Valentine Pontifex

Kathleen Hunt posted one dandy of a post on the talk.origins newsgroup.

<a href="http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&selm=3CC5FAD8.5070605%40u.washington. edu" target="_blank">Info on C14 in coal deposits </a>

It has received a nomination for the T.O. PotM. I suspect it is a shoe in unless it is outright made into an FAQ.

LiveFreeOrDie

Thanks, LV. This was very timely.

lpetrich

Creationists are also fond of discussing C-14 dating of present-day marine organisms.

The problem there is that to get into the flesh of a clam or a seal or whatever, the C-14 has to diffuse not only through the air, but also into the water, which has a large amount of dissolved CO2. So it's not surprising that living in the ocean produces greater-than-expected ages.

Which does not affect how well C-14 dating works on land organisms, of course, contrary to what creationists hope to imply.

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>

ex-robot

They must be ill-informed considering the ICR wrote on this matter in 1989. See below:

<a href="http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-189.htm" target="_blank">Myths of Carbon Dating</a>

xr

lpetrich

Ex-robot, you ought to be aware that other creationists have not gotten the message of that ICR article, because other creationists continue to approvingly cite marine-organism C-14 dates as "proof" of how untrustworthy C-14 dates supposedly are.

This sort of behavior shows that creationists are phony "scientists", because real ones would try to reconcile such discrepancies between different ones' results.

Consider that creationists insist that some hominids are apes and some are human -- but they not only cannot agree on where they dividing line is, they also make no effort to resolve this discrepancy, as far as I am aware.

Compare evolutionary biologists' treatment of the discordant family trees (phylogenies) that they sometimes find. They try to puzzle out why it happened, whether it is some statistical artifact like long-branch attraction or an assumption of single evolution of some feature that turns out to be unwarranted.

For example, if one tried to construct a family tree in which birds, bats, and insects are descended from some flying ancestor, meaning that flight had only evolved once, one would have serious problems reconciling such a tree with trees made with the help of other features.

For example, bats' hair, external ears, exposed-skin noses, and other such features would peg bats as mammals (compare a bat to a mouse -- they look awfully similar); while insects have a periodically-molted skeleton of hardened outer skin, multi-jointed legs, and other features which identify them as arthropods.

Birds are more difficult to place, but they have several distinctive features, such as feathers, beaks, two walking limbs, a shortened tail, etc.

Thus, one concludes that flight had not evolved once, but three times -- separately in the ancestors of birds, bats, and insects.

ex-robot

That is why I said "ill-informed" because I am aware of it.
Huh? That is a broad statement for something that may only pertain to Hovind and lay creationists who are not even scientists in the first place or ever were for that matter.

xr