Primal Man

[bobfritzelpuff]

Ok, I know this stuff is probably easily refutable, but I am a lazy bastard and i'd like to know the easy refutations for this stuff:

http://www.chick.com/catalog/comics/0106.asp

[Another brick in the wall]

You spelled "arrogant" and "condescending" wrong. Fortunately, this will make you look even more arrogant!

[baric]

Living organisms ingest a certain % of Carbon-14, a unstable isotope that occurs naturally in the atmosphere but breaks down over time. As long as the organism is alive, the amount of C-14 in its tissue is stable because it is constantly replacing C-14 from the atmosphere. When the organism dies, the % of C-14 in the tissue drops because it is no longer being ingested.

You can't carbon-date a mollusk shell because the mollusk gets its carbon from limestone deposits, not the atmosphere, which means that the ratio of C-14 cannot be predicted.

You have to understand how a test works so that you can understand its limitations. The creationists do not try to understand, which is why their arguments are so stupid to people who do understand.

[Another brick in the wall]

Not only that, but just because a test yielded an incorrect result once (or a handful of times) it does not mean that the test is flawed. I once gave a presentation debunking creationism, and I spoke about carbon dating. I used the analogy of using a bathroom scale to weigh an object of unknown weight. If the scale gives the same answer over and over, and other scales give the same answer, you can be fairly confident of the object's weight. Similarly, scienctists can date fossils with various methods (Dendrochronology, radiological dating, measuring the distance of stars) and arrive at the same answer. When enough scientists get duplicate results, they can fairly confident of a fossil's age.

[baric]

With regards to argon-dating, this has to do with measuring the ratio of a potassium isotope to the argon that it decay to.

Unfortunately, lava already contains argon because not all of it escapes during the eruption. So even though the potassium in the lava will decay to argon, this is already some argon there before the process starts. So someone who did not compensate for the argon already in the lava already would conclude that some potassium has already decayed into argon, making the lava look much older.

This is probably Geology 101, which is why creationists don't get it.


The comment about erosion doesn't consider that geological forces are pushing up land (hey, look at those volcanoes!) and this means that you are not going to erode all of the land into the sea. That's just a really absurd position to take.


I'm not familiar with the moon dust argument, but I'm sure it's about as uninformed as the others.

[Another brick in the wall]

The moon dust argument greatly overestimates the amount of meteoric dust the moon receives every year. The creationist figure comes from a man who estimated the dust influx on the moon by measuring the dust accumulation on some mountaintops. You can find a refutation at www.talkorigins.org under "Age of the Earth."

[bobfritzelpuff]

You spelled "arrogant" and "condescending" wrong. Fortunately, this will make you look even more arrogant!
Meh, I'm more into the logic thing than the spelling thing. English is a messed up language anyway. (Most are.)

But thanks, I changed it. I may be ar(r)ogant and condes(c)ending, but not about my spelling.