Dating Methodology and its Associated Assumptions

And even more than that, we see strong positive evidence that the rate of decay of at least some elements hasn't changed in a few billions of years now. Most of the visible light from a supernova is powered by the electron capture decays of nickel 56 to cobalt 56 and then on to iron, with (earthly) half lives of 5.9 and 77 days, respectively. And, imagine that! The light decay curve of a supernova nine billion LY away looks just like one you would calculate using these ground (= present day) radiodecay rates.Additionally, isotopes used for dating come in several flavors - both alpha and beta decay are used. These, as I understand it, are governed by different forces - on by the Strong and one by the Weak Nuclear Force. It's a rather big coincidence to have ages from four or more different isotopes match up, like for example in the Isua rocks from Greenland, if they all have been tinkered with by some deity......

WT, See if your library has Brent Dalrymple's 'The Age of the Earth.' It's a little out of date - 12 years old or so, and the accuracy of measurement has improved somewhat in that time. He goes one better than you're asking. His Table 4.1, for example, quotes ages using three different isotope systems determined by five different reasearch groups on the Uivak gneisses of Labrador:
3.76 +/- 0.15 billion years (uranium - lead}
3.55 +/- 0.07 billion years ( rubidium - strontium)
3.56 +/- 0.08 billion years ( Rb - Sr)
3.61 +/- 0.20 billion years (Rb - Sr)
3.56 +/- 0.20 billion years (samarium - neodymium)And those are less than a tenth of the entries in the table, all done before 1985. There are still several groups actively researching the old rocks in Labrador and Greenland. They just keep on turning out dates consistent with these - even when they try different methods like argon-argon and lutetium-hafnium! Even when they're just grad students trying to get a degree, and not Evil Atheistic Conspirators hell-bent on destroying Christendom and all of Western Civilization!

Citation, please? It appears to be online - Charles Lyell (1797-1875) geologist.
- how 'bout a page number?

Again, I call your bluff, WT. Document this claim or withdraw it.

Again, I'm no "respected evo," but I'll contradict it. The Cretaceous ended about 64,500,000 years ago, as attested by maybe a couple of hundred dates using five or more separate, independent radioisotope methods on rocks from all around the globe. If you want a pile of links, Mark24 posted them here a few months ago. I'll find the thread, if you'd like.Where did Lyell claim 80 million? Just give me the volume and chapter from that online edition, if you don't remember the page.Or withdraw your claim that he said so.

Bullshit, as you've been shown repeatedly.If you would quit making stuff up, WT, I might believe a little of what you write. I went to the library a few minutes ago, and found that Lyell did, in fact, offer what he himself called an estimate that the Cretaceous ended about 80 million years ago. He made this estimate in the 1860's, though, not in "Principles." And though Milton may claim to be an "atheist," he damn sure can't claim to be a scholar. He's a crank who knows how to sell books to gullible people.

Blind luck, mostly, and a decent appreciation of how slowly shellfish and the like evolve. Where did Milton get this figure, do you think? The thickness of the Cretaceous here beneath my desk is zero meters. An average worldwide thickness is hardly indicative of rate of deposition in any one spot: Holocene deposits are building up quite a bit faster 100 miles south of New Orleans than they are in Lubbock, Texas.If dating is so terribly inaccurate, WT, why to the 14C dates in Lake Suigetsu increase monotonically with depth in the core from there? How are all 250 of them "wrong?" Why are there 50 dates from 100,000 varves down or so that ALL show "too old to date" by carbon-14?Document some of this fraud that goes on "all the time," WT, or shut up about it, already.

I'm not being nasty or posting insults - I'm merely asking you to back up this claim of continuous, widespread fraud on the part of all of the hundreds of poor grad students worldwide that have worked in this field. Has every one of them been God-sense-ectomized? Really? And they're all willing to throw out data that cost sometimes a couple of thousand dollars per data point just to win schoolkids for the International Secularist Conspiracy?I think you and/or Milton are making these claims up out of the whole cloth. Produce some evidence that discarding data is a widespread practice, or retract the claim.

Mark - I will summarize Willowtree's reply in advance:
"CONSPIRACY! Their God-Sense was removed as punishment for not having God-Sense!"This message has been edited by Coragyps, 10-28-2004 12:53 PM

The YECs have a museum in LA? Wow! And they found dinosaur bones at La Brea? Wow Wow!You're making this stuff up, Willowtree.

Like a myocardial infarction serious. Find me a record of ONE dinosaur that came out of the La Brea tar pits. One.You can't do it.

WT, have you ever answered a single question asked of you in all the time you've been around this board? All you do is whine - possibly as much as Rush Limbaugh does! Crap, man!

Does anyone here know what the fuck he's blathering about? Other than "dinosaurs" at La Brea, I mean.

And why, in the case of floresiensis, do the papers report four different dating methods, that agree? Should we look on Flores or elsewhere for the huge mound of results they had to discard?

Unfair and untrue, wj, and you'd know it if your GodSense were still present. The perch in Milton's birdcage may be empty, but the newspapers at the bottom are heavily laden.