resistance is futile, you will be assimilated

[Paleophyte]

In my life, I’ve know roughly a double dozen actual, working scientist, and not ONE of them was confused about radiometric dating.

Boru

the only radiometric dating I know how to do is carbon dating...

I don't understand how to do the other dating methods... do you???

Yes. I've obtained radiometric ages from rocks as old as 2.9 billion years old. I could easily get ages from older rocks but haven't worked with any yet.

The underlying principle is the same as for 14-C dating, you simply use a different radiometric system. No radiometric system can be used much beyond 10 half-lives of the radioactive isotope. There won't be enough of it left to date. Your rock keeps aging, but because there's no 14-C left, the clock stops "ticking". Instead, we use isotopes with much longer half-lives. 14-C has a half-life of just 5730 years, but 235-U has a half-life of 703.8 million years. 238-U, 40-K, and 87-Rb are even longer-lived.

The big difference is that living organisms don't typically contain any Uranium, and precious little potassium or rubidium. Occasionally, fossils are formed in ways that introduce U, K, or Rb, but that's rare and unreliable. Instead, we date volcanic rocks laid down in the same strata. By logical necessity, a rock can't be older than material that it includes and can't be younger than material that cuts it. So all you need to do is find some volcanic material immediately above and below your fossil that you can date. There you go, age bracketed to better than the error bars on the dating technique.

Zircon U-Pb ages are the gold standard because zircon is nigh on indestructible. When zircon forms, the chemistry that produces it excludes any "common lead"  that may be lurking but incorporates abundant uranium, so you don't typically need to correct for common lead. You also get two independent clocks ticking away: 235-U decaying to 207-Pb and 238-U decaying to 206-Pb. You also typically get 232-Th decaying to 208-Pb for independent verification. You can get ages from a single zircon crystal that's too small to be seen with the naked eye by a variety of techniques, including wet chemical techniques and TIMS, in situ laser techniques coupled to ICP-MS, or in situ secondary ion sputtering.

[Fake Messiah]

You can look in many of DK popular science books and see illustrations of how radiometric dating is done.

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[Paleophyte]

If life based carbon materials are found in a fossil, you would think that they would carbon date it!!!

as a scientist I have real discoveries, real unique experiments, and real new inventions.

Then, as a scientist, you'll understand the limitations of any measuring tool only too well. Here are a few caveats for the 14-C radiometric system:

(1) The analysis typically requires a gram or so of material. Modern AMS techniques can push this down to the sub-milligram range.

(2) No radiometric system works much beyond 10 half-lives of the active isotope. For 14-C that's 5,730 years, which means you can't reliably date anything much older than about 60,000 years with it.

(3) Fossilization typically introduces abundant "dead carbon" contamination in the form of carbonate minerals and fluids.

So when looking at cells in dinosaur fossils you have (1) way too little material that's (2) way too old and (3) way too contaminated for 14-C dating to be meaningful. If you could find an entire herd of Tyrannosaurs and were foolish enough to dissolve up the fossils of their bones then you might be able to find enough material to not provide you with a date regardless. Congrats, you'll have conclusively demonstrated that there's no 14-C where nobody except for religious crackpots expected to find it. The only sensible reason to do that would be to demonstrate contamination and there are much more effective means to do that.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

The material isn't blood, it's some material that might be blood cells, depending on interpretation. You can't carbon date individual cells. Simply not enough material to lift a 14-C date off of. The scientists who maintain that the material has recently been contaminated (not blood cells but rather fungal cells) would love to do exactly that. Finding modern 14-C would demonstrate that the samples have been contaminated.

How do you contaminate the sample if its locked up in solid fossil?

What we should find if 'your' theory is correct, is that there would be zero carbon 14.

We should have the test done either way.

For at least the third time, there is no point looking for C-14 in samples that old for dating purposes.

Why would you call yourself a scientist?

Boru

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Even God doesn’t love everyone - it says so in the Bible. If there are limits to God’s love, then ‘God is love’ is a nonsensical statement.

Boru

I like that argument.

but, in the bible, who does God not love?


"those loving violence, my soul certainly hates"

can you hate and love at the same time or hate and love the same person for different reasons such that there is still some love?

(Bold mine)

Esau.

If God has any hate at all, or even the capacity to feel hate, then - once more, with feeling - 'God is love' is rendered a nonsensical statement, like 'healthy botulism' or 'child-safe plutonium'.

Boru

[Sheldon]

"Non-Mineralized Tissues in Fossil T rex"

"The absolute ages of all fossils ultimately hinge on radiometric dating techniques, the validity and accuracy of which are beyond reasonable doubt."

"Multiple analyses using several independent radiometric techniques show that the rocks in which the MOR T rex was found are about 65 million years old. The age of this fossil is a settled fact."

"for the past few centuries “fossil” has had two distinct meanings: the remains or traces of ancient life (the time-based definition), and an object of biological origin that has undergone the process of “fossilization” (the process-based definition). The creationist challenge to the age of the MOR T rex is an equivocation based on this dual definition:

1. A fossil (time-defined) is old.

2. The MOR T rex is not a fossil (process-defined) because the presence of soft tissue demonstrates that it is not fossilized.

Therefore, the MOR T rex is not old.

The argument is invalid because each of the premises defines “fossil” in a different way. Few arguments used by creationists are as easily refuted as this, because most errors in creationists’ reasoning are not simple logical fallacies, and arise instead from misinterpretations of empirical evidence and hence requiring detailed refutation. But the equivocal use of “fossil” is not a creationist invention; it is a bad habit that they learned from palaeontologists themselves."

CITATION

This is quite an old creationist canard, well debunked by science. 

Here is another source debunking it, from TalkOrigins website, CITATION

did they carbon date the blood?

Read the citations, it's an old creationist canard, it was debunked years ago.

[Sheldon]

just quote any "proof" you think you have?

You are allowed to quote the proofs, but I am not.

It's always hilarious when apologists claim they have a "proof" for a deity in an internet chat room, as if this has escaped the rest of the world, even millennia of religious apologetics, and they genuinely don't see how spectacularly stupid a claim that is. Teenage boys usually, the hubris is a dead giveaway.

[Sheldon]

Even God doesn’t love everyone - it says so in the Bible. If there are limits to God’s love, then ‘God is love’ is a nonsensical statement.

Boru

I like that argument.

but, in the bible, who does God not love?


"those loving violence, my soul certainly hates"

The bible depicts a deity that indulges in, and encourages in its pets, indiscriminate violence, and murder, endorses slavery, and commits global genocide, to name but a few, luckily there isn't a shred of objective evidence any deity exists or is even possible, but the one depicted in the bible is  amoral, barbarically sadistic, and indifferently cruel megalomaniac. 

You're selling a product you can't demonstrate exists or is possible, and that product is morally repugnant anyway.

[arewethereyet]

@SubtleVirtue

If I may ask, which came first, your belief in a god, or your proofs of the existence of a god?

I spoke to God when I was one and a half years old. He told me not to kill my brother and to go and tell my mother.

No one else found this to be disturbing?

To me it is the "proofs" needed to know that the Subtle one is full of sh$t and not to be believed about anything.

[Sheldon]

I spoke to God when I was one and a half years old. He told me not to kill my brother and to go and tell my mother.

No one else found this to be disturbing?

To me it is the "proofs" needed to know that the Subtle one is full of sh$t and not to be believed about anything.

The claim he spoke to anything at 1.5 years old is disturbingly stupid, but yes the rest would be pretty disturbing, if it weren't demonstrably made up bs.