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.

No Fossil Trees with Thousands of Rings

Tree rings grow support for Young Earth Science (YES).  Tree Rings Matter.  What tree in the fossil record has the most rings?  There is a Sequoia specimen with 816 growth rings.  Just search “sequoia 89 by 68.”  Where are the fossil trees that are thousands of years old?  Sequoias, Redwoods, Bristlecone pines, Junipers and Olive trees can live for thousands of years.[1]  Why are there no 2K, 3K or 4K year old trees in the fossil record?  If the earth is young this is no problem.  How do supporters of Old Earth Fallacies (OEF’s) handle this enigma?    

Many attempt to avoid the weight of this argument by claiming that the fossil record of trees is not abundant.  The oldest forest trees are dated at 385M years by Big Science, so lack of fossil evidence is just an escape mechanism.  If there have been hundreds of millions of years for fossil trees to form, then why do we see no fossil trees with thousands of rings?  Trees can’t run away from tsunamis or floods.  We witnessed the initial formation of fossil trees in the 1980’s.  According to Wikipedia:

“…virtually identical lahar and stream deposits that contain buried upright standing trunks of forests and beds of transported logs and upright stumps were created by the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, and other Quaternary and Holocene eruptions of other Cascade Range volcanoes.  The Late Pleistocene lahar and stream deposits of Mount St. Helens contain buried prehistoric logs and in place (in situ) upright tree trunks that are in the initial stages of being naturally petrified by silica.” (emphasis added)

Erling Dorf (d. 1984) was a professor of Geology at Princeton.  He studied the fossil trees at Yellowstone and found that the average number of tree rings was 500 – far less than 4,000!  At one time the Yellowstone Fossil Forest was considered to have taken 20K years to form.[2]  Now a catastrophic interpretation is widely accepted.

Some might claim that redwoods don’t ever become fossilized, but that’s not the case.  The PetrifiedForest near Calistoga, CA has the largest fossil trees in the world.  There are redwoods and one pine that have been turned to rock.  The fossil tree named “The Queen” is estimated to have 2K rings, but this deposit is of relatively recent origin according to standard geological dating (3.4M).[3]  The point is, where are the trees from Jurassic times with 2K, 3K or 4K rings? 

Is the fossil record really woefully incomplete?  A scholarly work last century specifically addressed that very issue, The Adequacy of the Fossil Record edited by Stephen Donovan and Christopher Paul (Wiley, 1998).  Donovan and Paul demonstrate that protesting about the “incompleteness of the fossil record” is just an excuse.  This book deals specifically with the completeness of the fossil data.  The fossil record may be incomplete, but it is entirely adequate for most studies.

Tree rings ring true, Young Earth Science (YES) has friends in the forest.

Notes:

1) YES - Young Earth Science by Jay Hall (IDEAS, Big Spring, TX, 2014), pp. 20, 21.

2) Hall, pp. 120, 121.

3) This count is apparently based on the width of the tree.

Turbidity Currents, Turbidites and You

Turbidites are gravity flow formations often generated by earthquakes. [1]  The 1929 Grand Banks earthquake (off Newfoundland, M=7.2) and turbidity current caused telegraph cables to break and thus record its speed.  The current deposited at least 175 km³ of sediment and formed a bed more than 1 m thick (gravel to coarse silt).  A significant portion of the rock record is made up of turbidites.  If much of the Geologic Column was formed rapidly, then maybe this is a young planet after all.  Young Earth Science?  YES you can!

The Cambrian Burgess Shale is a significant challenge to evolution.  Multiple phyla are found in the earliest rocks and no transitional forms are found in Pre-Cambrian layers.  This conundrum, known as the Cambrian Explosion, is delineated in my book. [2]  The Burgess Shale is considered to be a turbidite!  So we find more evidence that the rock record was formed quickly.  So the next time you bring up the Cambrian Explosion in a conversation, be sure to point out that it favors Young Earth Science (YES).

A classic turbidite follows the pattern of the Bouma sequence.  Turbidites are very common.  As Stéphanie Girardclos et al point out in Marine Geology, “Gravity flow deposits, and particularly turbidite deposits, are ubiquitous in the sedimentary and rock record, and are economically important as potential hydrocarbon reservoirs.” [3]  GerardMiddleton (Geology Dept., McMaster Univ., Canada) concurs:  “Beds deposited from turbidity currents (called turbidites) are one of the commonest types of sedimentary rocks … the majority of sandstones in the geologic record were deposited either from rivers or from turbidity currents …” [4]

Even some gypsum beds, often thought to be the result of a long process of evaporation, have been interpreted as turbidites. [5]  Actually, gypsum may form directly as a precipitate from hot volcanic springs. [6]  So the next time you look at your wall (gypsum board), know that it supports Young Earth Science (YES).

Notes:

1) YES – Young Earth Science by Jay Hall (IDEAS, Big Spring, TX, 2014), p. 130.

2) Hall, pp. 84, 85, 116.

3) “The 1996 AD delta collapse and large turbidite in Lake Brienz” by Stéphanie Girardclos et al, Marine Geology 241 (2007) 137–154, p. 138, emphasis added.

4) “Sediment Deposition from Turbidity Currents” by Gerard Middleton, Annual Review Of Earth And Planetary Sciences, Volume 21, pp. 89-114, p. 90, emphasis added.

5) Evaporites: Sediments, Resources and Hydrocarbons by John Warren (Springer, 2006), p. 350.

6) Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Rocks and Minerals by Annibale Mottana et al (Simon & Schuster, NYC, 1978), entry 122 (gypsum).

YES - the Young Earth Science podcast 2079

How old is the earth?  Does it matter?  On today's podcast we will see how radioactive dating supports a young planet.  Click here to learn more.  Consider this shocking admission from R.L. Armstrong writing in the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics:  

This is an inherent uncertainty in dating young volcanic rocks: anomalies may be detected only by stratigraphic consistency tests, independent dating techniques, and comparison with the known time scale of geomagnetic reversals during the last five million years. [1]

If radiometric dating has an epic fail on historic lava flows, how can we trust it for old rocks supposedly billions of years old?  Let’s labor to spread the news about a youthful world.  The Truth is out there – fight the Deep Past.

What is your reaction to these words of H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds)?  “The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.” – H.G. Wells

What evidence would be required to verify a young earth?  Let us hear from you:  YoungEarthScience@yahoo.com

Learn more about Young Earth Science (YES) by getting the bold new fully documented book.

Note:

1) “K-Ar Dating: Late Cenozoic McMurdo Volcanic Group and Dry Valley Glacial History, Victoria Land, Antarctica” by R.L. Armstrong, New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, vol. 21 (1978), p. 692, emphasis added.