K/T Nightmare

[YEC]

Living fossils such as the Coelacanth, Tuatara, Ginko tree, Wollemi Pine, Crocodiles and Horseshoe crabs do an enormous amount of damage to the evolutionary theories. These currently living species appear almost identical to their fossil counterparts. The question is, how did these “living fossils”...animals and plants ...survive the many millions upon millions of years with virtually no change? Perhaps they could last a few hundred thousand years unchanged, but according to evolutionary theories certainly not millions upon millions of years.

Some evolutionist will argue that these species found a special “ecological niche” and despite the enourmous amount of mutations that they say would have occurred naturally in those millions upon millions of years they were some how not exposed to the pressures presented by normal evolutionary change.

According to the old earth uniformitarian theory the whole world was upset in an iridium nightmare when a big time major world wide ecological “niche” changing event happened after a meteorite slammed into the earth, ...but, some how, species such as the Coelacanth, Tuatara, Ginko tree, Wollemi Pine, Crocodiles and Horseshoe crabs apparently weren't effected at all by the catastrophic event.
Despite this catastrophic event it is amazing that the evolutionist still claim that these living fossils conformed to their very own particular ecological niche. Some how they were able to pass through this world wide niche changing catastrophic event at the K/T boundary. It was at this time, 65 million years ago, that the evolutionist claim that 75% or so of all species from a wide range of taxonomic groupings on the land, in the skies and under the seas were wiped out forever.
It’s interesting to note that each of the above mentioned living fossils are claimed to have pre-dated this catastrophic event by tens of million years with virtually no change prior to or after the catastrophic event.

Certainly after an event such as the supposed mass extinction mentioned above, the changed environment, disappearing food chains on land and in the seas, tsunamis crashing into continents, fire scorched landscapes, sun blocked “winters” and their temperature changes would have caused the tempo of evolution to increase all over the surface of the globe, in the air and under the seas. This increased evolutionary tempo would have allowed for the selection of new beneficial mutations while scrambling to create new dramatically varied species that thrived in the new environmental biomes created on the land, in the air and under the seas.

Despite the argument that time coupled with mutations, and the normal pressures of evolutionary change should have been more than enough to introduce major morphological change into the living fossils. Considering the above, the event surrounding the K/T boundary and the massive change to the earth and the insignificant changes to the Coelacanth, Tuatara, Ginko tree, Wollemi Pine, Crocodiles and Horseshoe crabs make the likelihood of living fossils impossible and unfounded.

To perplex the issue even more, besides the mutational/natural selective changes mentioned above that should have occurred during the last 65 million years there is yet another mechanism that the evolutionist claim introduces major morphological changes into animals. This mechanism is Genetic Drift. Apparently in the last 65 + million years this process also produced no significant change where according to their theories a considerable change should have occurred to the Coelacanth, Tuatara, Ginko tree, Wollemi Pine, Crocodiles and Horseshoe crabs as their niches were upset.

The evolutionist say that change does happen. Shortly after the catastrophic event that supposably happened 65 million years ago at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary, in a period of less than 50 million years a four legged wolf like animal Andrewsarchus (or what ever the latest evolution scenario is) is claimed to have evolved into a sleek sea creature. In this time period Andrewsarchus lost its legs as they turned into flippers, developed a spout with a new breathing system that contained special valves for shutting the nostrils, echo location system with a transmitter and receiver, blubber and other whale like features.....all while the living fossil Crocodile watched from the swamp as the Tuatara peeped his head out of his borrow under the shade of a the Ginko tree and Wollemi Pine. Meanwhile, the Horseshoe crabs scurried along the bay floors and the Coelacanth swam by in the oceans and didn't change outside of their normal genetic variations ...despite the morphological mutations and genetic drift that would have occurred over the millions upon millions of years as the species felt the massive environmental change to the fauna in it’s biome at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary that the evolutionist tell us happened 15 million years prior.

The existence of the Coelacanth, Tuatara, Ginko tree, Wollemi Pine, Crocodiles and Horseshoe crabs are great example of creation. It shows that animals reproduce after their “kind” and don’t really change in the fashion in which the evolutionist claim. It seem as if the DNA and genetic code for the Coelacanth, Tuatara, Ginko tree, Crocodiles and Horseshoe crabs has been resistant to change through out it’s history....as expected.

It is just one more indication that scientist should view the geological column and the animals trapped in the fossil record as contemporanious rather than seperated by long time frames.

[Jose]

Unfortunately, YEC, I'm afraid I have to agree with Yarr. I gave you the information you asked for, but your response was based on only a small part of it. You have chosen to ignore the rest of the information. Perhaps, you didn't read what I wrote...I'll offer some evidence:

...enough more that, with mutations occurring at random, each base is likely to have been hit ...

Oh, did I mention that thses mutations are RANDOM?

This is interesting. Part of the logic is that mutations occur at random, and your rebuttal is that mutations occur at random. Of course they occur at random! That's how genetics works.

As for your other concerns, it seems pretty clear to me that we can't get much further until you answer the question I posed for you: what is a mutation? How do they work? We need to be talking about the same things, if we are going to discuss them in any meaningful way. Without your definition of what you think a mutation is, I cannot even begin to figure out what you mean when you say:

It's very obvious to me that mutations really can't add up over time.

One more reason...the mutations MUST occur again and again and again and again and again...on and on..in the same or very near DNA strand.

What you've said here doesn't fit with our understanding of genetic inheritance. So, I conclude that you are thinking of something else when you say "mutation."

[Jose]

if you know about the effects of the supposed meteor-earth collision, you would know that deep-sea fish would be effected. first of all, the supposed impact and massive explosion would have created a massive cloud of some sort of gas that surrounded the whole earth and totall blocked the sun AND massively polluted the air. all of the plants would have died, so oxygen would be sacrificed. but plants only provide 5% of the breathable air in the atmosphere. the other 95% is provided by chemosynthesizing phytoplankton that reside on the surface of the ocean. in order for the plankton to undergo chemosynthesis, they require the balance of nitrogen and oxygen to remain at 78% to 21&.(the remaining 1% is a combination of four other gases.) this massive polution would have undoubtedly changed the balance of oxygen and nitrogen. this would have killed off an extremely large portion of the plankton, completely disrupting the food chain. the small fish and the whales that eat plankton would starve and die, and the small fish that hang around the heat vents would die as well from lack of other fish "hanging around" the vents for a heat source.
So you see, no matter how remote the environment of a certain organism is, an event that the meteor collision would have required an evolutionary change, and the fossils prove that no change occured.

Welcome to the fray, axeplayer! I admire your logic here, with the numbers and everything. The difficulty is that the evidence (ie, what we find when we look at God's Creation itself) is that the meteor impacted the earth, and that some organisms died while others did not. Your hypothetical calculation is interesting, but is based on unstated assumptions of the size and effect of the meteor, and that it had uniform effects worldwide. Your logic also includes the incorrect assumption that the things at the vents live on fish from elsewhere. They don't. Riftia pachyptyla doesn't even have a mouth or anus! It is filled with bacterial symbionts.

Rather, the question is: what was it about the surviving organisms that enabled them to survive? We can't just do a calculation, and say that it was impossible--because God's Creation shows us that it happened. These creatures exist. There are fossils of similar organisms from before the impact, contemporaneous with fossils of organisms that no longer exist. So, the evidence is pretty clear: lots of things were alive before the impact, a bunch of 'em died out, but some survived. Obviously, there must have been reasons. Let's figure out what they are, rather than invent reasons that the organisms cannot exist.

There is, of course, an alternative explanation. It is described by the YECs who subscribe to it as the "appearance of age" model. It goes like this: God created everything just as described in Genesis [or as described in Terry Pratt's Thief of Time (i.e. re-creating the world every instant)], but with all of these cute little booby traps to catch the scientists. He put all of the isotopes into the rocks, all of the strata on top of one another "just so," and all of the fossils (and the iridium band--we mustn't forget the iridium band) in just the right places to make the earth wholly indistinguishable from one that is really 6 billion years old and on which life arose without a guiding hand, and on which evolution occurs exactly as we have demonstrated. According to this model, it's not really like this, it's just that God made it look like it. Pretty sneaky!

[Nyril]

first of all, the supposed impact and massive explosion would have created a massive cloud of some sort of gas that surrounded the whole earth and totall blocked the sun AND massively polluted the air.

So what? The creatures live at the bottom of the ocean, the energy from the sun doesn't reach them. All the heat in their system is provided by deep sea vents. Secondly, they're at the bottom of the ocean. Why does a change in the atmosphere hurt them?

all of the plants would have died, so oxygen would be sacrificed.

This is false. Already in this thread we've mentioned one plant that survived, and regardless, why would they all die. I'm not saying you didn't lose a good deal of plants, I'm saying that not all of them died, as you contend.

but plants only provide 5% of the breathable air in the atmosphere.

I'd heard closer to 40%, but without a source, we're really just shouting numbers at eachother.

the other 95% is provided by chemosynthesizing phytoplankton that reside on the surface of the ocean.

Do you mean photosynthesizing?

in order for the plankton to undergo chemosynthesis, they require the balance of nitrogen and oxygen to remain at 78% to 21&.(the remaining 1% is a combination of four other gases.)

Wow. I guess the world's supply of plankton dies every time it rains, a volcano erupts, or someone releases a bit of methane into the atmosphere. This is insanity, the plant requires no special mix of gasses other then the presence of carbon dioxide. Nitrogen serves no special function as far as photosynthesis goes, and is largely irrelevant in that degree.

this massive polution would have undoubtedly changed the balance of oxygen and nitrogen

I don't think so. The ratio of oxygen to nitrogen would likely remain the same, you'd just have more soot in the air.

this would have killed off an extremely large portion of the plankton, completely disrupting the food chain. the small fish and the whales that eat plankton would starve and die, and the small fish that hang around the heat vents would die as well from lack of other fish "hanging around" the vents for a heat source.

The fish at the bottom of the ocean have their own little climate area. You could still kill everything above them, and it wouldn't matter. Bacteria and other creatures grow on the deep sea vents, things eat them, and things eat the things that eat those things. What you're suggesting is that the ecosystem requires fish from the surface of the planet to swim to the bottom of the ocean to be eaten.

So you see, no matter how remote the environment of a certain organism is, an event that the meteor collision would have required an evolutionary change, and the fossils prove that no change occured.

Sorry, you're going to need to do better then that to make your case.

[Corvus]

Er, I may be missing something here, but what you, YEC, are saying is that evolution demands that should a very large comet smash into the earth, every single creature should be evolving in an effort to survive, otherwise they would perish (since if there was no risk of perishing, there would be no need to evolve). What I am having trouble understanding is that your alternate hypothesis is that creatures stay the same, so presumably things like the deep sea critters presumably were able to survive anyway, without change, when that comet hit earth.

According to the old earth uniformitarian theory the whole world was upset in an iridium nightmare when a big time major world wide ecological “niche” changing event happened after a meteorite slammed into the earth

I am thinking you don't believe a meteorite ever hit the earth. What do you mean according to the old earth uniformitarian theory?Wouldn't this be a matter of pure history, and not evolution? It seems to me that historians, geographers, evolutionists and every other branch of science are against you. It's also strange to see you using scientific evidence in the form of statistics for how balanced the atmosphere should be while you are trying to disprove other scientific evidence. If science is wrong on radiometric dating, evolution, tectonic drift, natural history, how can we trust you when you take advantage of chemistry or biology (when arguing about genetic inheritance) to prove your own argument?

[gluadys]

With all due respect to Jose and Nyril--who both make good points about deep sea habitats--we also need to remember that many of the survivors of the K-T extinction lived in much the same habitat as the dinosaurs. Among them were many terrestrial plants, mammals, crocodiles, and birds (themselves a branch of the dinosaur clade).

So life continued, somehow, in the very places the dinosaurs died.

[Corvus]

With all due respect to Jose and Nyril--who both make good points about deep sea habitats--we also need to remember that many of the survivors of the K-T extinction lived in much the same habitat as the dinosaurs. Among them were many terrestrial plants, mammals, crocodiles, and birds (themselves a branch of the dinosaur clade).

So life continued, somehow, in the very places the dinosaurs died.

You might know that I haven't actively participated in a C vs E debate for some time, so I am going to go out on a limb now. I am not challenging you, just posing a general question in the hope somebody could answer it. If a meteorite demands evolution in order for species to survive, what physical changes would we expect to see in the surviving species? They can only be physical changes because this is how we know they are "living fossils" any other changes, not immediately obvious to the eye, would be unknown to us.

[gluadys]

You might know that I haven't actively participated in a C vs E debate for some time, so I am going to go out on a limb now. I am not challenging you, just posing a general question in the hope somebody could answer it. If a meteorite demands evolution in order for species to survive, what physical changes would we expect to see in the surviving species? They can only be physical changes because this is how we know they are "living fossils" any other changes, not immediately obvious to the eye, would be unknown to us.

Good question, Corvus. But your basic assumption is wrong. A meteor impact does not demand rapid and obvious evolution for a species to survive.

It does present species with a new and challenging environment. And some species which cannot adapt to this environment will die out. Some other species will adapt rapidly and survive because they did. And some species will survive in spite of the fact that they did not change rapidly. These apparently had what it takes to survive the catastrophe without needing to change in any obvious way.

Now exactly why a major environmental catastrophe affects each group of species differently is a puzzle scientists are still working on. Obviously it would take a very detailed knowledge of both the species and the environment. And that's not the easiest thing to get from 65 million years ago.

One thing it does tell us, however, is how important diversity is to the survival of life. If species did not react differently to environmental pressures like this, we could lose all of life to a single catastrophe.

[Corvus]

You might know that I haven't actively participated in a C vs E debate for some time, so I am going to go out on a limb now. I am not challenging you, just posing a general question in the hope somebody could answer it. If a meteorite demands evolution in order for species to survive, what physical changes would we expect to see in the surviving species? They can only be physical changes because this is how we know they are "living fossils" any other changes, not immediately obvious to the eye, would be unknown to us.

Good question, Corvus. But your basic assumption is wrong. A meteor impact does not demand rapid and obvious evolution for a species to survive.

It does present species with a new and challenging environment. And some species which cannot adapt to this environment will die out. Some other species will adapt rapidly and survive because they did. And some species will survive in spite of the fact that they did not change rapidly. These apparently had what it takes to survive the catastrophe without needing to change in any obvious way.

Oh, I am quite aware of that, glaudys. I was looking at YEC's argument from an alternate perpective by following it to it's logical conclusion. If, as he states, a change is necessary to combat such an event, what change? I would be interested in knowing what we should expect if we should expect something (which, as you pointed out, is not necessary).

Edit: I may be simplifying this question a little too much by not asking what we should expect specifically from those creatures, since, correct me if I am wrong, evolution only builds on what is already available, gradually, so we would never see a pair of arms on anything that has a pair of wings. My understanding of this is limited, so someone else could probably explain it better.

[Jose]

You are entirely correct, Corvus, that evolution builds on what is there, and cannot invent new things all of a sudden. It is therefore likely that survival of the meteorite catastrophe would not lead to the appearance of new structures that we would be able to detect. I like your question, though, because it offers a way to understand the expectations of the non-evolutionists. This would be really good to have, since it is clear we are debating about very different processes.

Gluadys has made a very important point here. Species that already had the flexibility to handle climatic variations would be more likely to survive without change than would species that have limited ability to acclimate to changes. Currently, Pikas are in this latter category. Unlike other mammals, they have lost the ability to cool themselves metabolically. In hot weather, they hide in their burrows. As the climate warms, and their environment becomes hotter in the summer, they are expected to have to spend more time hiding, and less time gathering they grass they need to survive the winter. Many other species will be able to adapt to global warming, but these adorable critters are expected to become extinct.

Survival of an environmental catastrophe depends on how greatly the catastrophe affects your particular microenvironment, which must be variable, depending on the nature of the catastrophe and the nature of the local environment. Survival also depends on your species' own particular pre-existing genetic makeup, genetic variation, and particular characteristics. As gluadys so accurately pointed out, mammals made it in the same surface world that killed the dinosaurs (except for the dinosaur variants that we now call birds).

I am reminded, here, of a classic misconception: that species evolve in order to survive. It doesn't work that way. There's no "in order to" about it. Individual animals can't sit around thinking about what mutations would be useful in another million years or so, and then cause those mutations to occur. Mutations occur at random, at their own pace. If a species happens to have the right genetic makeup at the time of environmental change, then some of the individuals are likely to survive the change. Perhaps, if a mutation occurs early enough in an environmental transition, then a few individuals might make it through, But more often than not (as inferred from the fossil record, which shows mostly species that are no longer with us), the genetic makeup of a species does not happen to include the characteristics that allow it to survive the environmental change, and everyone dies.

If you assume that an environmental catastrophe affects all environments equally severely, and if you assume that survival is impossible without mutation, and if you assume that environmental change causes mutations to occur, then you may develop the notion that the K/T impact (or the Permian extinction, or any other) should either have killed everything, or caused all of the survivors to look differently very quickly. But, these are not valid assumptions. The first is common-sense, but easily thrown out on close inspection. The second and third are based on a misconception about how mutations and evolution work. If we take away these assumptions, then it's much easier to see how what happened did happen.