Indeed. I assume that’s what most people do.
Probably because I taught programming, it always bothers me when such automation remains unfinished. Nesting arises in so many applications and in an ideal world should always be addressed. (Of course, seeing how the programmer probably doesn’t get paid to improve the software, I certainly can’t blame him/her for having other priorities. As always, we should be thankful for what we have.)
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Hi r -
Thanks for providing the link.
I think you missed a very important point in this article: YEC geologist Austin did not perform the decontamination work required to get a clean sample.
To conclude that no geologist can perform the decontamination work is therefore entirely without warrant. Henke criticizes Austin precisely because Austin failed to adequately use known techniques for decontaminating samples.
Moreover, the contamination–to the extent it created any problem–may have added a couple million years to the Mt. St. Helens samples. This would scarcely be a rounding error for the strata used to date the dinosaur fossils Mary Schweitzer analyzed.
I appreciate that you are eager to amass evidence for very young life on earth, and you do so for honorable motives. In my opinion, though, the best way to honor the God of truth is to look carefully before we leap to conclusions that 99.9% of scientists would dismiss based on expert knowledge of analytic techniques and data.
Best regards,
Chris Falter
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Hi r -
In any endeavor, whether theological or scientific (or both, in this case), it is wise to consult with others who have expertise in the field(s) you are exploring. I very much have the sense that you have not discussed your ideas about geological evidence with Ph.D. geologists; that is not a good idea. The geology community is very well-acquainted with the issues you are looking over. They have far more expertise than you or I. If you think you have a novel insight, the very first thing you should do is go to the nearest state university with a department of geology, enroll in a class, and look for an occasion to have someone well-trained in the methods and evidence of the discipline give you feedback.
The reason I don’t think you have done this is that you have drawn exactly the wrong conclusions from Dalrymple (1969). I have little training in geology, but my familiarity with data science gives me some ability to understand the paper. Here’s the key sentence you seem to have missed:
With the exception of the Hualalai flow, the amounts of excess 40Ar and 36Ar found in the flows with anomalous 40Ar/36Ar ratios were too small to cause serious errors in potassium-argon dating of rocks a few million years old or older.
You used Dalrymple’s paper to question the dating of a fossil that is tens of millions of years old. But Dalrymple’s conclusion is exactly the opposite; his findings would only indicate uncertainty for samples that are less than a few million years old.
An analysis of Table 2 (Summary of measurements in Table 1 with anomalous ratios of 40Ar/36Ar) show how he came to his conclusion. Here’s Table 2:
Key points to note:
If the average radiometric dating error is 100,000 years and the maximum error is 1.2 million years, then it is highly unlikely that a fossil dated at 85.0 million years is less than 84.7 million years old, and just about impossible for it to be less than 83.8 million years old.
It seems like your logic, @r_speir, is as follows:
Where your logic goes wrong is that the radiometric dating error (step 1) has been quantified, so you can’t leap from step 1 to step 2. Per Dalrymple’s paper, anomalous Ar inclusions cause, on average, an error of about 100,000 years, and at maximum 1.2 million years, for K/Ar measurements. This minuscule amount of error is entirely inconsequential with respect to Schweitzer’s fossils–or any other fossils from strata dated at more than a few million years old.
Respectfully,
Chris Falter
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You might want to do a little reading on how long it takes large magma intrusions to cool. It is much longer than 10,000 years. An excellent resource is The Bible, Rocks and Time which is reviewed in linked article.
Hi @r_speir -
The path you are taking is essentially to invoke a miraculous act of God which is not even recorded in the Scripture (truly cataclysmic, simultaneous eruptions of lava flows). However, it is not true that such a miracle would leave no traces; just as the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus would leave a visibly empty tomb, the miracle of cataclysmic global lava eruptions would leave recognizable evidence. For example, since identifiable eruptions throughout recorded history have left igneous formations with an apparent age of 0.01 - 1.2 million years, we would expect the flood-associated formations to have an apparent age of 0.01 - 1.2 million years, as well.
Following this logic, we would be forced to conclude that any formation with an apparent age of significantly more than 1.2 MYA is not associated with the hypothesized flood. And thus paleontology as we know it would emerge largely unaffected.
Of course, you could continue to spin ever-more imaginative miracles that would supposedly not have left evidence and would have impacted scientifically gathered data. Weak force constants could have been shifted during the flood, resulting in faster radioactive decay. But this would have resulted in the meltdown of every carbon atom in the bodies of Noah’s family and animals. But then God could have performed some other miracle…
You might prefer to live in a world where we cannot trust anything we observe, @r_speir, but I do not. So I guess we will go down separate paths on the questions of interpreting God’s Word and God’s world.
I would discourage you from citing scientific publications as evidence for your view, though. As soon as an appeal to science is made, your case is hopelessly lost. If you want to convince others, better not to invoke science at all.
Blessings,
Chris Falter
EDIT: The Scriptures show us that God brought the world from disorder into an order in which humanity could thrive as His agents, His image. That Scriptural observation is the foundation for preferring the view that we should be able to trust the data we gather and the inferences we can draw based on the assumption of orderliness over time. My $.02
Suppose that I grant the argument that every igneous formation observed on the planet had as much exogeneous 40Ar as the Hualalai formation. What would the conclusion be?
We would conclude that we would have to subtract 1.2 million years from every date ever calculated by the K/Ar method.
In turn, that would mean that Schweitzer’s dinosaur fossils are not 85 million years old. No, indeed! They are only 83.8 million years old!
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Read the book or at least the two articles I linked above. The thermal conductivity of rock isn’t great, it starts at an extremely high temperature, and the mineral crystal sizes tell you the depth at which the rock cooled before it was lifted to the surface are just a few of the reasons why you can’t fit magma cooling into 6,000 years.
Yay, we’re back on topic.
Hi r,
I trust Schweitzer’s senses and thinking.
Have you read Schweitzer’s publications? She explains that she did not find soft tissue in the sense that you could pull out a steak knife and enjoy a T. Rex steak, which as far as I can tell is the picture you have in your mind.
What she discovered is that the bone fossilization process, which is a kind of mineralization, trapped tiny fragments of blood vessels and dinosaur proteins, sealing them from the deteriorating effects of oxygen. Moreover, iron from dinosaur red blood cells helped preserve tissue fragments, with an effect and chemical activity similar to that of formaldehyde. Schweitzer and her colleagues even confirmed the preservative effect of hemoglobin:
They then tested the iron-as-preservative idea using modern ostrich blood vessels. They soaked one group of blood vessels in iron-rich liquid made of red blood cells and another group in water. The blood vessels left in water turned into a disgusting mess within days. The blood vessels soaked in red blood cells remain recognizable after sitting at room temperature for two years.
So let me repeat, I trust Schweitzer’s research findings. They are surprising only to people unfamiliar with the science because they seem counterintuitive.
You are appealing to intuition, @r_speir, as a way of discounting Schweitzer’s explanation of how 80 million year old tissues got preserved. Scientists know that human intuition (“common sense”) does not always agree with scientific findings. Common sense does not agree with time dilation as the speed of objects increases. Common sense does not think of gravity as the warping of space. (When my pencil fell off the table, it didn’t look like the fabric of space was warped!) Common sense does not think it is theoretically impossible to identify the exact location of an electron at an exact moment of time. But science shows that all of these “common sense” ideas are not accurate. So, too, the common sense idea that it is impossible for soft tissue fragments to survive tens of millions of years. But if they are preserved long enough by an iron-based preservative–until they get entombed by fossilization such that oxygenation becomes impossible–then by golly soft tissue fragments can survive.
Let’s call the age predicted by the 40Ar/36Ar ratio the “apparent age.” Dalrymple tested the 40Ar/36Ar ratio of igneous samples known to be extremely young. 69% of them had the ratio of 40Ar/36Ar that is in our atmosphere, which means that the apparent age (very recent) was essentially identical to the actual age (very recent).
31% of the samples had an apparent age (I repeat, determined by the ratio of 40Ar/36Ar) that was inconsistent with extreme youth. The apparent age for those 8 samples ranged from 10,000 years old to 1.2 million years old. Dalrymple attributes this difference of 10,000 - 1,200,000 years between apparent age and actual age to the intrusion of xenoliths in those samples.
His findings allow us to determine the impact of xenolith intrusion on the accuracy of K/Ar dating. That impact is zero in 69% of cases. And in 31% of cases, the impact is somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 1.2 million years.
Thus, if a geology lab dates an igneous sample as 1.25 million years old, Dalrymple’s findings tell us that the actual age of the sample might in rare cases be as low as 50,000 years. The error could be as large as 1.2 million years (although such an error occurs with only a tiny percentage of samples). 1.25 million years (apparent age from dating) minus 1.2 million years (max error) = 50,000 years. If a massive global flood happened 50,000 years ago, the formation from which the igneous sample was gathered might have been formed at the time of the flood.
If a geology lab dates an igneous sample as 80 million years old, Dalrymple’s findings tell us that the actual age might be as low as 78.8 million years. Again, the error could be as large as 1.2 million years, although such an error occurs with only a tiny percentage of samples. 80 million years (apparent age from dating) minus 1.2 million years (max error) = 78.8 million years. 78.8 million years is the youngest possible age for the formation from which the igneous sample was gathered. Therefore it is impossible that the formation occurred at the time of a hypothesized global flood just 50,000 years ago.
In fact, because the maximum error is 1.2 million years, any sample with an apparent age of significantly more than 1.2 MYA could not possibly have been formed during a very recent global flood. For example, the youngest possible actual age for a sample with an apparent age of 5.0 million years would be 5.0 million - 1.2 million years = 3.8 million years. A geological event 3.8 million years ago (after allowing for the maximum possible error) is way, way too old to be associated with a flood that is hypothesized to have occurred during human history.
Best regards,
Chris Falter
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No, what Chris is doing is simply highlighting the fact that inaccuracy can be quantified. In this case, the inaccuracy of K-Ar dating has been quantified as being up to 1.2 million years. But in the context of 80 million year old fossils, that would quantify the inaccuracy as being ±1.5%.
For comparison, your car’s speedometer has an inaccuracy of typically about ±2.5% (actually, strictly speaking, +0% to -10%).
“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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