Quality of the extrapolation leading to billions of years

Indeed, to get a stalactite, you have to have limestone laid down , eroded and uplifted and caves developed before one can even begin to form. A 10,000 year old stalactite is actually proof of a much older earth.

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hi @dcscccc

I hope all is going well for you today. James McKay already provided a very good response to your comment. His response included a helpful link to a research paper.

The reason I’m responding is just to point out that it would be helpful if you would provide links to the research you are relying on when you make comments. For example, when we are discussing DNA analysis, it would be helpful to know which paper it was that asserted that DNA can’t be older than 15,000 years.

Thanks,

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Just a further note on the concordance of dating methods here.

According to this Talk Origins article, there are somewhere between 50 and 100 examples of questionable or impossible Rb-Sr isochron dates in the scientific literature, depending on who you ask. John Woodmaroppe (1979) cites 65; Y.-F. Zheng (1989) cites 42.

To give this some context, I understand that the scientific literature contains over 100,000 radiometric dating results. I don’t know how many of these are Rb-Sr isochrons, but it’s probably into five figures. This would suggest that somewhere around 99% of isochrons have some kind of corroborating evidence for their reliability.

The article also refers to a study of isochron dates from meteors and moon rocks: a relatively small population of samples with a simple geologic history, meaning that inconvenient results or discarded data would be obvious. However, the article doesn’t provide any summary of the data from this study, though it is implied that the concordance there is strong.

Does anyone know of any YEC commentary on why the prevalence of anomalous isochron results should be as low as 1%?

true. but the paper (see Biomolecules in fossil remains: Multidisciplinary approach to endurance, The Biochemist, pp. 12–14, June 2002.) give an upper limit in average temp.

so we now have 2 methods that agree with each other.

why not? i talk about the whole stalactites caves on earth. you can check it for yourself and see that most of the stalactites are no more then one meter in lengh.

hi chris. whats up?

see my comment above.

Thanks, dcs! If you could provide a URL, though, rather than the title of the paper by itself, your reference would be much more helpful.

Which two methods are you referring to?

According to this source, the Carlsbad Caverns have a stalagmite that is 60 feet in length. It is estimated to have an age of at least 180,000 years.

Please bear in mind that a cave needs to form before stalactites and stalagmites can form. Cave formation can take millions of years. For example, the existing caverns in the Carlsbad formation have an estimated age of 1 - 8 M years.

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chris. google it. its a pdf file. so i cant link to this.

dna and stalactites.

i talk about most of them and not about one specific. some of them can evolve very fast. even in a few dozen years.

first lets talk about those 2 above.

And your source for this is what?

dcsccc:

chris. google it. its a pdf file. so i cant link to this.

PDFs can be linked. Example:
http://www.talkorigins.org/pdf/faq-age-of-earth.pdf

Here is a hyperlink to a PDF

These shoot you right to a PDF. Alternatively, one could reference the web page that links to the PDF.

Is this the PDF you wanted to link? This is a summary from 2003. James McKay’s reference is 2013. There has been much advancement in our understanding of ancient DNA recovery. Even the 2003 paper you reference lists a lifetime of 125K years for DNA at freezing temperatures.

Be aware that reports of DNA recovery from well over a million years is still disputed. By 2002 it became clear that some of the earlier reports were due to contamination. However, here’s a paper which suggests that it may be possible to pull DNA fragments from samples up to about the 1MY range.

I think you’re missing my point here. I’m talking about cases of a single sample, artefact or event being given a specific age with a specific uncertainty of 1% or less, by two or more methods.

Neither DNA nor stalactites date anything. DNA might provide a hint at the order of magnitude of the age of the sample, but nothing more precise than that. Stalactites provide a minimum age for the cave in which they are formed, but not a maximum. In any case, you are talking about two different things. You are not dating the same thing.

see here several examples:

so how you can explain this one?:

http://www.amjbot.org/content/91/4/615.full

"The possibility of contamination is extremely low because no PCR products were detected in any negative controls, and the laboratory at Washington State University in which DNA of M. latahensis was extracted, amplified, and sequenced never possessed samples of the four extant species of Magnolia that share an ndhF sequence with M. latahensis. "

first- even the radiometric methods doesnt have a 1% of uncertainty. see this table from aig site:

its actually date the average. so its a good method.

So since some can grow quickly under special conditions (that is what your article says) that must mean that “all” of them grow quickly? So “special” really means “any”?

not at all. i actually said that most of them showing us a young age. again- an average of about 60 cm for a 6000 years old stalactite.

so how you can explain this one?:

It might be possible.That’s within an order of magnitude for estimates. This is going to be a largely empirically-driven determination. These are chloroplast sequences which would be present in high-copy numbers, so that’s a factor in its favor. However, that work needs to be reproduced in an independent laboratory.

Different chemistry dcscccc:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD250.html

You’re still missing my point. One set of poor quality data that does not match up has no bearing whatsoever on one hundred thousand sets of good quality data that do.

In the world of software development, we call examples such as this “corner cases.” They are indicative of unusual circumstances that are specific to those particular situations.

Exactly what does it date?

Exactly what is the average?

Exactly what is the standard deviation (i.e. the uncertainty, or error range)?

If you are bringing quantitative evidence to the table, you MUST quote both figures. You MUST state your conclusion in the form “A is X years old, plus or minus Δ.” If your evidence is quantitative but does not quote error ranges, it is simply not evidence.

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So the 60 ft stalactite in Carlsbad Caverns took 182,800 years to form. And this is after however many years were required to form the caverns. What are you calling “a young age”?

Bill, James.

I’m finished too.

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