It`s Between 5 and 6 million years old!! The difference is 1 million years ?

Question

a million years difference means you don`t have a clue. Why not say it is between 1 day and a million years old? This is true with any artifact discovered or a fossil

Answer 1

yu wanna go bak tu the good ol daes wen sientist sed that deer fozzil is 5 megayeers?

Modern siens is 2 smart for yu.  Em add in a ges bout how good the first ges is.

Answer 2

The margin of error increases as you increase the length of the time frame. Lets say you asked an 18 year old when their first they went to Disney World and they say two and a half years ago. Thats not very precise. Was it two years and six months exactly or was it two years five months and seven days or was it... How is that kid going to know exactly when and just because he doesn't know exactly when doesn't mean he knows nothing.

How about we ask an 80 year old the same question. Lets say he says between 50 and 55 years ago. NOW THE DIFFERENCE IS 5 YEARS! However, is it alright to just say he might as well not say he went at all because he can't remember the exact moment he entered the park? According to you unless one has an atomic clock and a digital hard drive attached to their heads they have no perception of time and should therefore should not make any assumptions or decisions based on time.

Answer 3

To say that some event was between 5 and 6 million years ago is more precise than to say that it was between 1 years and 13.7 billion years.  And it can be more useful, when we try to understand the universe that God created for us.  

At least, the evidence that something is between 5 and 6 million years old does indicate that it is older than, let's say, 6000 years.

The reasoning (if we can call it that) you use is what ruins most "scientific-sounding" paper written by so called creationist scientists:

e.g.,  The author shows that different techniques yield different possible ages for the same rock:  one technique says that it is older than 6 million years, the other says that it is only 5 million years old.  Therefore, the author concludes, the rock is only 6,000 years old.

Yeah, right.

Answer 4

Are you saying you never said you have five or six of something, like five or six apples in the fridge?

Are you saying, that if I ask you when you wrote this question, and you answered, about 20 minutes ago, it means you have no clue if you can't be more precise?

Yours is a fatuous complaint.

EDIT.  The difference between five and six million years is exactly the same as the difference between five or six apples, in relative terms.  20 percent.

An error range of 5 million years for a date of 1.2 billion is an extremely good value.  A lot more precise than saying 20 minutes ago when the reality was 19 minutes ago, yet no one blinks at saying 20 minutes when the reality was somewhere from 18 to 22 minutes ago.  

On the other hand, someone that says an object is one million years old, give or take one million years, is definitely not being very precise.  Not really providing much useful information.  Sort of like saying my neighbour lives somewhere between one inch and one mile from my house.

Answer 5

Without checking, tell me the distance between the centers of your pupils when you're looking off into the distance. You'll probably say something like "two inches." When you actually measure it, you'll find out it's a little more than that. For me, it's 2.5 inches.

The important measure of error in this case is relative error. If my estimate is 2 and the truth is 2.5, the relative error is

| 2 - 2.5 | / 2.5 = 0.5/2.5 = 0.2 = 20%

It's the same with an estimate of six million years when the truth is five million years.

| 6 - 5 | / 5 = 1/5 = 0.2 = 20%

So it's not as if "you don't have a clue." A 20% error margin means that you really DID have some clues, only not enough to be more precise.

It is a habit of creationists to try to portray the honesty of real scientists as proof of the errors of evolution, when in fact it is proof that the real scientists are humble enough to be cautious about how much they claim to know. Which means, of course, that creationists are as arrogant as they are deceitful.

Answer 6

Good point. bustersmycat's point is not valid since we're not talking about the difference of one apple or maybe five minutes but freakin' 1 million years. Go figure.

Answer 7

I am not sure if your question has something to do with semantic, religion (creationism) or science.

Of course, dating anything prior to human recording is a difficult task. But I am sure scientists are doing their best based on so many different inputs. In any case, I think that the absolute dating is unimportant compare to the relative one. It's nice to know that e.g. an event happened on earth before or after another one. Now, it could even be that time is not linear but exponential. After all if the universe expands in space and time, what was a minute after the Big Bang might be something completely different today. But then, what do we measure it to as a reference?

... or was your question about something entirely different?

Answer 8

The error factor from 5 to 6 is 20%.  The error factor from one day to a million years is 36,525,000,000%.  Slight difference.

We do have a clue.  Many of these dating calculations have a built-in error. The range is often given in order to convey the approximate degree of accuracy.  Being off by 20% isn't that much of a condemnation.

On the other hand, take the ages dictated by the literal interpretation of the bible, as per Bishop Ussher. Six million years is different by a thousand TIMES the biblical age of the universe.  The scientific estimate of the age of the universe is 2 million TIMES greater than the biblical age.

People who don't understand the value of qualitative analysis or something as simple as proportional comparisons should not be presuming to judge the mathematical legitimacy of a couple hundred years of solid scientific research.

Myotherme, no, it's a foolish point based on mathematical incompetence.  Bustersmycat's point is  absolutely valid and well-put.

Fundies can whine and lie their way around evolution all they want, but it's a lot harder to BS your way around math.  In the words of the spiritual, "There's no hidin' place down there!"

Answer 9

That is an error of 20% or 16.5% if you use the upper figure.  Such errors are not very rare when estimating the age of some fossil specially on one determination.  The estimate says that it is more than 5 million but less than 6.  This may be adequate for some purposes.  A more expensive series of tests might give a better result, but scientific budgets are limited, particularly in paleontology as nobody makes big money out of it.  

If a more expensive series of tests are done, a second fact is that a newspaper and specially TV report of  something of that age will ignore the 5.6 +/- 0.35 million years reported in the scientific literature and just give the 5 to 6 million year range to avoid confusing the not-so-mathematically literate public.  

Bishop Ussher calculated the creation of the Earth using, in part, the very clear list of the patriarchs in Genesis as 4004BCE.  Other religious authorities using the same material give dates of around 5600BCE and there are a few other dates too, hundreds of years different.  Care to calculate the error there?

I have here a kerosene lamp.  It was made in France sometime between 1890 and 1908.  It is impossible to tell exactly because the factory made the same style for nearly 18 years.  

This is not true of artifacts, nor is it of fossils.  I know where you are coming from and I have heard it all before.

Answer 10

If  I were to tell you you  will get between  5 and 6 million dollars from an inheritance would you reply that  you would just as soon have  between 1 and one million because the difference is  a million in both cases?