Re: Study Re-evaluates Evolution of Mammals

On Mar 28, 11:49 pm, "derdag" <der...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 28, 11:40 pm, AC <mightymartia...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


[snip]

You didn't actually expect any of the local trolls and loons to bother
checking up on something before they made asses of themselves? For a
good look at what "derdag" is all about, go look at the sheer stupidity
he is practicing to try to justify he's idiotic comments about C14
dating.


[snip sig]

I learned enough about it to see that my position on C14 hasn't
changed in substance. It looks like a load of horse nuggets. Plenty
of other people who did know more about it than myself feel the same.
Just look at how well C14 results that were "concrete" have just been
screwed by this new study here. They must need to recalibrate their
C14 dating due to this, aye? lol

You have just spectacularly demonstrated that you are clueless about
C14 dating. For those that are curious as to why, the upper limit to
C14 dating is about 50,000 years - that is, as far as carbon-14 is
concerned you can't tell the difference between something that died
50,000 years ago and something that died 50,000,000 years ago. The
reason for this, and the reason that carbon-14 gives excellent,
reliable dates for things that died less than 50,000 years ago, is
that the half-life of C14 is 5,760 years. This means that no matter
how much carbon-14 you have to begin with, after 5760 years half of it
will have decayed to nitrogen-14; after 11,520 years you will have
only a quarter of the original amount of carbon left; after 17,280
years there will be only an eighth of the original amount left, and so
on. After 50,000 years (ten half lives) there is about a thousandth
of the original carbon-14 left. Since carbon-14 forms only a very
small fraction of the total carbon in the biosphere reservoir (about
twelve orders of magnitude less than carbon 12; see, for example,
http://www.cstl.nist.gov/div837/837.01/expertise/IsotopeMetrology.htm)
when you get down to a thousandth of that you are starting to talk
about small numbers of atoms. We can in fact count very small
numbers of atoms without much trouble using accelerator mass
spectroscopy, but with samples older than ten half-lives we start to
lose the statistical basis for dating, which depends on more than a
few hundred atoms of C14 being present.

Derdag, if in fact you 'learned enough' about C14 to critically
evaluate the reliability and accuracy of radiocarbon dating then you
must have learned the facts I mention above. It seems to me that no
one in possession of that knowledge would make the connection between
C14 and events that occurred fifty million years ago (a thousand times
longer than the useful range of carbon dating). Thus I am forced to
the conclusion that you are either mistaken in the rigor of your
assessment of C14 dating, or you are deliberately raising irrelevant
and fatuous points for the sake of rhetorical advantage - that is, you
are either lying to yourself or lying to us. In either case it
doesn't fly.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Study Re-evaluates Evolution of Mammals
    ... Just look at how well C14 results that were "concrete" have just been ... radiocarbon dating is no good beyond 50 000. ... to fossils where all the carbon has been replace by other minerals. ... derdag so stipulates that derdag isn't accurate about methods of C14 ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Where is vowel boy? Re: Still no takers for the critique
    ...  research paper in the area of C14 dating or dendrochronology. ... atmospheric levels of C14. ... Why would good data about levels of C14 in the atmosphere at ... various locations and times in the earth's history be a desiderata for ...
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  • Re: Radiocarbon dating part II
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    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Radiocarbon dating part II
    ... But it (past atmospheric radiocarbon levels) is testable - that's ... C14 in the atmosphere during the lifespan of any particular creature ... no amount of "calibration" can ... dating mechanisms that allows confidence to be assigned to the method. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Age dating question
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