Intermediate fossils

[MrGoodBytes]

Though it would be common sense to most but i guess ill have to explain. If you look at the picture youll notice the head isnt attached to the rest of the body..... so yes it is headless. The human head could of been seperated, or even right beside the body. Once the organs of the body decayed, animals could of displaced the head (either while eating the dead carcus or after it was only bones). As you can see theres many answers that can be given to why that isnt the actual head....

Whoops, I got the whole thing reversed. The head is apelike, the torso is the more humanoid part of it. Anyway, this is a nonsensical explanation. Turkana Boy is dated to 1.6 million years, long before Homo Sapiens came.

Maybe thats an overexagerated example, but a distinct "intermediate" stage would be preferable. We already know macroevoltion takes place on a daily bases even today....macroevolution is a topic in itself.

Like this?


http://www.christianforums.com/t4585675-noahs-flood.html#post30730600

 

[jwu]

Though it would be common sense to most but i guess ill have to explain. If you look at the picture youll notice the head isnt attached to the rest of the body..... so yes it is headless. The human head could of been seperated, or even right beside the body. Once the organs of the body decayed, animals could of displaced the head (either while eating the dead carcus or after it was only bones). As you can see theres many answers that can be given to why that isnt the actual head....

If that had happened, there would be no reason for the lower jaw to be found in the same place, which is a seperate structure after all.

Also note that there are ways to confirm that the skull is the right one, by taking a closer look at the spine bones and how they fit to the skull. Another important feature is the location where the nerves from the spine enter the skull. This location gives clear evidence about whether the individual stood upright or walked on all fours or knuckles. A knuckle walker skull would not fit to a upright walker spine for that reason.

 

[pyro214]

Whoops, I got the whole thing reversed. The head is apelike, the torso is the more humanoid part of it. Anyway, this is a nonsensical explanation. Turkana Boy is dated to 1.6 million years, long before Homo Sapiens came.

and what dating method derived this...let me guess, carbon dating?
aka, unproven assumptions that are easily effected by the chemical environment of the object.

Like this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambulocetus
proof not words please.

 

[pyro214]

Also note that there are ways to confirm that the skull is the right one, by taking a closer look at the spine bones and how they fit to the skull. Another important feature is the location where the nerves from the spine enter the skull. This location gives clear evidence about whether the individual stood upright or walked on all fours or knuckles. A knuckle walker skull would not fit to a upright walker spine for that reason.

very true, yet this picture doesnt give any background on such research.

 

[RedAndy]

and what dating method derived this...let me guess, carbon dating?
aka, unproven assumptions that are easily effected by the chemical environment of the object.

Carbon dating wouldn't have been of any use for a 1.6 million year-old specimen.

Also, read this article before you make any "unproven assumptions" about the nature of radiometric dating.

 

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

and what dating method derived this...let me guess, carbon dating?
aka, unproven assumptions that are easily effected by the chemical environment of the object.

[/url]
proof not words please.

Not a good guess. Turkana boy is found in deposits with volcanic ash that has been dated to 1.6 million years old by both pottasium/Argon and Argon/Argon dating. (Added in edit: Actually between a layer 1.9 myo and one 1.4 myo)

 

[pyro214]

Carbon dating wouldn't have been of any use for a 1.6 million year-old specimen.

Also, read this article before you make any "unproven assumptions" about the nature of radiometric dating.

there not, what i said is simply a paraphrase of what scientists have derived:

http://www.allaboutarchaeology.org/is-carbon-dating-accurate-faq.htm
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/carbondating.html

also your link didnt work for me...

Not a good guess. Turkana boy is found in deposits with volcanic ash that has been dated to 1.6 million years old by both pottasium/Argon and Argon/Argon dating. (Added in edit: Actually between a layer 1.9 myo and one 1.4 myo)

doesnt matter, sitll inaccurate:
http://www.ees.nmt.edu/Geol/labs/Argon_Lab/Methods/Methods.html

 

[Frumious Bandersnatch]

there not, what i said is simply a paraphrase of what scientists have derived:

http://www.allaboutarchaeology.org/is-carbon-dating-accurate-faq.htm
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/carbondating.html

also your link didnt work for me...



doesnt matter, sitll inaccurate:
http://www.ees.nmt.edu/Geol/labs/Argon_Lab/Methods/Methods.html

The reason that both Ar/Ar and K/Ar are used is that one can be used to check on the other. That is when they agree the dates can be considered accurate.

 

[Flame]

As no one answered me ill try again!!

Specificly the Bible says God created everything. What it does NOT do is tell exactly how he did it. I don't see a debate here. How do we know that God didn't create original forms that evolved as part of his creation. I for one could care less how he did it. Again, nothing to debate here. On the evolution side which attempts to take God out of the game all togather, answer me this, Where did the first molecule come from that evolved into all this that we know around us? Who or what provided the first Atom?? It had to start somewhere. I submit it started from God.

 

[grimbly]

snip

doesnt matter, sitll inaccurate:
http://www.ees.nmt.edu/Geol/labs/Argon_Lab/Methods/Methods.html

Your Site you referenced seems to not support your contention. They certainly are of the opinion that K/Ar Ar/Ar techniques are accurate and they list a whole ton of papers to back up that contention. Now they do admit up front that in order to get good results , there are a lot of factors that must be taken into consideration but certainly nothing that invalidates these techiques.
So I'm confused why you listed them as supporting your assertion.

 

[pyro214]

The reason that both Ar/Ar and K/Ar are used is that one can be used to check on the other. That is when they agree the dates can be considered accurate.

intresting but im still not convinced,, ill look more into it after homework/ birthday dinner. bbl

 

[ENominiPatri]

Specificly the Bible says God created everything.

In the Koran it says Allah created everything. What are your grounds for rejecting that claim?

What it does NOT do is tell exactly how he did it. I don't see a debate here. How do we know that God didn't create original forms that evolved as part of his creation. I for one could care less how he did it. Again, nothing to debate here.

Do you reject naturalistic causes based on your devotion to a holy book or have you looked at all the evidence and decided it was wrong?

On the evolution side which attempts to take God out of the game all togather, answer me this, Where did the first molecule come from that evolved into all this that we know around us? Who or what provided the first Atom?? It had to start somewhere. I submit it started from God.

Evolution occurs with or without a god's help. The Theory of Evolution makes no specific claims about the origin of life, rather implies common descent by default. Abiogenesis is where you want to look if you're curious as to how life began. It's quite an intriguing hypothesis.

Negative gravitational potential energy means that the net energy of the universe is zero, so we came from nothing and still are nothing as the law of conservation of energy was not violated by the big bang.

You submit that god created everything, well for that to be at all plausible you must define the properties of your hypothetical god and the method of creation used by that god. You have done neither so you made an illogical and irrational conclusion.

 

[jwu]

very true, yet this picture doesnt give any background on such research.

You can be very sure that it has been done though, as the bones have been examined very closely. It is a common procedure.

http://www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/carbondating.html

I'm glad you posted this link, because it shows a lot about the usual techniques of many of the anti-evolution websites out there.

Let's dissect it:

But there is the problem. They assume dinosaurs lived millions of years ago (instead of thousands of years ago like the bible says). They ignore evidence that does not fit their preconceived notion.
What would happen if a dinosaur bone were carbon dated? - At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Scientists dated dinosaur bones using the Carbon dating method. The age they came back with was only a few thousand years old.
This date did not fit the preconceived notion that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. So what did they do? They threw the results out. And kept their theory that dinosaurs lived "millions of years ago" instead.
This is common practice.

Well, it's a complicated technique and there can be errors, so when a result occurs which goes straight against the vast majority of other results which were obtained by independent methods which wouldn't have any reason to agree if they were flawed (but they do agree), then it is reasonable to assume that something went wrong there.

It's a common technique to highlight occasional bad results in order to discredit a hundred times as many good results.

They do this many times, using a different dating method each time. The results can be as much as 150 million years different from each other! - how’s that for an "exact" science?
They then pick the date they like best, based upon their preconceived notion of how old their theory says the fossil should be (based upon the Geologic column).
So they start with the assumption that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, then manipulate the results until they agree with their conclusion.

No, occasional bad results are discarded because a majority of other results disagrees with them, thus marking them as bad results. Anyone who has worked in a lab on an experiment with measurements has experienced occasional bad results. If e.g. ten clocks say that it's 3pm and one say that it's 7am, then i put my money on 3pm and disregard the single clock which says 7am. I think that's a reasonable way to handle it. Note that in scientific papers all the results are still published though unless the cause of the error was identified. They are not treated as non-existent.

There are also calibration methods which show that C14 and other radiometric dating methods do work - e.g. dating pieces of biomass which were found in layers of annually forming lake varves, then comparing the C14 results to the layer number and even counterchecking this with other independent methods. If C14 were flawed, this shouldn't give agreeing results, but it does:

Dating methods are based on 3 unprovable and questionable assumptions:
1) That the rate of decay has been constant throughout time.
2). That the isotope abundances in the specimen dated have not been altered during its history by addition or removal of either parent or daughter isotopes
3) That when the rock first formed it contained a known amount of daughter material
("Radioisotopes and the age of the earth" pg v)

1) There is nothing which indicates that they have not, but there is evidence which indicates that they have been stable, e.g. observations from supernova 1987A . And squeezing 4.5 billion years worth of nuclear decay into 6000 years would release enough energy to turn the earth into a ball of superheated plasma.
2) This can be checked by use of isochron dating, it indicates contamination. Same about 3), initial presence of the daughter element is indicated by isochron dating as well.

And then there are dating methods which do not depend on knowledge of the initial ratio of parent and daughter at all, e.g. fission track dating.


Anyway, let's get to the really funny part:

Living penguins have been carbon dated and the results said that they had died 8,000 years ago! This is just one of many inaccurate dates given by Carbon dating.

But it's an expected one! Penguins get their food from the ocean. C14 dating only works with things which get their food from land, as that food in return has to get its carbon from the atmosphere. The C14 content of the oceans is very irregular and generally lower than that of the atmosphere, and therefore one does even expect such a bad result!
In other words, the author of that website either has no clue what he is talking about or he is just plain dishonest and deceptive.

The shells of living mollusks have been dated using the carbon 14 method, only to find that the method gave it a date as having been dead for 23,000 years!(Science vol. 141 1963 pg. 634-637)

Mollusks - more marine life.

The body of a seal that had been dead for 30 years was carbon dated, and the results stated that the seal had died 4,600 years ago!

Seals eat....fish! So no surprise here...

What about a freshly killed seal? Well, they dated one of those too, the results stated that the seal had died 1,300 years ago. (Antarctic Journal vol. 6 Sept-Oct 1971 pg. 211)
Antarctic seawater has a low level of C14. Consequently organisms living there dated by C14 give ages much older than their true age.
A lake Bonney seal known to have died only a few weeks before was carbon dated. The results stated that the seal had died between 515 and 715 years ago. (Antarctic Journal, Washington)

Emphasis mine...the author of that website shoots his own foot there by even giving the reason for the bad results. So either he didn't even properly read his own sources, or he is just plain deceptive.

"Scientists got dates of 164 million and 3 billion years for two Hawaiian lava flows. But these lava flows happened only about 200 years ago in 1800 and 1801.

This is a rather well known case...they measured xenoliths (pieces of rock which were not completely molten), not the actual lava.

 

[rmwilliamsll]

The Theory of Evolution makes no specific claims about the origin of life, rather implies common descent by default.

i don't think so. it appears that common descent has good evidence for it and can not be derived from the TofE from any first principles.

so example:
the deepsea vents may very well have a different genetic code (one good piece of evidence for common descent), and use totally different pathways for metabolism. we don't know until someone looks, this is the different between the TofE implies (as you say here) and the TofE have good evidence as a conclusion.

it is important to watch carefully the difference between implication and an evidenced conclusion.

 

[FishFace]

Also note that there are a plethora of different radiometric dating methods, each with its own caveats. Carbon dating only works to about 65kya, and that's pushing it (you need extremely sensitive, well shielded equipment to pick up the decays) and only works with dead, organic material. And the food source has to be correct, too.

Other radiometric dating methods are available for certain things, going further back, but crucially, they all point to a vastly older earth than 10,000 years! Even better, when multiple methods can be combined they always seem to match up. When they don't, it is time for scientists to work out why - see above for how we've worked out the limitations of C14 dating.

 

[pyro214]

Also note that there are a plethora of different radiometric dating methods, each with its own caveats. Carbon dating only works to about 65kya, and that's pushing it (you need extremely sensitive, well shielded equipment to pick up the decays) and only works with dead, organic material. And the food source has to be correct, too.

Other radiometric dating methods are available for certain things, going further back, but crucially, they all point to a vastly older earth than 10,000 years! Even better, when multiple methods can be combined they always seem to match up. When they don't, it is time for scientists to work out why - see above for how we've worked out the limitations of C14 dating.

they all use simlar methods, why wouldnt the results match up?

 

[TeddyKGB]

they all use simlar methods, why wouldnt the results match up?

Radioisotope dating methods are not only calibrated by other radioisotope dating methods. They are also calibrated by tree rings and ice core samples.

 

[pyro214]

Radioisotope dating methods are not only calibrated by other radioisotope dating methods. They are also calibrated by tree rings and ice core samples.

which only prove it up to what....10k years? due to half life, the further you go the less consistant this method becomes. Half life is only one of the several things that effect this results significantly.

[SIZE=-1]This means that given a statistically large sample of carbon 14, we know that if we sit it in a box, go away, and come back in 5730 years, half of it will still be carbon 14, and the other half will have decayed. [/SIZE]

This is a past reply i made about Tree rings:

and let me guess, this old old tree is a guestimate?
Your probly using a fact thats like this, far from factual:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v...living_tree.asp

"This is clearly based on far more assumptions and uncertainties than tree-ring dating."
It appears that traditional tree-ring dating on any timber found growing at the site so far gives an age of no more than 4,000 years. This is well within the ages of the oldest living bristlecone pines, which have around 4,600 tree-rings and are still the world's oldest living organisms. (Bristlecone pines are native to the Rocky Mountains of the United States.)

If anything, you just added proof to Noahs flood

Ice core dating, first time i heard about it was in this thread....apparently still not accurate:
all i did is type in "ice core dating/ accuracy"...now, if it said completey accurate that would be nice but, like trees/carbon dating, a bunch of innacurate statments are made against it
http://www.flem-ath.com/icedate.htm
also keep in mind that if there was a flood...this could of tilted the Earths axis, thus changing temperatures.

You can be very sure that it has been done though, as the bones have been examined very closely. It is a common procedure.

not exactly, even i could fake a picture like that....although im sure there are other cases were this has been done, maybe.

I'm glad you posted this link, because it shows a lot about the usual techniques of many of the anti-evolution websites out there.

type in, "carbon dating/inaccurate" or ''carbon dating/inaccuracy"
I may of not chosen the best of links but ive read some very informal data in the past....and also we both no that all of its not true, therefore carbon dating isnt 100% accuarte.

There are also calibration methods which show that C14 and other radiometric dating methods do work - e.g. dating pieces of biomass which were found in layers of annually forming lake varves, then comparing the C14 results to the layer number and even counterchecking this with other independent methods. If C14 were flawed, this shouldn't give agreeing results, but it does:

i disagree,
carbon dating may, and im sure ive read this several times, be accurate only up to a couple thousand years. If your comparing it to layers or trees....you only prove it to be useful for a couple thousand years. Otherwise your just assuming that if it works within a couple thousand, why not a million. This is not true because of half life etc... is you disagree ill bring up some more facts.

1) There is nothing which indicates that they have not, but there is evidence which indicates that they have been stable, e.g. observations from supernova 1987A . And squeezing 4.5 billion years worth of nuclear decay into 6000 years would release enough energy to turn the earth into a ball of superheated plasma.

why 6000 years? and no the Bible doesnt derive this....or any specific date for that matter.

Emphasis mine...the author of that website shoots his own foot there by even giving the reason for the bad results. So either he didn't even properly read his own sources, or he is just plain deceptive.

not like its a bad thing, some writers use this technique to further a point...maybe in this situation hes showing that animals that died a long time ago may of eaten fish....and results may be incorrect. Many dinosaurs did not eat marine life though, so this doesnt get him very far.

 

[Valkhorn]

Um, Ice Cores go back about 750,000 years.

 

[pyro214]

Um, Ice Cores go back about 750,000 years.

points to link in previous reply "http://www.flem-ath.com/icedate.htm"