In the widely-read online science magazine Quanta we recently had a story claiming that some scientists have finally solved a problem that has long baffled them: what is called the faint young sun paradox. The story is an example of what we may call a "Solved It!" story. Such triumphal-sounding stories tend to have the characteristics listed below:
Why should we be very doubtful that this Guess Graph is correct? There are several reasons:
- One of the papers the Quanta article links to tells us that "the atmospheric CO2 concentration of the Archean [very early] Earth is highly uncertain." A NASA page says, "“Atmospheric and surface conditions during the first billion years of Earth’s history are poorly understood due to the scarcity of geological and geochemical evidence."
- When you do a Google image search for "evolution of earth's atmosphere," you get a large variety of graphs from scientific publications, and quite a few of them tell a very different story than told by the Guess Graph in the Quanta Magazine article. Some of these graphs show carbon dioxide reaching a peak about three billion years ago, and then steadily declining (rather than steadily declining over the past 4.5 billion years).
- The main evidence given in the Quanta article to back up the Kasting claim that the early Earth may have been 70% carbon dioxide is a reference to a speculative paper that presents a speculative model. You don't substantiate one speculative model by appealing to another speculative model.
- In a 2013 article Kasting stated that the faint young sun paradox is "one of those problems that will never really be 'solved,' because the parameters for early Earth — particularly the surface temperature — will always be negotiable."
- After stating this about the faint young sun paradox: "To resolve the paradox, Kasting (1993) suggested that high concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, either CO2 or perhaps methane, prevented the oceans from freezing over," a scientific paper stated this: "In contrast, Rosing et al. (2010) have argued that the prevalence of magnetite (iron oxide) in Archean sediments and paleosols and the absence of siderite (iron carbonate) indicate that CO2 levels in the Archean atmosphere were little greater than those of today."
- A scientific paper published in 2018 gave reasons why the claims of extremely high carbon dioxide levels in the early Earth (as imagined by Kasting) are doubtful.
"Sometimes, the absence of geological records is just as telling as their presence. The Great Unconformity, a missing chunk of time that appears in rocks across the world, is the ultimate example of this phenomenon. This giant lapse in Earth’s memory exceeds one billion years in some places, resulting in 550 million-year-old rocks sitting atop ancient layers that date back 1.7 billion years, with no trace of the many lost epochs in between."
You've probably never heard of this Great Unconformity. The impression we've got from geologists is that geological strata show a nice continuous record in which you can trace back time gradually, like someone backwardly flipping the pages of a big diary, without any big gaps. Clearly this Great Unconformity is a big embarrassment to geologists, who seem to have pretty much swept it under the rug, and have mentioned it so infrequently that the average person has never heard of such a thing.
The vice.com story mentions a very dubious idea of how all of these eons disappeared from the fossil record: "the glaciers did it." It's another dubious "solved it!" boast. The vice.com story refers to a scientific paper that refers to " the oft-held perception that continental ice sheets cannot deeply erode the upper crust," while trying to argue that continental ice sheets did deeply erode the upper crust.
Hard-To-Explain Observational Reality |
Dubious Professor Explanation of This |
Sun's heat was 70% less billions of years ago, but Earth was apparently warm at that time |
Billions of years ago there was 10,000 times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which kept Earth warm |
Every organism has in its body thousands of very complex inventions: thousands of types of functional protein molecules, each having amino acids arranged in just the right way to be functional |
It was all just lucky copying errors in DNA |
Galaxies don't rotate as they should, given how much regular matter we observe |
For every matter particle, there are many dark matter particles, all invisible (please ignore the fact that such particles do not exist in the Standard Model of physics) |
The expansion of the universe is accelerating |
Most of the universe's mass-energy must be some mysterious dark energy (please ignore the fact that dark energy particles have no place in the Standard Model of physics) |
The universe's earliest expansion rate seems to have incredibly fine-tuned, with the expansion rate exactly matching a "critical density" to one part in a billion trillion quadrillion |
This was merely caused by a wondrous instantaneous cosmic transmogrification, produced by a never-discovered "inflaton field" (please ignore the fact that such a field has no place in the Standard Model of physics) |
Old-World monkeys closely resemble New-World monkeys, too closely to explain by convergent evolution |
Monkeys rafted across the Atlantic ocean millions of years ago |
All or almost all of the animal phyla appeared rather suddenly in the Cambrian Explosion |
It was just higher oxygen levels that caused such a huge flood of information-rich innovation. Haven't you heard of the vast creative intelligence of oxygen molecules? |
The type of cells used by mammals (eukaryotic cells) are vastly more complicated than the simplest types of cells (prokaryotic cells), with the difference being like the difference between a billionaire's mansion and a little wooden shack |
Endosymbiosis: eukaryotic cells originated in a wondrous sudden leap when one cell kind of gobbled up lots of other cells, with its offspring inheriting the ingestion, kind of like some monkey species turning into a tiger-bird-monkey species because the monkey ate a tiger and a bird. |
Contrary to the predictions of quantum field theory, interstellar space is almost empty, rather than being extremely dense and heavy because of a super-abundance of virtual particles |
It was just “lucky cancellations” caused by very high physics numbers that coincidentally canceled each other out in a fantastically improbable coincidence |
Thousands of years ago, humans suddenly developed a host of intellectual capabilities far beyond those of any other species, such as language abilities and philosophical reasoning |
Meat-eating is the reason – we needed wise, communicative minds so we could hunt animals. It takes a subtle literate reasoner to club an animal on the head. |
For decades massive numbers of people have reported floating out of their bodies and observing them from below, while at the same time having heightened cognition |
It's just vast numbers of people coincidentally having a similar hallucination, kind of like millions of people all having a hallucination of seeing a pink elephant. |
When a person suffering from severe seizures has half of his brain removed to stop the seizures, there is a good preservation of memories and intelligence |
Maybe your brain makes backup copies of each memory (one on the left side, and another on the right side), and maybe your brain is “super-plastic” so that the remaining half does all the work of the removed half, like some computer that keeps working well when sawed in two |
Defying odds far greater than a quadrillion-to-one, our universe has just the right fundamental constants allowing it to be habitable for life |
The multiverse did it -- didn't you know we can explain our universe by referring to imaginary other universes? |
A billion years are missing in geological strata |
The glaciers ate up all the missing strata |
We cannot find much of any evidence of the vast number of transitional fossils that should exist if there occurred the gradual evolutionary progressions assumed by the dogma of common descent |
Maybe the glaciers ate up all the missing fossils |
Hi Mark, your article has very interesting points to explore.
ReplyDeleteI'm just wondering do you have any thoughts if gradualism works better at explaining the origins of plants, trees, and vegetation?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe post you refer to is here:
ReplyDeletehttps://futureandcosmos.blogspot.com/2020/06/useless-early-stages-nonfunctional.html
Scientists have found that the genomes of plants are often as complex as those of animals,
and sometimes more complex. A simple rice plant has something like 40,000+
types of protein molecules,
each its own separate complex invention. It has been estimated that the
wheat plant uses more than 165,000 types of protein molecules, about 8 times
more than the roughly 20,000 types of protein molecules in the human body.
Countless other plants use 20,000+ types of protein molecules.
Whenever you are trying to explain the origin of
protein molecules, you have the problem of useless early
stages and nonfunctional intermediates (discussed at the link above).
So the shortfall of gradualism is similar
on the plant kingdom side and the animal kingdom side.
Many plants that look simple are fantastically organized and immensely complex
on a biochemical level.