Shut up when you're goddamned ahead!

[elfs]

I flipped back and forth around the dials listening to the various channels taking up Sarah Palin, and after slipping past Sean Hannity's passive banality I dropped into liberal Randi Rhode's show. Randi was ranting and raving about how Palin is a pro-Intelligent Design advocate.

Rhodes was screaming about how science proves evolution, and she kept ranting about "Carbon dating, you can't deny carbon dating, evolution is supported by carbon dating!"

I my reaction was, "Please, shut the fuck up!"

Carbon dating is only useful for the human era. You don't use carbon dating to study evolution. The nested evidentiary columns of cosmogenic dating and geologic stacking support each other in establishing the age of the Earth, supported by both chemical and nuclear science and experience, gives us always-provisional knowledge about the age of the Earth.

But please, it's not carbon dating.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Carbon dating does, however, support an Earth older than the Biblical chronology, which only goes back a little more than 6000 years. And radiological dating in general covers the whole history of the Earth, though with some gaps (one of them, irritatingly, during the key period of human evolution).

[funos.livejournal.com]

I think the problem here is that you're expecting technical accuracy from the media. :)

(And if they aren't being inaccurate, it's usually because they are repeating a canned phrase, a content-free fnord. "A new medical study shows..." Aaaargh!)

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Carbon dating is used to study extinct human species.