[x2398dh1]

What you pointed out is a very astute answer, but comes from a creationist perspective rather than an evolutionary perspective. His main answer is:

> Firstly, fully reduced (oxidation state 0) metal has a high energetic cost to create in reduced form.

Basically, it takes a ton of energy to make steel. We are literally burning gigagallons of over a billions years worth of pressurized organic matter to have made all of the steel we have made in the past century and a half or so. We could make a super inaccurate but somewhat plausible estimation that we have used something like 150 million years worth of the entire earth's lifeforms at the time's dead bodies and converted that into 150 years worth of steel. So if my orders of magnitude are correct...it would be something like a million times more difficult energy-wise for an organisms to create steel from scratch than calcium-based hardened material.

That's assuming we have burned through 15% of a billion years worth of oil from bacteria, that 100% of the bacteria converted into oil and then converted directly into steel, and that there was only a billion years of bacteria to oil creation. I am sure these numbers are off, but maybe that means it's only 100,000 times or 10 million times more difficult for organisms to make steel rather than bones.

[Dylan16807]

You are vastly overestimating the efficiency of turning life into oil, and vastly overestimating how much has gone into steel. The article even addresses the energy needed to reduce iron, and it's not that much. The high number of 60kJ/mole/reduction comes out at about 500 food calories per kg to reduce twice. Industrial molten iron production is only around 5000 food calories per kg. So it's really no big deal to produce a few kilograms per lifetime. (Mixing in other elements to get steel is a minor cost per kg.)

[jotm]

Well that's interesting, it seems we've got the next few centuries to start colonizing the solar system, or we're going to go extinct at this rate of usage... Who was it that made the theory, a next civilization may never happen because we used up all the easily available resources...

[fjsolwmv]

How is it Creationist? Creationism is just a metaphor for evolution plus a fictional goal of evolving toward specific human form.

[eesmith]

Creationism is not "just a metaphor for evolution." It is a word which covers a wide range of beliefs, include those who argue that each species was the result of a specific act of divine creation.

("In Creationism, special creation is a theological doctrine which states that the universe and all life in it originated in its present form by unconditional fiat or divine decree." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_creation )

Take this quote from "The Vanishing Case for Evolution" by Henry Morris, http://www.icr.org/article/vanishing-case-for-evolution/ one of the founders of the Institute for Creation Research:

> The absence of evidence for evolution does not, by itself, prove creation, of course; nevertheless, special creation is clearly the only alternative to evolution.

How can special creation - one type of creationism - be both a "metaphor for evolution" and "the only alternative to evolution"?

Obviously it can't, which is why it's incorrect to summarize creationism as you did.

Progressive creationism is more accepting of evolution, in that it says "microevolution" occurs but "macroevolution" does not. Even this cannot be seen as a metaphor for evolution, because it rejects part of evolution.

Perhaps theistic evolution fits your description (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution ) but otherwise most types of creationism do not.