Donald R. Prothero was Professor of Geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and Lecturer in Geobiology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He earned M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in geological sciences from Columbia University in 1982, and a B.A. in geology and biology (highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of California, Riverside. He is currently the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 28 books and over 250 scientific papers, including five leading geology textbooks and four trade books as well as edited symposium volumes and other technical works. He is on the editorial board of Skeptic magazine, and in the past has served as an associate or technical editor for Geology, Paleobiology and Journal of Paleontology. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological Society, and the Linnaean Society of London, and has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation. He has served as the President and Vice President of the Pacific Section of SEPM (Society of Sedimentary Geology), and five years as the Program Chair for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. In 1991, he received the Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society for the outstanding paleontologist under the age of 40. He has also been featured on several television documentaries, including episodes of Paleoworld (BBC), Prehistoric Monsters Revealed (History Channel), Entelodon and Hyaenodon (National Geographic Channel) and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts (BBC).
RSS feed for this authorIn the spirit of Earth Day, which happens today, I’ll blog about another important ecological topic: the alleged “global warming pause”.
About a year ago, I wrote a post about the climate-denier myth that “it’s been cooling since 1998″. As the post pointed out, this is based on cherry-picking the anomalously warm year of 1998 (atypical because it was an extraordinary El Niño year that brought a lot of heat from the tropical oceans into the atmosphere), then deliberately picking one or two years following and calling that “cooling”.
As the climate deniers have been called out about this lie, they’ve shifted the goalposts, and made the claim that the global warming has “paused” since 1998. As reported in Mother Jones, Fox News began playing this meme over and over again in 2012, so that soon the regular media were echoing their meme as well. But is it true? NO! (continue reading…)
comments (59)God Bless America: Strange and Unusual Religious Beliefs and Practices in the United States
by Dr. Karen Stollznow
Pitchstone Publishing, Durham, North Carolina
2013, 256 pp.
Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight.
—Mark Twain
When I grew up in the Presbyterian Church, we were given a slim little paperback book about the various religious cults and what they believed. We had all heard about the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology, and Christian Science, but as naïve high school kids, we knew nothing about them. It was truly an eye-opener to read all about their strange beliefs, as the book preached why they were wrong and why the Presbyterians were right. At no point did the book turn the mirror on itself, and examine the weird ideas espoused by the Presbyterians and other mainstream Christians.
Then, when I began to study comparative religions in college, I encountered a totally different perspective: the detailed (and often dry) scholarly dissection of world religions. These books were often massive, and included huge detailed sections on the mythologies and core beliefs that soon became overwhelming. It was eye opening to see what other religions reveal about the religion you grew up with, but it was also a lot of hard work. (continue reading…)
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A review of Your Inner Fish, a three-part documentary series airing on PBS beginning on April 9, 2014
In 2008, Neil Shubin published his best-selling book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion Year History of the Human Body. Based on his experience teaching medical school anatomy at the University of Chicago, the book explored the evidence of our evolutionary past demonstrated in the peculiar jury-rigged anatomy of humans. Interspersed with the anatomical evidence of evolution were stories about his field work discovering important fossils that showed the transition from fish to amphibians (Tiktaalik), as well as other important finds. Shubin’s research is not only in anatomy and paleontology, but also in evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”), so there were many stories in the book detailing the new discoveries in genetics that explain the oddball poorly-designed way we are constructed, and how these genetic mechanisms were inherited from our ancestors. The book was named “Best Book of the Year” by the National Academy of Sciences. After his earlier career at the University of Pennsylvania, Shubin is currently the Robert Bensley Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Associate Dean for academic strategy of the university’s Biological Sciences Division. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011. (continue reading…)
comments (10)Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.
—Will Durant
For my post this week, I originally planned to write about the 50th anniversary of the Great Alaska earthquake, March 27, 1964. It was the largest measured quake in U.S. history, measuring 9.2 on the moment magnitude scale, and caused huge amounts of destruction in southern Alaska. It also profoundly changed the science of geology as well, since it proved that subduction zones were real, and showed us how the land changed after subduction zone earthquakes. And then as I finished this post on March 28, the earthquakes along the Puente Hills fault started to roll in. It seemed that earthquakes were the theme of the week!
But then another disaster grabbed the headlines, and pointed to some important issues that seemed even more timely. On Monday, March 24, we heard the news of the gigantic landslide that buried the tiny town of Oso, Washington, about an hour north and east of Seattle. When I originally wrote this (March 28), the official death toll was 25, but over 90 were missing and feared dead. At last count it is 28 dead, 22 still missing. Most of the news coverage of the story focuses on the horrors of thousands of tons of mud and rocks roaring down on people in a matter of seconds, burying them alive or crushing them under the enormous weight of wet mud, ripping houses and cars to shreds, and even shredding the clothes off the bodies of the victims. In the weeks before the slide, over twice the amount of the normal rainfall fell, saturating the ground and increasing the pore pressure so the sediment was like quicksand or wet concrete. The slide material itself was made of ancient glacial lake and valley sediments, mostly porous sand that can absorb a lot of moisture, and is loose and crumbly, so when it is saturated, it will flow. Witnesses described the debris flow as a “fast-moving wall of mud” containing trees and other debris cutting through homes directly beneath the hill. A firefighter stated, “When the slide hit the river, it was like a tsunami”. In numerical terms, the size of the mudflow is staggering. It’s estimated at 15 million cubic yards moved all at once. A Washington state geologist said the slide was one of the largest landslides he’d seen. The mud, soil and rock debris left from the mudslide is 1,500 ft (460 m) long, 4,400 ft (1,300 m) wide and deposited debris 30 to 40 ft (9.1 to 12.2 m) deep.
comments (28)A foolish man, which built his house upon the sand—Matthew 7: 24-27.
Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee—Job 12:8
During the Ham on Nye debate last February 4, Bill led off with a great example to throw Ken off balance. He pointed out that (ironically), the Creation “Museum” itself was built upon rocks which refuted flood geology! Bill even brought a piece of fossiliferous limestone from a road cut nearby to show that it was full of fossils, delicately preserved, and not the kind of thing a flood would produce. He explained it briefly, but I don’t know how many people got the point—and given the humorless nature of most creationists who don’t catch on to sarcasm and snark, I doubt they even noticed the irony that their entire model was refuted by the rocks beneath them at that very place.
Let’s look at the geologic background to this concept. First of all, how do limestones form? Geologists know from studying them all over the world, and looking closely at them in ancient settings, that limestones are produced by the accumulation of fragments of calcareous animals and plants (shell fragments, corals, pieces of calcareous algae) in warm, shallow, clear tropical waters, with no mud or sand from land that would clog the gills of the shelly organisms or corals, or make the water dark and muddy. Since many of these organisms (especially corals) only form big reefs in warm tropical waters, and since much of the reef community is plants (not only the calcareous algae, but also the algae symbiotically living in reef coral polyps), the water must be very shallow and clear to allow light penetration. Consequently, modern limestones are formed in shallow clear tropical waters far from the mud of land-based rivers: the Bahamas, Bermuda, Yucatan, the Atlantic Coast of Florida (but not the Gulf side, where Mississippi mud darkens the waters), the Persian Gulf, and the southwest Pacific and Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Nowhere else! Not only is this a very restricted setting, but under no circumstances do limestones (today or in the past) show any evidence of being formed in the muddy, turbulent, cold waters of a typical flood—or even a supernatural flood. If you look at them closely, they are accumulations of layer after layer of fossil communities, slowly building on top of each other in quiet waters, often with delicate organisms (such as the stick-like bryozoans and delicate corals and sponges) buried in life position, with no evidence that they had been battered and toppled by the powerful energy of flood waters. Knowing this, right away we can refute “flood geology”, because there are many places in the world with huge piles of limestone, each made of layer upon layer of delicate fossils, that cannot be made by flood energy. Heck, even the creationists’ favorite example, the Grand Canyon, is built with many limestone layers: the Muav Limestone near the base, the huge thickness of Redwall Limestone at the cliff break, and the Kaibab and Toroweap Limestones that cap the rim. (continue reading…)
comments (32)As Saint Patrick’s Day was beginning to dawn here in Los Angeles, most people in the central and western side of the city were abruptly awakened just after 6:30 a.m. by a 4.4 magnitude quake on the north side of the Santa Monica Mountains, near Woodland Hills, where I teach geology at Pierce College. It awoke my family during the 2-5 seconds of shaking, but I slept through it. I’ve been through the 1971 Sylmar quake, the 1987 Whittier quake, the 1994 Northridge quake—every major quake here since I was born in the region, so a piddling 4.4 doesn’t even rattle me. I even was lucky enough to experience a rare Eastern earthquake when I felt the Virginia quake of August, 2011, from the top floor of the Frick Wing of the American Museum of Natural History.
We immediately turned on the news and got the basic information about the quake, as the magnitude was downgraded from 4.7 to 4.4 when better data came in, and the location was moved from Westwood to Sherman Oaks, closer to the actual fault line on the north side of the Santa Monica Mountains. Most of the reporting was competent, although in the early stages, it’s largely silly stuff like “Did you feel it?” and “What did it feel like?” rather than anything accurate or scientific that would tell us something important about the quake. Sure enough, sooner or later it was bound to happen: one of the “man-on-the-street” interviewees spouted the geologists’ least favorite myth: “Oh, it was warm yesterday, so there must have been earthquake weather.” Fortunately, the news anchor was smart enough to dismiss this urban myth and move on to another interview, but if you surfed the internet, it was full of claims that “earthquake weather” must have caused this quake. (Geologists’ other pet peeve: people—especially news anchors and reporters—using the term “tidal wave” for tsunamis, which have nothing to do with tides. Fortunately, the lessons of the Dec. 26, 2004, Sumatran quake and tsunami seem to have reduced the incidences of these displays of ignorance ). (continue reading…)
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Like many scientists, for over a year I’ve been anxiously awaiting the first episode of the new version of “Cosmos,” starring Neil DeGrasse Tyson. A reboot of the classic series originally done by Carl Sagan in 1980, this version is co-written and co-produced by Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan. It is also co-produced by “Family Guy” creator Seth Macfarlane and by Jason Clark (producer of “42”, “Ted”, and the newly released “Mr. Peabody and Sherman”, which premiered the same weekend; he’s married to former actress Kimberly Beck, a high-school classmate of mine). I figured with these people at the helm, and Tyson as the spokesperson, they would not disappoint. But I was not prepared for how amazing the first episode turned out, even given those high expectations.
It aired on Sunday, March 9, on Fox, which had me a bit concerned, given the political bent of their news network, but this was because Macfarlane has good connections at Fox thanks to “Family Guy”. As the evening started, I was watching my Facebook feed and Twitter to see the reactions from those who saw it in all the time zones before I got my chance in Pacific Daylight Time. I was a bit worried to see a few of my Facebook friends didn’t like the show, but overall it seemed that most of them loved it. Finally, we got the kids to bed and it aired at 9:00 p.m. our time. This is mighty late if they wanted to reach anyone under 12, or for early-to-bed, early-to-rise people like me who get up before 6:00 a.m. It is especially so since we had just gotten the change to Daylight Saving Time that same morning, and most of our biological clocks were out of whack. (continue reading…)
comments (29)On March 11, we mark the third anniversary of the huge Sendai earthquake and tsunami in Japan (officially known as the Tohoku quake of 2011, since it struck that region). It was the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan, and the fifth most powerful quake ever to occur since modern recordkeeping began in 1900. It started when the oceanic crust about 70 km (43 miles) to the east of Tohoku and 30 km below the surface thrust down into the subduction zone beneath Japan. This plate movement produced a quake with a moment magnitude of 9.0, and it caused the islands of Japan to shift 2.4 m (8 feet) east in a matter of seconds. The upward acceleration on the quake was almost 3 times the force of gravity, so many objects flew up in the air. It released almost twice as much energy as the Sumatran quake on Dec. 26, 2004, which killed a quarter of a million people. The energy released by the quake would have been enough to power Los Angeles for an entire year. The earthquake even shifted the earth’s axis and caused it to wobble as much as 10-25 cm (4-10 inches). It also generated low-frequency sound waves that could be detected by satellites.
The quake shook up my life in many ways. Just weeks before, my new book Catastrophes! had been published, and the publicity folks at Johns Hopkins University Press asked me to be prepared to get a big boost of press events and sales if a natural disaster occurred. Sure enough, a week or two later we heard the news from Japan, and suddenly my phone was ringing off the hook. The next morning, I found myself getting up at 5:00 a.m. to drive over to a studio where I could speak directly to the East Coast audiences on MSNBC twice in a few hours–my first experience as a “talking head expert” on TV. Then I got home and found a call from the Los Angeles Times for a short piece on earthquakes and preparedness, which I wrote in just two hours and was published on the editorial page of the Times the next morning. That same day it appeared, I got a call from Mayor Villaraigosa, who wanted my opinion on earthquake preparedness in Los Angeles, and what we should do besides our annual “California Shake-Out” drills each October. Over the next few months, I found myself doing interview after interview: NPR, BBC, PBS, and numerous other radio and TV outlets. Never in my life have I gotten so much free publicity for promoting a book! (continue reading…)
comments (7)A few months ago, there was a big buzz of publicity for a new show on Spike TV called “The $10 Million Bigfoot Bounty”. As I described in my post shortly after it began, it was a cross between a typical competitive reality show in a rugged location (like “Survivor” or “The Amazing Race”), with a veneer of cryptozoology to give it a new twist. Originally, eight teams of two people were to compete for a $10 million bounty if they found good evidence of Bigfoot, and a $100,000 “research grant” as a consolation prize for the team that did the best even if they didn’t find Bigfoot. The series was hosted by former “Superman” actor Dean Cain, and the judges were molecular anthropologist Dr. Todd Disotell and primatologist Natalia Reagan.
Well, the show finally aired its eighth and last episode (some of which can still be watched on the show’s website). If you were watching a few episodes and want to follow it to the end, I won’t reveal everything and spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that none of the teams were very competent, so the “winner” could have been just about any of the original groups of contestants, except for those who were so completely out of shape and unfamiliar with the woods that they dropped out after a round or two. And it should come as no surprise (since it taped last summer and there were no leaks of amazing discoveries) that no evidence of Bigfoot was found—not even close! Nobody won the $10 million bounty. Instead, the final competition hiking all around the Porcupine Mountains State Park on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan hinged on whether one of the two teams didn’t bicker all the time—since the “evidence” both teams obtained was worthless. In the teaser for the episode, Disotell says they each got primate DNA! And then, after commercial, he finishes his sentence and says that it was human DNA (probably from the “hunters” themselves). (continue reading…)
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Order the book from Skeptic.com
In my 2007 book Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters, I detailed the problems with the bizarre view of the earth known as “flood geology.” Originally hatched by George Macready Price, a school teacher with no training or experience whatsoever in geology, he dreamed it up by reading children’s books about geology. Price was a Seventh-Day Adventist, therefore he had to believe in Young-Earth Creationism. Thus, he would create elaborate explanations of how Noah’s flood could explain the entire geological record—or at least the record as portrayed in oversimplified cartoons in kiddie books. If he had ever bothered to go into the field and look directly at the rocks, he might have changed his mind.
Ironically, the entire idea of Noah’s flood explaining the rock record was disproven by creationist geologists themselves. The Noah’s flood model was widely believed before 1795, but in the early 1800s geologists began to look at the rocks of Europe in greater detail, and realized that it could not be explained by one flood or by many floods. By 1830, “flood geology” was completely dead, even though the geologists of the time were all devoutly religious and believed in the Bible. And this all happened decades before Charles Darwin published his ideas in 1859, so in no way did geologists “shuffle the fossils and the strata” to prove evolution, as some creationists claim. (continue reading…)
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