This news from EurekAlert, the online news service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), should be quite a challenge to creationists. As you know, creationists are forever claiming that evolution isn’t science because it can’t be tested and it makes no predictions. Further, they say that the dating techniques of fossils and geological features are not only flawed, but fossils are often arbitrarily declared to be old, and their fictitious age is then assigned to the rock layers where they’re found — a fraudulent exercise in circular reasoning.
Let’s take a look at some excerpts from New models predicting where to find fossils, which directly challenges all of that nonsense. The bold font was added by us for emphasis:
An international team of scientists have developed a way to help locate fossils of long-extinct animals. Using the estimated ages and spatial distribution of Australian megafauna fossils, the team from University of Adelaide in Australia and Kiel University in Germany built a series of mathematical models to determine the areas in the country most likely to contain fossils.
This is obviously different from the creationist view of things, which claims that wherever you dig, you’ll find the jumbled remains of all species that were drowned by Noah’s Flood 4,000 years ago, which was roughly 2,000 years after all species were created. How can the creationists ignore a challenge like this? EurekAlert says:
Published in PLOS ONE, the models were developed for Australia but the researchers provide guidelines on how to apply their approach to assist fossil hunting in other continents.
This is the published paper: Where to Dig for Fossils: Combining Climate-Envelope, Taphonomy and Discovery Models. You can read it online without a subscription, but we’ll stay with EurekAlert. They tell us:
“A chain of ideal conditions must occur for fossils to form, which means they are extremely rare — so finding as many as possible can tell us more of what the past was like, and why certain species went extinct,” says project leader Professor Corey Bradshaw, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide.
“Typically, however, we use haphazard ways to find fossils. Mostly people just go to excavation sites and surrounding areas where fossils have been found before. We hope our models will make it easier for palaeontologists and archaeologists to identify new fossil sites that could yield vast treasures of prehistoric information.”
Professor Bradshaw is obviously a Darwinist fool! If his model is a failure — and creationists know it must be — then Darwinism is doomed! Let’s read on:
To produce the species distribution models of these long-extinct animals, the researchers used ‘hindcasted global circulation models’ to provide predicted temperature and rainfall for the deep past, and matched this with the estimated ages of the fossils.
“What we did was build a probability map for each of these layers – the species distribution, the right sort of geological conditions for fossil formation (for example, sedimentary rocks, or caves and lakes), and the ease of discovery (for example, open areas rather than dense forest),” says Professor Bradshaw. “We combined each of these for an overall ‘suitability for fossil discovery’ map.”
Here’s one more excerpt:
“Our methods predict potential fossil locations across an entire continent, which is useful to identify potential fossil areas far from already known sites,” says Kiel University’s Professor Ingmar Unkel. “It’s a good ‘exploration filter; after which remote-sensing approaches and fine-scale expert knowledge could complement the search.”
A “good exploration filter”? It couldn’t possibly compare to the design filter developed by William Dembski and the Discovery Institute for identifying the handiwork of the intelligent designer — blessed be he!— see The Discoveroids and Their Magic Filter.
Well, dear reader, what will be the creationists’ response? Will they be boldly confident of their beliefs, and immediately denounce this work as doomed to failure because it’s hopelessly misguided by secular, naturalistic, evolutionist presuppositions? Or will they ignore the whole thing, hoping that it will just fade away? We shall see.
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