IUBio

brain sizes: Einstein's and women's

John Knight jwknight at polbox.com
Sat Oct 5 20:46:52 EST 2002


"Dave Wilson" <testaccount2002 at btopenworld.com> wrote in message
news:3D9F5844.6030809 at btopenworld.com...
> Matthew Amsel wrote:
> > John Knight wrote:
> >>This makes four FALSE assumptions:
> >>
> >>1)  That Earth has been around "millions of years".  This CANNOT be
proven,
> >>scientifically or otherwise.
> >>
> >
> > nor can it be disproven. given that carbon dating gives us dates in the
> > millions, it is far simpler to assume that this is the range of time
> > rather than to assume that:
> > A) the rate of carbon 14 decay in the universe varies with time
> > or B) God purposely made the earth in such a way as to appear millions
> > (closer to the billion range,    actually) of years old to a bunch of
> > guys who wouldn't even appear for millenia
> > gotta love occam's razor
> >
>
> For anything beyond ~50,OOO years, carbon dating is pretty inaccurate,
> (and even within its usable timescale, it needs organic content, and
> really is best with calibration from dendrochronology for good accuracy)
> but radiometric dating using other elements (Potassium/Argon,
> Argon/Argon, Uranium series, etc) can be used for the longer geological
> timescales.
> Particularly where the composition of samples and timescales is such
> that different radiometric methods can be used, a high degree of
> confidence can be placed in the results.
> Dave W.
>

There are two primary problems with both techniques:

1)  It's assumed that the increase or decrease in radioactivity is a
constant, and we have NO way to prove that it is.

2)  The ONLY factor (written history) which can be used to calibrate either
technique is not accurate itself.

There's abundant scienfic evidence that increases and decreases in
radioactivity are not constant.  As just one example, recent measurements of
the changes in the strength of the Earth's magnetic field suggest that the
magnetic field may have been so strong just 5,000 years ago that space
radiation may not have even been able to enter the atmosphere.

Obviously this would throw the calibration way off.  On top of that, the
assumption that any existing written document is older than 2,000 years is
an ASSUMPTION, so the calibration of organic matter that's associated with a
2,000 year old written document is based exclusively on an ASSUMPTION that
cannot be proven with any scientific validity.

A small error in that ASSUMPTION would throw off the extrapolation by
thousands or tens of thousands of years.

The third problem, of course, is that 2 people become 6 billion people in a
big hurry.  At the rate of growth of the US, with wars, abortion, and the
pill, it would take only 1,500 years to go from two people to the current
world population of 6 billion http://christianparty.net/population.htm

John Knight







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