Breaking news on this case: Strom Thurmond has just acknowledged they’re his tracks.
Take it from someone who’s been there–the Paluxy tracks aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.
One hot, sweltering day, a friend of the family invited be to go along with his family to see the tracks. The whole bunch of 'em were diehard creationists and bible literalists, and thought that they could cure of my alarming evolutionist tendecies. What the heck–I’ve got nothing better to do. So they packed up the camper and we set out on an hour drive toward Glen Rose.
First on the itinerary was an stop at the Creationist Museum, run by the respected (in their mind) Carl Baugh. I use “Museum” in the most tenuous sense, as in my mind it more resembled a one-room shanty with few exhibits but plenty of creationist merchandise. Cost of admission: $5 per family. Practically a steal, considering the carnival charges $7.50 to see their sideshows.
Inside was a make-shift auditorium consisting of a numer of chairs lined up facing an overhead television. Along one side is a painted mural showing the various stages of earth as it was created. What’s this squiggly line in stage 5? That, my friend proudly explains, is the sound of the Lord emanating from earth and reaching out across space. Sound travels through space? I could see this was going to be a long day.
The television flickers, and a pre-programmed tape of Baugh in his earlier years starts playing. Mostly it consists of him standing at a table, pointing to various artifacts that “disprove” evolution. If I recall correctly, they were a fossilized human finger found in Cambrian rock, a snail carbon-dated to be 2,000 years old, various footprints, and sundry other credulous finds. My friend and his family sit enraptured. I quickly become impatient, then bored, so I toured some of the other exhibits. Among them were an oversized footprint, a tank of “vegetarian” piranha (I didn’t ask), and a water tank that apparently was used in some breeding experiment. Peachy.
Wait! I’m getting to the damn tracks! After my companions came out of their trance, we drove down to the “human” tracks. After an extended hike, we came to a section of the river that had been screened off with sandbags. These tracks, my friend proudly explained, gesturing to a line of footprints, was the final nail in the coffin of evolution.
First thing I noticed was, yeah, they did look vaguely human, and by making exagerrated strides you CAN walk in line with them. But they had irregular lengths, some longer than others, and the ridges where the clay should be pushed between the toes were broken and chipped away on all the prints, making it difficult to tell how many toes were on the foot that made these tracks. My friend explains that skeptical debunker named Kuban snuck in one night with a sledge hammer and smashed all the toes on all the prints so it wouldn’t threaten the orthodoxy of evolution. Uh huh. Also, you’d expect a human track to have a bulge in the middle of the print with a depression in the back, corresponding to the arch and heal of the foot. Instead, the prints I examined start wide but narrow along the length the foot the deeper one goes into the clay, like a half-buried cylinder.
The rest of the trip was basically them taking potshots at evolution, but getting defensive when I point out some of the flaws in their theory. If it’s one thing I learned from this trip, is that these people can dish it out, but they sure can’t take it themselves.
The only plausible explanation seems to be the Dick Clark one.
Well covered topic! A couple of additional comments:
First, if you haven’t been by the creationist “museum” in Glen Rose lately, they’ve got a new addition. They’ve constructed a “hyperbolic chamber” to prove their theory (cough!crackpot babbling) that in the antediluvian era, the atmospheric pressure was much higher and richer in oxygen and water vapor. They claim that under these conditions, all living things can live to be hundreds of years old (cf., Adam begat Seth who lived to be a bijillion years old, Seth begat Sasquatch who lived to be fifteen bijillion, etc.) This fits in with the dinosaurs, they claim, because lizards grow larger for as long as they live (they say–I only have primary knowledge of geology, not biology); thus, old lizards = large lizards = dinosaurs. Except that dinosaurs look nothing like lizards, amongst other things. So, the wackos in Glen Rose are raising lizards in their so-called “hyperboloic chamber” trying to grow dinosaurs.
Second, geology is plagued by what I’ve always blown off as “accidents of erosion”… just because a rock looks like a hamburger doesn’t make it a hamburger. Likewise, it wouldn’t be unlikely for moving currents of water and/or air to carve out small, elongate, it-sorta-looks-like-a-footprint-if-you-hold-your-head-just-right tinajas. As was commented earlier about the Glen Rose “human” footprint, it’s very vague–think about alleged satanic backward masking in rock albums. I always hear “blURwaaWURR” where the creationist (while wearing their anti-rock crusader hats) hear “I love the devil”. Now apply this analogy to these ambiguous footprints.
Third, no matter how much one might be convinced they are footprints, fossil evidince doesn’t lie–only in the latest precambrian do we even start to see jellyfish. So, unless it’s the footprint of a brave alien geologist, it’s just a fluke or a hoax.
Pantellerite
You don’t know the half of it, Pant–that family I was traveling with are the ones constructing the tank! For those who haven’t seen it, it’s about 8 feet in diameter and about 50 feet long.
The plan, my friend explains to me, is to stock it full of lifeforms and tweak the atmostphere inside to approximate (in their mind) the conditions of early earth. They’re gonna pressurize it to 2 atmospheres and tweak the oxygen level to 50%. Also in works is a giant electromagnet that’ll run through the center of the tank that’ll bathe the organisms in energy. Supposedly, the life they’ll grow inside will grow to giant porportions and have longer lifespans.
You’d be amazed at the lengths some creationists are going to get this project to completion. According to my friend, they’ve had offers from women to give birth and raise their children inside the tank! Can you imagine growing up inside a metal enclosure surrounded by rats and insects? (To my friend’s credit, he turned them down.)
Of course, no matter how long the project goes on without producing giant animals, dinosaurs, etc., they will not admit they are wrong. They will just say they don’t have everything right. Must increase the pressure, decrease the magnetic flux, whatever.
If only they’d all offer to live inside it themselves. I’d pay big bucks to see that.
I can see why the’re so happy about this:
- It’s a real-looking experiment
- If it fails, it doesn’t prove anything; they just got the conditions wrong, or maybe lizards have “micro-evolved” to meet their current environment (Creationists often accept evolutionary change, just not speciation).
If it attracts attention to Creationism, they will be happy.
Let’s all start wearing lizard pins in jest! Makes a great symbol for evolution, no?
I would be tempted to say we’ll all be eating crow if the experiment works and lizards grow to enormous sizes, but we’d probably all be eating lizard instead. (Mmmmm… lizard…)
Recipes, anyone?
If they attempt this experiment as y’all say, they’ll just end up with dead animals. Pure oxygen under pressure with or without high humidity is actually toxic.
Maybe we should alert the ASPCA.
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
Of course they won’t be able to get the correct conditions because they would have to ask the missing link that the damnable evolutionists haven’t found yet.
“There are many sweeping generalizations that are always true” -Space Ghost
On page:
http://www.bible.ca/tracks.htm
, where they experiment with footprints of junior-high-school kids in wet concrete, they come up with, not protracted toes, but "prorated" toes!
Ray
I am sick and tired of your ignorance, you evolutionists. My parents rode stegasaurases to school, in the cold snow, uphill both ways, no saddle on the spikes, and fighting off the velociraptors with their bare fists, proving that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.
–Lyndon B. Johnson
I’m waiting for a Creationist to claim that the movie “1,000,000 B.C.” was based on a true story.
Hey, that’s it! Raquel Welch left those tracks!
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
I’ve seen a “human”-early man- footprint in a t-rex’s footprint at a nearby dino dig. out east of dallas. It is too vague too call.
a teacher of mine once was at some sort of fossil archives at A&M, and there are many fossils there that could dissprove darwinism or Creationist therories.
that is my 2¢
realm505: I’m not a perfect typist myself. You must do as I do: I implore you, proofread, proofread, proofread.
You said that some fossils at Texas(?) A&M could disprove Darwinist or Creationist theories.
Well, which is it? The terms are mutually exclusive. They would be evidence for or against either Creationism or Darwinism, but not both.
And if you’re talking about the dinosaur tracks near Glen Rose, Texas… Glen Rose is southWEST of Dallas, not East. And besides, those are the tracks the rest of us have written about. (Well, except the pre-Cambrian ones. Pre-Cambrian rocks would be older than any known dinosaur fossils.)
You DID read the whole thread, didn’t you? Trust me, you don’t want to make the mistake of not reading the whole thing. 
Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to relive it. Georges Santayana
Taking the claim at face value, the question becomes; how close to human do the prints have to look before they are presumed to be human?
And, to give the creationists their due, should that standard be tougher for tracks that are found outside their normal date range, such as these? To put it another way, if these prints were found in human-era rock, would they be presumed human?
It’s easy to say no, but how does one measure closeness of fit to match fossil prints with their originating species?
Because, if we conclude that they’re not human simply because the date is wrong, then it would seem that creationists are justified in concluding that there’s no way their evidence can ever be given a fair shake; it’s wrong because it doesn’t fit expectations.
(Having said that, I agree that they don’t look all that much like human tracks, although there is a superficial resemblance. Carl Baugh and Don Patton (Man-track creationist buddies), however, are no more scientists than I am; they have phony-baloney PhDs, according to the talkorigins.org FAQs. Much of their evidence seems to rely on trusting their scientific knowledge about, for example, the difference in appearance between carved and stepped-on impressions.)
jab1:
The terms/concepts may be exclusive, but they DON’T represent the entire range of possibility…which is to say, realm505 COULD be right. The fossils at TX A&M might, for example, be related to…the 2001 obelisk, yeah, that’s the ticket!..thus in ‘one fell swoop’ putting both Creationism and generally-accepted theories of evolution into doubt AND making a number of posters to this board very happy.
You can imagine that the folks at A&M wouldn’t want to let word out until they’d properly researched those fossils, of course…