We are in the middle of a revolution. The Information revolution is transforming how business gets done and what individuals do for a living just like the industrial revolution did in a past century. The internet allows us to share information quickly and easily, a technology that we all thought would speed the advancement of science as the brilliant minds in Universities around the world partnered and compared notes. Although this certainly has happened, the medium of the internet has also allowed the forces of ignorance to share their seductively simple and deceptive messages with an ever broadening audience as well. This became very evident as I investigated the Carbon-14 radioactive dating method on the interenet tonight.
Tonight’s online investigation began with a post on slashdot in a thread about Dungeon’s and Dragons. It began innocently enough with a quote: “Jesus saves…everyone else takes 2d20 crushing damage”. I laughed, anyway. Several posts later I ran into a link to a D&D related comic on Jack Chick’s site. Chick’s comics are not new to me, in fact I had read that D&D comic before, but it led me to poke around Chick’s site until I ran across one called Primal Man? in which a ’scientist’ is presented by ‘evidence’ refuting evolution. One part of the evidence referred to an article in Science, Vol 141 (1963) by M. Kieth and G. Anderson purportedly proving that Carbon 14 dating was invalid. Having studied Biology and Geology in college I am familiar with the technique, but a very simple explanation from How Stuff Works might br helpful if you are not.

I thought “well, that’s easy enough to check” and proceeded to google those terms. My searches turned up literally hundreds of *other* references to the paper, but at first, nothing scholarly, mostly hearsay garbage. I will not link to some of the worst offenders, but suffice to say you can usually identify them quickly as they will invariably cite dates with reference to the flood and Noah.

One of the better creationist, Carbon 14 refutation pages was on evolution-facts.org which again made reference to the article as proof against the method, but didn’t discuss it at all: “Various living mollusks (such as snails) had their shells dated, and were found to have “died” as much as 2300 years ago (*M. Keith and *G. Anderson, “Radiocarbon Dating: Fictitious Results with Mollusk Shells,” in Science, 141, 1963, p. 634).” Unfortunately for the Creationists, simply repeating something a hundred or so times does not convince me of anything, you need to have a better argument. The author dismisses the entire body of work done in dendrochronology by simply stating that the oldest living trees are 4000 years old, ignoring correlations made in the rings of the living trees to those in dead ones found nearby. That’s for another argument though… This page does list 13 assumptions scientists need to make to accept the dating method. I haven’t investigated these claims thoroughly, but on the face of it several of them are logically valid. Examples: we must assume a constant rate of comic ray bombardment creating a constant amount of C14 over time, we must assume the decay rate of C14 does not change, etc.

It was with some relief that I found the talk.orgins site. The website exists as a storage location for the FAQs of a usenet group of the same name. I quickly added talk.origins to my newsreader and will be following it in the future. The site has a handy index of Creationist claims that will make further investigations much easier. One of the links in the index specifically discussed the Kieth and Anderson article and described the ‘reservoir effect’ which did indeed cause an older date for mollusks dated using the C14 technique. The whole purpose of the article was to describe potential dating errors that might occur when dating mollusks that have built shells in water with great amounts of dissolved (and very ancient) limestone (C12). A greater amount of C12 would skew dates obtained with the technique to appear much older. I was happy to find a related article on this site discussing how scientists can use tree ring dating to correlate and correct dates obtained using C14 dating as I alluded to above.

I think there’s enough fodder here for a good read (and subsequent ‘think’) for anyone interested in science. Avail yourself of it! Don’t let the media techniques that brought you four more years of GW and war in Iraq create a climate in this country where rational thought becomes a heresy.