Darwinist
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- ********0
First off, no one is certain of the earth's age. The scientific evidence is thoroughly inconclusive, based on Carbon dating and Potassium Argon dating and the inconsistencies of the Geologic Column.
discipler
(Jan 6 06, 06:03)The fact that they call it absolute dating is ridiculous, because it's not absolute and you're right discipler.
- Nairn0
I'm sorry.
I just see more evidence of there not being a God than 'tother way around. Occum's Razor-like, if you will.
I can appreciate the path of organisation from the quantum netherworld through atoms, molecules, cells, evolution etc. I can appreciate something of the formation of our planet, system and universe. I can begin to imagine something of the whole of reality.
And this is where the crux of the difference between us lies.
At the edge of my comprehension, I have to give in to some kind of faith or belief to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.
Here, I see no need for Godhead or supernatural abstraction.
I'll admit, I can't preclude their existence, but just as equally, I have faith in the supposition that they are not required.
You and your kind, on the other hand, feel the need for this figure, and whatever that may bring with it.
We are fundamentally opposed.
We've all said our piece.
We've all made our case.
We'll all believe in what we will.
You're not likely to convince us otherwise.
So.
Please.
Drop it.
It's Friday. Let's talk about ME GOING SKIING FOR TWO WEEKS IN FRANCE TOMORROW.. YAAAAAY.
*the end.
- ********0
The fact that they call it absolute dating is ridiculous, because it's not absolute and you're right discipler.
JazX
(Jan 6 06, 06:23)
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JazX, in all honesty, and please enlighten me, as I am not up to snuff on the ins and outs of carbon dating, but is the technique so questionable to give false results consistently - or even have measrures of error on the scale of millions or hundreds of thousands of years? I mean, even if it has problems, can it still peg something within a few hundred thousand years or even a million?
- ********0
I want slighty crumbed Trilobyte on a bed of Basmati Rice.
- flagellum0
Tick, you are simple. Thank you for that definition of science. Now please show me how Darwinian Macro evolution is testable & falsifiable, thus making it scientific? So, you see, there are some things which pretend to be science but are thoroughly unscientific if we go by the conventional lemon test. Furthermore, you like all the other uninformed, conflate Creationism with Intelligent Design. So, you lose credibility because you don't understand the issues.
There were no Priest-Kings during evolutionary timeframes which had 0 technological advancement. It is "primitive stone age" man we are talking about. Learn about what you are trying to support.
Current scientific findings have abolished and continue to threaten the extinction of pseudo-enlightenment notions. We have new data, we should pay attention to it. Your fathers of the so-called-enlightenment didn't know about the cell, let alone DNA.
The websites I post list very very specific scientific data and research... far from propaganda. It is you who lacks critical thinking as you consistently dodge the science which link and provide and opt for rhetoric.
Web design is cool.
- ********0
I want slighty crumbed Trilobyte on a bed of Basmati Rice.
JazX
(Jan 6 06, 06:27)
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I think you might want some wasabi with that as well...
- Nairn0
I bought my 10 year old cousin a 480 million year old Trilobyte fossil* for christmas.
She's not growing up an ardent Christian, I'll make sure of that.
* give or take 6000 years
- KuzIII0
empirical evidence? you mean the fact that the oldest agrarian civilisations date to about 10000-7000 years ago. And that this coincides with the end of the ice age. And that the earliest forms of writing were used to date the best time for harvest and to calculate how much agricultural product was used? and its no coincidence that recorded history should coincide with the neolitihic revolution
that compared to the empirical, and cogent argument you use which is nothing more than the statement "humanity cannot have existed 100,000 years ago cos there wasn't much technological advance for most of that period".
lol, are you an idiot?
- ********0
JazX - I just read this, is this accurate (oh geology expert dude):
Will Carbon-14 dating work on all artifacts?
No. There are a few categories of artifacts that cannot be dated using carbon-14.
First, carbon-14 cannot be used to date biological artifacts of organisms that did not get thier carbon dioxide from the air. This rules out carbon dating for most aquatic organisms, because they often obtain at least some of their carbon from dissolved carbonate rock. The age of the carbon in the rock is different from that of the carbon in the air and makes carbon dating data for those organisms inaccurate under the assumptions normally used for carbon dating. This restriction extends to animals that consume seafood in their diets, as well.
Carbon dating also cannot be used on artifacts over about 50,000 years old. These artifacts have gone through many carbon-14 half-lives and the amount of carbon-14 remaining in them is miniscule and very difficult to detect.
Carbon dating cannot be used on most fossils, not only because they are almost always too old, but also because they rarely contain the original carbon of the organism. Also, many fossils are contaminated with carbon from the environment during collection or preservation proceedures.
How do we know Carbon-14 dating is accurate?
Scientists check the accuracy of carbon dating by comparing carbon dating data to data from other dating methods. Other methods scientists use include counting rock layers and tree rings.
When scientists first began to compare carbon dating data to data from tree rings, they found carbon dating provided "too-young" estimates of artifact age. Scientists now realize that production of carbon-14 has not been constant over the last 10,000 years, but has changed as the radiation from the sun has changed. Carbon dates reported in the 1950s and 1960s should be questioned, because those studies were conducted before carbon dating was calibrated by comparision with other dating methods.
Nuclear tests, nuclear reactors and the use of nuclear weapons have also changed the composition of radioisotopes in the air over the last few decades. This human nuclear activity will make precise dating of fossils from our lifetime very difficult due to contamination of the normal radioisotope composition of the earth with addition artificially produced radioactive atoms.
How do scientists date older fossils?
Although the half-life of carbon-14 makes it unreliable for dating fossils over about 50,000 years old, there are other isotopes scientists use to date older artifacts. These isotopes have longer half-lives and so are found in greater abundance in older fossils.
Some of these other isotopes include:
* Potassium-40 found in your body at all times; half-life = 1.3 billion years
* Uranium-235; half-life = 704 million years
* Uranium-238; half-life = 4.5 billion years
* Thorium-232; half-life = 14 billion years
* Rubidium-87; half-life = 49 billion years
- KuzIII0
and ooh, it only took a couple of hundred years for crude oil to form from the compression in the earths crust of the decaying corpses of prehistoric trees and creature. NOT! It took millions of years!
- ********0
and ooh, it only took a couple of hundred years for crude oil to form from the compression in the earths crust of the decaying corpses of prehistoric trees and creature. NOT! It took millions of years!
KuzIII
(Jan 6 06, 06:36)
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No, no no Kuz..you see God put the oil there for us humans to exploit and use up before he comes back and blows everything up...so you know the future doesn't really matter..nor the past..
- KuzIII0
then why'd he give it all to the arabs?
he is surely an evil god
- ********0
Tick, yes, that's what I'm saying. To make a long story short and without using loads of scientific jargon, Carbon-14 is only used by the Archaelogical community. Geologist scoff at it's use.
Potassium-Argon is primarily used, a few others depending upon lithology of the rock, for dating older rocks, but the data that is retreived from these analyzations is inconsisten across the board. Although, it does, generally speaking work in terms of how evolutionary scientists on all levels use it to explain their system.
make sense?
- ********0
then why'd he give it all to the arabs?
he is surely an evil god
KuzIII
(Jan 6 06, 06:39)
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I have a Bible Thumper friendly answer to that, but to explore that line of thought would get me booted by the Mighty QBN ..see Pat Robertson's recent comments vis a vis Ariel Sharon
- ********0
absolutists of any kind should be shot
- flagellum0
Look, let's just summarize the actual hard facts and everybody can go away and digest them. *Forgive me for repeating myself in these points:
1. The fossil record shows the sudden appearance of all major phyla during the Cambrian era and then stasis.
2. The fossil record lacks any transitional forms between species. i.e. flight birds, appear as flight birds. Turtles appear as turtles, mammalian hominids appear as fully formed hominids. No intermediates leading up to these, just sudden appearance.
3. Natural Selection + Unguided Mutation has never been shown to provide information-gaining change. Only loss of information. The most it can do is provide adaptation within an existing species. i.e. bird beak changes, etc... It has never been shown to produce large scale changes and on the molecular level, has been shown to be incapable of building cellular machinery which requires all of it's parts at once, to function (cannot be assembled gradually).
4. We see the hallmarks of design everywhere. From the 4 letter digital nucleotide code on the spine of the DNA molecule to the rotary turbines, transport shuttles and other mind boggling machines in the cell. Design is replete in living systems.
5. The age of the earth and carbon dating is far from conclusive - from 30 year old pig's teeth being called hominid teeth, to a geologic column which shows layers that should be on the bottom, on top and fossils that "should" be on the bottom, on mountaintops. Again, a secondary issue.
6. Precision fine-tuning of the physical constants, i.e. gravity tuned to minute tolerance to keep us from flying off the planet and keep us from being squashed to death, and perfect positioning from the sun and moon to support organic life. Any slight tweak in either direction and we wouldn't be here.
etc.. etc..
*gasps for air
- KuzIII0
more from the economist:
The fact is, you can't stop evolution. Those who argue the opposite, pointing to the survival thanks to modern medicine of people who would previously have died, are guilty of more than just gross insensitivity. They have tumbled into an intellectual pitfall that has claimed many victims since Darwin first published his theory. Evolution is not about progress. It is about adaptation. Sometimes adaptation and progress are the same. Sometimes they are the opposite. (Ask a tapeworm, which has “degenerated” into a mere egg-laying machine by a very successful process of adaptation.) If a mutation provides a better adaptation, as Dr Cochran thinks these disease genes did in financiers, it will spread. Given the changes that humanity has created in its own habitat, it seems unlikely that natural selection has come to a halt. If Dr Deacon is right, it may even be accelerating as cultural change speeds up, although the current rapid growth in the human population will disguise that for a while, because selection works best in a static population.
The next big thingEvolution, then, has not stopped. Indeed, it might be about to get an artificial helping hand in the form of genetic engineering. For the fallacy of evolutionary progress has deep psychological roots, and those roots lie in Dr Miller's peacock-tail version of events. The ultimate driver of sexual selection is the need to produce offspring who will be better than the competition, and will thus be selected by desirable sexual partners. Parents know what traits are required. They include high intelligence and a handful of physical characteristics, some of which are universal and some of which vary according to race. That is why, once the idea of eliminating disease genes has been aired, every popular discussion on genetic engineering and cloning seems to get bogged down in intelligence, height and (in the West) fair hair and blue eyes.
This search for genetic perfection has an old and dishonourable history, of course, starting with the eugenic movement of the 19th century and ending in the Nazi concentration camps of the 20th, where millions of the confrères of Dr Cochran's subjects were sent to their deaths. With luck, the self-knowledge that understanding humanity's evolution brings will help avert such perversions in the future. And if genetic engineering can be done in a way that does not harm the recipient, it would not make sense to ban it in a liberal society. But the impulse behind it will not go away because, progressive or not, it is certainly adaptive. Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founders of genetics, once said that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. And that is true even of humanity's desire to take control of the process itself.
- ********0
JazX - so what I've read is that a) Carbon dating does have some inaccuracies in it b) that these problems have been accounted for and adjusted in new calculations, but dating from the 50's and 60's are still held suspect in the scientific community currently c) CArbon dating is useless for most biological work and for things older than 50,000 years...
So, if this is true, than the whole Carbon dating thing used by Creatio..oops I mean Intelligent Designer Proponents is a huge Straw Man, much like all the other half assed scientific "facts" they set up and blow over..
You know the other thing these ID people aren't fair about is the self-correction involved in the scientific process. They seem to make like it's this big point that scientisits are some kind of morons or ignorant to keep putting out inaccurate Carbon dating, yet all the stuff I have now just researched has scientists themselves seeking to correct and modify the technique, and admiting prior mistakes...further more, even if carbon dating can be unusable on things older than 50,000 years we do have other evidence of living organisms existing prior to that date in the geological record, correct JazX?
- flagellum0
Intelligent Design does cannot answer the age of the earth question. It simply detects specified complexity in biological systems.
Creationism, on the other hand does speak to the age of the earth. Here are some of the compelling reasons why YEC say that the universe is in fact young:
- flagellum0
No, Kuz, you can't stop evolution within a species. Agreed. We will continue to advance and adapt in numerous ways.