Religion Creationism, Evolution and the Bible

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
It doesn't need to. As many others have already stated, everything about Origins is extraneous to the actual Theory of Evolution. People like fiddling with it because it's interesting but A. it doesn't need to, B. what has happened has odds of 1.

And, of course, there's the lovely question of, why do people keep assuming DNA happened in one brilliant moment. Even your Space Virii friend runs into this fundamental flaw. Fossils are not all from one instant. RNA exists. There are forms of DNA that ARE NOT Chromosomal. Chromosomes are not mandatory.

Experiments that got E. Coli to actually eat a new nutrient looked like there was no change for ages and then suddenly it could eat. But it's not "then suddenly it could eat" it was "there were a bunch of independently do nothing changes that then only needed one more change to bring them together into a nutrient channel".

Plenty of people argue that DNA is impossible because improbability or energy. None of them consider the question, "why would DNA come first?" DNA does fuck all on it's own. It must first be READ. The first step is not creating the record, it's creating literacy. And that's a very interesting question, because the literacy of an individual is dependent on the writing, but literacy itself just needs A writing system. DNA is a specific writing system, but the question is not "what are the odds of DNA" but "what are the odds of a molecular writing system?"

Why do people fixate on DNA then? Well, frankly, for the same reason you are. They don't WANT Evolution to be true so they go for something that FEELS like a strong argument.

Also, you are still not responding to my point. So frankly, until you have a response, I'm going to stop engaging with your "but IMPROBABILITY" from here.
People argue DNA because that at least gives Evolution a chance. You literally cannot create the amino acids required for the "reading system" under any theoretical possible atmosphere.

Running away from "but Evolution doesn't explain where life came from" is a pedantic trick, much like "We can't debate abortion until we have a mathematically perfect definition of a human" or "I'm not a biologist so I can't define a woman." It boils down to not being able to actually argue the facts, so run away and argue something adjacent using Motte and Bailey tactics.

I would further point out you're peddling some terrible science here. F'rex you've spoken of "Giant Spiracles" proving evolution because the atmosphere was different in the Carbonaceous. That's a bit of circular logic posited only be evolutionists, the spiracles must have been in a higher-oxygen atmosphere, hence evolution is true! But we have no idea what kind of mechanical or chemical tricks may have been in the non-fossilized tissues to work in a standard atmosphere.

However, as already posted in this thread, we do know what the atmosphere was like, and a mere 500 million years after its formation, it had an atmosphere much like our modern one.


Geologists have a saying - rocks remember. -Neil Armstrong

The rocks remember. We have numerous oxides that are older than life, yet could only have formed in our own atmosphere. Evolutionists have been reduced to either ignoring this fact, or postulating that life came from space because there's no possible way it could have originated by chance on earth with what we now know about earth's atmosphere.

The fossil record also rather handily disproves evolution. The biggest is the one Darwin himself acknowledged, the Cambrian Explosion.

“As Darwin noted in the Origin of Species, the abrupt emergence of arthropods in the fossil record during the Cambrian presents a problem for evolutionary biology. There are no obvious simpler or intermediate forms - either living or in the fossil record - that show convincingly how modern arthropods evolved from worm-like ancestors. Consequently there has been a wealth of speculation and contention about relationships between the arthropod lineages.” -Osorio, D, J. P. Bacon, and P. Whittington. 1997. The evolution of arthropod nervous system. American Scientist 95: 244.

We see massive numbers of new species suddenly appear simultaneously, fully formed and active, without the slightest trace of any evolutionary development and no transitional forms. Complex structures like eyes and arthropod exoskeletons appear suddenly whole cloth. This is impossible under evolution but exactly what we'd expect if a Creator is dropping new species into his Minecraft server. We further keep finding species in the wrong places. Evolutionists are prone to ignoring these but the rocks remember.


Complex skeletons well before the Cambrian explosion happened. How? Those didn't evolve until hundreds of millions of years later. What about the Permian? No mammals then, the Carboniferous hadn't even happened yet! We have modern bear tracks going through a Permian layer according to the Smithsonian.



Even though flowers and pollinators evolved in the Cretaceous era, they found flowers in the Jurassic era long before that. This is fairly troubling, because like every other life form, flowers suddenly appear in the Fossil record with absolutely no transitional forms, further there's no real theory on how flowers are even possible to evolve because they're meaningless without pollinators but pollinators can't have evolved without flowers to feed them.


Another intriguing element is that flowers seemed to have arisen during the Cretaceous ‘out of nowhere’.

How's that work? Well, the layers aren't nearly as distinct as Evolutionists need them to be. There are a lot of fossils "out of their depth" that get quietly ignored because they don't fit the narrative. We also have Polystrate fossils, such as trees that are fossilized with their roots in one layer and their tops in an entirely different one evolutionists claim to be millions of years older. Oh, they say, well that one place obviously the layers formed quickly but these other ones were millions of years because we need that for our asinine theory to work. And not just a few such, there are thousands of polystrate fossils all over the planet.

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These fossils are impossible with the current understanding of evolution but exactly what we'd expect to see if there was a global flood and a certain amount of "sorting" happened as the floodwaters eroded the landscape and buried things en mass. We'd see sea life being buried first, then amphibians that live near low-lying water, then we'd see animals that might run away from the surging waters and eventually drown at higher elevations, and finally birds that flew to high ground and didn't drown until the end. Trees meanwhile would be buried alongside these things, potentially extending from one layer to the next. The fossil record neatly supports creation and even points clearly to a global flood. Fossils don't speak Evolutionists do.

 

Scottty

Well-known member
Founder
Basically zero is not equal to zero. Even the most improbable of things can happen completely at random once or more than once. Take this 1952 experiment, for example:


That relatively simple experiment produced more different amino acids than those which are found in the genetic code. It's entirely possible and quite likely that the conditions were or currently are just right near more than one of the approximately 200 sextillion (2×10^23) stars in the observable universe for life as we (somewhat) know it to spontaneously say "Hi!" and thrive.

Making amino acids under laboratory conditions is more an example of intelligent design than of random chance, just saying. They set up the experiment to produce the results they wanted.

As for the chances of life spontaneously happening at least once because big numbers, the point is that people have already done the maths on that. And the answer is nope.
 

bintananth

behind a desk
Making amino acids under laboratory conditions is more an example of intelligent design than of random chance, just saying. They set up the experiment to produce the results they wanted.

As for the chances of life spontaneously happening at least once because big numbers, the point is that people have already done the maths on that. And the answer is nope.
Intelligent design is more like engineering: "Here's what we want and here's what it takes to get it." Laboratory eperiments are more along the lines of answering "How did we get here?", "What do we get when we try this?", and "Are the results reproduceable?".

Luck plays a part in the latter and Lady Luck is a very fickle mistress.
 

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
Thank you Scotty and Bear Ribs for making my points for me.

I've been getting a bit tired of repeating myself, and Bear Ribs has more details on the truth of the fossil record than I do.
 

Morphic Tide

Well-known member
I was saying using the 10^230 number based off of a single chromosome, if you're going to just hand me things like this, then we're running over 1 in 10^787,952 zeroes.
You were saying that the odds were 10^230 of the DNA in a chromosome forming over the lifespan of the Earth if it were made entirely of "ingredients". 10^787,952 is an input into the formulae in question, compared to 10^28,122,212 for Chromosome 21 (to use the specific smallest human chromosome).

You have constantly failed to comprehend very basic aspects of the statistics in question, by making claims that are utterly obviously wrong to the slightest thought of the actual biology and mathematics.

You literally cannot create the amino acids required for the "reading system" under any theoretical possible atmosphere.
...The entire point of the Miller-Urey experiment was to emulate the then-theorized prebiotic atmospheric composition to test abiotic synthesis theories. While it only produces 11 out of 20, that is still a conclusive demonstration of a basic mechanism as something very real.

That's a bit of circular logic posited only be evolutionists, the spiracles must have been in a higher-oxygen atmosphere, hence evolution is true! But we have no idea what kind of mechanical or chemical tricks may have been in the non-fossilized tissues to work in a standard atmosphere.
"Thing like current life cannot exist with current atmosphere, therefor must not actually be like current life" is a hell of an ass-backwards argument, whereas the evolutionist argument is "we know X is a limitation of Y biological system, we see Y system above X's limit case in current conditions, therefor conditions must have differed. Our geologist friends have supporting evidence of exactly that with oxide ratios and trapped gas pockets".

Interlocking, interdisciplinary data, gathered over the course of literally centuries in some cases, all back up the evolutionary theory virtually everywhere short of abiogenisis, and that's still got loads of dependencies of the theories demonstrated as fact.

How? Those didn't evolve until hundreds of millions of years later.
Clearly the theory was wrong, and they arrived earlier. No problem to the wider theory of evolution because it casts no doubt on the overall mechanism, just new data showing the estimates of following trends backwards were wrong.

because like every other life form, flowers suddenly appear in the Fossil record with absolutely no transitional forms
Archaeoceti is comprised pretty much entirely of transitional forms towards modern Cetaceans. "Transitional forms" are not a complete tree of life, but are far from a baseless cop-out with how many dating methods corroborate the gradually different organisms unlike any that are currently extant.

We also have Polystrate fossils, such as trees that are fossilized with their roots in one layer and their tops in an entirely different one evolutionists claim to be millions of years older.
I believe this to be exactly what one would expect of a place like Petrified Forest National Park getting re-buried. Because fossils don't instantly disintegrate once they're exposed. Your own image shows the fossil outlasting its surrounding rock, is it so strange a thought that it could have had this happen previously as the higher strata formed?

They're almost exclusively trees, generally encased in volcanic strata. Abrupt encasement of things prone to remain standing in the face of many energetic events, weathering re-exposing the now-fossilized still-upright trees, then re-encasement in new volcanic material is a rather obvious mechanism that's quite commonly applicable.

These fossils are impossible with the current understanding of evolution but exactly what we'd expect to see if there was a global flood and a certain amount of "sorting" happened as the floodwaters eroded the landscape and buried things en mass.
Radiocarbon dating means that you'd have to overturn the Standard Model of Particle Physics for this to be the case, as radiocarbon dating is based on well-demonstrated radioactive decay and irradiation of upper atmosphere nitrogen. Again, interdisciplinary data, it cannot be just evolution that's wrong. For evolution to be wrong, numerous other entire disciplines need to be wrong, because it's a massive interconnected tapestry of theories supporting eachother with more data than remotely reasonable for one person to work with. Hence the different disciplines in the first place.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
You were saying that the odds were 10^230 of the DNA in a chromosome forming over the lifespan of the Earth if it were made entirely of "ingredients". 10^787,952 is an input into the formulae in question, compared to 10^28,122,212 for Chromosome 21 (to use the specific smallest human chromosome).

You have constantly failed to comprehend very basic aspects of the statistics in question, by making claims that are utterly obviously wrong to the slightest thought of the actual biology and mathematics.
Since you're so much more knowledgable than him about it, how about you go ahead and show us your numbers instead?

...The entire point of the Miller-Urey experiment was to emulate the then-theorized prebiotic atmospheric composition to test abiotic synthesis theories. While it only produces 11 out of 20, that is still a conclusive demonstration of a basic mechanism as something very real.
No it's not. We've literally already definitively proven the atmosphere they used was completely impossible. There is no possible theoretical atmosphere that can produce the needed amino acids and the basic mechanism doesn't work without it.

Further even granting that atmosphere, the Miller-Urey experiment is obviously bunk. You can't synthesize amino acids if there's any free oxygen in the atmosphere. Which, we know, existed before life. But ignoring that, like you have to ignore everything to go with evolution, without oxygen there's no ozone layer and massive amounts of UV will promptly scour the surface. We still use UV filters to disinfect to this day for that very reason.

The Miller-Urey experiments, to any actually reasonable mind, dramatically highlight the absurdity of abiogenesis. You need a reducing atmosphere that never existed on earth, inside of an oxygen atmosphere that would instantly destroy the amino acids if it weren't constrained by a glass jar, with a spark at just the exact right strength to produce the amino acids that are then trapped in water because that same spark will destroy them more quickly than it forms them without the water trap.

IOW, a situation that's completely absurd without an intelligent designer micro-managing every step.

"Thing like current life cannot exist with current atmosphere, therefor must not actually be like current life" is a hell of an ass-backwards argument, whereas the evolutionist argument is "we know X is a limitation of Y biological system, we see Y system above X's limit case in current conditions, therefor conditions must have differed. Our geologist friends have supporting evidence of exactly that with oxide ratios and trapped gas pockets".

Interlocking, interdisciplinary data, gathered over the course of literally centuries in some cases, all back up the evolutionary theory virtually everywhere short of abiogenisis, and that's still got loads of dependencies of the theories demonstrated as fact.

Clearly the theory was wrong, and they arrived earlier. No problem to the wider theory of evolution because it casts no doubt on the overall mechanism, just new data showing the estimates of following trends backwards were wrong.
You left out the word "entire." Clearly, the entire theory is wrong. Actually, this evidence casts staggering doubts on the entire mechanic of evolution. The problem you run into is the so-called "Big Squeeze." Evolution is supposed to work slowly, otherwise we'd have seen it happen in the time mankind has been on the planet. So, the theory requires, it must work on a timescale too slow to be visible there. But the presence of complete complex skeletons at the same time every other clade suddenly appears, simultaneously, throws all kinds of doubts on that.

Full developed complex skeletal systems right at the start of the Cambrian Explosion indicates that life had to have evolved at super-speed. Literally, everything suddenly started appearing at the same time. Arthropods suddenly appear, no transition, skeletons suddenly appear, no transition, etc. etc. Exactly what would happen if a Divine Creator said "Let the sea swarm with living souls" but the exact opposite of what should be happening with gradual transitions from one form to another.

Archaeoceti is comprised pretty much entirely of transitional forms towards modern Cetaceans. "Transitional forms" are not a complete tree of life, but are far from a baseless cop-out with how many dating methods corroborate the gradually different organisms unlike any that are currently extant.
It's a truism that the less complete and more fragmentary the skeleton, the better a "missing link" it is and the more it supports evolution. We got Nebraska Man presented to the press as the missing link when the "overwhelming evidence" was one tooth, which on examination belonged to a pig. Peking Man, a distant ancestor hominid based on a single tooth... later claimed to be homo erectus once they got more of a skull... finally turned out to be a normal homo sapiens once they got a few more bones. Or Ramapithecus, as Origin magazine reported:

“As far as one can say at the moment, it is the first representative of the human family... The evidence concerning Ramapithecus is considerable—though in absolute terms it remains tantalizingly small: fragments of upper and lower jaws, plus a collection of teeth.

Of course, this was because of pure wishful thinking, and the ability of evolutionists to construct an entire (imaginary) skeleton out of a couple of teeth, as usual. Once we started finding more bits it became apparent that Ramapithecus was no ape-man and no missing link. You might notice, evolutionists are especially fond of fossils where all we have is a tooth or bit of jawbone, if you've got, say, a foot you can actually tell something about the creature but from a tooth you can make up the entire rest of the skeleton to be whatever you need it to for your theory.

The reason we're taking this delightful tour down the many, many frauds of evolution lane is to come back around to the Archaeoceti and see what we've got.

Pakicetidae
Dozens of fossils are known, but only of skulls, teeth, and jaw fragments; no complete skeletons have been found. Stunned awe, so surprising. No wonder it's full of transitional fossils.

Ambulocetus
Oh hey, there's a single mostly intact skeleton instead of just teeth on this one. What's that mean?

"Ambulocetus has its eyes raised up on top of its head in a very strange way, an it is unusually large for an early whale...maybe it's not on the main line [in whale evolution]." -Dr. Philip Gingerich, Evolution: The Grand Experiment

Oh, right, a mostly intact skeleton instead of a couple of teeth means it's no longer a transitional form, as always.

Remingtonocetidae
Just jawbones and skulls so this one's still a "transitional" fossil until they find the rest of the skeleton.

Rhodhocetus
Nothing epitomizes how the Evolutionary Transitional Fossil fraud scheme works better than Rhodhocetus. When first discovered by Dr. Gingerich they drew up the creature showing how it was a natural transition, flukes just starting to appear as the legs withered away.
ANbyha2LLfUPGuPbiJMFeuywsdzY05_RUcGtwXFMsPO-PONDWxwWZOxFEgboG9YfEO9w6CuNfxAsdaXPs8PssLw7TQNlm0M10tCcN0p7W10CkqEmy79KPJzNo3ipWCWcfqnXPw=s0-d
Then we found a pelvis and one leg...
ANbyha1WMygUBwYjJRCKIYlsp7xSU8SuV82a_ts32zglHOOyiHQ4vM3l_ToJ4VWrZzuyMRF--5dMEyO6pglCX9O2fRqfrLzKCxBRLTkrUadmPbtpgwV4-rg4ge6p59bG0xCoJASp71c-H_7W0648_nmxPMp1E_A-PmB-2CnROreXXfYIq4KyG467TOsWXSzyjHRLZtaJxdGS_vkLMRfyOVhetUO9BO8CQfRVdmEGvg=s0-d
Yeah, turns out it didn't have all those transitional features scientists claimed. But where did those imaginary transitional features come from in the first place when we only have a few fragmentary bones?

"I speculated that it might have had a fluke, I now doubt that Rodhocetus would have had a fluked tail." -Dr. Gingerich

Since then we have found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arms of Rodhocetus, and we understand that it doesn’t have the kind of arms that can spread out like flippers on a whale.” -Dr. Gingerich

And this is how it always goes with these transitional fossils. The only reason Archaeoceti is full of transitional fossils is because as long as there's only a couple of teeth to work with, evolutionists can make up whatever they want, add flukes, surmise that it had flippers, envision that it had a partially developed blowhole and sonar system, anything's possible as long as you get to imagine up all the skeleton except for two teeth. Each time a more intact skeleton shows up there's one less transitional fossil.

Evolutionary Scientists themselves put it best:
If you brought in a smart scientist from another discipline and showed him the meagre evidence we’ve got he’d surely say, ‘forget it: there isn’t enough to go on’. -David Pilbeam, Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

I believe this to be exactly what one would expect of a place like Petrified Forest National Park getting re-buried. Because fossils don't instantly disintegrate once they're exposed. Your own image shows the fossil outlasting its surrounding rock, is it so strange a thought that it could have had this happen previously as the higher strata formed?

They're almost exclusively trees, generally encased in volcanic strata. Abrupt encasement of things prone to remain standing in the face of many energetic events, weathering re-exposing the now-fossilized still-upright trees, then re-encasement in new volcanic material is a rather obvious mechanism that's quite commonly applicable.
They're almost never in volcanic strata. Actually volcanic fossils are stupid rare, are you sure you actually know anything about fossils? An overwhelmingly large percentage of all fossils, including the polystrate fossils, are in sedimentary strata. There's also a lot of trees because squirrels 30 feet tall are somewhat uncommon, however there are several hundred whales that extend between strata, and no few jellyfish, at least one mesosaur, numbers of spines that extend through layers, and several thousands of others around the world. One particularly interesting one is a massive school of fish that appear to be swimming through millions of years of strata. At one site, due to a pod of whales extending through utterly massive amounts of strata, the evolutionist concluded that whales kept returning and dying at the same spot at least four times millions of years apart (and not evolving at all in the meantime of course) because nothing else would preserve his theory.

If the fossils were being exposed and reburied repeatedly, we'd see at least some signs of wear on top of them since that part would be exposed to weather, but we don't. Even when the tree is upside down with tiny rootlets on top, there's no erosion there and the tiny rootlets are still intact. This absolutely contradicts any notion that the fossils are being unburied and reburied.

Radiocarbon dating means that you'd have to overturn the Standard Model of Particle Physics for this to be the case, as radiocarbon dating is based on well-demonstrated radioactive decay and irradiation of upper atmosphere nitrogen. Again, interdisciplinary data, it cannot be just evolution that's wrong. For evolution to be wrong, numerous other entire disciplines need to be wrong, because it's a massive interconnected tapestry of theories supporting eachother with more data than remotely reasonable for one person to work with. Hence the different disciplines in the first place.
A: Bullshit, radiocarbon dating doesn't work on fossils at all. It has a max range of about 80,000 years so it's absolutely not going to work on the timescales you're claiming it does. It also won't work if the organic material is gone and replaced by minerals, such as fossils.

B: Radioisotope dating in general using actual isotopes with a decent half-life is only slightly more legit than flat earth theories. The methodologies are incredibly dodgy, come up with contradictory results all the time, have a ludicrous margin of error, and are reliant on things we absolutely know to be untrue to function (such as the sun never changing it's output, the atmosphere never changing it's composition, and the earth's magnetic field never fluctuating).


Yeah, testing a volcanic flow from 1954 yielded results ranging from 0.27 million years to 3.5 million years. That's how utterly useless radioisotope dating is.

We also have concrete evidence that external factors can change half-lives and alter how fast radioactive isotopes decay.


And Earth's magnetic field has decayed dramatically (about 10%) in just the last 150 years. Coincidentally, this will influence the rate that fresh radioisotopes are created and thus throw off all calculations as to how well something can be dated since we can't tell how much isotope may have existed in it originally.

If carbon dating is the ice you're skating on I hope you know how to swim.
 

Scottty

Well-known member
Founder
As Bear Ribs points out, radiometric dating is based on some quite unsound premises - it assumes things that are often known to be simply not true.
For example: the ratio of Carbon-14 to Carbon-12 in the Earth's atmosphere being constant. It isn't. The amount in parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere varies wildly both locally, and overall in time.
And we are talking here about in historical time. Within the last few hundred years.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
As Bear Ribs points out, radiometric dating is based on some quite unsound premises - it assumes things that are often known to be simply not true.
For example: the ratio of Carbon-14 to Carbon-12 in the Earth's atmosphere being constant. It isn't. The amount in parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere varies wildly both locally, and overall in time.
And we are talking here about in historical time. Within the last few hundred years.
One of the interesting ones is that there was an uttermassive spike in the amount of C-14 in the world in the year 774, known as the Charlemange Event. Nobody's quite sure why though records say a giant glowing cross appeared in the sky around then, and there's theories it was a solar event of some kind futzing with decay rates or possibly C-14 creation rates. No telling how many similar events there were in the distant pass changed the supposedly unchangeable rates for radioisotopes.

Time_profile_of_the_774_AD_spike_in_C-14..jpg
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
As Bear Ribs points out, radiometric dating is based on some quite unsound premises - it assumes things that are often known to be simply not true.
For example: the ratio of Carbon-14 to Carbon-12 in the Earth's atmosphere being constant. It isn't. The amount in parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere varies wildly both locally, and overall in time.
And we are talking here about in historical time. Within the last few hundred years.
All of which has been accounted for in how carbon dating and radio-isotope dating is done.

There are specific formula's and corrections to account for non-uniform carbon-12 to carbon-14 distribution and local fluctuations, as well as now the fallout carbon from nuclear tests, and to account for weird solar/extra-solar particles hitting radioactive isotopes.

For one, averaging multiple samples, some times from multiple areas, tends to cancel out weird outliers that could be caused by such issues.

I say this as someone with a geology degree who had to learn how both types of dating worked.
One of the interesting ones is that there was an uttermassive spike in the amount of C-14 in the world in the year 774, known as the Charlemange Event. Nobody's quite sure why though records say a giant glowing cross appeared in the sky around then, and there's theories it was a solar event of some kind futzing with decay rates or possibly C-14 creation rates. No telling how many similar events there were in the distant pass changed the supposedly unchangeable rates for radioisotopes.

Time_profile_of_the_774_AD_spike_in_C-14..jpg
You do realize events like this are factored into C-14 calculations, right?

You do understand the people who do C-14 work routinely have huge catalogues of weird events and anomalies they end up factoring into the dates they put out.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
All of which has been accounted for in how carbon dating and radio-isotope dating is done.

There are specific formula's and corrections to account for non-uniform carbon-12 to carbon-14 distribution and local fluctuations, as well as now the fallout carbon from nuclear tests, and to account for weird solar/extra-solar particles hitting radioactive isotopes.

For one, averaging multiple samples, some times from multiple areas, tends to cancel out weird outliers that could be caused by such issues.

I say this as someone with a geology degree who had to learn how both types of dating worked.
You do realize events like this are factored into C-14 calculations, right?

You do understand the people who do C-14 work routinely have huge catalogues of weird events and anomalies they end up factoring into the dates they put out.
Yes, I too have a degree in geology and know what the Calibration Curve is, and also how much fudging and guesswork goes into it. Again, a known volcanic flow from 1954 tested out as being 0.27 million years to 3.5 million years old. Their correcting for such issues is rather faulty.

Medicine isn't the only area where we're learning we can't actually tRuSt ThE sCiEnCe, it's endemic.
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
Yes, I too have a degree in geology and know what the Calibration Curve is, and also how much fudging and guesswork goes into it. Again, a known volcanic flow from 1954 tested out as being 0.27 million years to 3.5 million years old. Their correcting for such issues is rather faulty.

Medicine isn't the only area where we're learning we can't actually tRuSt ThE sCiEnCe, it's endemic.
That sounds like somebody made some very dumb mistakes with calibrating lab equipment, or contaminated the samples.

The science behind carbon dating and radio-isotope dating is solid; most weird shit with it is usually lab or sampling errors.

Because I know about sampling lava flows and dating them (did it as a senior capstone project) and those sorts of dates on a known lava would make me do a a recheck of all lab equipment and sampling procedures, not question if the entire science behind the dating techniques is crap.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
That sounds like somebody made some very dumb mistakes with calibrating lab equipment, or contaminated the samples.
From the actual study:

All samples were sent first for sectioning one thin section from each sample for petrographic analysis. A set of representative pieces from each sample (approximately 100 g) was then despatched to the AMDEL Laboratory in Adelaide, South Australia, for whole-rock major, minor and trace element analyses. A second representative set (50–100 g from each sample) was sent progressively to Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge (Boston), Massachusetts, for whole-rock potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating first a split from one sample from each flow, then a split from the second sample from each flow after the first set of results was received, and finally, the split from the third sample from the June 30, 1954 flow.

Two different independent labs had five failures in a row, each? Sure, just miscalibrated equipment, or every single sample managing to be contaminated.

The science behind carbon dating and radio-isotope dating is solid; most weird shit with it is usually lab or sampling errors.

Because I know about sampling lava flows and dating them (did it as a senior capstone project) and those sorts of dates on a known lava would make me do a a recheck of all lab equipment and sampling procedures, not question if the entire science behind the dating techniques is crap.
Yes, of course if you knew you got the wrong results you'd redo the tests until you got the results you wanted. That attitude is the problem.

Historically the finest French Wine testers always found French wines far superior to those upstarts from California, that is up until the Judgement of Paris where the bottle labels were covered, at which point suddenly two California wines beat out all competition and one judge even tried to get her scorecards back and hide the results rather than own up to their own previous decision. Not a whole lot of difference when it comes to researchers fudging results until they get the ones they wanted.
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
From the actual study:

All samples were sent first for sectioning one thin section from each sample for petrographic analysis. A set of representative pieces from each sample (approximately 100 g) was then despatched to the AMDEL Laboratory in Adelaide, South Australia, for whole-rock major, minor and trace element analyses. A second representative set (50–100 g from each sample) was sent progressively to Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge (Boston), Massachusetts, for whole-rock potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating first a split from one sample from each flow, then a split from the second sample from each flow after the first set of results was received, and finally, the split from the third sample from the June 30, 1954 flow.

Two different independent labs had five failures in a row, each? Sure, just miscalibrated equipment, or every single sample managing to be contaminated.

Yes, of course if you knew you got the wrong results you'd redo the tests until you got the results you wanted. That attitude is the problem.

Historically the finest French Wine testers always found French wines far superior to those upstarts from California, that is up until the Judgement of Paris where the bottle labels were covered, at which point suddenly two California wines beat out all competition and one judge even tried to get her scorecards back and hide the results rather than own up to their own previous decision. Not a whole lot of difference when it comes to researchers fudging results until they get the ones they wanted.
Ok, let's go through this a bit, because I see 2 real possibilities here.

1) Un-even radio-isotope distrubution in fresh lava's; this is a know issue. I only have ever done sampling on stuff that was about 50-60 mill old, not fresh stuff, but the fact is most lava's are slightly radioactive when they first come out, before the shorter lived isotopes begin to cool off.

2) The samples that went in were bits of clasts that had broken off from the surrounding rocks in the magma chamber as the magma mass moved up and eventually erupted, without fully melting into the main magma mass and fully melting itself.

Do you have a link to the actual study, because I'm not gonna deny that sort of date on a Holocene lava flow is all kinds of fucky, and I want to see what exactly they were dealing with.
 

ParadiseLost

Well-known member
The very simple explanation for belief in evolution, if you believe evolution lacks evidence, is that the average human cannot accept that something is unknown.

As it is, most people treat the origins of life as though the only options were evolution or the Judeo-Christian God.

Obviously, in an environment where scientists are primarily atheists, evolution must therefore be left unquestioned. They can't tell the common man that we don't yet know how life originated, because the common man wouldn't be able to accept that.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Ok, let's go through this a bit, because I see 2 real possibilities here.

1) Un-even radio-isotope distrubution in fresh lava's; this is a know issue. I only have ever done sampling on stuff that was about 50-60 mill old, not fresh stuff, but the fact is most lava's are slightly radioactive when they first come out, before the shorter lived isotopes begin to cool off.

2) The samples that went in were bits of clasts that had broken off from the surrounding rocks in the magma chamber as the magma mass moved up and eventually erupted, without fully melting into the main magma mass and fully melting itself.

Do you have a link to the actual study, because I'm not gonna deny that sort of date on a Holocene lava flow is all kinds of fucky, and I want to see what exactly they were dealing with.
Yes, posted upthread. Here's a repost of the study's data for your convenience.

The issue with "Holocene" is that this just happens to be the entire period for which we have historical evidence and records to compare with. Fundamentally you're saying the system has issues with anytime we can independently verify the numbers but it works just fine as long as we have no way to double-check.
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
Yes, posted upthread. Here's a repost of the study's data for your convenience.

The issue with "Holocene" is that this just happens to be the entire period for which we have historical evidence and records to compare with. Fundamentally you're saying the system has issues with anytime we can independently verify the numbers but it works just fine as long as we have no way to double-check.
Ok, going to read this whole this; been a while since I had to scan something like this in detail.

I have I checked out both the abstract, along with conclusion and further research bits (to actually see the trust of the article, and not just a lab work and field notes) and then I will be able to judge better what may be going on.

I am going to see how they got from A to B & C.
 

Bacle

When the effort is no longer profitable...
Founder
@Bear Ribs The article's science seems...well, no obvious gaps in the methodology, though the conclusion I think is a massive reach.

I think there may be some issues with Ar-Ar and K-Ar dating that lie in the 'zero Ar40 at initial state' assumption of the equation, which seems...like something a mathematician and not a field geo made.

Which is actually worthy of further study and work on it's own, as excess Ar can definitely impact dating if it's not behaving the way originally postulated, and is getting trapped in unexpected places in other minerals. Refining lab results and proceedures to account for that sort of thing is fairly important work.

Look I believe in the divine, but this isn't proof of the Flood like the paper claims, and it takes something which is a 'huh, that's weird' issue and calls for some serious study to ensure the technique can be made as accurate as possible.

I would also say I found it weird they never sent any sample for U-U analysis, just to cross check stuff with another isotope chain. Though that could be an issue of running out of sample material or funding, I guess.
 

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
@Bear Ribs The article's science seems...well, no obvious gaps in the methodology, though the conclusion I think is a massive reach.

I think there may be some issues with Ar-Ar and K-Ar dating that lie in the 'zero Ar40 at initial state' assumption of the equation, which seems...like something a mathematician and not a field geo made.

Which is actually worth of further study and work on it's own, as excess Ar can definitely impact dating if it's not behaving the way originally postulated, and is getting trapped in unexpected places in other minerals. refining lab results and proceedures to account for that sort of think is fairly important work.

Look I believe in the divine, but this isn't proof of the Flood like the paper claims, and it takes something which is a 'huh, that's weird' issue and calls for some serious study to ensure the technique can be made as accurate as possible.

I would also say I found it weird they never sent any sample for U-U analysis, just to cross check stuff with another isotope chain. Though that could be an issue of running out of sample material or funding, I guess.
I tend to agree, I found no serious methodology errors when I examined it either. I too don't see this as proof of the flood (Though I have seen numerous other lines of evidence for it) by itself and I'm not a young earth creationist in the first place, however it is one of several cases establishing that radioisotope dating has serious issues and does a good job of proving the point I used it for. Specifically, trying to claim evolution has to be accepted because radioisotope dating is infallible.
 

LordsFire

Internet Wizard
The very simple explanation for belief in evolution, if you believe evolution lacks evidence, is that the average human cannot accept that something is unknown.

As it is, most people treat the origins of life as though the only options were evolution or the Judeo-Christian God.

Obviously, in an environment where scientists are primarily atheists, evolution must therefore be left unquestioned. They can't tell the common man that we don't yet know how life originated, because the common man wouldn't be able to accept that.

Oh, it's more than that.

The Theory of Evolution as the origin of species through purely naturalistic means is explicitly one of the key tools in the atheists long-running culture war against Christians in the West.

Up until the 1800's, not only was the clergy the generally most trusted source of wisdom in western culture, academia was also tightly intermeshed with it. Partly because contrary to modern atheists' fables, the church historically guarded what knowledge there was about the natural world, with at least as good a record about it as atheists have had since, and partly because a lot of universities were founded in part or whole as schools for training clergy.

In the latter half of the 1800's though, a serious movement got going, I honestly don't know when or how it started, that rejected the existence of God, and started fighting for secularization of practically everything. Perhaps at first it was an extension of the cultural backlash against sectarian wars between Protestants and Catholics, part of trying to keep specific denominations from abusing cultural authority.

Even if it was in part originated from that, by the early 1900's, it was already aggressively trying to seize cultural authority, and oust Christians and Christianity from places of influence. Across the mid-20th century, it succeeded in this, one of the key milestones being evolution getting pushed into classrooms after the Scopes Monkey Trials.

And contrary to what the atheists will claim, everywhere they have gained primacy, things have gotten worse. The Eugenics movement, every major Socialist movement of the 20th century, Post-modernism and its founders attempts to normalize pedophilia, the general dehumanization of man, period.

Atheism is the cultural corrosion at the root of so many evils of the modern era, for one simple reason. It removes the moral arbiter from the picture, and therefore moral law becomes a matter of opinion. As Nietsche himself predicted, after the cultural elite 'killed god,' the 20th century became the bloodiest in human history as a result.

People will go to literally insane lengths to try to redefine morality so that their pursuit of power and pleasure is no longer evil.
 

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