Evolution vs. intelligent design: The debate continues

[bob b]

It was like 40 days right?

Wrong. Try reading it.

 

[Real Sorceror]

Wrong. Try reading it.

Sorry bob b, why dont you just tell me how many days?

 

[eisenreich]

Wrong. Try reading it.

"And the flood was forty days upon the earth." - Genesis 7:17


Were you thinking of these verses, bob?

"And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days." -- Genesis 7:24

"And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the one hundred and fifty days the waters were abated." -- Genesis 8:3


But don't worry, this isn't a contradiction, after doing some mental gymnastics, it all makes perfect sense:

The flood was measured by the waters from the “great deep” and the “heavens” pouring water on the surface of the earth. After 40 days, the rain and underground fountains stopped. Evaporation of this water would be very slow. It wouldn’t be until 150 days later that the water was fully dissipated, and the earth was dry. So, technically, the flood was only 40 days long, but a full evaporation of the water on earth was not until 150 days later.

TADA!

 

[soothsayer]

"And the flood was forty days upon the earth." - Genesis 7:17


Were you thinking of these verses, bob?

"And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days." -- Genesis 7:24

"And the waters returned from off the earth continually: and after the end of the one hundred and fifty days the waters were abated." -- Genesis 8:3


But don't worry, this isn't a contradiction, after doing some mental gymnastics, it all makes perfect sense:

The flood was measured by the waters from the “great deep” and the “heavens” pouring water on the surface of the earth. After 40 days, the rain and underground fountains stopped. Evaporation of this water would be very slow. It wouldn’t be until 150 days later that the water was fully dissipated, and the earth was dry. So, technically, the flood was only 40 days long, but a full evaporation of the water on earth was not until 150 days later.

TADA!

Then why wouldn't it say in 7:17 that it "rained" for forty days? And it seems unlikely to me that a flood that covered the entire earth would evaporate in just 150 days.

 

[avatar382]

Then why wouldn't it say in 7:17 that it "rained" for forty days? And it seems unlikely to me that a flood that covered the entire earth would evaporate in just 150 days.

Yeah, really. How does that compare to the local flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans?

 

[soothsayer]

Yeah, really. How does that compare to the local flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans?

And that flood was just from 1 day of rain...imagine how long 40 days of rain would really take.

The flood story is essentially a myth. Admittedly, there probably really was a disastrous flood (probably many in different regions at different times), maybe even a shepherd (or something) named Noah who maybe actually saved some animals (his livestock) by building a boat. When the story was passed down orally over generations, it eventually morphed into the flood story (or stories) we have in Genesis.

 

[On Fire]

Then why wouldn't it say in 7:17 that it "rained" for forty days? And it seems unlikely to me that a flood that covered the entire earth would evaporate in just 150 days.

Yeah! God might be able to make it rain for 40 days and flood the Earth but causing it to evaporate in 150 days....come on!

 

[death2impiety]

And that flood was just from 1 day of rain...imagine how long 40 days of rain would really take.

The flood story is essentially a myth. Admittedly, there probably really was a disastrous flood (probably many in different regions at different times), maybe even a shepherd (or something) named Noah who maybe actually saved some animals (his livestock) by building a boat. When the story was passed down orally over generations, it eventually morphed into the flood story (or stories) we have in Genesis.

Sounds like someone's been watching the discovery channel :chuckle:

 

[soothsayer]

Sounds like someone's been watching the discovery channel :chuckle:

Actually, I didn't get this from the Discovery Channel. I arrived at this conclusion by applying my sense of reason. It seems more reasonable to me that Genesis (and every other book in the Bible) is a primarily mythological writing. It is not literal.

 

[bob b]

Sorry bob b, why dont you just tell me how many days?

Try reading it.

Genesis 7
11In the six hundredth year of the life of Noah, in the second month, in the seventeenth day of the month, in this day have been broken up all fountains of the great deep, and the net-work of the heavens hath been opened, 12and the shower is on the earth forty days and forty nights.

Genesis 8
1And God remembereth Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle which are with him in the ark, and God causeth a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subside, 2and closed are the fountains of the deep and the net-work of the heavens, and restrained is the shower from the heavens.

3And turn back do the waters from off the earth, going on and returning; and the waters are lacking at the end of a hundred and fifty days.

4And the ark resteth, in the seventh month, in the seventeenth day of the month, on mountains of Ararat; 5and the waters have been going and becoming lacking till the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first of the month, appeared the heads of the mountains.

--------------

Since the major part of the waters originally came from beneath the crust (the fountains of the deep) I would assume that the crust would gradually settle down at those points where the water had been released, and this could have created the "great deeps" found today in the oceans. (Before the 1950s and the advent of sonar it was not realized how deep certain areas of the ocean were, being in some spots deeper than Mt. Everest is high).

Thus evaporation was undoubtedly not the sole or even the major mechanism which caused the waters to recede.

It probably took close to 150 days (5 months) for the waters to reach their maxinum level and many months if not years after that for it to completely recede, even though it took less time for it to recede enough for Noah and his company to leave the Ark.

 

[Spenser]

Why is that?

Do you really need to be taught geology?


From Here

Why are geological eras consistent worldwide? How do you explain worldwide agreement between "apparent" geological eras and several different (independent) radiometric and nonradiometric dating methods? [e.g., Short et al, 1991]

How was the fossil record sorted in an order convenient for evolution? Ecological zonation, hydrodynamic sorting, and differential escape fail to explain:

the extremely good sorting observed. Why didn't at least one dinosaur make it to the high ground with the elephants?
the relative positions of plants and other non-motile life. (Yun, 1989, describes beautifully preserved algae from Late Precambrian sediments. Why don't any modern-looking plants appear that low in the geological column?)
why some groups of organisms, such as mollusks, are found in many geologic strata.
why organisms (such as brachiopods) which are very similar hydrodynamically (all nearly the same size, shape, and weight) are still perfectly sorted.
why extinct animals which lived in the same niches as present animals didn't survive as well. Why did no pterodons make it to high ground?
how coral reefs hundreds of feet thick and miles long were preserved intact with other fossils below them.
why small organisms dominate the lower strata, whereas fluid mechanics says they would sink slower and thus end up in upper strata.
why artifacts such as footprints and burrows are also sorted. [Crimes & Droser, 1992]
why no human artifacts are found except in the very uppermost strata. If, at the time of the Flood, the earth was overpopulated by people with technology for shipbuilding, why were none of their tools or buildings mixed with trilobite or dinosaur fossils?
why different parts of the same organisms are sorted together. Pollen and spores are found in association with the trunks, leaves, branches, and roots produced by the same plants [Stewart, 1983].
why ecological information is consistent within but not between layers. Fossil pollen is one of the more important indicators of different levels of strata. Each plant has different and distinct pollen, and, by telling which plants produced the fossil pollen, it is easy to see what the climate was like in different strata. Was the pollen hydraulically sorted by the flood water so that the climatic evidence is different for each layer?
How do surface features appear far from the surface? Deep in the geologic column there are formations which could have originated only on the surface, such as:

Rain drops. [Robb, 1992]
River channels. [Miall, 1996, especially chpt. 6]
Wind-blown dunes. [Kocurek & Dott, 1981; Clemmenson & Abrahamsen, 1983; Hubert & Mertz, 1984]
Beaches.
Glacial deposits. [Eyles & Miall, 1984]
Burrows. [Crimes & Droser, 1992; Thackray, 1994]
In-place trees. [Cristie & McMillan, 1991]
Soil. [Reinhardt & Sigleo, 1989; Wright, 1986, 1994]
Desiccation cracks. [Andrews, 1988; Robb, 1992]
Footprints. [Gore, 1993, has a photograph (p. 16-17) showing dinosaur footprints in one layer with water ripples in layers above and below it. Gilette & Lockley, 1989, have several more examples, including dinosaur footprints on top of a coal seam (p. 361-366).]
Meteorites and meteor craters. [Grieve, 1997; Schmitz et al, 1997]
Coral reefs. [Wilson, 1975]
Cave systems. [James & Choquette, 1988]
How could these have appeared in the midst of a catastrophic flood?

How does a global flood explain angular unconformities?] These are where one set of layers of sediments have been extensively modified (e.g., tilted) and eroded before a second set of layers were deposited on top. They thus seem to require at least two periods of deposition (more, where there is more than one unconformity) with long periods of time in between to account for the deformation, erosion, and weathering observed.

How were mountains and valleys formed? Many very tall mountains are composed of sedimentary rocks. (The summit of Everest is composed of deep-marine limestone, with fossils of ocean-bottom dwelling crinoids [Gansser, 1964].) If these were formed during the Flood, how did they reach their present height, and when were the valleys between them eroded away? Keep in mind that many valleys were clearly carved by glacial erosion, which is a slow process.

When did granite batholiths form? Some of these are intruded into older sediments and have younger sediments on their eroded top surfaces. It takes a long time for magma to cool into granite, nor does granite erode very quickly. [For example, see Donohoe & Grantham, 1989, for locations of contact between the South Mountain Batholith and the Meugma Group of sediments, as well as some angular unconformities.]

How can a single flood be responsible for such extensively detailed layering? One formation in New Jersey is six kilometers thick. If we grant 400 days for this to settle, and ignore possible compaction since the Flood, we still have 15 meters of sediment settling per day. And yet despite this, the chemical properties of the rock are neatly layered, with great changes (e.g.) in percent carbonate occurring within a few centimeters in the vertical direction. How does such a neat sorting process occur in the violent context of a universal flood dropping 15 meters of sediment per day? How can you explain a thin layer of high carbonate sediment being deposited over an area of ten thousand square kilometers for some thirty minutes, followed by thirty minutes of low carbonate deposition, etc.? [Zimmer, 1992]

How do you explain the formation of varves? The Green River formation in Wyoming contains 20,000,000 annual layers, or varves, identical to those being laid down today in certain lakes. The sediments are so fine that each layer would have required over a month to settle.

How could a flood deposit layered fossil forests? Stratigraphic sections showing a dozen or more mature forests layered atop each other--all with upright trunks, in-place roots, and well-developed soil--appear in many locations. One example, the Joggins section along the Bay of Fundy, shows a continuous section 2750 meters thick (along a 48-km sea cliff) with multiple in-place forests, some separated by hundreds of feet of strata, some even showing evidence of forest fires. [Ferguson, 1988. For other examples, see Dawson, 1868; Cristie & McMillan, 1991; Gastaldo, 1990; Yuretich, 1994.] Creationists point to logs sinking in a lake below Mt. St. Helens as an example of how a flood can deposit vertical trunks, but deposition by flood fails to explain the roots, the soil, the layering, and other features found in such places.

Where did all the heat go? If the geologic record was deposited in a year, then the events it records must also have occurred within a year. Some of these events release significant amounts of heat.

Magma. The geologic record includes roughly 8 x 1024 grams of lava flows and igneous intrusions. Assuming (conservatively) a specific heat of 0.15, this magma would release 5.4 x 1027 joules while cooling 1100 degrees C. In addition, the heat of crystallization as the magma solidifies would release a great deal more heat.
Limestone formation. There are roughly 5 x 1023 grams of limestone in the earth's sediments [Poldervaart, 1955], and the formation of calcite releases about 11,290 joules/gram [Weast, 1974, p. D63]. If only 10% of the limestone were formed during the Flood, the 5.6 x 1026 joules of heat released would be enough to boil the flood waters.
Meteorite impacts. Erosion and crustal movements have erased an unknown number of impact craters on earth, but Creationists Whitcomb and DeYoung suggest that cratering to the extent seen on the Moon and Mercury occurred on earth during the year of Noah's Flood. The heat from just one of the largest lunar impacts released an estimated 3 x 1026 joules; the same sized object falling to earth would release even more energy. [Fezer, pp. 45-46]
Other. Other possibly significant heat sources are radioactive decay (some Creationists claim that radioactive decay rates were much higher during the Flood to account for consistently old radiometric dates); biological decay (think of the heat released in compost piles); and compression of sediments.
5.6 x 1026 joules is enough to heat the oceans to boiling. 3.7 x 1027 joules will vaporize them completely. Since steam and air have a lower heat capacity than water, the steam released will quickly raise the temperature of the atmosphere over 1000 C. At these temperatures, much of the atmosphere would boil off the Earth.

Aside from losing its atmosphere, Earth can only get rid of heat by radiating it to space, and it can't radiate significantly more heat than it gets from the sun unless it is a great deal hotter than it is now. (It is very nearly at thermal equilibrium now.) If there weren't many millions of years to radiate the heat from the above processes, the earth would still be unlivably hot.

As shown in section 5, all the mechanisms proposed for causing the Flood already provide more than enough energy to vaporize it as well. These additional factors only make the heat problem worse.

How were limestone deposits formed? Much limestone is made of the skeletons of zillions of microscopic sea animals. Some deposits are thousands of meters thick. Were all those animals alive when the Flood started? If not, how do you explain the well-ordered sequence of fossils in the deposits? Roughly 1.5 x 1015 grams of calcium carbonate are deposited on the ocean floor each year. [Poldervaart, 1955] A deposition rate ten times as high for 5000 years before the Flood would still only account for less than 0.02% of limestone deposits.

How could a flood have deposited chalk? Chalk is largely made up of the bodies of plankton 700 to 1000 angstroms in diameter [Bignot, 1985]. Objects this small settle at a rate of .0000154 mm/sec. [Twenhofel, 1961] In a year of the Flood, they could have settled about half a meter.

How could the Flood deposit layers of solid salt? Such layers are sometimes meters in width, interbedded with sediments containing marine fossils. This apparently occurs when a body of salt water has its fresh-water intake cut off, and then evaporates. These layers can occur more or less at random times in the geological history, and have characteristic fossils on either side. Therefore, if the fossils were themselves laid down during a catastrophic flood, there are, it seems, only two choices:
(1) the salt layers were themselves laid down at the same time, during the heavy rains that began the flooding, or
(2) the salt is a later intrusion. I suspect that both will prove insuperable difficulties for a theory of flood deposition of the geologic column and its fossils. [Jackson et al, 1990]

How were sedimentary deposits recrystallized and plastically deformed in the short time since the Flood? The stretched pebble conglomerate in Death Valley National Monument (Wildrose Canyon Rd., 15 mi. south of Hwy. 190), for example, contains streambed pebbles metamorphosed to quartzite and stretched to 3 or more times their original length. Plastically deformed stone is also common around salt diapirs [Jackson et al, 1990].

How were hematite layers laid down? Standard theory is that they were laid down before Earth's atmosphere contained much oxygen. In an oxygen-rich regime, they would almost certainly be impossible.

How do you explain fossil mineralization? Mineralization is the replacement of the original material with a different mineral.

Buried skeletal remains of modern fauna are negligibly mineralized, including some that biblical archaeology says are quite old - a substantial fraction of the age of the earth in this diluvian geology. For example, remains of Egyptian commoners buried near the time of Moses aren't extensively mineralized.
Buried skeletal remains of extinct mammalian fauna show quite variable mineralization.
Dinosaur remains are often extensively mineralized.
Trilobite remains are usually mineralized - and in different sites, fossils of the same species are composed of different materials.
How are these observations explained by a sorted deposition of remains in a single episode of global flooding?

How does a flood explain the accuracy of "coral clocks"? The moon is slowly sapping the earth's rotational energy. The earth should have rotated more quickly in the distant past, meaning that a day would have been less than 24 hours, and there would have been more days per year. Corals can be dated by the number of "daily" growth layers per "annual" growth layer. Devonian corals, for example, show nearly 400 days per year. There is an exceedingly strong correlation between the "supposed age" of a wide range of fossils (corals, stromatolites, and a few others -- collected from geologic formations throughout the column and from locations all over the world) and the number of days per year that their growth pattern shows. The agreement between these clocks, and radiometric dating, and the theory of superposition is a little hard to explain away as the result of a number of unlucky coincidences in a 300-day-long flood. [Rosenberg & Runcorn, 1975; Scrutton, 1965; Wells, 1963]

Where were all the fossilized animals when they were alive? Schadewald [1982] writes:

"Scientific creationists interpret the fossils found in the earth's rocks as the remains of animals that perished in the Noachian Deluge. Ironically, they often cite the sheer number of fossils in 'fossil graveyards' as evidence for the Flood. In particular, creationists seem enamored by the Karroo Formation in Africa, which is estimated to contain the remains of 800 billion vertebrate animals (see Whitcomb and Morris, p. 160; Gish, p. 61). As pseudoscientists, creationists dare not test this major hypothesis that all of the fossilized animals died in the Flood.

"Robert E. Sloan, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota, has studied the Karroo Formation. He asserts that the animals fossilized there range from the size of a small lizard to the size of a cow, with the average animal perhaps the size of a fox. A minute's work with a calculator shows that, if the 800 billion animals in the Karoo formation could be resurrected, there would be twenty-one of them for every acre of land on earth. Suppose we assume (conservatively, I think) that the Karroo Formation contains 1 percent of the vertebrate [land] fossils on earth. Then when the Flood began, there must have been at least 2100 living animals per acre, ranging from tiny shrews to immense dinosaurs. To a noncreationist mind, that seems a bit crowded."

A thousand kilometers' length of arctic coastal plain, according to experts in Leningrad, contains about 500,000 tons of tusks. Even assuming that the entire population was preserved, you seem to be saying that Russia had wall-to-wall mammoths before this "event."

Even if there was room physically for all the large animals which now exist only as fossils, how could they have all coexisted in a stable ecology before the Flood? Montana alone would have had to support a diversity of herbivores orders of magnitude larger than anything now observed.

Where did all the organic material in the fossil record come from? There are 1.16 x 1013 metric tons of coal reserves, and at least 100 times that much unrecoverable organic matter in sediments. A typical forest, even if it covered the entire earth, would supply only 1.9 x 1013 metric tons. [Ricklefs, 1993, p. 149]

How do you explain the relative commonness of aquatic fossils? A flood would have washed over everything equally, so terrestrial organisms should be roughly as abundant as aquatic ones (or more abundant, since Creationists hypothesize greater land area before the Flood) in the fossil record. Yet shallow marine environments account for by far the most fossils.

Before dismissing all of the above please note it was written by scientists who study this stuff and is well referenced to demonstrate it is not just propaganda nor pure assertion. It is peer reviewed material...

 

[bob b]

Do you really need to be taught geology?


From Here





Before dismissing all of the above please note it was written by scientists who study this stuff and is well referenced to demonstrate it is not just propaganda nor pure assertion. It is peer reviewed material...

Talk.origins is an atheist website and not a scientific journal.

Essentially all of the material you pasted has been answered or refuted on creationist websites like trueorigins.

In addition atheists have never explained satisfactorily how slow accumulation over millions of years could generate the distinct layered deposits that extend across entire continents. Such a theory is absurd on the face of it.

 

[Spenser]

Talk.origins is an atheist website and not a scientific journal.

Essentially all of the material you pasted has been answered or refuted on creationist websites like trueorigins.

In addition atheists have never explained satisfactorily how slow accumulation over millions of years could generate the distinct layered deposits that extend across entire continents. Such a theory is absurd on the face of it.

Like I said, their website is hosted by scientists, some of who are Christians. That isn't the part that matters, their work is well referenced and peer reviewed. You could hardly say the same for any creationist website. Please point out all major scientific publications that they have come up with.

It is amazing you can dismiss nearly the entire field of Geology so ignorantly and yet it is still taught all over the world at nearly all accredited universities. Chew on that one for a sec...

 

[bob b]

Like I said, their website is hosted by scientists, some of who are Christians. That isn't the part that matters, their work is well referenced and peer reviewed. You could hardly say the same for any creationist website. Please point out all major scientific publications that they have come up with.

It is amazing you can dismiss nearly the entire field of Geology so ignorantly and yet it is still taught all over the world at nearly all accredited universities. Chew on that one for a sec...

It is amazing that people can be indoctrinated in a belief that is so obviously flawed at its very foundation.

So does anyone in geology have an explanation as to how such distinct layers that continue over so many miles can be formed so slowly over millions of years?

Talk about dumb ideas. :nono:

 

[Spenser]

It is amazing that people can be indoctrinated in a belief that is so obviously flawed at its very foundation.

So does anyone in geology have an explanation as to how such distinct layers that continue over so many miles can be formed so slowly over millions of years?

Talk about dumb ideas. :nono:

Every one take note that Bob has completely ignored all evidence, that was well referenced scientific material, and instead asks another question completely ignorant to the field of Geology. It is ok though cause Bob thinks its dumb :juggle:

Bob, your question is basic Geology and can be answered with a simple Google search. Perhaps if you went into more specifics about what you see is wrong with geological layering and the time necessary for it to occur...

 

[bob b]

Every one take note that Bob has completely ignored all evidence, that was well referenced scientific material, and instead asks another question completely ignorant to the field of Geology. It is ok though cause Bob thinks its dumb :juggle:

Bob, your question is basic Geology and can be answered with a simple Google search. Perhaps if you went into more specifics about what you see is wrong with geological layering and the time necessary for it to occur...

It is very simple: you can't get distinct layering that continues over wide expanses using a process that supposedly takes millions of years.

Since this is how geologists attempt to explain what we see in the geological record their fairytales aren't worth the paper they are printed on.

 

[Johnny]

you can't get distinct layering that continues over wide expanses using a process that supposedly takes millions of years

Why not? This is terribly ambiguous and vague and I daresay you won't (because you can't) defend this with any distinct statements that might be subject to cricitism. You should also be specific as to the claims you are trying to refute. I think we'd all appreciate that. I also found this extremely ironic:

Talk.origins is an atheist website and not a scientific journal.

Essentially all of the material you pasted has been answered or refuted on creationist websites like trueorigins.

Talk.origins is not an atheist website, it is a scientific website. I am a theist and I reference their material all the time. Furthermore, all of their material is referenced to peer-reviewed scientific journal. The funny part about this is that you socrn that talk.origins is an atheist website and not a scientific journal, and then you proceed to quote a faith-based psuedo-scientific website who is also not a scientific website.

 

[bob b]

Why not? This is terribly ambiguous and vague and I daresay you won't (because you can't) defend this with any distinct statements that might be subject to cricitism. You should also be specific as to the claims you are trying to refute. I think we'd all appreciate that.

Johnny. It is not necessary to refute the thousands of claims geologists make in the journals.

What happens in science when a new theory replaces an old one? Does anyone ever bother to go back and examine all the papers that were written in an effort to determine where they went wrong? Of course not. They are simply forgotten whenever the main premise is refuted and replaced by a new guiding paradigm.

The distinct layers of sedimentary material that extend over vast distances were obviously laid down in a great global deluge. That is why the layers are distinct for heaven's sake. This is what happens in floods on a small scale, so it is obvious that this is what would happen if the scale of the flood was sufficiently large. :duh:

 

[Johnny]

Wht happens in science when a new theory replaces an old one? Does anyone ever bother to go back and examine all the papers that were written in an effort to determine where they went wrong?

Bob, the reason a new theory replaces an old one is because "old theory papers" were found lacking and new theory papers are a better explanation. This is what happens in science. Science doesn't latch onto big ideas all at once. It is a gradual process. The very first thing that must happen for a new scientific idea to gain acceptance is the demonstration of why the old idea is incorrect. As time goes on, the need to address old theories diminish because they have all been adequately addressed. You're so disconnected with science and it shows. Those of us that keep up watch this happen all the time.

Of course not. they are simply forgotten whenever the main premise is refuted and replaced by a new guiding paradigm.

Feh. You're wrong, see above.

The distinct layers of sedimentary material that extend over vast distances were obviously laid down in a great global deluge. That is why the layers are distinct for heaven's sake. This is what happens in floods on a small scale, so it is obvious that this is what would happen if the scale of the flood was sufficiently large.

A large scale flood is not consistent with geological findings. This became evident over 100 years ago.

 

[bob b]

Bob, the reason a new theory replaces an old one is because "old theory papers" were found lacking and new theory papers are a better explanation. This is what happens in science. Science doesn't latch onto big ideas all at once. It is a gradual process. The very first thing that must happen for a new scientific idea to gain acceptance is the demonstration of why the old idea is incorrect. As time goes on, the need to address old theories diminish because they have all been adequately addressed. You're so disconnected with science and it shows. Those of us that keep up watch this happen all the time.

You are thinking about small ideas, not big ones.

A large scale flood is not consistent with geological findings. This became evident over 100 years ago.

Nope. That was never shown. And it is never shown today either.

The global flood idea was dropped because nobody could believe that so much water could ever be generated to cover the entire earth. At that point in time it was not known that sedimentary layers were as distinct and so widespread as we know today. So they opted for an idea that seemed, in light of what was then known, to be more plausible: slow accumulation over millions of years.

Now we know better. But ideas once widespread die hard. Even dumb ones.