Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

While Bill Maher can be downright anti religious, and his approach is usually offensive, he's got one thing right. The vast majority of scientists accept evolution. Gallup's 1991 poll showed that 95% of scientists (including non-biologists) accept evolution, with biologists above 99%.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

"Macro" and "micro" evolution, besides being outdated terms from the 1800's, are defined as such:

Micro-evolution: evolutionary change involving the gradual accumulation of mutations leading to new varieties within a species.

macro-evolution: major evolutionary transition from one type of organism to another occurring at the level of the species.

Both have been observed directly. Use google to look up examples of what is called speciation.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

You go on to say that "most of the sequence comparisons do not match Darwin's concept of the tree of life" as if Darwins book is the standard that science goes by when it comes to evolution theory. Theories are improved with increased evidence. This is a result of the scientific method, and it keeps science from becoming dogmatic. Darwin, of course, formulated his theory before the discovery of DNA. DNA actually provides some of the strongest evidence of common ancestry.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

Next, you say "We weren't there when it happened. So how could we really know how it all happened... unless we had a truthful and trustworthy eyewitness account to rely on? Wait a second! Isn't that what Christians and Jews believe God has provided for us in the Genesis creation account?"

Of course no one was there when it happened. But we can still know it happened from the evidence. Direct observation is not always possible. Take, for instance, electricity. We cannot actually see electrons, and yet we see the evidence of them. In evolution, we see Endogenous Retroviral DNA insertions in the same spots in humans and chimps etc.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

What is interesting is your logic concerning creation.
"Genesis is true. How do we know? Because God provided it. How do we know God provided it? Christians and Jews believe it. Why do they believe it? Well, because God provided it of course."

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

Next, you proceed to commit a Burden of Proof fallacy.
"Without having the divine quality of omniscience themselves, how can they honestly claim to know that there is no God or supernatural, and therefore that all accounts of the supernatural and miraculous could not possibly be true?.Repeat after me. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

Of course its possible that the supernatural exists, and that God created everything willy nilly.

It's also possible that the universe was created during a sexual experience between two deities. Boom chicka dow wow. Both deities have a divine climax, and poof, our universe was born. Both stories have the great characteristic of not being disprovable. What then, is the reason for believing one over the other? A book?

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

What then, is the reason for believing one over the other? A book?

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

next, "The mind-boggling complexity required for the even the simplest conceivable self-replicating cell happening... all by chance!"

Please, please, please. Read a biology book. Evolution only deals with life once it is here, not the origins of life- that is Abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is perfectly debatable and does not have the overwhelming evidence that evolution has.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

My favorite quote here is "We can't get Obama to show us his long-form birth certificate to prove that he is a natural-born US citizen." Check USA Today. He has.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...a-hawaii_N.htm

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

Finally, "I feel much safer with elected representatives who believe in the Genesis Creation account, because I know they will ascribe to high moral standards."

You think that because a person believes in your special creation story is more fit for office than a person who does not? .

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

Picture this. One hundred billion galaxies. One hundred billion stars in each galaxy. Even if the conditions on Earth represent one in a billion, there is a pretty big chance that there are life suitable planets besides our own. Whether life (whatever you define it to be) on Earth came from organic chemistry, panspermia or a divine deity, it has since evolved into the complex array of varieties we see today. That much is not disputed by scientists.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

Also, realize that the universe is not governed by human "common sense", and that vacuum fluctuations, however weird the idea, have been confirmed:

Enjoy your day.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

"You realize this is classic argumentum ad populum, don't you?"

Absolutely.

I made no such argument. I was showing the statistics to counter your statement that a "significant minority" disagrees with what you define as "macro" evolution. No such "significant minority" exists.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

And...there is no difference in the mechanics of "micro" and "macro" evolution. Macro is simply outside of the species barrier, micro is within. Please cite a credible scientific source that says otherwise. Hell, cite a credible scientific source that still even uses the terms.

Evolution on the grand scale resulting in the origin of higher taxa. In evolutionary theory it thus entails common ancestry, descent with modification, the genealogical relatedness of all life, transformation of species, large scale functional and structural changes, etc.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

Also, your barayim hypothesis is impossible. It is estimated that there are anywhere between 5-50 million species on Earth. To be fair, we'll say 15 million. It's laughable to say that a few "barayim" would produce that number in a few thousand years fresh from the Ark. Not to mention the millions of other species that have gone extinct. How many events of speciation would that involve per year? That's a little trick I call math.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

"These may be explained by the affinity of retroviruses for certain "spots" in the genome rather than common ancestry. If an insertion happened in one species, it can happen in another."

Nope. Experiment after experiment shows absolutely no affinity for specific spots in the genome. Viruses are pretty damn random after all.

And... why is it that every time we look at species that are considered closely related, we see that they have the same ERV insertions? Chimps and humans, mice and rats. All confirmed by retroviral insertions. Even if your hypothesis is given the benefit of the doubt, and retroviruses have an affinity for certain spots in the genome, it would still be the same Retroviral DNA found, meaning that we should expect to see completely random combinations of different viruses and thus different ERV DNA in different species

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

True science= Look at the evidence, draw the conclusion. Not, choose a conclusion, ignore evidence against it, and devise nutty hypothesis to protect it.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

"As a result of new research, Darwin's tree of life has given way to something more like a "web of life," making the theory of descent from a common single-celled ancestor very messy."

Evolution by means of natural selection remains the backbone of modern biology, with decent from a common ancestor still the best explanation for the variety of life on Earth. It is independently confirmed by many different and unrelated sciences such as biochemistry, geology, paleontology, zoology etc.

Single celled organisms still appear in the Archaean period, dinosaurs in the Mesozoic and early hominids in the Cenozoic.

Funny that we don't find fossil squirrels in the Cambrian.

Of course, after the flood, we should expect to see rabbit fossils with Triceratops fossils, as they died next to each other. Or footprints next to each other. But we don't.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

"Having a government official verify that it exists is not the same as releasing it and permitting us read and examine it. So no, he has not shown it to us."

lol. I guess the supreme court doesn't count for anything does it. Interesting. And after 20 seconds of searching, look what I found: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.sha...ertificate.jpg.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

I've read the probability arguments. And they're poor.

Creationist probability arguments fail because:
1) Arguments are based on the assumption that the first life forms formed by pure chance, and biochemistry is not governed by chance.
2) The arguments are usually focused only on protein molecules, ignoring others that may aid in promoting life.
3) Assumes the oldest life forms would be similar to its present form. The oldest life forms would be incredibly simple, and have almost none of the characteristics of modern cells.
4) The arguments ignore countless trials that would have been occurring simultaneously.

I have to say it would be refreshing to hear a creationist probability argument that actually takes account of the above.

Originally posted by Thereisnospoon

As far as a multiverse, I don't buy it. Occam's Razor makes short work of that IMO.

"It is governed by orderly laws and described by precise mathematical values, without which life could not exist."

The laws of the universe are a description of what we observe, not a prescription. Quantum mechanics shows us that the universe is not at all as "orderly" as we once thought. The uncertainty principle and vacuum fluctuations are a few examples of this. And... life may be able to exist in a form that we are not familiar with.

"There is uncommon (improbable) sense to it, a lot of it. So...where did this "sense" - a synonym for orderly logic or arrangement, come from?"

"Sense"? You're kidding, right? Read my above paragraph.

"I encourage you to open your mind to the idea of the universe having been created by a transcendent metaphysical intelligence."

I am open to the idea. Thus, "agnostic" in my profile description. The god of the Bible hardly qualifies as "transcendent metaphysical intelligence"; human-like insecurities, atrocities, eternal punishment for finite crimes, the idea of original sin, blatant errors in a book supposedly written by him and the creation and sustaining of an "anti-god" or satan . If there is a "transcendent metaphysical intelligence", it probably doesn't care who we share a bed with, if we claim to follow a certain book, or whether we believe in it or not.

I first read something very similar to this about 15 years ago in Henry Morris’ book, “The Scientific Case for Creationism.” I thought that I would use a very similar methodology, combined with current estimates and some other observations, for this post.

The late information scientist Marcel J.E. Golay wrote in "Reflections of a Communications Engineer," in Analytical Chemistry, June 1961, p. 23: “Suppose we wanted to build a machine capable of reaching into bins for all its parts, and capable of assembling from these parts a second machine just like itself. What is the minimum amount of structure or information that should be built into the first machine? The answer comes out to be of the order of 1,500 bits - 1,500 choices between alternatives which the machine should be able to decide. This answer is very suggestive, because 1,500 bits happens to be also of the order of magnitude of the amount of structure contained in the simplest large protein molecule which, immersed in a bath of nutrients, can induce the assembly of those nutrients into another large protein molecule like itself, and then separate itself from it.”

Here, Golay was not describing 1500 random chemical events, as some creationists seem to have understood him. He was describing correct selections, which are not always synonymous with a single chemical event. In information theory, a bit represents a selection between two alternatives, and is the simplest unit of choice. It is also the simplest unit used to describe information. Golay is saying that a self-replicating machine must be able to make 1500 correct selections between equal alternatives to create a separate copy of itself. If we speak of the likelihood of a self-replicating molecular machine forming by a series of random chemical events, then the odds get much lower than ½ ¹⁵⁰⁰, the figure Golay used to express the minimum information needed for this machine. Please allow me to illustrate why,

Ever play the game, "Twenty Questions"? In the game, you try to guess something another person is thinking of in 20 yes/no questions or less. The best strategy for winning the game is to ask a series of questions each with a 1/2 probability of being right (bits), such as, "Is the person male or female?" This involves the ability to intelligently evaluate equal alternatives and choose between them in order to correctly identify information.

But for a series of random chemical events to produce a self-replicating machine, there is no intelligent evaluation of equal alternatives going on. There is no intelligent choice going on either. The possible alternatives at each step in the sequence of events would typically be much higher than 2 as well, given the number of elements and mind-bogglingly high number of possible molecular combinations there are.

In the quote above, Golay only described a simple self assembling machine, such as a protein. He did not describe life, which is much more complex. For instance, Mycoplasma genitalium has the smallest known genome, with 580,000 base pairs. It is a pathogen, meaning that it needs other life to feed on, so it may be even simpler than the first cell was. One self-replicating protein is much, much simpler than that!

But still, let’s give abiogenesis a huge benefit of the doubt here, and say that only 1500 random events must occur, each with a probability of ½, to form any kind of self-replicating biological life. Note that this would not be the odds for one single combination, but rather the odds for any combination that might lead to life. Given this liberal assumption, the odds in any given sequence of random events would be ½ ¹⁵⁰⁰, or 1/10.⁴⁵⁰. ( I read that biologist Frank B. Salisbury, in American Biology Teacher, concluded that the odds of the chance evolution of a medium-sized protein of 300 amino acids was about one in 10.⁶⁰⁰, an even smaller number, which, he said, is 'completely beyond our comprehension.'")

What is the likelihood of this having happened somewhere in the universe? The latest estimate of the number of stars in the observable universe is 70 sextillion stars. CNN reported that Dr. Simon Driver, when asked “if he believed the huge scale of the universe meant there was intelligent life out there somewhere, replied: ‘Seventy thousand million million million is a big number ... it's inevitable.’” [http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/07/22/stars.survey/]

Is this true? Since Driver noted that light from the visible universe has not reached us yet, and that the universe could actually be much larger, let’s increase this estimate to an amount greater than one trillion times what can currently be observed, to 10,000,000,000,000,000 sextillion, or 10³⁷

Golay’s machine has all of the parts it needs to make a copy of itself right beside it. How often does that happen in nature? Let’s assume it happens a lot more often than it probably does, and suppose that each of these stars has 1,000,000 earth sized planets that are all giant nutrient baths, containing 10⁵⁵ atoms (more than an amount 1,000,000 times the approximately 8.87 x 10⁴⁹ atoms on earth). We will imagine nutrient baths, so that all of the needed parts for life will be on hand, near each atom, to be consistent with Golay’s analogy above.

Now let’s suppose that each of these atoms takes part in 10²² events per second. Multiply that by 10²³ seconds of cosmic history (an amount higher than 100,000 times the current maximum estimated age of the universe, which is 6.3x10¹⁷ seconds), and you get 10³⁷ x 10⁵⁵ x 10²² x 10²³ = 10¹³⁷ possible chemical events that could have been tried out on these planets since the universe began.

Given these assumptions, the odds of a simple self-replicating system arising would therefore be 10¹³⁷ /10⁴⁵⁰ = 1/10³¹³ . Henry Morris, in his book, The Scientific Case for Creationism, used Golay’s figure and was even more liberal in one of his assumptions (his other figures, though lower, were still larger than current estimates). He imagined the entire known universe at that time was packed full of particles the size of electrons rather than atoms. And his odds still came out incredibly low, 1/10²⁸⁰ .

The truth is that Senator Pryor was right. While most scientists think that particle to species evolution (macroevolution) has happened, a significant minority do not...

Within this simple question, there is a lot of communication and implication going on. Maher could have been more direct and asked something like, "You don't actually believe Jesus rose from the dead, do you?" but expressing disbelief in a talking snake is a much less sacred target, and less likely to offend. The intended effect of the question is the same, however, and that is to engender doubt.

Isn't it downright conceited and arrogant of metaphysical naturalists to imply that their view is the only one that could possibly be true?

Now I wonder, how many times did Senator Pryor get asked about talking snakes in town hall meetings when he was running for office?

Could not these things, along with the serpent, have been actual historic objects and events, planned and intended by God to import symbolism and deep meaning?

As we read the Bible, our suspicion is confirmed. And lest there be any doubt, the very last book of the Bible makes the identity of that sinister intelligence very clear:

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. - Revelation 12:9

Most creationists believe it does occur within created kinds, which we call barayim. How else do you think the limited number of barayim on the ark could have given us the rich variety of species we have today? But despite speciation, a canine is still a canine and a feline is still a feline. There has been no macro-evolution from one barayim to another. If you want to refute us, then it would be good to take aim at what we really believe, not a straw man.

Secondly, recent experiments have demonstrated that flood sediments sort according to size and density in water.

Thirdly, in the initial stages of the flood, higher organisms would have migrated to higher areas, leaving the more primitive ones to be covered by sediment first.

Fourthly, stratigraphic disoder (out of sequence fossils) is a fact of modern geology, and numerous hypotheses seek to explain them.

The late information scientist Marcel J.E. Golay wrote in "Reflections of a Communications Engineer," in Analytical Chemistry, June 1961, p. 23: “Suppose we wanted to build a machine capable of reaching into bins for all its parts, and capable of assembling from these parts a second machine just like itself. What is the minimum amount of structure or information that should be built into the first machine? The answer comes out to be of the order of 1,500 bits - 1,500 choices between alternatives which the machine should be able to decide. This answer is very suggestive, because 1,500 bits happens to be also of the order of magnitude of the amount of structure contained in the simplest large protein molecule which, immersed in a bath of nutrients, can induce the assembly of those nutrients into another large protein molecule like itself, and then separate itself from it.”
...
Given these assumptions, the odds of a simple self-replicating system arising would therefore be 10137 /10450 = 1/10313 . Henry Morris, in his book, The Scientific Case for Creationism, used Golay’s figure and was even more liberal in one of his assumptions (his other figures, though lower, were still larger than current estimates). He imagined the entire known universe at that time was packed full of particles the size of electrons rather than atoms. And his odds still came out incredibly low, 1/10280.

The authors show that a 32-amino-acid peptide, folded into an alpha-helix and having a structure based on a region of the yeast transcription factor GCN4, can autocatalyse its own synthesis by accelerating the amino-bond condensation of 15- and 17-amino-acid fragments in solution

Originally posted by The Pixie

What are you (or Golay) claiming is the "simplest large protein molecule which, immersed in a bath of nutrients, can induce the assembly of those nutrients into another large protein molecule like itself, and then separate itself from it"? How did Golay calculate the "amount of structure" in it?

Here is an alternative approach. According to an article in Nature by Kaufman (see below), a 32 amino acid sequence will self-replicate. If we assume this has to form randomly from a soup of 20 amino acids, then the probability of a particular sequence would by 32^20, or about 2^128. That is rather less than your figure of 2^1500. That would make abiogenesis more likely by a factor of 2^1372. Using your calculation, we can thus expect abiogenesis to occur on 1/10^313 x 2 ^1372 = 2^433 or 10^144 planets (assuming the rest of your calculations are reasonable).

http://www.asa3.org/archive/evolution/199705/0014.html

Self-replicating Peptides?
Amino acids can be formed (with difficulty12) in Miller-type experiments where reducing gases are sparked, unlike ribose and the nitrogenous bases. Thus some evolutionists are investigating protein-first rather than nucleic-acid-first theories of the origin of life. But proteins do not have anything analogous to the base-pairing in nucleic acids. So there was a surprise in August 1996, when some newspapers and science journals reported a peptide that can reproduce itself. David Lee et al. reported that a short peptide derived from part of a yeast enzyme can catalyse its own formation.13

Lee et al. made a 32-unit-long a-helical peptide based on the leucine-zipper domain of the yeast transcription factor GCN4. They found that it catalysed its own synthesis in a neutral, dilute water solution of 15 and 17-unit fragments. This was an ingenious experiment, but it does not help the evolutionary cause because:

1.Where would the first 32-unit long chain of 100 % left-handed amino acid residues come from? Amino acids are not formed as easily as Lee et al. claim. If they form at all, they are extremely dilute and impure, as well as racemic (50–50 mix of left and right-handed forms). Such amino acids do not spontaneously polymerise in water.
2.Where would a supply of the matching 15 and 17-unit chains come from? Not only does the objection above apply, but what mechanism is supposed to produce the right sequences? Even if we had a mixture of the right homochiral (all the same handedness) amino acids, the chance of getting one 15-unit peptide right is one in 2015 (= one in 3 x 1019). If it is not necessary to get the sequences exactly right, then it would mean that the ‘replication’ is not specific, and would thus allow many errors.
3.The 15 and 17-unit peptides must be activated, because condensation of ordinary amino acids is not spontaneous in water. Lee et al. used a thiobenzyl ester derivative of one peptide. As they say, this also circumvents potential side reactions. The hypothetical primordial soup would not have had intelligent chemists adding the right chemicals to prevent wrong reactions!
4.The particular 32-unit chain was an a-helix, where hydrogen bonds between different amino acid residues cause the chain to helicize. This common structure is more likely to be able to act as a template under artificial conditions. Lee et al. claim that b-sheets, which also depend on hydrogen bonding, might also be able to act as templates. This seems plausible. a-helices and b-sheets are known as the secondary structure of the protein.14
The exact way in which the protein folds is called the tertiary structure, and this determines its specific properties. Although Lee et al. say:
we suggest the possibility of protein self-replication in which the catalytic activity of the protein could be conserved,
they present no experimental proof.

http://creation.com/self-replicating-enzymes

In a primordial soup, the choices would not be between 20 amino acids alone. In the experiment you refer to, the replication took place in a water solution of 15 and 17 unit peptide fragments. In other words, the replicators were already half-assembled and the environment and choices were controlled and limited! So this is not likely a replicator that could survive in a primordial soup where the possible number of reactants would be huge, and pre-assembled 15 and 17 unit peptide fragments of the correct sequence would probably not be readily available.

If you will read the following response by Sarfarti to the article you refer to, it becomes evident that there is much more information in these 15 and 17 unit amino acid sequences than first meets the eye.

Lastly, of course you know the assumptions I worked from were not realistic at all (with the universe one trillion times larger than it is thought to be, and 1,000,000 planets of primordial soup surrounding each sun!)...

Originally posted by The Pixie

Athanasius

Am I correct in thinking you are the author of the OP?

Originally posted by The Pixie

Canines will always be canines because they all fall in the same clade, that is they all descend from the same common ancestor. If new species arise, they will still be canines because they will still have that common ancestor. In exactly the same way, they will still be mammals. Mammals is another clade comprising all animals that have a common ancestor rather longer ago. And yet there are numerous species of mammal....Something that puzzles me about "kinds" or barayim is how do you decide what counts as a kind. Is it cat, or is it felinae, or is it felid (see here for the differences)? If creationist was right, we should see some clear disconnect. In reality, there is no such gap, and this is why baraminology is so problematic - if the disconnect was there, baraminologists would have an easy time assigning each species to a "kind".

Originally posted by The Pixie

There are varying estimates for the numbers of animals on the Ark, but one such is 16,000 (from here). To get to an estimated 145,400 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, you require a process of (I assume) hypermutation, with new species appearing at the rate of nearly 29 new species appearing each year. I find it ironic that creationists have to assume such high rates of evolution.

Originally posted by The Pixie

Could you expand on this? Are you suggesting that the fossil record is sorted (within the flood stata) by size and density, so all the big heavy creatures are at the bottom, with the small, light ones on the top?

Another question that comes to mind is how radio-isotopes got sorted by the flood. Why is it that the more depleted samples of a certain isotope get sorted to the bottom, with the less depleted ones at the top. For all the different isotopes. Old Earth explains this very well, of course. The low stata are millions to billions of years old, so the radio-isotope has been deleted over long time. This cannot be the case is a flood scenario, where the stata are laid down over just one year. I would also wonder why stable isotopes were not sorted by the flood.

So I guess all the trees would be at the bottom of the layer, right? Then the really slow animals, like sloths and snails. Right at the top, we see the fast ones, like velocaraptor.

About what percentage of fossils are found out of the order predicted by an old Earth scanerio? How does that compare with your density, size and speed sorting hypothesis?

We don't equate barayim to the species level, if that is what you mean, but roughly speaking, to the family level. This does not preclude the idea of multiple species having been originally created within the same family, however.

Pix: There are varying estimates for the numbers of animals on the Ark, but one such is 16,000 (from here). To get to an estimated 145,400 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, you require a process of (I assume) hypermutation, with new species appearing at the rate of nearly 29 new species appearing each year. I find it ironic that creationists have to assume such high rates of evolution.

Ath: No, not at all. Your numbers reflect the aggregate number of new species for all the populations combined. When we look at each individually, on average only 9 new species have descended from each species on the ark from the time they left the ark to the present day. That's one new species every 484 years.

I'm not a biblical geologist, but I have read enough and contemplated enough to answer some of your questions. We do not at all attribute all strata or fossils to Noah's flood.

The Biblical geologic chronology is very complex. Fist we have the chaotic state prior to the formation of the earth. Then we have sediments that resulted from the rising of the dry land in one day during creation week. This would result in tremendous non-fossil bearing sedimentation. Next we have the post edenic, pre-diluvian period, with fossils laid down at a uniform rate. Many species may have become extinct prior to the flood, not been chosen as a representative species of their barayim, or may have become extinct shortly after the flood. Then we have the early flood stages, with migration of many species to higher ground, breaking of natural dams, etc. Then we have catastrophic plate tectonics, with possiblly entire crustal plates sinking and rising and tremendous volcanic activity. Then there is sorting during the process of sedimentation, and the rather uniform post flood period puntuated by many local geologic events such as flooding, the ice age, glacial movements and melting, river delta sedimentation, etc. You asked specifically about trees. This is also not so simple, with floating quake-bog like forests being destroyed in the flood, and the behavior of trees and broken trunks in flood water. Creation geology is a fascinating and complex field.

Originally posted by The Pixie

Athanasius

Do you (creationists) consistently do that? I suspect that you keep humans out of the great ape family, for example. Do you think the numerous families of beetles are all different barayims (is that the plural)?

If creationism was correct, it would be easy to determine barayim. There would be as much connection between ladybirds and scarab beetles as there was between people and daffodils. Okay, I accept that to have the same basdic shape, there would be many similarieties, but at the molecular level, for example in the non-coding DNA, we would expect the variation to show no connection. Many proteins can vary someout in their amino acid sequence without affecting their functionality. In a creationist scenario, we would expect them to either by the same for all species, or be random for all species. On the other hand, for common descent, we would expect there to be much more variation between species that were distantly related. The classic protein for this is cytochrome-c, which is present in funghi and animals (and I think plants and bacteria). Closely related animals, like chimp and man, have identical sequences, distantly related, like man and yeast have sequences that vary by something like 40% (by the way, experiments have shown that cytochrome-c from different species work perfectly well when swapped around).

Actually that would be 17, as there were only 8,000 species (and two of each) on the ark, so that is one new species every 262 years (assuming 4500 since flood) for each of the original. Which means a new species of some kind appearing every 0.03 years, or 1.7 weeks (i.e., 29 times a years).

We are both right about the maths. I think the total number of new species appearing each year is the interesting figure. You think that the rate at which new species evolve from the original is more important. Which every way you look at it, neither reflects what is observed. Species events are actually very rate, especially among vertebrates.

Okay. Can you state which layers were laid down by the flood and which were not? You might like to reference the old Earth model described here.

So which strata correspond to which event? Presumably flood geologists have got that far, as the events you describe would produce very different layers. The catastrophic plate tectonics would leave very clear evidence, with whole sections of strata miles(?) deep missing in places where the plates had vacated. The sedimentation process would give a continuous layer of rock that gradually varied from course-particle-based at the bottom to fine-particle at the top. Can you identify this layer in the geological column? Should be dead easy, if there is only the "rather uniform post flood" layer on top of that.

What theories have been proposed for the sorting of radioisotopes?