Re: Fossil Records Show Biodiversity Comes and Goes

From: maison.mousse (maison.mousse_at_wanadoo.fr)
Date: 03/15/05 

Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 17:14:40 +0100

Ron O a écrit dans le message
<1110897619.788418.241970@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>...
>
>George wrote:
>>
>http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Phys-fossil-biodiversity.html
>>
>> BERKELEY, CA - A detailed and extensive new analysis of the fossil
>records of
>> marine animals over the past 542 million years has yielded a stunning
>surprise.
>> Biodiversity appears to rise and fall in mysterious cycles of 62
>million years
>> for which science has no satisfactory explanation. The analysis,
>performed by
>> researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley
>National
>> Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at
>Berkeley, has
>> withstood thorough testing so that confidence in the results is above
>
>> 99-percent.
>
>What about the cretaceous and permian mass extinctions? Do they fit in
>this cycle? Is it 62 million plus or minus 15 million or so? If they
>do fit the cycle the current mass extinction that we are witnessing is
>just about right on schedule. Chance? How was the 99% confidence
>calculated? Maybe the comets are just a little late. How are the
>IDers going to put this into their "theory?"
>
>If you take 62 million years as one hour to the Biblical god it would
>be around 9 billion years since the creation of the universe around 6
>days ago. This excersize in numerology comes closer than just about
>anything to getting the age about right.
>
>I appologize for joking around, but the 99% confidence seems to be some
>type of joke. Most of the dates for any given fossil used in the
>analysis likely has less confidence than that. It is pretty hard to
>get a higher confidence for your conclusions than you have for the data
>used to get your conclusions. I guess you can say the scatter evens
>out if you know the distrubution of the random scatter with enough
>sampling. I'd suspect that a lot of dates for the fossils used are not
>independent. How was this bias adjusted for?
>
>Ron Okimoto
>
Almost any thing out of Berkeley could be considered a joke. The very nature
of the way fossils are preserved means that the record is intermittent (1).
There is as far as
any knows no cyclic nature to extinctions nor of any evidence of mass
extinctions over a geological short period of time. Absent of fossils of a
certain type does not mean that
that species was not present during any time frame.
  The practice of some "geologist" of attempting to use statistics to create
data or
reality only enhances the argument by some that geology is not a real
science.

1: The practice of America Indians of hunting Buffalo by chasing herds of
them over a cliff left little trace. (so much for the Indian living in
harmony with their environment)
   The almost extinction of the same animal because of mass killings by
European settlers also left little
trace. We know that the DoDo (spelling?) bird was abundant a few hundred
years ago but little or no fossil record remains of it.

JOL

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