South African fossils could be 'new human ancestor'

[highwaystar101]

Slimebeast said:

highwaystar101 said:

Slimebeast said:

highwaystar101 said:

Come on Slimebeast, don't fall for the AIG myth of "All radiometric dating doesn't work, therefore all the data is useless". Of course the dating methods work to a more than adequate level; if they didn't then why would people use them?

Are dating methods 100% accurate? Of course not.

Are they accurate enough to be used? Yes, very much so.

Here's a video on the subject that explains it better than I can, start at around 2:20 and watch until the end.

 

Either way, I doubt this fossil was carbon dated, they would have used another method. Anyway, they can give the date of the bones to between 1.95m and 1.78m years, this prediction has accounted for the potential accuracy errors in dating and has not given a specific date, but a band of dates (source).

That kind of extreme accuracy is just stupid. I simply don't believe in it.

Why don't you believe it?

Do you understand the process of dating better than the countless scientists who use it on a day to day basis?

Do you know something the thousands of people who think the results of various dating techniques are accurate enough to base their research on it don't?

Because if you know something they don't, then I think you should tell them.

I work with uncertainty every day. I analyze symtoms and findings in patients including blood samples, x-rays and whatnot and it's usually very hard to put a correct diagnosis.

Look at other areas with uncertainty. We can't even measure the global warming today properly. Is it 0.5 degrees or 0.7 degrees global average temperature up in the post-WWII era? (uncertainty in measurement stations, tons of factors affecting etc).

In paleonthology they establish these timelines. They dont look at the monkey skeleton directly to determine it's age. They look at how old the cave was and the animal skeletons (species) in it. And since the cave is assumed to be ~2 million years old (not the rock, but the typical findings in the upper strata) they then play around with some numbers and arrive at a number for the monkey skeleton.

In criminology they find a human carcass, it's usually very hard to estimate the age. They say between 1-3 days, or 1-4 weeks, and if it's years they say maybe he died in the 30's, maybe in the 50's.

In archeology you have constantly these findings where they debate weather an object is from the bronze age or stone age, or bronze/iron even if there's other objects in the same area and strata.

For this particular monkey skeleton, if they claimed intervals like between 500,000 and 3 million years maybe I could believe in it more.

Paleonthologists have an agenda. I can't trust them.

You attempt to pose two arguments here.

A. Dating results are not accurate.

B. Paleontologists have a hidden agenda.

 

A.

In your argument you showed that you understood the concept of tolerance in making predictions. Surely you must recognise that tolerances are made from the known accuracy that the testing model can produce?

You make a point that human dating of recently deceased people can sometimes only be determined within a tolerance of a day to three days. That is the tolerance criminologists know exists for their current dating methods. They don't make rash predictions like this person has been dead between an hour and a decade, because they know the dating technique allows for a much higher accuracy than that, they understand the tolerance.

When someone comes to you with a fractured leg, you can safely assume that they have fractured it somehow, maybe a fall, maybe brittle bones. You wouldn't say it is influenza. You can be fairly accurate in your prediction because you understand the accuracy of your methods.

What you suggested paleontologists do is just that. You essentially accused them of looking at a fractured leg and saying "how can you say it's a broken leg? Don't rule out the possibility of influenza?".

The paleontologists understand the data they are looking at and they understand the tolerence of their dating methods. They have been refining various dating techniques for decades, they understand the tolerances of the data. If they say the tolerance is 170,000 years, then that tolerance is determined by knowledge of how accurate the dating technique(s) used is.

 

More to the point, what alternative answer are you proposing? That these fossils are only a few thousand years old? That they're ten years old? that they're several trillion years old? Do you believe in a young Earth and that human remains can only be 6000 years old max? 1.9 million years old sounds like a reasonable prediction to me.

 

B.

Paleontologists have a hidden agenda? Give me a break. Are you suggesting that Paleontologists are attempting to cover up evolution not happening? I'm sorry, but the evidence for human evolution is overwhelming, in fact it is in the realms of overkill. Go on to Google scholar and look at the sheer volume of research papers written on the subject from thousands of scientists all over the world, many groups researching independently, and all have gone through scrutiny from external sources.

Sure scientists are going to debate over this fossil, and quite heavily too; but they are not going to say "Oh yeah, actually this fossil is just a week old, it's a regular Homosapien, evolution doesn't occur". The model works, they are simply trying to make it more accurate.

The debate is going to be over classifying the species of hominid or determining factors of its existence. Why? Because evolution has occurred in humans, they all accept it as fact as they see the evidence every day, they want to understand it better.