Newsweek Dabbles in Young Earth Creationism

Kastalia Medrano, of Newsweek, has written a post describing the discovery of a fossilized Antarctic Forest.  The piece starts off innocuously enough:

Scientists announced the discovery of the fossilized trees in Antarctica’s Transantarctic Mountains in November. They believe the forest is the oldest one known to exist in the southern polar region, according to Breaking News Israel. They proposed that the ancient trees preserved a record of a large-scale global die-off event, which raised the planet’s temperature to dangerous extremes and turned its oceans acidic, and ultimately wiped out 95 percent of species on Earth. But they were left with the question of what exactly was the catalyst for those changes.

Then comes the sharp turn:

At least one biblical scholar believes he has the answer: The die-off event was the Great Flood described in the Book of Genesis.

“This discovery should be no surprise to those who take Genesis as literal history,” Tim Clarey, a geologist from the Institute for Creation Research, wrote on the ICR website. “The Bible clearly describes a global flood that affected all land masses—why should Antarctica be an exception?”

The problem, of course, is that the Permian extinction is only one of five mass extinction events, and it is not even the first one. It is the third, behind the Ordovician and late Devonian extinctions.The one that took out the dinosaurs was the late Cretaceous extinction.  Furthermore, there are many, many layers of sediment between each extinction event.  So the question: why would this particular extinction event signify the flood?  Why not the most recent one?  Also, isn't it generally thought by young earth creationists that the ENTIRE geologic column represents the flood deposits?  Clarey does not mention this at all in his column.

Part of the interpretation hinges on the discovery of fossil cells, which are explained by an extremely rapid burial, an explanation that Clarey doesn't buy.

Clarey then received a critique from a biblical scholar, Brent Landau, as Medrano writes: 

If you’re not persuaded by the secular community, take it from the religious community. Brent Landau, a biblical scholar from the University of Texas at Austin, told Newsweek that Clarey is “espousing a form of religiously motivated pseudoscience, and a relatively unsophisticated one at that.”

Landau explained that Young Earth Creationists arrive at the idea that the planet is only 10,000 years old through methods like adding up the ages of people written about in the Book of Genesis, and that there’s no need for religious scholars to take that kind of evidence more seriously than the “vast amount of scientific data” pointing to the Earth being around 4.6 billion years old.

“Notice that he links the destruction in Antarctica to the Flood, but insists that the scientists’ date for this catastrophe of 280 million years ago must be incorrect,” Landau wrote to Newsweek over email.

As Carol Hill pointed out, there simply isn't any defensible evidence for a world-wide flood. Even if the fossilized trees were entombed very rapidly, there are many other natural formations that show clear signs of slow deposition. You simply cannot extrapolate one localized area to the entire world, yet this what young-earth creationists continually do.

New Scientist: Is Extinction Really Such a Bad Thing?

A new exhibit at London's Natural History Museum asks just that question and concludes that, no, it is not.  Shaoni Bhattacharya at The New Scientist's Culture Lab writes:

The five mass extinctions in Earth's history wiped out swathes of life, but out of the devastation new species rose - shaped and honed by evolution - to inherit the Earth. More than 99 per cent of species that ever lived are now dead, and the exhibition hammers home the point that extinction drives evolution, which results in life in all its wondrous forms.

But it tempers this message strongly with a second sobering one: human actions are causing extinctions in a way never before seen. "If we don't do anything about it, make no mistake - it will hugely affect the world we live in," says Adrian Lister, a palaeontologist at the museum whose work on the extinct Irish elk forms part of the exhibition. "It would take the biosphere millions of years to recover."

It's not all doom, though. There are upbeat stories on display - animals we drove to the brink but then saved through conservation efforts: the Californian condor, the Arabian oryx, and China's Pere David's deer.

We have many, many tales of extinction in our own "bush." The robust australopithecines, who got out-competed by early Homo and the Neandertals come to mind.  The case of the Neandertals is peculiar, however, because it looks like they interbred with modern humans before they got gene-swamped.  Regardless, it is out of their stock and those like them that we came.

As far as conservation goes, I certainly hope we learn to understand how important it is to have our great apes around. 

Climatic Conditions of the Ordovician

A new article in PhysOrg reports on efforts to get a handle on what led to one of the greatest mass extinctions in the planet's history. Tony Fitzpatrick writes:

A team of researchers, including earth and planetary scientists from Washington University in St. Louis, for the first time has been able to reconstruct both ocean temperature and general ice thickness of massive glaciers during one of the biggest mass extinctions in history hundreds of millions of years ago.

The extinction, which occurred between 445 and 443 million years ago in the Late Ordovician Period, is one of the five biggest mass extinctions in Earth history, wiping out an estimated 75 percent of simple marine species.

The Ordovician glaciation is the only one that coincides with a major mass marine extinction. Shedding light on this ancient event can help reveal clues about the interplay between evolution, climate and environment.

Some might say, big deal. Why is money being spent on something like this? Simply: if it happened once, it can happen again. It also educates us about how the earth came to be the way that it is and helps us understand how it behaves better.

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