Half-lives and Creationist Bunk

One of the common arguments of creationists is that (a) evolutionary theory is based on the radiocarbon dating of fossils, and (b) that dating is utterly unreliable.

Both propositions are false. Just for the record, "radiocarbon dating" is only of several methods of radiometric dating, and not one that is important for work on the evolutionary tree.

Radiocarbon, specifically, is very useful for archeologists but utterly useless for paleontologists. It is the use of a radioactive isotope of carbon to tell time, given knowledge of the half-life of that isotope. For anything older than about 50,000 years, there is so little carbon-14 left that it can't be measured accurately.

For older finds (those of interest to a paleontologist) one looks for the isotopes of other elements, which have longer half-lives and so different ranges of utility.

Somebody once tested a dinosaur fossil using the radiocarbon method, and THAT system declared that fossil to be 50,000 years old. This is akin to putting the speedometer of an ordinary vehicle into a jet plane, and then finding: "it says here the jet plane's max speed is 110." Creationists have been making use of that misbegotten experiment ever since.

If you want to get into the grains of the wood on this subject, here is a source.

https://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/origins/rate-ri.htm

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog