Geology Fail at India
Tiny insects debunk a widely-taught scenario about where India came from.
130 million years ago, India began a 30-million-year float trip north. It slammed into Asia, forming the Himalayan mountains. Experts call this the “biotic ferry” model for the origin of India. It must be true, because TV animations prove it.
A new problem has surfaced. While India was moving like a big barge out in the open ocean, it was a long way from land. It should have been isolated from African and Asian organisms. India’s ecology should have had 30 million years to evolve on its own. There are many organisms that appear unique to the Indian subcontinent, but scientists publishing in PLoS One examined amber samples from northern India and found something interesting: biting midges dating from that isolation period that are just like the ones in Europe and Asia. These little insects are incapable of flying over the ocean. Phys.org explains the problem:
India gradually drifted away from Africa and Madagascar towards the north and collided with the Eurasian plate. Scientists assumed for a long time that the subcontinent was largely isolated during its long journey through the ocean and unique species of plants and animals were therefore able to develop on it. However, paleontologists at the University of Bonn are now showing using tiny midges encased in amber that there must have been a connection between the apparently cut off India and Europe and Asia around 54 million years ago that enabled the creatures to move around. The surprising results are now presented in the journal PLOS ONE.
These midges can be assigned to genera from Asian subcontinent, including China. Evolutionary geologists could explain this if they can dream up a mechanism of species exchange during that long time period. Here, they bring in the ad hoc rescue device:
Stebner assumes that a chain of islands that existed at that time between India, Europe and Asia could have helped the biting midges to spread. As if from stepping stone to stepping stone, the insects could have gradually moved forward along the islands. “Some of the biting midges found in Indian amber were presumably not especially good long-distance flyers,” smiles the paleontologist from the University of Bonn. It was therefore probably not so easy to reach the subcontinent or move from there during the migration of India.
Maybe the midges hitchhiked on the backs of rafting monkeys. That’s how evolutionists explain the origin of New World monkeys: they rafted from Africa (4/27/15). For the midge hitchhiking story, though, 30 million years is a long time to be sucking a monkey sailor’s blood. Usually, other monkeys groom the bugs off.
How the insects were able to spread between drifting India and Eurasia has not yet been clarified fully. “Nevertheless, it also seems to have been possible for birds and various groups of mammals to cross the ocean between Europe and India at the time,” the paleontologist refers to studies by other scientists.
The journal paper ends by complaining about the lack of evidence for the continental drift theory of India:
For helping to understand India´s plate tectonics history the phylogenetic relationships as well as the age of origination of the various clades, and also the knowledge of Asian faunas subsequent to Cambay amber, which is rather fragmentary, are of great importance….
Despite the uncertainties discussed above and the fact that the fossil assemblage studied in the present work is rather small, data recorded here display a valuable source of information for Indian amber research, which is still in its beginning, and should be regarded as a small fraction of a puzzle that still is far from being complete.
Will Big Media include this uncertainty in its TV documentaries? Probably not. It would take up too much valuable commercial time.
One possibility they will never consider is that India moved much faster during plate tectonics. Flood geologists have a theory for that. It doesn’t require tens of millions of years; just one year. Problem solved. See Walt Brown’s page about little-known problems with standard plate tectonics theory.
Comments
So.. I don’t want to bring in what will be considered “crazy” theories..
But the DC comic artist Neal Adams, on a hunch when looking at the continents made computer models that support the “expanding earth” view.
If you take an earth that was about 1/3rd smaller – and then stretch it – all the continents go where they should go in a much more logical way than with Pangea. And it also works the same way with our moon – Mars, and others.
Many times (I think 17) the scripture states God “stretched out the heavens”, though I can only speculate at how God goes about creation – I quite clearly can imagine him creating the universe in a smaller scale and then simply giving a little tug on either side — causing the “expansion” we are all familiar with, and also the effective “growing” of the planets. Imagine the eloquence of it. An earth smooth as a ball, and then a little tug on the edges of time/space – and the continents pull apart separating the firmaments.
Pangea seems absolutely laughable — the continents just floating about willy nilly for 250 million years. The only thing that I see as an argument against the expanding earth is their data on subduction.. and I have a bit of trouble verifying that data independently. If you haven’t seen his videos – I’d recommend them. I, of course, disagree with Neal on his time frame – cause he still is a moyboy, but I think the premise is quite plausible. The Sun grows – trees grow – everything grows.. why not the planets themselves?
lux113,
Comments should not go into alternative theories by comedians you think are plausible, but should address the statements in the article.