Stunning victory of Creation

If this is your definition of dishonesty, then you are being dishonest yourself. They are selecting samples of known date as a way of testing the system, and showing that the dates come out wrong. Normally when we test things using instruments, and we get a result that is close to zero, or so high that it goes off the scale, we use another instrument. But radiometric dating isn't like that. They want to know the age before they test it, which defeats the purpose of the test. I can't see anything wrong with exposing the weaknesses of these tests.

No, Piltdown Man is such an embarrassment that nobody wants to use it any more. But the school books are still using Haeckel's embryos that were touched up to make them more convincing, and the black and white peppered moths that were glued onto tree trunks and actually demonstrate nothing about evolution.

Mike

 

"No, Piltdown Man is such an embarrassment that nobody wants to use it any more. But the school books are still using Haeckel's embryos that were touched up to make them more convincing, and the black and white peppered moths that were glued onto tree trunks and actually demonstrate nothing about evolution."

OK then maybe you can tell me where these modern textbooks are that still use Haekel's drawings as part of the instruction for evolution. Ontogeby is a valid science so mere examples of embryoes is not sufficient.

As far as the moths go...Have you tried taking pictures up close of living things? The pictures were staged but they were staged in a reprepsentative way. Studies show that the pictures are representative of the normal resting habits of the moths.

Majerus, M. E. N. (1998). Melanism: evolution in action. Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press, pp. xiii, 338.

And I think Piltdown was a hoax that was never that widely accepted.

 

"(1) You side with those who claim since the 50's that the age of the earth has changed from thousands of years old then about 50 years later it is now billions and billions of years old. Is that honesty? The evolutionists are in a constant state of change."

I do not believe that the age of the earth was estimated at thousands of years of age in the past fifty years. Perhaps you can demonstrate such.

I also must ask if you object to all advance. Do you allow your doctor to use techniques that were not available 100 years ago? Do you use transportation systems that have been developed in the last fifty years? Or is it only certain areas of science that you think should not be allowed to collect more and better data?

"(2)Research requires documentation. I have seen none to support your generalization about YE folks. Give some examples from men like Morris and ICR. "

and

"If this is your definition of dishonesty, then you are being dishonest yourself. They are selecting samples of known date as a way of testing the system, and showing that the dates come out wrong. "

Not exactly. Let's give an example.

Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 146-147.

Morris based this on a legitimate paper [Funkhouser, J. G. and J. J. Naughton, 1968. Radiogenic helium and argon in ultramafic inclusions from Hawaii. Journal of Geophysical Research 73(14): 4601-4607. ] thatwas fdoing testing on some rocks from a recent lava flow in Hawaii.

Now, when rocks are heated to a sufficiently high temperature and are melted, the argon in the rocks escape. When the lava hardens into rock, the potassium-40 begins decaying into Ar-39. By measuring the ratios, a date can be determined. Now if the rocks are not heated sufficiently, the argon does not escape and the rocks will date older than they really are.

Funkhouser and Naughton were purposely removing xenoliths from the rocks that did not melt to see how much older they would date. Of course they dated as old because they had not been reset by melting. They also tested the bulk rocks and found that the ages were zero, as expected.

So Morris takes the data that measured too old, ignores the known reason that it dated too old, and then claims that radiometric dating does not work. If he actually read the paper, he should know better. It was easy to see and was even the purpose of the work. He lied about the true results of the study. Properly selected samples dated correctly. Samples that the geologsts could tell did not fully melt did not date correctly.

 

How about Austin?

http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-224.htm

"The observation that obviously recent lava flows from the north rim of Grand Canyon give ages even older than the deeply buried lava flows, challenges the basic assumptions upon which the isochron dating method is based. The discovery of an "old age" in an obviously "young" series of lava flows has encouraged further research at ICR."

Basically what Austin is claiming is that isochron dating does not work because it yielded a date for a lava flow older than a lava flow that was underneath it. But there are some things that he is not telling the reader.

When selecting samples for isochron dating, they must be cogenetic, that is they must have been isotopically homogeneous. Austin selected samples that did not meet this requirement. Instead they came from four different flows and a phenocryst, a grain that was not melted when the lava flowed but that likely solidified in the magma chamber from which the flows came.

Even better is that geologists will sometimes deliberately choose non-cogenetic samples. Why? Because they can be used to determine the age of the common source material for the different flows. Austin is aware of this possiblity because he cites an article on this very thing. ( http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-178.htm , C. Brooks, D.E. James, and S.R. Hart, "Ancient Lithosphere: Its Role in Young Continental Volcanism," Science, 193 (17 Sept. 1976): 1086-1094.)

So what this means is that he was dating the lithosphere under the older flow. This was already known to be older than the other flow (it is underneath for the obvious one).

Austin incorrectly carried out an isochron dating, knew what his mistakes were, knew what he was actually dating, and still submits this as evidence that isochron dating does not work. He lied about the meaning of his results.

 

Austin did a similar thing with samples of rock from Mt. St. Helens.

http://www.creationism.org/articles/swenson1.htm - link to YEC article on "Dr. Steven Austin and others from the Institute for Creation Research" collecting rocks from Mt. St. Helens and having them dated.

This is a typical example of the trickry involved with some YEC claims. The dating method involved was K-Ar and the guys at ICR claim that excess argon caused the rocks that were only a few years old to date to millins of years old. Big problem for radioisotope dating, right. WRONG. As it turns out, the rate of decay to Ar is so slow that it is not possible to date things less than about two million years old, older if you want better accuracy. They submitted the material to a lab which states up front that they cannot date things younger than 2 million years. They submitted it without telling what it was. And of course the dates came back within the noise of the method. The actual age was much less than the accuracy of the method so the given dates are just noise. The problem is not that radioisotope dating does not work, it is that it was misapplied in this case. I find it disturbing that the ICR would deliberately put out misinformation in their quest. Unfortuneately, there are YECers out there who are experts at picking samples that they know will not date correctly and dishonestly passing that off as problems with geology.

More information on this from another poster.

http://www.baptistboard.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php/topic/28/2740/2.html#000027

And my follow up to that poster.

 

Let's do an exampl of Snelling and quote mining together.

"In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favour of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation." (Ridley, Mark, "Who doubts evolution?" "New Scientist", vol. 90, 25 June 1981, p. 831)

USed many places including
http://www.evolutionisdead.com/quotes.php?QID=313&cr=29
http://www.genesispark.org/genpark/link/link.htm
http://www.linda.net/creation.html

You will also find that the presentation of this quote in this form originated with Snelling according to the citations. Good old Snelling.

Well, lets give a fuller quote.

So you see that what he is saying is not that the fossil record is not any use for proving evolution. He is saying that he knows of three better methods. And since he is a zoologists, is it surprising that he finds three subjects from his field to be the best at proving evolution is true?

Snelling tried to pass off a quote that shows that there are more ways than just the fossil record to support evolution as a quote against evolution. Do you really think that the author intended the statement as Snelling quoted it? Do you really think that the author thinks the fossil record is worhtless? DO you really think that the author does not accept evolution?

 

Snelling and dating...

http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/docs/v21n3_date-dilemma.asp

Now the good Dr. Snelling claims that he found a piece of wood in a Triassic era sandstone and had it dated. The Triassic was roughly 200 million years ago. But it C14 dated to about 33000 years old. Obviously this means C14 dating is flawed, right?

Nope. What it means is that Snelling took an iron concretion and presented it for dating. Sandstones tend to be porous and water can flow through them and deposit minerals in the sandstone. Iron concretions are one type of deposit that can be formed and they are known to geologists to give incorrect dates because they are not organic in nature and due to the flowing water are likely contaminated.

The head of the C14 dating group at Geochron Labs, where Snelling had the sample sent for analysis, told Snelling that the sample was not wood but likely an iron concretion. Snelling said to date it anyway. He also still reported the sample as wood and claims that this shows that dating is flawed. He will not submit his work to peer review nor will he allow others to inspect the sample.

It does not sound as if he is being honest here.

 

How about false claims of fresh dinosaur blood being found?

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/4232cen_s1997.asp

AIG claims that actual ed blood cells were found of a dinosaur. And since a blood cell cannot survive long, this must mean a young earth. But not so fast, my friend.

Now what was actually found was this. A very well preserved dinosaur was found. So well preserved that the fossils of the individual cells could be observed. (There are other interpretations, even less kind to the YECers.) Within these cells were a few organic molecules. They removed these molecules and had them tested. On the basis of a number of tests, they found that the compounds contained heme (the oxygen carrying group in blood cells) and concluded that the molecules were from the dinosaur tissue. The abstract reference is given below. So, a scientist reports then they found a well preserved fossil that contained fragments of heme and AIG reports that actual blood cells were found. Junk science.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/94/12/6291

 

How about more misrepresenting what a date actually means?

The RATE group has proposed that C14 dating was inaccurate because they were able to obtain a young date from a diamond in a supposedly hundreds of millions of years old formation.

A little digging reveals that the age they got was about 57000 years. This is significant. Why? Because this is beyond the range of accurate ages possible for C14 dating. For a perfectly preserved sample, about 50000 years is the limit. Beyond that, it becomes impossible to separate the C14 signal from the background radiation no matter how well shieled the lab. So a date older than 50000 years only means that it is older than 50000 years. No way to tell how much older.

The RATE people were clear to point out that the C14 found could not have been from contamination because it was locked inside a diamond. Whay they did not tell you was that background radiation will for small amounts of C14 even in a diamond.

So if you were to ask a geologists what date to expect if you were to carbon date a diamond (after he picked himself up off the floor from his laughing fit) I would expect him to predict that you would get the meaningless age of about 50000 years. When RATE gets this predicable answer, they turn around and claim that it means that dating does not work. Me thinks they are hiding something.

 

How about more quote mining?

http://www.evolutionisdead.com/quotes.php?QID=297&cr=58

"Species that were once thought to have turned into others have been found to overlap in time with these alleged descendants. In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another." (Stanley, S.M., The New Evolutionary Timetable: Fossils, Genes, and the Origin of Species, 1981, p. 95)

Oh no. It sounds like there might not be the plethora of transitionals as we were led to believe. Maybe solace will be found in the full quote.


[quoteSuperb fossil data have recently been gathered from deposits of early Cenozoic Age in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming. These deposits represent the first part of the Eocene Epoch, a critical interval when many types of modern mammals came into being. The Bighorn Basin, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, received large volumes of sediment from the Rockies when they were being uplifted, early in the Age of Mammals. In its remarkable degree of completeness, the fossil record here for the Early Eocene is unmatched by contemporary deposits exposed elsewhere in the world. The deposits of the Bighorn Basin provide a nearly continuous local depositional record for this interval, which lasted some five million years. It used to be assumed that certain populations of the basin could be linked together in such a way as to illustrate continuous evolution. Careful collecting has now shown otherwise. Species that were once thought to have turned into others have been found to overlap in time with these alleged descendants. In fact, the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another. Furthermore, species lasted for astoundingly long periods of time. David M. Schankler has recently gathered data for about eighty mammal species that are known from more than two stratigraphic levels in the Bighorn Basin. Very few of these species existed for less than half a million years, and their average duration was greater than a million years.[/quote]

Oh, so the author was talking about a specific geographic location, and not the fossil record in general. Not an honest quote, do you think?

 

Uh, 'scues me UTEOTW, but I'm a little lost here. Are you saying the mass of matter before the big bang would hve been approximately 20 lbs to as little as a microgram? (I am assuming you are using standard Earth sea-level gravity as the standard for measuring mass since you are using weight.)

Do I understand this correct? So, with so little mass does this little ball of mass contain all of the mass and energy of the universe within it before the big-bang? That must be some huge amount of energy since the mass is so small. What do you propose this energy takes the form of?

Am I missing what you are saying entirely?

Just curious. I don't mean to sound condescending, I am trying to understand what you are describing.

Thx,
Phillip </font>[/QUOTE]Thanks Philip. I could not have responded nearly as well. I was too .

 

Let's look at another YE leader. Hovind and the great cyctochrome C lie as it has become known.

While we are talking about chemistry, Dr. "Dino" Hovind himself said "Well, now, hold it. If you want to just pick one item and that's supposed to prove relationship, did you know that human Cytochrom [sic] C is closest to a sunflower? So really the sunflowers are our closest relative folks."

Now since humans and chimps have identical cyctochrome C, how can the sunflower be closer?

Here are the codes, BTW, for each.

Human:
mgdvekgkki fimkcsqcht vekggkhktg pnlhglfgrk tgqapgysyt aanknkgiiw gedtlmeyle npkkyipgtk mifvgikkke eradliaylk katne

Chimp:
mgdvekgkki fimkcsqcht vekggkhktg pnlhglfgrk tgqapgysyt aanknkgiiw gedtlmeyle npkkyipgtk mifvgikkke eradliaylk katne

Sunflower:
asfaeapagd pttgakifkt kcaqchtvek gaghkqgpnl nglfgrqsgt tagysysaan knmaviween tlydyllnpk kyipgtkmvf pglkkpqera dliaylktst a

I think Hovind will say anything. But he told a lie here.

http://members.cox.net/ardipithecus/evol/HovindLie.html

 

How about a different misrepresentation of cytochrome C?

http://www.creationscience.com/

"One computer-based study, using cytochrome c, a protein used in energy production, compared 47 different forms of life. If evolution happened, this study should have found that, for example, the rattlesnake was most closely related to other reptiles. Instead, based on this one protein, the rattlesnake was most similar to man. Since this study, experts have discovered hundreds of similar contradictions."

As we have seen, chimp cyctochrome C is identical to human so the rattlesnake cannot be closer. For copmarison, here is the rattlesnake sequence to compare with that above.

gdvekgkkif smkcgtchtv eeggkhktgp nlhglfgrkt gqavgysyta anknkgiiwg ddtlmeylen pkkyipgtkm vftglkskke rtdliaylke atak

And human again:

mgdvekgkki fimkcsqcht vekggkhktg pnlhglfgrk tgqapgysyt aanknkgiiw gedtlmeyle npkkyipgtk mifvgikkke eradliaylk katne

 

When I read the article and heard John Morris speak about the issue in 1998 I did not hear him make the claims you suggest. As I recall he was taking a look at someone else's data and not his own using it to show the inconsistency in the standard way of dating and how it is not always reliable. He was showing how the evolutionists make claims without substance.

 

More misrepresenting of dating results.

http://www.icr.org/newsletters/impact/impactoct03.html

"In view of the profound significance of these AMS 14C measurements, the ICR Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) team has undertaken its own AMS 14C analyses of such fossil material.2 The first set of samples consisted of ten coals obtained from the U. S. Department of Energy Coal Sample Bank maintained at the Pennsylvania State University. The ten samples include three coals from the Eocene part of the geological record, three from the Cretaceous, and four from the Pennsylvanian. These samples were analyzed by one of the foremost AMS laboratories in the world. Figure 1 below shows in histogram form the results of these analyses...Applying the uniformitarian approach of extrapolating 14C decay into the indefinite past translates the measured 14C/12C ratios into ages that are on the order of 50,000 years."

Now, remember what we learned earlier when the RATE group tried to C14 date a diamond. Same thing applies here except that you have to add the coal is much more porous than the diamond and has the additional possibility of contamination. And a trace amount of contamination is sufficient to give ages on the order of the 50,000 years they report. Background radiation will also convert some of the carbon in the coal to C14 on a continuous basis. This may be even more likely for coal than for a diamond because the coal ash itself can contain trace amounts of radiactive oxides. Plus, 50,000 years old is right at the detectable limit for C14 in a sample.

In other words, once again these guys used C14 in an inappropriate manner, got an age that merely indicates that the sample is at least 50,000 years old (possibly much older, it is impossible to tell), and yet will report this as a problem for C14 dating.

 

"When I read the article and heard John Morris speak about the issue in 1998 I did not hear him make the claims you suggest. As I recall he was taking a look at someone else's data and not his own using it to show the inconsistency in the standard way of dating and how it is not always reliable. He was showing how the evolutionists make claims without substance."

Others have dated that flow. They, too, chose samples that were not cogenic because they wanted to date the age of the sample for the flow, not the flow itself. This is a recognized technique. They did it on purpose. Austin misrepresented the results by saying the technique was dating the flow itself. It was not. And he knew this because he cited the paper where they described that this is what they were doing.

 

How about this example of how dates from different mammoths are dishonestly compared to make it look like C14 dating does not work.

I will be quoting Walt Brown from this page.

http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FrozenMammoths8.html

You can also see Kent Hovind ("Dr. Dino") repeat the claims here.

http://www.drdino.com/QandA/index.jsp?varFolder=CreationEvolution&varPage=CarbonPotassiumargondating.jsp

"This probably explains why different parts of the first Vollosovitch mammoth had widely varying radiocarbon ages—29,500 and 44,000 RCY. One part of Dima was 40,000 RCY, another was 26,000 RCY, and “wood found immediately around the carcass” was 9,000 –10,000 RCY. The lower leg of the Fairbanks Creek mammoth had a radiocarbon age of 15,380 RCY, while its skin and flesh were 21,300 RCY.147 The two Colorado Creek mammoths had radiocarbon ages of 22,850 +/- 670 and 16,150 +/- 230 years, respectively."

Obviously C14 dating cannot work because different parts of the same animals are dating to widely different ages. Not so fast, my friend. Let's check the references.

The source cited for the first claim is

Troy L. Pewe: “Quaternary Stratigraphic nomenclature in unglaciated Central Alaska” Geological survey professional paper #862 US GOV printing office 1975, pg. 30.

Now, no where in this can anyone seem to find any mammoths at all dated to 29500 or 44000 years old, so it is unclear where these dates came from.

If you will go to the reference material for the Dima mammoth claim

Ukraintseva, V. V., 1993. Vegetation Cover and Environment of the "Mammoth Epoch" in Siberia. Hot Springs, SD: Mammoth Site of Hot Springs of South Dakota.

you will find that there really was not two different ages found for the mammoth with a third for the surrounding plant material. In fact, the dates for the mammoth and for the surrounding deposits are all consistent.

And if you look at the first source, you will soon discove the problem with the claims on the Fairbanks Creek mammoth. The 15380 years old date was from a mammoth found under about 80 ft of silt in 1940 by Osborn. The 21300 year old date was a baby mammoth found in 1948 by Geist in a beaver dam. These are not the same animal nor were they even close.

It is not honest to claim that two different mammoths found 8 years apart in completely different circumstances were the same animal.

 

Have you ever heard the one about how long it takes various salts to accumulate in the oceans? This one is Morris again.

One of the common arguments you run across is that the earth cannot be old based on the rate at which various salts run into the ocean. This line originated with Henry Morris (Morris, Henry M., 1974. Scientific Creationism, Green Forest, AR: Master Books, pp. 153-155.) and is still used by young earthers today. For an example see ICR.

http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-017.htm

The origin is work published in 1965 (Riley, J. P. and G. Skirrow, (editors). 1965. Chemical Oceanography (Volume I) Academic Press, New York.) where the residence times of various metals in the ocean were listed. Now the first mistake is that these are residence times which is how long, on average, the metal stays in the ocean before being removed. But Morris calls it the time "to accumulate in ocean from river inflow." This is a major difference and error.*

Now the range of residence times is from 100 years for aluminum to 260 million years for sodium. Usually YECers will just quote the few in the middle that come out to be in the 6 - 10 thousand range. (Props to ICR here for at least including all the values even if they did not tell the truth about what is meant by the data.)

The other thing that they fail to tell you is that these elements are known to be at or very close to equlibrium, that is that the rate in is equal to the rate out. There is no net accumulation. This means that even if the residence time of nickel is 9000 years that this cannot be used to determine an age because you have no way of knowing how long it has been at equilibrium.

SO now we have exposed two flaws in how ICR presents the data. Flaws that they should have been aware of. So either they are talking about things they do not understand and pretending that they do. Or they are purposefully leaving things out in order to misrepresent the data.

But, they have been called on this enough times that some YEC organizations ae trying to address the problems. See the following for example.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3910.asp

In this, Sarfati tries to demonstrate that only 27% of the sodium that comes into the oceans each year is removed. He believes that he is showing that the ocean is not at equilibrium with respect to sodium. But he makes two major mistakes. The first is very serious. They miss the amount of sodium removed by the alteration of basalt by hydrothermal activity by a factor of 35. If you go back to the original by Austin and Humphreys, you will find that one of their references is a book (Holland, H. D., 1978. The Chemistry of the Atmophere and the Oceans, New York: John Wiley and Sons.) that gives the correct value. So why did they put in such a bad value? The other bad claim is that there is not any removal of sodium by biological activity. Another reference of theirs (Holland, H.D., 1984. The Chemical Evolution of the Atmosphere and the Oceans, Princeton: Princeton University Press.) tells of biological removal, so there is no excuse for this either. It is a misrepresentation, but it is of much less consequence because of the smaller amounts involved.

Once the corrections are made, instead of only 27% being removed, you come up with 7% too much being removed. This is well with the range of experimental error and is consistent with the oceans being in equilibrium with reference to sodium.

And you see these kinds of mistakes made often. Bob will often get stirred up and post for pages on uranium instead of sodium. What he always fails to tell you is that the difference in measured removal rates from the input rates is less than the experimental error in measuring the rates. This means that equilibrium is within the experimental error. So from the data we have, you cannot say that uranium is not at equilibrium.

------------------------

*Let's explain the difference. Say that you have a 100 gallon tank and it has a valve at the bottom that will allow exactly 10 gallons per minute to run out by the force of the head of water when the tank is completely full. Now the residence time would be (100/10=) 10 minutes. The time to accumulate 100 gallons from an empty tank, however, would be much more than 10 minutes because as soon as you started adding water, some would begin to leave through the valve. Less water would leave than was entering until the tank was full and the situation reached equilibrium. That is also the case here. The residence times are listed but the time to accumulate would be much greater. And since they are at equilibrium, you cannot tell how long they have been at equilibrium so you cannot use them to date.

 

Enough examples for now?

One thing to carefully notice isthat for almost all of these I provided links so you can go see where these things are still in use. Notice, too, that most of these are examples of not just these guys being wrong, but of them deliberately misstating the truth.

In contrast, when YEers bring up things like Haeckel or Piltdown, try finding where any of these things are still in use.

Even this short list of problems I have noted above should give you an idea of why I find these guys to be so dishonest.