[_ Old Earth _] More dodgy creationist sources...

[logical bob]

This is a response to a post by Ashua here which I'm posting in a new thread to avoid derailing the one it came from.

What does carbon dating show?

Good question. It shows:

1. Living mollusk shells were carbon dated as being 2300 years old. (Science vol. 141, 1963 pp. 634-637).
2. A freshly killed seal was carbon dated as having died 1300 years ago. (Antarctic Journal, vol. 6 Sept-Oct. 1971, p. 211).
3. Shells from living snails were carbon dated as being 27,000 years old. (Science vol. 224, 1984, pp. 58-61).
4. One part of the Vollosovitch mammoth carbon dated at 29,500 years old and another part at 44,000. (Troy L. Pewe, Quarternary Stratigraphic Nomenclature in Unglaciated Central Alaska, Geological Survey Professional Paper 862, p. 30).
5. One part of Dima, a baby frozen mammoth, was 40,000, another part was 26,000 and the wood immediately around the carcass was 9-10,000 years old†(Troy L. Pewe, Quarternary Stratigraphic Nomenclature in Unglaciated Central Alaska, Geological Survey Professional Paper 862, p. 30).
6. The lower leg of the Fairbanks Creek mammoth had a radiocarbon age of 15,380 RCY (Radio Carbon Years), while its skin and flesh were 21,300 RCY. (Harold E. Anthony, Natures Deep Freeze. Natural History, Sept. 1949, p. 300).
7. The two Colorado Creek, AK Mammoths had radiocarbon ages of 22,850 and 16,150 respectively. (Robert M. Thorson and R. Dale Guthrie, Stratigraphy of the Colorado Creek Mammoth Locality, Alaska. Quaternary Research, vol. 37, no. 2, March 1992, pp. 214-228).
8. Living Penguins have been dated as being 8,000 years old.
9. Material from layers where dinosaurs are found carbon dated at 34,000 years old. (R. Daly, Earth’s Most Challenging Mysteries, 1972, p. 280).
10. Russian scientists Kusnetsov and Ivanov carbon dated dinosaur bones at less than 30,000 years. (Strange Stores, Amazing Facts, Readers Digest, 1978, p. 335).
11. Hugh Miller, Columbus, OH had 4 dinosaur one samples carbon dated at 20,000 years old. The samples were not identified as dinosaur in advance. (Noah to Abram the Turbulent Years by Erich von Fange, p. 36).
12. A geologist at the Berkeley Geochronology Center, Carl Swisher uses the most advanced techniques to date human fossils. Last spring he was re-evaluating Homo erectus skulls found in Java in the 1930s by testing the sediment found with them. A hominid species assumed to be an ancestor of Homo sapiens; erectus was thought to have vanished some 250,000 years ago. But even though he used two different dating methods, Swisher kept making the same startling find: the bones were 53,000 years old at most and possibly no more than 27,000 years (the difference between these two years is a 96% error rate) – a stretch of time contemporaneous with modern humans. (Leslie Kaufman, Did a Third Human Species Live Among Us? Newsweek, December 23, 1996, p. 52).

Trust in that voo-doo "science" if you wish.
My apologies to the original poster. His question demanded an answer from the truth.

When you cut and paste someone else's words it's polite to acknowledge your source. The above comes from here. Perhaps you didn't want to mention that your source is, again, Kent Hovind.

I'm not going to respond to all of that - I'll focus on 1 and 3 because you can gt the abstracts of the articles from Science for free. Here they are:

1. Evidence is presented to show that modern mollusk shells from rivers can have anomalous radiocarbon ages, owing mainly to incorporation of inactive (carbon-14-deficient) carbon from humus, probably through the food web, as well as by the pathway of carbon dioxide from humus decay. The resultant effect, in addition to the variable contributions of atmospheric carbon dioxide, fermentative carbon dioxide from bottom muds, and, locally, of carbonate carbon from dissolving limestones, makes the initial carbon-14-activity of ancient fresh-water shell indeterminate, but within limits. Consequent errors of shell radiocarbon dates may be as large as several thousand years for river shells.

3. Carbon-14 contents as low as 3.3 ± 0.2 percent modern (apparent age, 27,000 years) measured from the shells of snails Melanoides tuberculatus living in artesian springs in southern Nevada are attributed to fixation of dissolved HCO3- with which the shells are in carbon isotope equilibrium. Recognition of the existence of such extreme deficiencies is necessary so that erroneous ages are not attributed to freshwater biogenic carbonates.

In other words, both of these articles are explaining how shells absorb stuff from their environment in a way that makes it hard to carbon date them. Like any method of measuring anything, you have to be careful that you're doing it right.

The paper claims that radiocarbon dating is “based on the false assumption that the sample is uncontaminated.†That’s like saying that because your watch won’t keep time if you put it next to a magnet, relying on your watch is based on the false assumption that it isn’t next to a magnet. It’s like saying that measuring a pH can never be trusted because somebody once got a funny result from a contaminated sample.

The author must have read at least these abstracts in putting together his paper. He must have noticed that neither in any way supports the idea that you can’t use C14 to date anything. So again I ask: are these people stupid or are they lying to you? It’s got to be one or the other.

 

[Free]

When you cut and paste someone else's words it's polite to acknowledge your source.

^^ This. Thanks for the link.

 

[Burke]

I think there is another option... Neither stupid or lying, it's the point that there ARE contaminants and false reading, and to dismiss them carte blanche is just as disingenuous as dismissing the science as some fundamentalists unfortunately do as well. Your analogy of the watch is a good one. Without knowing if the watch had EVER been near a magnet, how can you know that the time is correct? It may be "keeping" correct time, but still giving a false reading. If your watch's battery went dead, and it stopped for an undetermined length of time, just putting a battery in the watch wouldn't automatically give you the correct time.

The theory of false radiometric dating of fossils is taking into account the fact that without knowing 2 things: The actual amount of parent material and the rate of decay... the determined age is at best an educated guess based on unknown history. The fact that there ARE "anomalies" that can be sited are proof of that.