Yellowstone & Catastrophe (General)

by dhw, Monday, December 22, 2014, 15:17 (3622 days ago)

First of all, may I make a general plea? It's sometimes difficult enough to follow the different threads, and there is simply no way the weirdness of Yellowstone can come under horizontal gene transfer! If anyone wants to start a totally new discussion, would you please put it on a new thread.-Secondly, a personal note to David, who wrote: “Dhw thinks I'm closed-minded. I'm not, but I can't know everything, and I work to conclusions I've had time to cover.” I don't think you are closed-minded in general - on the contrary, having worked closely with you for so long, I find you extremely tolerant and open on many issues. However, in the context of your anthropocentric view of evolution, I do find you surprisingly intransigent. Having said that, your approach tends to vacillate, which suggests that maybe you are not quite as convinced as you seem to be. On different occasions (though I don't have time to delve back into the files) you have rejected and accepted the concept of the intelligent cell, and although you now refuse to think about what God might have done before the Big Bang, I remember vividly your acknowledgement that he might well have created earlier universes. If your mind was closed, you would have abandoned us long ago, and I for one am deeply grateful that you haven't.-On the subject of Yellowstone, with trees from Asia, there are many similar anomalies, such as fish fossils being found on the tops of mountains, and as I'm sure you know, one theory that explains them is catastrophism, i.e. a history of floods, volcanic eruptions, tectonic displacements, collisions with asteroids and comets etc. One of the theorists (Peter Warlow) even goes so far as to posit a “tippe top” overturning of the Earth, due to a mega-collision. He also posits reversals of the Earth's rotation. This would certainly solve some of the geological mysteries. Incidentally, Darwin was a uniformitarian, which goes hand in glove with his insistence that evolution must be a gradual process. My guess is that he was wrong on both counts.
 
Noah's Flood is one of countless flood myths. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (on which some scholars think the Noah story is based) the hero is Atrakasis. Of course there is no way the authors of these stories would know first-hand what had happened, let alone how widespread the floods were: a local catastrophe in those days would seem like the end of the world. I'd like to make two contrasting comments on this: 1) I have no doubt there were catastrophic floods in olden times, so it's scarcely surprising that stories should have been handed down; 2) Do those who believe that the story of Noah is the literal truth also believe that the story of Atrakasis is the literal truth? If not, why not?