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blue bits. red rocks.
Monday 27 April 2009

He also argued at length that the provisional, evidence-based nature of the scientific method was somehow problematic. For example, he remarked that many of the older folks in the audience were probably told that the Earth was 250 million years old, while the current accepted age of the Earth is 4.5 billion years, and he then implied that this extended age of the Earth is not based on any evidence but is merely an ad hoc attempt to give the Earth an age old enough to be compatible with extended periods of evolution, which is simply untrue. The expanded age of the Earth resulted from more accurate dating techniques and geological theories that came to prominence before Darwin had even developed the theory of evolution. Once the uniformitarian theory of geological change had been established and rough estimates of dating based on radioactivity had been established, the Earth was consistently dated as older and older. These dates did not result from biologists trying to prove evolution, but from geologists in the case of the uniformitarian theory and physicists in the case of radiometric dating techniques. Other than that, it was also untrue that the older folks in the audience were told that the Earth was merely a few hundred million years old, as radiometric dating had been developed in the early 1900s and soon after that the age of the Earth was routinely placed in the billion-year range by scientists. So unless several 110-year-olds were present in the audience, it is unlikely anyone was told the Earth was only millions of years old in school. Saint Gasoline

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