The calibration curve for carbon dating is validated back 12,000 years by measurements on tree rings, and up to 50,000 years on annual deposits on lake beds. Further confirmations include historical artifacts of known age, such as Hezekiah’s tunnel in Jerusalem, which agrees perfectly with the Biblical time. There is much more, including synchronization with other independent dating methods, cave deposits, and ice cores. Carbon dating has been tested and tested again and again; it is not just a few assumptions in play like YEC likes to portray.
1 Like
To be maximally charitable, external radiation might excite an atom into a state whence it decays at a different rate than its ground state, or transmute it into a more or less stable isotope (it would arguably be a different kind of atom in that case). But unless we are talking about nuclear explosions that end up irradiating most of what they do not outright destroy with the sheer amount of heat they release in their admittedly rapid chain reaction of decay, we are dealing with effective rate changes of like one part in a thousand. A far cry from the million-fold speedup needed to fit a handful billion years worth of decay into a handful thousand at most. For carbon, and its effective lifetime of some 50k years, we would still need a speedup by a factor of 10, which is still some four orders of magnitude greater than the (disputed, one should stress!) fluctuations ever measured.
Yes, they were.
Oh? And how much was that, then?
For that matter, how would this render one sympathetic to young-earth creationism? We could throw away everything we know about human origins tomorrow, and we would still be left with a host of undisputed facts about our planet in particular and the universe at large that completely eliminate all scientific plausibility young-earth creationism might hope to have: There would still be organisms alive today that are demonstrably older than what YECs suggest the age of the universe is[1]. There would still be stars visible in the night sky well within our galaxy – never mind distant galaxies we can see with the naked eye – that shouldn’t be, had their light only travelled for the time YECs say the universe has existed for[2]. There would still be the current state of radioactive decay on Earth’s surface, to arrive at which such astronomical amounts of heat were released, that could not have left Earth even having a solid rocky surface, had they all been produced within the YECs’ claimed lifetime of the universe[3].
Unless God deliberately made those organisms to appear older in order to deceive us about the universe’s real age. ↩︎
Unless God deliberately made some starlight in transit already – in some instances for stars that never existed, for stars that we have observed die in recorded history, if they were only far enough away, would never have sent out a single photon that would end up reaching us before their demise – in order to deceive us about the universe’s real age. ↩︎
Unless God deliberately drained that heat out in order to deceive us about the universe’s real age. ↩︎
2 Likes
That’s not an argument for a young Earth, its an argument for not knowing the Earth’s age.
It still might be the most compelling argument for YEC though.
That makes a lot of sense. I just recalled the point because I heard it mentioned in conversation or online once and thought it would be the only feasible explanation without putting much thought into it. I remember measuring the decay rate in physics lab and just said past 100 years since I assumed that was about as long as we’ve had the detectors. But back checking it against objects with historically known ages makes sense. Just was trying to come up with the only argument that I could’ve been a lifeline for YEC from my knowledge
1 Like
That definitely makes sense. The sun is a giant fusion reaction but I don’t think we would ever get the level of radiation needed for this unless we were orbiting somewhere in the corona, haha.
As for Neanderthals being a separate species, I think it’s more accurate to call them a subspecies at best since they were able to interbreed with us. I’m old enough to remember them changing the taxonomical name to Homo sapiens neandertalensis (as opposed to homo neandertalensis) for just this purpose. Seems like a semantical issue as I’m sure you’re aware of the interbreeding which I recall being a good rule of thumb for the determination of speciation, but I’m no biologist. The people were burying their dead and wearing clothes and ornaments for crying out loud!
As for changes in the story of human origins: I was thinking about how we’ve recently found the oldest hominid fossil in Europe recently hundreds of thousands of years earlier than any in Africa. Grecopithicus I think is the name. That was a pretty big shakeup. Also, I can recall the dates for hominin habitation in Europe changing by the order of 100ks of years on at least an annual basis. That’s the kind of order of magnitude I was thinking of in terms of change in the story of human origin. Just seems like there is a lot more color to the picture of our origin story, not to mention the other hominid that we find contributing to our genome like Denisova and other ghost populations in genomes we have yet to find the bones of. It seems pretty significant to me, so I’m pretty hesitant blankly ascribing to the out of Africa 40k years ago model (which is increasingly becoming caveated and nuanced with time, leaving any hardline adherents in a kerfuffle if they took the original model as the final word).
Just was being charitable to the YEC position, maybe sympathetic was the wrong word. Also not sure if a YEC has to believe that the planet or the universe as a whole must be less than 10k years or whatever they believe, just that the first humans have to be within that period.
1 Like
Unfortunately nature doesn’t much care how we decide to call and classify things. So while (successful) interbreeding is a reasonable criterion to separate organisms into groups we call species, there are often edge cases like this, where organisms that behave differently, look different, have different diets and habitats, and do not generally interbreed in the wild, are technically capable of producing fertile offspring in some or all instances. Ring species are even more confusing: Two populations are not interfertile, but each is interfertile with a neighbor, each of which is interfertile with yet another, and those chains of interfertility actually connect at some point. So a simple criterion like that just doesn’t draw the lines sharply enough, because, frankly, the lines aren’t that sharp in nature in the first place. When I say neanderthals and H. sapiens are different species, I mean that the overlap in morphologic and genetic features between the two is smaller than the overlap between different populations within each. Like if we plotted the variation for different diagnostic features, it would look like two well-distinguishable humps, and individuals that share a hump in the distribution for one feature would almost never find themselves scattered across both in another. We fall outside of each other’s range, so to speak. We are still very closely related, enough for there to be significant interfertility, but it’s more like the distinction between tigers and lions, or horses and donkeys, rather than like between dog breeds.
As for the migration out of Africa, indeed the picture has grown more complete, with (afaik) multiple waves at different times. A simple tale of a dozen words almost never tells the whole story about much of anything, and of course clinging to one as a “final word” is likely to leave one some flavour of incorrect at some point, even if one didn’t mind looking silly all the time until then. That being said, I would suggest that the migrations of modern man are a different question than his origin. As much as the former has been expanded with new finds, there is no respectable suggestion that perhaps our evolutionary history is closer to that of hogs than to apes after all, or that the earliest population that became Homo sapiens lived in New Zealand after all, or that an alien race did a genetic experiment on a proto-man to produce the modern variant. I don’t think anything came up within the last twenty years to call into serious doubt that we are the last survivors of a genus of bipedal African apes, nor that anything is likely to challenge this as more remains are found.
As for what is the minimal set of beliefs that make for YEC, I’m comfortable leaving that to its adherents. Though, if past experience is anything to go by, the ‘young-earth’ part of ‘young-earth creationism’ concerns the age of the earth, not just of humanity’s time on it. Most YECs I have ever been made aware of believe that all of nature was created within the equivalent time of a week some six thousand years ago, and that Noah’s flood some four-and-a-half thousand years ago accounts for most of the geologic features that would otherwise suggest a much more ancient earth. That’s not to say it has to be all or nothing, there are certainly people who accept the ancient age of the earth or the universe, whilst rejecting some or all of evolution, and others who accept it all, but say that a divine hand guided some or all of it. But YEC, as far as I know, is specifically the sort of creationism that insists that the earth, and often the universe at large, are young compared to what the evidence on the subject would imply.
1 Like
Allen,
Stop picking on my Neanderthal ancestors. They were the smartest people around 50,000 years ago. One of my grandmothers married a Neanderthal in the Middle East around 45,000 years ago and from them humanity flourish worldwide.
2 Likes