The Roraima Pollen Paradox

"Credentials please. If you are going to start postulating and defending novel hypotheses that the scientists who had all the data never considered then we need to evaluate your professional capacity to do so." We are 4 rounds in, and now you're demanding I show credentials? Howcome whenever you first challenged me to this debate, you didn't warn me that I'd have to have a science degree? You knew from the start that my position required defending "novel hypotheses", so you are being incredibly disingenous. "Thus, we have two studies of naturally occurring microfossils reduced to graphite at 500 C and an experimental study showing that microfossils become more graphitized at 500 C." The microfossils retained their morphology and no graphitization was detectable without the aid of spectroscopy analysis, and even then, this spectroscopy analysis (called Raman analysis) was inconclusive.[8] That's a long way from becoming reduced to graphite. There is no reason to assume pollen is unable to remain "well-preserved" in metamorphosed rock. Indeed, the fact that in the experimental heating of microfossils, they retained their morphology with no observable graphitization, demonstrates pollen is capable of being well-preserved in metamorphosed rock. "The quartz bands are the coarse portion of graded bedding" They are not limonite bands though. Your entire argument on this point was based on the idea that limonite indicates contamination via water, but there is no limonite in this quartz bedding, so your argument is moot. "The palynological assemblage has not yet been matched conclusively against any known suite, a fact which is not surprising in view of the distance from control sections of known age and the highly endemic character of the flora of today" If you want to argue the pollen is contamination, you're going to have to explain why only a small range of pollen types is in this rock, when many types of pollen are living in the area. What's so magical about this pollen? It's more reasonable to think this pollen was fossilized in the rock at a time when there were fewer types of pollen living in the area. Futher, this position doesn't require assuming pollen can survive seeping through hundreds of feet of rock to end up "well-preserved" when discovered. "Ultrasonic cleaning removed the pollen, thus it is either a surface contaminant or the rock is more porous than suggested" Misleading. The paper doesn't say all the pollen could be removed with ultrasonic cleaning, suggesting that the ultrasonic cleaning only removed some of the pollen that happened to be sticking out of the rock. Besides, how in the world can one claim to have removed all the pollen from a peice of hornfel rock, since hornfel rock is not transparent? You can only say the rock is "practically barren" of pollen if you crumble it to little peices, in which case, you're exposing the pollen fossils deep within the solid rock to the ultrasonic cleaning process which can then dislodge it with it's high pressure. "[If contamination] be granted, it would have been operative for a long period, and a mixed suite of spores and pollen should be expected." "No description of the pollen assemblage(s) is available so we can't evaluate this statement." The text is clearly insinuating that a mixed suite of pollen was not found, indicating the pollen was fossilized when the rock was created. "These are undercuts in a cliff, not caves." No relevant difference. "All that is required is water percolating down through a joint or crack in the rock, carrying pollen with it. This isn't even implausible" Yes it is. It's implausible that pollen survived a treck through hundreds of feet of rock to be found by scientists and declared "well-preserved." "Now let's examine a few conspicuous absences: The lack of plants[...] If we have conditions where pollen can easily be preserved we would expect to find the host plants preserved as well." Not true at all: "[P]ollen are normally retrieved from their host sediments as disjunct entities, separate from the original parent plant mean[ing] that their natural affinities are often obscure."[10] "Stainforth's second sentence of his paper is, "Individual authors will doubtless publish detailed stratigraphic and palynologic accounts of the occurrence in due course." No further work was done. Stainforth himself published up until 1982 and lived until 2002 but never published another word on this pollen" That's because, as he admitted, he was unable to resolve the paradox. This is due to his bias in favor of Evolution. Since I don't care about Evolution, I can easily resolve the paradox: Evolution was wrong when it predicted no fossil pollen in Precambrian rock!Summary: "Pollen heated to the temperatures experienced by the Roraima hornfels is converted to graphite. This has been documented in [a] laboratory experiment[...] so it must be contamination." Absolutely false. The experiment did not convert the microfossils to graphite, in fact, the only way one could detect the presence of any graphite at all was via high-tech spectroscopy, and even then, this analysis was inconclusive. "Pollen is removed by ultrasonic cleaning demonstrating that it isn't bound within the rock but is on surfaces or bedding planes. This demonstrates that it is not part of the rock. Again, contamination." False again. The paper didn't say all the pollen could be removed this way; further, it is not even possible to determine if all the pollen is removed without crumbling the rock into peices, which would involve dislodging any genuinely fossilized pollen anyways! "The absence of any plant fossils mitigates against the pollen being produced at the time that the rock was formed." Fossil pollen is rarely found with it's host plant, so this is just another unfounded claim. "The lack of any further work demonstrates that the pollen from the Roraima hornfels did not have an explanation worthy of further publication. This suggests a mundane explanation rather than one which would have led to a paradigm shift in geology and biology at the very least." This doesn't make sense. The paper ended with an admission that no resolution of the paradox could be found. The fact that this verdict was hasn't been overturned for almost 50 years doesn't mean a mundane explanation was found; it demonstrates the exact opposite! [8]http://vsgc.odu.edu... (page 3)[9]http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu...[10]http://www.ucl.ac.uk...