Anti-Climacus writes:
Dr. Cresswell writes:
...Plot a histogram of these differences and one would expect something not too far from a normal distribution; a significant step down at greater than 3 or 4 standard deviations from the mean would indicate that a lot of outliers are not reported.
This is an excellent idea. And I pondered, on more than one occasion, in doing so. But again, the concept of unpublished discordances renders such a study incapable of accurately reflecting the true scatter of ages.
I don't think your response demonstrated an understanding of what Dr. Crosswell was trying to point out. If I understand correctly, it
is the absence of outliers that would be diagnostic of unpublished dates. Due to your response it seems like you think that because of the unpublished dates that this kind of analysis would be impossible yet it is exactly what this type of analysis would show.
Could someone else verify that my interpretation of this is correct. I am not a statitician nor an applied scientist.
Also, I have a major point of contention with one of the primary ideas you keep repeating that geochronoligists hap-hazardly dismiss discordant dates as products of metamorphism, etc. In many of the quotes I have read thus far it seems like the people making them are merely hypothesizing about potential sources for descrepancy rather than espousing sound knowledge that said heating/weathering actually occurred. In how many of these cases have additional studies been done to validate the reason for the descrepancy? Wouldn't an analysis of this have been prudent before outright saying that all geochronologists trivially discard data without care?
It just seems like the claim is based on attempt to
prove that radiometric dating
IS flawed rather than an attempt to
discover IF radiometric dating is flawed. If you want a certain outcome, you can always make the dots fit the line.