In2-MeC

Arriving by train in West Bengal, India--destination Sridhama Mayapur
20 February 2004

Recent Underwater Discoveries are Unexplainable
by the Standard Model of Prehistory

From an 2002 Internet news archive

The following article gives mention to newly discovered underwater archaeological sites in seas near Japan, Taiwan, and Key West (Florida USA). It gives in-depth treatment to a find at the bottom of the Gulf of Cambay off the coast of Gujarat, India.

Over the past decade or so there have been numerous discoveries about the ancient world, many of which cannot be explained by traditional views of prehistory. It would be impossible to keep abreast of them all, but many have major implications for our greater understanding of the cataclysmic events occuring in the stories of Atlantis, Lyonesse, and 'the flood' of Noah which have been passed down in oral and written traditions since time immemorial.

Of course, there are so many ancient tales of flooded kingdoms, cataclysmic inundations and sunken lands from more or less every corner of the world, that it is difficult to avoid the basic question of whether or not they all refer to the same cataclysm, or a series of cataclysms that happened over several millennia from around 15,000 BC to around 1,500 BC? Either way, we now know for certain that there were a series of rapid sea-level changes that marked the abrupt end of the last Ice Age, especially at the time of Plato's original date of 9,600 BC, and the question cannot any longer be reasonably avoided by serious historical researchers:

What more evidence of ancient civilisations, and of the sea-faring peoples of world-wide mythology, remains to be discovered beneath the waves on the continental shelves all around our planet?

In October 2002, the Morien Institute interviewed Professor Masaaki Kimura of the University of the Ruykyus, Okinawa, Japan about the discovery of megalithic structures found off the coast of Yonaguni-jima, Japan.

On November 26 2002, The China Post ran a story headlined

Archaeologists announce discovery of underwater man-made wall in Taiwan

Underwater archaeologists yesterday announced the discovery of a man-made wall submerged under the waters of the Pescadores Islands that could be at least six and seven thousand years old. Steve Shieh, the head of the planning committee for the Taiwan Underwater Archaeology Institute, said the wall was discovered to the northwest of Tong-chi Island in the Pescadores towards the end of September. The stone wall, with an average height of one meter and a width of 50 centimeters, covers a distance of over 100 meters, Hsieh said.

The wall ran along the ocean floor at depths of between 25 and 30 meters, he added. Despite difficult diving conditions, Shieh said that a team of more than ten specialists was able to ascertain the positions of at least three of the wall sections. The proximity of the wall to a similar structure found in 1976 suggests that it may be further evidence of a pre-historical civilization. A three meter high underwater wall was discovered by amateur divers in waters off the nearby Hu-ching (Tiger Well) Island. British archaeologists examined the find and proclaimed that the wall was probably made between 7,000 and 12,000 years ago.

On November 13 2002 Keysnews. com announced

Prehistoric forest discovered off Key West--on sea bed

Research divers and marine archaeologists expect to find shells, rocks and remnants of shipwrecks when they excavate areas of the ocean bottom. But pine cones, tree branches and charred limbs--thought to be about 8,400 years old--were an unexpected and intriguing treasure awaiting archaeologist Corey Malcom, who spent much of the summer underwater in search of the remains of the Henrietta Marie, a British slave ship that sank 35 miles off Key West in 1700.

Lost Underwater City 'could rewrite history'

That was headline at BBC News Online on Saturday, January 19, 2002. Written by Tom Housden, it told of a 'lost city' discovered 120 feet underwater in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay) off the western coast of Gujarat, in India. It was found completely by chance by marine scientists from the Indian National Institute of Ocean Technology, (NIOT), who were conducting a water pollution survey of the area. Oceanographers from NIOT told the BBC that they had discovered arch�ological remains 120 feet underwater in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay) which could be over 9,000 years old.

On their website BBC Online reported that "Using sidescan sonar which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120 feet. "

An assortment of debris was recovered from the site area, including pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculptures and also human bones and teeth, some of which have been carbon 14 dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.

This amazing discovery is bound to radically change accepted ideas of Indian prehistory as: "The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan civilisation, which dates back around 4,000 years"

Indian marine arch�ologists used a technique called "sub-bottom profiling" to show that the remains of the many buildings of this vast city, which is five miles long and two miles wide, and said to predate the oldest known arch�ological remains on the Indian subcontinent by more than 5,000 years, stand on enormous foundations. Naturally, the BBC went to interview Graham Hancock, who, despite the obvious dangers involved, has regularly dived on ancient structures in many parts of the world in pursuit of his belief that there is "a big missing chapter in man's early history".

This is a belief which is increasingly being shared by many, including some arch�ologists, who are reluctantly having to come to terms with the fact that there is quite likely to be much more evidence of ancient civilisation waiting to be discovered at the bottom of the oceans, on continental shelves, and in areas of shallow seas, all over the world. In fact, lying underwater in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay), there are not one, but two massive cities, both around the size of Manhattan, one approx. 8 km long and the other some 9km in length.

As we enter the 21st century, advances in computer technology are allowing Oceanographers everywhere to use sophisticated computer programs in order to simulate the ancient sea-levels before the end of the last Ice Age. As a result, they are discovering huge tracts of land all around the world that were above water some 10 to 15,000 years ago. While this would have been obvious to marine scientists for a many, many years, marine arch�ologists have tended to restrict their underwater activities to the recovery of 'sunken treasure' and have barely, if ever, considered the possibility that 'any' evidence of ancient civilisation from before the end of the last Ice Age could be found in exactly the locations they have been discovered over the past decade or so.

Hancock told BBC Online:

The [oceanographers] found that they were dealing with two large blocks of apparently man-made structures. Cities on this scale are not known in the arch�ological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities began to appear in Mesopotamia. Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is known. The first cities of the historical period are as far away from these cities as we are today from the pyramids of Egypt.

Recent discoveries such as that of the Yonaguni monument in the East China sea between Japan and Taiwan, and more recently of a 'Lost City' in the Caribbean Sea, between the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and the western coast of the Guanahacabibes Peninsula of Cuba, are adding to the sense of awe that many of those involved in the historical sciences generally are beginning to feel as their long-cherished prehistory paradigms are being completely trashed again and again. Hancock told BBC Online:

There's a huge chronological problem in this discovery. It means that the whole model of the origins of civilisation with which arch�ologists have been working will have to be remade from scratch.

But, not everyone agrees at all with Hancock's argument, preferring to link the discoveries with the Harappan period. BBC Online also interviewed an arch�ologist from the British Museum, Dr Justin Morris, who told them that a lot more work would need to be undertaken before the site could be categorically said to belong to a 9,000 year old civilisation. Justin Morris told BBC Online:

Culturally speaking, in that part of the world there were no civilisations prior to about 2,500 BC. What's happening before then mainly consists of small, village settlements.

Dr Morris further told BBC Online that artifacts recovered from the sites of these two massive prehistoric urban settlements would need to be very carefully analysed, and, as the BBC reported, Dr Morris: ". . . pointed out that the C14 carbon dating process is not without its error margins. "

True, but this sounds very much like the usual 'sour grapes' with which the arch�ological community has responded to the work which Graham Hancock, and his wife, the photographer Santha Faiia, have painstakingly conducted over the last 5 to 10 years. Unable to accept that they are simply wrong in many respects about prehistory, many academics have stooped to the sort of tactics that were highlighted in the now infamous BBC Horizon-Atlantis affair, concerning two programmes about Atlantis which were broadcast in October and November 1999.

The tactics used there were (a) to examine the not so well-known fact that elements of the German Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler were fascinated by the idea of Atlantis, and then (b) to attempt to portray Hancock, and all others interested in Atlantis and the possibility that there may be thousands of ancient cities at the bottom of our oceans, as somehow heading for "a slippery slope" down into the sewer of Nazi ideology.

Entitled "Atlantis Uncovered", and "Atlantis Reborn", the programmes should have been more correctly called "Get Hancock".

But these are far from the tactics adopted by the BBC Online team, who have treated Hancock with similar respect to that which they treat their own underwater camera operators, seeming to appreciate the very real dangers of embarking on underwater discovery expeditions of any sort. Acknowledging both Hancock's logic, and the constant dangers he has faced in his quest for "a big missing chapter in man's early history", they reported that:

It is believed that the area was submerged as ice caps melted at the end of the last ice age 9-10,000 years ago.

BBC Online went on to report that although the first signs of a significant arch�ological find came eight months ago, exploring the area has been extremely difficult because of the "highly treacherous waters, with strong currents and rip tides". It seems now that with the recent recovery from the sea floor in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay) of carbon datable artifacts, including pieces of ancient timber, the Indian government has set up a special team to oversee further studies in this area. The Indian Minister for Human Resources and ocean development, Murli Manohar Joshi, who seems convinced by the discoveries of marine scientists from his own National Institute of Ocean Technology, told them:

We have to find out what happened then . . . where and how this civilisation vanished.

That there will inevitably be much evidence of Ice Age civilisation discovered on the vast tracts of land submerged after the end of the last Ice Age is something that Morien Institute researchers have been saying for many years, and it hadn't gone unnoticed that their January 2002 story was not first time that BBC Online has referred to the discovery of these incredible arch�ological remains in this eastern part of the Arabian Sea.

On Tuesday, May 22nd, 2001, BBC Online reported the initial discovery of what was then only thought to be structures that " . . . resemble arch�ological sites belonging to the Harappan civilisation, dating back more than 4,000 years. " It is now suspected that they are much earlier still, and BBC Online reported:

A leading marine arch�ologist says that far more detailed investigations need to be done to confirm the exact date of the structures. S R Rao, who has spent years researching the nearby Gulf of Kutch, said the only conclusive way of establishing the antiquity of the site was by studying pieces of submerged pottery from the same area.

Since May 2001, those in charge of the Indian marine arch�ological research project in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay) have come increasingly to believe that the remains are very definitely pre-Harappan, and Graham Hancock has dived in the company of some of their leading marine archaeologists in many areas around the coasts of India. Sceptics, both academic and otherwise, and especially those who missed the recent (February/March 2002) programmes on UK Channel 4, "Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age", should read Hancock's recent (February 2002) book "Underworld", before they go pronouncing any further about the 'impossibility' of any remains of Ice Age civilisations being discovered offshore. They already have been--in Japan and in India in depths of up to 300 feet underwater, and also in Cuba, where the remains of a vast city have, amazingly, been found some 2,200 feet underwater.

There's no glory in stifling debate about prehistory, and there's equally no shame in being wrong about the chronology of human civilisation. Perhaps the time has come for our academics to admit their errors, as Hancock has done recently on UK Channel 4, and to an audience the size of which most of them can only dream about. Both are looking for clues about the origin of civilisation, and to his credit, Graham Hancock, for his part at least, is prepared to admit:

In doing so I've occasionally followed highly speculative leads, some of which I now realize have led me wide of the mark. This has attracted a lot of criticism, some of it richly deserved. But none of it's convinced me that there couldn't be a big missing chapter in man's early history.

Information and Evolution

From the Internet

Darwin developed his theory of evolution before anyone ever thought of information theory. Although the study of information theory is still in its infancy, it is clearly posing some problems for the theory of evolution.

We now know that DNA contains the instructions for building various kinds of living cells. We even know how to measure that information in "bits. "
 

 

 

But what really is information? Where does it come from? What does it have to do with evolution?

Let's answer the last question first. If information can be created by chance and natural selection, then DNA could have evolved the information necessary to build living cells without the help of an intelligent designer. But if information only comes from an intelligent source, then DNA had to be created by an intelligent source. It could not have evolved. So that is why it is important to figure out if information can come from a random process or not. We certainly can't figure out where information comes from if we don't know what it is, so that's where we must start.

What is information?

The nickname "Information Superhighway" is an overused clich� for the Internet. It is so overused that many people are sick and tired of hearing the term. But it does illustrate an important point. Information flows (in the form of text or images) between people over the Internet.

Let's talk about images first. Images are patterns of colored dots. These colored dots (called pixels) are formed by mixing various amounts of red, green, and blue light. It takes a certain number of bits to transmit each pixel. You can multiply the number of bits per pixel times the number of pixels per image, and that will tell you the maximum number of bits of information the picture can contain.

Images rarely contain that maximum number of bits of information. Images are generally "over-sampled," resulting in "redundant pixels. " Since it takes time to send each bit over the Internet, engineers have worked hard to figure out ways of "compressing video" to remove these redundant bits. How this is actually done is irrelevant. The point is that ways exist to determine the amount of information in an image and the minimum number of bits needed to transmit the image. So, information is a quantity that is measured on a regular basis.

The amount of information in a message is inversely related to its probability. Suppose I could tell you which face would come up on the next roll of a die. Since the probability of a correct prediction is 1 in 6, that message would contain 2. 585 bits of information. ¹ If I could tell you (within � mile) the latitude and longitude of the location where the next meteor will strike the Earth, that message would have 15. 6 bits of information because the odds of predicting that location are about 50,000 to 1. A message containing the 6 numbers (out of 80) that will be drawn in a lottery would contain 28 bits of information because those odds are about 300 million to 1.

Information by Chance?

It is possible to write a computer program that generates random characters (letters, numbers spaces, punctuation marks) with the same statistical distribution as found in a typical English document. If we let that program generate random characters, and run that gibberish through a spelling checker, most of the "words" will be misspelled. But there will be a few character sequences that happen to be correctly spelled English words. A mathematician can calculate the expected number of correctly spelled words in randomly-generated text. If he does the calculations correctly, then the number of randomly produced words will be close to the prediction. If the number of words spelled correctly matches the expected value, then there is no information in the randomly-generated text. No surprise means no information.

If you select a text file at random from somebody's floppy disk, and run it through a spelling checker program, nearly all the words will be recognized by the spelling checker. (There might be some technical terms or geographical names that the spelling checker doesn't recognize. ) Since the number of correctly spelled words is not even close to the expected number for random text, it is a clear indication that the text file was produced by an intelligent agent rather than a random process.

A thorough analysis of a typical text file will show some patterns. The letter "q" will often be followed by the letter "u". Certain sequences of letters, like "t-h-e" will appear more frequently than would be produced by a random process. So, the existence of patterns suggest the presence of information. (The same is true of images. Images that convey information have a pattern in them. But if you disconnect your TV antenna you just get pattern-less "snow" or "confetti" on your screen. ) Truly random data does not contain any patterns.

There is more to English text than just patterns of characters that form words. One could write a program that randomly selects English words from a dictionary and builds sentences from them. If you pass such a file through a spelling checker program, it would find many correctly spelled words. This is an indication of an intelligent source. In fact, the process wasn't completely random. An intelligent programmer selected words from a dictionary that had been created by someone with a knowledge of correct English spelling. So, the surprisingly high number of correctly spelled words is a valid indication that an intelligent source was somehow involved in producing the file.

A file produced this way might contain, "Ate sound John. " This sequence of words is not a sentence because it is syntactically incorrect. English sentences don't take the form verb-object-subject. Words have to be in a valid order to make a sentence.

"John ate sound" has the subject, verb, and direct object in a valid order, so this "sentence" is syntactically correct. Even so, it is semantically incorrect. In other words, it has no meaning. One cannot eat sound.

Text files produced by intelligent humans contain words that are spelled correctly, arranged in syntactically (that is, grammatically) correct sentences, that have semantic content (that is, they make sense). This gives them the ability to convey information from one person to another.

The probability that a random character generator (even if it is filtered by a spelling checker) would produce the sentence, Amelia Earhart's airplane crashed into the ocean at 5 degrees, 8 minutes, 24 seconds south latitude, 172 degrees, 54 minutes, 3 seconds east longitude is essentially zero. But just for the sake of discussion, suppose it did. The chances that the wreckage of her airplane would be found within one-half miles of the specified latitude and longitude is about 1 in 50,000.

Suppose you received a message from an unknown source that correctly specified the location of the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's airplane. A random character program could not have generated that message. Someone who knew where she crashed must have written the message. Random messages don't contain that much information.

Consider the DNA molecules in your body. Your DNA is a sequence of about 3 billion base pairs that contains the blueprints for all the cells in your body. The information coded in this molecule tells how to make blood cells, skin cells, brain cells, bone cells, and optic nerves. It contains instructions far more detailed than directions to Amelia Earhart's missing airplane.

If a tree falls. . .

Philosophers sometimes debate the question, "If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" We may not be able to answer that question, but we can answer a more pertinent one. "If someone sends a message and nobody receives it, is information transferred?" Certainly the answer to that question is, "No. "

The information in a DNA molecule would be useless if the cell didn't know how to process it. Consider this actual fragment of DNA.

ctgcaggaaa ctttatttcc tacttctgca taccaagttt ctacctctag atctgtttgg ttcagttgct gagaagcctg acataccagg actgcctgag acaagccaca agctggtgag ttgtaggcat tttttccatt actttctgat tcataggctc aacgcacctc aaagctggaa atgccgggtc tgggtacacc ctggggaact gcaaagcctg cacacttggg gggaatgatc aagatgagag gcaggggtgg ggatggcatg tgcaccagga gatgttagag aaacctgagg aagagcagag tgcagcaggt gatgggggag agtgggcagc aagcgaggcc aggacagcca ctctgctcag tcaccagtcc acacacccag gggctcactc tgcccctctg agcacccaag gacgttaaag agctggaact gttagtctaa atataggacc atccaagctc tgaaccaaaa tgtgtccctt gcctcaactc aggagatcca cagaggcaga agtaaggaat ttattttctg aaagatagat ttctatcagt tctgggtgac atgttctgac act

Does it tell you anything? If it does, you can pick up your Nobel prize. But your cells know it is a human monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 receptor gene, 5' region. Your cells know how to read it, even if you don't. Did the cell's ability to read DNA evolve by chance? Do computers figure out how to read information from the Internet without someone programming them to do it? Certainly not.

The Evolutionists' Dilemma

Evolutionists must explain where the genetic information in DNA came from. They can't do it. Here is how one evolutionist tries to dance around the problem:

It is simply not possible to change a hemoglobin gene into an antibody gene in one step. . . To understand how evolution really works, we have to abandon the notion that such mutations can happen. Instead we must think of mutations as small changes affecting the functions of preexisting genes that already have long and complex histories. Usually, new mutations tend to damage genes in which they occur because they upset their precise functioning and their finely honed interactions with other genes. But sometimes they change them in ways that increase the fitness of their carriers, or might increase the fitness of their carriers farther down the line if the environment should alter in a particular way. ² [italics in the original]

Dobhzhansky's view [is] that much of the variation needed to accomplish the transition was already present in the gene pool. . . ³ [italics in the original]

There are two fallacies in this argument. The first is that random changes in existing information can create new information. Random changes to a computer program will not make it do more useful things. It doesn't matter if you make all the changes at once, or make one change at a time. It will never happen. Yet an evolutionist tells us that if one makes random changes to a hemoglobin gene that after many steps it will turn into an antibody gene. That's just plain wrong.

Information does not gradually increase through small, incremental random changes. There is no scientific evidence to even suggest that it does. But many of us are painfully aware that just one bit error in Windows 95 can cause our computer to die! Information certainly can be lost by a small, incremental change.

The second fallacy is the assumption that information "was already present in the gene pool" just waiting to be changed. Where did that previous information come from? Presumably it came from modifying other existing information. But where did that existing information come from?

Remember, a message telling the 6 winning lottery numbers (a 300 million to 1 shot) contains 28 bits of information. Just the first 50 letters of the monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 receptor gene printed above contains about 100 bits of information. That whole gene contains about 1166 bits of information. But that gene represents just 583 of the 3 billion base pairs in a single human DNA molecule.

Information Isn't Just Structure

At our last Fourth Friday Free Film showing, our favorite critic argued that hydrogen and oxygen naturally combine to form water, which is a more complex structure, and therefore contains more information than hydrogen and oxygen alone. (We admit, he didn't say it quite that succinctly. He never says anything succinctly. ) He confused structure with information. The carbon atoms in a diamond are arranged in a neat crystal structure. The carbon atoms in a lump of coal are not. The carbon atoms in a diamond don't have any more information than the carbon atoms in coal. Information is coded in patterns that have meaning to the receiver. Water molecules and diamonds don't contain patterns that represent information. Yes, they have structure, but no, they don't have information.

Information Needs a Source

If you find a message that contains information (such as the location of Amelia Earhart's airplane), someone had to write it. Random chance does not produce information. If there is information coded in a DNA molecule (and there certainly is), an intelligent source must have put it there. There is no scientific evidence that even a small amount of information can be generated by chance. There is scientific evidence that random changes to a message can remove information. Mutations might remove information, but they will never create it. To believe that a DNA molecule evolved by chance, you have to reject science.

Footnotes:

1. The amount of information is log₂(1/probability).
2. Christopher Wills, The Runaway Brain, 1993, page 166 (Ev)
3. ibid. page 64

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