Why can't Evolutionists Create Fossils in the Lab?

They are failing, because they have not tried to simulate the conditions of the Biblical Flood!

Selections from Can a Laboratory Make an Authentic Fossil? by Mark H. Armitage

Marko’s summary: Creationists are skeptical of the explanations given by some scientists to explain the formation of fossilized organisms under everyday conditions. Unusual and specialized conditions are required! Certain minerals must be present, heat may be required, and that burial must be rapid and complete. In other words, you need to simulate the conditions of Noah's Flood to try to create an authentic fossil...

(These selections by Marko Malyj are of the article published in Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal, Volume 47, Number 1, Summer, 2010, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/abstracts/Abstracts47-1.htm).

Fish with fossilized fleshy parts

Although rare, the soft, fleshy parts of animals and plants are found preserved within fossils. At times, the micro-anatomical structures are preserved (Zhang and Pratt, 1994; Babcock et al., 2006).

Scientists have found excellent levels of preservation of fish eye pigments in the Santana Foundation (Martill et al., 2008). That report concluded that preservation occurred within days or weeks (unlike most dated theories concluding that long periods of time were involved in fossilization).

Taphonomy is the scientific discipline of studying fossil remains in the rock record and comparing them to decaying organisms over time in order to understand how fossilization occurs. Many taphonomy experiments have been conducted in the laboratory with fish (e.g. Bass et al., 1995; Monge-Najera and Hou, 2002; Whitmore, 2003; Channing and Edwards, 2004; Soja, Sunderlin, and Close, 2004; Gupta et al. 2006; Raff et al., 2006), but none have resulted in perfectly preserved fossils such as those we find buried in the earth's crust.

Many researchers have found that fish decay quickly in water within weeks or days (Krumholz, 1950; Zangerl and Richardson, 1963; Schafer, 1972; Elder, 1985; Britton, 1988; Elder and Smith, 1988; Weigelt, 1989; Minshall et al., 1991; Parmenter and Lamarra, 1991; Schneider, 1998; Hankin and McCanne, 2000; Whitmore, 2003). Therefore, burial in sediment must have been rapid.

Fish often surface when submerged in water, leaving them available to surface predation and mechanical actions that can alter or destroy tissues. Futhermore, fish rupture due to internal gas buildup (Rupp and DeRoche, 1965; Henley, 1967; Parker, 1967; Axon et al., 1980; Whitmore 200). Yet billions of perfectly preserved, well-articulated fish exist in the fossil record.

Many different fossilized organisms display significant soft-tissue preservation (see Briggs et al., 1997, for dinosaurs; see Bartels et al., 1998, for other marine organisms; and see Morlo et al., 2004, for other organisms). However, the results of ongoing taphonomy experiments do not completely explain the extraordinary preservation of birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, and other organisms in the rock record.

Creationists are skeptical of the explanations given by some scientists to explain the formation of fossilized organisms under everyday conditions (i.e., slow sediment deposition, typical water action, etc.). Creationists argue that unusual and specialized conditions are required, that certain minerals must be present, that heat may be required, and that burial under these unique sedimentary conditions must be rapid and complete. Theories of fossil formation in the recent literature include the notion that preservation must be rapid if it is going to happen at all, especially at the ultrastructural level; therefore, there is good reason to believe that creationist theories of fossil formation might be the norm.

References (selected)

Axon, J.R., L. Hart, and V. Nash. 1980. Recovery of tagged fish during the Crooked Creek Bay rotenone study at Barkley Lake, Kentucky. Proceedings of the Annual Conference, Southeastern Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies 33:680-687.

Babcock, L.E., S.A. Leslie, D.H. Elliot, A.L. Stigall, L.A. Ford, and D.E. Briggs. 2006. The "preservation paradox": microbes as a key to exceptional fossil preservation in the Kirkpatrick basalt (Jurassic), Antarctica. The Sedimentary Record 4(4):4-8

Bartels, C., D.E.G. Briggs, and G. Brassel. 1998. Fossils of the Hunruck Slate - Marine Life in the Devonian. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Bass, M., D.E.G. Briggs, J.D.H. van Heemst, A.J. Kear, and J.W. de Leeuw. 1995. Selective preservation of chitin during the decay of shrimp, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 59(5):945-951.

Briggs, D.E.G., P.R. Wilby, B.P. Perez Moreno, J.L. Sanz, M.Fregenal-Martinez. 1997. The mineralization of dinosaur soft tissue in the Lower Cretaceous of Las Hoyas, Spain. Journal of the Geological Society, London 154:587.588.

Britton, D.R. 1988. The occurrence of fish remains in modern lake systems: a test of the stratified-lake model. Master's thesis, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA.

Channing, A., and D. Edwards. 2004. Experimental taphonomy: silicification of plants in Yellowstone hot spring environments. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Earth Sciences 94:503-521.

Elder, R.L. 1985. Principles of aquatic taphonomy with examples from the fossil record. Doctoral diss., Univerity of MIchigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

Elder, R.L., and G.R. Smith. 1988. Fish taphonomy and environmental inference in Paleolimnology. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaoecology 62:577-592.

Gupta, N.S., R. Michels, D.E.G. Briggs, R.P. Evershed, and R.D. Pancost. 2006. The organic preservation of fossil arthropods: an experimental study. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 273:2777-2783.

Hankin, D.G., and D. McCanne. 2000. Estimating the number of fish and crayfish killed and the proportions of wild and hatchery rainbow trout in the Cantara spill. California Fish and Game 86:4-20.

Krumholz, L.A. 1950. Some practical considerations in the use of rotenone in fisheries research. Journal of Wildlife Management 14:413-424.

Martill, D.M., P.M. Brito, and J. Washington-Evans. 2008. Mass mortality of fishes in the Santana Formation (Lower Cretaceous, ?Albian) of northeast Brazil. Cretacious Research 29(4):649-658.

Minshall, G.W., E. Hitchkock, and J.R. Barnes. 1991. Decomposition of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) carcasses in a forest stream ecosystem inhabited only by nonanadromous fish populations. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 48:191–195.

Monge-Najera, J., and X. Hou. 2002. Experimental taphonomy of velvet woms (Onychophora) and implications for the Cambrian "explosion, disparity and decimation" model. Revista de Biologia Tropical 50(304):1133-1138.

Morlo, M., S. Schaal, G. Mayr, and C. Sieffert. 2004. An annotated taxonomic list of the Middle Eocene (MP 11) vertebrata of Messel. Courier Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg 252:95-108.

Parker, R.O. 1967. Rotenone and fish population estimations. Masters thesis, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

Parmenter, R.R., and V.A. Lamarr. 1991. Nutrient cycling in a freshwater marsh: The decomposition of fish and waterfowl carrion. Limnology and Oceanography 36:976-987.

Raff, E.C., J.T. Villinski, F.R. Turner, P.C.J. Donoghue, and R.A. Raff. 2006. Experimental taphonomy shows the feasibility of fossil embryos. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 130(15):5846-5851.

Rupp, R.S., and S.S. DeRoche. 1965. Standing crops of fishes in three small lakes compared with C14 estimates of net primary productivity. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 94:9-25.

Schafer, W. 1972. Ecology and Palaeoecology of Marine Environments. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Schneider, J.C. 1998. Fate of dead fish in a small lake. The American Midland Naturalist 140:192-196.

Soja, C.M., D. Sunderlin, and S.J. Close. 2004. Using burial experiments to unscramble dinosaur egg taphonomy. Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs 36(5):382 (Palentology VIII Processes of fossilization).

Weigelt, J. 1989. Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and Their Paleobiological Implications. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.

Whitmore, J.H. 2003. Experimental fish taphonomy with a comparison to fossil fishes. Ph.D. diss., Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, CA.

Zangerl, R., and E.S. Richardson Jr. 1963. The Paleoecological History of Two Pennsylvania Black Shales. Chicago Natural History Museum, Chicago, IL.

Zhang, X.G., and B.R. Pratt. 1994. Middle Cambrian Arthropod embryos with blastomeres. Science 266(5185):637-639

His Life for Mine, by Lauren Talley, sung by Marko

I sang "His Life for Mine" by Lauren Talley, on 30-Aug-2009 at Fellowship Bible Church of Philadelphia.



If you don't see the DivShare control above, you can listen at
http://www.divshare.com/download/12659862-043

This was my very first Special Music solo performance. I hope you are blessed by it. Thank you, Jesus!

Faith? Belief based on Evidence that leads to Action...

Each person in the world exercises Faith every day.

The ingredients of Everyday Faith:

That Old Bridge...

Example: driving across a river.

Belief: you will cross the bridge and arrive safely.

Evidence: why do you believe that? The bridge was designed well and  built by trained engineers; you have crossed the bridge 100 times before and it has always held the weight of multiple vehicles, including yours.

Action: what do you do with what you believe? You drive across the bridge.

You can have the belief and the evidence, but without the action it remains merely intellectual belief, not faith. If you don't drive across the bridge (action), does believing the bridge is sound get you across the river? Of course not! Faith lived out requires action.

Saving Faith is so much more than Everyday Faith !!

The object of saving faith is Christ (not crossing a bridge, going to a doctor, sitting in a folding chair...) and it is salvation-centered.

Saving faith:

Jesus is the Bridge!

Belief: Jesus lived a sinless life, died on the cross, and came back to life. Therefore his claims to forgive my sins and give me eternal life are true.

Evidence: There is both external and internal evidence. External: the Bible says so! There is support for the linguistic and historical accuracy and integrity of the Bible and its claims to be the very word of God. Internal: the changes in my life; the changes in others' lives (many radical changes!); the continued existence of the Church throughout years of persecution, and more.

Action: Ask Jesus to forgive my sins and save me...which will lead me to God's good works "prepared in advance for us [me] to do". (Ephesians 2:10)

To God be the glory.

Creation is the Foundation, by Henry M. Morris

Without the creation, a supposed gospel would have no foundation, without the promised consummation, it offers no hope, without the cross and empty tomb, it has no saving power. The wonderful threefold work of Christ: creation, conservation, consumation! (Colossians 1:16-20)

For more, see Creation is the Foundation, also Creation, Conservation, and Consummation: Communicating the full gospel of Christ, both by Henry M. Morris, founder of Institute for Creation Research.

Facebook Profiles, Groups, or Pages?

Facebook is a jungle to the serious beginner, as you can tell from the Wikipedia article on Facebook. If you are promoting a cause, one of the key considerations is how to get your message out despite opposition. Therefore it is critical that you understand the pluses and minuses of the 3 different types of Facebook presence: the Profile, Group, and Page.

Facebook does not have mechanisms for comment moderation, which is a severe drawback for promoting a cause. At the end of this post there is a list of commercial products available for comment moderation. Unlike Facebook, they are not free!.

(I researched this post before Facebook put out its New Groups feature on October 7, 2010. See PCMagazine and Yahoo News for initial reactions.)

Here is a list of pluses, minuses, and recommendations for Profiles, Old Groups, and Pages.

Items CAPITALIZED in Red are really hard to overcome if you are promoting a cause!

Profile (+) Pluses

1. Blog Feeds - Yes. 
1. However, if you use Facebook's built-in Import Blog to Notes feature, as in Everything TypePad, you may end up with a feed that stops functioning and cannot be fixed, as testified to by more than 400 posts in this discussion.
2. Also, you may have to wait 3 days for new blog posts to feed through to your Facebook Wall. The trick to manually force Facebook to re-feed given by Kevin Donahue is no longer available.
3. Before October 2010, when the blog post finally appeared on your Wall, you had to manually click "Share" to have it published to your Friends' News Feeds, and the resulting News Feed item did not show any picture. In October 2010, when the blog post finally appeared on your wall, it automatically publishes to your Friends' News Feeds, with the first picture in the post appearing as well, but you have no control over the timing of the publish. 
4. If you don't want to suffer the pain of this built-in Facebook feed, support, feed alternatives are SocialRSS, RSS Graffiti, and my favorite, NetworkedBlogs. But these applications post back-links to the original blogspot article, instead of creating a copy to a separate Facebook posting. In NetworkedBlogs, this means that people have to go back to the original blog post to create a comment, and the resulting comment is not a true Facebook comment. This is awkward.

Profile (-) Minuses

1. Messaging - No. If you want to mass message friends from a Facebook Profile, create an event.
2. EVENTS - No, according to Bluegrass, but I'm not sure this is true.
3. Multiple Admins - No.
4. Comment Moderation - No. "Facebook itself could badly use a comment moderating service; I've given up reading comment streams for any news or company feed, as they usually attract hateful, vile comments, often having nothing to do with the post subject." "You can delete other people's comments on your pages. However, I've never heard of comment moderation on FB."
5. FRIENDS - 5,000 FRIEND LIMIT. When I reach the 5,000 friend limit, how hard is it to cull friends by identifying those who have not created comments recently? This is difficult, for some clues, see "How to retrieve the number of comments on a blog post?", "Comments Box FAQ", "fql.query. Evaluates an FQL (Facebook Query Language) query. For more complex queries where you want to use the results of one query in another query without making another API call, consider using fql.multiquery"
6. DISCUSSIONS - NO. I could not find any Discussion application that works with a profile. See SearchEngineJournal, SocialReflections. Without discussions, you will have to draw peoples attention to your Profile Wall for individual postings and the comments on each of them

Old Group (+) Pluses

1. Messaging - Yes, as a Facebook message with email alert.
2. Events - Yes, with mass-invitation ability.
3. Multiple Admins - Yes, post under their own names. Groups are directly connected to the people who administer them, so that activities that go on there reflect on each admin personally.
4. Blog Feeds - possible with RSSGraffiti app (per Thomas Boelskifte), or the similar Facebook applications NetworkedBlogs, SocialRSS. But these applications post back-links to the original blogspot article, instead of creating a copy to a separate Facebook posting. In NetworkedBlogs, this means that people have to go back to the original blog post to create a comment, and the resulting comment is not a true Facebook comment. This is awkward.
5. Member Approval (Closed Groups only) - Yes. You can remove and ban a member (per April 27, 2010 at 9:39 am post). Permissions settings make it possible for group admins to restrict access to a  Closed group, so that new members have to be approved. Access to a Page, however, can only be restricted by certain ages and locations. Again, this makes groups more like a private club.
6. Discussions - Yes. See wchingya for How To Create A Private Discussion Board On Facebook.

Old Group (=) Recommendations

1. Monetizing - "I would encourage you to create fans pages for every group you create".
2. How to Create a Group - see here.
3. 5 Tips to Revive a Fading Facebook Group: Make your messages interesting, relevant, brief… and rare. “Too many messages” is the Number One reason for people leaving a Facebook Group.  Once or twice a month is usually plenty for Group mass-messaging. Throw a party by creating an event. Give a reward - adding your most active Group members as “Officers” can help to make them feel more actively involved. 

Old Group (-) Minuses
(Closed Groups are not viewable to non-Group members)
(Open Groups have no member approval mechanism)

1. EVENTS - You will NOT be able to invite the members of a host Group to an Event if the group has over 5,000 members.
2. MIGRATE TO A PAGE - No (as of October 11, 2009 at 10:18 pm).
3. MESSAGING - NO, for Groups with more than 5,000 members (per June 4, 2008 at 10:30 am post), also here.
4. Internet Search - No, only the public profile is available to external search engines such as Google.
5. Comment Moderation - Neither Groups nor Pages have great moderation features. They can both be a little granular as to how things get posted, who can post, and what kind of media can be posted, but that’s about it. If someone posts spam on your Group or your Page, you have to remove it manually, and you can also remove specific members.
6. VIEWABLE BY NON-GROUP MEMBERS? NO FOR CLOSED GROUPS - no one can see the activity inside the group, unless they become a member, which defeats the purpose of disseminating information openly. Yes for Open Groups, however everyone on Facebook can view the group and join. If the group is exclusive to a specific network, only the people on that network can become a member.
7. Blog Feeds - NetworkedBlogs, SocialRSS, RSS Graffiti Facebook applications post back-links to the original blogspot article, instead of creating a copy to a separate Facebook posting. In NetworkedBlogs, this means that people have to go back to the original blog post to create a comment, and the resulting comment is not a true Facebook comment. This is awkward.
8. MEMBER APPROVAL - NO FOR OPEN GROUPS. Anyone can join at anytime, so opponents of your group can all join up and force you to the 5,000 member limit.

Page (+) Pluses

1. Messaging - Yes, comes as an update. Page admins can send updates to fans through the Page, and these updates will appear in the “Updates” section of fans’ inboxes.
2. Fans - Can exceed 5,000 fans. There is no limit on how many fans a Page can have.
3. Internet Searches - Yes, pages are indexed by external search engines such as Google.
4. Discussions - Yes.

Page (-) Minuses
(Fan Approval is the Problem here)

1. Events - Yes, but no way to invite all your fans.
2. Multiple Admins - Yes, post under a single business name. Pages don’t list the names of administrators, and are thought of as a person, almost like a corporate entity is considered a ‘person’ under the law.
3. FAN APPROVAL - NO - No approval mechanism for new fans. Pages are a free-for-all (per April 14, 2010at 3:49 pm post). 
4. COMMENT MODERATION - Neither Groups nor Pages have great moderation features. They can both be a little granular as to how things get posted, who can post, and what kind of media can be posted, but that’s about it. If someone posts spam on your Group or your Page, you have to remove it manually, and you can also remove specific members. Unfortunately for Facebook pages you don’t receive email updates when a new comment is posted or something you posted gets commented on… and that stinks.  

Page (=) Recommendations

1. How to Create a Page - see Squidoo or Facebook.

Content Moderation

1. Context Optional Social Marketing Suite, with Moderation, Applications, Publishing, Analytics modules. The Social Monitoring Console normally run $500 to $2000 per month. Click here for a review.
2. Vitrue Publisher.
3. Conversocial.
4. LiveWorld.
5. Tempero.
6. Articles on content moderation - at RyanShell.

This blog post originally appeared at http://umarko.blogspot.com/2010/10/facebook-profiles-groups-or-pages.html.