• theodorejb 2 days ago |
    Why did people assume that strata were deposited over eons and represent different ages? Many of these layers can be viewed in the Grand Canyon, and there is a notable lack of erosion between them. As I see it, these paraconformities are a strong evidence that there were not large gaps of time between the strata - they must have been laid down rapidly over a relatively short period (e.g. by a great flood).
    • 082349872349872 2 days ago |
    • pushcx 2 days ago |
      TalkOrigins.org has many detailed rebuttals to creationist lies. This one hybridizes two topics, or maybe it’s a garbled version of CD210.

      Grand Canyon: https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH581.html https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-science.html https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD210.html

      Erosion: https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD610.html https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD620.html

    • cossatot 2 days ago |
      It was assumed (correctly) by not long after Cowper's time that the strata were of different ages because of the different fossil assemblages in them, but of course no one had any data-derived numbers to put on the different eras.

      Furthermore, there is abundant evidence for erosion between many of the layers in the Grand Canyon, and they don't look anything like flood deposits, which are generally chaotic (unsorted, discontinuous bedding, etc) because of the high energy in the environment during deposition. Paraconformities indicate a cessation of deposition, which is often accompanied by erosion. They are 'para' conformities not because of the gap in time between the layers, but because there wasn't major deformation of the Earth's crust during that time (this means substantial tectonic activity), which would cause regional tilting of the lower (older) rocks. Throughout much of the middle of the country, there are young sediments deposited in a paraconformable relationship on top of rocks that are 400 million years old (making up the surficial bedrock of the region), because there hasn't been major tectonic activity in the region since those 400 million year old rocks were deposited (and indeed, for close to a billion years before that in much of the midcontinent).

  • PeterWhittaker 2 days ago |
    As much as I like poetry, why do we attribute to a poet that which we owe to a most observant and introspective canal digger who felt free to question dogma and received wisdom?

    William Smith deserves so much of our respect. Cf, e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Map_that_Changed_the_Wor..., which summarizes the most excellent book.

    • pushcx 2 days ago |
      We don’t. The article explains and credits the scientific research that the poet is referring to. And to answer your question a second way: because that research came decades earlier than Smith’s work.
  • alamortsubite 2 days ago |
    Slightly OT, but Cowper street in Palo Alto is named after William Cowper. So a fun shibboleth (and as OP points out) is that the name is pronounced KOO-per.
    • type_enthusiast a day ago |
      I grew up a couple streets over, and spent a lot of time on Cowper because a good friend lived there.

      Always called it Cow-per (like the livestock). So it's interesting to know I've been wrong all along!

  • sgt101 a day ago |
    My uncle believed in bible chronology. He believed it so much that he learned to program computers (to calculate and explore patterns in dates) and then built a series of web sites culminating in https://www.biblechronology.com/

    When he died he had assembled a team of people who worked on it. The site is now suffering from a bit of rot (the videos don't serve anymore) but he has been dead for six years so I suppose that's no surprise. I don't know if his "gang" still maintain it, but someone must be paying for the domain and hosting I suppose.

    The time and energy he committed to this are astonishing to me, he was a talented man - he had the option to be a partner at Arthur Anderson (progenitor of Accenture) before becoming a CFO at a series of small banks and building societies. His career was firmly on the up, he worked for one of the precursors of what became RBS in the 1980's. If things had gone differently perhaps he would have muzzled "Fred the Shred" and we'd all be the richer, especially his kids. But, at some point a conviction and faith gripped him and he gave up everything for his bible project. He died penniless.

    I wonder, because I don't understand, because I just see numerology and over interpretation, does it mean he was wrong? I think so, but perhaps that's just my faith talking.

    • jasperry 14 hours ago |
      Speaking as someone who has been where your uncle is (edit:was), I don't hear it discussed much how tempting religion is to scientific/nerdy types, or anyone with a thirst for knowledge.

      If you believe your religion's scriptures are an infallible set of truths handed down from above, then you've got the secrets of the universe in your hand and all you have to do to expand your knowledge is deduce correctly from that. It's an addictive hobby, and much easier and less messy than real science, where there's no final authority and you have to work for years to make a small discovery in one area and even then you might fail. Isaac Newton himself got caught up in that sort of thing.

      • geye1234 9 hours ago |
        The reverse is also true. If you're a nerdy type, physics' power of prediction can lead you to think the whole of reality could be explained in principle by physics. But there's of course no good reason for making this leap. Physics explicitly limits its scope to the material, so cannot be used as an argument that the material is everything.
      • pstuart 7 hours ago |
        Most of us want our life to have meaning, and religion delivers it like a high powered drug -- it truly is the opiate of the masses.
      • fellowniusmonk 6 hours ago |
        As someone who went to Seminary in my misspent youth I can't agree more.

        Theology is a huge nerd snipe. Isaac Newton is my go to example for how it's a fixation with a extremely vicious cycle. There are whole manifestations of OCD that are just focused on religion as the core OCD fixation.

        If forced to choose between owning a dishwasher, washer, dryer, AC, etc.... I would give up every moment of theology training, argument, etc. and keep the tech.

        A big part of the difficulty with theological training is most people are graduating from schools that push hermeneutics that encourage tortured logic of the text. Ultimately training people primarily not to identify truth claims or evaluate propositions but to tie intellectual knots and take primrose paths that fall apart with any holistic scrutiny. Just read the papers coming out and you can easily see that people are graduating with PHD's in mental gymnastics.

        All the good I've brought into the world, all the lasting things I've done and they have not had anything to do with theology.

        My parents were academics who got nerd sniped by theology as well, the few times they stepped outside of theology they did so much good but all that time spent in theology just left them penniless and, ultimately, dying terribly early.