Are these the false prophets God warned us about?

[Paraleptopecten (Timothy Campbell)]

@Burrawang

Yes, of course the majority of the world has overwhelmingly agreed that ‘deep time’ is real and evolution is real, but that is hardly surprising, given that the world hates the Truth. Most of the mass media and most of academia perpetuate these two myths.

Okay, then why did Michael Tuomey say this in 1848?

@Paraleptopecten

…

"
This is from Michael Tuomey’s Report on the Geology of South Carolina (pp. 58-59), from 1848. The immediately prior pages argue against Lamarkian evolution, and for the best-fit model of the time, individual creation of species, but note that there are some components of the fossil record that look somewhat like Lamarkian-style evolution. [To avoid a bad counter-argument for a third time, the geologist who died in 1857 was not the same person as the Tammany Hall politician who was still active in the 1870s.]

@Burrawang

All over the planet there are enormous fossil graveyards where many different types of animal remains have been washed away from disparate ecosystems and buried together in mass fossil graveyards, where terrestrial plants and animals and marine creatures have been rapidly buried together

This falsely implies such deposits to be common. They are not. Most deposits have precisely determinable water depth range or elevation, come from specific environments, and have a few specimens mixed in from other areas (e.g., a few terrestrial vertebrate bones or freshwater shells in an otherwise marine deposit).

@Burrawang

I say ‘rapidly’ only because of the exquisite preservation of detail in the fossil remains.

Which is rare, not universal.

@Burrawang

If the burial wasn’t rapid, then decay, from bacterial and fungal action and oxidation and of course scavenging would have utterly destroyed the remains leaving nothing, but the reality is that even jellyfish and skin textures are beautifully preserved in the fossils, thus a very rapid sediment laden watery burial is a rational explanation as to why billions of fossils are so sharply defined in the field

Most deposits are not lagerstaetten that preserve soft tissues. The majority of global fossil deposits and the majority of global macroscopic fossils preserve hard parts of shallow marine organisms.

@Burrawang

The remnants of soft tissue and actual bones of dinosaurs that have been discovered sticking out of the surface of the ground in locations where the mean temperatures often exceed 25 degrees C, and not been mineralised

That’s been pointed out to you to be untrue repeatedly. They are mineralized.

@Burrawang

contain osteocytes

Remnants of them.

@Burrawang

More and more dinosaur soft tissue is being added to the literature every year.

Yes, and none of it makes any difference to dating of the specimens. No supposed “physical laws” governing decay of organic molecules are as fundamental as the ones that govern radiometric decay (plus, they would be radically altered if radiometric decay rates changed). Proteins decaying is incredibly dependent on conditions. Decay of atoms depends on fundamental constants that would either make all atoms fall apart, irradiate everything and turn every planet into a ball of plasma, or require a deceptive and pointless miracle to fix everything.

@Paraleptopecten

Assuming a person is about 60 kg, then something like 50 kGy per day is about right.

@Paraleptopecten

Note too that the related sped up radioactive decay would give Noah a beta-radiation dose (from the 40K atoms inside his own body, which for these purposes is basically all of the radioactive atoms inside a person) of about 50kGy per day (adding the background rate from the crust would up that to about 70kGy). Either way, that’s a fatal dose every few seconds.

That is an insane amount of radiation–10 times the dose inside the worst-contaminated parts of the Chernobyl reactor immediately after the meltdown. Except this lasts for 6 months.

That’s actually enough to kill Thermococcus gammatolerans.

@Paraleptopecten

Given that Uranium, Thorium, and Potassium are the most common radioactive elements, we can get an estimate of the energy released by looking at them. Both Uranium and Thorium require about 1 half-life to go by in six months, and Potassium-40 about 4 to produce the measured ages. Given their abundance in the earth and earth’s mass, that is roughly 6x10^44 becquerels. Alpha decays emit about 10 MeV each. Hence, 4.5x10^32 joules get poured into the earth in that time. For reference, that is slightly more than Earth’s binding energy, or about the amount of sunlight that hits the earth every billion years. That is also enough to raise temperatures at 1000K/s, re-melting the crust in about a second and vaporizing the earth in 10. By the end of six months, the ball of plasma once known as earth would be (assuming that it stayed the same size) about 22.5 kK and shining as brightly as a small star.

@Burrawang

What we find all over the Earth are billions upon billions of exquisitely preserved fossils, which is exactly what we would expect to find if the whole planet was submerged under water as faithfully and accurately described in the Holy Bible.

Given that we could theoretically find quadrillions of fossil shells from deposits that show precisely measurable depth ranges and environments of life and deposition, that wouldn’t be very informative even if it were perfectly true.

@Burrawang

What I do know is that 14C is found intrinsic within diamonds purported to be hundreds of millions of years old. And before you claim contamination, no contamination was ruled out by following standard procedure to avoid as best possible any contamination of the samples.

Contamination cannot be completely ruled out. Ever. And the levels detected there are in the range that is considered “as close to 0 as can be measured”.

@Burrawang

The interpretation that x mass = n years is based more on philosophy than it is on empirical measurement of age, simply because there is absolutely no irrefutable way to accurately calibrate your equations that convert an elemental isotope concentration in a sample into an age in years.

They are calibrated based on directly measured decay rates.

@Paraleptopecten

@Burrawang

What is wrong is the belief that radiometric dating dating is a reliable, accurate methodology to determine ages of samples from the distant past.

If it were wrong, then atoms fell apart (magically) without leaving any evidence; the earth turned into a ball of radioactive plasma, again (magically) without leaving any evidence; or God performed a deceptive and pointless miracle.

@Burrawang

those measurements are not ages, they do not provide a result in units of time.

@Paraleptopecten

And if the worldview demands honesty, it will not dismiss how measurements work. He’s the math for how a parent/daughter isotope ratio is converted to a date, for situations where the daughter isotope is actively excluded from the parent material (e.g., U-Pb dating of zircons); additional calibration steps are needed for places where the daughter isotope may have been present:

log2(Observed proportion of parent) * (calculated half life based on direct measurements of decay rate of a sample)

Measuring the decay rate generally is using something like energy release from a sample and converting that to decays/time. Decays/time can then be divided by the known number of atoms of the isotope in question in the sample to give the probability of decay of each atom in a given short amount of time, and then that can have its base 2 logarithm taken to give the half-life.

Here’s a paper describing how this was done for 209Bi: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.3138

In other words, it’s just measurements and math, and completely independent of worldview, so long as the worldview demands honesty.

@Burrawang

. Making assumptions that the initial starting concentrations of parent and daughter isotopes can be reliably based upon mineral analysis is all honesty a clear situation where that analysis does not adequately demonstrate the assumptions made from them, because to much needed information is missing.

And what if the mineral crystals are directly observed to actively exclude the daughter, like zircons with lead or anything with noble gasses?