Proceedings of the Houston Section of the ASA OK-TX Section Meeting, 2007-07-07

Proceedings of the Houston Section of the ASA OK-TX Section
July 7th, 2007

There were three of us: Bruce Koons, Ed Nelson, and Scott Robinson. We started at 12:15 and ended at 3:00.

Meeting on 7/7/07 seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. It’s also Robert Heinlein’s 100th birthday (not that he’s counting), so it’s a big day.

We chatted first, about the blog, and about Evo-Devo - how homeobox genes are found virtually unchanged in almost all higher organisms. These genes may control organisms’ development and provide easier pathways for single mutations to have enormous effects.

Main Discussion

For our topic of the month, we discussed “Assessing the RATE Project,” by Dr. Randy Isaac, who is our Executive Director (PSCF June, 2007, pp. 143-146).

Ed: Asked about radioisotopes in the Earth must be billions of years older than Earth itself, and their half-lives are such that there must have been lots more of them in the past. Doesn’t that imply a pretty radioactive early universe?

Scott explained: Radioisotopes are produced in novas and supernovas, which occur from time to time in the galaxy, and are added to the molecular clouds which eventually form planets. They are then concentrated in crusts of planets like ours which have plate tectonics. They aren’t that common in the planet as a whole. But yes, the half-life of Uranium and Thorium is long but still it had to be 32X or 128X more abundant in the early solar nebula.

[I looked it up on the Web, and found a Q&A from my old graduate institution, the University of North Dakota. That was cute. The half-life of uranium is 760 million years, longer than I thought. An age of 4.5 billion years means there could be about 6 doublings, meaning there was about 64 times as much Uranium when Earth accreted as there is now. It did have an effect on the early thermal history of the Earth, according to that site, and I think that squares with what I remember.]

[And there is another reason why I don’t think the moon-forming collision gave us plate tectonics. There was plenty of heat in the early Earth, both from short-lived radioisotopes like Uranium 235 which decayed quickly, and from the “iron catastrophe”, as I explained at the meeting. Any body that’s warm enough will convect. I don’t know where Ed read that the moon-forming impact gave us plate tectonics, but I’d like to read it. I’m skeptical it was that key of an event.]

We read the first part of the article, which told how the RATE project report listed some arguments based on radioisotopes for a young earth. They were

1. Rate of helium diffusion in minerals coupled with high concentrations of helium in zircons implies a young earth.

[Randy said that helium diffusion in minerals is so complex that radiochronologists don’t use it for dating, but Davis Young’s article (immediately before Randy’s) tells how they do. It’s used to date when the zircon crystal reached “closing temperature”, at which point He would no longer diffuse out of the crystal.]

2. Radiohaloes. Scott explained that these are discolored areas in mica crystals around “bullet holes” from high-energy particles from radioisotopes in the crystals. Robert Gentry, a young-earther at Oak Ridge National Labs, noticed these halos and demonstrated that biotite polonium was almost the only radioisotope which could produce them. Its ultra-short half-life (it does not occur naturally) implied that the granites with the haloes were young. However, later research indicated that over time, the haloes enlarge, and other radioisotopes or cosmic rays could produce the halos. [This may not be all accurate, since I was going by memory.] [I also note that Randy says that uranium in the granites could decay to polonium and produce the halos too. Oops. Should have read the article more carefully!]

3. Isochron discordances – the authors cite isochron dating disagreements of 10-15%, but that’s not enough to throw the method off by factors of a million or a billion.

Bruce noted that some young-earth creationists (YECs) want to do more research and find further evidence of a young earth, and that’s good. Others seem to be convinced of their position no matter what.

Ed thought that the challenge for evangelicals is to have a high view of the Bible’s accuracy with science challenging the simple literal view all the time.

Bruce: Hugh Ross would say his view’s literalistic.

Ed said Ross invests a lot of energy into parsing the verses to explain things – like claiming the Flood was a local flood. But Ed surmised that Ross was trying to give the homeschoolers an alternative to bad science, and that’s a good thing.

Scott agreed, saying that Hugh Ross is the sole loud old-Earth voice, and that he’s doing a good job reaching out to homeschoolers. But to Ross’ credit, he view his theory as a work in progress, and is willing to change it as new evidence comes.

Ed: This is a pretty strong rebuke of YEC by the ASA. God could do anything He wants; who do we think we are, to think we can unravel it?

Scott: But if YECers claim we can understand how God did it, but also say it requires physical processes we’ve never seen,. They can’t claim it’s science if they just say “we have faith that we can figure out how God did it.”

Ed: “Steourn” in Ireland claims to have invented perpetual motion. He’s raised funding, invited scientists to see it, and set it up in a museum but it keeps not working. His scam is starting to unravel.

Ed: “By fiat” (by law?). There’s no way to say we could understand what God did; He could tinker/change anything. If I were a YEC, Ed said, I’d say God could do anything He wanted, period.

But Hugh Ross’ attempts to parse the Flood narrative to pieces is less attractive than that simple appeal to miracle.

Miracles do happen. A friend of Ed’s father had a PSA (prostate-specific antigen) of 35-40, and was told the prostate was breaking out of its capsule. He was told to go have a good time. On Memorial Day weekend a month ago, this man, with Ed’s boss and some others, were out at a cabin. Oral Roberts’ son was asked to pray with this man, and reached him at the cabin on the trip. He prayed for the man over the phone. Ed’s boss was standing with him, as a friend, while he was talking on the phone with Oral Roberts’ son. Suddenly, Ed’s boss said, the man started sweating profusely and his waistline got hot – physically hot to the touch. Oral Roberts’ son then said, if God is doing something, you might feel heat down in that area. When he went back, and got re-tested, his PSA was 0.5, and there was no evidence of swelling!

That’s a miracle, doesn’t need any scientific means to explain it. Miracles happen. The Flood could be one.

Bruce said he’d had widely varying prostate results before, and that wasn’t necessarily a sign of remission. But the drastic reduction in swelling? Interesting.

Scott said Randy’s article has clarified his understanding of ASA’s position. He’s glad we can take a stand on things like this.

Miscellany

Book in Scientific American ad: Leonard Susskind, “The Cosmic Landscape”. Based on string theory, he posits 10500 universes, of which ours is one. That’s God! That’s effectively infinite, and such a whopping extrapolation it takes as much faith to believe as to believe in God’s existence.

Robert Heinlein (whose 100th birthday is today) posited multiverse, beings going up and down the timeline, storing things in dimensional pockets taking no space in this Universe, but he was writing fiction. This is supposedly not.

Catholics just keep it simple, no big elaborate scenarios, just God miraculously did it.

Bruce: I wish we’d spend more time joining with YECs against enemies of the faith, than battling with each other.

More discussion about homeobox, and their remarkable preservation through 500 million years. A long time for a signal to be preserved faithfully!

Scott thought that not as remarkable as it seemed prima facie. As another example of molecules that have persisted for most of life’s history, Scott mentioned cytochrome c, which all oxygen-breathing organisms possess, even dinosaurs and as far back as we can sample organic material.

Scott summarized life’s history: At 3.8 billion years ago, carbon stains [graphite, actually] are found in gneisses in Greenland, with organic isotopic signatures. The rocks have been cooked at high temperatures and any organics were broken down to pure carbon. At 2.7 and 1.8 billion years ago, banded iron formation was formed, meaning huge amounts of reduced iron precipitated out of the oceans. To put that in proportion, the entire history of life since the Cambrian explosion has taken “only” 0.6 billion years. Algal mats are present with the iron formations. These are formed today by photosynthesizing bacteria (cyanobacteria and blue algae). [Also, I forgot to mention at 0.8 billion years ago were the fossils of the Ediacaran fauna which look totally different from anything in the Cambrian. They have no hard parts, either. For some reason, organisms started to generate calcic and silicic hard parts (shells, teeth) near the Cambrian, and suddenly we have a fossil record. If it was a genetic mutation that finally happened, why did it take so long to happen the first time and then spread to so many different creatures in a geologic instant? Maybe there was finally enough free oxygen to let it happen?] Finally, at 0.6 billion years ago came the Cambrian explosion and everything else we see.

Then, Scott had a sudden thought: Maybe the development of photosynthesis and oxygen respiration is another chicken-or-the-egg problem. Photosynthesis makes oxygen. Without it, the early earth was oxidized but there was no free oxygen. Oxidative metabolism does no good w/o oxygen to breathe. But what good would photosynthesis be, since it takes oxygen to liberate the energy out of sugar? These are two very elaborate processes, each of which doesn’t seem to give any benefit without the other already existing.

that was it, and we headed on our ways but agreed to check the blog for more posts.