There is an article here http://ageofrocks.org/2015/10/16/holocene-cold-snap-boreal-cooling-age-of-the-earth/ that illustrates how a variety of dating methods can be used and the very close agreement of the dates generated by the various methods. This article is discussing a recent, 8400 years ago, cold snap but I found the discussion of the methods to be quite interesting.
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again- you dont know that. you assume that.
and this date base on radiometric dating. that base on extrapolaltion. so again- how do you know that the extrapolation of the radiometric methods is true? in the past several dating methods gave us a result of about dozens milion years. so this science was wrong in a factor of 5000%!
From samples where multiple dating methods (both radiometric and non-radiometric), whose assumptions are independent of each other, give results that are in close agreement.
Individual discordant dates are not sufficient to invalidate radiometric dating as a whole. In order to do so, you must show that agreements are sufficiently rare, and disagreements are sufficiently large, that they can reasonably be ascribed to random coincidences.
If discordances are the exception rather than the rule, they merely indicate that the preconditions of the methods concerned were not met in those specific cases, whereas in the other cases, where there is a close agreement, the preconditions were met.
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I wrote
In your example, like the one I presented on E. coli, the assumptions are not valid.
dsccc replies:
again- you dont know that. you assume that.
For this discussion, I’m going to go with a definition of ‘knowing’ that includes inferences from strongly supported empirical and theoretical understanding backed by solid practioners of modern science. All ‘knowing’ is conditional.This is much like knowing that Pluto has orbited around the sun many times in the past, despite humans only have observed it for less than half its orbital period.
So, yes, I do know that humans most likely did not appear de novo on this Earth, having been founded by a population of only two within the past 10,000 years. For starters, in so far as we can know about the past, there is no genetic data to support your ideas, dcssss, but much more data that pushes the origin of modern humans much further back. Also, you assertion runs counter to studies of human population distribution and even the estimates of human populations based on recorded information from old civilizations for which we can correlated to specific dates and time periods. These aren’t based on wild assertions and over extrapolation but carefully considered work of hundreds of diligent scientists who have spent lifetimes of study.
jammycakes answered part of your second question, dscccc. You might also want to seriously read the other references listed earlier in the discussion. They provide an good starting point and should at least be understood before making assertions about ‘base extrapolations’. Claims such as yours have been addressed many times in the past in many online discussions. Please consider looking them up. No sense reinventing the wheel.
If a particular method has an error bar of ±1M years, for example, it would be quite suitable for dating rocks probably 100MY old and extremely useful for rocks probably 1BY old. It would be totally unsuitable for rocks known to be less than 1MY old. It would be like weighing a postage stamp on the scale at a truck weighing station.
This is why the RATE project’s submission of a sample known to be < 1KY old for radiometric dating was so inapropos.
According to Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, the decay rate of U238 has been observed in a variety of earth-like conditions to have a near-constant decay rate; the inferred age of geological formations would vary by only about 1% due to any variance in conditions on earth.
A widely-cited study in the YEC community states that U238 decay can accelerate rapidly in lab conditions. However, that “laboratory condition” involved a few atoms heated to a plasma state at 300,000 K, which is 10 times the heat of the sun.
This is off the top of my head; I can supply links later if you need them.
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so if i will take for example 3 dating methods that base on extrapolation- it will be correct?
Some of them may be based on extrapolation; others may not. But it doesn’t make any difference whether the dating methods use extrapolation or not. If multiple dating methods give dates that are in close agreement with each other, that provides compelling evidence that these methods are valid. If dating methods really were so unreliable that they could not differentiate between six thousand years and hundreds of millions of years, we would not expect to see any concordance. Anywhere. At all. Furthermore, disagreements between different dating methods would span multiple orders of magnitude.
Besides, extrapolation is still a mathematical operation: it is NOT guesswork and it is NOT a matter of blind assumptions. You still put in one set of numbers, together with their uncertainties, and get out another set of numbers, together with their uncertainties. You still end up with a number that quantifies the quality of your extrapolation.
so if i take for example any 3 different methods (that base on extrapolation)that agree with each other- then its mean that the result is true?
That is correct, yes.
Unless there is some factor at work that affects all these methods in exactly the same way and exactly the same proportions. This is extremely unlikely. However, if there were a known factor at work here that did have such an effect, then scientists would look for additional methods that are not affected by it, and besides, the possible extent of this factor would still allow them to come up with adjusted upper and lower limits as to the true age of the sample. As for unknown factors, you’re getting into “recent creation with the appearance of age” territory there.
Did you have any specific methods in mind here when you asked this question?
in the past several different methods gave us an age of about 100 my for the age of the universe. but they all was wrong in a factor of 5000%. so the current methods also can be wrong in the same way.
Could you be a bit more specific here please? In particular:
- Which methods are you referring to?
- How large were their uncertainties?
- Where can I find out more? Could you include links?
james, see here:
Thanks for the link. I take it you’re referring to the nineteenth-century results that predate the discovery of radiation and its applicability to dating methods? To summarise:
- “Between 20 million and 40 (400?) million years” (Lord Kelvin, 1862)
- 22 million years (Helmholtz, 1856)
- 18 million years (Newcomb, 1892)
- 56 million years (George H Darwin)
- “80 to 100 million years” (John Joly, 1899-1900)
The problem here is that this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison with what we have today. These older results were all based on very, very incomplete information with a lot of speculation and incorrect assumptions thrown into the mix. They were all hotly debated by the entire scientific community at the time. They all had huge error bars by today’s standards. And they are all spread out over an entire order of magnitude. It’s a very far cry from the kind of concordance that we see today, where modern-day methods routinely give dates that agree with each other to within a fraction of one percent.
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actually there is a lot of cases that we see different result by different methods.some of them get wrong in about thousand percent. so its very similar to the past methods.
This is not what I was talking about. I was responding to your claim of examples of past methods where multiple different methods gave the same erroneous result. That is a different thing altogether from different methods giving different results.
Besides, cases where different methods give different results don’t answer the question – what about the cases where different methods give the same results?
lets see- we also have several methods that base on extrapolation that give us a young earth (close to 10000 years: for example a dna from a suppose 20 my fossil)). does it mean that the earth is about 10000 years old then?
DNA from a “suppose” 20 my fossil is not based on extrapolation and does not place a specific numerical constraint on the age of the earth.
actually scientists try to figure how many years need to degenerate a dna. one paper claim that after about 15000 years the dna will not survive. so any fossil with dna cant be older then 15000 years. so how we find such a fossil? extrapolation of stalactites lengh also give us about no more then 10000 years and so on.
It depends on the conditions in which the DNA was preserved – hot and damp versus cold and dry. This article gives a review of what has been recorded in the scientific literature as far as DNA is concerned.
In any case, this has no relevance whatsoever to what I was talking about when I referred to methods that give the same result. I was talking about different dating methods that give specific results with uncertainties typically better than ±1%, whose differences are comparable to the size of the error bars. If conventional dating methods really are so unreliable that they can’t differentiate between a few thousand and hundreds of millions of years, results that match up this well should be extremely rare. Are they? If not, why not?
This may give an indication of the age of the individual stalactite(s) concerned. It does not give an indication of the age of the earth.