In point of fact, what's being observed is that the magnetic field is declining in strength. It's an inferrence that it will reverse. There are contrary opinions, such as those that show that the energy being lost is not being stored in quadrapoles, octopoles, and so on.
I realize most readers of/. are unwilling to consider reading this paper due to where it's published, but if you are willing to evaluate a paper by a PhD with many patents from working at Sandia Labs, try reading this paper. It shows how the magnetic field is declining and not storing this energy in the non-dipole moments.
I didn't dispute the fact that it fits the model for volume diffusion; I was addressing your claim in your post:
mutiple dates using different systems of material from the same sample have been shown to give consistent results (a rather important and reproducible result you seem to shrug off)
Just one simple point for your claim that dates are repeatable inside one rock. Check out
C.S. Pickles, S.P. Kelley, S.M. Reddy and J. Wheeler, "Determination of High Spatial Resolution Argon Isotope Variations in Metamorphic Biotites," Geochemica et Cosmochimica Acta, 61 (1997): pp.3809-3833
for the conclusion:
128 Ar isotopic analyses were obtained from ten profiles across biotite grains in high-grade metamorphic rocks, and Ar-Ar ages
within individual grains ranged from 161Ma-514Ma
Citing qualifications is not IMHO a useful endeavor. The facts are more useful.
And yes your insight is quite correct - there is no way to validate the method. However your assertion that the only weak link is the geologic context is, I believe, a bit of an understatement. While the geologic surroundings are quite important, so are simple things like: if the rock is exposed to air and sunlight, diffusion of Ar will be accelerated over a rock buried in a glacier. Similarly a fast-moving stream or river will cause leaching which can effect several of the minerals used in dating.
But perhaps most significant are the assumptions made about both the initial conditions and about the time between formation and measurement. Initial conditions which are not known can have a profound effect on the measurements. And the assumption underlying all of this is generally referred to as "uniformitarianism". To the reader who may be unfamiliar with this term, that is a reference to the assumption that everything is today as it has been in the past, that there were no major disruptions in the environment, that gradual change is the only agent of change.
The opposing theory to uniformitarianism admits that we don't know what conditions were like thousands of years ago, that radioactive decay might be effected by, for example, a neutrino burst from a supernova, or from a different phenomenon that we can't explain today. It also asserts that the Grand Canyon, for example, was not formed over billions of years, but was actually formed far more rapidly (and there is strong evidence of that being the case).
Allowing the point you have made, the bottom line result remains: there is no known case of a known-age sample (age known via a completely different method) that tested accurately and repeatably. Yes you may say the problem is we only absolutely know the ages of things that are so young that they cannot be accurately measured due to variations in initial conditions or contamination levels of decay products.
However the conclusion remains: radiometric dating has never been verified by anything other than radiometric dating. That is circular reasoning, and it is not a valid basis for science.
Just because radiometric dating can give wildly inacurate results, doesn't invalidate it.
But please consider this point: what other measurement techniques are widely used, quoted to the public as absolute truth, taught in schools as authoritative, yet have such a description from a defender of them?
And consider the definition of science as requiring both falsifiability and repeatable experiments. Can you cite an example of a known-age rock that was repeatedly accurately dated? If not, then the only proven results of radiometric dating are those that point out its inaccuracies, and there are none that prove its accuracy.
Yes of course many things make radiometric dates potentially inaccurate, such as heating too much or too little, leaching, initial conditions that are other than assumed, proximity to sources of radioactivity, diffusion, etc.
But any measurement used in science needs to be proven to be accurate before it's blindly accepted, and radiometric dating has not achieved that.
Take Carbon-14 as another case. Live mollusks have been tested and, were they able to be surprised, they would have had their shells knocked off by the news that they have been dead for 2300 years according to C14 dating. Or take the writing of Dr. Robert Lee in the Anthropological Journal of Canada in 1981:
The troubles of the radiocarbon dating method are undeniably deep and serious. Despite 35 years of technological refinement and better understanding, the underlying assumptions have been strongly challenged, and warnings are out that radiocarbon may soon find itself in a crisis situation. Continuing use of the method depends on a fix-it-as-we-go approach, allowing for contamination here, fractionation there, and calibration whenever possible. It should be no surprise then, that fully half of the dates are rejected. The wonder is, surely, that the remaining half has come to be accepted.... No matter how useful it is, though, the radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually the selected dates.
what kind of effect these impacts have on radioactive dating methods?
Radiometric dating has so many problems that it probably wouldn't effect it at all.
Every dating done on a known-age volcanic rock has resulted in wildly inaccurate data. Example: Mt. St. Helens rocks were dated at (varies by sample, that alone should raise red flags about the radiometric dating concept) values ranging from 350,000 to 2,800,000 years. The samples came from the dome, which was known to be 8 years old at the time of the testing. Apologists for radiometric dating respond that this is a case of poorly selected samples; yet they have no counter-example of a well-chosen sample that shows the correct date. Nor do they answer how to know that tests in other sites are correctly chosen, aside from their rather vicious ad hominem attacks.
Further examples: the Hualalai volcano, which erupted in 1800-1801, was tested at 1,600,000 years old. The Etna volcano eruption of 1792 is dated at 1,410,000 years ago. There are many others but that makes the point - radiometric dating is badly flawed, from K-Ar to C14 to isochrons to Ru-Sr and the rest.
So since every case where the age of a rock is known the measured age is wrong, on what basis is the assumption made that rocks where the age is unknown that the methods are correct?
Science is supposed to be about repeatable experiments with falsifiability criteria. Falsification of radiometric dating is simple: find a rock of known age, if the test can't repeatedly produce the correct answer, then the method is not accurate. So it's time to find another dating method that does produce repeatably correct results with known age samples.
Dinosaurs were the prehistoric form of birds. If you've ever had your Porsche® automobile or other expensive motor vehicle shat on by a flock of pigeons [google.com], you have been attacked by the descendants of dinosaurs.
Fraid not - Alan Feduccia, recognized the world over as a leading expert on bird biology, says the notion that birds are related to dinosaurs is absurd.
I would pick Dr. Morris's point about the hydrologic cycle (oceans, evaporation, condensation, precipation, aggregation, flow to oceans) which is made repeatedly in the Bible. Of course I can't pick what would be most impressive to you.
Just curious, what (I gather about 2nd law of thermo) bothers you about Dr. Morris's work?
The Koran (or Qu'ran, transliteration makes it tough to be exact) clearly states both that to disbelieve anything in it is heresy, and that the earth is flat.
Yes the phrase "Stretches out the heavens" was not understood in relation to redshift, there was no such thing as redshift known until pretty recently. But regardless of the failings of human understanding, it is an accurate fact.
Given the success rate of science vs. religon in showing us what the physical world is like, I know what horse I'd bet on.
Which I'd partially agree with - religion is probably the thing the Lord Jesus Christ was most against when He was here. The religious systems were primary in getting his anger up.
However to your point, the Bible has had scientific truths in it that scientists over millennia have ignored. For centuries, it was thought that you needed to drain blood in order to cure disease. But in the Bible it clearly states "the life is in the blood". And for years scientists taught that the earth was flat, whereas the Bible clearly indicates it's a sphere. For years it was taught that the stars did not move, whereas the Bible says God "stretches out the heavens" - stars in motion did not gain acceptance until relatively recently. There are many other things in the same vein. No other sacred book has anything like that record.
Point was, Mims was denied employment because of his beliefs, not because of his work. In many other situations, were the shoe on the other foot, there would have been lawsuits flying.
And the point was to show that the in-place orthodoxy (Neo-darwinism) has tried to block anything that challenges it seriously. Gould was okay since he stayed sufficiently inside the fence (and was after all only expounding on Goldschmidt's work of decades before).
The bottom line to me is that I accept supernatural explanations for some things; but the orthodoxy is pure naturalism, rejecting all supernatural causes. That however takes at least as much faith, since how can you explain the laws of physics, origin of matter, origin of energy, etc. arising from naturalism?
If you want evidence of the anti-creationist actions (note I do not claim a conspiracy) of prominent journals, google for "Forrest Mims" and read the story about how he was treated by SciAm. Quite shameful.
In fact the magnetic field has never reversed; it has been steadily declining. And no, it's not that the energy is transferring into the non-dipoles. This is very recent research, which is well worth reading here.
An excerpt:
Using data from the International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF) I show that from 1970 to 2000, the dipole part of the field steadily lost 235 ± 5 billion megajoules of energy, while the non-dipole part gained only 129 ± 8 billion megajoules. Over that 30-year period, the net loss of energy from all observable parts of the field was 1.41 ± 0.16 %. At that rate, the field would lose half its energy every 1465 ± 166 years.
Unlike creationists, geologists are extremely careful of the rocks which test
and
Austin (plus all the other young earthers) disagree with pretty much all of modern geology, describing them as geologists would be a surefire way to lead to confusion
In both of those statements, you made sweeping generalizations, essentially ad hominem attacks on any person who interprets data differently than you do. There is a simple fact here: Steve Austin has a Ph.D. in geology. Are you demanding a further standard that he achieve in order to be called a geologist by you? Must he subscribe to a belief system you approve of? That certainly seems to be a reasonable interpretation of your twoposts on this thread.
You attack Dr. Austin, but have you read his thesis? Do you have a basis for attacking him other than his beliefs? Are you aware of the solid evidence he has put forward for a young earth? Have you considered the published articles (in Science and in Nature) by Gentry which show a rapidly-formed earth?
Please check your definitions, you're blurring natural selection and evolution when you state
Er. That orange cat example _is_ evolution, it's not a complicated concept
Natural selection is a process whereby the population mix is altered based on the survival through parenting age of members based on criteria that affect their ability to produce interfertile offspring (being alive being one of those factors). Evolution in its typical definition, more accurately macro-evolution, involves cats eventually becoming a sufficiently different kind of animal that there is clear morphological and reproductive differentiation, with the descendent having gained some new feature which was not present in the ancestor. This is "descent with modification", the root of Darwin's theory. Merely losing interbreeding ability can be just loss of inherent variation within the original kind, and is not demonstrative of a new kind. A simple example - the mosquitos in the tube in London can no longer interbreed with the above-ground relatives. Not that they're a different kind (still mosquitos), just that they have lost some of the richness in their DNA and are no longer compatible with their cousins.
Given that K-Ar dating has a lower limited on the age required for a accurate answer (which is much greater than 8 years), the person who submitted them to the labs for testing must have been either (a) clueless, or (b) only after propaganda. Not surprising that this comes out of the creationist world
Sticking just to the facts, if the rocks being too young to be tested were the only problem, then ALL of the rocks should have had the same age - same K and Ar levels. But the age varied by a factor of greater than an order of magnitude. That's way too big to be called a reliable method. If I took a fever temperature reading on you, and it was 37C to 370C, you'd be either perfectly healthy or a glowing ember. Clearly my temperature measurement method would be condemned as completely useless. Why then accept +/- an order of magnitude in radiometric dating?
Unlike creationists, geologists are extremely careful of the rocks which test. Radiodating is complex, and one must be careful in it's application
Steve Austin has a Ph.D. in geology, so he is a geologist. If his philosphical belief is towards a young earth and that disqualifies him, then atheistic geologists with a belief in an old earth should be similarly disqualified by your criteria - or is balance a problem here?
Kettlewell's peppered moth experiments have been revealed as fakes (the pictures in textbooks are of moths glued to tree trunks).
Personally I think the peppered moth case though is quite true, there was an adaptive pressure on the moths, and the population ratios changed. However there had always been a small percentage of dark moths; the change in environment just altered the ratio. Sort of like if someone shot all the orange cats in your neighborhood, you'd see a general change in the color mix of cats in your area. Doesn't mean evolution was observed, just that a sicko with a gun was on the loose. There were already a variety of cat colors, and the whacko exerted a selection pressure on one color. Lock up the nutcase, throw away the key, and the cat population will return to normal.
One point not mentioned in the textbook summaries of Kettlewell's experiments is that once legislation forced a cleanup of the pollutants, the black moths were predominant for a long time (many years) after the tree trunks lightened up. There was a pressure, but it wasn't from the color of tree trunks.
Actually according to G. Brent Dalrymple, a geologist with the USGS, there are a number of cases where radiometric dating was very far off. Not to mention the case of Mt. St. Helens, where rocks were taken from the newly formed lava dome and K-Ar dated. They were known to be roughly 8 years old (how long the dome had been forming). Yet the labs tested them and the youngest date was over 200,000 years (oldest test date was in the millions). Now yes many apologists will claim that this was due to excess Argon. Of course it had to be either excess Ar or depleted K, since this is a ratio measurement. And they'll mention that the rock selected must have either heated insufficiently to achieve full Ar bleedout, or that chunks of the rock were never liquified and therefore were pockets of ancient ratios.
Certainly the explanation is some combination of those causes. However it does bring up a significant methodological question. Since cases where the age is known result in conclusively incorrect data, even if it can be explained, why should anyone accept as accurate rocks which are from an unknown time frame? The same explanations used to excuse the immensely incorrect ratios in known-age rocks could apply to rocks with an unknown history.
Isn't it true that some of the methods have been falsified, and we should look for better tools?
I'm responding to you on/. and in email, since this then satisfies both any lurkers and your questions...
The post that I was commenting on was the one you figured, by ianscott who made the very sweeping statement about Behe and Darwin (as quoted above repeatedly).
I understand your frustration in cr-ev discussions; I have seen the things that frustrate you about some creationists in many evolution defenders as well. They seem to start from an assumption that everything can be explained in a purely humanistic, materialistic, naturalistic way, and absolutely deny any possibility of God. Pitting advocacy sites against each other is kind of debate by proxy, and it's never very effective unless all the parties have an actual understanding of the topic involved.
The book I mentioned by Gentry is not about redshift (the link you provided is about his redshift theory), the book is about pleochroic halos caused by Po-218. I have not researched the redshift theory of Gentry's sufficiently to comment on it myself. Talkorigins has also addressed the topic of Gentry's book, but Jeff Brawley (who did an awesome job of amateur scientist in his field work) apparently missed some key papers by Gentry in Nature and Science in the 60s and 70s. These papers (published in the book too) show Gentry designing and conducting experiments to see if the possible cause of the halos was Rn gas seepage. He comprehensively proved it was not and could not have been caused by Rn seepage, and Brawley ignores that fact for whatever reason. Unfortunately talkorigins has left his post up for a long time, even though it was disproved decades ago.
In my opinion, having read and listened to Behe a fair bit, is that his fundamental point about ID is that the initial steps, like the flagellum motor or the eye could not possibly have arisen without divine intervention. That's his area of expertise, and he accepts without criticism what most of his colleagues in other branches of bio say. But again, the original poster made a statement which was overly broad which I was trying to correct.
And you're quite right that Ms. Scott is far from the only one to call Behe (mistakenly) a creationist in the YEC camp. Having read his book and some of his other works, I do not classify him as such. However neither is he a pure neo-Darwinist as the initial poster claimed.
And you're quite right about knee-jerk jerks on all sides of this issue. I admit I flip the bozo bit on some evolutionists when they start citing Miller-Urey or Haeckel as being great proofs of Darwin.
BTW if you want to stretch your mind, try Gentry's book. It's far afield of Darwin, but very interesting.
In that link (and in his book) he says he's a "theistic evolution" believer; but that is most certainly not in accord with the claim as written that
he concedes macroevolution in all its guises
since macroevolution has as a basic tenet that it is unguided and uses random mutations as its basic fuel. That is what is currently referred to as "neo-Darwinian" evolution, using Darwin's basic concept merged with an understanding of DNA based genetics.
In fact if you read the link you posted, it talks about how Eugenie Scott criticized Behe's book but she is the one who clearly had not understood (or perhaps had not read) the book, since she was the one who made the claim that Behe does not believe in evolution.
On the topic you brought up of credentials, I have found that those engaged in discussion with creation science types routinely make an attack assuming an utter lack of scientific training on the part of the creationist. I've also learned to short-circuit the most absurd counterpoints in order to move the discussion to more useful arenas, such as the topic at hand, rather than the very typical ad hominem attack used as a first pass.
I've read Behe, book and followup papers, and I don't see where you derive the claim that he
concedes macroevolution in all its guises
Yet I'm one of those "fundies" you're ranting about. I have a degree in organic chemistry with biochemistry from an ivy league school, so I'm not what you labelled "a lay reader". And like many folks much brighter than I, I'm a creationist.
Behe is by training a biochemist - so he does not have (nor does he claim) any expertise in the fields of biology that touch on "descent" within, for example, vertebrates. He wrote a book about his area of expertise, showing that evolution (in his expert opinion in his field of research) could not possibly explain molecular machines or the origin of the cell. He concedes that he lacks the expertise to fully judge other areas of biology.
In my reading of his book, he does not say "Darwin was right", which seems to be what you're claiming he wrote. I have his book inches from me right now; I'll concede your point if you can provide page and paragraph numbers proving your point.
If you're attacking Behe for not publishing in refereed journals, then answer why Darwin also wrote a book instead of publishing in a journal. If that is your criterion for rejecting a position, then why apply your negativity only to one of them?
My point about "fluids are frustrated" is that it is not necessary to use emotional terms to describe inanimate or nonsentient entities. "The fluids were prevented" or "the fluids are blocked" would just as colloquially make the point without escalating to engaging in fluid dynamics terminology.
Your assertion that "organic synthesis will select for chirality by default" is in direct opposition to all organic chemistry research I'm aware of. Racemic, not unichiral, results happen outside living organisms. In making such a radical statement, it would be appropriate to give citations or to publish in J.Org.Chem. if you've managed to synthesize, from nonchiral constituents, a purely unichiral product.
The current bio textbooks still have Haeckel in them; he's been known as a fraud for well over a hundred years; what's the standard for a time frame to clean that up?
Miller-Urey was so artificial. It assumed a non-oxygen atmosphere; yet without oxygen the NH3 would be rapidly dissociated by the strong UV which was not blocked by O3 (ozone). There are many other problems with it as well, as has again been thoroughly documented for decades. How many decades do you suggest waiting for intro bio textbooks to catch up? How many decades of teaching bad science?
Slashdot Mirror
In point of fact, what's being observed is that the magnetic field is declining in strength. It's an inferrence that it will reverse. There are contrary opinions, such as those that show that the energy being lost is not being stored in quadrapoles, octopoles, and so on.
/. are unwilling to consider reading this paper due to where it's published, but if you are willing to evaluate a paper by a PhD with many patents from working at Sandia Labs, try reading this paper. It shows how the magnetic field is declining and not storing this energy in the non-dipole moments.
I realize most readers of
How do you explain that one?
Citing qualifications is not IMHO a useful endeavor. The facts are more useful.
And yes your insight is quite correct - there is no way to validate the method. However your assertion that the only weak link is the geologic context is, I believe, a bit of an understatement. While the geologic surroundings are quite important, so are simple things like: if the rock is exposed to air and sunlight, diffusion of Ar will be accelerated over a rock buried in a glacier. Similarly a fast-moving stream or river will cause leaching which can effect several of the minerals used in dating.
But perhaps most significant are the assumptions made about both the initial conditions and about the time between formation and measurement. Initial conditions which are not known can have a profound effect on the measurements. And the assumption underlying all of this is generally referred to as "uniformitarianism". To the reader who may be unfamiliar with this term, that is a reference to the assumption that everything is today as it has been in the past, that there were no major disruptions in the environment, that gradual change is the only agent of change.
The opposing theory to uniformitarianism admits that we don't know what conditions were like thousands of years ago, that radioactive decay might be effected by, for example, a neutrino burst from a supernova, or from a different phenomenon that we can't explain today. It also asserts that the Grand Canyon, for example, was not formed over billions of years, but was actually formed far more rapidly (and there is strong evidence of that being the case).
Allowing the point you have made, the bottom line result remains: there is no known case of a known-age sample (age known via a completely different method) that tested accurately and repeatably. Yes you may say the problem is we only absolutely know the ages of things that are so young that they cannot be accurately measured due to variations in initial conditions or contamination levels of decay products.
However the conclusion remains: radiometric dating has never been verified by anything other than radiometric dating. That is circular reasoning, and it is not a valid basis for science.
And consider the definition of science as requiring both falsifiability and repeatable experiments. Can you cite an example of a known-age rock that was repeatedly accurately dated? If not, then the only proven results of radiometric dating are those that point out its inaccuracies, and there are none that prove its accuracy.
Yes of course many things make radiometric dates potentially inaccurate, such as heating too much or too little, leaching, initial conditions that are other than assumed, proximity to sources of radioactivity, diffusion, etc.
But any measurement used in science needs to be proven to be accurate before it's blindly accepted, and radiometric dating has not achieved that.
Take Carbon-14 as another case. Live mollusks have been tested and, were they able to be surprised, they would have had their shells knocked off by the news that they have been dead for 2300 years according to C14 dating. Or take the writing of Dr. Robert Lee in the Anthropological Journal of Canada in 1981:
Every dating done on a known-age volcanic rock has resulted in wildly inaccurate data. Example: Mt. St. Helens rocks were dated at (varies by sample, that alone should raise red flags about the radiometric dating concept) values ranging from 350,000 to 2,800,000 years. The samples came from the dome, which was known to be 8 years old at the time of the testing. Apologists for radiometric dating respond that this is a case of poorly selected samples; yet they have no counter-example of a well-chosen sample that shows the correct date. Nor do they answer how to know that tests in other sites are correctly chosen, aside from their rather vicious ad hominem attacks.
Further examples: the Hualalai volcano, which erupted in 1800-1801, was tested at 1,600,000 years old. The Etna volcano eruption of 1792 is dated at 1,410,000 years ago. There are many others but that makes the point - radiometric dating is badly flawed, from K-Ar to C14 to isochrons to Ru-Sr and the rest.
So since every case where the age of a rock is known the measured age is wrong, on what basis is the assumption made that rocks where the age is unknown that the methods are correct?
Science is supposed to be about repeatable experiments with falsifiability criteria. Falsification of radiometric dating is simple: find a rock of known age, if the test can't repeatedly produce the correct answer, then the method is not accurate. So it's time to find another dating method that does produce repeatably correct results with known age samples.
See here and here for details
I would pick Dr. Morris's point about the hydrologic cycle (oceans, evaporation, condensation, precipation, aggregation, flow to oceans) which is made repeatedly in the Bible. Of course I can't pick what would be most impressive to you.
Just curious, what (I gather about 2nd law of thermo) bothers you about Dr. Morris's work?
Check out this site for details about how out of touch the Koran is.
And check out "Many Infallible Proofs" by Henry Morris, PhD for very strong evidence for the Bible.
The Koran (or Qu'ran, transliteration makes it tough to be exact) clearly states both that to disbelieve anything in it is heresy, and that the earth is flat.
Yes the phrase "Stretches out the heavens" was not understood in relation to redshift, there was no such thing as redshift known until pretty recently. But regardless of the failings of human understanding, it is an accurate fact.
However to your point, the Bible has had scientific truths in it that scientists over millennia have ignored. For centuries, it was thought that you needed to drain blood in order to cure disease. But in the Bible it clearly states "the life is in the blood". And for years scientists taught that the earth was flat, whereas the Bible clearly indicates it's a sphere. For years it was taught that the stars did not move, whereas the Bible says God "stretches out the heavens" - stars in motion did not gain acceptance until relatively recently. There are many other things in the same vein. No other sacred book has anything like that record.
Point was, Mims was denied employment because of his beliefs, not because of his work. In many other situations, were the shoe on the other foot, there would have been lawsuits flying.
And the point was to show that the in-place orthodoxy (Neo-darwinism) has tried to block anything that challenges it seriously. Gould was okay since he stayed sufficiently inside the fence (and was after all only expounding on Goldschmidt's work of decades before).
The bottom line to me is that I accept supernatural explanations for some things; but the orthodoxy is pure naturalism, rejecting all supernatural causes. That however takes at least as much faith, since how can you explain the laws of physics, origin of matter, origin of energy, etc. arising from naturalism?
If you want evidence of the anti-creationist actions (note I do not claim a conspiracy) of prominent journals, google for "Forrest Mims" and read the story about how he was treated by SciAm. Quite shameful.
An excerpt:
You attack Dr. Austin, but have you read his thesis? Do you have a basis for attacking him other than his beliefs? Are you aware of the solid evidence he has put forward for a young earth? Have you considered the published articles (in Science and in Nature) by Gentry which show a rapidly-formed earth?
Kettlewell's peppered moth experiments have been revealed as fakes (the pictures in textbooks are of moths glued to tree trunks).
Personally I think the peppered moth case though is quite true, there was an adaptive pressure on the moths, and the population ratios changed. However there had always been a small percentage of dark moths; the change in environment just altered the ratio. Sort of like if someone shot all the orange cats in your neighborhood, you'd see a general change in the color mix of cats in your area. Doesn't mean evolution was observed, just that a sicko with a gun was on the loose. There were already a variety of cat colors, and the whacko exerted a selection pressure on one color. Lock up the nutcase, throw away the key, and the cat population will return to normal.
One point not mentioned in the textbook summaries of Kettlewell's experiments is that once legislation forced a cleanup of the pollutants, the black moths were predominant for a long time (many years) after the tree trunks lightened up. There was a pressure, but it wasn't from the color of tree trunks.
Actually according to G. Brent Dalrymple, a geologist with the USGS, there are a number of cases where radiometric dating was very far off. Not to mention the case of Mt. St. Helens, where rocks were taken from the newly formed lava dome and K-Ar dated. They were known to be roughly 8 years old (how long the dome had been forming). Yet the labs tested them and the youngest date was over 200,000 years (oldest test date was in the millions). Now yes many apologists will claim that this was due to excess Argon. Of course it had to be either excess Ar or depleted K, since this is a ratio measurement. And they'll mention that the rock selected must have either heated insufficiently to achieve full Ar bleedout, or that chunks of the rock were never liquified and therefore were pockets of ancient ratios.
Certainly the explanation is some combination of those causes. However it does bring up a significant methodological question. Since cases where the age is known result in conclusively incorrect data, even if it can be explained, why should anyone accept as accurate rocks which are from an unknown time frame? The same explanations used to excuse the immensely incorrect ratios in known-age rocks could apply to rocks with an unknown history.
Isn't it true that some of the methods have been falsified, and we should look for better tools?
I'm responding to you on /. and in email, since this then satisfies both any lurkers and your questions...
The post that I was commenting on was the one you figured, by ianscott who made the very sweeping statement about Behe and Darwin (as quoted above repeatedly).
I understand your frustration in cr-ev discussions; I have seen the things that frustrate you about some creationists in many evolution defenders as well. They seem to start from an assumption that everything can be explained in a purely humanistic, materialistic, naturalistic way, and absolutely deny any possibility of God. Pitting advocacy sites against each other is kind of debate by proxy, and it's never very effective unless all the parties have an actual understanding of the topic involved.
The book I mentioned by Gentry is not about redshift (the link you provided is about his redshift theory), the book is about pleochroic halos caused by Po-218. I have not researched the redshift theory of Gentry's sufficiently to comment on it myself. Talkorigins has also addressed the topic of Gentry's book, but Jeff Brawley (who did an awesome job of amateur scientist in his field work) apparently missed some key papers by Gentry in Nature and Science in the 60s and 70s. These papers (published in the book too) show Gentry designing and conducting experiments to see if the possible cause of the halos was Rn gas seepage. He comprehensively proved it was not and could not have been caused by Rn seepage, and Brawley ignores that fact for whatever reason. Unfortunately talkorigins has left his post up for a long time, even though it was disproved decades ago.
And please do at least check out an overall review of the inaccuracies in the talkorigins site.
Thanks for the reply.
In my opinion, having read and listened to Behe a fair bit, is that his fundamental point about ID is that the initial steps, like the flagellum motor or the eye could not possibly have arisen without divine intervention. That's his area of expertise, and he accepts without criticism what most of his colleagues in other branches of bio say. But again, the original poster made a statement which was overly broad which I was trying to correct.
And you're quite right that Ms. Scott is far from the only one to call Behe (mistakenly) a creationist in the YEC camp. Having read his book and some of his other works, I do not classify him as such. However neither is he a pure neo-Darwinist as the initial poster claimed.
And you're quite right about knee-jerk jerks on all sides of this issue. I admit I flip the bozo bit on some evolutionists when they start citing Miller-Urey or Haeckel as being great proofs of Darwin.
BTW if you want to stretch your mind, try Gentry's book. It's far afield of Darwin, but very interesting.
In fact if you read the link you posted, it talks about how Eugenie Scott criticized Behe's book but she is the one who clearly had not understood (or perhaps had not read) the book, since she was the one who made the claim that Behe does not believe in evolution.
On the topic you brought up of credentials, I have found that those engaged in discussion with creation science types routinely make an attack assuming an utter lack of scientific training on the part of the creationist. I've also learned to short-circuit the most absurd counterpoints in order to move the discussion to more useful arenas, such as the topic at hand, rather than the very typical ad hominem attack used as a first pass.
Behe is by training a biochemist - so he does not have (nor does he claim) any expertise in the fields of biology that touch on "descent" within, for example, vertebrates. He wrote a book about his area of expertise, showing that evolution (in his expert opinion in his field of research) could not possibly explain molecular machines or the origin of the cell. He concedes that he lacks the expertise to fully judge other areas of biology.
In my reading of his book, he does not say "Darwin was right", which seems to be what you're claiming he wrote. I have his book inches from me right now; I'll concede your point if you can provide page and paragraph numbers proving your point.
If you're attacking Behe for not publishing in refereed journals, then answer why Darwin also wrote a book instead of publishing in a journal. If that is your criterion for rejecting a position, then why apply your negativity only to one of them?
My point about "fluids are frustrated" is that it is not necessary to use emotional terms to describe inanimate or nonsentient entities. "The fluids were prevented" or "the fluids are blocked" would just as colloquially make the point without escalating to engaging in fluid dynamics terminology.
Your assertion that "organic synthesis will select for chirality by default" is in direct opposition to all organic chemistry research I'm aware of. Racemic, not unichiral, results happen outside living organisms. In making such a radical statement, it would be appropriate to give citations or to publish in J.Org.Chem. if you've managed to synthesize, from nonchiral constituents, a purely unichiral product.
The current bio textbooks still have Haeckel in them; he's been known as a fraud for well over a hundred years; what's the standard for a time frame to clean that up?
Miller-Urey was so artificial. It assumed a non-oxygen atmosphere; yet without oxygen the NH3 would be rapidly dissociated by the strong UV which was not blocked by O3 (ozone). There are many other problems with it as well, as has again been thoroughly documented for decades. How many decades do you suggest waiting for intro bio textbooks to catch up? How many decades of teaching bad science?