BWE
Posts: 1902
Joined: Jan. 2006
|
| Quote (C Gieschen @ Oct. 23 2007,11:58) | | As for claiming that AIG will not deal with you realistically, then I invite you to give them your best shot and tell them I sent you. Perhaps you'll be printed in the skeptics letters section. I caution you to fully research the site and list specific scientific errors or illogical thinking and back them up. Be concise as you can. |
Here is a snippet of an exchange I had/am still having with a YEC on another forum. I assure you it is much worse if you read the whole thing. In no way am I taking this out of context but you can read the whole thing Here if you want confirmation.
| Quote | | Quote (Fundy @ typical,delusion) | Dr. Don Batten, [snip for appeal to authority], has written ... | Quote | Claimed older tree ring chronologies depend on the cross-matching of tree ring patterns of pieces of dead wood found near living trees. This procedure depends on temporal placement of fragments of wood using carbon-14 (14C) dating, assuming straight-line extrapolation backwards of the carbon dating. Having placed the fragment of wood approximately using the 14C data, a matching tree-ring pattern is sought with wood that has a part with overlapping 14C age and that also extends to a younger age. A tree ring pattern that matches is found close to where the carbon ‘dates’ are the same. And so the tree-ring sequence is extended from the living trees backwards.
Now superficially this sounds fairly reasonable. However, it is a circular process.
[URL=http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/2441 |
and he goes on to explain why he thinks it is a circular process. |
Why is that Dave? Do you agree with what he says? Specifically equivocating pinus radiata with pinus longaeva because tiger and lions can produce offspring? Dang I'm just going to get a beer ready for when you bring that one up. Just so you know, the reason Bristlecones are good for 14C calibration is the environment they live in:
Ferguson, C.W. 1969. A 7104-year annual tree-ring chronology for bristlecone pine, Pinus aristata, from the White Mountains, California. Tree-Ring Bulletin 29(3-4):3-29.
Link here |
and:
| Quote (me @ night,drunk) | 3. Creationists are using fallacies, untruths and rhetorical games to confuse the issue and convince vulnerable people not to investigate the matter.
The artist sometimes known as Woodmorrappe in this editorial points out that
| Quote | Trees absorb whatever carbon dioxide gas is within their vicinity. In the absence of other sources, the only source of CO2 is the atmosphere. But what other source could there possibly be? One source is volcanogenic gases. And, since deep subterranean carbon usually had no prior contact with the atmosphere, it has zero 14C and therefore an infinite carbon-14 age. Now, consider a tree that imbibes half of its CO2 from the air and the remaining half from local volcanogenic gases. Its concentration of 14C at time of death is only half that of the ambient atmosphere, and hence it dies having a ‘built-in’ carbon-14 age of 5,700 years (one half-life).
Tuscany, Italy, is probably the first place where ‘inherited’ carbon-14 dates on wood were described.6 These dates, much too old to be attributed to any past civilization in Italy, were determined from timbers located several kilometers from a volcano. Since that report, other examples of this phenomenon have surfaced from all over the world.7 A recent, detailed study8 has shed further light on the dynamics of this process. Particularly interesting is the fact that these ‘bad’ carbon-14 dates do not occur haphazardly, but to the contrary:
‘The pattern of 14C depletion in the annual rings is remarkably consistent between all three of the trees cored, suggesting that either changes in CO2 flux are occurring homogeneously across the entire area of the tree kill, or that trees integrate CO2 flux very well over relatively large areas.’9
Under the right conditions, inherited carbon-14 dates can therefore mimic ‘real’ ones. |
but fails to note how frickin easy it is to determine if this has happened. I'm gonna just post this image:
from
This paper and you can just figure out why that might be.
For a more detailed critique of the artist sometimes known as Woodmorappe click here |
and I will stop after this one although there are more:
| Quote | | Quote |
David Rohl has pointed out some serious problems with dendrochronology ... |
Actually, calling a circle a square does not diminish it's ability to roll. Mr Rohl has not pointed out any serious problems with Dendrochronology your claim notwithstanding. Unfortunately, being YEC, and being thus compelled to create obfuscation strong enough to keep the rubes' money flowing, he has to use enough information to keep the thinking YEC's confused. Using real information can be dangerous when you are knowingly using a false argument.
Now Dave, you wrote this: | Quote |
Note the highlighted portion above ...
[1] | Quote |
Thus one would be justified in asking if the crucial cross-links which connect up the floating sequences of the Belfast and German chronologies [and by inference, all the other sequences] are based on incorrect wiggle-matches which have resulted from the phenomenon of auto-correlation. |
And further questions would be ...
[2] Why does Mazar reject the dendro curve? How about the wiggle-match problems? How about auto-correlation? How about inflated t-values? How about the Sweet Track Chronology being withdrawn? The South German sequence abandoned? Why did Kuniholm reject the date with the highest t-value? And so on? |
I think a bit of deconstruction is in order here:
By Mazar's rejection, does Rohl mean Amihai Mazar of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem? The one who coauthored 14C Dates from Tel Rehov: Iron-Age Chronology, Pharaohs, and Hebrew Kings (the article will open with a free subsrcription) with Hendrik J. Bruins and Johannes van der Plicht? (Science 11 April 2003:Vol. 300. no. 5617, pp. 315 - 318)
Because if so, he apparently no longer objects.
Yeesh. Of course that is the Mazar Rohl means.
(Rohl) | Quote |
Bibliography:
Mazar, A. -- 1990: Archaeology of the Land of the Bible: 10000-586 BCE (New
York).
... |
link
Well, Mazar published that after Rohl wrote his book so we can only note that, as time marches on, another gap gets filled. Mazar's objection is dealt with and Mazar starts to use the new technology. Strike 1.
Rohl begins by misusing the royal "WE" rather than the correct "I" when he writes:
| Quote | | We cannot know for sure why the various dendrochronology calibration curves cause this problem. |
Actually, "We" can know this thanks to Ferguson, Stuiver, Yamaguchi, and many many others. Although, if you are any indication, "He" probably can't. Interesting to note:
| Quote | | Unlike the dendrochronologies of the sequoia and bristlecone pine where it was possible to read the rings of individual trees over a period of a few thousand years, the European and recently developed Turkish dendrochronologies have had to be constructed from many shorter lived trees, whose rings have had to be 'wiggle-matched.' By cross-matching sequences of narrow and wide growth-rings from different logs the trees can be overlapped -- thus extending the chronology backwards through time. This is a straightforward technique and should be relatively easy to implement. However, a number of difficulties have recently come to light. |
So, sorry to say this, but it looks like Ferguson isn't subject to the entire next portion of this editorial, right? Since he had large enough samples with excelent characteristics for his study. Well, never mind. You want to use ferguson 1969 so I guess that's what we'll do. Actually, that's what I did in my draft post I offered to you before you needed to post.
Rohl's problem is summarized and hinges on this bit here:
| Quote | | Another notable weakness in the construction of the European oak chronologies is the use of statistics. In 1991, J. Lasken raised the problem of inflated t-values.15 A t-value is given to a wiggle-match on the basis of a statistical analysis of the correspondence between two wood samples. This statistical assessment is done by computer which assigns high t-values (3 and above) to good wiggle-matches and low t-values (below 3) to those with poor correspondence between the ring patterns. In 1986, D. Yamaguchi recognised that trees tend to auto-correlate -- that is they possess the ability to cross-match with each other in several places within the tree-ring sequence. He took a douglas fir log known to date between AD 1482 and 1668 and demonstrated that it could cross-match with other tree-ring sequences to give t-values of around 5 at AD 1504 (for the low end of the ring age), 7 at AD 1647 and 4.5 at AD 1763. Indeed he found 113 significant candidate wiggle-matches throughout the whole of the AD tree-ring sequence.16 |
Yamaguchi apparently dealt a severe blow to "wiggle matching". I mean, both Rohl and Batten cited Yamaguchi as scientific proof positive that Dendro ultimately fails because of autocorellation errors, right? Remember that doug-fir log that came up with 3 separate positive matches? That means that both Rohl and Batten must have read the Yamaguchi paper. So I suppose Yamaguchi must have been crushed when he invalidated his own field? Well, just to clear up a little misunderstanding, Yamaguchi didn't invalidate wiggle matching. He improved it by demontrating the need for fitting autoregressive intergrated moving average models to standardized tree-ring series to remove autocorrelation from them. In fact, I read Yamaguchi and you should too! Here is a bit at the end:
[
Hmmm. Makes you wonder don't it? Let's move on:
| Quote | It is therefore interesting to note that a number of the crucial dendrochronology sequences -- for example the Garry Bog 2 (GB2) to Southwark sequences which connect the Belfast absolute chronology (i.e. the AD sequence) to the 'floating' Belfast long chronology (i.e. the BC sequence), and ultimately used to redate the South German chronology, have t-values of around 4. These t-values are considerably lower than those obtained for some of the historically incorrect dates produced by
Yamaguchi's experiment. Thus one would be justified in asking if the crucial cross-links which connect up the floating sequences of the Belfast and German chronologies are based on incorrect wiggle-matches which have resulted from the phenomenon of auto-correlation. |
Well, fortunately Yamaguchi gave us a way to fix autocorrelation errors and now the field in general addresses them whenever appropriate. A peer revuer won't let that problem slip by now that it has been identified. Thank you David Yamaguchi.
Hmmm. Now that I am aware of what Yamaguchi's contribution was, it would be darned dishonest of me to try to claim autocorrelation problems in more modern peer-revued publications that do address the problem now wouldn't it? Well, thanks for that scanned page Dave, So far all the creationist literature cited demonstrates dishonesty. That is part of my proposal and will certainly be part of my conclusion. Maybe you might want to double-check your sources before you post them. |
Do you see how that kind of ridiculousness could make a conscientious person blush? (I'll leave it to you to determine who should blush)
--------------
Who said that ev'ry wish would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star
Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it
Look what it's done so far
The Daily Wingnut
|
