Re: Bas van Geel, a Figment of the Imagination?//Re: PS-S.W.Care?

In article <77Xc7.20$k7.470@reggie.win.bright.net>, Thomas S. McDonald wrote:
> In Article <9l17qa$sjd$1@news1.xs4all.nl> josX  wrote: 
>> In article <3B73F43D.7DF66774@zetatalk.com>, Nancy Lieder wrote:
>>> In Article <g4ic7.339$5z5.21664@reggie.win.bright.net> Thomas McDonald wrote:
>>>> Dutch scientist purportedly working on the Discovery Channel mammoth
>>>> project.  You did not, however, produce a single reference to the
>>>> said Dutch scientist that one could use to establish his bona fides.
>>>> Who is Bas van Geel?
>>
>> Try google, it's a "search-engine".
>> <snip google search results>
>> Looks real enough, don't you agree?
>> regards,
>> Jos
>
>Dear Jos,
>
>    I never claimed that Bas van Geel was "a figment of the
> imagination."  Only that Nancy gave us nothing to tell us
> that he had anything to say on the subject.
>
>    You do understand, don't you, that the person using an
> authority as support for a position has the onus of
> providing adequate references?

It's not so much ""authority"" - which is an invalid argument by
definition - but it is his findings regarding the plants. He just
happens to be the one doing that research for Discovery-channel, so
why not mention his name.

The flowers were unnaturally frozen with the pollon still inside the 
unopened flowers (indicating `fossilization through freezing' before 
summer I guess).

>                                I looked at a few of the
> google search hits you listed, and it seems that Bas van
> Geel has expertise in paleo-ecology.  Probably why the
> Discovery folks used him.  However, none of the references
> you gave me gave any indication of his involvement with the
> Discovery mammoth project,

He is not (from what I gathered of the broadcast) directly involved,
they just asked him to test some samples they collected.

>                           nor what his views might be about
> the possibility of a "pole shift" causing the freezing of
> this particular mammoth.

The issue is the plants, just a fragment of the evidence of a rapid
climate change...

>    I did my own Google search, using the terms "bas van
> geel" and "mammoth."  The first site listed was the
> Discovery "Land of the Mammoth" site, specifically the page,
> "Who (or What) Killed the Mammoths?" by Bill Gasperini.  In
> it, he cites van Geel and two other Dutch scientists as
> having identified floral remains that point to a dry, grassy
> steppe environment.  Just as I have said, and have cited
> scientific evidence for.  The article gives no support to a
> "polar shift" hypothesis for the death of the mammoth, and
> is completely consistent with the evidence I quoted from
> other sources about environmental change on the mammoth
> steppe from that time to this.

What caused this environmental change. It's quite a change going
from a mammoth supporting environment (meaning LOTS of food for BIG
herbivors) to a continual freeze condition, all so fast and extreme
that mammoth don't decay over thousands of years, and also out of
sync with the seasons as "proven" by Bas van Geel's research on
plant-samples (meaning, it isn't a case of an unusual string of
bad summers, summer was abruptly cut short for some reason).

>    The article also quotes biologist Ross MacPhee, of the
> American Museum of Natural History in New York as saying,
> "We know that the mammoths lived through many different
> climatic periods, warm and cold....They were adaptable
> animals, resilient."  The story goes on to say that this
> finding makes it less likely that mammoths died out from
> environmental change, and that workers are looking into "a
> counter theory: that a deadly virus introduced by humans
> killed the mammoth and other mega-fauna at the end of the
> last ice age."  Earlier, the article's author noted that the
> mammoth they were investigating was not complete, and that
> they had not yet found any meat from the carcass.  The
> mammoth is not, as Nancy would have us believe, intact and
> "flash-frozen" as though by a sudden shift in the earth's
> crust.

It's common knowledge mammoth have been found with flesh on the
bone, so good dogs ate it.

No chance in debunking this one.

The `jarkov'-mammoth, as it's called, had fur/hair sticking out
of the block, and it still smelled like an animal (pretty badly
so they said).
This hair was in the location where you would expect it to be
for an intact animal. You are saying the flesh under the skin
was replaced by mud ?

>    I would ask you to note that Nancy, in common with many
> "fringe" types, scatter-guns arguments, shooting out a wide
> variety of information from many sources of variable
> quality, and then makes deductions based on them.  As is
> shown by the effort I've taken to more closely investigate
> ONLY ONE of her arguements, this technique relies on
> surface plausability and the difficulty that critics have
> when they try to back-track her claims and confirm or
> disconfirm them.  She relies on the fact that the effort to
> shoot her wild claims down is laborous, often tedious, and
> beyond the immediate resources of most of her readers.
>    In other words, her stuff is crap, but crap wrapped up
> in a package that some find more appealing than real
> science.

bye,
Jos