Scientific American Gives Up

aw JL its not difficult. The stuff that was brought up By Senator tombstone is old junk. Were not even sure that those polonium halos are even due to polonium, and Gentry and Austin are silent. I think Austin is just trying to stay out of site.
These are examples of Popes lines about

"a little knowledge is a dangerous thing
drink deep or drink not from the (something something) spring"

It was either Alexander Pope or Yoda , I forget, but thats not the point is it?
The Creationists and some of the IDers lean on false science that is made up for general consumption and popular science literature . The truth lies in boring slogging out detail of the breadth of scientific inquiry.
Ive just finished the "Beak of the Finch" and found it marvelous , direct, and simple. No mumbo jumbo, no quasi-crap, and no nyah nyah too many gaps in the fossils.
Im prepping because , a few weeks ago, Rosborne made an excellent point, When were too close to some sciences and all that comes out is jargon, its easy to be swayed by Creationist razzle dazzle. All the "faculty" at Discovery Institute and The ICR are trained in "preaching" They are convincing and they keep good one liners by their sides.Their science is presented in enjoyable chunks. They are primarily entertainers, even though many have advanced degrees.

As far as the polonium issue, S Austin was a respected mineralogist who got off the deep end when he embraced some of Gentry's crap. Gentry was a scientist at Oak Ridge who was working on packaging nuke waste in hyaline membranes. He saw that certain substances showed halos or "burn circles" from particles in rad decay. He then transerred his work into rocks and because he knew a little about granitic rocks he made some huuge assumptions and started the polonium ring brigade back in the 70's.
HE has never ever shown that polonium was even responsible for the rings and, because people shipped him rock samples , he never had any idea whethere the granites were new melts, old melts, metamorphic granite or what. SOme people that I know from Penn State observed some of his samples and said that many werent even granites. The big thing about Gentry was that he made the dim assumption that granite is the "primordial crust" of the earth. His experiments only involved microscopy of thin slices of rock from indeterminate locations, and that he never proved that polonium was the source of the rings. He employed circular reasoning all the way. But hey, it was entertaining when I was in grad school. But back then people were reading and believing I. Velakovsky too.

I think that most creationists really want their stuff to be soundly scientifically rooted and so, they rely upon authorities who, most often, dont have the same simple devotion to truth.
The Intelligent Designers, on the other hand , do stipulate to the age of the planet, they recognize and respect radiochemitry and isotope dating, they understand plate tectonics and, most accept evolution. The IDers are really where the Catholic Church was in the 1940s.

Pope - great quote, too:

"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.

yeh what she said. Thanks rabbit.

I recall getting partially hooked on Velakovsky.

I found hilarious what Carl Sagan had to say about Velikovsky, that he knew the astronomy to be crap but he was impressed by the man's wide and profound knowledge of ancient history and literature. He then relates that at a faculty get together, he was talking to a professor of ancient lit when the topic of Velikovsky came up, and the prof said his grasp of ancient literature and history was non-existent, but that he had been impressed by his knowledge of astronomy.

I tried to read Velikovsky, but it was so far out there, that i had to give it up. I am no expert on astronomy, but i wasn't buying a story which had Venus popping out a side door from the interior of Jupiter to make several close passes of the earth, dropping off flies and frogs for the plagues of Egypt. I had also already read enough ancient history (that's where i started, at the beginning) that i knew that he was full of horsie poop on that heading, which made his astronomy suspect in my estimation.

I once sarcastically recommended Velikovsky to a young, mouthy and uninformed poster here, who later sent me a PM in which he excitedly recounted all he was learning from Velikovsy, and sincerely thanked me for the recommendation.

Irony is not dead, it is simply unselfconscious.

he he. Neat stuff, set.

sometimes being a DOB is its own reward

****! There's three weekends down the goddamn drain.

Lola - LOL. You may actually have a better chance with your flowerpots using Lysenko's agricultural expertise than you did with your nuclear reactor using Gentry's ideas on gaseous diffusion - that's if you can enlist Velikovsky's alien visitors to help