He thinks that the maximum length doesn’t count, but only the average.
The words of Charles Babbage come to mind here:
“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
This thread started with GCS asking about the ‘quality of extrapolation leading to billions of years’. I later replied:
I stand by that statement, dcscccc. In my opinion, you’ve produced nothing to suggest otherwise. I don’t see that you get it.
but you cant know how many factors can effect the data. so if you are date a rock how did you know what process was in the past that may effect the dating?
again- stalagmites grow faster than stalactites. and you take the average insted of the max in this max example. so it doesnt work.
You can’t know all the processes that were active in the past – there may be some that aren’t fully explored.
But that is why you cross-check multiple independent dating methods. These may not always agree, but they agree far, far, far, far, far too often to make either random chance, or cherry-picking of the data, or unknown factors, a realistic explanation for the times when they do.
Do you understand that? I’ve explained it to you several times already but you still keep coming back to the same tired argument. Is there something about this point that you do not understand?
I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. This has already been explained to you multiple times on this thread.
I don’t know why you keep saying stalagmites grow faster than stalactites, they don’t. Do you have a source for that?
The paper I linked shows stalagmite grown rates as low as 0.01 mm / year,
The max length stalagmite using the max grown rate, which will give you a minimum possible age, is still 39,0000 years old. And that is making a lot of assumptions which are probably not true so the actual age will be OLDER than that.
so if we will find a factor that can effect all those method in the same time with a similar result those method will be useless?
because of the fact that the tallest stalagmites are taller then the tallest stalactites. simple.
first- its not the limit but the high rate. some stalactites can grow even faster:
secondly- its still will be evidence for a young earth. comparing 40,000 years to 4,000,000,000. where all the caves with taller stalactites\stalagmites gone?
I suspect caves fill in or collapse as they are transient phenomena over long geological time scales. Why don’t you investigate how caves disappear?
Not so simple. You are assuming identical conditions in both cases. The examples you quoted are not even on the same continent.
The “rapid growth” you are trying to quote isn’t applicable to the the growth rate for stalactites in a limestone cave.
Stalacties form in caves. They can only start to grow after the cave has been formed and the land has been uplifted enough to be out of the water table. Do you have any idea on how long that takes?
The stalactites in Calsbad Caverns are not currently growing so their clock is “stopped”. So how do you determine how long they have been there?
You are assuming that
Considering that such cross-checks include such things as visual counting of lake varves and ice core layers, and GPS measurements of continental drift, among many, many others, the probability of this happening is nil.
see for yourself here for example:
even in the same cave stalagmites usually are longer then stalactites.
by checking the average in other caves.
so considering that there is about dozens evidence that point to a young earth the probability that the earth is old is a nil?:
even if we ignore all those. in the past scientists also claimed that the earth is about dozens milion years base about several methods that agree with each other. but even so they was wrong in a factor of about 5000%. so even if we have several methods that agree with each other it’s possible that the date is wrong.
Modern evidences for an ancient earth are very high precision. Better than 1% is the norm; one part in 5,000 or better in some cases. They are also based on processes that are extremely stable and where the assumptions of constancy have been cross-checked and verified in some cases to one part in 1011. The constraints they put on the age of the artefacts concerned, and therefore the lower limits they place on the age of the earth, are very, very tight.
The “evidences” for a young earth are very, very low precision. Worse than one significant digit in many cases, with equilibrium conditions lying well within the (unquoted) error bars, meaning they could indicate any age at all. They are also based on processes that are extremely variable and where the assumptions of constancy are totally unrealistic. The constraints they put on the age of the artefacts concerned are non-existent.
The obsolete evidences that you cite as being out by a factor of 5,000 suffered from the same problems as the “evidences” for a young earth. That is why they are obsolete.
The average age of a person in the US is 37 years. What does that prove about the age of the oldest person in the US?
The concept of using averages to assess results is actually a good start at reasoning through the issues. Any single measurement, by itself, exhibits a degree of error & variability. When you compile large numbers of results, you can use statistics (with knowledge of the phenomena’s mechanism) to assess probabilities of error.
However, averages are not enough. You also need to understand the distribution of individual results in your evaluations. For example, one could measure the individual growth rates of a representative sample of stalactites in a region of a cave. Next you could see how well that distribution of growth rates accounts for the distribution of observed stalactite lengths. If these match then you might reasonably assert that conditions have remained stable or only varied equally over time in the part of the cave.
It’s interesting that dcsccc isn’t applying the concept of averaging or statistical assessment to radioisotopic age measurements. In the case of stalactites, he’s defending averaging (however poorly reasoned) methods for his dating arguments yet citing outliers (though it’s often understood why these could be outliers), to argue against old earth conclusions based on the compilation (averaging) of many radiometric results.
Consider wall clocks in a large office building…
At any particular time there are going to be a number of clocks that are either set incorrectly or are simply broken. Still, the majority of clocks will be consistent. If you take the median of times reported over all the clocks (or use some other statistic), you can arrive at a pretty good determination of the actual time. What dcsccc is arguing is that you can never determine the time by reading wall clocks because a certain number of wall clocks can be broken.
@Casper_Hesp Thank you for your post Mar 31 - my apologies for taking this long to respond (I was near the end of a holiday when I initiated the topic, Mar 30, and this is the first opportunity I have had since then to respond) - your explanation of determination of cosmic age and therefore the lack of need to extrapolate was very helpful - I will keep your explanation in mind as I pursue the subject futher
Of course he is not arguing this at all. He is arguing the opposite, that the average time of the clocks is likely to give a reasonably accurate time. What you are arguing is that the broken clocks prove that the average time is invalid. What he is arguing is that the broken clocks (faster stalactite rates) are outliers, have explanations which do not deny the validity of the averages.
While the distribution of results is interesting, in that it can demonstrate the height of the bell curve and the skewing of the peak as well as the slope and extent of the deviations, it will not really change the point of the average in this case.
The previous example of the oldest tree indicating the age of the forest, is also apropos, since one tree does not make a forest… it is only one tree. In a similar way, a few huge stalagmites and stalactites do not represent the average, if they formed much quicker, and perhaps for some time before the other stalactites began to form. The real point is not that they indicate an absolute 6000 yr age, but that they call into question the radiometric methods being applied to them.
The argument that radiometric methods mostly agree with each other is a circular argument. They are chosen and used because they presumably agree, and then their agreement is used as an argument for their validity. Yet, when they cannot date known-to-be-young rock accurately, explanations about excessive argon in the lava is given as an excuse (K-Ar) method. A previous comment was made that you don’t use a truck scale to measure a leaf, which is true. But if adding a leaf gave a weight of a hundred pounds instead of no weight at all, one would question the accuracy of the scale, even though the scale typically weighs trucks of 50,000 pounds.
In the same way, a radiometric method should give a nil age, not a 350,000 to 3.5 my age for some rock formed in the last fifty years. After all, this is how measuring things presently is extrapolated to ancient rates and ages. To get the weight of a ship and its cargo, for example, the ship is not put on a scale, but the individual components are weighed, such as the grain or oil it carries, or the volume of water it displaces. If the grain cannot be accurately weighed in smaller volumes, or the weight of water is not accurate in small known quantities, then the weight of the entire ship will be inaccurate. In the same way, the radiometric method ought not to be greatly inaccurate at the lower ranges, where it is the only place it can actually be more readily verified.
In the same way, finding carbon 14 in oil or fossil wood is a problem, since it should no longer be detectable if the wood is a million years old. (not even more than 50,000 yrs old). It is no good to counter that it would still be more than 6000 yrs old, since the method itself becomes suspect, the radio ages do not correspond, and when they appear to correspond, we are left only with the feeling that they correspond by accident, in a deceiving manner.
Not with regard to his comments on radiometric dating, johnZ, nor yours.
I had written:
It’s interesting that dcsccc isn’t applying the concept of averaging or statistical assessment to radioisotopic age measurements.
You consider consistency in radiometric dating techniques “a circular argument”. However, the various radiometric methods and results aren’t cherry-picked. They aren’t chosen for the mere sake of consistency. They’re accepted because they are demonstrated to work. There are theoretical, experimental and statistical data to support their uses. That’s how they come to be accepted in by the working scientists.
And yes, there will be outliers. Many times it is understood what went wrong. Sometimes, there is a likely reason but which hasn’t been demonstrated. Other times, in some particular cases, the reason behind the variance may not be understood. You understand that measurement methods in the real world can have outliers. You seem to understand how outliers may be handled in statistical analyses of stalactite measurements to yield reasonable results. Yet you feel that outliers in radiometric dating are sufficient reasons to distrust the methods and results. Am I correct in that observation?
Let’s delve deeper: Why do you think there are outliers or inconsistent results in radiometric dating?
No it isn’t and no they are not. Dating methods are chosen and used because the assumptions that they make are independent of each other. Multiple dating methods are used in order to validate those assumptions and determine when they do and do not apply.
Yes, there may be outliers. But if radiometric dating really were so unreliable that it can not distinguish between a few thousand and hundreds of millions of years, these would be the norm, disagreements would routinely be several orders of magnitude, and agreement between multiple methods would be extremely rare. As it stands, agreement happens about 95% of the time, and most of the time when they do disagree, the size of the disagreement is a few tens of percent at most. This is far, far short of demonstrating six orders of magnitude of unreliability.
And no, cherry-picking of the results is not a plausible explanation here. Not when radiometric dating costs thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars per sample, and we are talking about hundreds of thousands of samples.
No you would not. You would quantify on the accuracy of the scale. Which in this case, would be ±100 pounds, or, if you are weighing 50,000 pound trucks, ±0.2%. This falls far, far short of demonstrating that the scale is so unreliable that it can not distinguish between a truck and a leaf.
When the lab carrying out the dating explicitly states that it can not date samples less than two million years old, and that samples less than five million years old will incur a surcharge because extra care is needed in handling them, then 350,000 to 3.5 million years is within experimental error of zero.
Contamination must be ruled out before you can jump to conclusions. This can only be done if the study is independently peer reviewed and replicated by multiple research teams. Otherwise there is no guarantee that the study was carried out as described and that mistakes were not made.
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