The Politics of Old Earth

              *** UPDATE ***

Be sure to catch our latest video.  We tackle a potpourri of topics:  Thunder & C-14, Tree Rings & Ammonites,  Norman Macbeth (Darwin Retried), OMNI magazine & censorship ... #Rubio #NormanMacbeth #Darwin #AltMed #TreeRings

Hotep = B @ ☮

Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and Rick Perry (now supporting Ted Cruz) have all faced the age-of-earth controversy.  Politicians have engaged the old earth/new earth issue, but what about the power struggles and sociology of science that has led to a 4.5B year old planet?

Around 1900 there was a wide range of estimates for the earth’s age that were seriously considered.  Hermann von Helmholtz gave a date of 22M years based on the sun’s loss of energy.  By 1931 Arthur Holmes used the results of radiometric dating to assert that this planet is at least 1.5B years in age. [1]

In 1883, Alexander Winchell, former State Geologist of Michigan, estimated that the age of the earth at 3M years.  Former president of the Geological Society of London, Andrew Ramsay (d. 1891), held that the earth may be 10B years old! [2] 

Arthur Holmes, the most important person to make radiometric methods the dominant dating method, said in 1913, “It is now well known that if the proportion of radium in the interior of the earth is the same as that in the surface rocks, the earth ought to be growing hotter…” [3]  Did Holmes abandon his old earth PreSuppositions because of this contrary evidence?  No, he held tenaciously to his Deep Time WorldView. 

In 1921, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, there was no consensus on radiometric dating and an Earth that’s billions of years old.  In 1926, a committee of the National Research Council concluded that radiometric dating was the only reliable method to date rocks.  Arthur Holmes, who led the campaign for radiometric dating, wrote 70% of the report.  What in the politics of science changed between 1921 and 1926?  Scott Frickel and Kelly Moore have edited The New Political Sociology of Science (Univ. of Wisconsin Press) which tackles the power struggles in the research establishment.

To learn more about this drama in science, be sure to get your copy of YES - Young Earth Science today!  Chapter Two deals with the history of radiometric dating.  This fully documented work has over 450 footnotes and more than 130 charts, graphs and illustrations.

Notes:

1)  YES - Young Earth Science by Jay Hall (IDEAS, Big Spring, TX, 2014), p. 17.   

2)  Ibid., p. 50.

3)  quoted in Hall, p. 40

M=million, B=billion (10^9)

YES - the Young Earth Science podcast 2081 (The Renaissance of Catastrophism)

In 1923, J Harlen Bretz boldly advocated that the Channeled Scablands of Washington (East of Seattle) had a catastrophic origin.  He was scorned by his peers for many decades.  NOVA had an episode on "one of the Earth's strangest geological riddles" in their show Mystery of the Megaflood which highlights Bretz' story.

Today catastrophism is on the rise and even underlies the mainstream explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs.  Since around 1980, we are now in the Renaissance of Catastrophism - hear the podcast here.

Even Wikipedia has a page on the risk of global catastrophe.  According to a paper published in Nature in 1994, there's a 1-in-10K chance that a large asteroid (~2km wide) could hit the Earth within this century and wipe out a large portion of the world's population. 

Derek Ager was President of the British Geological Association and wrote The New Catastrophism which provides a plethora of examples of rapid geologic action.  If most rocks formed fast, could this planet be young (thousands, not billions of years old)?

The famous 1929 Grand Banks earthquake off Newfoundland caused a turbidity current where telegraph cables broke and thus recorded its speed of up to 60 mph!  This formed a turbidite which are abundant in the rock record.

For powerful evidence from History and Science that the earth is young, be sure to get your copy of YES - Young Earth Science and discover the clues refuting Deep Time.  D.S. Allan (science historian) and J.B. Delair (Geology museum curator, UK) have written Cataclysm!: Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C.  They provide abundant evidence of a great global catastrophe that occurred just thousands of years ago.  

"A science’s level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts."

  - Martin Heidegger

We appreciate your feedback:  YoungEarthScience@yahoo.com

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I scream for YES - Young Earth Science.  Please help pour on the truth of a young planet to this altered culture filled with Old Earth Fallacies (OEF's).
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Is School Choice Weak?

On January 19th, 2016 (the day after Martin Luther King Day) 10,000 school choice supporters rallied in Tallahassee.  Parents, educators and activists advocated for the biggest private school choice program in the U.S. (78K students participate).  A lawsuit is currently challenging it on constitutional grounds.  Martin Luther King III addressed the crowd near the Florida State Capitol.

Young Earth Science (YES) is one key motivating school choice.  Many hold that the earth is thousands of years old and not billions.  In a survey that came out in 2014, a full 36% of Americans are not too (or not at all) confident that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old (AP-GfK).

Homeschoolers the Jonas Brothers performed at National School Choice Week 2013 in Phoenix.  Learn more about School Choice Week here.

Donald Trump on school choice:

... Open the schoolhouse doors and let parents choose the best school for their children.  Education reformers call this school choice, charter schools, vouchers, even opportunity scholarships.  I call it competition - the American way.

Ted Cruz on school choice:

I am a passionate supporter of homeschooling. ... The Democrats are essentially bought and paid for by the union bosses and the teachers unions, so they will always oppose school choice.

Get your copy of YES - Young Earth Science today and learn the facts that support a youthful planet that you don't hear about in most public schools.  School Choice Matters!  Homeschooling rocks!  #DropTheSuit ‼

Straight Out Of Science (SOOS)

Should we always trust Big Science?  Michael Crichton (Jurassic World) said, "Consensus is the business of politics.  Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right … The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."  Let's consider some scientific frauds that fooled many in the scientific community.

Piltdown Man, found in 1912, was supposedly an early hominid.  It wasn’t until 1953 that the scam was brought to light.  The skull was human, but the jawbone was from an orangutan.

In November of 1999, Archaeoraptor came on the scene as an allegedly feathered dino.  Almost a year later, National Geographic magazine (Oct. 2000) admitted that Archaeoraptor was a fake.  But the damage was done and some even today may not be aware of the hoax. [1] 

Can science get political?  Trofim Lysenko (Трофи́м Лысе́нко, d. 1976) was a Soviet biologist who applied Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's idea of acquired characteristics.  Lysenko denied the ideas of Gregor Mendel (d. 1884), the father of Genetics.  Joseph Stalin favored Lysenko's program and over three thousand biologists were sent to prison, fired or executed.  Lysenkoism is the manipulation/distortion of science in order to teach what is dictated by the powers that be.

Science by force fails.  We are reminded of these sayings from Yoda:  "Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view [i.e. WorldView]" and "You must unlearn what you have learned."

Consider these wise words from Emil Røyrvik:

Efforts to make people bow uncritically to the authority of a dogmatic representation of Science, seems largely to produce ridicule, opposition and inaction, and ultimately undermines the legitimacy and role of both science and politics in open democracies. [2]

Reject Old Earth Fallacies (OEF) and learn about Young Earth Science (YES) by getting our newly updated book (w/ a brilliant new cover).

Science is not defined by majority vote.  Some would call global warming a hoax.  Let us know what you think:  YoungEarthScience@yahoo.com

Notes:

1) YES - Young Earth Science by Jay Hall (IDEAS, Big Spring, TX, 2014), p. 182.

2) quoted in Hall, p. 192.

YES - the Young Earth Science podcast 2080 (Biological Essentialism)

How old is the earth?  Does it matter?  On today's podcast we will see how biological essentialism implies a young earth.  Is a bat a flying rat?  Have kangaroos always been kangaroos?  What is a liger?  What are ORFan (orphan) genes?  Learn more here about these fascinating topics.  Biological essentialism teaches that organisms vary within limits (see ch. 3 of YES - Young Earth Science).  Richard Dawkins made his opinion on essentialism clear:

... essentialism has been applied to living things and Ernst Mayr blamed this for humanity’s late discovery of evolution - as late as the nineteenth century.  If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor. [1]

Andrew Shtulman, Psychology Professor at Occidental, gave a talk at UCLA in 2011 on the topic of "Cognitive constraints on the understanding and acceptance of evolution."  He recognized that essentialism is a primary reason why people fail to adopt Darwinism.  Children at an early age develop an essentialist WorldView.  They quickly come to realize that crabs and seahorses belong to different Essential Types of Life (ETL's).

ORFan genes are unique to certain organisms and no similar genes have been found in supposedly related animals.  That is, there is no apparent "parent" genes in other organisms.  For instance, more than half of the proteins of the leaf-cutter ant (see above) are unique to itself among the expressed proteins.  

Biological essentialism leads to catastrophism and that favors a young earth perspective.  What evidence would be required to verify a young earth?  Let us hear from you:  YoungEarthScience@yahoo.com

Get your copy of YES - Young Earth Science today!

Note:

1) quoted in YES – Young Earth Science by Jay Hall (IDEAS, Big Spring, TX, 2014), p. 73.

X-Files, Catastrophism and a Young Earth

In the first episode of the X-Files (Sep. 10, 1993), special agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) said this about alternate explanations,

J. Harlen Bretz proposed a huge flood through Montana, Idaho, Oregon and Washington that formed the Channeled Scablands.  The flood cut canyons up to 900 feet deep‼  For decades, Bretz suffered ridicule for his radical views.  However, in 1963, the International Association for Quaternary Research sent a telegram to Bretz ending “We are now all catastrophists.”  Bretz received the Penrose Medal (highest geology award) and claimed, "Perhaps, I can be credited with reviving and demystifying legendary Catastrophism and challenging a too rigorous Uniformitarianism." [1]

Should we always trust the experts?  Sometimes they are dead wrong.  Two intriguing books highlight this fact:

Consider the great Life-on-the-Moon hoax of 1835.  The New York Sun reported about research claimed to be from the Edinburgh Journal of Science that claimed that sentient beings were seen on the moon. [2]  This discovery was allegedly made by the very real mathematician, astronomer and chemist  Sir John Herschel (son of William Herschel who discovered Uranus ♅).

Scientific fraud is real.  In 2005, it was revealed that anthropologist Reiner Protsch von Zieten had fabricated false dates for ancient human fossils for decades. [3]  If the common dating methods are wrong and most of the rock record was formed catastrophically, then Young Earth Science (YES) is plausible.     

Are members of the academic elite ever willing to challenge ensconced conclusions?  Former Editor-in-Chief of the journal Philosophy of Science, Philip Kitcher, boldly declared that, “it is not necessary, and it may not even be true, that all species are historically connected.” [4]  If our favorite planet is young, evolution is left out in the cold.

Be curious - learn the facts that support YES - Young Earth Science.

Notes:

1) YES - Young Earth Science by Jay Hall (IDEAS, Big Spring, TX, 2014), p. 93.

2) Regret the Error by Craig Silverman (Union Square Press, NYC, 2007), pp. 30-35.

3) Wrong by David Freedman (Little, Brown & Co., NYC, 2010), p. 256.

4) see the bottom of p. 347.