Return to the
Reasons To Believe Home PageTwo researchers have devised a technique that promises to revolutionize fossil dating and perhaps destroy the last vestiges of neo-Darwinism. Until now, critics of fossil dating have had at least a shaky leg to stand on. Error bars for speciation events in the fossill record typically range from one to five million years. Though compared with life’s 3.9-billion-year existence, such inaccuracies seem insignificant. Nevertheless, they do leave room in the minds of some biologists for speculation about the operation of naturally occurring processes explaining all changes in life. However, most biologists would agree that that room has now become a narrow closet, at best.1-4
Revealing again the value of interdisciplinary research, geophysicist Brooks Ellwood teamed up with paleontologist Rex Crick to develop a method for dating marine sedimentary layers to the amazing precision of 10,000 to 20,000 years.5 Their approach begins with a measurement of how susceptible a sediment may be, because of its iron content, to the influence of Earth’s magnetic field. Because the iron in marine sediments comes from continental land mass erosion, variations in the magnetic susceptibility of these sediments reflects variations in the erosion rate. And since erosion rates are altered by climatic changes which, in turn, result from small variations in the earth’s orbit, astronomers can use their knowledge of orbital variations over the past 400 million years to provide accurate dates for marine sedimentary layers within that time frame.
Embedded in the marine sediments are thousands of fossils. With this new dating technique, paleontologists will be able to pinpoint speciation and extinction dates with hundreds of times greater precision than before. With speciation and extinction dates clearly in focus, we can apply our knowledge of molecular clocks (mutational change rates) to determine more realistically than ever what is and is not possible by random, natural processes alone. I look forward to keeping you posted.
1. Hugh Ross, "Biology’s Big Bang #2," Facts & Faith , vol. 7, no. 4 (1993), pp. 2-3.
2. Hugh Ross, "Fungus Paints Darker Picture of Permian Catastrophe," Facts & Faith, vol. 10, no. 2 (1996), p. 3.
3. Hugh Ross, "Life’s Fragility," Facts & Faith, vol. 8, no. 3 (1994), pp. 4-5.
4. Hugh Ross, "The Raising of Lazarus Taxa," Facts & Faith , vol. 8, no. 3 (1994), p.5.
5. Richard Monastersky, "Telling Time 400 Million Years Ago," Science News, 149 (1996), p. 399.
This page, and all contents, are Copyright © 1996 by Reasons To Believe.
Return to the
Reasons To Believe Home Page
Return to the table of contents for the Facts & Faith, Third Quarter 1996 Issue