From: news@fedfil.UUCP (news)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Still Waiting For Answers
Date: 11 Apr 92 06:10:28 GMT
Organization: HTE

In article <1992Apr6.165807.6390@digi.lonestar.org>, jtisdel@digi.lonestar.org (Michael Tisdel) writes:
> In article <2709@fedfil.UUCP> news@fedfil.UUCP (news) writes:
> >In article <1992Mar31.210126.4682@ac.dal.ca>, hyde@ac.dal.ca writes:
> [..bandwidth savings..]
> >"It has already been explained to me"?  By who?  God??  By somebody
> >disinterested, i.e. whose entire life hasn't been wasted persuing "science"
> >which is entirely based upon this false axiom of uniformity, as yours has?
 
> i.e.  if the refutation comes from a scientist, then you automatically reject
> it?  What, then, would you accept?  A coalminer?  [apologies to coalminers]

As opposed to a "scientist" of Hyde's stature, yes.  I'd have no apriori reason
to assume the coal miner was lying, if nothing else.

> >In recorded history, i.e. since the foundation of Rome, the arctic regions
> >have
> >always had the temperature which they have now, and the standard hypotheses
> >which you use can provide no reason for this ever having been different within
> >millions if not billions of years.  
> 
> Two questions:
>   (1) Do you mean to state that there is no recorded history prior to the
>       foundation of Rome?  What about _The Mahabarata_, _The Illiad_, _The
>       Odyssey_, the writings of the Hitite empire, the writings of the
>       Egyptian Kingdoms, the Babylonians, the Sumerians, even the Isrealites?
> 
>  J. Michael Tisdel              | 

I really did a bad job of phrasing that one, didn't I...  What I sort of meant
to say and more or less figured everybody would infer was that during any time
from which we have any written references to mans ventures into the northern
sections of Europe and/or Asia, and I normally take that as within
the last 2500 years or so.  Within that time, the northern reaches of the 
world have always been as they are now.  At no time during all this time has
the weather over northern Siberia ever been such as to allow herds of elephants,who need huge quantities of grass and leaves at all times;  ten months of the
year, the Liakhovs and Novo sibirsk are a frozen hell.

Forget Rome.  We have a pretty good picture of the life of the steppe nomads
at this point (Grousset's "Empire of the Steppes" for one), and we know
that their various empires (which we know anything about) go back to a few
hundred years before Christ, and the climate of Mongolia, Siberia, Manchuria[
etc. has always been more or less what it is now.

The reasons for this are known to school children.  The polar areas are cold
because the suns rays reach them much more obliquely than they do lower regions,especially in winter.

Nonetheless, we know for sure that giant herds of creatures which absolutely
require a much warmer climate inhabited these arctic areas only a few
thousand years ago.

Bill Hyde actually has no problem with this part of the picture (he might
try explaining it to Bishop and all these people who keep arguing for 
cold adaptation of mammoths).  The problem lies in a rationale.  Hyde is
claiming that these regions just sort of were warmer three or four thousand
years ago...  no particular reason, that's just the way it was.

The time period we're talking about is just beyond the fringe of the times
which we know about, around 3500 years ago or so.  Many mammoth remains
carbon date to about that age.  We know the reason why Novo sibirsk is cold
now, far far too cold for giant herds of giant herbivores, and we know
that within all the time we know of right up to this fringe I mentioned
that the weather of Novo Sibirsk and the Liakhovs has always been as it
is now.  

We also know that standard science posits the notion that all change
in geological forms occurs over huge expanses of time, and is inperceptable
to earth creatures living at any one time.

We further know that the minute changes which might be caused by such things as
the very slow precessions would not either act in such an enormous way or
in such an instantaneous way.  The habitat of these arctic areas changed
permanently and totally in the blink of an eye, as it were, as if somebody
had thrown a switch.

Hyde says this just sort of happened, without any violent or unusual cause.

I claim that's like believing in the tooth fairy, the easter rabbitt, Santa
Claus and all the rest.  Whatever caused this throwing of the switch had
to be a cause at least as grandiose as the change it effected.

This is described in Worlds in Collision.

Ted Holden
HTE

-- 
HTE
bear