Ideological Fossils

As I mentioned in an earlier post, and alluded to again in my last post, I'm getting back into rock-collecting after an eight year hiatus. I haven't had much time yet to get out and actually collect, though I'm scoping out some promising local sites, so at the moment a lot of my energy is going into bringing myself back up to speed on the basics of geology and mineralogy. Tonight I'm focusing on geology, with an eye towards remembering how to best evaluate geological features in the landscape for promising places to collect. I've even dug out my old geology textbook: The Earth: An Introduction to Physical Geology (Fourth Edition) by Edward J. Tarbuck & Frederick K. Lutgens.

Realizing that particular textbook was published in 1993 and wanting to see if I could find more up to date and more advanced information than an introductory text, even one at the college level, I decided to look online for free and public domain geology textbooks, if such exist. I have some promising leads, but I've also found creationist "rebuttals" to geology textbooks. One of the most amusing so far has dealt with dinosaur tracks that have supposedly been found along with human tracks, where the "human" track eroded into another dinosaur track over time. According to the creationist rebuttal, the humans were walking where the dinosaur had already stepped, following it, as someone might walk in the footsteps of another through snow. Unfortunately for this brilliant theory, if you step in the footstep of someone else your footprint will end up deeper than theirs. Erosion would uncover the larger footprint first and then the footprint inside it, not the other way around.

It astounds me that there are still people who are clinging so desperately to theories that should have been laid to rest centuries ago.