Simulation

Are they real or just a load of crap?



Living penguins have been carbon dated and the results said that they had died 8,000 years ago! This is just one of many inaccurate dates given by Carbon dating.

The shells of living mollusks have been dated using the carbon 14 method, only to find that the method gave it a date as having been dead for 23,000 years!(3)

The body of a seal that had been dead for 30 years was carbon dated, and the results stated that the seal had died 4,600 years ago! ( 4)

What about a freshly killed seal? Well, they dated one of those too, the results stated that the seal had died 1,300 years ago. (5)

Antarctic seawater has a low level of C14. Consequently organisms living there dated by C14 give ages much older than their true age.

A lake Bonney seal known to have died only a few weeks before was carbon dated. The results stated that the seal had died between 515 and 715 years ago. (6)

Shells from living snails were dated using the Carbon 14 method. The results stated that the snails had died 27,000 years ago. (7)

"Scientists got dates of 164 million and 3 billion years for two Hawaiian lava flows. But these lava flows happened only about 200 years ago in 1800 and 1801.(10)

Carbon dating references:
1) From a video Lecture by Dr. Kent Hovind
3) Science vol. 141 1963 pg. 634-637
4)"The Illustrated Origins Answer Book" by Paul S. Taylor
5)Antarctic Journal vol. 6 Sept-Oct 1971 pg. 211
6)Antarctic Journal, Washington
7)Science vol. 224 1984 pg. 58-61)
10)"Dry bones and other fossils" by Dr. Gary Parker


[ January 15, 2002: Message edited by: Simulation ]</p>

tgamble

I only know of two of the examples.

As would be expected. There are certain things you can't dated with carbon dating and mollusks are one of em. Not even the ICR uses this anymore.
<a href="http://www.darwin.ws/contradictions/carbon.html" target="_blank">http://www.darwin.ws/contradictions/carbon.html</a>

Only Hovind and chick would use such arguments.

Just another cretinist lie.
<a href="http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/hawaii.html" target="_blank">http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/hawaii.html</a>

<a href="http://home.mmcable.com/harlequin/evol/lies/lie023.html" target="_blank">http://home.mmcable.com/harlequin/evol/lies/lie023.html</a>

It's can be considered a scientific law (even better supported than thermodynamics) that everything Kent Hovind says is bullshit. Other creationists aren't very reliable either.

What such results have to do with either the age of the earth or evolution is a mystery since such dates are only good to about 50 000 years!

But cretinists don't let such facts get in the way of their delusions.

Ax for the other examples, I have no idea. But I bet patrick will tear em into pieces.

[ January 15, 2002: Message edited by: tgamble ]</p>

Undercurrent

True, but irrelevant. The carbon-14 method only applies to organic material whose only source of carbon is the atmosphere. Marine mullosks and creatures that directly or indirectly consume marine mullosks get some or all of their carbon from limestone deposits in which the level of carbon 14 is not constantly refreshed lake in the atmosphere.

This is a little more damning of the creationist community for deliberate deceit. The dating was not of the lava, but of the xenoliths within the lava which had not melted into the lava flow. Some details are found <a href="http://www.gate.net/~rwms/AgeEarth.html" target="_blank">here</a> (a little bit down the page.)

m.

Grumpy

You'd think they would notice (or expect a savvy audience to notice) that all these anomalies are from marine organisms. Once again, the eternal question: Are they being ignorant, or are they trying to pull a fast one?

Coragyps

And it's even more dishonest than it first appears! The article of footnote 3 in Simulation's excerpt is titled "Radiocarbon Dating: Fictitious Results with Mollusk Shells" (M L Keith, G M Anderson, Science v141, pp 634-637, 1963) and is a dissection of the several reasons that mollusk shells, especially fresh-water ones, don't give good 14C dates. They cite previous work that shows this phenomenon, showing that it was already well-known even in 1963.
The paper of footnote 7 is "Major Carbon-14 deficiency in modern Snail Shells from Southern Nevada Springs" (A C Riggs, Science v224, pp58-61, 1984) and is a similar study: the snails, which incidentally practice virgin birth exclusively, live in spring water which has traveled through 50 miles or so of Paleozoic-age limestone. The dissolved bicarbonate in this water has no 14C, and the snail shells are in equilibrium with the total dissolved carbon in the pool water, which, of course, is derived from a mixture of atmospheric CO2 and the ancient bicarbonate. The abstract of the article even states: "Recognition of the existence of such extreme deficiencies is necessary so that erroneous ages are not attributed to freshwater biogenic carbonates."
So both of these creationist citations are deliberately taking articles which are cautioning others on pitfalls to be avoided in radiocarbon dating, and offering their results as the normal, expected outcome for all 14C dating efforts. The titles and abstracts alone make it very clear what the articles' intents were: not even stupidity on the part of the original creationist citer is an excuse for misrepresenting them so completely. Deliberate deception of an audience that he thought would never check up on him is the only possibility. What chutzpah!


Edited by Coragyps to ask:
Don't many seals eat lots of shellfish? This intake of "old" carbon would make them look "old" too, nicht wahr?

[ January 15, 2002: Message edited by: Coragyps ]</p>

ps418

Thanks for those refs Coragyps. Nice Sherlocking.

And quoting the Hawaiian lava paper is outright deception, as Michael states, since they were dating xenoliths and not matrix, as the paper makes clear. And this is not the only xenolith-related paper abused by cretinists in this manner. Thirty lashes for these morons.

Patrick

Pantera

These sound like well respected, peer-reviewed publications to me.

scombrid

The sad thing is that I had an old friend visit me a year ago under the guise of a friendly visit, only to bring up YEC and deposit some rather cartoonish Duane Gish crap for my family to peruse (insulting act really, considering my brother's biology education, my father's PhD in ichthyology, and my BS with twenty extra bio credits and current pursuit of an advanced degree in marine science). He was educated with a B.S. in forestry from a very well respected college of forestry and wildlife resources (from where I happen to have graduated), so his conversion to YEC broadsided me. I didn't know how to react. He had been through a similar curriculum that included O'chem, genetics, ecology, and likely evolutionary bio(elective commonly taken by most students in the College of Natural Resources). He told me how the science that we had at university was flawed and biased by Satan's influence to hide the TrUtH. The above examples were his selling points. I didn't have any references on hand but pointed out the C14 problem and insisted that his sources were likely misinterpreted (thanks to a course in geomorphology with a section on biogeochemistry). I'm sorry to say that even college educated folks can be duped by the YEC folks. Most people don't bother to follow up and read the sources they give (it's not always easy to access the sources if you're not at uni and they aren't online).

PLUG: That's why I like II so much. Somebody feeds you bullshit. Somebody at II will have heard it before and will be able to refute it.