bill@utastro.UUCP (William H. Jefferys) (03/12/84)
Ray Miller writes: > But as I promised last week, here is a falsification test for creation (2 > test actually). First for the Paluxy River tracks. Given a slab of Cretaceous > limestone, fabricate a human-like footprint. It must be of equal quality as > the best that Dr. Baugh has found, i.e., subtle human features such as toes, > arch, heel, ball of foot, etc. all in correct anatomical proportions. > Additionally lamination lines *must* follow the contour of the depression - > including the toe region. The lamination lines will of course eliminate all > carvings (hoaxes, erosion, etc.) I will wave the additional restriction that > the print must be located underneath overlying Cretaceous layers to make it > easier. If such a thing can be done (and no scientist or evolutionist has yet) > then while not falsifying creation, I will agree that the Paluxy tracks cannot > be used as strong positive evidence for the model. I have twice criticised the Paluxy data as too weak and flimsy to be considered seriously as evidence against evolution. Ray has failed to respond. The above test is not what I asked for - a test that could falsify creation - but only a particular kind of test of the credibility of the Paluxy data. As I stated in my last article, even ignoring the question of hoaxes, the fact that the features can honestly be interpreted by different people as different things excludes them from serious consderation. However, the data Ray is asking for already exist! They are in the hands of Dr. Baugh himself, and are the very features he claims are tracks! Now, I do not mean to imply that Dr. Baugh carved them himself; I am willing to stipulate that he really excavated them. But by holding them forth as man-tracks, he has created them as surely as if he had manufactured them with his own hands. (I am reminded of Carl Sagan's remark on the Martian Canals, that there is no question that they were the product of intellegence, that the only question is the end of the telescope that the intellegence was on). Moreover, I do not mean to imply that Dr. Baugh is in any way dishonest in his belief that the features are genuine human tracks. As a creationist, he has a stake in their being genuine, and this naturally would cause him to view them in a particular way. All that has to be done is to find out what the features *really* are. Let Dr. Baugh take them to expert paleontologists, say at Harvard, or at the Smithsonian, and have them evaluated. That's the way science settles issues of controversy: By making the data available for peer review. If he is unwilling to submit them for independent evaluation, then I am afraid that science will rightly continue to ignore them. -- Bill Jefferys 8-% Astronomy Dept, University of Texas, Austin TX 78712 (USnail) {ihnp4,kpno,ctvax}!ut-sally!utastro!bill (uucp) utastro!bill@ut-ngp (ARPANET)