That assumes no contamination from outside carbon sources, and rare but low levels of 14N converting to 14C in the sample. You also have to take into account the noise in the instrument which could falsely detect 14C.
When an organism dies the ratio of 14C to 12C is 1.25 parts 14C to 1x10^12 parts 12C. That’s 1 to a trillion. So we are already starting out with low amounts, and both contamination and instrument noise will begin to dominate at about 10 half lives (i.e. 50,000 years).
In the example of the Grand Canyon formation, if it took place during or shortly after the Flood recorded in Genesis (and it is likely that it did), the erosion resistance of rocks less than one year old would be significantly less.
I was not comparing biological recovery time to lead in zircon crystals. But since you brought up zircon crystals . . . , here is an article about helium diffusion in zircon crystals: Helium evidence for a young world continues to confound critics · Creation.com . And please note that Dr. Russell Humphreys does identify the error bars for his data.
“Here we go again.” Ronald Reagan in campaign debate.
My understanding and claim is that using currently available technology, no c14 can be detected in samples dating more than 100,000 years old, not that there is no c14 in the sample. Of course, the limit of measurement technology does not mean that there is none left.
Next, you ask how I come up with the 50,000 year error bar. There are certainly error bars associated with measurable c14. So I used 50,000 years as an illustration. Why did I choose that number for my illustration? I have read several articles that have stated that there is no measurable c14 left after 50,000 to 100,000 years. So which is it? Since there is a difference of 50,000 years, it seemed to be a reasonable estimate and illustration of what the error bars would be.
Now old “earthists” often claim that there is a residual amount of c14 in everything. Am I correct in assuming that they mean measurable c14? So you are claiming this comes from contamination in the testing and measurement process, so that everything tested will show measurable c14, and that the protocols used do not eliminate that contamination? Wow.
Here is a similar type of measurement contamination. It has long been claimed that the human/chimp genomes are 98-99 percent similar. As it turns out, that is because the process was humanized, both in the way the matching was done (using the human genome as the template, and matching the chimp genome to it), and also by contamination of the chimp genome with human DNA from the environment.
We now know that the similarity is about 85.1 percent. Chimp Genome, 14.9% Difference | Evolution News and Science Today. In the lab, they no longer used the human genome as a template, and they were able through technological advancement to eliminate the contamination from the environment. Contamination through the air, researcher’s breath, gloves, etc, has been eliminated.
If contamination is such a well understood phenomenon, why was that not taken into account when the initial human/chimp genome findings were published? I am only referencing this as it shows that through technology, contamination can be removed from the environment. A discussion of the implications of the new human/chimp genome findings would be interesting, but that is not the focus of this thread.
So are you saying that this is not being done with carbon dating so that at a certain level, the error bars are such that carbon dating is unsustainable and unreliable–everything measured will show less than 100,000 years age?
If they were soft enough to be eroded as you claim they wouldn’t be able to make the sheer tall cliffs we observe. Also, the path of the river demonstrates that it wasn’t a catastrophic flood. The river meanders in a single channel, and side canyons feeding the main river come in at right angles. A catastrophic flood produces many wide and parallel canyons that form a braided formation, as seen with the Channeled Scablands.
That is completely unlike the Grand Canyon which has a single main channel with rivers feeding into it at right angles.
References?
There are error bars for any measurement. In my own lab work, I regularly get positive detections in samples that should be free of the thing I am trying to measure. You always have to have a negative control to determine what the background of noise is in the instrument. If your sample is indistinguishable from the inherent noise in the instrument and method itself, then you have a sample that is below detection.
Why “wow”? There is measurable 14C in the air around you. 14C can easily be introduced during sample preparation, and be present in the instrument itself in low amounts. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the possibility of false detections.
It has long been claimed that the substitution rate in aligned sequence is 1-2%.
No, it wasn’t. Reference free assemblies and alignments have been done and they return the same results. There is no evidence of contamination from human DNA in chimp or other great ape samples.
We know no such thing. You are confusing lack of alignment with no similarity. Those are not necessarily the same thing. The most recent results have similar figures for alignment that previous studies have reported.
Added in edit:
A nice explanation from Panda’s Thumb:
What we are saying is that contamination and instrument noise can make up a large proportion of the detected 14C at 10 half lives. This is a basic feature of almost every scientific measurement.
There were many Missoula Floods, which took place over a couple of thousand years, up to 15 thousand years ago.
Nick Zentner is a practicing Catholic and geology professor specializing in the pacific northwest. This video provides an in depth survey of the the Missoula Floods and associated glacial lakes.
Did you read the actual research in the original paper?
The complete sequence and comparative analysis of ape sex chromosomes
In his response article, Casey Luskin altered the figure from the paper to hide information which invalidated his response. Nothing in the research paper changed the accepted Chimp - Human genome similarity, which still stands at about 96-98% depending on the basis of measurement.
On the basis Luskin is using, humans are 92% similar to humans. Did you know that? On the basis Luskin is using, humans are closer to chimpanzees than gorillas are to gorillas. Did you know that?
"Radiocarbon samples are extremely sensitive to young contaminants. If just 1% of the carbon in a 50,000-year-old sample is a modern contaminant, the age will be underestimated by more than 10,000 14C years. " - from a paper generating improved dates for Australian fossils, using modern 14C techniques
Sorry Craig, but it doesn’t work that way.
One of the most fundamental rules of science is that you cannot cite low precision measurements at (and certainly not below) the limits of detection as evidence that vast numbers of much more high quality, well established and rigorously cross-checked measurements could be completely and wildly off base. The measurements that you cite must be comparable in quality and precision to the strongest of the ones you are seeking to overturn.
In this particular case, it means that if you want to argue that ancient diamonds contain carbon-14 when they shouldn’t, you bear the burden of proof that it can’t be accounted for by contamination. You can’t just claim that ancient carbon-14 could be there below the levels of detection just because the error bars are too big to rule it out completely.
This is not some sort of “evolutionist” or “anti-creationist” thing, and it is not some form of “stacking the deck”; it is a general rule that applies to every area of science, period. If we didn’t have rules like this, we would also be granting a free pass to astrology, homeopathy, feng shui, reading tea leaves, tobacco companies claiming that smoking is good for you, and every other crackpot armchair theorist on the face of the planet.
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