Cordova and Runyon on the fossil record

I’m in no way an expert on radiometric dating. But I’ve had opportunity to skim the peer-reviewed academic journals specializing in radiometric dating at a university Dept of Geology library. I was very impressed at what I noticed in the around forty year span of the articles. It seemed like every possible complication, contamination, what-about-this, and methodological detail had been scrutinized with a fine-tooth comb to verify whether radiometric dating could be considered reliable in countless contexts. (I wish I had some of those journal article titles and conference proceedings papers to post as examples.)

I mention that because every time I read anti-radiometric-dating material, the contrast is obvious to me. And it is a stark difference. (Yes, I will cite Dunning-Kruger one more time. I can’t help it.)

Oh my. That old trope needs to be retired. It belongs in the same dust bin as “Living fossils like the coelacanth and the ginkgo tree are an embarrassment to evolutionists because they haven’t changed in many millions of years.”

Just say no. The temptation can be resisted. Recycling discredited old tropes are not doing YEC advocates any favors. (Yes, such arguments can still resonated with lay audiences but they get nowhere with anybody who has ever bothered to read a textbook or a few academic websites. Even a few minutes in Wikipedia would provide some quick, effective, and welcomed inoculation from bad arguments.)

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My colleagues are PhD professors/researchers of biology, biochemistry from Ivy League or other fine schools. They are hardly lay audiences.

https://biology.missouri.edu/people/?person=62

https://www.lipscomb.edu/directory/deweese-joe

Rob Stadler:

There are few more whose names should not be mentioned.

But there are geology faculty at 3 universities friendly to the views articulated by me:
Cedarville, Loma Linda, Liberty University.

I strongly suspect Mr. Cordova’s target audience isn’t the scientific community or even scientifically knowledgeable laymen. Just like the DI does Mr. Cordova is targeting scientifically untrained but religious True Believers who are just looking for any scientific sounding reason to justify their religious literal Genesis beliefs. It’s obvious from the repeated bobbing and weaving here Mr. Cordova isn’t interested in analyzing the validity of his most remarkable YEC claims, many of which fall into the PRATT (Point Refuted A Thousand Times) category. He’s providing a service to those willing to pay for it.

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Have you noticed that faculty at those three schools (two fundamentalist schools and a Seventh Day Adventist campus) must be “friendly” to popular Young Earth Creationist arguments because it is a requirement for their employment?

I have known quite a number of Christian university faculty over the years who had crises of conscience each year when they had to sign their annual contracts because doing so forced them to reaffirm beliefs in what they consider non-essentials of the Christian faith and worldview which they no longer privately believed and supported.

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They are however all YECs who have decided their religious beliefs are more important than producing honest science.

Does John Sanford really believe the “250 mya bacteria” argument is good? Then he’s a loon and should not be listened to by anyone. A serious person can INSTANTLY see the flaw in it. What people have in front of their names doesn’t matter.

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Moreover, are biologists and biochemists truly the best people to consult when claiming vast sub-fields of physics, geology, and paleontology are hopelessly flawed? Seriously, @stcordova ?

Is academic scholarship and peer-review really as rampantly worthless as such a situation would imply?

I’ve never met John Sanford nor have I read much of his writings. But I do know him to be well-regarded by many. Has @stcordova accurately associated him with the lamentable “250 mya bacteria” argument?

If Dr. Sanford does indeed support that argument, I am stunned. However, I will reserve judgment until I see documentation for the aforementioned.

I must agree. No doubt about it. (As the old saying goes, “Everybody is entitled to their opinion—but not their own facts.”)

It is not the first time I have heard of creationists who come to websites with critical audiences to practice their apologetics, not because they truly care what any of us say. These people want to test out their arguments to find ways to make it give the appearance of standing up to scrutiny. A whole industry of this kind of cargo-cult science has been developed. It’s in the end all theater being done not to understand the world, but to make it seem like there is a serious scientific debate going on.

Look at the Confirmationbias in Genesis website’s statement of faith for just one second: By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.”

Anyone who works at or writes anything on behalf of that organization, or contributes to any publication in their in-house “journal” immediately discredit themselves. I could never sign a statement that say that some position is true by definition and all evidence to the contrary must be wrong. They’re effectively saying: If reality and doctrine differ, reality is wrong and doctrine is right.

How can someone who is “all there” agree to that? If you agree to that, you have lost your God-damned mind.

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You really should take some time to learn some basic geology. It would stop you from embarrassing yourself by posting videos citing stratigraphy 101 facts as though they overturn all of conventional geology.

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I cringe at the irony in that excerpt from that Answers in Genesis Statement of Faith:

Replace the words “if it contradicts the scriptural record” with “if it contradicts the AIG interpretation of the scriptural record.” Then the sentence which follows it becomes AIG’s own finger pointing back in organizational self-refutation.

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5 posts were split to a new topic: The Theatre of Conflict

Sal, do you believe there are any accurate dating methods that return dates older than 6000 years? Ice cores? Tree rings? Archaeological finds? Are they all flawed?

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John doesn’t mention it in his writings, but I pass on blurbs like that to him and he recognizes the significance. I spoke with him this morning on the phone for an hour as a matter of fact on a variety of issues.

Like me he was an evolutionist and then an Old Earth Creationist then a Young Earth Creationist.

His book, Contested Bones, which has some critiques of radio metric dating have some contribution by me on Alu SINE elements. I also was lead author on a publicly available, but unpublished paper on nylon eating bacteria with John as co-author.

Here’s another on my favorite YEC stumpers. :slightly_smiling_face:

Most of us have heard of the Lake Suigetsu varve record, individual layers in the lake deposited twice yearly (in summer and winter) for the last 150,000 years and which the last 60,000 years are used in C14 calibration.

Lake Suigetsu Varve Project

Creationists hand wave away the evidence by claiming Da Flud deposited all those varves through a series of hyper-rapid water “pulses” (whatever they are). What they won’t tell you is the varve layers in the lake can be cross-correlated and synchronized with volcanic eruptions in Japan and Korea going back 150,000 years. Turns out every volcano has a unique geochemical signature which allows ash in specific layers to be traced to specific eruptions. When that is done the age of the varves determined by counting precisely matches the radiometric age of the volcanoes.

Identification and correlation of visible tephras in the Lake Suigetsu SG06 sedimentary archive, Japan: chronostratigraphic markers for synchronising of east Asian/west Pacific palaeoclimatic records across the last 150 ka
Smith et al
Quaternary Science Reviews: Volume 67, 1 May 2013, Pages 121–13

Abstract: The Lake Suigetsu SG06 sedimentary archive from Honshu Island, central Japan, provides a high-resolution palaeoenvironmental record, including a detailed record of explosive volcanism from Japan and South Korea. Thirty visible tephra are recorded within the 73 m-long SG06 core, which spans the last ∼150 ka. Here we describe and characterise these tephras based on major element glass composition, which is useful for the identification and correlation of these tephras and the age models of the records in which they are found. Utilising the large number of radiocarbon measurements ( n > 600) from terrestrial plant macrofossils in the Lake Suigetsu SG06 record, we are able to provide precise and accurate ages for the tephras from eruptions within the last 50 ka. Glass compositional data of some of the largest eruptions from Japan (K-Ah, AT, Aso-4, Aso-A, Aso-D, and Ata; sampled at proximal outcrops) are also presented. These data show that the major element glass chemistry is distinctive for many of the visible SG06 tephra units, and allows some of the layers to be correlated to known eruptions from volcanoes in Japan and South Korea, namely K-Ah (SG06-0967), U-Oki (SG06-1288), AT (SG06-2650), Aso-4 (SG06-4963/SG06-4979), K-Tz (SG06-5181), Aso-ABCD (SG06-5287) and Ata (SG06-5181). The following ages were obtained for the SG06 tephra units: 3.966–4.064 cal. ka BP (95.4% probability range) for the SG06-0588 tephra, 10.242–10.329 cal. ka BP (95.4% probability range) for SG06-1293, 19.487 ± 112 SG062012 ka BP (2 σ ) for SG06-1965, 28.425 ± 194 SG062012 ka BP (2 σ ) for SG06-2504, 28.848 ± 196 SG062012 ka BP (2 σ ) for SG06-2534, 29.765 ± 190 SG062012 ka BP (2 σ ) for SG06-2601, 29.775 ± 191 SG062012 ka BP (2 σ ) for SG06-2602, 43.713 ± 156 SG062012 ka BP (2 σ ) for SG06-3485, 46.364 ± 202 SG062012 ka BP (2 σ ) for SG06-3668, 49.974 ± 337 SG062012 ka BP (2 σ ) for SG06-3912, 50.929 ± 378 SG062012 ka BP (2 σ ) for SG06-3974, and improved ages for two of the most important tephra markers across Japan, the K-Ah (7.165–7.303 cal. ka BP at 95.4% probability range; SG06-0967) and AT tephra (30.009 ± 189 SG062012 ka BP at 2 σ ; SG06-2650)

The paper is open access but the hosting site won’t allow hot-linking. It can be found on Google Scholar with a simple search.

Any YECs out there willing to explain how the physical counting of the varve layers matches the age of the volcanoes across the whole 150,000 count varve record?

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Could you tone down the appalling self-promotion? Just a notch or two.

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Nothing could be farther from the truth. The rate of the molecular clock is based on observations of mutation rates in today’s world.

Now it is true that the molecular clock does not establish common ancestry. That well-established inference is based on character-based nested hierarchies, genomic nested hierarchies, radiometric dating of geological strata surrounding fossils, well-documented transitions in the fossil record such as the cetacean family, etc. This could be a very long list if I had 5% of your available time to post.

A very tiny fraction of fossils are found in amber deposits. How does this fact lead to the generalization you draw?

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Worst argument on the thread. I put it right up there with “ there are marine fossils on mountaintops! Must’ve been a huge flood!”

Stick around. Upthread Sal told us he’s going to trot out the old YEC standby “the ocean in not salty enough to be old” sea-salinity PRATT. I can hardly wait.

You’ve got it backwards, Sal. The paper Timothy Horton cited simply demonstrates that the bacterium in question was very young. I would hardly think that you would dispute the contention that the bacterium was definitely not millions of years old!

The analysis simply shows that the salt crystal and the bacterium were not deposited in the same event. Thus they have to be dated independently. The analysis does not prove that the salt crystal is 250Myr old, but it does show that this particular bacterium neither supports nor refutes the YEC case.

Best,
Chris