Earth science curriculum tailored to fit wavering fundamentalists

As I said when you made the same threat to leave in the Evolution. We Have The Fossils. We Win. thread earlier this week, you use this as a debate tactic to bring discussion to a halt when something doesn't go your way, so if you do leave this thread then I will be holding you to it.

I've been asked this question by one of my wavering YEC fundamentalists and I want to make sure and get the answer right. I have searched this forum including the excellent thread " Self-Replicating Molecules - Life's Building Blocks", but can't seem to find a clear answer.Do we have current examples of self replicating molecules in the wild? Not lab created, but naturally occurring.And help would be greatly appreciated.Thanks
JB

An excellent question, and as far as I know the answer is no, not really.The closest would be RNA viral strands or prions, but those hijack cells to make reproductions of themselves.So the next question is what is different about the environment today than a pre-life environment ... aside from the atmospheric composition issue ... and the obvious answer is that the environment today is filled with bacteria that would avidly consume the building block amino acids.Cool example of bacteria being everywhere was a show I saw for kids to encourage them to wash their hands:Teacher opens a fresh loaf of (white) bread and

1. uses sterile tongs to place one piece in a ziplock bag (this is the control)
2. washes her hands and put a second peice in a second ziplock bag
3. passes a third piece of bread around for everyone to handle before putting it in a third ziplock bag

compare after a week or two.Found this by search: hand washing bread experimentNot a demonstration of self-replication, but of what they would be up against today.Enjoy

As RAZD said the answer is no. We haven't seen a self-replicator molecule in the open because we wouldn't know where to look. These things are really, really small and, once going, make delightful hors d'oeuvres for any passing amoeba.Ask your creationist friend, if an abiogenic event took place on his front lawn this morning would he know where to find it before it became dinner? Neither does anybody else. But the chemistry is all there. This world could be experiencing abiogenic events every few months, every couple days, 1000 times a day, and no one would ever know. The question has no effect on the reality of the chemistry we know is there and can duplicate in the lab. We just can not put the entire globe under a strong enough microscope to catch it happening somewhere.

Awesome answer. I already shared it with them.THANKSJB

A question for those dendro inclined.In all the YEC talk about multiple rings per year, I hear responses from knowledgeable dendro folk saying things like "it's far more common to have missing rings than multiple rings".I understand that 2 rings per year is rather easy to detect (cellular difference as I follow it), but does anyone have any idea how one could detect missing rings? I'm not talking about a situation where one tree among many might for some reason be one ring short in a common sequence (solved by crossdating), but rather where a large climate event might cause widespread loss of a year in all the trees in a say an entire region.Any thoughts?Thanks
JBEdited by ThinAirDesigns, : No reason given.

Tree rings are not on their own. There are several other sources of annular data against which to cross compare.And tree rings from different parts of the world can be cross compared. Events such as the "year without a summer" serve as markers which help to align the various sequences.The business we hear from creationists about multiple rings is just the usual nonsense of making things up in a vain effort to support their ancient tribal beliefs.

Some species are more prone than others to either multiple rings or missing rings. The Bristlecone Pines are apparently more susceptible to missing rings and the evidence comes from three sources:1 -- a second study done 19 years after the Methuselah chronology ended, where a number of the trees had missing rings and none had multiple rings,2 -- a second Bristlecone Pine chronology from a different mountain area than the Methuselah chronology; it (only) extends 5,000+ years into the past (compared to 8,000+ for the Methuselah one), but it matches ring width to ring width for those 5,000 except for two places where the new chronology has missing rings and the old one has very narrow rings,3 -- comparison to the two european oak chronologies (one Irish and one German, which agree ring for ring for 12,000 years iirc, except for 3 years difference) using measured 14C levels (which should be the same regardless of any change in 14C decay rate) and this shows that the Bristlecone Pine chronologies are short some 37 years total (an 0.5% error rate).Could the oak chronologies also be missing rings? Possible, but I would still argue that they are as accurate as one could wish for -- even an 0.5% accuracy is pretty phenomenal in science, and the oaks are closer to 0.02% accuracy.Knowing there are sources of error and being able to estimate how much they can affect the data is one of the critical elements of scientific evaluation of data.Enjoy

Missing rings would make it appear as if a tree is younger than it actually is. I don't think that YEC's can use that one...

I'll say thanks to all three of you that responded here at once.So it sounds like, other than crossdating other references, there is no way to know if rings are missing. Unlike multiple rings, where there are cellular differences that can be used to differentiate from normal rings, there is not tell-tale evidence left behind in the tree of a missing ring.I suspected as much but wanted to make sure.Thanks.
JB

Today, while describing the issues with dating water based mollusks / seals, etc., I was asked why these same water based variables didn't apply to plants which uptake water through their roots. Seems like a good question and one I've never heard asked before.By searching "Do plants uptake C14 through roots" I found several studies about the uptake of C02 through the roots, but nothing directly dating related.Any suggestions on where I can go to learn how to answer that one?Thanks
JB

The problem you describe is actually two separate problems.The marine mollusks and seals, etc., are taking in some water that contains "reservoir" carbon, that is, that has been sealed off from the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years. That makes that water, and anything using it, appear older than it really is. This is readily corrected for when dating marine mollusks.Plants taking up water or CO2 through the roots wouldn't be getting reservoir carbon in the same way as marine organisms, but might be getting old, dead carbon from limestone formations. This would make them appear older than they actually are. Freshwater mollusks would be very susceptible to this in some areas.

Thanks Coyote.Even though it can happen theoretically, it must not be much of an issue since I've never heard anyone complain about it before. I would think if it were common it would be discussed in papers and such.JB

Not totally. A chronology is constructed from multiple tree samples that overlap in time. They line up the rings between pairs of both by inspection and by a statistical technique called "wiggle matching". I can't explain it but it can match well even if some rings are missing.It does use 14C in the process, but using dendrochronology to calibrate 14C isn't circular because wiggle matching looks at the wiggles in 14C dates, not the dates themselves.

I recall one claim about a tree that 14c dated older than the tree rings. Apparently it grew in a volcano caldron and the CO2 from the volcano vents had old carbon from deep in the earth. Can't find the reference now.Yes missing rings are a small conundrum to find. The practical approach is to calibrate the chronologies to known dates -- such as the year without a summer or known volcanic eruptions that cause other climate dips (Year without a summer was the summer following Krakatowa iirc). That gives you a statistical error and you can use that to create bracket dates with standard deviations. To my mind these turn out to be amazingly small errors over thousands of years.There is also a newly known oldest tree -- another Bristlecone Pine that by ring count dates to 5,065 years old (in 2015), and I don't know if this is missing innermost (pith) rings as the others are, so this would be a minimum age, and from the comparison of the two Bristlecone Pine chronologies with (at least) 2 missing rings in one chronology we'd have to say the likely age is (at least) 5,066 +/-1 years.I note that this is older than most YEC dates for the Noachin Flood ...Enjoy