On the Preservation of Species

One of the biggest objections that people have to the unreality of the Bible is that there is no way that Noah could have fit two of every species on the Ark, especially considering the massive dinosaurs, and all the extinct species. I have long imagined a sign staked outside of the Ark that read “No Dinosaurs Allowed!” because I could not imagine how Noah could have possibly fit even a couple dinosaurs on the little boat portrayed in Sunday schools. Like Eve, I am often tempted to think that God didn’t actually know what he was talking about in the absence of evidence. Isn’t it interesting that the first sin was the selective editing of what God said and yet that is exactly what is encouraged in churches today. Even though dinosaurs grew to extreme sizes they all started off being similar in size to an ostrich egg, so a juvenile dinosaur pair could easily be smaller than sheep. That almost seems feasible, but what about the space?

If one is to really take an honest look at the apparent infeasibility of Noah’s Ark the first logical step is to actually read the portion of the Bible that describes the Ark. This is not something that occurred to me, so I was very surprised to find out that, based on an 18 inch cubit the dimension of the Ark were: 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high, with 3 stories. That gives you an area of 101,250 square feet with 15 foot ceilings. This turns out to have a striking similarity to modern ships. So given the amazing amount of floor space, combined with the reduced number of necessary “species”, and the small size of even the great dinosaurs. Perhaps we should be asking the opposite question, one proposed in the Answers Book: “What did Noah do with all that extra floor space? Perhaps a couple games of shuffleboard.” Further Reading: Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study.

Further Comments: The Discovery Channel has taken a liking to pointing out that, while the Ark “just happens to be” good dimensions for something like a freight hauler, it couldn’t possibly have enough structural integrity because it was made out of wood, not metal. I’d just like to point out the Ark was made out of “gopher wood“, whatever that is. NIV translates it as cypress and then footnotes it as “meaning uncertain”. The species of tree this came from could be totally extinct or unknown, so we have no way of knowing the tensile strength of the material. Similarly, ‘pitch’ doesn’t necessarily refer to a petroleum product.  At some point you just have to say “I don’t know, I wasn’t there, neither were you”.  It’s another good example of people trying to claim a non-existence or an impossibility. There’s a certain amount of intellectual hypocrisy that goes on to selectively criticize the Bible down the the point of needing structural integrity tests while calling the Epic of Gilgamesh the “older, more pure account”, and failing to note that the Epic of Gilgamesh describes a cube. Boats aren’t shaped like cubes for a reason.

The Genetics of Species

As part of the Biochemistry degree that I was working on when I first came to college I took a class simply entitled Evolution. The class was actually more about population genetics than specific evolutionary lineages of species. There are a surprising number of equations based on population genetics and most of what I know about mutation and population genetics I owe to that class.

The reason I mention this is because it was in this class that I came to the full realization that what we call “species” is an entirely human construction that we have forced upon nature. Species do not really exist in nature in the strictest sense in which we portray them.

Definitions of Species
Allow me to explain. The popular definition of species currently used is what is called the “Biological definition of species” which defines a species as a group of organisms which can interbreed with each other and produce fertile offspring. The fact that we have to specify ‘fertile’ is the first clue. Most every *cough* knows that you can breed a horse and a donkey to get a mule. Mules are almost always sterile so donkeys and horses are considered different species.

The boundaries we have set up break down even more when you consider “ring species“. These are a very interesting phenomena where a group of similar animals are spread out in a ring because of a physical feature (like a mountain). The animals can breed with each other in adjacent areas and genes can be passed clockwise around a mountain showing gradual change the whole time until the circle is complete and the group that results can no long breed with the starting population. So is it one species, two, or maybe seven?

It should be of interest that the Bible never uses the word ’species’ as it is clearly a human definition. In Genesis chapter 1 the Bible instead refers to animal “kinds” 10 times in 13 verses. Looking at it now, it almost seems as if the author is over emphasizing the point, being emphatically repetitively redundant. “God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds.” Genesis 1:25. God apparently created the original, whole and perfect kinds as a more variable, adaptable category of animals than what we have today. Kinds is certainly broader than species and wherever we see two species able to interbreed and create a hybrid, that is evidence they are, in fact, the same kind. The modern founder of taxonomy, Carolus Linnaeous, was actually a devout Christian and it appears in many cases that genus is the closest thing to the Biblical kind. Thus we say genus first, then species (specialization) second. This practice goes back to ancient times.

Baraminology
Baraminology is an alternative method of classification based on the study of Biblical “kinds” called baramins. The field is based upon the Bible’s statement that God created animals according to their kind and that they would reproduce according to their kind. The study of baramins is laid out in Todd Wood’s “Undertanding the Pattern of Life”, which is a fairly straight forward overview designed as a textbook on the subject. Baraminology is still a fairly new area of study. It incorporates both evidence of continuity as well as evidence of discontinuity. It is like no other system before it; Linnaeous believed in species fixity most of his life, and evolutionist believe any evidence of discontinuity is only a lack of data.

Answers in Genesis has a good explanation of the contrast between species models. The ability of two organisms to breed with each other and produce offspring is used as evidence of continuity; they are part of the same kind. Evidence of holistic differences between groups of organisms, like turtles as compared with all other reptiles, is used as evidence of discontinuity. So turtles and geckos never shared a common ancestor, but Asian and African elephants, along with woolly mammoth probably did share an ancestor. Didn’t know we had mammoth DNA? Baraminology is useful as a diverse classification system and in understanding the pattern of life in a creationist worldview.

Flood Stories
Almost every ancient culture on the planet has a story of a worldwide flood. The Gilgamesh Epic is often quoted as an example but it is only one of 200 documented flood stories. The fact that this story is so widespread across cultures with no contact lends credence to the idea that it actually happened. The Biblical account is (to my knowledge) the most detailed account so I will use that account here. The story goes that in order to preserve all the animals as well as mankind against a worldwide flood, a chosen person (Noah, Manu, etc.) built a giant life raft, called an Ark. Noah crammed all the animals onto the Ark, and these sole survivors were responsible for repopulating the entire planet afterwards. Let’s take a look at the feasibility of the species scenario laid out in the Bible from a genetics point of view.

Dispersion
So in the Biblical scenario the Ark comes to a rest at Mount Ararat, at the intersection of three major continents. The plants and plant seeds that have survived the Flood (along with insects and fish) are already dispersed throughout the planet while all the animals are concentrated in one place. The natural thing to do as an animal at this point is spread and reproduce like crazy. Our normal ecological models are based around an assumption of competition for limited resources of food and land. Each one of these animal kinds (baramins) is originally genetically diverse but each new population of animals is started from only a few individuals. This means that that genetic diversity will be subdivided, then subdivided, and subdivided again. This would create a lot of genetic drift and loss of genetic diversity inside each sub-group. Keep in mind that there is no new genetic information being added to the population but instead a loss of genetic information creates increasingly distinct biological groups over a very short period of time. This comes at a cost to fitness so that this process cannot go on forever.

Some would call this rapid speciation even evolution, in which case, not only do creationists believe in evolution, they believe in a far faster form of evolution than even Richard Dawkins could stomach. However, it is probably more accurate to call this adaptation or even genetic degradation. The nature of ‘new genetic information being added to the genome’ versus ‘genetic information being lost’ is fundamentally different. New information entering the genome is a process that would take millions of years, (if not an infinite amount of time), and so cannot really be observed inside a human time frame. Since it cannot be observed it is hard to call it science. Loss of genetic information, on the other hand, can happen in a single generation, and is scientifically testable and provable.

Hybrids
Hybrids are an important piece of evidence for baraminology. There are actually far more hybrids than I ever imagined. Generally, hybridization is seen as an unnatural thing, perhaps a worldview consequence. I recently asked a zoo keeper if they had any crossbreedings between any of their animals. She said “Well, we don’t allow it on purpose. But it does happen sometimes. People don’t exactly broadcast it when they get a hybrid. It’s generally looked down upon and avoided, so we don’t know.” In the course of researching for this article I found another surprise. Hybrid Vigor is apparently a commonly observed consequence of crossing two species. Hybrids are in many ways, more physically fit, and often have longer lifespans than either of their parents. In an evolutionary model, the breaking off of two groups of organisms is necessary so that fixation can take place and the two groups can evolve independently of each other. What is good for one group would not necessarily be a good trait for another group. So I naturally expected that a hybrid would be a degenerate form of an earlier ancestor, (especially given sterility). I am still very much an evolutionist at heart.

On the contrary, mules, ligers, bengals, and mutts all have great physical characteristics which would be more in line with loss of genetic information during separation. When the disparate groups are rejoined again we get a little closer to the original creature that fathered them both. Unfortunately, this only goes so far as there have been numerous mutations entering into the genome since the first divergence. “Plant hybrids, especially, are often stronger than either parent variety, a phenomenon which when present is known as hybrid vigor (heterosis) or heterozygote advantage.” (Hybrids)

Degradation and Dispersion
One more key point: The answer to all fragile-animal-specific-environment questions is actually quite simple. As animals moved across the landscape they lost genetic information until they became very narrow. Once they reached a point of stasis they could continue to grow within their environment. Taking into account the effects of genetic entropy the animals that we observe today have accumulated 4,000 years of deleterious mutations after undergoing a major amount of genetic drift/fixation. Natural selection works best on lethal mutations, and if the selection cost for eliminating lethal mutations is high enough then it will tolerate a fairly high level of “inconvenient” dependencies that match the environment, dependencies that would be lethal in a different environment. An ideal example of this is the Koala, which is almost entirely nutritionally dependent on the eucalyptus tree in order to survive. In an area where there are no eucalyptus this dependency is lethal so it will only survive where the plant survives, Australia. Notice that the farther from the Eurasian continent we get, (dispersion) and the smaller the functional population is, (degradation) the more specialized/fragile species there are. If you doubt the feasibility of animals populating a new area we need only look to the recent recorded history of Hawaii which was little more than a barren volcanic rock before the settlers arrived. Also, the baramin model can explain why we find strange isolated species all over the world with tiny populations, like the Echidna. If the populations had been there for very long the inbreeding would have killed them off, as we are observing with the mass extinction of biodiversity that is still going on.

Transitional Fossil
Transitional fossils are another piece of evidence that baraminology uses to establish continuity or discontinuity. The best example of this is horses in which we have a fairly diverse sampling of different types of the horse baramin, many of which are now extinct. The ability of our modern horse specimens to breed with each other is an affirmation of the fact they share a common ancestor so it is no surprise to find fossilized variations within the horse baramin. These can be called transitional forms between horse, donkey, zebra, etc. Perhaps a better word is intermediate form, because given genetic compatability the offspring is dependent on its parents DNA (that’s genetics), not based on the time at which it was conceived. Natural Selection then is not really progress but simply the extinction of species that can’t survive. Woolly mammoth couldn’t take the climate change, but most of its DNA is still preserved in elephants, so the baramin continues although depleted.

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The Things!:
Insects
The Number of Species
The Slow Rate of Evolution
Elephants
Deep Sea Fish
Australia
Koalas
Sloths
Define Kinds
Find the Post-Flood Dispersal Trails
Beetles
Blind Cave Fish

Further Comments: I see that all my picture hyperlinks are now broken.  They pointed to a great listing of known hybrids, with a whole bunch of pictures.  The site is gone now, that’s sad.  I wonder why the site was taken down?

Catastrophic Plate Tectonics

(Sorry for the long wait on new articles. I have hesitated in writing this because it’s very important and I don’t want to screw anything up. Here goes.)
Today, I’m going to give a quick summary of a theory called Catastrophic Plate Tectonics, which was primarily developed by Dr. Baumgardner during his time at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Baumgardner’s primary work was in developing a program called TERRA which is used by many scientists to model plate tectonics and physics in the core tracking temperature, viscosity, movement and other elements important to understanding the interior of our planet. The people who produced the movie “The Core” could have learned a lot from talking to Dr. Baumgardner. One of the reasons that he was interested in creating TERRA was to test a theory that the Genesis Flood was primarily a catastrophic geophysical event. The result of his intensive research has been the development of Catastrophic Plate Tectonics (CPT), which is probably the most comprehensive scientific theory of the Genesis Flood today.

Starting Evidence
If we look at a map of the Earth today you will notice that one either side of the Atlantic Ocean the continents look as though they would fit together quite neatly. If you are fortunate enough to have a map that shows the texture of the sea floor it also become obvious that the mid-Atlantic ridge or Marianas trench conforms to the same shape. This has led many people to the fairly reasonable conclusion that the continents were at one point joined together in one place, forming a super-continent.

At today’s rates this divergence would take millions of years, assuming the rates have never changed. The assumption that today’s rates are exactly the same as they have always been is a philosophical standpoint called Uniformitarianism. This naturally leads to extremely slow processes and long lengths of time, because today’s rates are slow. In contrast, Young-Earth Creationists tend to side with Catastrophism, stating that the “history of any one part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror” (Ager 1973). This is seen clearly every time a long dormant volcano suddenly erupts, transforming the landscape, as did Mt. Saint Helens in 1980. Is it possible that tectonic plates have not always moved at the rate your fingernails grow? Take a look.

Deformation Physics
Laboratory tests have shown that materials like silicate minerals (the stuff the mantle is made out of) can have hugely varying degrees of viscosity depending on the temperature and amount of force that is applied to them. For these type of materials pressure can reach a threshold where the change in viscosity makes movement easier, and the friction from movement generates heat, which in turn lowers the viscosity even more in a thermal runaway pattern. This is not just a little bit of slipping, but a massive change in the way a solid material behaves. “A point many people fail to grasp is that these weakening mechanisms can reduce the silicate strength by ten or more orders of magnitude without the material ever reaching its melting temperature” (Baumgardner). If you really want to look at all the advanced math involved in material physics they’re covered in plenty of detail in the technical paper “Runaway Subduction as the Driving Mechanism for the Genesis Flood”. I’m not a geophysicist so I’ll be doing the summary for the average Joe (who has graduated college with a degree in Natural Sciences). With this information in mind, here’s the scenario of the Genesis Flood according to Catastrophic Plate Tectonic Theory.

Catastrophic Plate Tectonics
An overview of CPT can be found in a joint effort technical paper on the ICR website. The overview itself is easily 10 pages, so here are the highlights: The starting condition for this scenario is that the Pre-Flood ocean floor was a thick layer of cold crustal rock. The Earth is extremely hot on the interior and the cold ocean floor was denser than the mantle it was sitting on because of the temperature difference. This is a classic case of potential energy for anyone that’s had Physics 101. Personally, this scenario reminds me of the same temperature instability that drives our weather, we have heating at ground level and cold air aloft, but heat rises and cold air sinks. Thus we have weather, most of the time it’s a calm circulation, but if the conditions are right you get a thunderstorm (this is just a personal analogy).

Cold material accumulating at the phase change boundary between the upper and lower mantle finally reached critical mass and the entire plate began diving towards the core. “Subducting slabs locally heated the mantle by deformation, lowering the viscosity of the mantle in the vicinity of the slabs. The lowered viscosity then allowed an increase in subduction rate, which in turn heated up the surrounding mantle even more. We believe that this led to a thermal runaway instability which allowed for meters-per-second subduction, as postulated and modeled by Baumgardner”(ICR Article). As the front end of the ocean plate was falling towards the core it pulled the attached tectonic plate carrying the continents with it.

This would have torn the Pangaea super-continent in two, opening up the mid-Atlantic ridge which was freshly exposed molten rock. Water would begin rushing in to fill this massive trench below sea-level and consequently be vaporized by the molten rock, producing super-sonic steam jets reaching miles into the air. The vaporized ocean water would cool in the atmosphere and fall back to the planet as rainfall. As the cold material was dropping into the mantle, hot material would rise up along the trailing edges, causing seafloor expansion, and creating the distinctive streaking pattern we see on the ocean floor. The continents could have been moving at speeds up to 35 miles per hour, all the while torrential sheets of rain are covering the land in water.

This interaction as well as other possible mechanisms would create mega-tsunamis that could carve up huge amounts of sediments and deposit massive sediment layers in successive waves on the continents. An easy way to picture what is must have looked like to be under water during all of this is being trapped in a continent scale washing machine. Currents would pull back and forth, scraping off layers and redepositing them. Evidence of massive water catastrophe including cross-bedding, varied sediment sizes, and large scale erosion (Grand Canyon) is all over the planet. I unfortunately, do not have time to explain all of flood geology, nor am I qualified.

This model also incorporates magnetic pole reversals as a natural consequence of plate CPT. Remember that the seafloor was also spreading at this time, and so recorded the reversals as they were happening. I’m not really able to summarize this point so here’s the block quote:

“One important consequence of mantle-wide flow would have been the transportation of cooler mantle material to the core/mantle boundary. This would have had the effect of cooling the outer core, which in turn led to strong core convection. This convection provided the conditions necessary for Humphreys’ [40,42] model of rapid geomagnetic reversals in the core. As the low electrical conductivity oceanic plates subducted, they would be expected to have split up the lower mantle’s high conductivity. This in turn would have lessened the mantle’s attenuation of core reversals and allowed the rapid magnetic field reversals to have been expressed on the surface. Humphreys’ [40,42] model not only explains magnetic reversal evidence (as reviewed in [41]) in a young-age creation time scale, but uniquely explains the low intensity of paleomagnetic and archaeomagnetic data, the erratic frequency of paleomagnetic reversals through the Phanerozoic, and, most impressively, the locally patchy distribution of sea- floor paleomagnetic anomalies [41]. It also predicted and uniquely explains the rapid reversals found imprinted in lava flows of the Northwest [21, 22, 2, 15].”

This major geologic catastrophe would draw to a close as the original ocean floor was completely subducted, and settled to the bottom of the mantle, next to the core. The potential energy driving this whole interaction would be spent and things would begin to equalize. The mountains like the Rocky Mountain Range were formed as the crust was lifted up isostatically, from debris that collected underneath the crust during subduction. In layman’s terms there’s basically less dense stuff that gets stuck underneath the crust, then bobs up like a cork. The equalization after this event took a long time and was the driving force behind other processes like the Ice Age that I’ll talk about in later articles.

Supporting Evidence
The predictions of Catastrophic Plate Tectonics have turned out to be it’s strongest point. The mantle was originally thought to be a homogeneous blob. Years after Dr. Baumgardner developed his theory, high resolution seismic data revealed that there are actually cold lumps sitting at the bottom of the mantle next to the core where it should be the hottest. This information can be found in numerous secular scientific articles and scientists are now looking at incorporating runaway subduction into their models. Large cold anomalies in the deep mantle and mantle instability in the Cretaceous, The fate of slabs inferred from seismic tomography and 130 million years of subduction.

Dr. Humphrey’s model of magnetic field reversals predicted that these reversals happened very rapidly, in the midst of lots of volcanic activity. This would mean that we should find lava flows that exhibit opposite polarity in very thin layers. This predictions has now been confirmed by several secular scientists looking at evidence in Steens Mountain Oregon, U.S.A. This would indicate that magnetic pole reversals happen very rapidly. Dr. Coe reports numbers like 6 degrees per day based on how fast these lava flows should have cooled. (Coe, R S. and M. Prevot. 1989. Evidence suggesting extremely rapid field variation during a geomagnetic reversal. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 92:292-298)

There is other corroborating evidence that I can’t get into but it merits future research. The composition of the seafloor is very different from the continents and almost all fossils occur on land (even marine fossils). The ocean plates look more recent than the fossil layer. There is also evidence that Venus has undergone a similar catastrophe. If anyone would like to do further research on these topics I’d be happy to add it to the page.

Heat Issues
There is one major problem with CPT that Dr. Baumgardner openly admits in his interview in New Scientist (Lone voices special: God said, let the dry land appear, New Scientist, Dec 2006). If that much magma had been exposed it would have released enough heat to vaporize the ocean’s on the planet. The planet would not have had enough time to cool down by now. Originally, he thought that the steam jets had enough energy to reach into space and thus release the heat out into space (which would also explain a reduced atmospheric pressure). But the calculated velocities of the steam jets aren’t high enough. Dr. Baumgardner believes that the heat was removed miraculously, since the Bible indicates that God directly intervened during the Flood and it appears that the geological processes can be explained. The issue of heat goes farther when you account for RATE’s results that suggest that a massive amount of nuclear decay took place during the Flood. Nuclear decay releases heat and whatever process caused the nuclear decay appears to be universal, indicating it would affect the entire planet (including interior) as well as other planets like Venus and Mars. This totals to a gargantuan amount of heat, (I believe it’s far more than CPT) that is essentially unaccounted for. It’s interesting to note that in the creationist model the Ice Age takes place directly after the Flood, so there’s apparently something going on with temperature stabilization.

So what happens if you find evidence that something truly absurd has happened? I’m inclined to label it an unknown physical process that requires further scientific inquiry. I am told that scientists love to find data that contradict their theory, because it encourages further work. I am further told that science is constantly changing and that’s what makes it so great, both would apply in this case. But to satisfy anyone’s curiosity, Dr. Humphreys and Dr. Chaffin proposed that the accelerated nuclear decay was caused by spatial expansion, which would also result in massive loss of heat, enough to ice over the planet if energy isn’t added to the system. Researchers almost certainly don’t have the full picture yet, but heat does not constitute a show-stopper when taken in the larger context.

Wrap-Up
There have been several models of the Flood, but Catastrophic Plate Tectonic Theory stands out in that it is the only theory that has been mathematically modeled thoroughly, with a fair amount of supporting evidence. It is widely accepted among many creation scientists and has a fair amount of respect in secular circles as well. The summary’s summary goes as follows: runaway plate subduction triggered a global flood. The rain waters were vaporized ocean waters that came in contact with exposed molten rock. Seafloor spreading and continental movement created massive tsunamis and deposited tons of sediment. Magnetic reversals occurred during seafloor spreading because of turbulence in the core. The violent portion of the flood ended when the cold seafloor material reached the core/mantle boundary, at which point he mountains rose up and ocean floor deepened isostatically. Waters receded naturally and formed our current day oceans.

I hope that was a useful summary to all that have not heard of Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. I apologize if there are any errors. For further reading you can look at the original papers I have listed for your perusal. I’d be happy to answer any questions that I can since anyone can leave a comment.

• CATASTROPHIC PLATE TECTONICS: A GLOBAL FLOOD MODEL OF EARTH HISTORY
• CATASTROPHIC PLATE TECTONICS:THE PHYSICS BEHIND THE GENESIS FLOOD
• COMPUTER MODELING OF THE LARGE-SCALE TECTONICS ASSOCIATED WITH THE GENESIS FLOOD
• RUNAWAY SUBDUCTION AS THE DRIVING MECHANISM FOR THE GENESIS FLOOD
• PATTERNS OF OCEAN CIRCULATION OVER THE CONTINENTS DURING NOAH’S FLOOD
• How a supercontinent went to pieces’, New Scientist, January 16, 1993, p. 19

Further Comments: It looks like on this article I did a good enough job that no one wanted to pick on it.  There should be enough information for anyone if you take the time to read it all.  Please keep in mind that collecting and linking all those articles and supporting evidence takes a lot of time for me.  I’ve spent a day or more on some of these.  Just because I don’t link tons of supporting evidence in some article doesn’t mean it isn’t there.  You just have to do your own homework.  Ideally, this article should be coupled with an overview of the RATE project (radiometric dating).  While they were developed separately, when taken together they present a complete picture of the mantle movement, heat generation, heat dissipation, and effects on radiometric dating.  Though the researchers in RATE were not aware of it at the time, their conclusion that there was a lot of radioactivity during the Flood meshed perfectly with Dr. Sanford’s observation on Genetic Entropy and the amount of mutations present in the human population.  I know most people will take each article at a time, mentally criticize it, then move on to the next.  But taken as a whole there really is a very large degree of interconnectivity that I don’t see elsewhere.  When you stick to a short time scale there is more than one thing happening at a time.  Billions of years give you the elbow room to ensure that no theory has to impinge on another.

Early Earth

What did early Earth look like?

That is a hard question to answer because none of us were there. Most people today agree that the Earth has not always been the way it is today. Change is the only constant on Earth, and yet we still have a hard time imagining our planet being anything other than the globe that we are all shown in kindergarten.

Our world today has a certain number of species on it, a count that we know is steadily decreasing as more species go extinct. Our world has seven continents, two polar ice caps, and a huge diversity of climates. We have major deserts around 30 degrees lattitude because of our atmospheric circulation, great deserts like the Gobi desert, Death Valley, and the Sahara (which is expanding). The world that we live in has 100 lightning strikes per second, distributed over 2000 thunderstorms at any given time. The ground we are standing on today is piled up on top of layers of bones. Bones that tell a story of a very different planet.

Some people may be surprised to find out that Creation Scientists use the fossil record to find out more about what the Earth looked like in the past. Even though the fossil record is often used as the stronghold of evolutionary theory, like everything else, it depends upon philosophical assumptions in order to interpret the data. In a creationist model, most of the fossil record was laid down in the flood and the geologic column is more of an indicator of habitat and intelligence than age. But I don’t want to get sidetracked on that today. First, what did Earth look like in the past?

According to Andrew Revkin’s The North Pole was Here (not a creationist) at one point even the north pole had a very temperate climate. There is fossil evidence of giant Redwood-like trees rimming the arctic ocean, and the ocean itself was apparently coated in a mat of dark fern vegetation similar to that found in warm ponds today. The fossils would indicate that at one point early in Earth history the north pole was near 68 degrees Fahrenheit, room temperature.

In what is normally referred to as the Cambrian Period, there is immense amounts of evidence that the oceans used to be teeming with every form of life imaginable. Nearly all fossils are marine or plant fossils, with only .01% of fossils found being land dwelling animals. Yesterday I had the opportunity to buy a large slice of rock for a mere $140 that contained sea shells piled on top of each other, as close as they could get. We have literally tons of rock containing huge amounts of marine fossils. Most scientists believe that the ocean was saturated with life at some point in the past. I can only picture videos I have seen of people swimming through colonies of jellyfish.

On land we know that there were thousands of species that are now extinct. Dragonflies with 2 1/2 foot wingspans have been found along with beetles bigger than baseballs. The Redwood forests that are so rare today at one point covered huge tracks of land and the vegetation that fed the dinosaurs must have been far more abundant and fast-growing than anything today. Massive dinosaurs, massive trees, even massive bugs have occupied this planet before our time.

Putting it all together
In a creationist worldview, all these fossil evidences point to the same time period. The fossil record is the second age of mankind (Antediluvian Period) that existed after the Curse until it was wiped out and buried in the Flood. In many ways the pre-flood world was still very much like the garden of Eden. Most of the Earth’s land mass was held at near room temperature, the atmosphere was more favorable to abundant plant growth and large creatures. It is possible that there were no Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) which would prevent extreme weather conditions like hurricanes and tornadoes (as well as rainbows). The atmosphere was probably denser than it is today and contained 35% oxygen and up to 5% carbon dioxide which would encourage both plant and animal growth. There was also a huge diversity of species with massive amounts of variation within each species.

All kinds of animals on the Earth existed together at one point in time. Humans would have lived alongside dinosaurs, as well as giant bugs, and every kind of fruit bearing plant that ever existed. It is difficult to fully grasp all the interactions that may have entailed. Many creatures probably had useful ecological functions that are not understood when we look at the creature in isolation. For example, I find it possible that trilobites served a role as bottom dwellers who could recycle excrement off the sea floor. (Whatever the interactions it is clear from the fossil record that we retain only a small fraction of the kinds of animals that once existed and that this depletion of our biosphere is still continuing today. We may speak of the theoretical rise of species over long periods of time, but the only thing that is observable today is the rapid loss of species.)

As for humanity, if we take the trends of Genetic Entropy and reverse them to look at the past, then our ancestors were genetically superior to us and probably enjoyed better immune systems, healthier and stronger joints and muscles, excellent nutrition on a wide variety of edible plant species, and many other factors that would contribute to life spans as long as 970 years. These long lived people were also very fertile and very intelligent so they had abundant time to found cities and see their generations of children prosper. It would be nice to believe that under these ideal conditions mankind could accomplish many wonderful things but according to the Bible this first, long lived generation of humanity turned totally evil and had to be wiped out in the Flood.

Application
Current technological progress is starting to once-again offer the prospect of living indefinitely. I wonder if we could make better use of a second chance at near immortality. From an evolutionary perspective, humans living past 120 would be a first. From a creationist perspective, it has already happened before and the results were far worse than the atrocities that we live with today.

Further Reading
For the best discussion on the Early Earth I suggest checking out Genesis Park’s Early Earth Display. They have some incredible evidence that is a must see. Including the Hyperbaric Biosphere suggested in the rather sarcastic Things Creationists Hate “Live in Pre-Deluge Conditions“. That one surprised me.

Further Comments: This is probably my worst put together article.  There’s a lot of emotional impressions in it.  That comes with being human.  Several people mistakenly assumed that I supported the Canopy Theory because I mentioned some stuff about CCNs and a different atmosphere.  This is not the case, I think the Canopy Theory is rubbish and I actually spent time trying to get ICR to remove any mention of the Canopy Theory from their museum.  That theory was originally proposed in the 17-1800’s.  People make mistakes, they just have to admit them.  No, I was talking about whoever you’re picturing I’m talking about you and I’m talking about me.  So, just because there was no Vapor Canopy doesn’t mean the atmosphere was EXACTLY the way it is today.  Have a little respect for granularity here.  The atmosphere could have been cleaner with less dust, sulphur, etc. and have a higher oxygen and CO2 content.  That’s all.  The point is, we don’t know.  We weren’t there.