Creationist hoopla over zircon study misplaced.

Many Creationist and young earth Creationist websites are crowing about a *cough* scientific paper by Humpreys et al., purporting to demonstrate that the helium diffusion rates from zircons from a precambrian igneous rock prove the rocks are only 6,000 ± 2,000 years old. The authors' conclusion: this study strongly supports the young world of Scripture. Too bad the study is deeply flawed.

The Commissar over at the Politburo Diktat has a lengthy post where he distills into layman's terms an even lengthier smackdown by Henke of Humphreys' paper. Both do an excellent job, and I encourage all to read everything to do with the paper/rebuttal. Pay particular attention to Commissar/Henke when they point out that Humphreys likely sampled the wrong rocks.

Based on all the documents, Humphrey's paper is lacking in scientific method, and his conclusions are unsupported. Humphreys' reply to Henke is here. Not surprisingly, Henke links Humphreys, but Humphreys doesn't return the professional courtesy.

An aside: Going through the original article, I noticed that when defining the principle of Uniformitarianism--a term of art in geology--the authors quoted the bible (all things continue as they were from the beginning. II Peter 3:4; page three of the pdf file). Not what one would expect from those wishing to be taken seriously. For the record, my definition is: the concept that the processes that have shaped the Earth through geologic time are the same as those observable today. Not quite the same thing.

Googling a few creationist terms turns up an amazing number of websites, many of which point to Humphrey's flawed article. These websites fail to note that the paper was published in a journal which, although claiming to be refereed and peer-reviewed (sine qua non for publication: shared ideology), so lacks credibility that it is not listed in a database for determining publication impact factors. Impact factors are calculated for most peer-reviewed scientific journals; the factor allows readers and researchers to judge the impact a journal has in its field. I also searched the journal database for any journals dealing with ID/Creationism/YEC. Nothing turned up.

Moreover, the Creation Research Society Quarterly, lists universities/colleges stocking its flagship publication. I was relieved to note that in Missouri (where I last lived before coming to Switzerland) only religious educational institutions subscribe. Oddly enough, the Zurich library has a subscription.

It used to be easy to ignore YECers and their ilk. They often lacked advanced scientific degrees, or when they possessed them, the degrees turned out to be from odd, unaccredited universities. Nowadays, however, many such researcher-apologists sport doctorates from outstanding institutions, and do otherwise fine research in their professions. Moreover, they publish creationist claptrap in any number of scientific disciplines (common theme: things went much faster than science assumes). This makes it far harder to dismiss their claims and, more importantly, provides a certain level of respect for their creationist studies.

In light of the gains these credentialed standard bearers for pseudo-science have made, I went looking for papers published in reputable journals. The papers would have to make an explicit claim for a young earth--claims at YEC websites about how this or that study proves their point were not acceptable.

I also searched for any competitive public grants the scientists received.

In the end I found nothing. However, if you know of such an article or grant, please forward a link. If it truly fits my criteria, I'll link it.