I am most assuredly male. Is it because a finch is such a girly-bird? 
Nolies, you continue to claim that the geologic time scale was made up out of thin air. You have yet to provide a valid argument to support that claim. Here’s a handy link to a discussion of that time scale, how it was developed, and references to the science behind it.
You need to provide a defensible refutation of all the science behind this time scale before you can go around inserting “presumed” into other people quotes. Nitpicking the details of dating techniques is not sufficient.
As I said before, if you’re going to claim that evolution is disproved by science, you have to play by the rules of science. If you can’t do that, your claim isn’t worth the magnetic disk space on the SMBD server that it’s written on.
That must be it. :smack:
Why is it that you give a Creationist a minor technical disagreement or inconsistancy and they inevitably blow it up into a major calamity, a total failure, an utter reversal of paradigm? On the other hand, (Christian) Creationsists throw out a reference to their favorite book, which apparently constitutes absolute and inviolate capitalized TRUTH! :rolleyes:
Yes, radiological dating methods can get varied results based upon the rate of elements absorbed. These elements (such as carbon, as mentioned) have varied in atmospheric composition through time. That is why multiple methods are used, including geological assessment, measurement of composition ratios, proximity of fossils of known age, et cetera, in order to calibrate and correlate radiological dating methods. Note that none of these give exact answers, down to, say, the year or the decade, especially the long time-frame methods, like the U-238 : Pb-206 method; they give close-order-of-magnitude results (within tens or hundreds of thousands of years), which are compared against other dating methods. When the comparisons agree down to an acceptible range of error, we have confidence in the method.
Science isn’t the discovery of a single fact and a “Eureka!” moment (despite how it is portrayed in film and TV). It is a careful collimation, verification, and comparation of data, often recorded or generated at many different times by different researchers until a hypothesis which is supported by the data becomes predominant and is elevated to an accepted theory. Radiological dating isn’t “proof” of anything; it is one drawer in the large toolbox of evolutionary science (including biology, paleontology, botony, zoology, geology, geophysics, physical chemistry, et cetera) which has to be validated in different ways before it becomes accepted.
But it makes for an easy strawman to burn if you assume it is so.
Stranger
Uh-oh, you spelled “botany” wrong.
Now you’re gonna get it.
Damn…well, my whole argument must be wrong then. My failures in spelling and copyediting invalidate my entire argument. I should just lie down and die now.
Nah.
Stranger
And very graciously too. Which is part of what science is all about - understanding that we all make mistakes, and should find and correct them wherever possible. That’s why we have peer review, and bulletin boards are not given quite the weight of peer reviewed scientific journal.
By the way, I am happy to see nolies return. One request: do you have a model of what the fossil record should look like under a creationist hypothesis? Why are whale fossils not found with the trilobite fossils? If you subscribe to the sorting hypothesis (much loved of floodites) could you propose an experiment to test it?
Ya know what, nolies? I’ll take you up on your offer.
I am not a trained biologist. I am not a scientist. My education is in business and my profession is in computers.
Nevertheless, I take you up on your offer for a formal debate.
However, I’ll brook none of this “let’s you and him fight” nonsense. It’s you I wish to debate.
Put up or shut up, friend.
OK, Nolies, if you’re such a stickler for accuracy, please do me a favor. Re-read chapters 1 and 2 in Genesis in your Bible. If you don’t have one handy, here’s a link to the NIV version of those two chapters. Now, please answer one simple question for me. Did God create plants and animals before or after He created man? Please cite chapter and verse to back up your answer.
CJ
I love the example of corporlites in discussions like this.
http://www.envs.emory.edu/ichnology/Dinocopro.htm
Put simply, they’re shit. But very interesting shit. Because they can tell us something about what particular animals ate. And amazingly, dinos and other such animals that evolution “presumes” to have lived millions of years ago, long before modern animals, seem to have had a curious perchance to never eat a modern animal or plant, which creationists assert would have lived at the same time as the dinos. In the shit of plant eating dinos, we find not a single flowering plant. The poo poo of oceanic predators contains only the animal life that evolution suggests existed (and indeed, it contains species which are now extinct or whose descendants are radically different from their ancestors in the shit), and none of the animals that YEC creationists claim would have lived concurrently. Not a predatory single dinosaur poops humans, dogs, horses, or any of the surely luciously delicious treats that larger modern animals would have made (many modern animals would have been pretty easy for dinos to catch too, as modern animals are not evolved to deal with huge, incredibly fast lizards). Flowering plants would have been even more yummy and easy to catch treats, and yet brontosaurs for some reason avoided eating even a one.
Poo.
“Oh, stewardess? I speak jive…”
Nolies’ statement makes sense if you insert an “e” in “plant”, making it “planet”. He did indeed watch a PBS show on the origins of Earth in which the “planet” (not “plant”) was portrayed as being “caustic” and “full of different chemicals”.
NOVA’s “Origins” from last September, began each of its four episodes with these words:
And most likely he’s specifically referring to Episode 2 with its statements like this:
Nolies is assuming, then, that only divine intervention could have created Life with a capital “L” in such a hostile environment.
…Which, like his beef with radiometric dating, has nothing to do with evolution.
Ah. I really did read it as “plant.” Lol.
Apos, the dinos didn’t eat daisies because they were allergic. Duh! Anyway, it looks to me that you are saying that evolution is all shit!
Because I haven’t seen Ben around in an eon, I’ll post these questions to Nolies (since I’m taking a break in writing my PhD thesis on the evolution of noncoding DNA)
How does creation theory explain pseudogenes?
More generally, why is it that time and time again, taxonomic trees assembled by purely morphological and paleontological data is upheld by molecular data, including sytenic changes and rearrangements, duplication and divergence, evolution of gene families, pseudogene decay, changes in exon/intron boundaries, base changes in functionally constrained DNA, and numerous other aspects of molecular evolution.
Honestly, if you don’t know what these terms mean or can’t explain them, you have no business telling scientists that they are wrong.
Ooh, ooh, I can answer.
God works in mysterious ways.
Nolies, do you accept that the Earth is billions of years old and humans have only been around for very recent millions? Species dying out and other species taking their place is what evolution is.
As someone who recently finished his thesis, I feel qualified to respond thusly:
Quit stallin’, and get back to writing your thesis!
I’m not Nolies, sis, but the proper answer to your question is “Yes.”