The Young Earth for Creationist Dummies

Today we take a look at the phenomenon of selective blindness, the practice of ignoring anything that does not fit with your preconceived notions. Our DotD today uses the yahoo email address job41 to conceal his name, but, at least according to the scanned letter in the body of his blog post "The Bible and Radiometric dating,"¹ his name might be Scott Taylor. Of course, given the tendency of creationists to endlessly recycle the same bogus information, who knows whether that's his real name: it might even be a pseudonym used to protect him from the well-deserved ridicule of others less blind to facts.

But let's take a look at a few examples of job41's bull, beginning with this claim:

"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.

They then use potassium argon, or other methods, and date the fossils again."

OK, for the scientifically illiterate - whether willfully or accidentally - here are the problems with this half-baked crap:

1. Oak Ridge National Laboratory does not have a geochronology laboratory. There's one at the University of Tennessee, but they're not the same thing - and "ORNL" sure sounds more high-falutin' 
2. You can't date dinosaur bones via radiocarbon, because the material in a fossil bone is not the original material, the bones have been fossilized by replacement of organic matter with inorganic minerals (here explained at a fifth-grade level), mostly silicon dioxide, aka quartz. If any of the original material remains, it is generally hydroxy-apatite, hydrated calcium phosphate; which contains no carbon!
3. You can't date fossilized bone with potassium-argon (no potassium), rubidium-strontium (no rubidium), or any of the other radiometric methods. Even if you could, it would only date the fossilization process...
4. What kind of person accuses scientists of "throwing out results" that don't fit with their "preconceived notions" and then does the same thing? Pot, meet kettle!

Of course there's more: our staff geologist was amused by the letter from a real geochronology lab at his alma mater, the University of Arizona. According to job41, someone sent them an Allosaurus bone to date and the resulting date was 16,000 years or so. Ha! says job41, that proves radiocarbon dating is wrong. But wait:

1. Where is this allosaurus bone he cites? Where did it come from? Who identified it as an allosaurus bone? 
2. See above: you can't use radiocarbon dating on fossilized bone because there's no carbon present. It's a safe bet that the professionals at the University of Arizona Laboratory of Geochronology are smart enough to recognize fossil bone (given the minerals present), and would not even attempt to date it using ¹⁴C. 
3. The reasonable assumption is that the alleged allosaursus bone is not a fossil, but a modern bone.

Moving on: job41 (are there really at least 40 others who are this misguided?) also cites the following: "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)" The problem being, of course, that the data in the cited article, now half a century old, has been investigated hundreds of times since. The easy answers to Job's criticism is that Marine mollusks have limited exposure to atmospheric 14C, but instead take up carbon dissolved in ocean water, which definitely resets the so-called atomic clock. But Job ain't having none of that, because -- tada! - it doesn't support his preconceived notion. In a classic example of selective blindness, Job reports the one age of 23,000 years; while ignoring the fact that a later study of almost 70 radiocarbon dates, which included the results from the cited study, found a mean age of 535 years. Talk about "throwing out results that don't agree with you"! It's just one more case of cherry-picking the one data point that looks like it supports your belief, while ignoring the many that don't (see "climate skeptic").

We could go on, but you'd be bored. Suffice it to say that job41 (Hugh Miller, if that's his name) is extremely well qualified to receive the Antisocial Network's award for Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The post has been deleted, but you can still see it using archive.org's Wayback machine. Its URL was   www.angelfire.com/mi/dinosaurs/carbondating.html

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