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Originally Posted by (AnonT,) So, we have a message from thousands of years before any form of physics or biology was around telling us basically how the universe was created and the basic order in which life evolved. Kinda miraculous, huh?<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>
It' s a great concept, Anon T, but unfortunately there is a lot wrong with it.
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Originally Posted by According to evolution, plants came extremely early on the evolutionary scale, before anything we'd consider animals, having evolved almost 4 billion years ago, within a few hundred million years of the time that the first bacteria evolved. <hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>
No, according to the geological record, life appeared on earth around 3.8 billion years ago (maybe earlier--but we haven't discovered anything earlier yet). And that life was simple prokaryotic cells (archea and bacteria). No plants. Nothing more complex appeared for over 2 billion years. Then we start finding eukaryotic monocells like ameobae and ciliates and dinoflagellates. Still no plants unless you consider microscopic green algae to be plants.
If by "plants" you mean photosynthetic organisms with roots and stems i.e. terrestrial plants, then animals appeared long before any plants appeared. Algae, on the other hand, did appear before animals, so if you consider green algae to be "plants", then, yes, plants appeared before animals.
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Originally Posted by According to evolution, the first animals evolved out of the sea, and the first major era (epoch? I think that's the word they use) of life on earth was water-based.<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>
Do you mean evolved "in" the sea? In that case you are right. From the time the first animals appeared some 600 to 700 million years ago and through the Cambrian period (540 to 490 million years ago) all animal life appears to have been marine life. In the next period (Ordovician 490-440 mya) there is evidence that some species became adapted to fresh water environments. But it is not until the following period (Silurian 440-420mya) that there is any evidence of animal life on land: centipedes and spiders. Terrestrial vertebrate life (amphibians and reptiles) did not develop until the Devonian (420 to 340 mya). So animals have an evolutionary record of some 300 million years before ever setting foot on land.
Terrestrial plant life also became abundant in the Devonian period, and in fact, the following period (Carboniferous) is so named because the plant forests of the time became the coal and oil we use today as fossil fuels.
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Originally Posted by According to evolution, the next epoch was mostly the dinosaurs.<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>
Actually the word you are looking for is "era". Geological history is divided into 5 eras: Hadean (when the earth's crust was still too hot to support life), Proterozoic (when most life was monocellular), Paleozoic (literally "old life" beginning with the Cambrian period, Mesozoic (middle life--the time of the dinosaurs) and Cenozoic (which includes the present). Eras are sub-divided into periods. Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, etc. are all period of the Paleozoic. Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous are the periods of the Mesozoic. And the cenozoic is divided into Tertiary and Quaternary periods. Periods can be subdivided still further into epochs, though this usually is done only for the Cenozoic. Words ending in "-ene" like Miocene, Oligocene and Pleistocene refer to different epochs of the Quaternary period. Then you can get down to an even finer sub-division known as an "age".
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Originally Posted by The last epoch was/is mammals, with humanity being an extremely recent (less than a million years old, with less than 10,000 years of "modern" man) evolution.<hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>
The dinosaurs (except for birds) became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, with mammals dominating the large-animal niches since then. But humanity is much more than a million years old. Possibly as much as 3.5 million years. Hominids may have emerged as much as 7 million years ago. As for modern man,
Homo sapiens has been around for close to 50,000 years, not just 10,000 years. 10,000 years ago is the end of the Pleistocene epoch (Ice Age) and not long after that the first complex civilizations begin to appear.
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Originally Posted by As for dinosaurs vs. birds, there's actually a growing number of paleontologists who are arguing that dinosaurs were more likely birds than reptiles. <hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>
As mentioned earlier, you have it backward about. Birds closely resemble one type of dinosaur and it is now recognized that they are descended from that dinosaur group. But there were all sorts of dinosaurs which were not bird-like at all.
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Originally Posted by Now we have another disparity: The Bible says that plants were created before the sun, moon, and stars. Well, consider that plants first evolved almost 4 billion years ago; that's about 1/4 to 1/3 of the age of the galaxy. Many of the stars in the sky hadn't fully formed yet, we may not have had a moon yet, and we may not have had as many planets in the solar system as we do now. <hr size="1" /></blockquote><span class='postcolor'>
There are two reasons for the bible putting plants on Day 3 while the sun does not appear until Day 4, neither of them having anything to do with mix-ups or mistakes or evolution or chronology. The first reason is that the biblical writer thought of vegetation as being part of the earth rather than living things. So he had no conceptual problem of plants needed sunlight to live. The second reason is that the biblical writer did not organize the creation days according to chronology, but according to a theme. The six days of creation are organized into two sets of three, with each of the first three sorting the chaos of dark waters into a structural order (Day/Night, Heaven/Earth, Ocean/Dry Land) and the last three populating each of these structures. So, since Day one is the day of separating Day from Night, its counterpart in the second cycle populates Day and Night with lights. Similarly, with Heaven and Earth separated on Day 2 (and Earth still being fully covered with water) the counterpart, Day 5 populates heaven and earth (birds and sea creatures). Day 3 separates dry land from the waters, so its counterpart, Day 6, is the day for populating the land.
Cosmologists tell us the whole solar system was formed together about 4.5 billion years ago. The sun and all the planets formed at the same time. It is believed the moon was formed from a part of the earth which separated from the planet in that early Hadean era, when the crust was still soft and molten and a serious gravitational event could rip part of it away. So there are no huge time differentials between the creation of the sun, its planets and any of their satellites.