This is something that could go in a few different threads. I'm guessing this one's best in the long run.
...and it's funny.
Wiki gets edited left & right these days, with indecisive evolutionists running the show. Here's what the link
currently says. (My focus here is on the tail)
Robert V. Gentry studied these halos and concluded that the rock must have formed within three minutes if the halo was formed by Po-218. This is taken by some creationists as evidence that the earth was formed instantaneously. Other creationists, including some fellow Seventh Day Adventists, have disparaged his work, and have "accused him of willfully ignoring pertinent evidence and of inconsistently and arbitrarily assuming nonuniform decay rates for all radioactive isotopes except polonium."[14]
Critics of Gentry from within the scientific community have pointed out that Po-218 is a decay product of radon, which as a gas can be given off by a grain of uranium in one part of the rock and collected in another part of the rock to form a uraniumless halo. Gentry's examples rely on a radon ring that is close to the Po-210 ring and it is a bit difficult to tell them apart, and it is not certain whether the rings can be positively associated with polonium.[15]
Gentry's work has been continued and expanded by the creationist R.A.T.E. project that was operating between 1997 and 2005. Radiohalos were studied as part of the R.A.T.E. project by creationists such as Andrew Snelling of Answers in Genesis, Russell Humphreys, John Baumgardner and Steven A. Austin at the Institute of Creation Research as well as others at the Creation Research Society.[citation needed] However, Lorence G. Collins, J. Richard Wakefield and others have repeatedly and soundly rebutted the radiohalo evidence for a young earth in peer-reviewed publications.[citation needed]
We've taken a look at Professor Collins' "sound rebuttal", but I was curious about this J. Richard Wakefield.
Found his article
at NCSE. . Ready for the funny part?
About the Author(s):
J. Richard Wakefield is a professional firefighter for the city of Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, and an amateur geologist. He studied zoology at the University of Toronto and has been studying creationism since 1983.
© 1988 by J. Richard Wakefield
I won't bore you with shredding the article in detail. Most of his argument is not in dispute. We already know that evolutionism has different conclusions about the age of the earth and the "layers" found on the surface. That Genty does not agree with "the mainstream" isn't surprising and it isn't news. What the author needed to demonstrate was that Gentry's ideas are flawed as a
"young" earth interpretation.
If one takes all the "old earth" interpretations of evidence as correct, one will disagree with Gentry's conclusions. The author demonstrates this pretty convincingly.
He throws in some junk about Gentry misidentifying rocks. At least some of the time he agrees with the identifications, and I haven't taken the time to sort through his accusations. I know others have found the same kind of radiohalos in granite.
He also tries to use "appearance of age", an argument so flawed that if arguments were living things it would've been stillborn.
His logic is obviously bad in one place.
This site is related to the Fission Mine, and it, too, is a calcite intrusive of the same origin. Here are some quotes from the Ontario Department of Mines (now the Ontario Geological Survey) report for 1957, written by D. F. Hewitt, on the geology of the site:
The [calcite vein dike] body consists of a coarse-grained calcite (1-5 inches in size), containing accessory black mica (lepidomelane [high mafic biotite] ) in books up to 2 feet in diameter. . . .
This deposit has some features characteristic of the metasomatic replacement deposits in marble, of the hydrothermal calcite-apatite-fluorite vein deposits, and of intrusive carbonate deposits. Its mode of origin is in dispute.
The coarse pegmatite crystallization of the calcite, black mica, hornblend, and albite suggest crystallization from a fluid medium, rich in volatiles. . . . The wall-rock alteration, involving addition of fluorine, carbon dioxide, and soda into the surrounding wall-rock, favours crystallization of the [calcite vein dike] body from a fluid state, such as a carbonate intrusive or hydrothermal solution. . . .
. . . The irregular replacement of the wall-rock gneiss and the long relic bands of biotite amphibolite in the [calcite vein dike] indicate metasomatic replacement of the wall-rock gneiss by [carbonatite].
The author believes that the [calcite vein dike] has originally been largely derived from marble but that it has been assimilated or desolved and recrystallized from hot solutions rich in fluorine and soda. This would account for the extensive wall-rock alteration and the metasomatic type of replacement of wall-rock gneiss, without disturbance of relic mafic gneiss bands. Such relict bands are incompatible with an origin of the [calcite vein dike] body involving tectonic movement of a marble bed in a plastic state. The author feels that the deposit is therefore best classed as a special variety of the hydrothermal deposit in which the solutions have carried out extensive metasomatic replacement of the wall-rocks.
From this we learn that the calcite vein dikes are intrusive into and thus formed later than the country rock that makes up the formation. They have also altered the country rock.
No. We learn
one interpretation of the evidence. We learn that at least one more interpretation exists, and that the matter wasn't settled at the time the report was written.
Pretty bad when they have to cherry-pick which
evolutionist interpretations to employ to try to make Gentry look bad, huh?
And the author's conclusion is not that the radiohalos have been explained away.
Still, we must give Gentry his due. Nothing in geology fully explains the apparent occurrence of the polonium halos as described by Gentry. They do remain a minor mystery in the field of physics. But this does not mean that no explanations are possible or that it is time to throw in the towel and invoke the "god of the gaps."
Funny. He never asks
why the radiohalos can't be produced naturally, or even by man, without leaving marks. The reason's pretty simple. The task involves suspending decay, getting the radioactives to gather into a place, and re-activating decay. That's all. As soon as a man figures out how to do these things, he'll know how to make them. As soon as he figures out a just-so story to get them to happen without manipulation, evolutionism will be undebunkable on the basis of simple radiohalo existence. Until then... well, some of us are content to follow the evidence.
Oh, and I'm sure a few creationists would be happy to acknowledge the capacity of nature to turn on and shut off radioactive decay, if it should be clearly demonstrated. It is the religion of evolutionism that insists that sort of thing
must not ever be investigated.
That's about enough for now. We could probably discuss a few more things here, if folks are actually interested.
Another copy of the same article can be found. This copy omits the "about the author" part, and includes additional propaganda on other topics.
http://ncseweb.org/book/export/html/3432
