(August 29, 2010 at 11:20 am)Tiberius Wrote: The evidence for evolution is far more than just "the Earth has been around for billions of years". The fossil record isn't going to vanish overnight because the Sun affects radioactive decay.
Secondly, the article does not mention how much the decay rate drops by. To make the jump from a simple announcement of a possible (i.e. unconfirmed) discovery to a suggestion that it would have a massive effect on our dating methods, without any data to back the assertion up, is unscientific.
To sort of add on to what Adrian is saying, it seems to be unknown just how much or even exactly what kind of effect the sun has on radioactive decay. I personally doubt it's off by billions of years (it's not just radiometric dating that gives us these figures) or how widespread the effect is - for example, if the sun affects radioactive decay only down to a certain depth or if it affects the entire planet (it may be the latter because the cause may be due to neutreno emissions).
For all we know right now, the effect may even merely be within the normal margin of error.
A more interesitng question, in my opinion, is how this may answer another longstanding question regarding radioactive decay and the internal heating of all of the terrestrial planets in the inner solar system. We still don't know if there's internal heating in Mars, for example (small planets like mars may be too cool to penetrate the crust or form a magnetic field, but the planet may not be completely dead.
So this may or may not affect figures on how fast planets can cool off, or it may not.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
