[Alan Fox asked why I’m a YEC (Young Earth Creationist), and I promised him a response here at The Skeptical Zone.]
I was an Old Earth Darwinist raised in a Roman Catholic home and secular public schools, but then became an Old Earth Creationist/IDist, a Young Life/Old Earth Creationist/IDist, then a Young Life/Young Earth Creationist/IDist. After becoming a creationist, I remained a creationist even during bouts of agnosticism in the sense that I found accounts of a gradualistic origin and evolution of life scientifically unjustified.
The fundamental reason I accept YEC is the physical evidence appears to me to be consistent with the recent miraculous emergence of humanity followed by a global flood in a way that is mostly line with the genealogy of Jesus as described in Luke 3 and Matt 1.
Theoretical physicist turned minister, John Polkinhorne said what distinguishes Christianity from any other religion is it’s bold claims about history. Luke 3 is a bold claim about history. Because of the boldness of the Bible’s claims and recent evidence supporting those claims, I came to accept the Divine Inspiration of Luke 3 and Matt 1.
The genealogy of Christ is partly elaborated in the Old Testament (OT), and I became astonished that the OT, unlike other religious texts (like the Book of Mormon), had archaeological confirmation for some of its claims related to Christ’s genealogy, like the existence of King Hezekiah (715 BC) , the exitence of Saul (1050 BC), etc. The genealogy of Christ may have support perhaps as far back as Abraham (2100 BC) who was only 9 generations away from Noah who was 9 generations from Adam.
My belief in the New Testament follows along the lines of former atheist and famed police detective James Warner Wallace’s journey to faith. Wallace was featured on national TV for solving cold case murders, but he also wrote the book Cold Case Christianity which details how he came to accept the New Testament as credible witness testimony though the witness records are ancient and often presumed to be fabrications.
The most important part of YEC for me personally is the creation model which posits miraculous events as the origin of life and of species versus the mainstream model which posits natural origin of life followed by Darwinian Selection.
Darwin led the world into thinking that nature acts like an engineer. He supposed if given time, nature will construct ever more complicated designs. Darwin thought giving nature more time is friend of mindless design like time is a friend to intelligent design by an engineer. This is demonstrably false at least as far a known science and OOL and debatable with respect to the post OOL world. As far as a supposed pre-OOL world, we observe biological materials in an almost-working state decay quickly into far-from-working state. Time is the enemy, not friend of mindless design (which is an oxymoron as far as I’m concerned).
Even if one argues life is not Turing complete, nor a full-blown Quine software system, nor full blown von Neumann Constructor, emergence of elements of these systems in biological chemistry (DNA-RNA-Protein) is far from natural expectation as a matter of principle, so much so infinite many worlds are put forward by researchers like Koonin as a solution to OOL. If one posit infinite Many Worlds as the creator, one could just as well posit the infinite Christian God as the Creator.
What we have seen in the lab is that all the essential parts of living von Neumann Constructors must be in place for the algorithmic style of 3D replication/printing in cells to take place. Hence, a chemical evolutionary scenario is ruled out as a matter of principle. This is not an argument from ignorance, but rather a proof by contradiction. Whether one is an atheist or not, it would seem to me, as a matter of principle, the origin of life was a highly unusual event far from expectation. But at what point is an unusual event indistinguishable from a miracle? Though “miracle” has theological connotations, it seems the first life was a miracle.
If the first life was created, Darwin claimed subsequent life from that first life evolved:
…the first creature, the progenitor of innumerable extinct and living descendants, was created.
Charles Darwin
But what about after OOL? Superficially, similarity of DNA appears compelling evidence of common ancestry, but it could just as well be evidence of common design of separate special creations if there is a Creator. Rather than Darwin’s Tree of Life, the Creator could just as well create an Orchard of Life from which all life radiated from specially and independently created ancestors.
One set of strong evidences of the Creationist Orchard of Life vs. Darwinian Tree of Life was articulated in two papers by an Associate Professor of Biology at a secular university, Change Tan. This professor got her PhD at an Ivy League school, so she is no run-of-the-mill-Kent-Hovind-preacher-type creationist. See:
Information Processing Differences Between Archaea and Eukarya and Information Processing Differences Between Bacteria and Eukarya. Tan’s paper highlights several problematic evolutionary molecular convergences that defy common descent as a matter of principle (not argument from ignorance, proof by contradiction).
In addition to molecular convergence, common descent is also challenged by the problem of orphan genes and orphan features. Orphan and taxonomically restricted features just pop up without any suggestion of a gradual pathway. Hence, it is easy for one to believe if the first life was created, the Creator also created a set of ancestral species which radiated into the sub-species we have today. How to define the actual trees of the orchard could be an active area of research.
Having at least a provisional case for a Creator of life and ancestral species, we can turn to hard-nosed empiricism to establish when species might have appeared on Earth. The physical data suggest the fossil record is far younger than claimed by the mainstream.
An old universe and Earth seem intuitively satisfying in as much as something so grand and changeless as the Earth should rightly be old. One would think if the Earth isn’t Old, God ought to make it that way! But as aesthetically pleasing the thought may be of an old or eternal universe, I decided if the evidence favors a young fossil record, I can accept by faith that maybe the Earth or even the universe could also be young. Part 2 will state some reasons I think the fossil record is young.
fg,
Nice to hear from you, ARN companion from 2004! Hard to believe 11 years have passed. Hope you are well. 🙂
Personal beliefs shouldn’t influence cold hard numbers and math. FWIW, I couldn’t have made it through a science curriculum if I didn’t respect the science I was learning. I may not like a fact, but a is a fact, I have to respect facts. As far as personal beliefs, the Christian worldview isn’t one I would have necessarily loved since it has such a bleak characterization of reality (an angry God sending people to eternal punishment). I think I’d much rather believe in some beautiful goddess who’ll make all my wishes come true and make me blissful for eternity…
For OOL, I claimed the life is improbable and far from an expected outcome. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable by saying it OOL might look like a miracle to some based on the known science available.
Things have changed since we debated in 2004, and there is more data. At that time I only was about 50% convinced of YEC, and I didn’t have much to go on then. Things have changed.
Even if I were an atheist, I don’t think I could just sweep under the rug some of the anomalies that are finally being admitted in professional literature.
I look forward to your viewpoints in YEC part 2. I expect you’ll disagree with my final conclusion, but I think I do have numbers that aren’t easily dismissed and look forward to you hopefully providing some comments.
Thank you.
stcordova,
That would only be an effective refutation if you had, in fact, a value for x, and a value for y was also accessible. We don’t, and simplistic analyses like Hoyle’s can’t be used to derive it. How can one ‘refute’ algebra? Well, y is bigger than x, I guess. There. Done it.
Looking forward to it, but long experience with YEC discussions makes me fear that you will want to discuss this:
[URL=http://s684.photobucket.com/user/snijderj/media/noise.jpg.html][IMG]http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv201/snijderj/noise.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
whereas I would want to discuss this:
[URL=http://s684.photobucket.com/user/snijderj/media/data.jpg.html][IMG]http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv201/snijderj/data.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
fG
So (given the realm of application of potentially YEC-friendly anomalies at what secular scientists might place at the 2 billion-year-plus mark), God can create prokaryotes, and may be able to generate a chimeric lifeform involving two such forms. Evolution did the rest.
Sal, thank you for your kind greetings, I hope you are well too. Yes we have been at this for more than a decade now, and with what results? Still, once more unto the breach, as they say!
fG
I echo Mung’s (implied) question.
Most often, when we discuss “origins” here, we debate the ID arguments about evolution, largely assuming a shared assumption that life has been around for over 3 billion years, and that where we differ is over what the fossil evidence, embedded in dateable strata, represent in terms of how the organisms in the past relate to the mostly very different organisms in the present.
The belief that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that there was a global flood even more recently, is simply in a different ballpark. It requires is to ignore the entire apparent chronology of the geological record, and indeed makes no sense of geology at all. It is contradicted by countless independent lines of evidence which not only contradict YEC but are consilient with each other in giving dates for various events, including the age of the earth, the age of rocks, and the age of the universe.
So to discuss, on this thread, evidence for an “orchard” rather than a “tree” seems largely irrelevant, because if the earth is billions, not a few thousand, years old, the orchard vs tree argument is moot. I mean, Stephen Meyer proposes a kind of Cambrian orchard, but he doesn’t dispute that its roots are in the Cambrian.
For you, presumably, the Cambrian organisms were alive four thousand years ago, and, despite being marine, were the first to succumb to death by flood.
YEC simply makes no sense at all, given the counter-evidence.
Can you explain how you reconcile even one aspect of geology or archaeology with a recent global flood, for instance?
As I’ve said, I have no problem with the idea that faith requires belief in YEC, and that somehow the evidence must be there, even if we can’t see it yet (well, not much of a problem). But for an intelligent man like yourself to think that the evidence supports YEC – well it mystifies me.
Perhaps we should wait for Part 2! I had a fun discussion with Byers on this very topic.
When we get to talk about the data for the age of the Earth, can we please concentrate on this:
instead of this:
ETA: Nope, I don’t know how to display a couple of small graphs I have on Photobucket. Can someone explain to me how? Thanks,
fG
I have a feeling that image display in comments only works for admins. I’ll see if I can get Paul to do something about that. If you PM me the links I could put them in a post.
Before I forget, I have to clarify something with respect to the sequence similarity and divergence and whether it is from evolution from a common ancestor or was specially created recently. There are data points that need to be verified through the DNA sequencing process.
1. Are deeply “conserved” non coding regions deteriorating in real time? We know mice and men share deeply “conserved” regions, but knockouts don’t seem to have any effect as far as selection. This is still a paradox. I’ve suggested this is an area of research for IDists and creationists. If deeply “conserved” regions start to scramble in real time, this is evidence SIMILARITY was specially created recently, not the result of common descent.
2. Is there evidence of frozen clocks in some regions. If there are intra-species clocks frozen but interspecies clocks ticking, this is evidence DIVERSITY was specially created recently and the appearance of phylogeny is merely an illusion.
stcordova,
It’s a bloody good one! 😉
stcordova,
Don’t quite get this. You seem to be saying that if a genetic region is monomorphic in a local (young) region of a clade, but polymorphic when we add the wider (older) clade within which it nests, that helps YEC? But such a pattern is entirely in accord with common descent, so … ???
Sal, if you don’t mind, based on *what* evidence other than the Biblical genealogical record (which isn’t evidence at all) do you claim that the Earth is no more than 10,000 years old and that a massive flood wiped out humanity?
stcordova,
That’s just too vague. I think in the first instance you’d need to supply a map of the knockout region and any ‘man-mouse conserved’ regions within, and point up anything that goes against neutral expectation on analysis.
eta: also, s values in the wild are likely far too small to show up in any analysis which involves simply seeing if the knockouts seem healthy and ‘normal’.
Looks like it does work for you, and I’ve added them in. The code is:
[img src=”http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv201/snijderj/data.jpg” alt=”” /]
Substitute triangular brackets for square.
[corrected code, thanks to JonF]
It’s also irrelevant to a discussion of YEC. It’s like debating whether a man was murdered or not by discussing whether he had any enemies, when there’s a knife sticking out from between his shoulderblades.
Quote from some James Bond movie, “I can shoot you from Hamburg and still make it look like a suicide.” Now, that would be design!
Physician, heal thyself.
You have an extra > in there at the end, which would break it if he doesn’t understand HTML.
Sal,
Molecular clocks are an approximation, not exact, and one that is better the more closely related the groups are (contrary to what you say).
But most important is that clocks are simply not needed to infer phylogenies. You keep missing that point. You do say that “a hierarchical pattern” is found. Yes, a treelike hierarchical pattern.
You say that mammals are more divergent from each other than “fish” are, and this means that there is no evidence that their common ancestor is fishlike. I pointed out that if the “fish” include lungfishes and coelacanths and sharks, this isn’t true. Sharks and tuna will show more divergence from each other than any two mammals do. Same for lungfish and tuna, same for coelacanths and lungfish.
From you on this point … silence.
Changing the subject won’t make the evidence go away.
It’s not YEC views that are exasperating. It’s the standard YEC tactic of cherry-picking and heavily spinning a few anomalies in the data while ignoring the other 99.9% of the consilient scientific evidence that’s been presented.
The molecular clock discussion is relevant since it could show life is younger than thought. Deterioration of genomic conserved regions could indicate life is young.
An example of the conserved region is described here UCEs see Somehting
The existence of these regions indicates mammalian systems are young, or molecular clocking is busted, or both! The evolutionists were astonished for good reason. The lab findings again go against theory. Predictions were at variance with observations, hence the hypothesis is falsified, except evolutionary theory can’t be falsified in the mainstream because anomalies like this that ought to be headlines are forgotten.
I raised a troubling data point regarding the paradox of ancient bacteria having modern genes. It is evidence that molecular clocks are either frozen, or they are ticking but the clock is showing only a little time elapsed!
Stuff like this that ought to be headlines takes the back seat to dubious missing link discoveries that are later retracted.
Few want to professionally stick there necks out and publish stuff like that paper. It ought to make the evolutionary community pause and reconsider. Too much institutional imperatives to allow open rethinking and proper skepticism.
The YEC community has access now to DNA sequencers as well as public access to NCBI trace archives, etc. Some of the ideas I laid out can be investigated further by observation, measurement and experiment.
Um, is the obvious answer not just that modern bacteria have ancient genes?
Joe,
I’m sorry to belabor the point, but if mutations don’t happen at sufficient rate within sufficient time, there is no divergence, Lack of intra-species (within species) divergence when there is large inter-species (between species) divergence indicates at least the following possibilities:
1. the divergence that generates the hierarchical pattern was a created feature
2. the creation event was relatively recent
It proves the orchard model and it also shows the hierarchical pattern cannot be the result of variations from a common ancestor. I used the phrase molecular clock to refer to rates of change even supposing the rate of change is variable.
We both agree there is a hierarchical pattern in biology. Your definition of homology proceeds from common descent, mine from Owen’s view of common design.
The hierarchical pattern was perceived even by Creationists like Linnaeus. He saw it at the morphological level, today we see it at the molecular level too.
I’m simply pointing out, if there is insufficient intra-species variation, then descent with modification as an explanation for the hierarchical pattern is then observationally falsified and common design through recent special creation becomes the superior explanation.
Surely we should have a means of falsifying one mechanism over the other, or at least we should try to find one.
stcordova,
Does the entire genome behave like these UCE’s? No? Enough with the confirmation bias, then. The necessary multi-generational experiments with the knockout mice have not, AFAIK, been done (there is a research proposal dated 2012 on Researchgate with that intention). It is interesting, but control for all non-Creation possibilities has yet to be done. You are in the peculiar position of arguing that a region with no apparent function must be essential to all Created organisms, despite being unnecessary in mice. Do you think UCEs are Created Junk?
stcordova,
That is completely wrong.
stcordova,
So if there is less variation amongst siblings than amongst cousins (in an asexual for simplicity) descent with modification is observationally falsified? I must be missing something.
Nevertheless, the Australian aboriginals were in Australia long before the purported time of Adam and Eve.
Really, Sal. YEC is absurd. And you know that it is absurd.
I can understand having reservations about evolution. But that doesn’t help the YEC case.
You’ll be doing that for the rest of your life then. Why not actually write a formal paper?
Sal,
Where did all the water come from, and where did it go?
I’m pretty sure that will be answered in YEC Part 2, or maybe never …
I’d like to make a suggestion.
The vast majority of comments in this thread so far having nothing at all to do with being a YEC, mirroring the OP. So you all are allowing Salvador to discuss things irrelevant to his claims and to get away with it. He will think that if you can’t shake him on whatever it is you’re arguing about that his case for YEC is somehow supported, when it isn’t.
You should ask Salvador why it leads to being a YEC, as opposed, e.g., to being an Old Earth Creationist.
A miraculous origin of life does not lead one to YEC.
Sudden appearance of animal phyla does not lead one to YEC.
ORFan genes do not lead to YEC.
And on and on I could go.
Please help Salvador focus on why he’s a YEC, since that’s supposed to be the topic.
thank you
[p.s. I see Elizabeth made a similar comment upthread. I agree with Elizabeth :)]
Mung,
Fair points, Mung. Let’s enjoy this agreement with a virtual beer. 😀
Richardthughes, not a beer drinker, I’ll have a hard cider though!
The origin of life could indeed be a miracle [or indistinguishable from a miracle].
The physical evidence indicates it took place billions of years ago, not 6000 years ago.
How does that support YEC?
p.s. What is the evidence for a 10,000 year old earth as opposed to a 6,000 year old earth? IOW, why do you reject the 6,000 year old earth, and if you don’t reject it, why don’t you stick with that figure instead of waffling about?
cheers
There may in fact have been independent origins of life. The “orchard model” may have something to be said for it, or the “tangled web model.”
The physical evidence however, indicates the appearance of “the orchard” at far greater than 6,000 years ago, so how does that argue for YEC, as opposed say, to Old Earth Creationism?
I hope this doesn’t sound cruel, but it appears to me that Salvador is a YEC primarily because he met people who befriended him who were YEC.
That at least makes more sense than the reasons that Sal has given.
Cool – well that’s fine, but OOL isn’t exclusively a YEC problem, as others have pointed out. I was pointing to this:
(bit of reading required) where KeithS was using Theobald’s statistical congruence argument FOR evolution.
He’s going to discuss the fossil record in part 2.
I expect an arkload of PRATTs.
And how did it escape the attention of the ancient Egyptians and other literary cultures that flourished at the time? The usual dates of the global flood based on Biblical chronologies coincide with the final phase of the Old Kingdom (the 6th dynasty, approximately) in Egypt and the 1st dynasty of Lagash in Sumer. We have their written records and chronicles. They don’t mention a global flood, and their civilisations don’t seem to have been wiped out.
Piotr Gasiorowski,
https://answersingenesis.org/archaeology/ancient-egypt/were-the-pyramids-built-before-the-flood/
But there’s Rohl’s Revised Egyptian Chronology…
Thank you for you compelling and well-articulated comment, however….
If you need multi-generational experiments, that indicates the selection is not that strong, certainly not as strong as the researchers posited, since they assumed relatively strong selection was needed to maintain such deep conservation. Besides, we know from mutational load, selection cannot enforce much beyond a few independent traits at a time in mammalian lines like humans.
I could have told you ahead of time selection won’t be an explanation for deep conservation because of Kimura’s work shows most molecular evolution is free of selection. Yes, the issue is deep in the weeds, but the astonishment of the researchers themselves should tell you something is amiss.
Finally, this leads to testable experiments now that we are starting to get cheaper and cheaper sequencing. I said either the clocks are stopped or they are running but not showing a lot of time. It’s a bit hard to tell right now, but what if the UCE’s start to show signs of intra-specific divergence as we sequence each generation in the present day? If clocks are running but not showing a lot of time, then this indicates special creation of life quite recently.
Additionally, I re-derived relevant equations that are accepted by Nachman and Crowell and Eyre-Walker Keithly:
Darwin Delusion Consice Version and Darwin Delusion Long Winded Version. This shows, the human genome cannot be pressed to hard to toss out too many variants via natural selection. Drift due to random gametic sampling can toss things out, and it usually does, but to toss things out in away that maintains deep conservation between species? Now that’s really magical, and the researchers know it.
But you don’t seem to want to concede this is evidence of Young Life Creation. I respect that, but like the question of OOL, a proper refutation is needed to put the issue to rest. Until then, we have an anomaly that sticks out like a sore thumb in Old Life Evolution by Darwinian Selection Model but which accords with the Young Life Creation, Orchard Model.
Finally, Darwinists keep thinking selection can purge all the bad, but the equations population genetics says otherwise (such as the one linked above).
I point to this article in Nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7319/full/nature09534.html
Do you all think this number will increase or decrease? It depends on how many loss-of-function variants enter the population per generation and how many can be purged out by the excess reproductive rate.
If it turns out the rate of loss-of-function variation exceeds what can be carried reasonably by a human female (say more than 30 births per female, YIKES!), then it suggest that we didn’t evolve, but rather were created relatively recently, because our species could not have been around that long, lest we be dead by now. To paraphrase Kondrashov, “how are we not dead 100 times over?”
The answer as to why we are not dead 100 times over is that humanity was specially created not too long ago.
It can’t be evidence of Young Life Creation, Sal, because because that hypothesis is already falsified by masses of consilient geological and cosmological evidence.
So it must be evidence of something else.
What you are doing is insisting on providing evidence consistent with a hypothesis that has already been ruled out.
And it isn’t even good evidence. You aren’t thinking of John Sanford, are you? Because his book is riddled with conceptual and factual errors from beginning to end. Charming man, but simply wrong.
And did you actually read Kondrashov’s answer?
Nuclear power, atomic bombs, and even the radium dials on old-fashioned watches don’t work at all, unless atomic decay works exactly the way physics theory says it works. Both the current best theory and the lab observations of radioactive samples over the past century show that the rate of atomic decay for each element is constant. And unfortunately for YEC, those constant decay rates really are evidence for an old Earth in the millions of various samples which have been tested.
Now the YEC has two basic choices: accept the Earth is more than 4 billion years old (impossible!!) or claim that the physics must be wrong. But again, if the physics is off by more than a few percent, our entire world would not work; we wouldn’t even exist, much less have a solar-heated planet, nuclear medicine, and personal computers. So that option is also out. What’s a poor YEC to do?
As we discussed elsewhere recently, they aren’t allowed, by their religious affiliation, to imagine that god created the world young but with the appearance of old age as a sort of “trick” or fun game.
The fourth option, I’d say, is to simply ignore the physics theory and the literally billions of tons of physical evidence altogether. We might call that the Amish strategy (and the Amish, characteristically, also ignore the so-called “creation-science”).
Finally, an option we see here is not to ignore it altogether, but to look at only the teensy teensy exceptions, the noise in the data, to focus on any slender thread upon which they can hang their hopes that “mainstream science” is wrong (about everything). In this, it’s vital that a YEC believer not go head to head with the physics of everything, because, honestly, rational people already know that physics works. Here we are, typing on our computers! So instead, we get this touching concern that mutation rates are too low for evolution or too high for survival or maybe both at once, who knows.
I can’t tell if this paper has ever convinced a YEC but it’s my favorite resource for an old-Earth discussion with believers: Christian Perspective on Radiometric Dating
In addition to geological dating, Wiens gives good explanations of tree ring and varve data which clearly show that evolution has been in action at least 4 times longer than Sal’s picked-out-of-thin-air 10000 year figure. 40,000 is just the bare minimum, based on carbon dates (and we know for certain that C14 dating is valid because we’ve successfully tested it against carbon-containing artifacts of known age).
Here’s his summary:
Synergistic Epistasis. It’s not known if this sort of truncation selection will actually work as claimed.
But we’ll see if his fix actually works. We have data pouring in now to settle the issue of who is closer to the truth. No need to argue the point to much, the data will settle it.
That said we do know entire genomes are going extinct, not just by mutation, but plain old accidents, and nothing to replace them. We see real evolution in play today, versus Darwin’s Speculation of upward improvement and diversification.
At the rate forms are being deleted from the biosphere, it raises the question, why are any complex life forms still around? I demonstrated that real time evidence does not confirm Darwinian diversification, but that real evolution has a net deletion species per year.
The price of cherry picking for addicted gamblers and believers in Darwinism
If species are dying faster than getting replaced, this confirms nature destroys rather than builds, and that maybe the present set of species was specially created recently.
The fossil record is presumed to indicated diversification of forms over millions of years, but if the fossil record is young, then combined with the current extinction rates, it supports that life was recently and specially created.
I look forward to arguing my case that the fossil record is not as young as supposed in Part 2.
Thank you to all who participated.
The fossil record shows we have had at least five major mass extinction events in the last 500 million years. Each time the number of species crashed dramatically and in each case the total number of species eventually recovered. YECs have no explanation for those clear patterns of extinctions then re-radiations of life found in the geologic column. Ignoring all that evidence won’t make the evidence go away Sal.
The fossil record isn’t young. Fossil evidence of life dates back well over 3 billion years, fossil evidence of multicelled life well over 650 million years.
That’s a boatload of evidence to ignore Sal but if anyone can do it I bet you can.
That’s one reason. There are lots of others, including the fact that he was referring to problems with small populations.
Sal, when an equation predicts something that we don’t think is true, does it not occur to you that perhaps the equation is the problem?
The equation Kondrashov was using is extremely simple. It’s a clever model because it shows the power of drift. However, it completely ignores the fact that the selection coefficient of a mutation is itself a function of the evolving population – it’s not fixed.
To expect a simple linear equation to model a complex non-linear process is absurd. Kondrashov’s paper make this point – that simple population genetics equations are too simple.
But the fact is that we know that the equation doesn’t work – if it were true, and life was really only a few thousand years old – why do rapidly breeding populations do just fine? Why are there still mice?
The data already settle it. It is simply wrong – it’s why Kondrashov wrote his paper.
Oh, yeah. Radiocarbon, dendrochronology, historical records etc. mean nothing when confronted with the Bible. If the Bible implied that the Great Flood happened in 1945, Rohl would condense all known history to 70 years, and World War II would be dated between last Wednesday afternoon and last Thursday morning. (Which, by the way, would still be less off the mark than making the Earth 6000 years old.)