Replies to Origins TV

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Episode 3: Evidence For a Young World - Part 1 with Dr. Russell Humphreys

Spiral galaxies would have wound up a lot more if the universe was old.
Before reacting to this item, I should note that Humphreys himself did a presentation with a trampoline analogy in the "Starlight and Time" episode, claiming that the earth was in a timeless zone during which the light from the galaxies propagated to earth. So in his model, the universe is young in earth time, but not in time of the distant galaxies. Why aren't they all wound up? The second error in his presentation is that stars in the edge of a galaxy rotate slower than inner stars. That is incorrect and the discovery initially in the 1930s by Fritz Zwicky and later in the 1960 by Vera Rubin started the Dark Matter hypothesis. The rotational speed stays flat throughout the galaxy but the rotational period does increase due to the larger orbits. Lastly, the spirals are side effects of increased density due to the elliptical orbits of the individual stars as shown in this picture:

(insert picture). There is also an animation available that shows how the spirals stay as they are while the stars in the galaxy rotate (and move in and out of the spiral arms)
Magnetic fields of galaxies indicate a young universe.
I did not understand the claim here. He states that magnetic fields follow the spiral arms of spiral galaxies. This might be the case, but how is that relevant?
Comets crumble too quickly.
That would be true if all comets would be short-period comets, but that is not true. Many comets (like the 1997 Hale-Bopp comet) have an orbit of many thousands of years or follow a hyperbolic path and pass the sun only once, never too return. Humphreys creates a straw man of the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt. The Oort cloud is not necessarily feeding the Kuiper belt, both are sources for comets. The Kuiper belt is generally a source for shorter-period comets while the Oort cloud is often a source for long period or single instance comets. His dismissal of comet-like bodies in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud is comical. Before the Hubble space telescope, Pluto was the only object known in the Kuiper belt. Now, as he admits himself, we've found "some" (over 100,000) asteroid-like bodies but no comets. Comets are generally sized in the order of tens of meters. What telescope does he propose to view those bodies at a distance of 30 to 50 AU? The same goes for the Oort cloud, it is at nearly a light year distance (50000 AU) so a direct observation of Oort cloud bodies is not possible. The existence of the cloud has been inferred through the trajectories of long-term and single instance comets -- just like the existence of the Kuiper belt was inferred through trajectories of small period comets before the HST had been launched.
Sea floor mud accumulates too fast
The sea is not salty enough.
These two items will remain without reply. I know too little about geology to give a decent comment on this one.
The earth's magnetic field is losing energy too fast.
This would be an interesting argument if the rate of losing the energy would be constant and if there was no process that would reverse it. Oh wait, he claims that the polarity changed every couple of days during the Genesis flood. Talking about shooting yourself in the foot. Yes, we know that the magnetic field has changed polarity in the past, we've found the evidence for that, but if he claims that this happened every couple of days during the Genesis flood, I would like to see some evidence that supports this rate. I would also like to know what mechanism was due to the polarity reversal if the Genesis flood had anything to do with it. Let's put things in perspective. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that the flood did happen and that it was a world wide phenomenon. The Mariana trench is the deepest oceanic trench at nearly 11 km. The highest mountain peak, Mount Everest, lies at nearly 9 km. So let us be generous and assume that the earth was covered in a 20 km thick layer of water. The outer core lies at a depth of approximately 2900 km. How is 10 billion cubic km of water going to impact the core significantly enough to change the polarity of the magnetic field multiple times every few days if there is more than 900 billion cubic km of mantle on the core already?
Mercury's magnetic field is young.
One more item that I will leave mostly untouched. I know too little about the geology of Mercury to give a decent reaction. The only shot from the hip that I would like to bring up, is that it is not that unlikely that a process started not to long ago that started the decline of the magnetic field of Mercury. That does not imply yet that Mercury formed at the start of that process.
"Mitochondrial Eve" lived 6000 years ago, not 200000.
Humphreys claims that this finding has been published but sites no source. I doubt this statement. I think he confuses Mitochondrial Eve with the latest female ancestor of all humans. Mitochondrial Eve is the latest female ancestor of all humans in the female line. To visualize this: two cousins, children of two brothers, have their latest female ancestor in their grandmother, the mother of the two brothers, but for the latest common ancestor in the female line (mother of the mother of the mother etc) you might have to go back a lot more, maybe even to Mitochondrial Eve. The last estimate I heard was that Mitochondrial Eve indeed lived in Africa around 200,000 years ago and that Y-chromosomal Adam (the last common male ancestor of all humans on the male line) lived in Africa between 237,000 and 581,000 years ago (extended significantly due to a Y-chromosome discovery in 2013).
DNA in amber of 135 million years ago should have decayed.
Take note that Dr. Humphreys says that the DNA of the insects in the amber could be reconstructed, not that it was present in non-decayed form. Anyone who has an idea of how DNA is sequenced knows that this possibility is very real. It is a multi-layered process of alignment which would take us to far to go into.
Permian era bacteria have been revived so it could not be 250 million years old.
A cursory search indicates that this is likely a contamination with modern bacteria. The genetic similarity with modern bacteria is too large for the "revived" bacteria to be old.
Neanderthal DNA has been reconstructed.
This is true, I've personally been to a lecture of the lead investigator of the project and like item 9, this is clearly viable.
Dinosaur blood cells.
This is a common creationist's misrepresentation. Mary Schweitzer discovered some red residue in fossilized blood vessels of a T.rex bone and wondered if those could be residues from blood cells. No actual cells have been found. Read Mary Schweitzer's own words: "Clearly these structures are not functional cells. However, one possibility is that they represent diagenetic alteration of original blood remnants, such as complexes of hemoglobin breakdown products, a possibility supported by other data that demonstrate that organic components remain in these dinosaur tissues."
Not enough stone age graves.
This one is really silly. It supposes that bones are always preserved and that nothing acummulates on top of the dead bodies. For comparison: how many birds have died in the last 1000 years. Can you scoop up all those bird bones in you back yard?
Written history is too short.
His arguments seem to get sillier as he goes along. Yes, writing is only a few thousands of years old. How does that imply in any way that the earth or the universe are as well? The statement that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon men were "smarter than us" and thus should be able to write is a complete non-sequitur.

Introduction to the "Replies to Origins TV" blog

I have been requested by my creationist brother to view a series on YouTube with an open mind and to record my observations. It's quite an undertaking, but I'll give it a shot and indeed, try to keep an open mind. OTOH, it would not be a fruitful undertaking if my reflections would be a private endeavor, that's why I opted to make a blog series out of it. The video series is named "Origins TV" and can be viewed online via this playlist (which seems to be a repost from Blip TV). I have no idea if and when I will have caught up to the nearly 100 episodes and it may happen that the time between two replies will be long. This is a spare time project and I do not want to be pinned down to any schedule or obligation.

First, a caveat. I am not a scientist. I am just a Joe Blow with a keen interest in some sciences, most prominently astronomy/cosmology and (evolutionary) biology (with an emphasis on molecular biology). I know little about geology and paleontology so my comments on those items will be sparse, if any, when those items arise.

That said, the series purports to give scientific reasoning for the creationist's position, so my reflections will be from a scientific point of view. This view means that to explain a phenomenon, a hypothesis needs to be made and this hypothesis should lead to testable predictions, most specifically, predictions that could falsify the hypothesis. While testing the hypothesis, one should not cherry-pick data but the hypothesis should be capable of explaining all data points.

Science is a methodologically naturalistic endeavor. This does not imply that the supernatural realm is denied by science, it just means that the methodology of science cannot take the supernatural into account. As an illustration of this, if e.g. miracles were allowed within science and many different scientists repeated the same experiment with the same result, that would still not imply that the next experiment could not yield a wildly different result because of a miracle. So if at any time an appeal to the supernatural is made as an explanation for a phenomenon, I will not regard that as evidence at all. It isn't.

My reflections will be very note-like and will likely not make a lot of sense unless you actually view the episodes. A link to the episode in question will be included in each post.
I could not determine when the episodes aired or what the order of airing was. Knowing this could have helped to set a context in which some statements are made but lacking this, I will just use the order from the YouTube playlist. I know that the YouTube playlist is not in the airing order because there are some references to other episodes early in the playlist. The playlist seems to be clustered on guests. Given some slides, it seems most episodes aired somewhere in the mid to late naughts.

The order of blog postings is that newest posts are first on the main page, so I will add a link to this post from each of the blog posts I will be making. This post is a living document and will be edited to include links to the various posts in the order that I make them.

Happy reading. Comments are welcome. They are moderated, just to keep spam out, but I will likely not deny any comments that are made on the subject, however critical or condescending it might be. Don't worry, I've got quite thick a skin. If you start a flame war, please put on your asbestos suite, because the flames will be returned your way! ;-)

The list of replies:

Episode 1: Starlight and Time with Dr. Russell Humphreys

How light got here fast
Near/far galaxy similarity
Red shifts
the "Pioneer anomaly"

Dr. Humphreys claims that God made everything as water first and created an expanse in the midst of the waters. He does not explain how all other elements in the periodic system except for hydrogen and oxygen came to be, just that the water "below" the expanse was transfered into the earth. I can only assume that this is a roundabout way of supernaturally creating the elements in the periodic system.

He also claims that there is still water "above" the expanse and even quantifies it as a mass, 20 times greater than all galaxies combined. He does not provide any evidence for this notion (let alone for the quantification of its mass) and does not explain what is keeping such a large mass from crushing the universe in itself. It seems just a hypothesis to make his model work, but he does not offer a method to assert or falsify it.

His presentation is of a geocentric cosmology and even though he rushes to say that the earth is "not necessarily exactly in the center of the universe", it is claimed to be "near that". I wonder what he means with "near the center". The earth goes around the sun at appr. 150 million km and the complete solar system goes around the center of the milky way at appr. 26.000 light years (2.5 x 10¹⁷ km). Cosmologists claim that all galaxies (with the exception of close galaxies that are on a collision course) recede from each other with no apparent center, but even if we let that slide, given the place of the earth in the galaxy, we can hardly pin the earth as the center if there are around 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone, many of which have planets. Why should we single out the earth? If Dr. Humphreys wants to claim a geocentric cosmology, he should first give evidence of a center to the universe in the first place, then give evidence that our galaxy is in that center and then show the significance of the earth in that galaxy. He's done neither.

Humphreys uses the biblical verses that say that God "stretched out the heavens like a curtain" to indicate the expansion of space-time. That is a little less than honest IMO because most of those verses, including the one he presented (Isa 40:22) make the analogy with a tent. The Hebrew word used there (אהל, o'-hel) is pretty unambiguous and lines up clearly with the common cosmological idea of the bronze age, where the earth was flat and a half spherical (tent-like) dome was above that and held the heavenly bodies (think of the famous Egyptian artwork where the air-god Shu holds up the sky bu forming a dome around the earth).

His trampoline analogy is interesting, but take note that the earth crossing a "timeless zone" is because it passes a Schwarzschild radius of a black hole! All matter would collapse under those circumstances that he so conveniently calls "the timeless zone". The water, the land and the plants of the third day and earlier would not have survived this ordeal, even if all of space-time is stretched enough afterwards so matter could exist.

Humphreys talks about the farther away galaxies looking similar to the closer ones. What is he smoking? Has he actually looked at the various Hubble deep field images? The farther away galaxies are not discernible as spirals or ellipticals, quite the contrary. They are generally smaller and more often irregular. He should visit the Galaxy Zoo project which is a citizens project to morphologically classify galaxies and till now, 10 million galaxies have been classified. I think Humphreys suffers from a severe condition of confirmation bias.

His explanation of the red shift phenomenon is consistent with the science. It is indeed the expansion of space-time and not the Doppler effect that causes the red shift. He claims that this stretching of space is explaining the slowing down of the Pioneer. If the stretching would be significant enough (at these distances) to make the "trampoline dent" less shallow to explain the smaller measurement of Pioneer's distance, it would be overcome tremendously by expansion itself and the Pioneer would recede a lot faster than is currently witnessed.

Pioneer should be a good lesson for people who want to insert God in a scientific knowledge gap. The slowing down of the Pioneer has been a puzzle for decades and if we would have taken the "God did it" route, we would not be able to explain it. Luckily, we didn't so in July 2012 the anomaly has been explained completely as "radiation pressure". Pioneer is losing heat to space at the opposide side of the sun and this is causing a slight but measurable slowing down of the probe. To put it in perspective, the speed that the probe is currently traveling at is more that 43000 ^km/_h and the slowing down rate is appr. 1 ^km/_h over 10 years.

What did I miss?

There was no mention of the cosmic microwave background and more specifically, his hypothesis does not explain the correlation between the cold spots in the CMB (as measured by COBE, WMAP and the Planck satellite) with the galactic super clusters. At least the data from COBE was known in the late naughts.
He did not explain the speeding up of the space-time expansion which was a known phenomenon since the late 90s.

Episode 4: Evidence For a Young World - Part 2 with Dr. Russell Humphreys

Links:
Introduction to this series
URL to the video
Please read the introductory blog to the series (linked above) first if you haven't yet done so to get the correct context for this blog.

This episode had quite a few time fillers. They went at length on the professional history of Dr. Humphreys and rehashed the "salt in the ocean" problem that he mentioned as evidence number 5 in the previous episode. I googled the issue a little and found that this problem has had a reply by Glenn Morton in 1996, way before his 2005 article in at icr.org which mentions this problem. Morton stated that a lot of output mechanisms for sodium have been overlooked in the 1990 Austin and Humphreys paper and that if those mechanisms are quantified and added to the mechanisms that were mentioned, the sodium input and output are within margins of error of each other. Without the error bars the sea should become less salty.

Like last time, I am incapable of lending merit to any one of the viewpoints, but Morton claimed in his open letter to Austin and Humphreys that the reflection was very quiet and I must say that I could not find a rebuttal on-line.

Still on the subject of sodium in the ocean, Dr. Humphreys goes at length on an anecdote of a young geochemist that showed confirmation bias and would not accept the creationists evidence on the salinity of the oceans but rather would rely on the opinion of the paleontologist Stephen J. Gould. Now isn't that the pot calling the cattle black? Humphreys is a champion of hand waving old-earth evidence (as will be made very clear shortly) or whole-sale ignoring evidence which contradicts his own world view. He dismissed the evidence for the origin of comets in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, he does not mention for a minute the cosmic microwave background and it's significance in the Big Bang model and he does not mention Mary Schweitzer, the original investigator of the T.rex blood cell remnants.

Finally he goes into the two subjects that he wanted to present. Carbon 14 showing a maximum age for old material and Helium leakage from zircon crystals. He starts with the notion that lots of matter like coal, wood, shells, bone, oil and CO2 contain C-14. With some of these, especially wood and CO2, I wonder why that is an issue, but I digress. He then states that the rebuttal to this is that even untainted diamond contains C-14. Now this is a claim worth looking at. If diamond, which formed during millions of years deep in the earth, would contain significant amounts of C-14, it would prove the diamond young because, as he clearly states in his presentation, C-14 has a half-life of only 5700 years so it is unsuitable for showing dates extending a few tens of thousands of years. I googled the subject and found that there is quite a bit of criticism that can be had on the process which was used to determine the C-14 content. The biggest giveaway was that diamonds that were not processed for dating showed a lower C-14 content than processed diamonds, a clear indication of contamination. As a side note, Humphreys says that the C-14 date is 58,000 years "conventionally", but if you correct for "wrong assumptions" the age is less than 10,000 years. What assumptions? How do you correct for them? If you want an example of hand waving evidence that Humphreys so much argues against, here you are.

What's more, Humphreys (and Austin for that matter) make a grave thinking error in presenting this evidence. It is not evidence for a maximum age of the earth, but for a minimum age. Let's grant, for the sake of argument, that the measured values are correct, then we have an extremely young piece of diamond and we should investigate how it would be possible to get such a young diamond through natural processes (the supernatural can't be proven scientifically but we do not exclude the possibility a priori). This, however, does not imply that the earth itself is young. Taylor and Southon use diamonds to measure instrument background radiation and get a C-14 rate comparable to the unprocessed diamonds by the RATE team (abstract at doi.org). Those diamond indicate a minimum age of several tens of thousands of years. One swallow does not a summer make.

Dr. Humpreys then goes on to another piece of evidence: helium leakage from zircon crystals. Zircon repels lead during its crystallization but does incorporate uranium. This decays to lead in a multi-step process and releases alpha particles (helium ions) during each step. This helium tends to leak out of the zircon with a rate that is dependent on the temperature. Humpreys made a graph and plotted two scenarios, the leak rate for the different temperatures given a 6000 year process and the leak rate given a 1.5 billion year process. His team also ordered an independent lab test for the leak rate of the helium given various temperatures and the plot for those leak rate lines up perfectly with the 6 Kyr process.

The first observation we need to make is that the data points are all in the higher temperature regions, to the right of the scale of the predictions with little overlap of the predicted values. One wonders if there is some data cherry picking going around here. It's worth mentioning here that (according to an evaluation of the RATE study) the zircon crystal samples have been taken at a depth of 750 m and 1490 m respectively, and both have associated temperatures that are below the range of what the lab study evaluated. I haven't seen the actual reports of either their zircon study or their lab test so I can hardly make an argument either way, but people who have make some reservations as to the scientific completeness of the study, especially regarding the lack of error bars and the lack of evaluating excess helium that seems to be common to the source region of the zircon crystals (see talkorigins.org).

The interesting part is that Dr. Humpreys acknowledges that the U-Pb dating of the same crystals show a 1.5 Gyr date. Once again, he employs some hand waving by saying that "God must have sped up the uranium decay during the past 6000 years". First, if the helium leak rates can be evidence that "God sped up the U-Pb decay", the reverse works just as well. We could just as well say that the U-Pb dating shows that "God must have slowed down the helium leaking during the past 1.5 billion years". His choice for the former is typical for starting with the answer and looking for confirming evidence while disregarding contrary evidence. But let's assume that God did speed up the U-Pb decay (and let's ignore that this would be contrary to the secular equilibrium that we see in intermediate daughter products), the sped up decay would equally increase the released energy for the decay and all oceans should be vaporized right now. The fact that they haven't shows that the 1.5 Gyr date is more likely than the 6 Kyr.

After the break there is nothing substantial in the episode, in fact it is just an advertisement for a few creationists' books on relevant subjects.

Episode 2: Center of the Universe with Dr. Russell Humphreys

Links:
Introduction to this series
URL to the video
Please read the introductory blog to the series (linked above) first if you haven't yet done so to get the correct context for this blog.

In this episode Dr. Humphreys take a good amount of time to explain the red shift phenomenon. I have no issues with this, apart from the fact that it could have been more clear that the red shift is an indication of the receding of an object (relative to us) due to the expansion of space-time. It is not a measurement of distance but a heuristic to distance due to Hubble's law. Not that Humphreys state the opposite but that could have been made more clear.

He presented a histogram showing that galaxies tend to cluster around specific rates of red shift (and hence distance). His explanation is that there are "spherical shells" of galaxies around our own galaxy and that those shells are not present from other positions in the universe. This would put the Milky Way galaxy and hence, the earth in a special place and likely the center of the universe. Again, Dr. Humphreys hastens to say that it's not necessarily the earth that is at the center, but that our Milky Way galaxy is near the center, within a million light years.

The first paper that noted the clustering was by William Tifft in 1973 where he recorded the red shift of 200 galaxies. This was repeated by Guthrie and Napier in 1992 with 83 galaxies and in 1997 with 250 galaxies. Am I alone in finding the sample set extremely low?

The first thought that crossed my mind when I heard the presentation was: has he taken clusters and super clusters into account, especially since the data seems to concern very local galaxies (within appr. 20 Mly)? It seems I wasn't too far off. The notion of clustering as a cause for redshift periodicity was part of a 1987 proposal to explain the phenomenon.

Aside from that, I mentioned the low sample set. It might have been that in the 1970s there was not that great a sample set to use, but now there are at least two. There's the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) that contains 220,000 good quality spectra of galaxies (380,000 objects in total) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) which contains the spectra for over a million objects. In 2002 Hawkins et al used the 2dFGRS data and found no clear quantization of redshifts and in 2005 Tang and Zhang used both the 2dF and the SDSS data and found no clear periodicity.

Judge for yourself. The SDSS data has been plotted into a movie which does a 3D fly through of the galaxies. Can you spot the shells? I can't.

Dr. Humphreys used the balloon analogy to show why cosmologists do not suppose we are at the center even though further away galaxies recede from us faster (as the Hubble law states). He did a pretty poor job of explaining the concept. The balloon analogy works better when a finite but unbounded universe must be demonstrated, but for the apparent centrality of galaxies, it doesn't work as well. A better way to visualize this is to use two dot patterns, one of which is expanded. The dots represent galaxies and even though this is a two-dimensional representation, it is not hard to imagine a three-dimensional analogy as a loaf with raisins that expands though the working of baker's yeast.

As the image demonstrates, if space-time itself expands, from the viewpoint of any galaxy, the close neighbors do not recede as fast as the further galaxies. This confirms perfectly with what is actually witnessed.

Humphreys did not present that much evidence for a centrality in the Universe and what he presented does not corroborate with the data that we have. There is no reason to assume the existence of a centrality in the universe and even if their is one, there is no data to confirm that the earth is anywhere near such a center and enough data to give the impression that it's not.