Buz's refutation of all radiometric dating methods

All this talk about digging etc seems to be rather beside the point anyway.One issue that is being discussed is the K/T boundary dates. Some aspects of this boundary are not "flood" effects. The layers above are laid down over top of the fossils we want to date both by the impact event and by lava flows. They are layered over top so must be younger than what is below. They lava has it's clock reset at that point and dates to a bit older than Buz wants it to be.

I'll jump in here, Mark is certainly welcome to it also.Not that I'm any great expert, but I find no fault with the quoted.As I understand it, the living conditions on earth, for the dinosaurs et all, was in serious decline, even before the asteroid (or whatever) came crashing down. The impact only put a period onto what was already being a major extinction event.So, esentially, the boundary was pretty well marked out, even before the Irridium clay layer was discovered.Cheers,
Moose

I will say that this is absolutely true (especially in terms of geology), and I rely on the considerably more knowledgeable posters to step in and correct me, or to say "leave this one for the grown-ups" when necessary.If I have any saving graces I hope they are enthusiasm and patience. And hopefully some humility. Sorry if I've totally c*cked up the discussion. Pretend I was talking about dating lava or something.

According to Harris, the age seems to be undetermined and controversial. He also seems to minimize the significance of the impact of the heavenly object and the tektites which Mark considered to be determinate in interpreting the boundary.

Again, you have to understand that the boundary was clear and well defined before any idea of the impact was raised. The K/T boundary is now very strongly associated with the iridium layer but Harris is pointing out that this is not the formal definition of the boundary.The age is not controversial. It may well have been given a few different values in the past as it was more carefully worked out. In the last several decades it hasn't to my knowledge been taken as lower than 60 Myr ago. The 64.8 MYr BP date now is darn close to that isn't it?He is talking about formal definitions here.The interpreting of the boundary that Mark is talking about is a different issue from defining it or from dating it.It was the iridium that pointed out something very special about what happened and lead to the search for the impact that the shocked quartz and iridium strongly suggested must have happened. This is what is meant by interpretation.There isn't the disagreement that you seem to be reading.Would you care to disect the sentences of the Harris quote in more detail to show how you read it?

quote:

---

According to Harris, the age seems to be undetermined and controversial.

---

Harris says no such thing, the two adjectives do not even appear in his piece. He says that the absolute age of the K/T boundary has been refined over the last 50 years due to improvements in the radiometric dating techniques and refinement of the fossil-based boundary. He shows no indication of disagreeing with the current dating of the K/T boundary at 65 million years ago. Any indeterminateness or controversy is in your own mind.

quote:

---

He also seems to minimize the significance of the impact of the heavenly object and the tektites which Mark considered to be determinate in interpreting the boundary.

---

Harris is simply giving the history of how the K/T boundary was initially defined. It is the boundary at which certain index fossils from lower levels and characteristic of Cretaceous period disappear and where other index fossils from higher layers of the Tertiary period first appear. This is the way in which all boundaries in the geological column were initially defined.As this (K/T boundary)layer in the geological column also co-incides with the presence of volcanic ash beds, iridium, tektites and stressed quartz, it allows the K/T boundary layer to be radiometrically dated and also strongly suggests a meteorite impact at that time.I think there has also been a suspicion that there may be iridium deposits associated with earlier mass extinctions.It seems that you are trying to use quote mining in lieu of an understanding of geology and physics, and not very successfully.

Buz, Sure, but others beat me to it..... The K-T boundary is defined by life, or more specifically, fossils of living things, not the Iridium layer or tektites. This doesn't alter the FACT that tektites occur at the K-T boundary as defined by the fossils. It is therefore reasonable that dating the tektites found at that fossil boundary, also dates the boundary, right?This is still an irrelevant point, the point of message 18 wasn't supposed to be about dating XXX layer in the geologic column, but to show the fantastic corroboration of different dating methods, it was serendipity that Dalrymples methods also dated rocks at the K-T boundary.Now, do you, or do you not, have any substantive response to message 18, & message 35?Mark------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.[This message has been edited by mark24, 06-25-2003]

I was going to jump in too... Ok, back to business - Buzsaw, post some actual evidence of your assertation that all radiometric dating methods are bogus. We are tired of hearing your unsupported opinions. You may believe that the Flood happened - you may believe that the sky is purple for all I care; yours is a free country, as they say - but unless you have some kind of evidence, you are simply making a fool of yourself.Post something - anything - scientific that supports your claim, or admit for once that you are WRONG.Failing that, some indication that you understand the basic concepts of palaeontology would be nice.The Rock Hound

quote:

---

It seems that you are trying to use quote mining in lieu of an understanding of geology and physics, and not very successfully.

---

Geologists and physicists mentally locked into the illogical TOE tend to downplay simple logic and common sense in much of what they have become able to swallow, ideologically. So I'm not all too convinced that one must know everything about to these things in order to debate some of the issues. Obviously, I must borrow a lot from quotes to make up for my lack of education, but so what? Who cares if what I use is not all original?Having said the above, I found this forum link page which is a K/2 debate, between creatos and evos. I pretty much concur with the arguments Karl has made on this page concerning the k/t boundary. Some of his argument includes quite a list of species which survived the k/t including living fossils and reptiles close enough to the smaller dinos that if the order of dino's (much greater than that of modern reptiles) died off, including the small ones, why didn't the others go with them? He also challenges them with the fact that if the k/t event did indeed wipe out about 75% of life world wide, why ALL of the dinos gone and so many others got through it quite unscathed?http://www.carm.org/evolution_archive/fossils_coccoliths.htm[This message has been edited by buzsaw, 06-25-2003][This message has been edited by buzsaw, 06-25-2003]

From my knowledge of palaeontology, the story goes something like this (please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong):At the end of the Cretaceous, the number of dinosaur taxa had declined from 30 to about 12. Across the K/T boundary the number fell to 7; so some dinosaurs did survive into the Tertiary, but these died out very quickly.

quote:

---

He also challenges them with the fact that if the k/t event did indeed wipe out about 75% of life world wide, why ALL of the dinos and so many others got through it quite unscathed?

---

This is incorrect. Most of the dinosaurs were extinct before the K/T event, which finished off much of the remainder.Let's do a little thinking - compare how many species existed before and after the K/T event. Is there a drop of 75% in number?This is beside the point anyway. Buzsaw, post your evidence for bogus radiometric dating methods, or retract your claims.The Rock Hound

So basically you're calling the scientists who actually study the relevant facts "illogical" and "irrational" because they don't agree with you.And I read the thread you linked to and it certainly doesn't seem like a victory for the creationists - their arguments were at best inconclusive while the coccolith evidence is very strong evidence agaisnt YEC flood geology.

quote:

---

Zephyr, you begin by saying you're speechless and then proceed to go on and on about how stupid buzz is. What's the matter? Can't refute the specifics of my statements? Why don't you be nice and simply cut n paste the specific statements I make which you deem to be erroneous and refute those individual statements if you can. Isn't that the way these exchanges are suppose to work?

---

The specifics are starting to seem pointless, which was the whole point of my post. I'm losing interest in telling you about specifics because you don't seem to acknowledge them most of the time. You seem bent on viewing everyone who disagrees with you as a brainwashed slave of the evo paradigm. But many of us were taught what you were and, through honest pursuit of the truth, realized we had been deceived. It's rather insulting to hear your blanket dismissals, and kills the spirit of good faith debate.

quote:

---

At the end of the Cretaceous, the number of dinosaur taxa had declined from 30 to about 12. Across the K/T boundary the number fell to 7; so some dinosaurs did survive into the Tertiary, but these died out very quickly.

---

It never ceases to amaze me how you people fire off these statements allegedly having gone on 60 million years ago in such detail as if you were discussing historical record of the civil war. You've all become so comfortable with these astronomical figures in the scores of million to billions that I do believe you've lost all sense of just how awfully long ago this was and how awfully much time there has been for the unknown factors to have happened undected by mere modern finite fallible humans. Then you so pompously give creatos unceasing heck for alleging all this order and complicated intricacy was designed by intelligence, using the data we have pertaining to a few thousand years ago.

quote:

---

This is incorrect. Most of the dinosaurs were extinct before the K/T event, which finished off much of the remainder.

---

Again, how can you be so sure?This admission, from an old earth evo Berkeley link. Please expecially note item #3 pertaining to K/T:

quote:

---

Complications: Now we're heading into the tough stuff; the reasons why we have no conclusive answer to the mystery of the K-T event. Several complications that make work hard for the scientist/detectives trying to crack this case:

​

1: The Fossil Record - It's not perfect, as you may know; that's why paleontologists keep finding new fossils: so much is hidden in the rocks! Most data on the K-T event comes from North America, which is one of the few areas known that has a somewhat continuous fossil record (remember, fossils are only formed under certain rare conditions, and are only found in sedimentary rocks). The infamous Hell Creek locality in Montana is one such continuous site enclosing the K-T boundary. UCMP researchers have led and continue to lead expeditions to Hell Creek, gathering fossils from the rich fossil beds. The secret to the K-T event may lie within our collections; who knows! Anyway, we don't know much about what was occurring in the rest of the world at the time of the K-T event. The marine fossil record gives us great hints about what was occurring within the sea, but how applicable is that to what went on in the terrestrial realm?
2: The Nature of Extinction - Extinction is not a simple event; it is not simply the death of all representatives of a group. It is the cessation of the origination of new species that renders a group extinct; if species are constantly dying off and no new ones originate through the process of evolution, then that group will go extinct over time no matter what happens. New dinosaur species ceased to originate around the K-T boundary; the question is, were they killed off (implying causation, especially a catastrophe), or were they not evolving and simply fading away (perhaps implying gradual environmental change)?

​

3: Time Resolution - Determining the age of rocks or fossils that are millions of years old is not easy; carbon dating only has a reasonable resolution when used with organic material that is less than about 50,000 years old, so it is useless with the 65 million year old K-T material. Other methods of age determination are often less accurate or less useful in certain situations. So we don't know exactly when the dinosaurs went extinct, and matching events precisely to give a picture of what was happening at a specific moment in the Mesozoic is not easy. Thus, the ultimate question of a gradual decline of dinosaurs vs. a sudden cataclysm is almost intractable without a wealth of good data.

---

The Great Mystery: Background[This message has been edited by buzsaw, 06-25-2003]

quote:

---

Please expecially note item #3 pertaining to K/T:

---

There's a big difference between acknowledging the imprecision of a method and discarding it entirely because it may be off by a few percentage points. Besides, you've not substantially responded to detailed descriptions of very close agreement between several different methods used for the same rock.

Buz, from that same page: Your quote is worrying about the exact sequence of events. They already are quite certain when it happened, to an accuracy at least comparable to "the summer after I was in the tenth grade." They are only trying to figure out whether you went to Six Flags before or after the time Jimmy found the case of beer - it was all the same summer. A long time ago.