Earth science curriculum tailored to fit wavering fundamentalists

Asimov covered that issue very well in The Relativity of Wrong (I think that's not it's original publication).

I'm on a tablet so urns urls are tricky so Google:Asa kbertsce coal

To expand a tad on Coyote's answer:An index fossil is easily recognized and occurs over a relatively small time period. They are used to correlate, not actually date, different places. If sedimentary layers A and B, widely separated, both contain index fossil X they are close to the same age. If igneous layer C above layer A is 5 Mya and igneous layer D below layer B is 5.2 Mya, that gives a range of dates in which A and B must lie.This is the source of the common YEC canard "The rocks date the fossils and the fossils date the rocks; that's circular reasoning."Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

That reminds me of the KBS Tuff, beloved of creationists because originally two very different dates were obtained, therefore radiometric dating doesn't work. Of course it's really a triumph of the scientific method; the differences were argued out in Nature (arguably he most prestigious scientific journal) rather than being buried (as YECs claim discordant dates are treated). Only when the reason for the discordant dates was well understood,and multiple labs had replicated the final analysis using both Ar-AR and fission tracks, was the question settled.Anyhoo, all the original samples were used up in the first measurements and the first attempt at replication in a different lab, so we'll never know exactly what went wrong initially. The original investigators' theory, published in the late 80's, is that the field workers, not trained geologists who collected the samples somewhat removed from the place where it overlays hominid fossils, got the wrong tuff because there are so many around there.

Talk to the local librarian. http://journals.aps.org/...-public-and-high-school-libraries.

I think Aarsdma isn't a less-than-10,000 years YEC, but he is an honest and knowledgeable source.Many of his ICR articles went against the party line. I don't know anything about his separation from ICR but I wonder...

FWIW the MIT libraries will send you a PDF of any paper they have (not OCR'd, just pictures of the paper) for $20.Document Services

Sudden relative to the time scale of the depositional process. Often not sudden on human time scales.

Except for the many places we see erosion inside the stack, despite your many unevidenced assertions to the contrary..

Neither is a demonstration. You still haven't figured out that your unsupported opinions are not evidence.How 'bout you explain exactly what known facts or referenced material makes that map a demonstration of your claim?Never happen.

Faith's water is magic water. It did whatever she wants it to do at the moment. Even if it contradicts something she said in the preceding message.

Yeah, they looked at reality instead of their own fantasy worlds.

They were looking at everything they could find, which was a lot. You don't need to see much of the geologic record to see there was no global flood and the Earth and life are old.Of course we've seen much more now, and all that we have found reinforces their conclusions.

Ask and ye shall receive.It's obvious that the guy has a sense of humor, and it's also obvious that he's discussing the need for better 14C calibration, which was still in its infancy at that time, and he's not talking about the validity of the overall method.

quote:

---

A number of 14C laboratories have been working for nearly 20 years dating samples of known age in order to determine just how far 14C dates vary from the true calendar, due to those variations of the 14C inventory of the atmosphere. Several of these laboratories have published their work, and many users of radiocarbon have seized upon the data, the better to align their dates with TRUTH. Truth, indeed.

​

FIGURE 5 represents along the bottom line the ages of dendrochronologically dated samples. Along the left margin are indicated the number of years by which 14C dates on those samples deviate from the known age. The hash spread across the chart represents the spread of such deviations as measured by Arizona, LaJolla, and Pennsylvania, the three major laboratories in this game. The vertical scatter indicates the variations between laboratories , ... not too bad at the recent end, but unwieldy as we go back in time.

​

Remember, please, that this represents the measurements made by only these three laboratories. Not included here are those of Yale, the British Museum, Groningen, Copenhagen, Heidelberg, New Zealand, Uppsala, UCLA, the Smithsonian, and all the other laboratories who have had some experience with this problem. The trend is clearly visible, and on that all laboratories agree. But they have yet to reach agreement on the refinement of the discrepancies you see here. Until those laboratories that are actually performing the work can agree on discrete correction factors for discrete time periods, I suggest that it is presumptuous in the extreme for any radiocarbon user to select any single correction or user so omniscient as to determine which scheme, which laboratory, is correct.

​

Given time, these people will get the matter straightened out, and then it will be of some purpose to apply the agreed corrections. Until that time, however, your publication of your dates corrected by one scheme or another merely adds to the existent confusion. Eventually, those corrected dates will have to be uncorrected in order to be recorrected in order to be correct. We all know how impossible it is to remove from the literature anything that has once been published. You are likely to wind up with two sets of dates on the same samples, all different, appearing at different times in different journals, and all bearing your name. Rather you than me.

​

Our chairman, Meyer Rubin, has come up with a truly marvelous phrase in referring to this business as rubber band years. Agreed, the ruler is elastic in spots. But it is elastic to the same degree in the same spots no matter from where the sample comes, or from which laboratory. Your 5,000-year date is just as valid as anybody else’s, and just as invalid. They may all be off by 300 years, but there is absolutely nothing you can do about it now. As relative dates, they’re fine. So relax. After all, this whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th-century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read.

---

If I had an email address for you I could send you the whole thing.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.Edited by JonF, : No reason given.

KBS Tuff is a good example. Human ancestry is involved. Creationists say bad stuff about it (Bones of Contention). In reality it's a triumph of modern science. Two methods, one well established (pig fossils) and the other fairly new at the time (the Ar-Ar radiometric method) disagreed by a *lot*, and Richard Leakey liked the older radiometric date. Because a hominid skull was found beneath it.It was all hashed out extremely publicly in Nature, arguably the most prestigious journal, for some time. Turned out the pigs were right. But first the scientists had to understand what caused the conflict. They only accepted the revised radiometric date after they figured out what caused the error (washed-in and older sediment), established a procedure for separating the constituents, and dated the tuffacious component agreeing with the pigs by multiple methods (Ar-Ar, then better developed, and fission tracks) inin multiple labs.Conflicting results were published in Nature, not hidden as YECs would have us believe. Radiometric dates were seriously questioned. Dogma didn't win; evidence, careful testing in any way anyone could think of, and replication won.I'm on a tablet so links aren't handy.