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Author Topic:   What's the creationists thought on this?
JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 75 of 136 (619530)
06-10-2011 8:30 AM


Although it's been pretty beaten to death already, a few items:
Woodmorappe did not look at 500 papers, he selected 350 dates from a lot fewer than 350 papers. He did not give any indication of how many dates he reviewed to select those 350, so a meaningful statistical analysis is impossible. His claim to have found "Over 300 serious discrepancies..." is laughable. I've read the original paper, and the majority of his "serious discrepancies" are not that at all, they're well-explained and well-understood. Steven H. Schimmrich wrote a critique at TalkOrigins, Geochronology kata John Woodmorappe, which is easily understood by the non-geologist and explains several of the "discrepancies". he concluded that Woodmarappe made many serious errors:
  • Selective quotations from the scientific literature
  • The presentation of data devoid of any geological context
  • Ignoring well-known limitations of dating methods
  • The use of a "shotgun" approach
  • The inclusion of obsolete data
  • The use of a small data set to reach sweeping conclusions
  • The lack of an appropriate audience
Glenn Morton plotted Woodmorrappe's dataset at Young-Earth Arguments: A Second Look. measured age against expected age. There's a lot of scatter, as you'd expect when the criterion for data selection is the existence of scatter, but the trend is clear:
Chuck77, it would do you good to reflect on the reliability of your sources.
Woodmorappe's paper is not online, but I have a PDF of it if anyone wants to read it.

Replies to this message:
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JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 85 of 136 (619691)
06-11-2011 9:08 AM
Reply to: Message 82 by Admin
06-11-2011 7:02 AM


it's over 3MB
Yeah, that's because it's pictures of the document with OCR'd and selectable text lurking behind the pictures. That's how Acrobat handles scanned documents.
Is it everyones opinion that this paper has no merit whatsoever? Even with all the references and sources listed? Are you all saying that his entire paper is a complete bald faced lie?
Yes, as detailed at the links I already gave. Creation "science" is composed of lies and nothing else. Believe what you wish for whatever reasons make sense to you, but when you start claiming scientific respectability you're in an arena with particular ways of investigation, and creation "science" has consistently failed in that arena.
Number of refrerences doesn't mean much. Intellectual honesty and integrity, weight of evidence, logical thought… they count.
Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

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 Message 82 by Admin, posted 06-11-2011 7:02 AM Admin has seen this message but not replied

JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 99 of 136 (619980)
06-13-2011 4:12 PM
Reply to: Message 96 by Coyote
06-13-2011 3:13 PM


Re: Carbon-14 dating
Coyote writes:
I'd just like to bring this research to your attention in response to your assertion that carbon dating is accurate.
"Carbon found within ancient rocks has played a crucial role developing a time line for the emergence of biological life on the planet billions of years ago. But applying cutting-edge technology to samples of ancient rocks from northern Canada has revealed the carbon-based minerals may be much younger than the rock they inhabit, a team of researchers report in the latest edition of the journal Nature Geoscience."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...ases/2011/05/110518121227.htm
Sorry, scientists don't date rocks with Carbon-14 dating. That technique goes back only about 50,000 years and must be applied to something what was once alive (bone, shell, plant material, etc.).
Rocks are dated using other radiometric tests.
If you want to comment on science, it is best to learn something about it first as you are bound to run into folks who have learned something.
Actually, what he refers to does not involve 14C dating but does involve carbon, and is very interesting. The researchers looked at carbon particles found in metamorphic rock that is 3.8 to 4.2 billion years old. These particles have an isotopic composition and structure that indicate the presence of life, and are often cited as evidence for life on Earth being 3.8 to 4.2 billion years old. However, these researchers applied new techniques:
quote:
The new approach relies upon a variety of microscopy and spectroscopy methods to characterize intact micro-fabricated cross-sections of crystalline graphite removed from the rock samples.
They concluded that the carbon particles are younger than the rock:
quote:
"The characteristics of the poorly crystalline graphite within the samples are not consistent with the metamorphic history of the rock," said Boston College Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences Dominic Papineau, a co-author of the report. "The carbon in the graphite is not as old as the rock. That can only ring a bell and require us to ask if we need to reconsider earlier studies."
I don't know the details, I can't access the primary source. But it's totally irrelevant to 14C dating, as you knew, but as Mazzy should have known but didn't.

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Replies to this message:
 Message 100 by fearandloathing, posted 06-13-2011 4:59 PM JonF has replied

JonF
Member (Idle past 168 days)
Posts: 6174
Joined: 06-23-2003


Message 112 of 136 (620174)
06-14-2011 2:17 PM
Reply to: Message 100 by fearandloathing
06-13-2011 4:59 PM


Re: Carbon-14 dating
I found it interesting also, but is a few million years much when we are talking about something that is 4 billion years old? It is a new technique also, maybe there may be problems with it.
The article never says how much the dating difference was, is there an acceptable amount of error in something 4 billion years old, and if so would a few million years fall within that accepted amount of error? All it says is millions of years difference, which could mean a few or 10, 100, 500???...
As a rule of thumb, precision of a couple of percent is a reasonable result in most dating systems. U-Th-Pb dating systems can achieve sub-1% accuracy, mostly because the half-lives are known more precisely than for other isotopes (bombs and reactors, ya know).
See Neodymium-142 Evidence for Hadean Mafic Crust (free registration required). The rocks involved are constrained by the geological setting to be older than rocks that date to 3817 ± 16 My from U-Pb discordia dating, a claimed precision of about 0.4%. The rocks themselves were dated using Sm-Nd isochrons at 3819 ± 270 My and another set were dated at 3840 ± 280 My, both about 7% error. That's fairly high uncertainty, but these rocks have been through a lot and it's difficult to extract the information.
See Earliest Evidence of Life for a brief explanation of why these carbon particles are thought to be evidence of life. That article was published at about the same time as Neodymium-142 Evidence for Hadean Mafic Crust, and does not take those findings into account.
Edited by JonF, : No reason given.
Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

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