From: Duff,Robert Joel (rjduff@uakron.edu)
Date: Fri Oct 10 2003 - 11:27:47 EDT
Glenn's comments about the sheer number of fossils reminded me also of
some other very simple problems that really do not get expressed enough.
There have been a number of recent articles in YEC journals that
emphasize that plant evolution is a serious problem. I've been amazed
(even more so than usual) at the lack of basic knowledge of the fossil
record of many of the authors. As Glenn has just pointed out, given
how much they talk about the fossil record it is remarkable how little
aware they are of the actually facts of the record. The presence of
flowering plant macrofossils and pollen is an amazing example of the
structure of the fossil record. I've copied something I wrote about
flowering plant fossils for another list last year after attending the
Botanical Society of America meeting in Madison last summer. Joel Duff
**********************************************
I was thinking about dating methods, flood geology and fossils today as
I
attended a bunch of paleobotany (=ancient plants/plant fossils) talks.
In
particular there was a highly anticipated pair of talks (well,
anticipated for
a bunch of botanists anyway) dealing with some flowering plant fossils
found in
the north eastern China. One talk in particular was a preview of a paper
that
will come out in one of the top two scientific journal in the world in a
couple
of weeks. I suspect the plant fossil will be on the cover. They
presenter
from China presented an overview of a set of flowering plant fossils
found in
just the last year from the same rock deposit that they are finding the
feathered dinosaurs in.
So what do I find so interesting about theses fossils? Well, its
uniqueness
is that this particular fossil is said to represent the oldest flowering
plant
known in the fossil record. According to the Chinese the rock layers
these
fossils have been found are dated (directly by at least 3 different
radiometric
methods) to be between 139-141 million years. The next presenter who
earlier
found another flowering plant species in rocks several layers above had
that
layer dated to 125 million years . This age 139-141 is the oldest report
of a
flowering plant in the fossil record anywhere in the world. What is
really
interesting is that flowering plant fossils have been reported in rocks
dated
to around 120 million years on several other continents but not earlier.
So
in the fossil record we have the "sudden" (over several million years)
of
flowering plants. Below this point there has never been seen a flowering
plant
(alive today we have 300,000 species of flowering plants).
So relative to the entire geological column what does this mean? If the
entire
column is said to cover over 1 billion year then this means that
flowering
plant fossils are restricted to the top 10% of the rocks of the column.
There
are many places on earth where there rock even at the surface of the
ground are
much older than 140 million years so that means all the layers of rock
below
the top contain NO flowering plants (eg. I believe the corn fields I'm
looking
at here in Wisconsin are right on top of 400 million year dated rocks
and no
flowering plant fossils have been identified in Wisconsin, I believe,
except in
one areas where there are some younger rocks).
Back to the fossils, the preservation of these plants was absolutely
amazing,
you could see even the veins on the leaves had been preserved in the
rock. He
had the entire plant including roots, stem, leaves and the "flower" but
this is
not a flower like you might think. This flower consists only of female
and male
parts but NO petals and sepals. This is a prediction of the primary
theory of
flower evolution now this any many other recently found oldest flowering
plants
are upholding this prediction. One other thing I found amazing was the
second presenter who had described the plant form the higher layer but
then
showed a plant found in Germany that looked to me exactly like the same
plant.
He showed how they differed only slightly in their leaves (kind of like
the
differences between an oak from NA and an oak from Japan would be very
similar
but not identical). Now the really amazing part, that fossil from
Germany has
been dated to the 120-120 million year range by a different group a
couple of
years ago! And again, at that locality in Germany which has been
thoroughly
researched there are other flowering plants above it (I might add that
as you
go to layers above you get not only more different types of flowering
plants
but they also begin to have other more complicated seeds and flowers).
What are the implication of this? First of all I have always been struck
by
the extreme level of order in the fossil record. We look around and see
mostly
flowering plants BUT in the fossil record only the very very top of the
geological record contains ANY flowering plants. You might think that
maybe
below a certain point flowering plant parts don't preserve in the
sediments
very well but we have places with rocks at very low in the geological
column
that are dated between 300-450 million years that contain massive
amounts of
plants that we can even see details of individual cell and even details
of the
components of cells walls and finer structure than we have in most
flowering
plants and yet in these massive rock layers which have been studies
quite
thoroughly also not a single flowering plant has ever been seen.
I can't help but wonder how a noahic flood picked up all the world
animals and
plants and deposited them such that not a single flowering plant ended
up near
the bottom 9/10 of the sediments that are hypothesized to have been laid
down
by that flood. Even more dramatically, flowering plants produce pollen
grains
that are distinctive compared to pine tree pollen and fern pollen and
pollen
grains and spores can be found in the fossil record back 400 million
years but
NO flowering plant pollen grains have been identified in rock layers
older than
something like 140 million years (I'll have to look that up when I get
back,
could be a bit older) . This is absolutely incredible if there were
flowering
plants before the flood (which I think the Bible suggests there were
though it
doesn't mention flowers specifically)! How did all these plants get
picked up
with the soil get mixed and then settle into 10 km thick layers of rock
of
which maybe only the top 500-1000 meters contain any flowering plant
pollen or
flowering plant fossils? One could hypothesize that flowering plant
pollen
could sort differently than fern pollen but you can test this hypothesis
at
home. Simply take some sand, pollen from a pine tree (abundant right now
in
some places), spores from a fern, and some pollen from some flowering
plants
and mix them up in a jar and let the sand settle. Then take bits of
sediment
from various layers and see if the pollens separated from one another?
Even if this type of sorting could be explained, one has to wonder why
the
pollen of flowering plants which is microscopic happen to start showing
up in
the fossil record about the same time flowering plants if the fossil
record is
simply the result of plants and animals being trapped in the raging
flood
waters. One other observation along the same lines, it seems an amazing
coincidence that the same plant is found to be the oldest flowering
plant found
in China and Germany on opposite ends of the world. How could the flood
waters
sort this particular plant which certainly wouldn't be the heaviest or
lightest
or anything unusual, from all other plants to place it at the lowest
point of
all flowering plants in two places of the world?
To me the pollen and flowering plant appearance where they are in the
rocks has
to be the result of a supernatural process IF we grant the
presupposition of
the creation scientists that a global flood is responsible for the
majority of
the geological column. To me this is as miraculous as Christ rising from
the
dead. Now I absolutely believe in a miraculous resurrection but do I
think
that pollen miraculously was placed in the fossil record? I don't know.
Obviously nothing in the Bible directly reveals this but this miracle
could be
inferred from Scripture if it can be confidently inferred that the
entire
geological column was formed after the creation week in a 6000 year old
world.
Here is just another case where I think the creation scientists trying
to force
a naturalistic explanation just doesn't work but I can see why many
would also
be uncomfortable simply positing everything as a miracle as well.
Wish I had a great summary and big point to make but I don't so I'll
just say,
thanks is you managed to read this far down these ramblings from the
McDonald's
in Evansville Wisconsin. My fries are gone so it must be time to hit the
road
again. Regards, Joel
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Oct 10 2003 - 11:28:51 EDT