Nuclear Chemist Dr. Jay Wile on Dinosaur Soft Tissue and Carbon 14

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Are you getting those, Terry? Yeah, I was granting some requests, too. OK, good.

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So as long as you can do it, because once I start the presentation, I'm not going to pay attention to that. Oh, yeah, we'll take care of it from there.

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OK, very good. Shall I go ahead and introduce Dr. Weil now, Robin? Go ahead. Yes, please. I'm going to start recording right now.

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OK. All right, Dr. J .L. Weil holds an earned PhD in nuclear chemistry and a

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BS in chemistry, both from the University of Rochester. He has several awards.

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He has won several awards for excellence in teaching and is an internationally known speaker, having done presentations on the topics of nuclear chemistry,

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Christian apologetics, homeschooling, and creation versus evolution in several different countries.

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He is best known for his award -winning K through 12 science textbooks designed specifically for the homeschool.

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Dr. Weil and his wife of more than 35 years, Kathleen, homeschooled their daughter,

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Dawn, from the time they adopted her until she graduated from high school. Dawn is now a

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Butler University graduate and owns a specialty shipping company called Paws Logistics with her husband,

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James. You can learn about Dr. Weil's curriculum at the Berean Builders website.

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It's bereanbuilders .com. And I'll put that into the chat so that people can look at that later.

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And with that, we thank you, Dr. Weil, for joining us. Well, it's great to be here. It's kind of one of the blessings, hidden blessings of the whole pandemic thing that people have converted over to these virtual things.

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And so I can speak where I normally wouldn't be able to get to. I usually, you know, travel around doing homeschool conventions and so forth.

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But this year, because of the pandemic, I've gotten to speak at more homeschool conventions because they've all been virtual. So places that couldn't afford to travel to send me out there.

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So that's been kind of a hidden blessing to all of this. I certainly would rather get back to normal life.

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And in Indiana, we're supposed to be back to normal life now. We'll see how that goes. But anyway, just my mother always told me to try and look for the hidden blessings in things.

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So that's what I'm trying to do, I guess. So when Terry asked me to speak, I thought I'd speak about the things

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I'm really, really interested in. And there are two things that are really, really fascinating to me going on right now in the origins research field.

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And so that's what I want to talk about. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here, see how this works. That's the one

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I want to share, I think. OK, so there we go. Hopefully, you're seeing my screen now. And so I'm going to talk about the soft tissue and carbon -14 found in dinosaur fossils.

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And I have to tell you, as a nuclear chemist, the carbon -14 bit is much more important to me or much more convincing to me than the soft tissue business.

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But nevertheless, both of them are really, really fascinating and very interesting and have a lot to relate to our discussions of whether the

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Earth is old or young or so forth. So anyway, I'm trying to see. Oh, there we go.

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So the soft tissue thing started back in 2005. And that's really not that long ago, especially in terms of science.

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It's really not that long ago, even though it was 15 years ago now. Mary Schweitzer sort of rocked the scientific world because she had to break open a

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Tyrannosaurus rex femur. Now, the femur is the bone that goes from the knee to the hip. It's usually probably the longest bone in most vertebrate bodies.

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And so anyway, she had to actually break it in order to get it out of what it was in. And when she broke it, she found inside some things.

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And one of those things looked like this picture here. And someone who knows just enough anatomy and physiology to be dangerous, like me, would look at this and say, that's muscle tissue, two globs of muscle tissue attached by a ligament.

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That's certainly what it looks like. And now, that's not actually what it is. But to someone like me, that's what it looks like.

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It is tissue, but it's probably not muscle tissue. So anyway, Schweitzer publishes this paper about this and shows, in fact, that this tissue is actually soft and elastic.

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She actually says you can grab both of those clumps with the forceps, pull it. And when you release, that elastic part comes back to its original size.

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So it can be stretched and then relaxed again, just like a rubber band. And the crazy thing about this is, this bone is supposed to be 65 million years old.

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And this doesn't make a lot of sense, because we know that soft tissue decays really rapidly.

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Under normal conditions, usually less than a year. The very chemicals that make this soft tissue up, the proteins that make this soft tissue up, we know enough about them to actually model their behavior and so forth.

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And models indicate that most of these proteins break down after 30 ,000 years.

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So even if there were some way to preserve the tissue, after 30 ,000 years, the proteins themselves ought to be so decayed away that the tissue wouldn't be recognizable anymore.

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So the idea that this stuff was in fossils that are supposed to be 65 million years old seemed really absurd.

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But Schweitzer was convinced that this soft tissue really was a part of the original dinosaur.

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Now, of course, this is a real problem for anyone who wants to believe these fossils are millions of years old.

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So a lot of evolutionists, and Schweitzer is an evolutionist. She's a Christian who is an evolutionist.

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But she believed that that's really tissue from the dinosaur.

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But a lot of evolutionists didn't want to believe that, because there's just no way soft tissue can be preserved that long.

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So they scrambled for other explanations. And one of the common explanations at the time was, oh, this really isn't tissue.

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It looks a lot like tissue. But what it is is this kind of goop called biofilm that bacterial colonies leave behind once they've died away.

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So the idea is this bone was sitting in something. That something got infected with bacteria really recently.

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And when those bacteria died, that biofilm was left behind. And you can find biofilms that look a little shinier than what was in the other picture.

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But this kind of looks like that biofilm, or that picture that I showed previously.

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So a lot of these evolutionists wanted to say, oh, well, this isn't really dinosaur tissue. It kind of looks like dinosaur tissue.

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But it's really the remnants of bacteria that invaded the fossil fairly recently. And of course,

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Schweitzer, being a good scientist, wanted to know if that was a possibility. So she did some chemical analysis of the tissue itself and found a protein that is typical for dinosaurs, but not made by any known species of bacteria.

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So that kind of eliminates the idea that it's a bacterial biofilm, because you would expect in a bacterial biofilm, the proteins left behind would be bacterial in nature and not vertebrate in nature.

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So in the end, Schweitzer was even more convinced that this is soft tissue. Now, Schweitzer works, or not works for, but Schweitzer's sort of guiding scientist or her research advisor is a fairly famous paleontologist, famous in the scientific community, maybe not famous elsewhere.

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In the scientific community, Jack Horner is a really popular character.

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He's a really renowned fossil hunter. And he runs a museum in Montana.

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And his museum owns this fossil and the soft tissue and everything, because Schweitzer was working under his guidance when she made this discovery.

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Well, some creationists really wanted him to carbon -14 date this tissue. And the reason is carbon -14 dating only works on relatively young things.

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I'm gonna talk about this a lot more later, but the carbon -14 dating system is useless after about 60 ,000 years max.

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So anything that's older than 60 ,000 years should not have any carbon -14 in it, shouldn't be carbon -14 dateable.

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And so a creationist group actually talked to a wealthy benefactor and convinced him to offer

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Jack Horner's museum $10 ,000 to simply allow them to carbon -14 date the tissue.

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And Jack Horner said, no, we're not gonna do that because, quote, the spin, unquote, creationists can get off this, quote, is not going to help us, end quote.

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So basically, Jack Horner was afraid they would find carbon -14 in the tissue.

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And if you find carbon -14 in the tissue, that means that tissue is very young. It can't be millions of years old.

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And he just didn't want that to happen to his tissue. And that's really sad because honestly, even if I believed these fossils were millions of years old,

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I would want to do every test I could to make sure they're millions of years old because I'd certainly like to know if I'm believing something false.

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So even if I believe this tissue is millions of years old, I would like to confirm that with as many tests as possible.

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But Jack Horner, who's the person who can make these decisions when it comes to this fossil, says absolutely not.

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And I think that says something about the character of at least some, not all, but of some evolutionists who are more interested in believing their ideas than actually testing them.

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And please note, this $10 ,000 grant was above and beyond the cost of the test. So the creationist group was gonna pay for the cost of the test and give the museum $10 ,000.

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And Jack Horner still said no. They finally did, they even tried to sweeten the deal and said, okay, we've brought in some more money.

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We can test that fossil and four other artifacts, anything in the museum you choose.

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You know, and carbon -14 dating is expensive. So museums want to carbon date things that are fairly young.

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And so the grant was going to give them money and give them the ability to test some things they may not have been able to afford to test.

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But Horner said no, because I suppose, because he was afraid of the results.

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And that's really unfortunate. A scientist, any scientist, including myself, should be willing to test his or her ideas to see if they're valid.

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And this would be a reasonable test to do, and he simply refused to do it. Now, since the time of Schweitzer's discovery, lots of examples of soft tissue have been found.

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So initially, a lot of evolutionists were very, very skeptical that this is soft tissue.

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But nowadays, there's been so much soft tissue found in so many fossils that now evolutionists believe it is soft tissue, and they just believe there's some unknown chemical process that keeps this soft tissue from decaying away and or being replaced by minerals.

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Here's one of the more interesting examples because it has an interesting story and some interesting follow -up that occurred later.

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So a group of creationists found a Triceratops horn in the

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Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Now, the Triceratops horn is supposed to be 65 million years old.

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That's when Triceratops were supposed to have existed. And so this fossil's supposed to be 65 million years old.

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And all they found was the horn. They didn't find the whole skull. They just found the horn. And the horn by itself isn't all that useful as an individual fossil to study.

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So rather than preserving the fossil, what they decided to do was to destroy the mineralized part of the fossil to see if there was anything soft left behind.

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I don't know if you've ever done the classic experiment, but it's an experiment I have my students do in a couple of different science books.

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And that is if you soak an egg in weak acid, the acid will remove the shell of the egg, but it will leave all of the tissue behind.

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And since there's a membrane that surrounds the egg inside the shell, once the shell is eaten out, you have this nice flexible egg that you can see through and everything.

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It's really, really cool because weak acid attacks minerals, but not tissue.

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And so the idea was if this was just minerals, there'd be nothing left after the horn soaked in weak acid for a while.

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If there was soft tissue, it would remain. And sure enough, once they soaked in the weak acid for about a month, in the end, all of the mineral components were gone, but there were strips of soft brown tissue that was recovered.

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So there was soft tissue in that horn as well. Microscopic analysis was done as a part of the process.

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And when they looked at the tissue under the microscope, they saw exactly what you expect. Exactly. These are called Haversian systems, named after the guy who first described them microscopically.

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This is exactly what you expect to see when you're looking at bone tissue, at least hard bone tissue, what we call compact bone.

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These little guys here, the little red guys, are drawings of bone cells called osteocytes.

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Osteocytes are the cells that maintain the bone and so forth.

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These cells are living and they have these little spidery extensions called filopodial extensions.

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And those extensions reach out to other cells so the cells can communicate to each other. And they need to communicate because the bones have to be dynamic.

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If you gain weight, your bones have to add mass in order to support your new weight. If you lose weight, your bones will get rid of some mass because they don't wanna waste their, the body doesn't wanna waste its energy carrying around heavy bones if it doesn't need them.

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So your bones adjust to changes in your body. And one way they can do that is for the cells to communicate with each other through these filopodial extensions.

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So this is really interesting. So the main investigator here decided to do some higher magnification work.

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He used a scanning electron microscope and he came up with these, this picture.

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These are three bone cells. They have every characteristic of a bone cell.

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This little black bar here that's in the picture indicates the length of 20 millionths of a meter, 20 micrometers.

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And so in that picture, a length that's equal to that black bar is a length of 20 millionths of a meter.

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And so these are very small, cells are very small, but they're the right size for bone cells.

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And they have those nice filopodial extensions which are characteristic of bone cells.

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So by all hallmarks, this is a bone cell or these are bone cells in the dinosaur fossil.

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The investigators wrote a report, wrote a paper that was published in the Secular Peer Review literature.

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And here's what they say. The filopodial extensions were delicate and showed no evidence of any permineralization or crystallization artifact and therefore were interpreted to be soft.

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So what he's saying is, I can't stab these things with anything that I can feel, so I can't be sure that they're soft.

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But from a microscopic standpoint, I can't see any mineralization at all, but I'm seeing these cells.

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And if I see cells without any mineralization, that means that I'm looking at the original cells.

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They're dead, but they're still soft and original. They haven't hardened yet. And once again, that's an incredible statement.

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Not only is soft tissue found in dinosaur bones, but when you go in microscopically, you actually find soft cells.

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And notice he's saying, even the filopodial extensions aren't mineralized.

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Now look how small these filopodial extensions is. Remember that black bar is 20 millionths of a meter.

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So these filopodial extensions aren't even one millionth of a meter wide, and yet they haven't hardened at all.

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That's hard to understand if this fossil has been sitting around for 65 million years. Now, this is a pretty groundbreaking study, pretty important study.

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So how did evolutionists respond? They fired the author. The study's principal investigator,

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Mark Armitage, was fired from his university position after the paper was published.

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He sued the university, and in the document that the court uses to start the lawsuit and so forth, he said one of the university officials stormed into his office after the paper was published and shouted, quote, "'We are not gonna tolerate your religion "'in this department,' end quote."

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And that was bad for the university, for a university official to say that. Now, I actually spoke with Mark Armitage.

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I've never met him in person, but I've spoken with him on the phone several times. And he says he doesn't think the paper is what got him fired.

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He thinks what got him fired was, once the paper was published, the students learned that they could come down to his lab and see dinosaur cells.

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And so he said he had a constant parade of students coming into his lab, asking to see the dinosaur cells.

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And he's more than happy to show them. He shows them the prepared slides that he made and so forth, shows them the, actually puts the slide in, lets them play around with it and so forth.

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So he lets them see dinosaur cells. And he thinks this is what got him fired, because the university did not want the students to be so familiar with something that is so hard to explain from an evolutionary standpoint.

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Now, that, of course, is just his interpretation. I don't know, but nevertheless, he thinks that's what got him fired. He was being too open with the students.

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And if that's true, that says something as well about the modern evolutionary movement.

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So not surprisingly, the university had to settle with Mark Armitage.

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And of course, he can't disclose the amount of money or anything, but he got a monetary settlement. And he's used some of those funds to continue his research.

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And what he's been able to do is he's been able to pull these cells out of the bone and suspend them in fluid.

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This is an image from his microscope of a bone cell pulled from this, pulled from the triceratops fossil, floating in water.

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So this is a soft bone cell. And that dark circle that's sort of in the upper right hand or the right -hand side, middle of the cell, that's probably the nucleus.

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And there's probably DNA in there. So it's really, really exciting to think we've got a soft cell, isolated, floating around in liquid.

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And he's got several. I'm gonna give you a link in a minute where you can see some of this stuff.

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And it's really quite incredible. So that's really exciting, the fact that we seem to be able to have actual soft cells from a dinosaur.

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He's found lots of other things as well. This is another microscopic image from him. And this is a blood vessel, the sort of clear 2B thing is the blood vessel.

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All the other stuff is stuff that comes from the detritus and so forth in the fossil. Now, when you look under a microscope, you can see things that look like this a lot.

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Fungi often look like this. There are certain types of hair can look like this.

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There are all sorts of things that can look like this. So just this image itself isn't enough to say, oh, that's a blood vessel.

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But there are tests you can do. There are certain chemicals you can add to your sample and those chemicals will change color or glow depending on the chemicals that are found in there.

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And he's done these tests. And this structure responds exactly as you would expect a blood vessel to respond and not the way you would expect any of these other things that kind of look similar.

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So he's not just saying this looks like a blood vessel. He's saying, I've tested this and it's a blood vessel.

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And it's from a dinosaur fossil that's supposed to be millions of years old. This was a thing when

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I saw his presentation and I saw this, I audibly gasped when I saw this.

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He has actually isolated vein valves from these blood vessels.

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If you don't know what a vein valve is, blood is pressurized in the arteries, but it's not heavily pressurized in the veins.

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And so it's possible for blood to flow backwards in the veins because the pressure is so low.

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And that would be very, very bad. So your veins have valves in them and they only open when the blood's flowing one way.

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So when the blood's flowing the proper way in this diagram up, the vein valve opens and allows the blood to flow through.

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If the blood tries to flow backwards, the vein valve closes to keep the blood from flowing backwards.

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Now, I have tried to do dissections and find vein valves. And I'm not a great dissector, but nevertheless,

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I've never ever seen a vein valve. They're incredibly delicate. However, if you're a really good microscopist and you're working with recently dead things, you can generally find them.

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And this is what they look like under the microscope. So here we're looking on top of a vein valve. This is the diagram on the left is a side view.

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Here we're looking straight down. So the vein valve is mostly circular, little oval, and that little thin sort of looks like glass or plastic.

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That's the covering of the valve. And that covering opens when the blood's flowing in the right direction, closes when it's flowing in the wrong direction.

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And this vein valve, the tissue there that's covering this valve, very, very delicate.

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Well, I audibly gasped when he showed, he found those in his dinosaur fossil. So on the left and on the right, you see two vein valves that have been isolated from the vein.

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On the left, the vein valve, the covering is open. It kind of looks like tent flaps opening.

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That's how the vein valve opens. On the right side, it looks like the tissue's been damaged because it looks like there's a hole in the vein and the tissue's not there, in the vein valve and the tissue's not there anymore.

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But like I said, I've tried to see these in dissection specimens that are, you know, have only been dead a year or so, and I can't find them.

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But he was able to find them in fossils that's supposed to be millions of years old.

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That's crazy. These things are so delicate. I tear them apart just trying to isolate them.

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He has found them in something that's supposed to be millions of years old. Hard to believe.

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He's also found the remnants of nerve cells as well. A nerve cell has a very specific structure.

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There's a cell body that contains the nucleus and a lot of the, most of the organelles and so forth.

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And there are dendrites that bring signals into the cell body. But the longest part of the cell body, of the cell usually is the axon.

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And the axon carries the signal away from the cell body. And the longest cells in your body are nerve cells because these axons can be very, very long.

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In order to help the signal travel quickly, there's this thing called the myelin sheath that basically allows the signal to jump from one end of the myelin sheath to the next.

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So each one of these segments of the myelin sheath, the signal can basically jump from one end of the segment to the next.

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Well, sure enough, looking at his dinosaur fossil, he's found those as well.

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The little blue arrows there are the ends of the segments of the myelin sheath.

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And once again, it's not just a tube that's sitting there and looks like a nerve cell. Once again, there are specific microscopic tests you can do to make sure this is really the axon from a nerve, and those tests indicate that it is.

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So once again, these are all very, very delicate things and he has found them in various dinosaur fossils that are supposed to be millions of years old.

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I encourage you to actually go to his website. His group is called the

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Dinosaur Soft Tissue Research Institute. And on his website, he has all sorts of his research up and it's dstri, dinosaursoftissueresearchinstitute .org.

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He's got three peer -reviewed papers that he's written that show his results and two of them have images of his isolated dinosaur cells.

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And also you can watch videos of a presentation he gave at Lower Columbia College. And in those videos, he shows you step -by -step how he knows the structure

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I showed that he identified as a blood vessel really is a blood vessel, and how that structure identified as an axon really is an axon.

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So he shows you the microscopic tests he does in order to do that. So it's really cool.

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He also has a YouTube channel that has other videos on it. There's this one video, I found it so fascinating,

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I posted it on my blog, where he's actually flipping, he's using the cover slip on a slide to flip a soft cell around in the fluid.

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And it's just really cool to see this soft cell just flipping around and so forth and think this is a dinosaur cell, but it's so soft, it's floppy.

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So anyway, I think he's done some really, really interesting stuff that's showing the importance of soft tissue in dinosaur bones.

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And please understand, this isn't a couple of isolated instances. It's not like this is just something you find in one or two dinosaur bones.

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It's incredibly common. To try and figure out how common it is, a group of paleontologists took poorly preserved dinosaur bones from a museum and just to look to see if they could find any soft tissue.

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These had been sitting in the museum for a while, and here's how one of the investigators described it.

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He says, quote, they're very scrappy individual broken bones. I can't even tell you what dinosaur they come from, end quote.

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So these are not well -preserved dinosaur bones at all. Yet, in a couple of those bones, not all of them, but in a couple of those bones, they found what looked like red blood cells, that's the picture on the left, and proteins, that's the picture on the right.

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So in the end, once again, soft tissue from scrappy broken bones, it seems to be soft tissue is incredibly common in dinosaur fossils.

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And we have truly reached the limit of absurdity here because the oldest fossil that we know has soft tissue has an age of 550 million years.

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This worm fossil is supposed to be 550 million years old, yet it has original soft tissue in it.

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The tissue hasn't decayed and it hasn't been fossilized. It's still soft. They did basically the same thing

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Armitage did. They used an electron microscope to look for mineralization and they couldn't find it.

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Here's what they say, quote, minerals have not replicated any part of the soft tissue and the carbonaceous material of the wall is primary.

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Primary means it hasn't changed. It's what it was originally. Preserving the original layering of the wall, its textures and fabrics.

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And by fabrics, they're mostly talking about proteins there. So in the end, if you want to believe the standard geological story, you've got to come up with some unknown method by which soft tissue can be preserved without being mineralized and without decaying for 550 million years.

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Now, this is not my chemistry. I'm not a protein chemist, but I know enough chemistry to know there's no known chemical process by which this can happen.

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By all known chemical processes, there's no way this soft tissue can last for 550 million years.

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So if these ages are really true, there's some exotic unknown chemical mechanism that's keeping this tissue preserved.

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Now, I find this fascinating. I find this stuff really fascinating. And I think for the average person or even the average scientist, this is the most graspable.

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We understand that soft tissue shouldn't exist for this long, but nevertheless, it does.

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However, what I find even more convincing is the significant amount of carbon -14 you find in dinosaur bones.

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That's something as a nuclear chemist that is positive evidence that these things are young, thousands of years old, not millions of years old.

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So creationists for years have been asking evolutionists to do some carbon -14 testing of dinosaur bones.

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The reason? Carbon -14 has a fairly short half -life, at least as most radioisotopes used in dating go.

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In the end, it decays by a half -life of 5 ,700 years.

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After roughly 10 half -lives, there's so little of a radioisotope left that it becomes almost impossible to detect.

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No matter how much you start with, if you cut it in half 10 times, it gets so small that it's very, very hard to detect.

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So after about 10 half -lives, you don't expect to find any of any radioactive isotope remaining.

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Since carbon -14's half -life is 5 ,700 years, 10 times that is 57 ,000 years.

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So the theoretical limit for carbon -14 dating is about 60 ,000 years.

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If something's 60 ,000 years or older, it is generally not carbon -dated because carbon -14 dating shouldn't be possible for such a structure.

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And but nevertheless, creationists have been year for years asking, let's carbon -14 date some dinosaur bones.

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If you're right, we won't find any carbon -14. If we're right, we're gonna find a lot of carbon -14. But of course, like Jack Horner, most evolutionists didn't wanna do that test.

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Now they will say it's because they didn't wanna waste the money. They know there's no carbon -14 in there, so why bother to carbon -14 date?

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The other reason you may not wanna carbon -14 date a dinosaur bone is shown in the picture there. You don't wanna carbon -14 date the outer part of the dinosaur bone.

31:56

That's subject to contamination. So what do you have to do? You have to cut into the dinosaur bone and you have to take something from inside.

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And cutting into a dinosaur bone, destroying a dinosaur bone like that, or at least harming a dinosaur bone like that, is really, really not looked on very favorably because dinosaur bones are pretty rare.

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This would be like crushing a Ming Bay vase to try and find out what the ceramic is. But nevertheless, creationists eventually were able to raise enough funds to go searching for dinosaur fossils.

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This is a Triceratops femur that they found. And they had enough money to extract samples and send those samples out to a carbon -14 dating site, dating lab, to carbon -14 dating.

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And not surprisingly, every bone they tested had significant amounts of carbon -14 in it, every bone.

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So this is a Acrocanthosaurus fossil, supposed to be 100 million years old.

32:56

Now they didn't tell the carbon -14 dating facility that they're dating something that's 100 million years old because the dating facility would have said we wouldn't do it.

33:04

They just said, this is a bone, this is a femur, this is an extraction from a femur, we'd like you to date it. And it came back with a carbon -14 date of somewhere between 23 ,760 and 30 ,640 years.

33:16

Now, if this were millions of years old, the result would have been, I can't date this because I can't find any carbon -14.

33:24

But they found plenty of carbon -14, enough to make it look like it's only 24 ,000 to 30 ,000 years old.

33:33

And once again, this is confirmation more of the creationist view. Now, I don't think these numbers are right.

33:40

I don't think the carbon -14 dating system works for dates much older than 3 ,000 years or so. However, it shows that these can't be millions of years old because if they were millions of years old, there wouldn't be any carbon -14 dating of it at all.

33:54

And there would be no carbon -14 date. A Triceratops fossil, supposed to be 65 million years old, carbon date somewhere between 24 and 39 ,000 years old.

34:04

In fact, eight dinosaur fossils from various locations around the world were tested.

34:10

And they had so much carbon -14 in them that none of them could have been more than 39 ,000 years old, according to the carbon -14 dating method.

34:19

Not a single sample tested as expected by evolutionists. Well, evolutionists would expect to see no carbon -14 at all.

34:28

And to me, this is really, really striking evidence that these bones are young, because at least with soft tissue,

34:36

I can at least say, okay, maybe there's some unknown chemical mechanism by which this happens. There's no way to explain how carbon -14 hangs around for millions of years.

34:45

There's just no way to do that. So how do evolutionists respond to this? Well, remember, in order to do these carbon -14 dates, you have to send them out to a lab that specializes in it, because it takes a particle accelerator.

35:00

Most creationists don't have a particle accelerator. It takes special training to be able to prepare the sample and so forth.

35:06

So in the end, you send this to a specialty lab, you pay the specialty lab, and the specialty lab gives you the results.

35:14

That facility now refuses any samples that the creationists sent. CAIS is the facility that was doing the carbon -14 dating.

35:24

And remember, the creationists were paying them for this service. And here's an excerpt from a letter they sent to the creationists.

35:32

The scientists at CAIS and I are dismayed by the claims you and your team have made with respect to the age of the earth and validity of biological evolution.

35:40

Consequently, we are no longer able to provide radiocarbon services in support of your anti -scientific agenda.

35:48

Now, it's very interesting that they use the phrase anti -scientific agenda, because what's more scientific?

35:55

Asking for more tests to be done on something that's not explainable or just refusing to do the tests?

36:01

It would seem to me that even if I believe these bones are millions of years old, then

36:08

I've got to come up with an explanation as to why there's carbon -14 in them. I've got to do that if I really believe they're millions of years old.

36:16

How am I going to explain that if I don't do more tests? If I do more tests, maybe

36:21

I can find a pattern to the carbon -14 dates. Maybe that pattern will tell me something.

36:26

But if I simply refuse to do the tests, I'm the one being anti -science.

36:33

So in the end, it's CAIS that's being anti -science here because they're refusing to try and figure out why there's carbon -14 in those bones, or in those fossils.

36:42

And that's really, really too bad. Now, of course, when I talk to my colleagues about this who are evolutionists and so forth, and I had a creation evolution debate with a vertebrate paleontologist a couple of years ago, no, several years ago now, and he said, oh, this is just contamination.

37:01

You know, all this carbon -14, it's just contaminated the fossil somehow. And that would be a possible explanation except if that's really true, then this calls into question all carbon -14 dates of 24 ,000 years or older.

37:18

Because in the end, some of these carbon -14 tests of dinosaur bones came back as 24 ,000 years.

37:25

If you're saying there's so much contamination that a fossil can be incorrectly read as 24 ,000 years old, then any fossil that the carbon -14 dating system says is 24 ,000 years old could possibly be much older than that.

37:42

There are literally thousands of fossils that have been dated to 24 ,000 years old according to the carbon -14 dating system.

37:49

So in the end, all of those have to be thrown in the wastebasket if this is contamination. Because if it's contamination in these bones, then all those other 24 ,000 year old bones or older could also be the result of contamination.

38:03

It's not likely that it's contamination for two reasons. First, the processes by which the samples are treated by the labs doing this testing are specifically designed to reduce contamination.

38:15

They're designed to get to the original bone tissue, the original, we call it the bone matrix, the mineral stuff that the animal made to make the bone.

38:26

And so the processes that these labs go through are actually designed specifically to find that original mineral stuff from the animal that left the fossil behind.

38:38

So it shouldn't be contamination because these processes are designed to keep that from happening.

38:43

But here's the big thing. In order to see if it was contamination, because creationists tend to be much more interested in doing scientific tests than evolutionists apparently, the creationists actually did some scientific tests.

38:55

They tested the surrounding rock. So you've got this fossil that you're gonna carbon -14 date.

39:01

And they then decided to carbon -14 date the material found in the rock surrounding it.

39:07

Now, if this were contamination, the stuff in the rock surrounding should have more carbon -14 than the fossil, indicating the carbon -14 is being leached into the fossil.

39:17

That's not what they saw. They actually saw that the rock surrounding the fossil had significantly less carbon -14.

39:24

So if anything, the fossil is losing carbon -14 to the rocks. The rocks aren't adding carbon -14 to the fossils.

39:33

So in the end, it's a pretty dramatic, I think, evidence that this is really carbon -14 from the dinosaur itself.

39:43

So here we have two independent lines of evidence that indicate these dinosaur fossils can't be millions of years old.

39:51

Soft tissue, especially thin, delicate tissue just doesn't last for millions of years. It has to either decompose or mineralize.

39:59

It doesn't just hang around and stay soft. And when we go all the way to the cellular level and we still see soft cells, then

40:07

I don't see any chemical explanation for how that could be happening if that fossil really is millions of years old.

40:18

Once again, carbon -14 becomes undetectable after 60 ,000 years old.

40:23

So every dinosaur bone, when they put it in the particle accelerator, when they break it down, do this treatment, put it in the particle accelerator, in the other end, the particle accelerator shouldn't see any carbon -14 at all, or at least it shouldn't be able to distinguish the carbon -14 from the background.

40:39

And so in the end, it should come back saying, we couldn't carbon -14 date this because there wasn't enough carbon -14 in there.

40:46

However, every one, every fossil that's been tested this way has plenty of carbon -14 in it.

40:53

So in the end, I find this really, really strong evidence that these fossils are not millions of years old.

41:02

Okay, that's all I've got. So I'm hoping we've got some questions here. I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing now.

41:10

So now hopefully I'm back. So Terry or Creation Fellowship, whoever you are,

41:17

I can't remember, do you wanna take over? I'm here. Okay.

41:23

I was expecting it to be longer, so you caught me off guard. We just had a couple of questions that have come up so far.

41:31

One of them, was there blood in the veins? Yeah, so that's one of the tests you do.

41:36

If you look at the videos, he actually, he doesn't see any blood cells, but he adds a stain that grabs onto blood cells.

41:49

And that stain then produces a color under the microscope. And he shows you how that color is concentrated in the blood vessel.

41:58

Okay. Okay, and then the other one that came up so far, how did the researchers who reported the soft tissue from the 550 million year old worm explain this observation?

42:10

So they didn't try to do any explanation. They just were trying to say this is primary tissue.

42:17

And now there has been an attempt at explanation. Mary Schweitzer has tried to explain how this soft tissue can be preserved.

42:26

She seems to think that iron has some preservative property. And she actually did an experiment where she took some ostrich blood vessels and let some of them set for a year just by themselves, let some of them set with extra iron in it.

42:41

And the blood vessels that had extra iron were less decomposed than the blood vessels that sat for a year without the iron.

42:51

And so she's thinking there's some iron mechanism. Now, the reason she thinks that is because some of her fossils seem to have the rich in iron content.

42:59

However, Armitage's microscopic images find no iron at all.

43:07

So if iron is a preservative, it's not the explanation for Armitage's result.

43:12

And I don't think that iron is really common in most fossils.

43:18

I think the iron that she got was probably from the sediment itself, because sediment can be iron rich.

43:23

So I think she saw iron and thought, oh, maybe this is what's preserving it. And really, I think it was just from the surrounding sediments.

43:31

But people are working on this. They're trying to come up with some sort of chemical explanation as to how this can happen.

43:40

Okay, next is a question about the electron microscope.

43:47

Doesn't this kind of microscope burn or damage the sample? And how can this confirm soft tissue?

43:54

Well, it would kill living cells, because yes, an electron microscope allows us to magnify bigger than a light microscope, because basically the size of what you can see depends on the wavelength of what you're using to see.

44:15

Well, visible light has a certain wavelength that's in the nanometer range. And so that limits how small the samples can be under a light microscope.

44:26

Well, with an electron microscope, you can accelerate these electrons and get them going so fast that their wavelength gets smaller than visible light.

44:33

You can then detect how those electrons ricochet off the sample. And from that pattern of ricochet, you can see what you can make an image of what the electrons bounced off of.

44:45

And they do bounce off of the tissue enough to kill it, but it doesn't burn it up. I mean, you can burn tissue with electron beam if you get it going fast enough.

44:57

Matter of fact, I was part of a team that actually used proton beams to burn cancer patients' tumors out of their brains.

45:04

I was part of a team that did some preliminary work on that. So you can use electrons or protons or anything going fast enough to burn tissue, but electron microscope accelerates them fast enough to get a small wavelength, but not so fast that it burns it.

45:21

And in fact, that's what limits it, because in fact, we could accelerate electrons so quickly that we should be able to see even smaller stuff.

45:28

But the problem is once they get going quickly enough, then they do burn the tissue up. So these electron microscopes are calibrated so that they can ricochet off, but not deposit enough energy to actually destroy the tissue, but it would destroy any life.

45:45

So it does kill whatever's under there if it was living to begin with. Okay, next question.

45:53

Could there be a process to preserve this tissue? Well, I can't definitively say no because there's a lot of chemistry we don't know, right?

46:02

So all I can say is if so, it's different from all the protein chemistry we currently know.

46:09

Based on all the protein chemistry we currently know, there's just no way proteins hang around this long.

46:15

In the end, the bigger, not necessarily bigger, but the more complicated a molecule gets, the less stable it is.

46:24

And so these proteins are pretty complicated stuff. And some proteins are fairly simple, like collagen is a fairly simple protein.

46:31

It's long, but it's fairly simple. And so it can last a lot longer, but proteins like hemoglobin that's in the red blood cells and things like that, very complex protein.

46:40

And the more complex something is, the faster it decays away. And so based on everything we know, these big complicated biomolecules should have decayed quite a long time ago.

46:52

If there is a mechanism, it's just beyond what we know right now, but I can't say it doesn't exist. Okay.

47:00

Next question comes from our new friend D, and he says, aren't laboratories now using carbon dating on samples supposedly older than 60 ,000 years because of better precision?

47:13

He said he's read that laboratories can detect C14 up to 80 ,000 years. Up to 80 ,000 years.

47:21

That's not really. So in the end, yes, under certain circumstances, you can extend a little more.

47:29

So for example, if I have the right kind of chemical that I'm trying to study carbon -14 from, if it's got the right kind of properties,

47:40

I can actually reduce the background from that.

47:47

So it's possible I can extend it a little bit. And I've never seen anything in the literature that says 80 ,000 years old.

47:55

I've seen some numbers like 65, but the thing is when you get to numbers that are bigger than 60, the error bars get really, really big.

48:03

So I would expect if I saw something in the literature that said 80 ,000 years, it would be 80 ,000 years plus or minus two or 3 ,000 years.

48:11

Whereas most carbon -14 dates are 55 ,000 years plus or minus 400 or something like that.

48:18

So in the end, if it's happening, it's happening with pretty wide error bars. But nevertheless, even then, you're still only extending it a little bit.

48:27

You're not getting out to anything close to even 100 ,000 years. Okay, I'm gonna ask you both of the next two questions together because I think you're gonna be able to do it all at once.

48:42

So one of them says, for my 10 -year -old grandson, can you do a quick explanation of carbon -14 dating and testing?

48:49

And the other one is, can you explain the reliability of carbon dating? Since the earth is about 6 ,000 years old, how do these longer time periods even work?

48:59

Yeah, okay, so carbon -14 dating is a part of a bigger class of dating systems called radioactive or radiometric dating systems where you're using the decay of a radioactive nucleus to track how long the process has occurred.

49:16

And so in carbon -14 dating, all living organisms have a lot of carbon in them because all of our chemicals are based on carbon.

49:26

So all the proteins in our body and almost all the chemicals in our body have carbon in them. And some fraction of that carbon is the radioactive form of carbon, carbon -14.

49:37

Now, that carbon -14 is always decaying away, but you're always getting new carbon from your environment because you eat and all that kind of stuff.

49:46

So you're bringing in carbon from your environment. Your carbon -14 is decaying away, but you're replacing it with new carbon -14.

49:53

So generally speaking, as long as you're alive, the percentage of carbon -14 in your body is the same as the percentage of carbon -14 in your environment.

50:04

The problem is once you die, you stop exchanging carbon with your environment. So at that point, your body has no way to bring in new carbon -14.

50:13

So the carbon -14 in your body starts decaying away and doesn't get replenished. So if I dig up a fossil and I measure how much carbon -14 is in it,

50:23

I can say, okay, here's how much carbon -14 is in there now. I can make an assumption about how much carbon -14 was in the environment while that organism was alive.

50:32

And the difference tells me how long that organism has been dead, because I know how long it would take carbon -14 to decay from what

50:41

I assumed to what I measured. Now, of course, the devil's always in the details.

50:46

And in this case, how do you figure out how much carbon -14 was in that organism when it was alive?

50:54

Well, we can look at carbon -14 in the environment now. And actually we wanted to look at it before the bomb because once the bomb was, once nuclear testing occurred, the amount of carbon -14 in the environment went up.

51:06

But pre -nuclear testing, we knew how much carbon -14 was in the environment. And so as your first guess, you could just say, well, it's roughly equal to that, right?

51:15

However, there's a slightly better thing you can do because when

51:20

I cut down a tree, I can count the rings and figure out how old that tree is. And each ring corresponds to a year.

51:28

So I cut down a tree count back 500 years. I know that ring formed 500 years ago.

51:34

Every time a new ring forms on a tree, the old ring is dead. So that ring we know died 500 years ago.

51:43

So it's a fairly accurate way of saying, okay, this is wood that died 500 years ago. So I can put that wood into a particle accelerator, figure out how much carbon -14 is in the wood now, correct for the 500 years of decay that I know happened.

52:01

And I can say, that's how much carbon -14 was in the environment 500 years ago. And so this is called a calibration.

52:09

I can use lots of different tree rings to get a reading for how much carbon -14 was in the environment every year in the past.

52:17

Now I have a very accurate way of knowing how much carbon -14 was in an organism when it died.

52:24

Because I can look back and say, okay, I'm initially gonna guess that it's the same as the amount of carbon -14 in the atmosphere right now.

52:31

That's my initial guess. Okay, how old does carbon -14 dating say the fossil is? Okay, it says it's 700 years old.

52:38

All right, now let's go look and see how much carbon -14 was actually in the atmosphere 700 years ago.

52:43

Now that's my new guess. And I'll do the whole process over again. I'll come up with a new age. If I do this over and over again,

52:50

I'll get to the point where the age never changes. And that tells, so that's a way of knowing that I eventually got to the right age because I get to the point where the assumed level of carbon -14 is the same as the tree ring said the measured level of carbon -14 is.

53:08

So it's called an iterative process that allows you to eventually figure out how old the fossil is.

53:15

This works really well as long as you have tree rings, because tree rings are your calibration.

53:21

The oldest tree rings are about 3000 years old. So carbon -14 is really, really accurate at up to 3000 years ago.

53:28

After that, you lose your calibration. Now there are other things evolutionists try to do to calibrate past 3000 years.

53:35

Corals have a way of kind of recording how old they are.

53:41

And so you can try and test corals that look like they're 5000 years old and get another calibration.

53:49

But that coral age testing is very unreliable and has been shown to be unreliable in lots of different situations.

53:55

The only reliable thing against which carbon -14 dating has been calibrated is the tree rings.

54:01

So up to 3000 years ago, carbon -14 dating works really well. The farther you get away from 3000 years ago, the worst carbon -14 dating becomes.

54:11

And we know this is the case. It's not just my idea. For example, when

54:16

I test pieces of wood that we know roughly when they were cut down because of historical records or something like that, we can then test them carbon -14 and we find out the carbon -14 dating method doesn't work.

54:30

So we know there are times when we know how old something should be and the carbon -14 dating method says it's wrong, says it's not that age.

54:40

And lots of things like we even have tested diamonds with the carbon -14 dating method because diamonds are made of carbon.

54:47

They ought to be able to carbon -14 tested, but diamonds are supposed to be hundreds of millions of years old, yet they carbon -14 date to about 45 ,000 years old.

54:56

So there's clearly something wrong the farther you go back in time. And it's because we just have a bad calibration.

55:03

But so the idea is if I measure how much of this radioactive isotope is there now, and I have some guess as to how much there was initially,

55:11

I can say how old the sample is. But the key is how do I know what the original amount was?

55:20

With carbon -14 dating, we've got tree rings that tell us back to 3 ,000 years. After that, we don't have a good calibration, so we don't really know.

55:28

With these other radioactive dating techniques, it's even worse. So for example, the radioactive dating technique that's mostly used to give us hundreds of millions and billions of years is the potassium -argon dating technique that's used on lava.

55:44

The potassium -argon dating technique assumes that when the lava is still liquid, all of the argon gas has bubbled out of it.

55:52

And so when the rock solidifies, there's no argon gas in it. Any argon gas you find must come from the decay of potassium.

56:00

But we know that's not true because we can analyze solid lava that solidified last year, and we can find lots of argon in it.

56:11

So we know that's not true. And we can also radioactively date, we can use potassium -argon dating technique to date lava flows that were recorded in history.

56:21

We know when the lava flowed because it was recorded in history. And when you do that, the radioactive date is always wrong.

56:29

So Hawaiian lava flow that we know happened 500 years ago, potassium -argon dates to 12 million years ago.

56:37

Little bit of a problem there. So as a nuclear chemist, I don't put any stock in any of these radioactive dating techniques.

56:44

The problem of assumption is really bad, but the fact is we know it's gotta be wrong because I never get coherent results from radioactive dating.

56:55

I have to throw away most of my radioactive dates to get any coherent results. Okay, well, we've got a lot of follow -up questions.

57:06

So let's start with this one about the trees. So Joyce says that she thought that the scientists or they no longer believe the rings of a tree are per year, just like the rings or layers in ice cores are not yearly.

57:25

Okay, so there are many, many trees where they aren't yearly rings because especially evergreens, some forms of evergreen, very, very bad for using tree ring dating.

57:37

But there are certain types of even evergreens like bristlecone pines, for example, that are really seem to be very good at making a ring every year.

57:47

Now, there are always some years where multiple rings are formed, but they tend to be very, very rare.

57:54

You have to have a really specific set of weather conditions to get a multiple ring year.

58:02

So, and it's estimated that maybe one to 2 % of years end up producing two or three rings.

58:09

So for the right kind of species of tree, it's still considered, honestly, it's still considered the most accurate dating technique we have.

58:18

And they extend it back beyond living trees. The oldest living tree by tree ring dating is about 4 ,700 years old.

58:26

But you could actually extend that backwards by finding a fossilized tree near a living tree and matching up the tree ring patterns because the tree ring patterns depend on weather and so forth.

58:38

So if we've got a fossil tree here and a living tree here, and I find where the patterns overlap in the living tree and the fossil tree, then any extra rings in the fossil tree extend the period down a little bit.

58:51

So we can do that. And so we can actually get tree ring chronologies that go back beyond the living trees.

58:58

I can't carbon 14 date those because it's a little difficult because a lot of that carbon is mineralized now.

59:04

And so it's newer carbon. But nevertheless, I can at least count the rings. So no, for specific rings, yes.

59:12

Now, you're absolutely right that ice layers are not annual. It used to be thought very naively that ice layers were annual.

59:21

But I don't know anybody who takes that seriously anymore because we've seen 10s and 40s of rings form, or of ice layers form in a year.

59:33

And even if you believe those are ice layers, each ice layer is a year, that those ice layers start getting crushed together from the weight of the ice above.

59:45

So when I've got a big collection of ice, the layers start out really noticeable, and then they get so tiny that you can't really distinguish them anymore visually.

59:55

What you have to do is do chemical tests to try and distinguish the layers, and that gets even harder.

01:00:02

So yeah, I don't know anybody who takes ice layers seriously anymore. But a lot of people, most people for specific species take the tree rings very seriously.

01:00:14

Okay, and then this is another follow -up question from Dan, and I'm gonna ask you a couple of questions here.

01:00:20

So he says, Dr. John Baumgardner found C14 in diamonds that would be equivalent to 80 ,000 years, he believes.

01:00:31

If the laboratory doesn't have the precision to measure that low amount of C14, how can his results be valid?

01:00:37

I know you mentioned something about 45 ,000, but maybe also in your answer, can you also answer this one?

01:00:45

What is a half -life and how reliable is it? Yeah, so I've read

01:00:53

Baumgardner's work, and if he's got 80 ,000 years, I would think I would see that as a red flag. He's got a lot that are really close, like 55 ,000 and things like that, and even those

01:01:03

I don't take very seriously because that's really near the edge. So if he says 80 ,000,

01:01:10

I don't see how in the world the lab could have done that, because that's now more than 10, more than, like I said, it's like 16 now.

01:01:20

I'm doing math in my head, that's always dangerous. Probably about 14 half -lives. I don't see how they have the precision for that.

01:01:26

If I look in the general scientific literature, usually if something returns no carbon -14, it's listed as greater than 60 ,000 years old.

01:01:36

That's usually how it's reported. So I sent a bunch of, if a paper sends a bunch of samples out and they come back and they said, okay, this is 30 ,000 years, this is 40 ,000 years, this is greater than 60.

01:01:49

The greater than 60 means it can't be carbon -dated. So I don't know of how you can get to 80.

01:01:54

And I try and stay on top of the literature. So if that's a technique, it's one

01:02:02

I'm not familiar with. Now, a half -life, there are lots of processes that are governed by half -lives.

01:02:10

Not only radioactive processes, but a lot of chemical reactions are governed this way as well.

01:02:16

A half -life is the amount of time it takes for half of the original stuff to go away.

01:02:22

So if I have a lump of carbon -14 in my hand and it's 100 grams and I wait 5 ,700 years, in the end, there will only be 50 grams of carbon -14 left.

01:02:33

In that 5 ,700 years, half of my carbon -14, half of that 100 grams will have decayed away.

01:02:39

I now only have 50 grams. If I then wait another 5 ,700 years, half of that will go away so that 50 grams will turn into 25 grams.

01:02:51

So every half -life, the amount of stuff you have gets cut in half. This is very common for something that is statistical in nature.

01:03:02

If something's happening on a statistical process, it usually doesn't completely eliminate. It just cuts itself in half over and over again.

01:03:10

And so radioactive processes and a lot of chemical processes occur that way. So the half -life is the amount of time it takes for half of it to go away.

01:03:18

How accurate is it? Well, it can be measured pretty easily because even though we can't wait around 5 ,700 years, the math that radioactive decay conforms to is really well -known.

01:03:35

It's been tested over and over again. And that math gives you the half -life after only like, was it one part per 100 ,000?

01:03:45

No, one part per million. Yeah, no, no, no, that'd be one part per billion. Yeah, so it's huge. Basically, if I plot the amount of radioactive isotope that exists at any one time in a sample, it decays away.

01:04:02

And so if I make a graph of the amount of radioactive isotope versus time, you'll see a curve that goes down.

01:04:10

And this curve can be fit with an equation. And the equation's always the same no matter what the radioactive isotope is.

01:04:17

The only difference is what the value of the half -life is. So all I have to do is

01:04:22

I have to get enough data so I get a nice curve. Then I can use math to fit that curve.

01:04:29

And the measurement of the half -life comes from that math. And it's very, very well -known.

01:04:34

So even though we've not waited around 5 ,700 years for carbon -14 to decay, if I put a carbon -14, a sample of carbon -14 in my reaction vessel, and I put a beta particle detector in front of it, and I leave it overnight to count, the next day

01:04:52

I can fit that line and tell you what the half -life is. And whether I test this carbon -14 or somebody in China tests this carbon -14, they always come up with 5 ,700 years.

01:05:02

So it's reliable not only because we know the math, but because lots of people do these measurements and they all turn out to be the same.

01:05:11

Now, there's one thing that's really, really important and something I always say when

01:05:16

I do a general age of the earth talk. Even before I was a young earth creationist,

01:05:22

I was skeptical of all this radioactive dating and everything because basically, we've been measuring radioactive half -lives for now maybe 100 years or so, probably not 100 years, but close to 100 years.

01:05:35

And over these 100 years, they've been very reliable, very consistent and so forth. However, in order for radioactive dating to be true, we have to believe that our 100 years of data is applicable 100 billion years ago, or not 100 billion years, but 4 billion years ago.

01:05:51

And that's a very, very poor assumption. It's very, very hard to say, okay,

01:05:56

I've been measuring something for 100 years, it's been really stable, so it must be stable for billions of years.

01:06:02

That's an absurd statement to make. So even before I was young earth creationist, I was very skeptical of all these dating methods that tell me the earth is 4 .6

01:06:10

plus or minus 0 .15 billion years old. Because in the end, all of these processes that we're using to do these dating have been measured for only a short amount of time.

01:06:21

And to assume that what we've done now applies throughout all the history of the universe, it's kind of crazy.

01:06:30

Okay, next question. Can you go back to the comment that you made about how there's more carbon in the atmosphere since the bomb?

01:06:38

Yeah. Can you explain why that's true? Yeah, so carbon -14 gets made in the atmosphere because there are particles, high energy particles that come from the sun that interact with, is it the nitrogen?

01:06:51

I'm gonna, it's gotta be nitrogen, right? Nitrogen doxa. I'm gonna say it's nitrogen,

01:06:58

I'm almost certain it is. Anyway, high energy particles come in from the sun, react with the nitrogen in the atmosphere, knock out a proton to make carbon -14.

01:07:08

So nitrogen -14 turns into carbon -14. Well, in order for that to happen, the only thing you need is high energy particles.

01:07:15

Well, the atomic bomb produced a lot of high energy particles and they went into the atmosphere as well. And so the atomic bomb produced a lot of high energy particles.

01:07:24

And even though the sun produces more, it's spreading its high energy particles all over the solar system.

01:07:30

Our atomic bomb put them all in the atmosphere. So we ended up getting a big spike in carbon -14 due to the atomic bomb, just because the atomic bomb produced the same kind of high energy particles that the sun bombards the atmosphere with.

01:07:46

And interestingly enough, this actually allowed us to disprove something that has been taught as definitive fact back when

01:07:52

I was in university and back when you were in university and all of that. It was always said that after a certain age, like age 18 or something like that, you don't make any new brain cells.

01:08:03

We now know that's false. And we know it because of the bomb. Because we have people who were older than 18 when the bomb was dropped.

01:08:13

And once they died, when you examine their brains, you find brain cells with the carbon -14 signature that's post -bomb.

01:08:22

And so we know that they were making brain cells after the bomb was dropped. And since they were older than 18, we now know that you actually do make some brain cells throughout your life.

01:08:32

And so that's kind of an interesting way we used the unfortunate fact that the bomb produced more carbon -14 in the atmosphere to learn something new.

01:08:42

So then I have a question. If there's an increase in the amount of carbon, does that mean that there was a decrease in the amount of nitrogen in the atmosphere?

01:08:49

Oh yeah, but remember, we're talking about really, really small amounts. So carbon -14 is not even a percent.

01:08:56

It's like thousandth of a percent or billionth of a percent or something like that of the amount of carbon.

01:09:02

So if I just add a few more carbon -14 molecule or nuclei around the atmosphere,

01:09:09

I'm gonna see a bump in the amount of carbon -14. So yeah, I did have to get rid of some nitrogen to do that, but I got rid of such a tiny amount of nitrogen.

01:09:18

And nitrogen, remember, is the most abundant chemical in the atmosphere. The atmosphere is 78 % nitrogen.

01:09:26

So there's a lot of nitrogen atoms out there and a few of them get knocked off and make carbon -14.

01:09:31

So I'm not saying that causes a bump in carbon -14 without a real noticeable drop in nitrogen. But yeah, technically it's there.

01:09:38

Yeah, I knew that Dr. Weill, because of your curriculum. Okay, Dan has another question.

01:09:48

He says, I have done research on post -flood rock layers that yielded argon -argon radiometric dates of almost 10 million years old.

01:09:57

How can this be explained in a young earth framework? And my understanding, the accelerated decay hypothesis proposes that accelerated decay happened mostly during the flood.

01:10:10

Yeah, so first of all, I can say we can't explain it right now. That's one of the things.

01:10:16

When I look at science, there are certain things that I can't explain if the earth is young, and there are certain things that I can't explain if the earth is old.

01:10:24

And there are a lot of things I can't even explain if the earth is middle -aged. So in the end, what

01:10:30

I have to do as a scientist is I have to look at what conclusion produces the least amount of unexplainable things.

01:10:40

And in my view, a young earth produces the least amount of unexplainable things. So as a scientist,

01:10:46

I'm a young earther specifically because there are fewer scientific mysteries, fewer unexplainable things in a young earth than in an older.

01:10:53

This is one of the unexplainable things in a young earth right now is the behavior, the results of certain kinds of radiometric processes.

01:11:05

A bigger thing to me rather than specific things like what you're talking about, argon -argon dating and post -flood materials, is just the fact that there are isotopes

01:11:15

I can make in the lab that have half -lives on the order of 10 million years.

01:11:21

I can make those in the lab. And there's no reason to think that those weren't made naturally. However, none of those guys exist now.

01:11:30

And in an old earth, that's really easy to understand because they were formed when the earth was formed. The earth's been around for 4 .6

01:11:36

billion years. Anything that has a half -life of 10, 100 million years, it's all gonna be decayed away. So from an old earth standpoint, it's perfectly understandable why those isotopes don't exist on earth.

01:11:48

From a young earth standpoint, I don't understand at all. They should be there. They're not, all right?

01:11:54

So there are things like this in the young earth framework that I just can't explain, but there are lots more things

01:12:00

I can't explain in the older format, like soft tissue and dinosaur bones, carbon -14, lots of things like that.

01:12:08

So in the end, and I'm still, even though I'm willing to admit accelerated radioactive decay occurs, and I think certainly we've had some repeatable experiments in the lab that show this, and we've had some pretty good evidence that it happened in the past, although it's not definitive.

01:12:27

Still, I think the accelerated radioactive decay hypothesis has a lot of problems associated with it, especially what do you do with all the heat that would occur as a result of this accelerated radioactive decay.

01:12:39

So even if you think that accelerated radioactive decay is a reasonable explanation, it's not gonna work for post -flood because it would have to happen during the flood, and even during the flood,

01:12:51

I would think the oceans would boil away. So I'm not, I'm just telling you that's a mystery, but I can find lots more mysteries in an older framework.

01:13:01

And so that's, and that's the beauty of science though, honestly, is that almost regardless of your point of view in a lot of the controversial areas of science,

01:13:13

I can find evidence to support both. And so in the end, what you have to do is make a reasonable or a reasoned analysis and find, okay, which one makes the most sense in terms of science in general.

01:13:26

So no, I can't explain that for you. Okay, here's another one.

01:13:32

Do fish get thirsty? Do fish get, believe it or not, believe it or not, there is a problem that fish have with water.

01:13:43

It depends on what kind of water they're in. So in freshwater, a fish is constantly absorbing water from outside because the concentration of stuff dissolved in the fish's tissues is greater than the concentration of the stuff dissolved in the surrounding water.

01:14:02

And so that dissolved stuff in the fish sucks the water in, that's a process called osmosis.

01:14:08

So fish in freshwater are never thirsty. In fact, they're peeing a lot to get rid of all the water that they're taking in.

01:14:17

Fish in saltwater are constantly thirsty because they're leaking water out of their bodies.

01:14:24

The amount of stuff dissolved in their bodies is less than the amount of stuff dissolved in the surrounding water.

01:14:30

So the seawater is sucking water out of them. So they have to pretty much drink constantly. And they usually have a way of trying to get rid of the salt separate from the water.

01:14:40

So yes, saltwater fish are always thirsty. Freshwater fish are never thirsty.

01:14:46

They got too much water. That's interesting. Okay, Dan wants to know what is the newest research on the reliability of radiometric dating in the creationist or mainstream literature?

01:15:01

And have there been any new interesting results? Have there been any new interesting results?

01:15:07

There are some folks I'm very skeptical of what they're doing and they're not creationists necessarily, but there are some folks in Croatia and another

01:15:18

Eastern European country, I can't think of where, but they have been doing some stuff with short laser bursts, trying to excite very specific energy levels within the nucleus to accelerate radioactive decay.

01:15:35

And they're producing some results that indicate that they've been successfully accelerating nuclear decay that way.

01:15:44

That's kind of interesting. Like I said, I'm still pretty skeptical of their results because, and it may be that I don't understand the process as well as, maybe they're not explaining it well, maybe

01:15:54

I don't understand it well, but it seems to me they're not spending a lot of time doing these laser bursts.

01:16:00

Maybe there's some experimental reason they can't, but I would want them to do these laser bursts over a longer period of time to get even more acceleration.

01:16:08

They don't seem to be doing that. But if that continues, that'll be really interesting.

01:16:14

I think one of the more interesting things that's occurred in the creationist literature is there's a really good, now a lot of really good studies of using radioactive decay, alpha radioactive decay and beta radioactive decay.

01:16:31

And if I've got a nucleus that's, or a decay chain that's mostly beta and I have another decay chain that's mostly alpha, they never give the same results.

01:16:41

And it's always the alpha decay chain or the beta decay chain that's younger. And so there does seem to be some sort of systematic problem with radioactive dating that beta decay is different from alpha decay.

01:16:55

And that's interesting. There was some stuff that was going on about, oh, five years ago where it looked like the rate of radioactive decay of certain isotopes depended on how far the earth was from the sun.

01:17:12

That there seemed to be a pattern when the earth got close to the sun, the radioactive decay was lower. When it got farther from the sun, the radioactive decay was faster.

01:17:20

And that was popular in the creationist literature for a while. It wasn't done by creationists, it was done by a group out of Purdue.

01:17:26

But in the end, that's pretty much been shown to be an experimental artifact.

01:17:32

The folks at the National Institute of Standards did some really, really solid research that indicates, no, these radioactive rates are stable year round.

01:17:44

So if you've seen that in the creationist literature, I'd move away from that because it doesn't look like it's reliable anymore.

01:17:54

I talked about a lot of my blog and now every article that's on my blog about that actually has a note saying, this probably isn't true anymore.

01:18:03

Can you remind me of the web address of your blog? I'll put it into the comments here.

01:18:10

Oh yeah, it's easy. It's blog .drwile, D -R -W -I -L -E. So just D -R, not full doctor.

01:18:17

So blog .drwile .com. Okay. Okay. And then we also, at the beginning,

01:18:24

I put your website for your curriculum, which was bereanbuilders .com. I'll put that again.