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Author | Topic: Radiometric Dating and the Geologic Column: A Critique | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Percy Member Posts: 22392 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 5.3 |
Suggestion: shorter posts.
I'll just respond to your claim that Woodmorappe has been misreprented by Henke at Hiding the Numbers to Defame Radiometric Dating:
Why would Woodmorappe go out of his way to take a 2 mya discordance out of context when he already cited a 200 mya discordance in the same subsection? But Woodmorappe didn't say it was a 2 mya discordance, did he (neither did Henke - he said 1%, and simple math yields a difference (including +/- error ranges provided in the excerpt) ranging from 0.2 to 1.1 million years)? No, he said:
[text=black]The same unit was most likely the one dated by Evernden et al. (1964) at 66.4 Ma [Ma ]. These ages are most likely too old, owing to the inclusion of detrital grains in the mineral separates.[/text] And he presents this without giving the amount of discordance shortly after describing a 250 mya discordance precisely to give the impression that the magnitude of error is large, when it's only around 1%. Seems like Henke has fairly accurately characterized Woodmorappe's misrepresentation. The name of the subsection might have been detection of open-system behavior, but as your quote of the discussion of the 250 mya discordance reveals, Woodmorappe is not limiting himself to that topic in this subsection. Here's your quote of Woodmorappe again for your convenience:
Woodmorappe writes: Apart from everything else that has been discussed in this section of the paper, the fallacy of the claims advanced by Leveson and Seidemann is proven by the many cases of dates which are recognized as reliable, only to be later discarded in favor of some other presumably-reliable dates which contradict the first set of erstwhile-reliable dates. Many such examples are given in this paper. Let me give another: Some U-Pb zircon dates from the Adirondack Mountain region of New York (McLelland et al 1997, p.A-466), based on bulk-zircon dating, yielded values up to 1416 million years old. These had been accepted as reliable — that is, until single-grain dates yielded results some 250 million years younger. All of a sudden, the earlier ostensibly-reliable dates had to be rejected. Thanks for providing this quote, because it makes it clear that Woodmorappe is trying to communicate precisely the misrepresentation he's accused of by Henke, subsection title notwithstanding. An observation: this discussion will advance little if we spend all our time on cross-accusations of impropriety. Though you say you'll ride this one out, I think it would be more productive to focus on a case for which the paper in question is available on the Internet. To do otherwise is to debate in the presence of too much incomplete and questionable information. --Percy
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Loudmouth Inactive Member |
quote: I second this suggestion. AC, in your replies to my posts, only focus on how we can determine the frequency of discordance (is it "impossible to know" or "clear" that it occurs frequently). Next, pick what you think is the most damning case of discordance that is well illustrated on the internet. I find it hard not to list examples of well supported concordance, but I can see how that would lead this topic astray. I think we can all wait for you to pick an example and we can work from there.
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Jazzns Member (Idle past 3911 days) Posts: 2657 From: A Better America Joined: |
I thought of this in my car...
We can conclude that radiometric dating is invalid because geochronologists hand pick their results. We based this upon a set of hand picked results. Why do we only have a small amount of results? Because geochronoligists hand pick their results! Sound familiar anyone?
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Loudmouth Inactive Member |
quote: Willowtree? Anyway, you are right that Woodmorappe is hypocritical in his arguments. He claims that geochronologists are being deceptive by relying exclusively on hand picked results. What does Woodmorappe do? He collects a data set of 450 hand picked results. Is not Woody guilty of the same thing that he is accusing geochronologists of? It would seem so.
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Jazzns Member (Idle past 3911 days) Posts: 2657 From: A Better America Joined: |
Moreover it is circular reasoning. "If geochronologists weren't so deceptive then we would have more proof of their deception."
I really do think the only answer to put this issue to rest is to have Creationists do that double blind study that everyone keeps mentioning instead of their pre-planned/we already know this is going to fail "experiments". Why won't they? Canned response, radiometric dating is an invalid method of scientific inquiry. The assumption proves the conclusion. Case closed. Does anyone know how to pronounce Woodmorappe anyway? I have been saying it in my head as (wood-more-app).
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 734 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
Does anyone know how to pronounce Woodmorappe anyway?
I've heard "what? more crap?" but surely that can't be it. Probably "Peczis," his real name. The one he's been known to cite as a reference.
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Jazzns Member (Idle past 3911 days) Posts: 2657 From: A Better America Joined: |
Peczis, his real name. Oh good! I am so glad we are taking the word of a man so willing to put his name on the line for what he believes in. Maybe he has a good reason to publish under a different name?
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Loudmouth Inactive Member |
quote: That's how I pronounce it. It's a pseudonym, so it really doesn't matter anyway.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1467 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
The one he's been known to cite as a reference. Funny. Pathetic, but funny.
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JonF Member (Idle past 168 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
The compilation of ages, in and of themselves, provide the evidence sufficient to prove my point: imprecision and contradictory results. Sorry, that's just flat-out wrong. Your claim is "radiometric dating will frequently yield ages which are grossly discordant compared with the predictions of geochronology and that such discordances will frequently exhibit poor precision." {emphasis added}. No mere compilation of ages can prove those claims. "Frequently" requires comparison to some other appropriate and justified number. Is 432 of something frequent? You can't tell until you compare it to something else. 432 major snowstorms per year is frequent; 432 snowflakes falling per year is not frequent. Of course, given Woodmorappe's well-known and documented mendacity and misrepresentations, the number of truly problematic studies in his sample is certainly less than 432. But I don't know what the right number is so, for the sake of argument only, let's take 432 as the number. Then all you have proven so far is that there are some problematic studies. Neither you nor Woodmoorappe have even tried to do the necessary statistics ... partly because the sampling is hopelessly flawed (it's not representative of the population) and, I suspect, partly because both of you know what the result would be and you don't want to acknowledge that result. OK, some studies are problematic. Until you can relate that to the properties of the population of all studies, using rigorous and well-understood statistical methods, you haven't even indicated an overall problem, much less a young Earth.
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JonF Member (Idle past 168 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
discordant dates are often listed in papers because event those dates tell us (mainstream geoscientists) something about the geologic history of an area There's also another significant source of such dates; tests of possibly inappropriate materials to verify whether or not they are inappropiate, especially those studies which conlude that the material is inappropriate. Such tests are the source of the old "fresh clams dated by radiocarbon tested as old" canard (the study was verifiying that marine organisms couldn't be tested meaningfully), the old "Volcanic rocks produced by lava flows which occurred in Hawaii in the years 1800-1801 were dated by the potassium-argon method. Excess argon produced apparent ages ranging from 160 million to 2.96 billion years." lie (the study was lookin specifically at dating xenoliths in the lava).
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JonF Member (Idle past 168 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
Aha, Woodmorappe, by claiming that they threw out an isochron is in fact fudging the data. No isochron ever formed because the data points did not form a straight line. This date was mentioned in the original study because it was an example of the isochron method detecting a contaminated or unclosed system I happen to have a scanned copy of Dalrymple (1984) with me (I'm asking permission to distribute the entire thing. Here's the figure to which the Dalrymple text refers:
It's pretty obvious that only a moron would try to draw one straight line through those data points! Let's also post the text from Dalrymple about Woodmorappe1 just before the part you posted:
1Woodmorappe, J. 1979. Radiometric geochronology reappraised. Creation Res. Soc. Quart. 16: 102-129, 147. {Upated image link) This message has been edited by Admin, 12-09-2004 06:53 PM This message has been edited by JonF, 03-07-2005 11:24 AM Edited by JonF, : Update image URL
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JonF Member (Idle past 168 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
Firstly, if we removed radiometric dating there is still more than enough evidence to conclude that the earth is ancient. There is zero evidence that the earth is less than a 100,000 years old, much less 6,000 years. Just for grins, a table of many such estimates extracted from Dalrymple's 1991 book is at Pre-1900 Non-Religious Estimates of the Age of the Earth.pdf.
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JonF Member (Idle past 168 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
It is clear to me that discordances are frequent and imprecise. Only because you made up your mind before examining the evidence, and you (and Woodmorappe) have done an exceptionally poor job of examining the evidence. Until and unless you compare your sample to the the population using standard and established statistical methods, all you have established is that some problematic dates exist. PurpleYouko pointed out how easy it is to collect appropriate data in Message 19. Of course, collecting and analyzing realistic data wouldn't give you the result you want ...
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JonF Member (Idle past 168 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
Maybe he has a good reason to publish under a different name?
Maybe he does. His use of a pseudonym has no relationship to the validity or in-validity of his arguments.
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