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Comment by protocolture | Hacker News Reader

Look a lot of this passes the sniff test but anything Younger Dryas related I have to assume based on past performance is all buillshit designed to prop up religious fundamentalists and bodgy history.

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???

There's no link to anything religion wise with the Younger Dryas AFAIK.

My only experience studying it has come from the geological / astrophysics sides though.

It has apparently been taken up as a cause by creationists.

Yeah. It’s conflation of coincidence (as in coincide) with causality, as usual. That there was a widespread major flooding event doesn’t support the existence of a God, though (unsurprisingly) most human cultures have a distant memory of such an event. It’s a similar assertion to saying that the existence of humanity is proof of a creator.

Comet Research Group is funded by fundies. They sort of angle towards science when making claims, but those claims are sort of designed to support a scientific creationism angle if they ever get upheld.

I don't know about the sniff test. The paper here does a little bit of the amateur scientist thing where they belabor details that real experts tend to take for granted. That doesn't make it wrong, but it increases the skepticism warranted.

I do agree the religious link is weird. The mere presence of a 12800 year timeline contradicts YEC. Then again, that kind of logic doesn't always stop pseudoscience people, especially the more conspiracy-flavored ones.

Also, the narrative of the paper references the lead author's dad telling him a story as a child based on not-uncommon geological features, alone. Either this is some amazing coincidence or self-confirmation bias on the part of the authors.

I would have liked to see 10 digs in a similar geological region thats not being claimed to have been airbursted as a control.

Not sure that's necessary. Shocked quartz is distinctive, and strongly diagnostic of either cosmic impact or nuclear detonation; I think you can safely think of this as the required control digs having been done decades ago. It's either there or not. If it's there, that place had an impact. We just need some unbiased people to go check the physical facts.

>The mere presence of a 12800 year timeline contradicts YEC

There are other creationists working on the timescale issue, attacking dating methods etc.

TBH if someone provided evidence of a flood, they would probably just publish bs suggesting the timescale is wrong and push out a bunch of YEC textbooks stating it as evidence of the biblical flood.

So you're going to ignore the possibility of events that happened thousands of years before the young earth creationists say the Earth was even formed because of a possibility of association with young earth creationists?

I am going to be even more skeptical in places where people being intentionally misleading often post their falsehoods yes.

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