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Cue creationists jumping on this to challenge evolution (by challenging carbon dating) in 4...3..2..

by ajju 16y ago

sp332 16y ago
Been there, done that. The Institute for Creation Research started the RATE project in 1997. http://www.icr.org/rate/ http://www.icr.org/rate/
- ajju 16y ago
  Sure, but it appears this is new evidence to support those claims? Or is this an old discovery that just 'went mainstream'?
  - sprout 16y ago
    The creationist pseudoscience tries to demonstrate that radioactive decay is variable here on Earth. This seems to be another case where our standard laws of physics break down at massively high temperatures and pressures. And of course, radioactive dating is one tool among many. The distribution of soil and rock on the Earth is almost certainly the result of billions of years of erosion, earth shifts, and climate changes.
    - ugh 16y ago
      Also: say that radioactive dating turns out to be worthless (which is not the case, even if the results in the linked article are true), that still wouldn’t tell you anything about the age of the earth. You can’t then just privilege the hypothesis that the earth is 6,000 years old. It’s quite funny actually, if we didn’t have radioactive dating it would make a lot of sense to say that evolution itself is one of the best pieces of evidence for an old earth. It is supported by so much evidence independent of any dating methods that any discovery which changes how much we believe we can trust radioactive dating is practically meaningless. (The obvious exception are results which would indicate that earth is orders of magnitude younger than radioactive dating makes it seem to be. But, no surprise, this is not that.)
  - sp332 16y ago
    This seasonal discovery is new, but it's exactly the sort of thing RATE has been talking about. The main point of the RATE project is to discredit the radioisotope dating methods. Sometimes they just send samples from the same rock formation to different labs and get different results. But they also spend a lot of time finding reasons that radioisotope decay rates might change over time. This is all from what I remember from a conversation I had with someone involved with the project about 10 years ago. They got a lot of funding and a lot of interest back in the late 90's when they were just starting. I thought some of their research was interesting, but there was so much propaganda mixed in that it turned my stomach, so I stopped following it.
KingOfB 16y ago
Creationists? Everyone should jump on challenging carbon dating. If we can measure variance inside of 33 days, and that's extrapolated over a few millions of years, that could skew the numbers a bit. But I bet the ballpark of neutrino's the sun has put out and will put out stays relatively constant inside of some rotational variance. The output behaving like a sin wave doesn't change things much, but if it's on an incline or decline, that has a huge impact on carbon dating. It seems exciting that we have an observable cause and effect and we don't understand why. That seems like it could be a good treasure chest of knowledge right there!
- api 16y ago
  Yeah, true, but I still predict the creationists will be all over it. But you could add much wider error bars to carbon dating and it still wouldn't support creationism. Maybe something 20 million years old is just 7 million. Fine. It's not six thousand.
  - KingOfB 16y ago
    I completely agree. I just find it funny that new science appears and everyone's moaning about the impact of the creationists argument!
  - Confusion 16y ago
    It's more like: maybe something estimated to be 20.0 million years old (with an error bar of 0.5 million years) should have been estimated to be 19.99 million years old, with the same error bar and hence the same precision, which is still 20.0 million years. And that only makes sense if we weren't talking about carbon dating, which isn't used for those timescales.
- apphacker 16y ago
  Whatever variation may exist, carbon dating has been independently verified via other dating means such as coral ring formations and dendrochronology. Unless whatever is having an effect on carbon dating also affects these other, unrelated, forms of dating in the exact same way we can expect the variation to be small and not significant enough to upend everything we know. The evidence that our dating mechanisms work is undeniable - tectonic movement, linguistic evidence of language dispersion, physiological changes in species and their geographical distribution, etc etc all happen at predictable rates and all match up with what we know about our dating methods. Really, creationists should be better suited applying their ultra-skepticism at the much larger gaps in evidence and analysis found in their own ideas. The thing about people who value science is that whenever data presents a challenge we have to account for it, unlike the idiot creationists who only embrace data when it agrees with their already pre-conceived ideas.
troymc 16y ago
Even if the rate of radioactive decay does vary periodically (with a known period), you just do a different calculation when figuring out some dead thing's age from carbon-14 measurements. Since this effect sounds like it's a small perturbation on top of the main model (a constant decay rate), I'd expect the final answer (the calculated age) to be about the same.
- btilly 16y ago
  Actually C-14 levels have varied over history, so we already need to calibrate C-14 readings with other measuring sticks, such as tree rings. That calibration would catch any possible variation. Incidentally did you know that C-14 dating no longer works? The reason is that we've released a lot of carbon from fossil fuels that is very low in C-14. As a result fresh organic matter today has lower C-14 levels than organic matter from 100 years ago. Odd, but true. (And don't think that the Creationists haven't been all over that fact.)
  - troymc 16y ago
    My general point was that one can make a mathematical model that takes into account the historical value of the ambient C-14 to C-12 ratio, plus the historical value of the C-14 decay rate. C-14 dating isn't used for dating recently-dead things, but not for the reason you suggest. The real reason is that the half-life of C-14 is about 5730 years. Not much decay happens in 200 years, and the little that does happen is difficult to sort out from measurement errors. Other techniques are used for dating things that died recently. Watch CSI for some clues :D

Cue creationists jumping on this to challenge evolution (by challenging carbon dating) in 4...3..2..

by ajju 16y ago

Cue creationists jumping on this to challenge evolution (by challenging carbon dating) in 4...3..2..

sp332 16y ago

Been there, done that. The Institute for Creation Research started the RATE project in 1997. http://www.icr.org/rate/ http://www.icr.org/rate/

ajju 16y ago
Sure, but it appears this is new evidence to support those claims? Or is this an old discovery that just 'went mainstream'?
- sprout 16y ago
  The creationist pseudoscience tries to demonstrate that radioactive decay is variable here on Earth. This seems to be another case where our standard laws of physics break down at massively high temperatures and pressures. And of course, radioactive dating is one tool among many. The distribution of soil and rock on the Earth is almost certainly the result of billions of years of erosion, earth shifts, and climate changes.
  - ugh 16y ago
    Also: say that radioactive dating turns out to be worthless (which is not the case, even if the results in the linked article are true), that still wouldn’t tell you anything about the age of the earth. You can’t then just privilege the hypothesis that the earth is 6,000 years old. It’s quite funny actually, if we didn’t have radioactive dating it would make a lot of sense to say that evolution itself is one of the best pieces of evidence for an old earth. It is supported by so much evidence independent of any dating methods that any discovery which changes how much we believe we can trust radioactive dating is practically meaningless. (The obvious exception are results which would indicate that earth is orders of magnitude younger than radioactive dating makes it seem to be. But, no surprise, this is not that.)
- sp332 16y ago
  This seasonal discovery is new, but it's exactly the sort of thing RATE has been talking about. The main point of the RATE project is to discredit the radioisotope dating methods. Sometimes they just send samples from the same rock formation to different labs and get different results. But they also spend a lot of time finding reasons that radioisotope decay rates might change over time. This is all from what I remember from a conversation I had with someone involved with the project about 10 years ago. They got a lot of funding and a lot of interest back in the late 90's when they were just starting. I thought some of their research was interesting, but there was so much propaganda mixed in that it turned my stomach, so I stopped following it.

KingOfB 16y ago

Creationists? Everyone should jump on challenging carbon dating. If we can measure variance inside of 33 days, and that's extrapolated over a few millions of years, that could skew the numbers a bit. But I bet the ballpark of neutrino's the sun has put out and will put out stays relatively constant inside of some rotational variance. The output behaving like a sin wave doesn't change things much, but if it's on an incline or decline, that has a huge impact on carbon dating. It seems exciting that we have an observable cause and effect and we don't understand why. That seems like it could be a good treasure chest of knowledge right there!

api 16y ago
Yeah, true, but I still predict the creationists will be all over it. But you could add much wider error bars to carbon dating and it still wouldn't support creationism. Maybe something 20 million years old is just 7 million. Fine. It's not six thousand.
- KingOfB 16y ago
  I completely agree. I just find it funny that new science appears and everyone's moaning about the impact of the creationists argument!
- Confusion 16y ago
  It's more like: maybe something estimated to be 20.0 million years old (with an error bar of 0.5 million years) should have been estimated to be 19.99 million years old, with the same error bar and hence the same precision, which is still 20.0 million years. And that only makes sense if we weren't talking about carbon dating, which isn't used for those timescales.
apphacker 16y ago
Whatever variation may exist, carbon dating has been independently verified via other dating means such as coral ring formations and dendrochronology. Unless whatever is having an effect on carbon dating also affects these other, unrelated, forms of dating in the exact same way we can expect the variation to be small and not significant enough to upend everything we know. The evidence that our dating mechanisms work is undeniable - tectonic movement, linguistic evidence of language dispersion, physiological changes in species and their geographical distribution, etc etc all happen at predictable rates and all match up with what we know about our dating methods. Really, creationists should be better suited applying their ultra-skepticism at the much larger gaps in evidence and analysis found in their own ideas. The thing about people who value science is that whenever data presents a challenge we have to account for it, unlike the idiot creationists who only embrace data when it agrees with their already pre-conceived ideas.

troymc 16y ago

Even if the rate of radioactive decay does vary periodically (with a known period), you just do a different calculation when figuring out some dead thing's age from carbon-14 measurements. Since this effect sounds like it's a small perturbation on top of the main model (a constant decay rate), I'd expect the final answer (the calculated age) to be about the same.

btilly 16y ago
Actually C-14 levels have varied over history, so we already need to calibrate C-14 readings with other measuring sticks, such as tree rings. That calibration would catch any possible variation. Incidentally did you know that C-14 dating no longer works? The reason is that we've released a lot of carbon from fossil fuels that is very low in C-14. As a result fresh organic matter today has lower C-14 levels than organic matter from 100 years ago. Odd, but true. (And don't think that the Creationists haven't been all over that fact.)
- troymc 16y ago
  My general point was that one can make a mathematical model that takes into account the historical value of the ambient C-14 to C-12 ratio, plus the historical value of the C-14 decay rate. C-14 dating isn't used for dating recently-dead things, but not for the reason you suggest. The real reason is that the half-life of C-14 is about 5730 years. Not much decay happens in 200 years, and the little that does happen is difficult to sort out from measurement errors. Other techniques are used for dating things that died recently. Watch CSI for some clues :D