> Unfortunately, I can't give you any citations, but the notion that radiometric decay is reliable is demonstrably false. Example: one of the scientists who studied the eruption of Mt. St. Helens went back after things had settled down, and took one of the rocks from the lava flow. In other words, it was a brand new rock. He sent it to a dating lab, and they said that this brand new rock was many millions of years old.

A newly formed rock that had older rocks embedded in it was analysed with a method that can't possibly measure anything below millions of years old. The lab told them that they wouldn't be able to get a meaningful result. Most subsamples gave a result where zero was within the margin of error (i.e. the sample was too young to be dated with that method). A couple of samples with high concentrations of xenoliths (the older embedded rocks) were measured as being about 2 million years old, which is the accepted age for the rocks that formed the lava.

How, exactly, is that a proof that the measuring techniques are invalid?

> Other people have split a rock into three pieces, sent each piece to a different lab, and got back three wildly different dates.

Did the rock show stratigraphic layers, indicating that different parts might really be of wildly different ages? Did it (as above) include older fragments of rock that would have skewed the results? Were the results achieved within the ranges achievable with the sequences used (using three different isotopic measurements, it's possible to get a set of ages (in years) like 100,000 +/- 250,000, 1,000,000 +/- 1,000,000, and 500,000 +/- 750,000. If you ignore the margin of error, these numbers are clearly contradictory, while in reality they're simply indicating a younger sample than can be reliably dated)?

In short, can you demonstrate that all three sections of the rocks should have given the same value?

> Some people might claim that just a few examples don't mean much, but in this case they do. Consider: almost everything in evolution is related to the dating of rocks. If the dating process can be demonstated to be inaccurate just a few times, how can one be absolutely sure that the process is accurate when there is no other way to verify the result?

It's easy to deliberately set up a sample that will give you a bad date. I don't think it's enough to prove that these few dates achieved through methods that no geologist would use are bad; you need to prove that the hundreds of thousands of dates that agree with each other are valid. Why does measurement after measurement after mesurement put the iriduim rich layer at the cretatious / tertiary boundary at 65 million years old, when these measurements test samples with different compositions found in different locations and are tested with different methods?

The question you're asking is: is it possible that the rate of radioactive decay has changed dramatically in the past?

I understand that physicists have direct evidence that this hasn't happened, but I don't understand those. I'm sure the physicists in the audience can tell us what would have to happen to the strong nuclear force for this to change, and how that would affect the nature of the universe.

There's also astronomical evidence - supernovas that exploded millions of years (and who's light is just now reaching us) show spectographic evidence that radioactive decay happened at the same rate then as it does now.

But the evidence that is most obvious is this: The oldest known rocks are dated to 3.9bn years old. If they are in fact only 6,000 years old then background radiation must logically have been almost a million times greater than they are today. And the longer ago the rate of decay dropped to present levels, the more radioactive the early Earth had to be. If the geological column was laid down in the Noachian Flood, then for that year the world must have been FOUR BILLION times as radioactive as it is now. I somehow doubt that many animals would have been left alive to drown in the flood...

Oh, and it's not true to say that "almost everything in evolution is related to the dating of rocks" - evolution is primarily based on the relationships between living animals. It's primarily a method of explaining the "double nested heirachy" - the fact that animals can be grouped into nested sets based on their morphological characteristics (all tetrapods are vertibrates; all mammals are tetrapods; all ursines are mammals, and so on), and that genetic analysis (specifically of non-coding or "junk" DNA) shows the same pattern of relationships. See the link below for more detail.

Fossil evidence is simply another line of evidence that leads to the same conclusion.

wintermute