Re: Glenn said

David J. Tyler (D.Tyler@mmu.ac.uk)
Tue, 24 Jun 1997 10:38:49 GMT

At 01:01 PM 6/23/97, Russell T. Arndts wrote:

> >***Do the rocks in England and the Black Hills have the same index fossils?***
> >
> >I am looking for a quote or book to verify that fact. At the moment, I
> >haven't even been able to get the names of the index fossils used in both,
> >not mention comparing the index fossils.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that the Flood Geology tradition has
included a number of people who have found the "geological column" to
be a valid concept and who do accept (in principle) the value of
index fossils. Harold Clark's "The New Diluvialism" (1943, I think)
was a very significant book for establishing this point. Although
Clark started as a student of George McCready Price, he found it
necessary to distance himself from Clark on several important issues:
notably the validity of the geological column, the role of index
fossils, the existence of overthrusting, and the interpretation of
the Quaternary as a glacial phase of Earth's history. In this book,
he discusses the correlation of strata, including europe/america
correlation.

On 23 Jun 97 at 22:21, Glenn Morton wrote:

> Now the usual creationist response is to claim that overthrusts are not real
> and that certain areas of Montana, Wyoming and other places have normally
> deposited material containing the fossils in an out of order sequence. This
> can be illustrated by the oldest purveyor of the creationist idea that there
> are no overthrusts. George McReady Price wrote:.....

Glenn is quite right to say "the usual ..." - Significantly, Henry
Morris and John Whitcomb chose to continue the tradition of Price
regarding the Geologic Column/index fossils/overthrusting, but they
broadly accepted Clark's diluvialist model of successive burial of
ecosystems (which he used to explain the pattern in the fossil
record) and also Clark's approach to the evidences of glaciation.
This situation has led to an uneasy tension in attitudes to the
geological column within the YEC movement: on the one hand there is a
general rejection of the Column as the product of "evolutionary" and
"uniformitarian" thinking, whereas on the other there is a desire to
explain the pattern in terms of ecological zonation and the
successive burial of zones by rising floodwaters. The situation has
slightly changed in recent years with John Woodmorappe's TAB model:
which relegates ecological zonation to a minor role and emphasises
tectonic control to produce the pattern. JWs model allows YECs in
the "Morris" tradition to reject the geological column and
stratigraphical correlation with a higher degree of consistency than
was possible before.

A significant problem with JW's model is that it presupposes tectonic
plates with distinctive biotas but without any apparent biological
reason for their distinctiveness. The model them becomes a
"diluvialist just-so story" with the same problems as the
"evolutionary just so stories" such as how the giraffe got a long
neck, or how insects learned to fly. There are numerous other
problems, but these have never been adequately critiqued by either
YEC or conventional geologists. Perhaps as JWs model becomes more
widely quoted, it will attract more detailed critical evaluation.

Best wishes,
David J. Tyler.