Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1

So I'm replying here as this would be off topic on Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.So the evidence of life from trees living 12,405 years ago is explained how?See Message 4 of this thread.and the evidence of organic debris from Lake Suigetsu sediments from 35,987 years ago is explained how?See Message 5 of this thread.Note that there is consilience of data between the trees and the lake varve data that also needs to be explained: why do the tree rings and the lake varves have the same %14C content for layers of the same age?Inquiring minds want to know.Enjoy

The age of the earth is a challenge to some sects of Christianity, just as the belief in an earth centered universe was in the times of Galileo. Christianity has (mostly) adapted. It will do the same for the age of the earth, and YEC will become marginalized and mocked the way flat-earthers are.SO start at Message 1 and see how far you get. I'll be happy to accommodate you in your search for truth.Enjoy

and this is about age correlations how?Thanks for your comments clarifying your position, but let's concentrate on the topic or post elsewhere.Enjoy

Arguments against the evidence I present here? Okay: ineffectual and incomplete, none explain the correlations.Please start with Message 2, Bristlecone Pines, and see what you can accomplish.

quote:

---

By counting tree rings and matching the overlapping patterns of growth from live to dead trees, scientists have developed a tree-ring chronology of nearly 10,000 years using wood from the Schulman Grove area, California (one tree still living is 4,839 years old).

​

edit: see Message 269 for new record holder at 5,062 years old in 2012.

​

Minimum age of the earth > 8,000 years based on this data.

​

This is already older than many YEC models (6,000 years for those using Archbishop Ussher's calculation of a starting date of 4004 BC). This also means that there was absolutely NO world wide flood (WWF) during those 8,000 years, as there would be no possible overlap of tree ring chronologies if there were some point at which ALL were dead.

​

This is only the start.

---

Note there were also pieces of dead wood used in the chronology that were found lying on the ground, wood that should have floated off in a flood.Note there is no correlation here yet, this is the first set of data showing an earth older that YEC claims. The correlation start with the next post Message 3.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : wood that would float ...Edited by RAZD, : .Edited by RAZD, : link

Trees breath, they take in C02 and exhale oxygen, and most trees drown if covered by flood water for 100+ days.Flood tolerant trees can be found growing on floodplains, but they have leaves above those periodic floods that create the floodplains, and are only tolerant for water over the roots. See willows.Bristlecone Pines are not flood tolerant. This is an issue for another thread: see Trilobites, Mountains and Marine Deposits - Evidence of a flood?See Message 189 where I've copied\moved this discussion for further discussion.This thread is about discussing the methods used to measure age, any perceived problems with them, and with the correlations between the methods.With Message 3 you are running into the first correlation, the one between the Bristlecone Pines and the European Oaks, correlations such as the 14C/12C levels being the same in the tree rings for the same year count for two different dendrochronologies from opposite sides of the earth, one pines high on a mountain and one oaks living on floodplains.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : moved to another thread

In Message 496 I gave you a brief summary for the Bristlecone Pine data from Message 2. Here is the same summary for European Oaks from Message 3:

quote:

---

My recollection is that dendrochronology started with oak trees in Europe, by setting up a database of oak tree sections from archaeological sites and matching different sections that overlapped in time to build a complete lineage of tree ring dates.

​

The common name for this species is "Post Oak" due to its natural resistance to rot thus making a good material for posts in ancient constructions. This also means that there are a lot of samples that are referenced to and associated with archaeological finds, finds that can be dated by other means, including historical documents as far back as the history goes.

​

There are several things to note here. First, is that there are three (3) main chronologies: one of Bristlecone Pine and two of European Oak, one German and one Irish. Second, is that originally one oak chronology was "not good enough" to be included in the IntCal98 - because it was off by 41 years in (then) ~8,000 years, an error of 0.5%. Third, is that when one oak chronology was corrected, it was not the odd one out, but the one that previously agreed with the Bristlecone Pine chronology. Fourth, now the Bristlecone Pine chronology is now considered "not good enough" - because it is off by 37 years in ~7600 years, an error of 0.5%. Fifth, that where some German Oak samples had been placed by carbon-14 levels in the earlier chronology (used in IntCal98) these are now placed by additional tree samples that fill in the consecutive chronology (and these initial carbon-14 levels are not now used to place those samples). Finally, that the European Oak absolute chronology now extends back to 9,147 years BP with cross dating and including all three in one data set means that the error involved is on the order of 0.5% - over the whole period of time covered. The IntCal04 discussion doesn't give the breakdown on the actual ages of each chronology, but it refers to a paper that does.

​

These are just three examples of dendrochronologies, the three that happen to be the longest absolute chronologies. There are many species of trees used for dendrochronology, and many different chronologies. Several chronologies are "floating" - do not have a fixed begin date - and many of those are older than the dates discussed here. All the species show the same trends in world climate whenever they overlap. The climatological trends correlate the ages from one species to the others, thus any errors that would invalidate dendrochronology would need to apply to each (and all) species in each (and all) locations at the same time. Here we need only discuss the three long absolute chronologies and how they validate each other.

​

Now we have a problem for YEC people, because not only do these different chronologies cover the same time, they also have the same pattern of climate shown in their tree rings even though they come from opposite sides of the earth and are in very different kinds of trees, one evergreen living at high altitudes and one deciduous living near sea levels, and anything that can cause errors in one system has to have a method that can cause exactly the same error in the other at exactly the same time. Positing false rings does not accomplish this. All three sets also show the "little ice age" and other marker events at the same ages. They all come to the same age for the matching climate data. We can be minimalist here, and say that the minimum age covered by the European Oak chronology is 10,429 years BP - 0.5% = 10,377 years BP. "BP" means "Before Present" and is defined as years before 1950(1), so this is really 10,434 years ago (in 2007).

​

Minimum age of the earth > 10,434 years based on this data.

​

This is now older than most if not all YEC models for the age of the earth.

​

This also means that there was absolutely NO world wide flood (WWF) during those 10,434 years, as there would be no possible overlap of tree ring chronologies if there were some point at which ALL were dead.

​

And this is still just the start: three different dendrochronologies that correlate age with climate and that match - wiggle for wiggle - within 0.5%.

---

So we have three dendrochronologies that agree within 0.5% after 8,000 years of tree rings.How is such accuracy obtained if there are any problems with the dendrochronology process?Note that the dendrochronologies were matched not just on climate data (ring widths) but on the level of 14C/12 existing in the rings (not "14C Age"). This correlation is discussed in greater detail in Message 4: Adding German Pines to the Mix. I'll have more to add when we get to that, as there is an update to the data that extends it.You may also want to read Message 20 and Message 109EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .

Thank you CRR for another example of creationist deceit.This is one large cut and paste and not your words, right? I'll forgive you for thinking this is a good piece of information ... it isn't. "Common in many species ... They found that multiplicity was more than twice as common as annularity, ..."... meaning that they were able to discern multiple rings in other species. With the techniques used by dendrochronologists to remove potential errors. Using trees susceptible to multiple rings.In 2007 I dealt with a similar paper by Don Batten, see Dendrochronology Fact and Creationist Fraud. Someone is lying to you, either Glock or (more likely) someone misrepresenting him. How do I know? Because there is more actual data that validates the Bristlecone Pine ages.See the new version of this thread, currently in development, The Age of the Earth (version 3 no 1), and Dendrochronology Basics, Message 9:

quote:

---

Three levels of replication of correlations are used to obtain accurate and precise results. The resulting dendrochronologies are thus accurate and precise, due to identification of both false and missing rings and determining annual rings from numerous samples, and by cross-checking the information on multiple levels. Some species of trees have stronger demarcation of annual layers than others, and this makes some species better for dendrochronologies than others.

​

It should come as no surprise that the thousands of dendrochronologist working on the chronologies are actually able to discern the difference between rainfall or stress patterns, that could cause false or missing rings, from annual patterns when assembling these chronologies with high levels of confidence.

​

Part of the challenge for age deniers that honestly question the dendrochronologies is to have some modicum of understanding of the work that has gone into them. Again I note that the real challenge for age deniers will be to explain the consilience in results from independent systems, rather than pick individual systems apart. More to come.

---

In The Bristlecone Pine Chronologies, Message 10, there is some updated information:

quote:

---

There is a second Bristlecone pine chronology that was developed independently of the master chronology (and using no common samples), and it provides additional information:

​

Accuracy of tree ring dating of Bristlecone Pine for calibration of the radiocarbon time scale⁽³⁾

​

quote:

---

... The final chronology contains 5403 annual values ...
... Year-by-year comparison indicates that the rings dated at 5859M and 5330M are absent from the Campito chronology. Insertion of a nominal value of '0' for the ring width index for each of these years (Figure 6) brings the chronologies into exact synchrony.

​

A long tree ring chronology for bristlecone pine has been developed independently of previous work. Several lines of evidence show that the growth rings are true annual rings. Evaluation of several potential sources of error in tree ring dates indicates that any uncertainty in calendar dates assigned to annual rings in this series is due to annual rings that may be absent from all samples for a particular year or years. Internal evidence and intrachronology comparison suggest that there are only two such occurrences in the 5403-year Campito record developed in this work. Annual rings for these years are represented in the Methuselah chronology, which has served as the standard for most radiocarbon calibration studies. The Methuselah chronology very probably contains no dating error, at least back to 3435 BC.

---

​

The time scale used here is the same "extended scale," where 8000 equals 1 BCE, so 8001-5859 = 2142 BCE and 8001 - 5330 = 2671 BCE. The "M" designates the Master chronology above.

​

The difference found was that two rings were missing from the second chronology and they matched two rings in the older chronology that were narrow growth rings rather than extra rings. The new chronology did not extend the age of the old chronology, but it did validate and strengthen the Master absolute Bristlecone pine dendrochronology from 1970 CE through 3,435 BCE.

​

Note that missing rings showed the resulting chronology was too short (under counted). Because of this cross-checking, with only two errors, we can have high confidence that the Master Bristlecone pine chronology is indeed a minimum record of annual tree rings firmly anchored in the present and extending to at least 6,291 BCE.

​

This is the first test of the consilience between different systems, even though they use the same technique - dendrochronology - and the same species - Bristlecone pines - they were developed independently and were basically identical for the years that overlap, and the new chronology properly counted the intervening years. This is very strong consilience.

---

Do you understand what this means regarding your paper? They say: So the pattern with extra rings they propose should result in no consistent match between the two chronologies because they grew in different areas and should have been affected differently -- by their own words.I think that should be enough to put "bogus" on your article, but there is more:

quote:

---

Additional Information on Bristlecone Pines, Message 11:

​

There are several factors that go into both the extreme age of Bristlecone pines and the confidence we have in the rings being accurate annual rings.

​

Accuracy of tree ring dating of Bristlecone Pine for calibration of the radiocarbon time scale⁽¹⁾

​

Three things to note: (1) that two independent Bristlecone pine chronologies were compared; (2) that the interval between the chronologies was 18 years and 18 rings were found in most samples in the new chronology, but some of the samples were missing one ring, and (3) none of the samples had an extra ring.

​

The climate and ecology of the Bristlecone pine is high, dry and cool, with minimal precipitation, most occurring as snow, which occurs even in July. The trees have adapted to the environment by taking advantage of the resources available during that portion of the year that temperatures are above their minimum growth level, a very short growing season:

​

Substrate-oriented distribution of Bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California⁽²⁾

​

Note the only month without snow is August, and the highest rainfall is in July. July would also be when the snow melts, so it would be the wettest month of the year for growing, and mid August would quickly become the driest. In addition, July and August are usually the only months with temperatures over 50°F.

​

The first impression is that growth would be water limited, and thus there should be a false ring due to the rain late in the summer, but there is another factor that limits growth, and that is temperature:

​

Recent unprecedented tree-ring growth in bristlecone pine at the highest elevations and possible causes⁽³⁾

​

Because the Bristlecone pines grow at such high elevations they have very short periods of growth when the temperature is only slightly higher than required for growth (~47°F). This actually helps ensure that the tree rings are annual without false rings from stress.

​

This information does not increase our knowledge of the minimum age for the earth, but it does increase our confidence in the Bristlecone Pine chronology accuracy and precision.

---

And I'm not done yet ... Accuracy and Precision in Dendrochronologies Compared to Historical Events, Message 16 in the new thread version:

quote:

---

... Thus we can test dendrochronologies with historical events, and we can look at this aspect in greater detail here:

​

Frost Rings in Trees as Records of Major Volcanic Eruptions (abstract)⁽²⁾

​

We can see the evidence of frost-rings for 1817 (following the "year with no summer"), and for 1884, after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. There are several other notable events shown going back to 1601 CE, however there was no frost-ring for 1785 when one of the highest DVI's was recorded.

​

Such effects may not occur in all locations, due to weather patterns, and thus may not affect all three chronologies, but effects can still be found in many wide spread localities. Frost rings are reported in pines in Sweden for example. Similar correlations can be found for other volcanic eruptions, demonstrating that these events can affect the tree-ring growth in a way that can provide accurate information of the interaction of eruptions with climate:

​

This high consilience between these independent chronologies ... increases our (already high) confidence in the Bristlecone pine chronology.

---

Note that is 100% accurate at 200 years, 200 years with no "Glock effect" showing up.But your biggest challenge will come after you deal with the oak chronologies, Message 3 on this thread and Message 13 through Message 16 on the new thread. At that point the relevance of Glock's paper will be moot.Again the issue is not the particular accuracy of the particular method or set of evidence, but the correlations between different sets of data and different methods that are consilient -- why do they get the same results?You've got some reading to do.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .Edited by RAZD, : ..Edited by RAZD, : correlations

Might be interesting to check it out at the library, rather than spending money on it. I live in a small town but the libraries are linked throughout the state and you can get books from any of them. By the time we get through with the European Oaks (Message 3) the issue of multiple rings in Bristlecone Pines will be moot -- they show that the Bristlecone Pines must be missing rings because they are ~37 years shy at 8000 years of common data. That's a 0.5% error and the other way from their proposed/assumed/wished 11% error (that was calculated to fit made up "biblical times").Also see Message 503, and as always ...Enjoy

You might also want to check out old Great Debates on this topic: Age of the Earth in Stages, Great Debate, S1WC and RAZD only
Great debate: radiocarbon dating, Mindspawn and Coyote/RAZDBoth discontinued by other participant dropping outEnjoy

Have you tried the library? This is what I mean by deceit ... he doesn't mention missing rings, he doesn't say anything about the techniques used that identify missing and false rings, and he doesn't make any effort to show that those "circumstances" apply to the trees in question.Enjoy

So, if for the sake of the argument I let you have some chance of multiple rings muddying the chronology of the Bristlecone pines, then what can you say about the oak chronologies in Message 3:

quote:

---

These are just three examples of dendrochronologies, the three that happen to be the longest absolute chronologies. There are many species of trees used for dendrochronology, and many different chronologies. Several chronologies are "floating" - do not have a fixed begin date - and many of those are older than the dates discussed here. All the species show the same trends in world climate whenever they overlap. The climatological trends correlate the ages from one species to the others, thus any errors that would invalidate dendrochronology would need to apply to each (and all) species in each (and all) locations at the same time. Here we need only discuss the three long absolute chronologies and how they validate each other.

​

Now we have a problem for YEC people, because not only do these different chronologies cover the same time, they also have the same pattern of climate shown in their tree rings even though they come from opposite sides of the earth and are in very different kinds of trees, one evergreen living at high altitudes and one deciduous living near sea levels, and anything that can cause errors in one system has to have a method that can cause exactly the same error in the other at exactly the same time. Positing false rings does not accomplish this. All three sets also show the "little ice age" and other marker events at the same ages. They all come to the same age for the matching climate data. We can be minimalist here, and say that the minimum age covered by the European Oak chronology is 10,429 years BP - 0.5% = 10,377 years BP. "BP" means "Before Present" and is defined as years before 1950(1), so this is really 10,444 years ago (in 2017).

​

Minimum age of the earth > 10,444 years based on this data.

​

This is now older than most if not all YEC models for the age of the earth.

​

This also means that there was absolutely NO world wide flood (WWF) during those 10,444 years, as there would be no possible overlap of tree ring chronologies if there were some point at which ALL were dead.

---

Do you have a source that says oaks are prone to multiple layers?EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .Edited by RAZD, : ..

In Message 40 marc9000 whines to admin that suggesting he doesn't debate things like the age of the earth was off topic ... in order to avoid answering the question.Well marc, it is the topic on this thread: will you continue to avoid the issue or will you attempt an actual argument about defending your perception of the age of the earth?I won't hold my breath.Enjoy

So you don't know, don't care. Fascinating. ... lie through their teeth and make their living off scamming the gullible. Actually there were a lot Christian geologists looking for evidence of the purported flood and came to the conclusion that the earth was older than a few thousand years, but regardless the estimates for an age in the billions of years predates Darwin's trip to the Galapagos on the HMS Beagle:

quote:

---

History of Geology

​

In the 19th century, scientific inquiry had estimated the Age of the Earth in terms of millions of years. By the early 20th Century radiogenic isotopes had been discovered and Radiometric Dating had been developed. In 1911 Arthur Holmes dated a sample from Ceylon at 1.6 billion years old using lead isotopes.[29] In 1921, attendees at the yearly meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science came to a rough consensus that the Age of the Earth was a few billion years old, and that radiometric dating was credible. Holmes published The Age of the Earth, an Introduction to Geological Ideas in 1927 in which he presented a range of 1.6 to 3.0 billion years. ...

---

This claim about the age of the earth being made old to accommodate Darwinism is just more typical Creationist non-science crapola.Your opportunity to admit error. And one of the things we rearrange is our understanding of the age of the earth based on testable empirical objective evidence. We've been doing that for thousands of years, and getting better at it.Just as science is doing a very good job of rearranging our understanding of how the universe works, how the climate works, how the effects of us doing things like burning fossil fuels at such an extraordinary pace that it changes the climate will be felt for decades and getting worse (for humans) than it already has.Arranging our understanding based on objective empirical evidence has proven to be much superior to achieving practical applications compared to emotional opinion or fantasy, especially as the evidence keeps getting stronger. Well I won't claim to talk for Bill, but my opinion is that the answer is the other way around, that we currently are not capable of understanding most of reality. But that capability increases the more we find what we do understand. ... over a thousand years by science minded individuals and groups looking for the reality through the use of objective empirical evidence and the testing of theories developed to explain the reality they observe.The methods and results and data presented here are available for review and criticism and testing -- and creationists have tried, and failed, to show the methods are wrong. The best they can do is lie about the results to delude the gullible into rejecting reality. After all, if you stay ignorant then you can believe anything.Enjoy

Rather it had been building for a while, as people were discovering that the Christian religious concept was increasingly unworkable (same wiki article):

quote:

---

Also during the eighteenth century, aspects of the history of the Earthnamely the divergences between the accepted religious concept and factual evidenceonce again became a popular topic for discussion in society. In 1749, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon published his Histoire Naturelle, in which he attacked the popular Biblical accounts given by Whiston and other ecclesiastical theorists of the history of Earth.[12] From experimentation with cooling globes, he found that the age of the Earth was not only 4,000 or 5,500 years as inferred from the Bible, but rather 75,000 years.[13] Another individual who described the history of the Earth with reference to neither God nor the Bible was the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who published his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels) in 1755.[14] From the works of these respected men, as well as others, it became acceptable by the mid eighteenth century to question the age of the Earth. This questioning represented a turning point in the study of the Earth. It was now possible to study the history of the Earth from a scientific perspective without religious preconceptions.

---

Bold for emphasis.That wasn't Darwin, that was the increase in knowledge as scientific methods were beginning to be used. More:

quote:

---

With the application of scientific methods to the investigation of the Earth's history, the study of geology could become a distinct field of science. To begin with, the terminology and definition of what constituted geological study had to be worked out. The term "geology" was first used technically in publications by two Genevan naturalists, Jean-Andr Deluc and Horace-Bndict de Saussure,[15] though "geology" was not well received as a term until it was taken up in the very influential compendium, the Encyclopdie, published beginning in 1751 by Denis Diderot.[15] Once the term was established to denote the study of the Earth and its history, geology slowly became more generally recognized as a distinct science that could be taught as a field of study at educational institutions. In 1741 the best-known institution in the field of natural history, the National Museum of Natural History in France, created the first teaching position designated specifically for geology.[16] This was an important step in further promoting knowledge of geology as a science and in recognizing the value of widely disseminating such knowledge.

​

By the 1770s, chemistry was starting to play a pivotal role in the theoretical foundation of geology and two opposite theories with committed followers emerged. These contrasting theories offered differing explanations of how the rock layers of the Earth’s surface had formed. One suggested that a liquid inundation, perhaps like the biblical deluge, had created all geological strata. The theory extended chemical theories that had been developing since the seventeenth century and was promoted by Scotland's John Walker, Sweden's Johan Gottschalk Wallerius and Germany's Abraham Werner.[17] Of these names, Werner's views become internationally influential around 1800. He argued that the Earth’s layers, including basalt and granite, had formed as a precipitate from an ocean that covered the entire Earth. Werner’s system was influential and those who accepted his theory were known as Diluvianists or Neptunists.[18] The Neptunist thesis was the most popular during the late eighteenth century, especially for those who were chemically trained. However, another thesis slowly gained currency from the 1780s forward. Instead of water, some mid eighteenth-century naturalists such as Buffon had suggested that strata had been formed through heat (or fire). The thesis was modified and expanded by the Scottish naturalist James Hutton during the 1780s. He argued against the theory of Neptunism, proposing instead the theory of based on heat. Those who followed this thesis during the early nineteenth century referred to this view as Plutonism: the formation of the Earth through the gradual solidification of a molten mass at a slow rate by the same processes that had occurred throughout history and continued in the present day. This led him to the conclusion that the Earth was immeasurably old and could not possibly be explained within the limits of the chronology inferred from the Bible. Plutonists believed that volcanic processes were the chief agent in rock formation, not water from a Great Flood.[19]

---

Bold again for emphasis.Still before Darwin. It wasn't "Darwinism" ... it was the pursuit of facts and reality by the scientific methods. Still more:

quote:

---

19th Century

​

... During this century various geologists further refined and completed the stratigraphic column. For instance, in 1833 while Adam Sedgwick was mapping rocks that he had established were from the Cambrian Period, Charles Lyell was elsewhere suggesting a subdivision of the Tertiary Period;[23] whilst Roderick Murchison, mapping into Wales from a different direction, was assigning the upper parts of Sedgewick's Cambrian to the lower parts of his own Silurian Period.[24] The stratigraphic column was significant because it supplied a method to assign a relative age of these rocks by slotting them into different positions in their stratigraphical sequence. This created a global approach to dating the age of the Earth and allowed for further correlations to be drawn from similarities found in the makeup of the Earth’s crust in various countries.

​

In early nineteenth-century Britain, catastrophism was adapted with the aim of reconciling geological science with religious traditions of the biblical Great Flood. In the early 1820s English geologists including William Buckland and Adam Sedgwick interpreted "diluvial" deposits as the outcome of Noah's flood, but by the end of the decade they revised their opinions in favour of local inundations.[25] Charles Lyell challenged catastrophism with the publication in 1830 of the first volume of his book Principles of Geology which presented a variety of geological evidence from England, France, Italy and Spain to prove Hutton’s ideas of gradualism correct.[21] He argued that most geological change had been very gradual in human history. Lyell provided evidence for Uniformitarianism; a geological doctrine that processes occur at the same rates in the present as they did in the past and account for all of the Earth’s geological features.[26] Lyell’s works were popular and widely read, the concept of Uniformitarianism had taken a strong hold in geological society.[21]

​

During the same time that the stratigraphic column was being completed, imperialism drove several countries in the early to mid 19th century to explore distant lands to expand their empires. This gave naturalists the opportunity to collect data on these voyages. In 1831 Captain Robert FitzRoy, given charge of the coastal survey expedition of HMS Beagle, sought a suitable naturalist to examine the land and give geological advice. This fell to Charles Darwin, who had just completed his BA degree and had accompanied Sedgwick on a two-week Welsh mapping expedition after taking his Spring course on geology. Fitzroy gave Darwin Lyell’s Principles of Geology, and Darwin became Lyell's first disciple, inventively theorising on uniformitarian principles about the geological processes he saw, and challenging some of Lyell's ideas. He speculated about the Earth expanding to explain uplift, then on the basis of the idea that ocean areas sank as land was uplifted, theorised that coral atolls grew from fringing coral reefs round sinking volcanic islands. This idea was confirmed when the Beagle surveyed the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, and in 1842 he published his theory on The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. Darwin's discovery of giant fossils helped to establish his reputation as a geologist, and his theorising about the causes of their extinction led to his theory of evolution by natural selection published in On the Origin of Species in 1859.[25][27][28]

---

So you have it backwards, in typical creationist misinformed fashion. The discoveries in geology drove Darwin's thinking, not the other way around. The concept of the age of the earth in Darwin's time was plenty long enough for evolution to work. The ensuing updates were not necessary. They continued, not to validate Darwin's theory but to find the answers to the question of the actual age of the earth. If it makes you happy to believe this, then wrap yourself up in it. You were the one dodging and dragging the thread into politics and dictionaries rather than just the creationists use of quote-mines when they claim a moral superiority that more and more is very apparently absolutely missing. What you are capable of understanding is tied directly to your ability to understand, and that is built on current knowledge, so it keeps changing. Can you define what quantity of knowledge that is? In order to be able to ascertain what proportion humans will eventually be able to understand, don't you need to know that? Currently we know ~10% of what we think the universe is. Will that increase? yes. Will the "what we think the universe is" increase? yes, as we learn more, we also learn what we don't know but hypothesis. So your question was silly. The correlations, the consilience, the continued evidence of old age from numerous different sources coming to the same results. The most recent 50,000 years are all based on signals left by living organisms, year after year with the same basic "life-as-we-know-it friendly climate" as exists today.The dating methods for more ancient times, like the ice-cores extending over 250,000 years in Greenland and 900,000 years in Antarctica have DNA in samples that show life was thriving at those times.They also validate radiometric methods, so the 4.5 billion year age of the earth and 3.5 billion year age of known life and all the fossils in between that flourish in the rocks of different ages all show a "life-as-we-know-it friendly climate" ... without evidence of a world wide magic flood or segregation of organisms into discrete "kinds" ...You may not be interested in how old the earth actually is, but the reality makes YECists just as loony, schizophrenic and deluded as belief in a flat earth, for the same reason: evidence of reality says otherwise. Except that it is the one way to have repeatably consistent information. Opinions and biased beliefs are notorious bad sources ... especially ones based on invalid myth, and moonstruck fantasy from listening to hucksters that are interested in one thing: making money off you (Ken Ham for example). Curiously it takes me much less than that to do the research to find the information I can use, and then organize it and assemble it, and you only need to read the first 13 posts to get the information I have condensed for you ... and anyone else interested in reality.The newest version is broken down a little more and has a lot of background information to assist understanding. Part 1 is the biological systems and it runs to some 20 posts of information, while Part 2 is the physical/chemical systems, currently at 7 posts and growing, while Part 3 will be about radiometric and cosmological systems (including one on why and how fast the Moon orbit is increasing and one on solar sunspot cycles and their footprints in the data).Mostly they include updated information that expands -- rearranges -- our knowledge of these systems.Enjoy

Most satellites are in low orbits that still have trace atmosphere, and so they slow them down bit by bit. The NASA engineers are well aware of this. Indeed, and at the same time the spin of the earth is slowing down, both due to the gravitational effects of daily tides ... and this too results in data that shows that the earth is old, very very very old.Enjoy