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: https://creation.com/en/articles/helium-evidence-for-a-young-world-continues-to-confound-critics . 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 | Science and Culture 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.
This is not quite correct, apart from the incorrect inferences. Can 14C be detected? Yes. Can we be confident that the 14C that we detect is actually a component of the sample rather than just contamination? No.
If you are on the moderately largish side for a human, with a mass of 100 kg, you have about 4.710^26 carbon atoms in you. (AI and Wikipedia seem to be giving a dry percentage C, not wet.) Of those, only about a trillionth are 14C - most of your radioactivity comes form potassium, not carbon. So you’re starting with about 4.710^14 atoms of 14C. The half-life of 14C is 5730 years. In 100,000 years, you are down to about 1.8*10^9 atoms of 14C. A billion sounds like a lot of atoms. But that’s what you would have if we had trapped every single 14C atom in you to start with and entered all of that into our mass spectrometer. Actual analyses only use as much as a few grams of sample. That is trying to detect one 14C in four quintillion atoms of stable 12C and 13C. By 190,000 years, the odds are about 50% that there are no original 14C atoms left in a sample, and by 300,000 years probably all of the original 14C atoms in our starting 100 kg individual are gone. But there are around 8,000 14C atoms in a milliliter of air, more if there have been nuclear bomb tests in the past few centuries.
And the literature is chocked full of examples of scientists trying to deal with contamination in samples that approach 50,000 years old.
Even samples close to 40k years old pose challenges due to contamination.
I’m aware of the RATE study on helium diffusion in zircons. It’s basically another case of young earthists presenting extremely weak studies as evidence that vast numbers of much stronger ones must be completely out of kilter.
Production and diffusion of lead in zircons is very well understood and very strongly constrained. There is only one way to get lead into a zircon crystal, and that is through nuclear decay from uranium. It is also very difficult to get it out again: it only starts to diffuse once you get to temperatures above about 900°C or more (the closure temperature). This means that any zircon from an igneous rock that shows no signs of metamorphism will be as old as the U-Pb date says it is. Zircons from metamorphic rocks will be even older still because the lead will preferentially leak out, resetting the “clocks.” U-Pb dating of zircons has been around since the 1940s and high precision techniques were developed in the 1980s and 1990s that mean we can now get an accuracy of about one part in ten thousand in the best cases.
By contrast, helium diffusion in zircons is nowhere near as well understood. Serious studies only started taking place in the 1990s and there was very little in the literature about the subject at the time of the RATE project, Even today I haven’t been able to find any studies on how pressure fits into the equation, and we can only go by how other, better studied minerals behave. Studied effects range from none at all for argon diffusion in glasses such as rhyolite obsidian, all the way up to several orders of magnitude for helium diffusion in garnet. (Dunai and Roselieb, 1996). The RATE project just assumed it would be insignificant, ignored Dunai & Roselieb altogether, and hand-waved away pressure as a “rescuing device.” For now, the claim that pressure will be insignificant needs to be treated as an unsubstantiated assertion.
Even if pressure effects are insignificant, the RATE study still has numerous flaws whose cumulative effect can totally account for the difference between a young earth and an old earth. Most of these are small, and the RATE team makes a big thing of the fact that most of them are small, but the fact remains that there are a lot of them (Kevin Henke lists about sixty of them in his 2010 response), and it’s the cumulative effect of all of them that matters, not any one of them taken in isolation. Studies with large numbers of small errors are the kind of thing that pseudoscientists and purveyors of nonsense particularly like because they take a lot of effort to debunk and it’s easy to respond to the rebuttal with rhetoric about so-called “rescuing devices,” especially when you are addressing a non-technical audience.
It’s also worth making the point that the RATE team is trying to argue for accelerated nuclear decay here. Accelerated nuclear decay on the scale that they need for a young earth is science fiction. They point out that some nuclear decay rates can be increased by a small factor of 1-2% (especially those involving electron capture), but that does not justify the much larger changes of a factor of a billion that they need by any stretch of the imagination. Besides, they themselves admitted that the accelerated nuclear decay that they need would have raised the temperature of the Earth to 22,400°C. That alone should be sufficient to tell you that they are taking you for a ride here. Billion fold accelerated nuclear decay is simply not a thing.
Perhaps we should hand wave away the RATE argument by claiming helium diffusion was just different in the past. Afterall, it’s just an “assumption” that helium diffused the same in the past as it does now.
On a more serious note, Reasons to Believe has a nice two parter that takes the RATE study to task.
I had briefly watched a clip of that interview previously, so I went back and watched the entire interview last night. I think its a really, really important insight into how creationism can destroy some peoples’ faith (not all, mind you). When you build your faith on false confidence and bad apologetics, it doesn’t always end well.
Good apologetics doesn’t always work either. I don’t find apologetics terribly convincing either way but I can see them being comforting for many. I look on his case as a story of someone re-evaluating their beliefs and coming to some difficult conclusions. And that doesn’t necessary make their life easier (particularly with their former community).
With regard to how some understand the Torah from within Judaism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuOHWI6Ys60
One of the best religion courses I had in college was from a Rabbi on “History and literature of Judaism”. He’d served as a Jewish chaplain in WWII and had a funny story about a Baptist chaplain calling the Rabbi over to a new recruit to demonstrate that Jews really don’t have horns. He had a good laugh with the Baptist chaplain afterwards.
IMO, YEC will go the way of the dinosaur (no pun intended) in the next 5-10 years.
https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2020/PSCF3-20Loechelt.pdf examines the helium diffusion claims in detail. Humphreys extrapolates from a few low temperature values and ignores the rest of the data. Once again, this is an example of young-earth misrepresentation of the evidence. It is not arguing honestly. Every time I examine a claim that scientific evidence supports a young earth, it turns out to not involve honest assessment of the evidence. Everyone makes mistakes, but at some point one needs to consider whether a batting average of 0.000000000 should remain in the lineup.
Intensity and time are both important. But the fact that human long jump ability ranges from 0 to almost 9 meters does not mean that Superman is real.
Some of us might strengthen that to conclude: "…it never ends well!* After all, what could a ‘good’ ending even look like? “Look at me! I’m strong and confident in my faith which is founded on this stuff that has been demonstrably shown to be untrue!”
Nope. Not for quite some time. 
The level of DNA similarity between chimps and humans can be measured in several ways. [Note that “Evolution News” is the Discovery Institute’s attempt to spin everything to sound like problems for evolution, not a reliable objective source.]
Technologically, the first approach was mixing human and chimp DNA and seeing how much of it would match up. Early sequencing technology allowed some detection of repeats. These add complications in how to count similarity. Technology has made these more accessible to analysis, but highly repetitive regions remain challenging to accurately sequence, and not just for labs - they have a high level of natural variation in copy number.
The proportion of human DNA that has quite close similarity to chimp DNA is in the high 90’s (obviously quantifying “quite close similarity” is needed to get an actual percent similarity). But often we or they have more copies of a particular region. How do you calculate similarity when they have 10 copies and we have 12? Or when they have 10-12 and we have 11? Does our calculation care about parts of chromosomes being swapped around, if all the same DNA is there but arranged differently? Defining how to calculate a single number as a percent is challenging in that context.
There are two major problems with the claim that the similarity is only 85%. As already noted, it uses a strawman claim about “evolutionists” claiming that the similarity is 99% and does not honestly calculate the 85% number (Complete sequencing of ape genomes | Nature is the article obtaining ape genomes. It does not attempt a simplistic percentage calculation.)
But the exact value of the percent is also irrelevant. Making a big deal about the percentage is intended to discredit science, but it doesn’t tell us anything as a stand alone number. What is significant is comparing the percent difference, however it is calculated, to other percentages. How does the difference between humans and chimps compare with that between chimps and gorillas, or any other pair of organisms? Honest comparison there is what is needed to assess what level of similarity reflects close relationship.
It’s also inconsistent to make a big deal about “only 85%” similarity while also making a big deal about the complexity. If the complexity is significant, then the similarities are also significant.
While the nearly complete ape genomes (even the latest version does not capture absolutely every base) do highlight both differences and similarities, there is nothing in the human genome that does not fit with evolving from ape ancestors. Certain regions of the genome are highly variable and show major variations in repeat numbers. Others are more stable. Random bits of viral DNA are inserted here and there. There’s nothing that does not fit with known evolutionary processes to generate the level of differences.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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