This is also actually kind of trivial and easily determined in the lab. Let’s see what the Missing Universe Museum thinks are the assumptions of radioactive dating methods. I guess we have to start at the top and work our way down… During an organisms life, it takes in CO have the common 6 protons and 6 neutrons. However, due to some interesting nuclear chemistry (which I’ll go into if requested), there’s another version of carbon (called an isotope) that has 6 protons and 8 neutrons. Note that if the number of protons change, then the atom is no longer carbon. Amazingly (and unlike what is claimed by the creationists), scientists have known about a variety of methods that create carbon-14 and how those methods have varied over time. Well, we take a carbon sample from a material of a known age and date that. Basically, the calibration curves are off by no more than 16 years over the historical range (6,000 years or so) and no more than 163 years over the last 20,000 years.Indeed, by doing almost 20 seconds of research on google (type in “variations in C14”, click on Google Scholar) the second link is this article from 1954: Carbon 13 in plants and the relationships between carbon 13 and carbon 14 variations in nature So, this issue has been known about for a long time. Then we compare the two and adjust the radiocarbon date to the known date. That’s less than 1% if you’re interested in that sort of thing. But this is already almost a thousand words and I’ve only done ONE! Long story short, scientists have always known that variations in C-14 concentration happen.In this way, items of unknown age can be tested and an age determined to a reasonable degree of accuracy. More tomorrow where we explore the concept of isochron dating and how it neatly destroys most of the rest of these ‘issues’.(Aside, my dad doesn’t know how old I am, he usually misses by about two years, giving him an error of almost 5%.) Not only, is this not a ‘false assumption’. Oh and here’s a link to the Table of Contents for this set of creationist misconceptions.

Fundamental to stratigraphy are a set of simple principles, based on elementary geometry, empirical observation of the way these rocks are deposited today, and gravity.This document is partly based on a prior posting composed in reply to Ted Holden.My thanks to both him and other critics for motivating me.These are often characterised as the norm, rather than the exception.I thought it would be useful to present an example where the geology is simple, and unsurprisingly, the method does work well, to show the quality of data that would have to be invalidated before a major revision of the geologic time scale could be accepted by conventional scientists.