Is Evolution Science?

The list of claims attributed to Stansfield are at http://www.bible.ca/tracks/fast.htm From reading the page (and notign that many of the points are common creationist arguments) it is apparent that Stansfield is quoting creationist arguments and that he does NOT endorse them. This appears to be a case of intentional misrepresentation. I also suspect that Stansfield may have given more detailed responses that have been omitted - only one short paragraph is quoted and that seems inadequate.As to the specific points you quote. The Human Population Dynamics argument is worthless because it relies on a constant exponential growth which is not found in any real population except for cases where resources are unlimited. It's just a demonstration of the principle "Garbage in, garbage out".As for C14 dating, the relevant points are that
1) Nuclear tests have increased the amount of C14 in the atmosphere (and therefore the amount decaying would be expected to be greater than the production rate)2) The production rate depends on cosmic ray bombardment and therefore does vary.3) If the creationist claim were true it should have been shown by calibration studies - but in fact calibration studies using dendrochronology have shown otherwise - for the last 10,000 years we see fluctuations in production rate, not a growth curve. Other studies, while not as accurate as dendrochronology, have extended this for over 40,000 years.Moving on to the wood in the limestone - well since we only see a bit of wood (or something that looks like wood, in a low-quality black and white photo) what is there to explain ? Someone hammered a bit of wood into a crack in the stone, perhaps ?

There is no doubt that Stansfield is repeating creationist arguments to criticise them. The fact is that all the claims quoted ARE arguments that are or have been commonly used by creationists. In the Radiocarbon point the following text is retained "Creationists argue that..." (last sentence). A paragraph labelled "Dr Stansfield's "Answer"" does indeed criticise the arguments.It is POSSIBLE that Dr. Stansfield's rebuttal was limited to the short paragraph quoted - however, it would be very easy for him to include more (the problems with the arguments are well-known, and many if not all would have been easily answerable even in 1977) - so I strongly suspect that Stansfield offered a more detailed answer, which has been omitted. But if he did not then it is poor writing on his part and not because the arguments have any merit.

Actually just looking at the site linked to is enough to confirm that I was correct both in the idea that Stansfield was quoting creationist arguments to rebut them - and that much of Stansfield's rebuttal was omitted. The last is clearly dishonest because it claims to present Stansfield's answer to the cited arguments when most of it has been left out.Here is what Stansfield says about the population argument:"...It was pointed out in the first chapter that although populations tend to have large reproductive potentials, the limiting factors of the environment prevent unlimited geometric increase. The size of a population may fluctuate over various lengths of time, but the long-term picture is one of stability. Populations need not continually expand in order to survive over long periods of time. Many more limitations to population growth were undoubtedly imposed on primitive humans than are faced by modern people. For one thing, primitive humans were gatherers and hunters. Scarcity of food was probably severely restrictive of human population growth until relatively recent times (a few thousand years ago), when humans learned how to raise their own crops and domesticate animals (the dawn of agriculture)."