The Science of Biological Evolution (no politics or religion)

  On the contrary. Bombing Hiro and Naga solved the problem of STOPPING the WAR. Japan HAD a choice. They could have continued fighting. It was neither religion nor politics, It was a choice.

Passive-aggressive!

hmmm

You're just being inflammatory now.

Bye.

s23bog, I would suggest reading about what the scientific method actually is (your description is crucially incomplete).

This is a good article to explain why you can never really trust results that have not been thoroughly replicated, however impressive they look. Well-formed hypotheses need to be rigorously tested AFTER they have been formulated. Many of the hypotheses of evolution have now been subjected to over a century of such tests. Modern refinements may have only had a decade or two of testing (of course, it's not the time, it's the extent of the testing that matters).

I've been reading the thread, as you do, and you know it's figures like 1.4million years and what supposidly happened 1.4 million years ago and even longer ago.  It's the fact that we souldn't even question these numbers that I find a little disconcerting.  Maybe we should stear the conversation towards dating methods used and what makes these people so confident while I'm just sat here going "and you were there watching I take it?"

I think he's refering to the moderator who is now reading our every word.  You know the one that thinks the first 191 pages were proberbly dull and can't be bothered reading, but now he's ethralled I'm sure.

Would my 1980 Chevette qualify ? It had 292,000 miles on it before I got rid of it.

It is not merely an assumption that the laws of physics have always been the same, it is a hypothesis that has been extremely well tested by observation. This is a matter of making predictions about how things would have behaved in the past and then making observations to check those predictions. Of course we get rather direct observations from almost the entire history of the Universe from observational astronomy, due to the finite speed of light.

Both s23bog and Twpsyn make the huge error of assuming that that there are not people who have stupendously better understanding than they do.

Every first-year undergraduate in any of the physical sciences knows that the rate of isotopic decay is universal and constant, as far as we can see anyway - and we can see back a long way now. This has been confirmed simply by observing and analysing the radiation that reaches us from distant (and not-so-distant) supernovae, billions of light years away. This particular hypothesis is not based on an 'assumption', but on directly observed evidence. See the difference there?

It's as plain as day that you haven't got a major in physics, I seriously doubt you have a major in anything (maybe pig-ignorant bollocks).

I have no compunction in admitting that there are people well ahead of me on the bell curve.  I however remain unconvinced that you are one of them.  What dating methods are used?  Let's have a systematic discussion about them.

No, let's not. You can google this, it's basic stuff.

Firstly, Twpsyn, I don't claim to be one of those who has top quality understanding of any of these topics. I do have quite strong qualifications and substantial experience of working in applied science but in different areas. So, I am talking about the expertise of others, like you are.

What you describe would be a good way for you to learn about the dating methods used in geology and why they are reliable. It would not take much work. [EDIT: I see Ghostliner makes a similar suggestion in a simultaneous post].

The first thing is that the fundamental methods are based on radioactive decay of isotopes. Now, you may or may not be aware, but these are nuclear processes that are virtually independent of almost all aspects of the environment (only other nuclear processes and powerful radiation are relevant). Moreover, there is near perfect knowledge of the statistical fate of every single nucleotide, how it decays over time. And with the very large numbers of atoms in bulk materials (many quadrillions per kilogram), this means that how the quantities of isotopes change over time is predictable with very small uncertainty.

There are details that I am not very knowledgeable about concerning the initial distributions of isotopes in rocks (this is more a matter of geochemistry, I presume), but the bottom line is using just a single, well-chosen isotope, you can get a date for many types of rock accurate to 1%.

Of course at this point you are (not unreasonably) wondering whether the reasoning of the people who come to this conclusion is correct. But they too have thought that, and they have a large number of examples where there are two or three completely independent methods of dating rocks available, using isotopes of different elements which decay at different rates, and these are found to confirm that the dates are indeed accurate to about 1%.

Of course, there are other, even more independent checks, such as when there is a well preserved stack of layers of rock of different ages, and the rocks are dated independently and the dates agree with a sequence of ages in one direction.

Beyond that, the dates of rocks are used to date fossils, but with the picture that emerges that fossils are themselves characteristic of a specific range of times in the past, these fossils can then be used to cross check the dating used by primary methods. 

The notion of cross-checking is worth keeping in mind. There is only a single consistent picture of a world which had geological era after geological era over the entire age of the Earth, each with its own distinctive characteristics preserved in the rock. Part of this picture is the history of life on Earth which has all the characteristics of the long-established Theory of Evolution. Regardless of what some non-scientist told you.

Is it?  Is it really?  Let's start off with dinosaurs.  What makes you think they are that old?  The controversial discovery of 68-million-year-old soft tissue from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex finally has a physical explanation. According to new research, iron in the dinosaur's body preserved the tissue before it could decay.  The find controversial, because scientists had thought proteins that make up soft tissue should degrade in less than 1 million years in the best of conditions. In most cases, microbes feast on a dead animal's soft tissue, destroying it within weeks. The tissue must be something else, perhaps the product of a later bacterial invasion, critics argued.

The researchers also analyzed other fossils for the presence of soft tissue, and found it was present in about half of their samples going back to the Jurassic Period, which lasted from 145.5 million to 199.6 million years ago, Schweitzer said.

"The problem is, for 300 years, we thought, 'Well, the organics are all gone, so why should we look for something that's not going to be there?' and nobody looks," she said.

The obvious question, though, was how soft, pliable tissue could survive for millions of years. In a new study published today (Nov. 26) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Schweitzer thinks she has the answer: Iorn.

I have another answer for you guys...  there not that old in the first place!

....and I'm a part of Team Twpsyn !!........ 

You don't understand. When I said "google this" I wasn't suggesting that you should go on a data-mining expedition.

Scratch that. Read a science book that covers the subject of radiometric dating.

Throroughly.

Not really, just a roundabout way of saying that you're talking bollocks. Is that straightforward enough?

The answers are to be found in this article.

[To be serious, let me point out that the entirely counter-factual "answer" proposed by Twpsyn is firstly inspired by passionately irrational people devoted to elaborating wildly on a few pages written by Bronze Age people, regardless of how obvious it is that they didn't know much, and secondly is just as convincing as the stork theory for the origin of babies].

Your telling me storks don't deliver babies?  If that's not the case, why do they have so big a beak?