Bob Enyart
[Originally published as part of the extensive RSR’s List of Not So Old Things]
Opals Can Form in “A Few Months” And Don’t Need 100,000 Years
A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert¹, observed that,
“scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands… Not true.”
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A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world’s opal is found, reported on the: “new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model.”
More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins, stone, petroleum, canyons and gullies, and even guts, all below). Regarding opals, Darwinian bias led geologists to long ignore possible quick action, as from microbes, as a possible explanation for these mineraloids. For both in nature and in the lab, opals form rapidly, not even in 10,000 years, but in weeks. See this also from creationists in a geologist’s article and a nuclear chemist’s blog.
Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin’s Birds?
Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species.
In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. “If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years,” Dr. Spetner asks, “why did Darwin’s Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?”
Blue Eyes Originated Not So Long Ago
Not a million years ago, nor a hundred thousand years ago, but based on a peer-reviewed paper in Human Genetics, a press release at Science Daily reports that,
Research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
Adding the Entire Universe to our List of Not So Old Things?
Based on March 2019 findings from Hubble, Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and his co-authors in the Astrophysical Journal estimate that the universe is about a billion years younger than previously thought.
Then in September 2019 in the journal Science, the age dropped precipitously to as low as 11.4 billion years!
Of course, these measurements also further squeeze the canonical story of the big bang chronology with its many already existing problems including the insufficient time to “evolve” distant mature galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, enormous black holes, filaments, bubbles, walls, and other superstructures. So, even though the latest estimates are still absurdly too old, regardless, we thought we’d plop the whole universe down on our List of Not So Old Things!
After the Soft Tissue Discoveries, now Dino DNA
When a North Carolina State University paleontologist took the Tyrannosaurus Rex photos to the right of original biological material, that led to the 2016 discovery of dinosaur DNA, So far researchers have also recovered dinosaur blood vessels, collagen, osteocytes, hemoglobin, red blood cells, and various proteins.
As of May 2018, twenty-six scientific journals, including Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Bone, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, have confirmed the discovery of biomaterial fossils from many dinosaurs! Organisms including T. Rex, hadrosaur, titanosaur, triceratops, Lufengosaurus, mosasaur, and Archaeopteryx, and many others dated, allegedly, even hundreds of millions of years old, have yielded their endogenous, still-soft biological material. This list is constantly growing, you can check out the collection of RSR pages.
Rapid Stalactites, Stalagmites, Etc.
A construction worker in 1954 left a lemonade bottle in one of Australia’s famous Jenolan Caves. By 2011 it had been naturally transformed into a stalagmite. Increasing scientific knowledge is arguing for rapid cave formation (see below, Nat’l Park Service shrinks Carlsbad Caverns formation estimates from 260M years, to 10M, to 2M, to it “depends”). Likewise, examples are growing of rapid formations with typical chemical make-up (see bottle, left) of classic stalactites and stalagmites including:
- in Nat’l Geo the Carlsbad Caverns stalagmite that rapidly covered a bat
- hundreds of stalactites at Australia’s less than 100 year old zinc mine at Mt. Isa.
Most Human Mutations Arose in 200 Generations
From Adam until Real Science Radio, in only 200 generations! The journal Nature reports The Recent Origin of Most Human Protein-coding Variants. As summarized by geneticist co-author Joshua Akey,
Most of the mutations that we found arose in the last 200 generations or so.
This is the same number previously published by biblical creationists. Another 2012 paper, in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Eugenie Scott’s own field) on High mitochondrial mutation rates, shows that one mitochondrial DNA mutation occurs every other generation, which, as creationists point out, indicates that mtEve would have lived about 200 generations ago. That’s not so old!
Footnotes:
- From Allan W. Eckert’s book The World of Opals, p. 17
