Posted on 03/10/2004 6:10:11 AM PST by vannrox
Are you saying the Carbon 14 isn't there? Or that it doesn't exceed known sources of contamination.
Or are you simply dismissing the evidence because it conflicts with your belief system?
No it isn't, but thanks for playing.
so most scientists use nearby fossils.
As an independent cross-check, sure. This is one of the methods by which we've been able to conclude that radiocarbon dating is *not* "notoriously inaccurate", but in fact it quite reliable.
The fossils dates are changed to fit evolutionary thinking.
I love a good conspiracy theory, but this one isn't very good.
Could another reason to bury the dead be to cover the smell?
I can imagine a mourning ritual being added to this simple act,
and after a few generations becoming a proto-religion.
Oh, horse manure.
Translation: Some dishonest creationists purposely submitted improperly prepared samples for K/Ar dating, then hooted about how "inaccurate" K/Ar dating is because they got back the expected messy results.
This is like trying to discredit a speedometer's accuracy by spinning your wheels on an icy road then chortling, "hey, this thing's busted, it's reading 20mph but the car's not moving!"
Just last night I made a post explaining the details of this to someone on another thread:
In layman’s terms, these volcanic rocks that we know were formed in 1986—less than 20 years ago—were “scientifically” dated to between 290,000 and 3.4 million years old!
No, in layman's terms Austin the creationist is either a fool or a charlatan (perhaps both).
"In layman's terms", here's what he did wrong (I'll leave it to you to decide whether he did so out of dishonesty or incompetence):
1. He chose an analysis lab which CLEARLY STATES that its analysis equipment is not sensitive enough to correctly measure samples less than two million years old. Read that again until it sinks in.
2. Austin then took the first set of measured results, WHICH INDICATED LESS THAN TWO MILLION YEARS OLD, and rather than doing what an honest scientist would have done (which is say, "ah, these results are below the lower bounds of the testing equipment, thus they're just reporting equipment noise"), instead Austin ran around in circles and tried to ridicule K/AR dating for giving him out-of-bounds results that made perfect sense.
3. As for the 2.8 +/- 0.6 Mya sub-sample, Austin sort of "forgets" to inform the reader that almost without exception lava rock contains what are known as "inclusions", which are bits of older crystalline mineral mixed in with the fresh lava flow. A volcanic eruption is a violent and hardly "clean" event and pulverized (but unmelted) minerals are incorporated into the lava as it flows up and outward from the volcano. These inclusions will produce K/Ar dates older than the date of the lava flow because they are, indeed, *older* than the lava flow. A real scientist (unlike, say, Austin) will take a great deal of care to extract inclusions from his sample before sending it to a lab to determine the date when the lava itself flowed, and/or hand-pick a "clean" lava sample which has relatively few inclusions compared to the flow as a whole. That's because they *want* to get as valid a date as possible for the lava flow. Now, guess what Austin didn't do? Gee, now guess *why* he didn't do it? Can you say, "*trying* to get an apparently invalid date so as to have a cheap, dishonest excuse to allege that there's something 'wrong' with K/Ar dating"?
As the old saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out" and Austin (unlike the honest scientists who *want* to produce valid dates) had no interest in getting a clean result -- the more "garbage" the result, the more he could claim a creationist "success". So he *submitted* garbage as his sample (i.e., a sample with inclusions, to a lab unable to date anything younger than roughly two million years).
As Henry Barwood notes, "Bad measurements, like bad science, reflect only on the measurer (Austin), not on the measurement (the procedure)."
For more details, see: Young-Earth Creationist 'Dating' of a Mt. St. Helens Dacite: The Failure of Austin and Swenson to Recognize Obviously Ancient Minerals. More at: Skeptics Visit the "Museum of Creation and Earth History" .
Here is a link showing similar problems with the Rubidium-Strontium dating method. Where one set of rocks are dated much older than they are known to be.
Exact same issue (lava rock with inclusions) submitted by the exact same creationist "researcher" (Steven A. Austin). He appears to be a one-trick pony.
Whether such problems have been identified in all radiometric dating methods, I do not know.
"Such problems"? Yeah, if you submit "dirty" samples for testing, you get "dirty" results. So what else is new? Honest scientists clean their samples first. Creationist "scientists" don't, then try to discredit the testing methods when they get bogus results. Go figure.
But it certainly casts significant doubt on it.
The only thing it "certainly casts significant doubt on" is the honesty/competence of "creation scientists".
The discussion wasn't about rocks and minerals but about fossils. Yes I agree it is continually produced but not at the levels found in the fossils.
You claim that in the case of Austin Mt. St. Helens sample the lab first reported insufficient argon. I don't know if that's true in Austin's case. I agree to not report that would be intellectionally dishonest. But I do know that other scientists submitted samples from other volcanos and the lab didn't report insufficient argon, in fact there was substantial argon and the lab gave old ages for new rock.
In some cases the whole rock was sent to the lab and the lab was responsible for all of the prepatoray work. So a "dirty" sample is not a valid excuse for the lab results.
If the lab can routinely come back with old ages for new lava rock, then how are we to know that their testing of other lava flows is any more accurate?
Incorrect.
If this is so, then why do they say the method is accurate to 50,000 years?
Because in the absence of contaminants, the AMS instruments can measure trace amounts of 14C to an accuracy sufficient to correctly date samples up to 50,000 years old.
If any C14 date has ever yielded a value over 30,000 years, this implies that such contamination is not ubiquitous.
Correct.
Of course, it could be that older measurement techniques were less accurate.
Correct again. The older decay-counting methods were less accurate for older samples than are modern AMS methods.
Here is another instance of an anomalously young carbon 14 date: At the 1992 Twin Cities Creation Conference, there was a paper presented called “Direct Dating of Cretaceous-Jurassic Fossils (and Other Evidences for Human-Dinosaur Coexistence)”. Among other things, the results of carbon-dating of Acrocanthosaurus bones are given.
The producers of that paper no longer make copies of that it available (itself a red flag), but the snippets I have found reproduced on the internet are not encouraging. For example, one table is simply an unsourced list of various radiocarbon dates *all* from 25 or more years ago, *none* provided with any citations that make it easy to go back to the primary sources to see what in the heck was being tested, how it was cleaned/prepared prior to testing, where it came from, or whether it was even puported to be actually ancient material being tested. For example, the table contains this helpful (*cough*) citation: "Specimen 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16 in RADIOCARBON (Vol. 1-10)." So anyone who wants to try to verify any information about these specimens has to read through TEN VOLUMES of the journal "Radiocarbon" and hope to spot them? Yeah, right. What are the authors trying to hide by failing to provide issue dates and page numbers?
I can't critique a paper when the authors are now trying to hide even the paper itself, but it turns out that Brad Lepper, a very reliable source (his other works that I've read have been solid) has already critiqued it for me. Here's a brief summary of his review:
From: www.talkorigins.org Feedback for May 1997.As for the dinosaur bone, I'd guess that it is a somewhat garbled retelling of a CSREF (a creationist organization here in Ohio) escapade. If so, CSREF's claims have been answered by Brad Lepper (1992). (The part about "retesting" is probably untrue; carbon dating is not capable of yielding results in the millions-of-years range.) Carbon dating is fairly reliable when applied carefully and properly. Unfortunately, CSREF did not do so. In fact, prior to an actual date being computed, the U. of Arizona lab told them that: (1) the fossil bone contained no collagen (meaning that all of the original bone material had been replaced and any resulting date could not possibly represent the time of death of the animal that the bone came from); and (2) it was loaded with shellac "and other contaminants" (meaning that it was known in advance that the resulting date would not be valid). CSREF told the laboratory to go ahead and perform the date anyway. Obviously CSREF wasn't interested in an honest test of carbon dating; they misrepresented the source of the material and ignored checks which indicated its unsuitability for dating. As Brad Lepper said:
Reference: Lepper, Bradley T., 1992. "Radiocarbon Dates for Dinosaur Bones? A Critical Look at Recent Creationist Claims" in Creation/Evolution 30 pp. 1-10."Such deliberate disregard of the warnings from both the Carnegie and Arizona suggests not mere ignorance of the limitations of radiocarbon dating nor even simple incompetence, but a premeditated intent to deceive. CSREF researchers must have known the radiocarbon dates on the Carnegie speciments would be hopelessly compromised by the contaminants. They knew the "dates" would be meaningless, but they also knew they would appear recent."
1992, p. 8
In other words, it's the same type of fraud committed by Austin as described in my previous posts.
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