Laurens
New Member
Tsentralka said:P.S. Laurens, please read the opening post for the answer regarding microevolution. Furthermore, I am what you would call a YEC.
Okay, so you do not accept that the earth is billions of years old.
Now I am guessing you will dismiss radiometric dating that shows the actual age of the earth (otherwise you wouldn't call yourself a YEC). I'll ignore these for now, despite the fact that dismissal of radiometric dating does provide problems with the laws of physics themselves. Lets look at other reasons to believe that the earth is older than the YEC model. I'll keep these brief, but I shall provide links for further reading.
Dendrochronology
The counting of annual growth rings of tress is well known to show the age of trees. Some chronologies date over 9000 years into the past (see link for how chronologies are formulated).
Lake Suigetsu Algal Blooms
Each year there is an algal bloom in Lake Suigetsu, Japan. These algae die and then create a thin white layer on the bottom of the lake. For the rest of the year clay sediments build up on top of these, creating an alternating pattern of light and dark bands. Scientists have counted 45,000 layers dating back to around 43,000 BCE.
Greenland Ice Cores
Annual ice layers in the Greenland ice cores can be used to date back over 60,000 years.
Coral Reefs
The Eniwetok atoll coral reef is 4610 feet tall. The coral has been measured to grow at 5mm per year, this can be used to estimate that the Eniwetok atoll reef is 280,000 years old. "A similar analysis for the much larger Grand Bahama Reef reveals an age of 790,000 years."
Geomagnetic Reversal
We know the rate at which the width of Atlantic Ocean is increasing. Reversals in the earth's magnetic field are recorded along the floor of the Atlantic. These are recorded for the past 80 million years (see link for details).
Helioseismic Dating
Helioseismic dating shows that the sun is 4.57 billion years old. This agrees with the radiometric age of the solar system.
Finally take a look at this image:
[image]http://geoinfo.nmt.edu/staff/scholle/graphics/Unconf.jpg[/image]
You can see that the layers of sediment at the bottom of this outcrop are tilted diagonally. These sediments will have built up gradually over long time periods, and then would have been titled diagonally by geological forces. As you can see, another horizontal layer of sediment has built up on top of the diagonal layers. These kinds of geological processes take millions of years, no process can account for this occurring on a short timescale.
There are many, many other evidences for an old earth. All of them agree that the earth is older than a few thousand years. The only evidence for a young earth is that someone added up the genealogies in the Bible and came up with a date of roughly 6000 years - there is no other evidence to corroborate this, and no reason to assume that the genealogies in the Bible are accurate.
Given this evidence, and the evidence for microevolution, there is no reason to dismiss macroevolution, given that it is essentially the consequence of microevolutionary changes over vast geological time scales.