A very long email (masters degree in biology), doesn't agree with most scientists
A LONG EMAIL FOR YOU TO RESPOND TO, I POSTED TWO FOLLOW UPS BELOW:
I am rather curious, how many of you started out believing in a religion,
but didn't really know much about it? Or believed in a religion and later
became atheist? Why do most atheist groups hold the theology that there is
no god but concentrate most of their arguments towards Christians, and Jews
when there are thousands of cult religions out there and many other
religions? I just want to clarify that I am a research scientist in
biology working on a double doctorate at the moment (DDS/PhD). My BS was
in Biology with a high concentration in molecular biology and a chemistry
minor. My Masters is in biology as well. Basically, my life has been
centered around two studies, the study of religion and the study of
science. I do believe that there are many many religions out there that
make outrageous claims and contradict scientific FACT. However, I do
believe that there are religions out there that science does not
necessarily disprove either or vise versa. I think a huge problem is that
many people take on the aspect of one extreme or the other. In other words
you're either for pure religion and what it says, or pure science and what
it says. Being a researcher I have been trained sufficiently to question
pretty much everything I come across. I question religion and science. I
have found that Christianity holds very strong points but I think is
easily misinterpreted by atheist’s theologians and the like. This sadly
draws weak support to their claims without even studying the materials at
hand in depth. The same can be true for the Christian who doesn't study
science. Ignorance may be bliss for many, but I beg to differ. I felt my
calling was to study both and try to make a connection to end the war on
the 'brainwashed' stereotype. From my studies, I have concluded that I am
more of a creationist than an evolutionist. Don't get me wrong, because I
am Christian it does not mean I disregard what science has to offer with
theories, facts and data. One thing I am blessed with is an open mind
that allows me to see past what is already understood or held true and to
put in my own fresh ideas that helps break down the walls.
This is what I believe: I believe in Christianity, the God of Christianity, the creation
story, and the bible in the literal sense, evolution in the standpoint of
genetic drift to a degree, adaptative radiation, microevolution and
geographical barriers (I am trying to keep this as simple as possible for
those who may not understand biology). As you may be aware, there are two
creation stories in the bible. This I am well aware of. However, it does
not contradict like many people think it does, but actually makes more
sense and thus provides supporting biblical evidence that the world is
older than 6000 years. I personally believe it is much older but many
Christians don't realize the two stories: the creation of the universe
and the world, and later the creation of the garden (simple explained
version, I could write a whole page on the whole ordeal). There is a time
frame there that isn't recorded which makes the age of the earth variable
even in the biblical sense. Another thing I believe in is Noahs ark.
Strangely it seems the creation story and the Noah’s ark story are the
two leading causes that people use not to believe in the bible, both from
genesis. The story of Noah’s ark holds many truths and evidence: No
living organism on the earth is older than 4600 years (and many can be
older than that) The oldest trees are 4600 years, the sahara desert with
the rate of spreading has only covered enough ground for a 4600 year time
frame, the oldest coral reef is 4600 years old. This is where science
plays in the bible, in Genesis it states that Noah should collect every
animal of it's KIND. Not every species. Many people disregard this and
see it as every animal in the world, when it is actually only land
dwelling animals of its kind that breathes through lungs, this doesn't
include insects who breath through slits on their exoskeleton, worms
through skin diffusion etc. This allows supporting evidence for
adaptation and changes in animals over the years after this point in
history. In the past thousand years we have taken wolves and bred them
into thousands of different types of dogs with probably 100 pure breeds,
(just ball parking it). So why is it so hard to think that 8 people
formed the 9 distinct geographical races of the world? Modern genetics
show how, following such a break-up of a population, variations in skin
color, for example, can develop in only a few generations. There is good
evidence that the various people groups we have today have not been
separated for huge periods of time. [Worldwide variations in mitochondrial
DNA (the "Mitochondrial Eve" story) were claimed to show that all people
today trace back to a single mother (living in a small population) 70,000
to 800,000 years ago. Recent findings on the rate of mitochondrial DNA
mutations shorten this period drastically to put it within the biblical
time-frame. See L. Lowe and S. Scherer, "Mitochondrial Eve: The Plot
Thickens," Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 1997, 12(11):422-423; C.
Wieland, "A Shrinking Date for Eve," CEN Technical Journal, 1998,
Next question is: What Is a "Race"?
There is really only one race -- the human race.. Clearly, though, there
are groups of people who have certain features (e.g., skin color) in
common, which distinguish them from other groups. We prefer to call these
"people groups" rather than "races," to avoid the evolutionary
connotations associated with the word "race."
All peoples can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. This shows that
the biological differences between the "races" are not very great. In
fact, the DNA differences are trivial. The DNA of any two people in the
world would typically differ by just 0.2 percent (J.C. Gutin, "End of the
Rainbow," Discover, November 1994, pp. 71-75.). Of this, only 6 percent
can be linked to racial categories; the rest is "within race" variation.
The variation in DNA between human individuals shows that racial
differences are trivial. This genetic unity means, for instance, that
white Americans, although ostensibly far removed from black Americans in
phenotype, can sometimes be better tissue matches for them than are other
Anthropologists generally classify people into a small number of main
racial groups, such as the Caucasoid (European or "white"),3 the Mongoloid
(which includes the Chinese, Inuit or Eskimo, and Native Americans), the
Negroid (black Africans), and the Australoid (the Australian Aborigines).
Within each classification, there may be many different sub-groups.
Virtually all evolutionists would now say that the various people groups
did not have separate origins. That is, different people groups did not
each evolve from a different group of animals. So they would agree with
the biblical creationist that all people groups have come from the same
original population. Of course, they believe that such groups as the
Aborigines and the Chinese have had many tens of thousands of years of
separation. Most believe that there are such vast differences between the
groups that there had to be many years for these differences to develop.
One reason for this is that many people believe that the observable
differences arise from some people having unique features in their
hereditary make-up which others lack. This is an understandable but
incorrect idea. Let's look at skin color, for instance.
One reason for this is that many people believe that the observable
differences arise from some people having unique features in their
hereditary make-up which others lack. This is an understandable but
What about SKIN COLORS?
It is easy to think that since different groups of people have "yellow"
skin, "red" skin, "black" skin, "white" skin, and "brown" skin, there must
be many different skin pigments or colorings. And since different chemicals
for coloring would mean a different genetic recipe or code in the
hereditary blueprint in each people group, it appears to be a real
problem. How could all those differences develop within a short time?
However, we all have the same coloring pigment in our skin -- melanin.
This is a dark-brownish pigment that is produced in different amounts in
special cells in our skin. If we had none (as do people called albinos,
who inherit a mutation-caused defect, and cannot produce melanin), then we
would have a very white or pink skin coloring. If we produced a little
melanin, we would be European white. If our skin produced a great deal of
melanin, we would be a very dark black. And in between, of course, are all
shades of brown. There are no other significant skin pigments [Other
substances can in minor ways affect skin shading, such as the colored
fibers of the protein elastin and the pigment carotene. However, once
again we all share these same compounds, and the principles governing
their inheritance are similar to those outlined here. Factors other than
pigment in the skin may influence the shade perceived by the observer in
subtle ways, such as the thickness of the overlying (clear) skin layers,
the density and positioning of the blood capillary networks, etc. In fact,
"melanin," which is produced by cells in the body called melanocytes,
consists of two pigments, which also account for hair color. Eumelanin is
very dark brown, phaeomelanin is more reddish. People tan when sunlight
stimulates eumelanin production. Redheads, who are often unable to develop
a protective tan, have a high proportion of phaeomelanin. They have
probably inherited a defective gene which makes their pigment cells
"unable to respond to normal signals that stimulate eumelanin production."
See P. Cohen, "Redheads Come Out of the Shade," New Scientist, 1995,
In summary, from currently available information, the really important
factor in determining skin color is melanin -- the amount produced.
This situation is true not only for skin color. Generally, whatever
feature we may look at, no people group has anything that is essentially
different from that possessed by any other. For example, the Asian, or
almond, eye differs from a typical Caucasian eye in having more fat around
them. Both Asian and Caucasian eyes have fat -- the latter simply have
What does melanin do?
It protects the skin against damage by ultraviolet light from the sun. If
you have too little melanin in a very sunny environment, you will easily
suffer sunburn and skin cancer. If you have a great deal of melanin, and
you live in a country where there is little sunshine, it will be harder
for you to get enough vitamin D (which needs sunshine for its production
in your body). You may then suffer from vitamin D deficiency, which could
cause a bone disorder such as rickets.
We also need to be aware that we are not born with a genetically fixed
amount of melanin. Rather, we have a genetically fixed potential to
produce a certain amount, and the amount increases in response to
sunlight. For example, you may have noticed that when your Caucasian
friends (who spent their time indoors during winter) headed for the beach
at the beginning of summer they all had more or less the same pale white
skin color. As the summer went on, however, some became much darker than
How is it that many different skin colors can arise in a short time?
Remember, whenever we speak of different "colors" we are referring to
different shades of the one color, melanin.
If a person from a very black people group marries someone from a very
white group, their offspring (called mulattos) are mid-brown. It has long
been known that when mulattos marry each other, their offspring may be
virtually any "color," ranging from very dark to very light. Understanding
this gives us the clues we need to answer our question, but first we must
look, in a simple way, at some of the basic principles of heredity.
Each of us carries information in our body that describes us in the way a
blueprint and specifications describe a furnished building. It determines
not only that we will be human beings, rather than cabbages or crocodiles,
but also whether we will have blue eyes, short nose, long legs, etc. When a
sperm fertilizes an egg, all the information that specifies how the person
will be built (ignoring such superimposed factors as exercise and diet) is
already present. Most of this information is in coded form in our DNA [Most
of this DNA is in the nucleus of each cell, but some is contained in
mitochondria, which are outside the nucleus in the cytoplasm. Sperm
contribute only nuclear DNA when the egg is fertilized. Mitochondrial DNA
is inherited only from the mother, via the egg.].
To illustrate coding, a piece of string with beads on it can carry a
message in Morse code. The piece of string, by the use of a simple
sequence of short beads, long beads (to represent the dots and dashes of
Morse code), and spaces, can carry the same information as the English
word "help" typed on a sheet of paper. The entire Bible could be written
thus in Morse code on a long enough piece of string.
In a similar way, the human blueprint is written in a code (or language
convention) which is carried on very long chemical strings of DNA. This is
by far the most efficient information storage system known, greatly
surpassing any foreseeable computer technology.6 This information is
copied (and reshuffled) from generation to generation as people
The word "gene" refers to a small part of that information which has the
instructions for only one type of enzyme, for example.7 It may be simply
understood as a portion of the "message string" containing only one
For example, there is one gene that carries the instructions for making
hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in your red blood cells. If
that gene has been damaged by mutation (such as copying mistakes during
reproduction), the instructions will be faulty, so it will often make a
crippled form of hemoglobin, if any. (Diseases such as sickle-cell anemia
and thalassemia result from such mistakes.)
So, with an egg which has just been fertilized -- where does all its
information, its genes, come from? One half comes from the father (carried
in the sperm), and the other half from the mother (carried in the egg).
Genes come in pairs, so in the case of hemoglobin, for example, we have
two sets of code (instruction) for hemoglobin manufacture, one coming from
the mother and one from the father.
This is a very useful arrangement, because if you inherit a damaged gene
from one parent that could instruct your cells to produce a defective
hemoglobin, you are still likely to get a normal one from the other parent
which will continue to give the right instructions. Thus, only half the
hemoglobin in your body will be defective. (In fact, each of us carries
hundreds of genetic mistakes, inherited from one or the other of our
parents, which are usefully "covered up" by being matched with a normal
gene from the other parent
To give an example of the speed time frame: The blue Fugates weren't a
race but rather an excessively tight-knit family living in the Appalachian
Mountains. The patriarch of the clan was Martin Fugate, who settled along
the banks of Troublesome Creek near Hazard, Kentucky, sometime after 1800.
His wife, Mary, is thought to have been a carrier for a rare disease known
as hereditary methemoglobinemia, which we'll call met-H.
Due to an enzyme deficiency, the blood of met-H victims has reduced
oxygen-carrying capacity. Instead of being the usual bright red, arterial
blood is chocolate brown and gives the skin of Caucasians a bluish cast.
Hereditary met-H is caused by a recessive gene. If only one of your
parents has this gene, you'll be normal, but if they both have it, there's
a good chance you'll be blue.
None of Martin and Mary Fugate's descendants would have been blue had they
not intermarried with a nearby clan, the Smiths. The Smiths were
descendants of Richard Smith and Alicia Combs, one of whom apparently was
also a met-H carrier. According to family historian Mary Fugate, the first
known blue Fugate was born in 1832. Because of inbreeding among the
isolated hill folk--the Fugate family tree is a tangled mess of cousins
marrying cousins--blue people started popping up frequently thereafter. A
half dozen or so were on the scene by the 1890s, and one case was reported
as recently as 1975. They were quite a sight. One woman is said to have had
lips the color of a bruise. – one hundred years and we observe a
phenotypically different group of individuals
Also there is a group of people that have two giant claw like toes for
feet called the ostrich people.
With all of this being said, is it still hard to believe that Noah’s ark
is a possibility? I still want to go back to my original question and ask
what made you atheist etc. Hope we can continue to talk because, as you
might see from just a partial piece of a topic, I have a lot to say.
1. Did you really just write that whole email for us?
2. Would you join our forum and discuss your email with others if I posted
1.yes I did.
2.I would love to discuss my email with others as well as potential others
under a few conditions: my faith isn't bashed....i.e. having people saying
that I'm gay for my beliefs, Jesus is a homo, christians are closeminded
etc, people stay on the subject at hand (it is easy for someone to talk
about one topic and then bombard their response with potentially endless
amounts of other comments acusations, questions, theories etc. Obviously
I have a life outside of the computer world, it takes time for me to type
and feel that I may be overwhelmed with too many emails to respond. I
also have control over what I say and request that any comments that I
state should not be taken out of context or used in an abusive manner that
may threaten my educational/oocupational endeavors. With this said, how do
I join and how fast do people respond? Obviously in a day I cannot go
through more than a few comments and have appropriate time to read, obsorb
think and respond.
Warning: the user drdoubleu has confounded abiogenesis with evolution.
Well then tell me, how did you get to evolution withiout starting with abiogensis? Panspermia? Seriously, I think you need to learn the dogmatic trend of evolution and know that it didnt' start with fish in the sea, you have to start before that, remember according to the theories of science the earth was rocks pulled together by their own gravity, super heated cooled etc.....but where is life on a super heated sterile environment with limited chemical elements? See....It's flawed.
Now you didn't seem to respond directly to my statement other than to imply that Carbon-14 dating is inaccurate enough to make 4.5k years look like 11k or 43k. Carbon dating can be used to find very young (geologically speaking) ages and can be calibrated based on known ages. It has.
Furthermore, your derision for estimates could just as easily be set upon your estimates of the ages of the living things we've talked about.
I did respond directly. In sum, the estimates made on the ages of these trees as you believe were based on fossils near the trees and not actually the trees themselve. No ring core samples were taken and when they were it was found that they could not be older than 4000 years give or take 100 years based on growth cycles of trees. I based my answer solely on a measurement that we find the most accurate today, counting the rings. It isn't exact but it gives you a very very close rough estimate. You can't count 4000 rings and say that the tree that is still living is 11,000 years old. That means for 7,000 years it went on a hunger strike and forgot to go through its normal growth cycle.
Tree resin turns into amber over millions of years through polymerization. Just because we don't know the exact details of how these things come together doesn't mean that they can't be dated accurately.
Fossils (such as amber) are dated by which strata of rock they are found in. A stratum's age can be determined quite accurately using radiometry (isotopes other than C-14).
Millions of years and polymerization, that is interesting. That means you would find more trees and sap over more periods of time. But you don't. You find it through one sedimentary level. Actually to tell you the truth what they don't tell you is that when they find a lot of these trees they are still standing upright and somehow go through layers of sediment that supposedly took a few million years to lay down. That is impossible. Even so, to take millions of year, amber wouldn't be in the massive chunks we find it in, it would be micro to macroscopic due to weathering and dispersal from breaking apart in rain, trampling etc. radiometry isn't much more accurate. One of my geologist friends pulled a little nasty prank on someone who did radiometry. He took clay and formed it into a rock with layers that made it look like it came from the Grand Canyon, hardened it and sent it out to two different places. One he said he found at the top of the canyon, the other he said he found near the bottom about 50 feet up in the wall. Guess what? they came back stating with their measurements that the rock was as old as the supposed ages of those layers of ground...the one said it was the age at the top of the canyon the other said it was at the bottom. The conclusion....it's still not accurate and based on a person's biased notions of how old certain layers are.
If I find a forest where the oldest tree is 200 years old, should I automatically assume that the forest didn't exist 200 years ago? Another possibility is that the trees live on average about 200 years. If the oldest tortise is 175 years old, that doesn't mean that 175 years ago, something wiped out all the tortises.
No, the basis of this would support evidence that the old climax community started its rise 200 years ago and the old canopy is now becoming the new climax community. Not all trees have the same average life span. The measurements I'm basing my statements on are species that can long withstand 5000 years of life. Interesting to know that after I stated why they aren't 11,000 years old you are now backpeddalling and saying that they can only be 200 years old. Which one is it? You had belief in something that I showed wrong so then you try to take what I showed and disproved it on the basis of another tree species? No offense, I just was entertained. The tortoise is irrelevant, we are basing it on older living models. We know trees can live over 5000 years old from other fossils and such, but what we dont' see is those same trees today being older than 4600 years old which draws support to my beliefs.
I invite you to read the section referred to by this link, directly addressing coral reef ages.
Given, these estimates of ages are dealing with complex phenomena (sp?), but the age of a reef gives no indication as to the time of a cataclysm.
That's interesting, BUT you didn't see the huge problem here: The guy you are reading that is writing this doesn't have sufficient education to make claims. meaning he's not a doctor or holds anything higher than a bachelors at best from what I see. Plus his scientific facts if you will are based on articles that have been outdated for on average 25 years. If we haven't found new scientific data in a 25 year gap we're screwed in regards to learning. I think the newest article was from 1993....still that's way too old. That's like this one professor I had that told the class that the results on fluorosis (darkening of teeth decay of bones due to fluoride) was lies.....based on a journal from 1947!!!
I'll try to find the quote later on the anchors, it literally is anchors, but they say they are pagan worship rocks or some crap like that....also in regards to the water, you should either read the bible or I can find a site for you. I've run out of time for today.