but have long deltaic sediment systems that show the presence of a large drainage system that has been in place for at least 2+ million years.
You cant argue a point by misusing existing evidence. A periglacial meltzone shows sediment character much different than "floods"

ANyway, your flood (universal you said) was not universal after all if we are to believe your conshelf "floodist"story. It would mean, by your own admission, that weve always had dry land above mean sea level.

LAstly, if you put me on ignore also, you can spout whatever you wish undisputed .

Hey . . . no begging. You have to earn your rewards just like everyone else.

Which is basically punctuated equilibria.

Again for anybody who might have missed it, Punctuated Equilibria ('punk-eek') is the defacto standard new version of evoloserism devised by palaeontologists including Gould, Niles Eldridge, and Ernst Mayr as a means of resolving two huge problems with the older versions:

[*}The total lack of unambiguous intermediate fossils while the theory demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils should be such interemediates. [*}The gigantic expanses of time which would be required to spread any sort of a genetic change through any large body of animals of the same kind, spread out over any kind of a sizable land mass.

The basic claim is that all meaningful genetic change occurs amongst "peripheral isolates", that is, amongst some very small population of animals which gets trapped into some isolated area, develops some genetic advantage, and then breaks out, spreads out, outcompetes, and overwhelmes the much larger herds of animals without the new change.

This supposedly explains the lack of intermediate fossils since the proposed groups are invariably too small to leave fossil remains around while simultaneously eliminating the need to ever spread changes throughout large groups of creatures.

The problems with this new version of evolutionism, unfortunately, are as big and as numerous as with the old version. A minimal list of such problems would include:

• The problem which Alexander Mebane (Tampa Bay Skeptics) mentioned, i.e. that if such a thing as 'beneficial mutations' exist at all, they are so rare that a small group of animals would never see one.
  
• The fact that you would always be talking about inbreeding with the small groups; inbreeding generally is not good for anybody or anything.
  
• The problem from probability theory known as the "Gamblers' Problem". This means that any small group of animals in an isolated area is highly likely to get wiped out by misfortune for which a genetic advantge would be of no help: drought, flood, fire, severe cold, or even a skewed sex ration in one generation. The much larger herd of animals spread out over a land mass (the group which the 'peripheral isolate' group is required to defeat and replace) would be almost totally immune from such problems. This is similar to the situation in gambling casinos in which the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without going bust while an individual gambler could only lose four or five times.
  
• The requirement (with punk-eek) for animals which are adapted to specific sets of localized conditions to defeat and replace animals which are globally adapted. In real life with few if any exceptions, the first time ordinary dogs, cats, and rats are introduced to one of Darwin's island paradises, the exotic animals get wiped out.
  
• The fact that Gould and Eldridge have not resolved the question of 'beneficial mutations' or whether any such actually exist. As far as anybody knows, ALL mutations involve loss of information and not gain, making it terribly difficult to picture any sort of a new KIND of animal arising via any combination of mutations and selection.
  
• The sheer number of times this business is supposed to have happened. Once or twice, maybe, but tens of billions of times??? You're talking about something akin to requiring George Custer to win at the Little Big Horn every day for billions of years.
  

There's basically no version of this business which is logically consistent or which can be made to work.

We have an evolutionary process going on right before our eyes--Gunga Dim is getting more clever at covering his tracks. A search for his first bulleted statement, a search for the exact text, yielded as the first result a discussion at Free Republic, in which the person who he is quoting attacks a theory of evolution with literally dozens of quotes. What she has posted is obviously an exercise in quote mining in many cases, and bald statements by people with a religious agenda in others.

What is interesting is that Gunga Dim got caught out when he linked a mirror site for a text from Saturnian Cosmologies, and i tracked down the originating site. So he becomes more careful. The person he is quoting at Free Republic is not the source of the quotes she is using, she is quoting from other sources who did the actually grunt work of quote mining, or who actually made the disingenuous statements which willfully ignore the full context of scientific research into evolution. Gunga doesn't quote her, he creates a synthesis of her arguments, and then quote mines her post for salient points he can make in an attempt to portray himself as having a profound grasp of the science involved. He doesn't want to get caught again directly quoting Answers in Genesis, or a goofy site like Saturnian Cosmologies.

If he ever hopes to gets really good at this, he'll have to learn to restate what his sources are saying, without completely screwing up the coherence, so that his sources cannot be identified by a verbatim quote search.

Its obvious that you have absolutely NO idea of what you speak gunga. Youve diplayed total ignornce of the writings in evolutionary biology by the above mismatch of terminology. Im not going to let you slip under the tent by your "much speaking".Your attempts at sounding mildly scientific are laughable and similar to the statement of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"
Punctuated equilibrium is an observed phenom that is only seen from the fossil recod. SO do you accept that rapid speciation (not saltation as you seem to try to befuddle us with) does occur? The fossil record, is replete with sveral major genera examples of PE. However, speciation IS NOT punctuated equilibrium. By your very bulleted posts you contradict yourself and Im making sure that you try to understand..

gamblers Ruin, has been used for decades by statisticians , with a specialized lingo grown up about it.The paths and outcomes of Gamblers Ruin are bcalled "Random Walks", where, once started, a random walk has no tendency to return to a level previously occupied, with "absortion boundaries " that rep under what conditions the players will go broke.
In an extinction context (see Raup 1981), we see the gamblers stake as the number of species in an evolutionary clade. (eg, say our stake is a genus with 10 species living at the same instant in the geological past). Our time scale wont be set like a casino clock but lets use a million years for every time interval. So for every million years each species has a fifty fifty chance to survive to the next million year time interval. If it survives, it has a fifty fifty chance of producing new species.
What happens?

1THE number of species (the diversity) will fluctuate just like in a random walk. Extinction lowers diversity.

2Eventual extinction of the genus is inevitable. This may appear counterintuitive but , an absorption boundary of ZERO SPECIES is the single limitational feature of the random walk. There is no upper absorption boundary, but the random walk is bound to hit the lower absorbing limit.Because our time sequences are so huge, the inevitability of extinction has no effect upon diversity and numbers. Speciation is an effect of adaptation thatis well displayed in the fossil record and the use of punctuated equilibrium is just total bullshit. Most scientists arent even certain that the mechanism is even valid.

2The "unambiguous lack of intermediate fossils" is pure bullshit and all you Cretinists are well aware of it. The fossil record is loaded with "intermediate forms" that you know in your hearts if you were to acknowledge , youre worldview would crumble. The exam[ples of fish-amphibians, bird-lizards, mammal-reptiles, human-hominids, proto cambrian simple fish with only notochords and gills but no other fishlike features, land bound cetaceans,sabre toothed marsupials (shows the preferential feature across clades), gymno-angiosperms, flower protofetaures , . The "Treatise on Vertebrate Paleontology has thousands of pages devoted to "intermediate types". That statement you made is just from a lack of meaningful understanding underpinned by a religious conviction that is ambivalent to the use of your "God given brain".

Breeding isolates have been studied in living species all over the world. Examples of species that have been isolated are interesting laboratories for the mechanisms of evolution. To deny that they exist is just foolish and shows a lack of any understanding on your part. To just deny a phenom despite overwhelming evidence is what most animist religions display. You seem to like to make a legend out of these phenomena rather than try to evaluate them.

3 This "Mebane fella" (Im not familiar with his " works"). To exclaim that beneficial mutations are rare or noexistent is not far from the truth. Its been calculated that mutations occur in somatic cells in an individual at an amazingly high rate. These mutations are seldom "beneficial" vbecasue they occur along a string of coding or non coding or extra genetic DNA. The mutations are , at best, neutral or non lethal. The environment confers the advantage upon any mutation (or result of somatic change without any mutation). To consider evolution as purely mutation driven is so last decade Gunga, get with the recentanalyses.

4Your one argument about the fatal nature of pnctuatedequilibria is not too far from fact. As I stated before, most all genera will become extinct and we must understand that old chestnut from Carroll who stated that " ANY SPECIES SO FINELY ADAPTED TO A SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENT< IS ALSO HELD PRISONER BY IT". Not a bad way of simply stating what you make out to be some scientific conspiracy.You want to explain everything in terms of PE , when even the real scientists dont fully accept it as a valid mechanism. Its merely an observation based phenom, the mechanisms are not genetically observable. Whereas the genetics of speciation are clearly understood. Speciation IS NOT Punctuated equilibrium. PE is merely an explanation , ferom the fossil record only, to explain the sheer appearance of advanced species much sooner after a lower strata would predict using normal slow speciation. SInce this was purely a geologic answer to a problem of species appearnace, Gould and Eldredge never really looked at their strata data. Recent studies of detail correlation have shown that (from detaile laminae isotopic studies) that greater time periods have actually passed in between one species and its apparent "PE'd" daugher (or that, in one or two cases, the daughters werent even daughters except by inference).
SO to claim that actual observable speciation mechanisms are an example of Punctuated Equilibrium , is disengenuous and is someones attempt at science fraud.