[_ Old Earth _] Evolution does not belong to Darwin

[Admiral Valdemar]

You dont need one. Not when you are dealing with universal constants. The half-life of a radioactive isotope is set.

WOW, your sooooo smart!

You'd be right, if only it wasn't shown in every damn radioisotope with a half-life in minutes. Or are you arguing that because we can witness that decay our assumption that the decay, as calculated using nuclear physics, is wrong for isotopes that last millions of years simply because we can't witness it?

That's like saying the speed of light is 300,000km/s in London, but we can't be sure it's the same at Alpha Centuri because we can't measure it there.

 

[M82A1]

Let me get something out right now: Every fossil, and every living organism, is a transitional species. Evolution is constant, it doesn't end.

 

[victorhadin]

To interject for a second on behalf of the radioactive decay and half-life constants, hoping to draw a clearer picture:


-Assuming radioactive half lifes are constant is a fairly understandable assumption to make. To alter half-lifes, you first need to mess about with electromagnetism and the constants involved. The strength of a field from a point source varies inversely with the square of the distance from the source. As a result, to double the influence on a point you need to effectively quadruple the strength of the source, to triple it you need to take the source charge up nine times, to multiply it by a thousand you need a million times more charge etc.

Now, in order to alter decay rates, as some creationists seem to think, you would need to tinker with the influence of electromagnetism. Assume, say, that you wish to shove decay rates up by 500'000 times, thus fitting in nicely with the young-Earth. The required increase in the influence of electromagnetism is gigantic, which has immediate consequences:

-For one, it effects every chemical and nuclear reaction in existence. Electromagnetism, boosted to such an extent, would render nuclear fusion in our star impossible. The Israelites would have been rather perturbed to find themselves crossing the red sea in a freezing everlasting night.
-Of course, this would be the least of their worries, since while they were attempting to do this, every chemical reaction in their bodies would have been thrown wildly out of kilter, killing them rather quickly. Gas would become all but incompressible, the creation of fire would hardly be practical....
-Hell; as if that wasn't enough the radioactive processes within the Earth would become hopelessly accelerated, leading to a vast sump of internal heat, with rather obviously detrimental effects.

Well, you see the point. It is folly to assume that constants might be changed without thinking:

a) How they could be.
b) What effects would the changed constants have?

Changing the speed of light offers similar problems, as changing permitivity of the vacuum also interferes with electromagnetism, energy release from the mass defect, nuclear processes etc.