Answers in Genesis' Deceptive Video on Radiometric Dating

Answers in Genesis now has a “Check this Out” feature where they tackle a scientific claim which argues for an old earth and try to debunk it.  Recently, much to my dismay, one of the home school teachers sent out a link to one of these videos on radiometric dating.  Aside from the mistakes inherent in the video, itself, it betrays a deep misunderstanding of how science works.  Here is the short video.



We will take this bit by bit.

• 0:28 – the narrator states that most scientists regard the age of the earth as between 4.55 and 4.6 and then remarks that, if this is so accurate, why the 50 million year discrepancy?  He then states “That seems like a lot.”  50 million divided by 4.55 billion is 1.09%.  That is the standard error. This date range is made up of thousands of individual dates. The speedometer on your car is less accurate than that (standard error of 2.5%).  In fact, in any statistical test a 1% standard error is considered is equivalent to saying that you are 99% confident that the results you have are accurate. 1% is not a lot of anything. Also carefully omitted from the narrative is that these dates are derived from at least five different kinds of radiometric isochron dating: 

• Lead-Lead isochron
• Samarium-Neodymium isochron
• Rubidium-Strontium isochron
• Rhenium-Osmium isochron and 
• Argon-Argon isochron.  

All of these dating methods have different decay states, decay rates and half lives and yet all give dates to within 1% error

• 1:52 – After a reasonably straightforward description of radiometric dating, the narrator then, while admitting that it is true that a decay rate can be measured using “observational science,” it requires “historical science” to tell how old the rock actually is. He states that in order to get accurate measures from rocks, one would have to know both the decay rate and the initial conditions of the rock, otherwise we cannot directly measure the ages of rocks.  He asks “how do we know what the initial conditions were in the rock sample?”  and “How do we know the amounts of parent or daughter elements haven't been altered by other process in the past?” and How does someone know the decay rate has remained constant in the past?"   He then says “They don't.” This is false.

• Timothy Heaton, Chair of the Department of Earth Sciences & Physics at South Dakota State University writes this about the parent/daughter ratios:
  

  Isochron dating bypasses the necessity of knowing the quantity of initial daughter product in the rock by not using that value in the computation. Instead of using the initial quantity of daughter isotope, the ratio of daughter isotope compared to another isotope of the same element (which is not the product of any decay process) is used as the comparison for isochron dating. The plot of the ratios of the number of atoms of the parent isotope to the number of atoms in the non-daughter isotope compared to the number of atoms of the daughter isotope to the non-daughter isotope should result in a straight line that intersects the vertical y-axis (which is the ratio of daughter to non-daughter isotopes). This point of intersection gives the initial ratio of daughter to non-daughter isotopes, which would also be the ratio in a mineral that crystallized without any parent isotope present.

  Here is a web site that shows how this plot works in graphic fashion. The narrator's  hourglass analogy is, therefore, inaccurate.  We don't need to know how much sand was in the hourglass to begin with, nor did we need to observe the process.  The decay rate is well-known and invariate, which leads to his second statement.
• As far as the variation in decay rates of radiogenic isotopes goes, they have been shown to vary only  0.1% in response to outside influences (here, and here) and have been shown to vary significantly only under extreme laboratory conditions not found on earth.

As noted above, buried deep in this video and others that Answers in Genesis puts out is a particular philosophical bent that sees “observational science” as real science and “historical science” as not. Ken Ham is often quoted as rejecting historical science by rhetorically asking “Were you there?”  In other words, we cannot know historical processes because we did not observe them.  Consequently, when the narrator of this video says “we don't” in answer to how we can know how some of our assumptions about radiometric dating are correct, it is this philosophical bent in action.

Such a perspective is facile, as it completely disregards the fact that we reconstruct past events every day at all levels, from the simple act of encountering a broken glass on the floor with ice and water beside it (someone dropped a glass of water) to complex murder investigations in which no one but the murderer was present.  No one questions the validity of these assumptions and they form the basis for much of what we do in life, including our entire criminal justice system.

Secondary to this notion that we can reconstruct the past is that the processes that occur today also occurred in the past.  If I am digging in a field and encounter, at a depth of three or so feet, a series of horizontal metal beams that are four and a half feet apart with ties in between them, because I know that distance is the standard railway gauge, I can reasonably assume that what I have uncovered is part of an old railway.  Was I there when they built it?  No, but I didn't have to be to have a pretty good idea of what it is.

This is true not just of human constructs but also of natural formations.  Because we have modern floods, hurricanes, meteorite craters and so on, we can identify these formations in the past.

This puts historical science and all of its reconstructive observational power on level footing with observational science.  While Ken Ham and others at Answers in Genesis might say otherwise, it simply is not so.

It is amazing how much damage to scientific and academic integrity one can do in a three-minute video.  Answers in Genesis is, apparently, up to the task.

Elizabeth Mitchell, David Menton and Andrew Snelling Take on the Ledi Jaw

As noted, the promised report from Answers in Genesis about the Ledi jaw (LD 350-1) is out.  Let's see what they say.  This is an interesting group of authors.  Andrew Snelling is the resident geologist, while David Menton is a former anatomist who wrote a truly terrible article on the evidence for human evolution, which I tackled over six long, straggly posts, ending here.  In it he, effectively, revealed that he has little to no knowledge of the fossil record.  I have read little of Elizabeth Mitchell's posts, other than the one in which she championed the evidence for unicorns in the Bible. 

The opening salvo in the “Lucy Connection” contains this:

An extinct knuckle-walking ape, “Lucy” is generally depicted strolling about East Africa 3 million years ago on her two supposedly arched feet with tiny teeth smiling from her gorilla-like face and tiny brain. That image has created an imaginary place for Australopithecus afarensis in the human lineage.

The initial problem with this paragraph is that there is no evidence to back up their depiction of Au. afarensis. The fossil remains that make up Au. afarensis, of which Lucy is a member, clearly indicate a hominin that was bipedal; that much is not debatable.  It carries none of the traits of an ape in this regard.  However, Au. afarensis does have some ape-like characteristics as well.  In fact, there are quite a list of traits that are Hominin and some that are ape-like.  I chronicled those here, in the fourth part of my response to Menton's 2010 article on human origins.  (Aside: It doesn't bother me that Menton didn't read my post, although Ken Ham knows I write for BioLogos because he referenced one of my posts for them.  It does bother me that Menton persistently mischaracterizes the transitional evidence in Au. afarensis, which is pretty hard to miss, if you are paying any attentional, whatsoever.)

Now, on to the jaw, itself, for which they get the account correct (Here is my short post for BioLogos on the jaw).  In fact, they report pretty much exactly what the discoverers and Fred Spoor determined about the jaw and the reconstruction of the related OH 7 skull. 

The the wheels fall off.

They write:

Could the Ledi jaw’s owner have been a transitional form? No. Evolutionists strain to see something ape-like in the array of Homo traits in the Ledi jaw because its position in the fossil record is so “far back” they think it must be their much sought-after transitional form. Since it lacks a protruding chin no one would suggest this fossil belonged to a modern human, but the lack thereof does not demonstrate that it is Australopithecus afarensis or an ape descended from it or even a less-evolved part of the human lineage. The relatively chinless jaw is simply not typical of modern humans. Nothing about this fossil indicates that its owner still had one foot in the ape-camp and was only in the process of evolving into a full-fledged human.

They are correct that the lack of a chin keeps it out of the modern human camp.  They are incorrect that it doesn't have transitional characteristics. Here is the relevant quote from the article¹:

Indeed, in overall dental and mandibular size LD 350-1 matches smaller specimens of A. afarensis (figs. S1 to S4 and tables S1 to S3). In addition, LD 350-1 shares with A. afarensis a primitive anterior corpus, including an inclined symphyseal cross section, a bulbous anterior symphyseal face, and a projecting inferior transverse torus that is only slightly elevated above the corpus base (Fig. 2A).

What then follows in the scholarly article is a long discussion of no fewer than five distinct characteristics that align the Ledi jaw with Homo to the exclusion of Au. afarensis.  Villmoare and colleagues are keenly aware of the differences between australopithecine and human morphology.  This is why they can recognize these traits.  Thus, when Mitchell, Menton and Snelling write that nothing about the Ledi Jaw is transitional, and provide no evidence of their position, one is tempted to not take them seriously.  The next paragraph is no better:

The Ledi jaw’s bid to be Homo or an early transition to Homo rests largely on the fact that its assigned dates place it in the desired gap between the ape Lucy and archaic varieties of humans. Had its host sediment been dated substantially older, its human features would likely have been ignored or explained away. Evolutionists have been known to dismiss fossil evidence of very early Homo, no matter how similar to modern man, if the stratigraphically assigned dates are too old to fit into the evolutionary schema.

This is illogical. Why would evolutionists care how old it is? There are some, in fact, who would relish the idea of our line being pushed back even further.  The human features are there, regardless of how old it is.  That is why it is making waves—because it has the human features.  If it had been found to be older, the human-like features would not have vanished like the snows of yesteryear.  They would still have been there. 

The last sentence in the quote is, once again, presented without evidence and calls into question the integrity of the scientists involved in this discovery and others like it.  What evidence has been dismissed?  How has it been explained away? To call into question the motives of scientists and call them duplicitous without giving evidence to that effect is worthy of scorn and disrespect.  Put up or shut up.

Next.

The Ledi jaw wouldn’t even be close to being the oldest “Homo” if certain other fossil bones and footprints that are virtually identical to modern man were rightly recognized as Homo sapiens. For example, the Laetoli footprints are claimed to be 3.66 million years old and are virtually identical to modern man’s footprints, but no evolutionist considers them to be human because they are simply too old. The Kanapoi elbow fossil from the Lake Rudolf region of northern Kenya is the distal end of a humerus that is indistinguishable from Homo sapiens, but it is considered to be australopithecine in origin because it is also too old at 4.0–4.5 million years to be considered human. These assigned dates, based on a host of worldview-based unverifiable assumptions, blind evolutionists to the true identity of fossils like these. In truth, humans have been around since the sixth day of the Creation Week, the first two people having been created by God the same day as the land animals.

They are right, the footprints are too old, given that there is no evidence for modern humans until around 190 thousand years ago. The footprints are securely dated by radiometric techniques that the folks from AiG will never accept, despite their robusticity.  Same with the Kanopoi remains.  What this simply means is that, as with many transitional forms at this time, some characteristics were more human-like than others.  What these authors do not mention is that in other fossils from the time period, there are ape-like characteristics as well.  The elbow traits, along with the knee and hip traits are derived in the direction of Homo.  The simian traits are retained from their ancestors.

What these authors do fail to demonstrate is that there are fully modern humans in the same strata as the australopithecines.  That would sink our understanding of human origins once and for all.  Yet, that has never been done. 

They write that this fossil is dated using methods found to have “unverifiable assumptions.”  Curiously, this links to another AiG page on radiometric dating, which, in turn, links to an article authored by Steve Austin, of the ICR, on radiometric dating of Mount St. Helens, rather than actual peer-reviewed scientific articles.

Austin collected dacite samples from around the new St. Helens lava dome, which he knew had been formed around 1986.  He then separated them and sent them to a laboratory for potassium/argon dating.  When the results came back, he declared that radiometric dating was flawed because the results inticated that the dome had been formed around 350 000 years B.P.

In Kevin Henke's response to this report, he addresses how Austin misused the methodology to arrive at his conclusions.  He writes:

Considering that the half-life of potassium-40 (40K) is fairly long (1,250 million years, McDougall and Harrison, 1999, p. 9), the K-Ar method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old (Dalrymple, 1991, p. 93). A few thousand years are not enough time for 40Ar to accumulate in a sample at high enough concentrations to be detected and quantified. Furthermore, many geochronology laboratories do not have the expensive state-of-the-art equipment to accurately measure argon in samples that are only a few million years old. Specifically, the laboratory personnel that performed the K-Ar dating for Austin et al. Specifically, personnel at Geochron Laboratories of Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, performed the K-Ar dating for Austin et al. This laboratory no longer performs K-Ar dating. However, when they did, their website clearly stated in a footnote that their equipment could not accurately date rocks that are younger than about 2 million years old ("We cannot analyze samples expected to be younger than 2 M.Y."; also see discussions by Bartelt et al.). With less advanced equipment, 'memory effects' can be a problem with very young samples (Dalrymple, 1969, p. 48). That is, very tiny amounts of argon contaminants from previous analyses may remain within the equipment, which precludes accurate dates for very young samples. For older samples, which contain more 40Ar, the contamination is diluted and has insignificant effects. Considering the statements at the Geochron website and the lowest age limitations of the K-Ar method, why did Austin submit a recently erupted dacite to this laboratory and expect a reliable answer??? Contrary to Swenson's uninformed claim that ' Dr Austin carefully designed the research to counter all possible objections', Austin clearly demonstrated his inexperience in geochronology when he wasted a lot of money using the K-Ar method on the wrong type of samples.

lawilson200 of Mount St. Helens watch also notes these problems, as does Skeptoid.  If Austin sent the samples to the lab that he knew were produced in 1986, then he either did not know that K/Ar dating requires samples that are at least two million years old to date accurately, or he did know that and submitted them to intentionally get spurious results to publicize the perceived limitations of radiometric dating.  In any event, without the support of Austin's argument, the bad date argument for the Ledi jaw collapses. 

Mitchell, Menton and Snelling write that the geologists studying the area around where the Ledi jaw was found cannot be sure how many stratigraphic layers are missing between the Gurumaha tuff beds and the Lee Adoyta tuff beds, so we cannot know for sure what the total thickness was.  Yes, but we know where the jaw was found and the authors are clear about what the maximum and minimum ages for the fossil can be, based on the dates.  The AiG writers then make an argument that the tuffs could have been formed in hours because of the nature of volcanic eruptions.  This fails to account for the depositional environment between the tuffs, to wit:

Ecological community structure analysis based on mammalian fauna recovered from the Gurumaha fault block indicates a more open habitat (mostly mixed grass-lands/shrublands with gallery forest) that likely experienced less rainfall than any of those reconstructed for the Members of the Hadar Formation (6). The landscape was similar to modern African open habitats, such as the Serengeti Plains, Kalahari, and other African open grasslands, given the abundance of grazing species and lack of arboreal taxa, although the presence of Deinotherium bozasi and tragelphins likely indicate a gallery forest (fig. S6). The existence of Kobus sigmoidalis, aff. Hippopotamus afarensis, crocodiles, and fish in this package reflect the presence of rivers and/or lakes. Approximately one-third of the mammalian taxa present are shared with the youngest Hadar Formation (~3 Ma), while one-third are first appearances of these taxa in the LAV (Table 1). The remaining one-third of mammals recovered can only be identified to the genus level.

How would these landscapes have formed in hours? They reflect hundreds, if not thousands of years of development, and they certainly could not have formed in the middle of a world-wide flood.

The argument presented by AiG also points to a peculiarity of the young earth argument: arguing against a proposition using uniformitarian principles, while at the same time taking no stock in those principles, whatsoever, since they have to be thrown out the window in any flood model. 

They continue:

The evolutionary determination to subdivide varieties of humans into various species is based on evolutionary claims, when in reality all humans would best be called Homo sapiens regardless of their variations. Nevertheless, we are stuck with the terminology that calls the descendants of various people descended like us from Adam and from Noah via the dispersion from Babel by names that imply they are unrelated. Truly, however, when it comes to a fossil like this one, the real question should not be “where in the evolutionary history of humans does it fit?” but rather “does it fit within the norms for human beings or not?” Though limited by its incompleteness, analysis of LD 350-1 suggests it belonged to a person.

Once again, how, then, do you explain the traits that link it to Au. afarensis? Those are clearly non-human. To sweep them under the rug is simply not tenable. These traits are outside the known variation of all modern humans.  No one has them.  Further, they don't even track with traits seen in later hominin forms such as Homo ergaster, Homo erectus or archaic Homo sapiens.  They are clearly australopithecine.

In summary, then, this article written by Mitchell, Menton and Snelling suffers from three principle problems:

1. A failure to correctly describe the fossil material related to the Ledi jaw (Describing Au. afarensis as “An extinct knuckle-walking ape,” for example)
2. A failure to correctly assess the human and non-human morphology of the Ledi jaw, itself, instead simply denying that the non-human traits exist, when in fact, they clearly link it to the preceding australopithecine fossil remains in many ways.
3. Reliance on a single article for rejection of modern radiometric dating assumptions that has been heavily criticized for its misuse of proper methodology. (See this Davis Young article on radiometric dating for a good primer on how reliable it is).

These problems completely sink the AiG's analysis and conclusions of the Ledi jaw.  


¹Villmoare, B., Kimbel, W. H., Seyoum, C., Campisano, C. J., DiMaggio, E., Rowan, J., Braun, D. R., Arrowsmith, J. R., & Reed, K. E. (2015). Early Homo at 2.8 Ma from Ledi-Geraru, Afar, Ethiopia. Science. doi: 10.1126/science.aaa1343

Initial Thoughts on the Bill Nye/Ken Ham Debate...

I took three pages (front and back) of notes but do not have them with me.  My first thought is that Ken Ham is the better debater.  His presentation was well-packaged and just vague enough in places that you couldn't quite grab a hold of it.  I was extremely impressed that he was so open and forthright about his Christianity.  That was gratifying to see.  Bill Nye, on the other hand, is an excellent presenter and had a wit and charm that served him in very good stead.  For the most part, he was able to hold his own and present the message he wanted to get across.  There were, however, a number of golden opportunities that Bill Nye missed that were very frustrating to watch.  Here are some that I remember:

• Ken Ham stated that his model of origins is viable and that there is evidence for the Garden of Eden, the biblical flood and the Tower of Babel.  There isn't.  Bill Nye's argument against the feasibility of floating a large wooden vessel was ineffective and his argument against the possibility that 16 million species could not have fit on the ark was, in my opinion, not well constructed.  The biogeographical arguments alone sink the world-wide flood model. 
• Further, had Nye spent even five minutes talking about how flat Ham's theological construct is and that there are many, many Christians who do not interpret the bible in the way that Ham does, his presentation would have been much more successful.  Nye focused on the fact that the bible has been translated and re-translated many times.  That won't fly.  The historical integrity of the bible is actually quite good. It is Ham's interpretation of the Bible, according to the vast majority of biblical scholars, that is suspect. 
• Ken Ham's initial presentation included the testimonials of real-life, practicing scientists who are self-professed creationists and yet publish in secular journals.  This gave a credibility to his presentation that creationism sorely needs.  What Nye should have done is mention that none of the people that Ham invoked deal directly the palaeontological, genetic or geological evidence involving the age of the earth.  Nye should then have said the reason for that is that 99.9% of scientists practicing in those fields don't accept Ham's model for origins.  It would be even more damaging if he had then brought up counter-examples of scientists who are Christians, such as Davis Young, Carol Hill or Dennis Venema who do not accept Ham's world view.
• When Ham began his diatribe about how we can never know the past because there were no observers (an expanded version of his "Were you there?" argument), Nye gave only two rambling examples of how predictive science is by using the discovery of the Devonian transitional tetrapod Tiktaalik and the 3K background radiation evidence for the big bang found in the universe.  Those examples should have been expanded and there should have been others.  For example, he could have mentioned the prediction of Charles Darwin's that we would find the oldest human ancestors in Africa because that is where our closest living relatives are found, or the prediction that, aside from finding living marsupials in Australia, we would find marsupial fossils in South America and Antarctica based on our knowledge of continental drift, or the hypotheses that resulted in the discovery of the meteorite impact crater in the Yucatan Peninsula that likely meant the demise of the dinosaurs. All of these came true.
• In a related point, Ham makes a mention of the fact that we cannot know the past.  Nye should have pointed out that the Bible was written in the past and that there is no one around today that existed at the time that it was written down.  The answer to "were you there?" is "No, I wasn't, but neither were you."   The bible has been painstakingly reconstructed from ancient texts and manuscripts and, as noted above, the process has been largely successful.  The same is true of the historical sciences, which are trying to piece together a reconstruction of the past world. 

Bill Nye addressed none of these arguments.   He had a message that was "good science education is absolutely necessary for the good of this country and Ken Ham's model doesn't provide it."  He varied from it very little.  Ken Ham's message was that "the Bible has all of the information necessary to develop a well-rounded complete view of the universe, exactly as it is written."

Bill Nye also spent too much time wondering how anyone in their right mind could accept the world as Ken Ham portrays it.  That doesn't matter.  They do.  Thousands and thousands of them do.  He needed to get past that and was, seemingly, unable to.

People will be talking about this debate for years to come and, based on what I have read, supporters of both sides have claimed victory.  It seems to me that very few punches connected on either side, let alone any knockout punches.  It looked, instead, like a fifteen-round split-decision. 

A Good Video on Radiometric Dating

Joy Walters has a video on BioLogos that explains in layman's terms why radiometric dating is sound and how hominin/hominid fossils have been dated. Go watch!