Listen in as Real Science Radio host Fred Williams and co-host Doug McBurney review and update some of Bob Enyart's legendary list of not so old things! From Darwin's Finches to opals forming in months to man's genetic diversity in 200 generations, to carbon 14 everywhere it's not supposed to be (including in diamonds and dinosaur bones!), scientific observations simply defy the claim that the earth is billions of years old. Real science demands the dismissal of the alleged million and billion year ages asserted by the ungodly and the foolish.
* Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. Hear about this also at rsr.org/spetner.
* Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin's Birds? Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species. In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. "If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years," Dr. Spetner asks, "why did Darwin’s Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?"
* Opals Can Form in "A Few Months" And Don't Need 100,000 Years: A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert, observed that, "scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands... Not true." A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world's opal is found, reported on the: "new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model." (And apparently, per a 2019 report from Entomology Today, opals can even form around insects!) More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins, stone, petroleum, canyons and gullies, and even guts, all below). Regarding opals, Darwinian bias led geologists to long ignore possible quick action, as from microbes, as a possible explanation for these mineraloids. For both in nature and in the lab, opals form rapidly, not even in 10,000 years, but in weeks. See this also from creationists by a geologist, a paleobiochemist, and a nuclear chemist.
* Blue Eyes Originated Not So Long Ago: Not a million years ago, nor a hundred thousand years ago, but based on a peer-reviewed paper in Human Genetics, a press release at Science Daily reports that, "research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye color of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today."
* Adding the Entire Universe to our List of Not So Old Things? Based on March 2019 findings from Hubble, Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his co-authors in the Astrophysical Journal estimate that the universe is about a billion years younger than previously thought! Then in September 2019 in the journal Science, the age dropped precipitously to as low as 11.4 billion years! Of course, these measurements also further squeeze the canonical story of the big bang chronology with its many already existing problems including the insufficient time to "evolve" distant mature galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, enormous black holes, filaments, bubbles, walls, and other superstructures. So, even though the latest estimates are still absurdly too old (Google: big bang predictions, and click on the #1 ranked article, or just go on over there to rsr.org/bb), regardless, we thought we'd plop the whole universe down on our List of Not So Old Things!
* After the Soft Tissue Discoveries, NOW Dino DNA: When a North Carolina State University paleontologist took the Tyrannosaurus Rex photos to the right of original biological material, that led to the 2016 discovery of dinosaur DNA, So far researchers have also recovered dinosaur blood vessels, collagen, osteocytes, hemoglobin, red blood cells, and various proteins.
As of May 2018, twenty-six scientific journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Bone, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, have confirmed the discovery of biomaterial fossils from many dinosaurs! Organisms including T. Rex, hadrosaur, titanosaur, triceratops, Lufengosaur, mosasaur, and Archaeopteryx, and many others dated, allegedly, even hundreds of millions of years old, have yielded their endogenous, still-soft biological material. See the web's most complete listing of 100+ journal papers (screenshot, left) announcing these discoveries at bflist.rsr.org and see it in layman's terms at rsr.org/soft.
* Rapid Stalactites, Stalagmites, Etc.: A construction worker in 1954 left a lemonade bottle in one of Australia's famous Jenolan Caves. By 2011 it had been naturally transformed into a stalagmite (below, right). Increasing scientific knowledge is arguing for rapid cave formation (see below, Nat'l Park Service shrinks Carlsbad Caverns formation estimates from 260M years, to 10M, to 2M, to it "depends"). Likewise, examples are growing of rapid formations with typical chemical make-up (see bottle, left) of classic stalactites and stalagmites including:
- in Nat'l Geo the Carlsbad Caverns stalagmite that rapidly covered a bat
- the tunnel stalagmites at Tennessee's Raccoon Mountain
- hundreds of stalactites beneath the Lincoln Memorial
- those near Gladfelter Hall at Philadelphia's Temple University (send photos to [email protected])
- hundreds of stalactites at Australia's zinc mine at Mt. Isa.
- and those beneath Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance.
* Most Human Mutations Arose in 200 Generations: From Adam until Real Science Radio, in only 200 generations! The journal Nature reports The Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-coding Variants. As summarized by geneticist co-author Joshua Akey, "Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so" (the same number previously published by biblical creationists). Another 2012 paper, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Eugenie Scott's own field) on High mitochondrial mutation rates, shows that one mitochondrial DNA mutation occurs every other generation, which, as creationists point out, indicates that mtEve would have lived about 200 generations ago. That's not so old!
* National Geographic's Not-So-Old Hard-Rock Canyon at Mount St. Helens: As our List of Not So Old Things (this web page) reveals, by a kneejerk reaction evolutionary scientists assign ages of tens or hundreds of thousands of years (or at least just long enough to contradict Moses' chronology in Genesis.) However, with closer study, routinely, more and more old ages get revised downward to fit the world's growing scientific knowledge. So the trend is not that more information lengthens ages, but rather, as data replaces guesswork, ages tend to shrink until they are consistent with the young-earth biblical timeframe. Consistent with this observation, the May 2000 issue of National Geographic quotes the U.S. Forest Service's scientist at Mount St. Helens, Peter Frenzen, describing the canyon on the north side of the volcano. "You'd expect a hard-rock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old. But this was cut in less than a decade." And as for the volcano itself, while again, the kneejerk reaction of old-earthers would be to claim that most geologic features are hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, the atheistic National Geographic magazine acknowledges from the evidence that Mount St. Helens, the volcanic mount, is only about 4,000 years old! See below and more at rsr.org/mount-st-helens.
* Mount St. Helens Dome Ten Years Old not 1.7 Million: Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Mass., using potassium-argon and other radiometric techniques claims the rock sample they dated, from the volcano's dome, solidified somewhere between 340,000 and 2.8 million years ago. However photographic evidence and historical reports document the dome's formation during the 1980s, just ten years prior to the samples being collected. With the age of this rock known, radiometric dating therefore gets the age 99.99999% wrong.
* Devils Hole Pupfish Isolated Not for 13,000 Years But for 100: Secular scientists default to knee-jerk, older-than-Bible-age dates. However, a tiny Mojave desert fish is having none of it. Rather than having been genetically isolated from other fish for 13,000 years (which would make this small school of fish older than the Earth itself), according to a paper in the journal Nature, actual measurements of mutation rates indicate that the genetic diversity of these Pupfish could have been generated in about 100 years, give or take a few.
* Polystrates like Spines and Rare Schools of Fossilized Jellyfish: Previously, seven sedimentary layers in Wisconsin had been described as taking a million years to form. And because jellyfish have no skeleton, as Charles Darwin pointed out, it is rare to find them among fossils. But now, reported in the journal Geology, a school of jellyfish fossils have been found throughout those same seven layers. So, polystrate fossils that condense the time of strata deposition from eons to hours or months, include:
- Jellyfish in central Wisconsin were not deposited and fossilized over a million years but during a single event quick enough to trap a whole school. (This fossil school, therefore, taken as a unit forms a polystrate fossil.) Examples are everywhere that falsify the claims of strata deposition over millions of years.
- Countless trilobites buried in astounding three dimensionality around the world are meticulously recovered from limestone, much of which is claimed to have been deposited very slowly. Contrariwise, because these specimens were buried rapidly in quickly laid down sediments, they show no evidence of greater erosion on their upper parts as compared to their lower parts.
- The delicacy of radiating spine polystrates, like tadpole and jellyfish fossils, especially clearly demonstrate the rapidity of such strata deposition.
- A second school of jellyfish, even though they rarely fossilized, exists in another locale with jellyfish fossils in multiple layers, in Australia's Brockman Iron Formation, constraining there too the rate of strata deposition. By the way, jellyfish are an example of evolution's big squeeze. Like galaxies evolving too quickly, galaxy clusters, and even human feet (which, like Mummy DNA, challenge the Out of Africa paradigm), jellyfish have gotten into the act squeezing evolution's timeline, here by 200 million years when they were found in strata allegedly a half-a-billion years old. Other examples, ironically referred to as Medusoid Problematica, are even found in pre-Cambrian strata.
- 171 tadpoles of the same species buried in diatoms.
- Leaves buried vertically through single-celled diatoms powerfully refute the claimed super-slow deposition of diatomaceous rock.
- Many fossils, including a Mesosaur, have been buried in multiple "varve" layers, which are claimed to be annual depositions, yet they show no erosional patterns that would indicate gradual burial (as they claim, absurdly, over even thousands of years).
- A single whale skeleton preserved in California in dozens of layers of diatom deposits thus forming a polystrate fossil.
- 40 whales buried in the desert in Chile. "What's really interesting is that this didn't just happen once," said Smithsonian evolutionist Dr. Nick Pyenson. It happened four times." Why's that? Because "the fossil site has at least four layers", to which Real Science Radio's Bob Enyart replies: "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha", with RSR co-host Fred Williams thoughtfully adding, "Ha ha!"
* Polystrate Trees: Examples abound around the world of polystrate trees:
- Yellowstone's petrified polystrate forest (with the NPS exhibit sign removed; see below) with successive layers of rootless trees demonstrating the rapid deposition of fifty layers of strata.
- A similarly formed polystrate fossil forest in France demonstrating the rapid deposition of a dozen strata.
- In a thousand locations including famously the Fossil Cliffs of Joggins, Nova Scotia, polystrate fossils such as trees span many strata.
- These trees lack erosion: Not only should such fossils, generally speaking, not even exist, but polystrates including trees typically show no evidence of erosion increasing with height. All of this powerfully disproves the claim that the layers were deposited slowly over thousands or millions of years. In the experience of your RSR radio hosts, evolutionists commonly respond to this hard evidence with mocking. See CRSQ June 2006, ICR Impact #316, and RSR 8-11-06 at KGOV.com.
* Yellowstone Petrified Trees Sign Removed: The National Park Service removed their incorrect sign (see left and more). The NPS had claimed that in dozens of different strata over a 40-square mile area, many petrified trees were still standing where they had grown. The NPS eventually removed the sign partly because those petrified trees had no root systems, which they would have had if they had grown there. Instead, the trees of this "fossil forest" have roots that are abruptly broken off two or three feet from their trunks. If these mature trees actually had been remnants of sequential forests that had grown up in strata layer on top of strata layer, 27 times on Specimen Ridge (and 50 times at Specimen Creek), such a natural history implies passage of more time than permitted by biblical chronology. So, don't trust the National Park Service on historical science because they're wrong on the age of the Earth.
* Wood Petrifies Quickly: Not surprisingly, by the common evolutionary knee-jerk claim of deep time, "several researchers believe that several millions of years are necessary for the complete formation of silicified wood". Our List of Not So Old and Not So Slow Things includes the work of five Japanese scientists who proved creationist research and published their results in the peer-reviewed journal Sedimentary Geology showing that wood can and does petrify rapidly. Modern wood significantly petrified in 36 years these researchers concluded that wood buried in strata could have been petrified in "a fairly short period of time, in the order of several tens to hundreds of years."
* The Scablands: The primary surface features of the Scablands, which cover thousands of square miles of eastern Washington, were long believed to have formed gradually. Yet, against the determined claims of uniformitarian geologists, there is now overwhelming evidence as presented even in a NOVA TV program that the primary features of the Scablands formed rapidly from a catastrophic breach of Lake Missoula causing a massive regional flood. Of course evolutionary geologists still argue that the landscape was formed over tens of thousands of years, now by claiming there must have been a hundred Missoula floods. However, the evidence that there was Only One Lake Missoula Flood has been powerfully reinforced by a University of Colorado Ph.D. thesis. So the Scablands itself is no longer available to old-earthers as de facto evidence for the passage of millions of years.
* The Heart Mountain Detachment: in Wyoming just east of Yellowstone, this mountain did not break apart slowly by uniformitarian processes but in only about half-an-hour as widely reported including in the evolutionist LiveScience.com, "Land Speed Record: Mountain Moves 62 Miles in 30 Minutes." The evidence indicates that this mountain of rock covering 425 square miles rapidly broke into 50 pieces and slid apart over an area of more than 1,300 square miles in a biblical, not a "geological," timeframe.
* "150 Million" year-old Squid Ink Not Decomposed: This still-writable ink had dehydrated but had not decomposed! The British Geological Survey's Dr. Phil Wilby, who excavated the fossil, said, "It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilized in three dimensions, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old." And the Daily Mail states that, "the black ink was of exactly the same structure as that of today’s version", just desiccated. And Wilby added, "Normally you would find only the hard parts like the shell and bones fossilized but... these creatures... can be dissected as if they are living animals, you can see the muscle fibers and cells. It is difficult to imagine... The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it..." Why is this difficult for evolutionists to imagine? Because as Dr. Carl Wieland writes, "Chemical structures 'fall apart' all by themselves over time due to the randomizing effects of molecular motion."
Decades ago Bob Enyart broadcast a geology program about Mount St. Helens' catastrophic destruction of forests and the hydraulic transportation and upright deposition of trees. Later, Bob met the chief ranger from Haleakala National Park on Hawaii's island of Maui, Mark Tanaka-Sanders. The ranger agreed to correspond with his colleague at Yellowstone to urge him to have the sign removed. Thankfully, it was then removed. (See also AIG, CMI, and all the original Yellowstone exhibit photos.) Groundbreaking research conducted by creation geologist Dr. Steve Austin in Spirit Lake after Mount St. Helens eruption provided a modern-day analog to the formation of Yellowstone fossil forest. A steam blast from that volcano blew over tens of thousands of trees leaving them without attached roots. Many thousands of those trees were floating upright in Spirit Lake, and began
sinking at varying rates into rapidly and sporadically deposited sediments. Once Yellowstone's successive forest interpretation was falsified (though like with junk DNA, it's too big to fail, so many atheists and others still cling to it), the erroneous sign was removed.
* Asiatic vs. European Honeybees: These two populations of bees have been separated supposedly for seven million years. A researcher decided to put the two together to see what would happen. What we should have here is a failure to communicate that would have resulted after their "language" evolved over millions of years. However, European and Asiatic honeybees are still able to communicate, putting into doubt the evolutionary claim that they were separated over "geologic periods." For more, see the Public Library of Science, Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of European Honeybees. (Oh yeah, and why don't fossils of poorly-formed honeycombs exist, from the millions of years before the bees and natural selection finally got the design right? Ha! Because they don't exist! :)
Nautiloid proves rapid limestone formation.
* Remember the Nautiloids: In the Grand Canyon there is a limestone layer averaging seven feet thick that runs the 277 miles of the canyon (and beyond) that covers hundreds of square miles and contains an average of one nautiloid fossil per square meter. Along with many other dead creatures in this one particular layer, 15% of these nautiloids were killed and then fossilized standing on their heads. Yes, vertically. They were caught in such an intense and rapid catastrophic flow that gravity was not able to cause all of their dead carcasses to fall over on their sides. Famed Mount St. Helens geologist Steve Austin is also the world's leading expert on nautiloid fossils and has worked in the canyon and presented his findings to the park's rangers at the invitation of National Park Service officials. Austin points out, as is true of many of the world's mass fossil graveyards, that this enormous nautiloid deposition provides indisputable proof of the extremely rapid formation of a significant layer of limestone near the bottom of the canyon, a layer like the others we've been told about, that allegedly formed at the bottom of a calm and placid sea with slow and gradual sedimentation. But a million nautiloids, standing on their heads, literally, would beg to differ. At our sister site, RSR provides the relevant Geologic Society of America abstract, links, and video.
* Now It's Allegedly Two Million Year-Old Leaves: "When we started pulling leaves out of the soil, that was surreal, to know that it's millions of years old..." sur-re-al: adjective: a bizarre mix of fact and fantasy. In this case, the leaves are the facts. Earth scientists from Ohio State and the University of Minnesota say that wood and leaves they found in the Canadian Arctic are at least two million years old, and perhaps more than ten million years old, even though the leaves are just dry and crumbly and the wood still burns!
* Gold Precipitates in Veins in Less than a Second: After geologists submitted for decades to the assumption that each layer of gold would deposit at the alleged super slow rates of geologic process, the journal Nature Geoscience reports that each layer of deposition can occur within a few tenths of a second. Meanwhile, at the Lihir gold deposit in Papua New Guinea, evolutionists assumed the more than 20 million ounces of gold in the Lihir reserve took millions of years to deposit, but as reported in the journal Science, geologists can now demonstrate that the deposit could have formed in thousands of years, or far more quickly!
Iceland's not-so-old Surtsey Island looks ancient.
* Surtsey Island, Iceland: Of the volcanic island that formed in 1963, New Scientist reported in 2007 about Surtsey that "geographers... marvel that canyons, gullies and other land features that typically take tens of thousands or millions of years to form were created in less than a decade." Yes. And Sigurdur Thorarinsson, Iceland's chief geologist, wrote in the months after Surtsey formed, "that the time scale," he had been trained "to attach to geological developments is misleading."
[For what is said to] take thousands of years... the same development may take a few weeks or even days here [including to form] a landscape... so varied and mature that it was almost beyond belief... wide sandy beaches and precipitous crags... gravel banks and lagoons, impressive cliffs… hollows, glens and soft undulating land... fractures and fault scarps, channels and screes… confounded by what met your eye... boulders worn by the surf, some of which were almost round... -Iceland's chief geologist
