Re: age of the Earth

On Sun, 20 Apr 2025 12:53:58 +0000, J. J. Lodder wrote:

The Starmaker <starmaker@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>

At Charles Darwin's time the age of the Earth was thought to be about
75,000 years old.  (you won't believe how someone else came up with that
number)
>
He was in a rush to publish his book and noticed the numbers were
wrong...
...he knew
eventually somebody would have
figured out you cannot change a fish to a man in 75,000 years.
>
So he, 'made up a number'!
>
Then when he published his book, (origin of species 1859) he wrote the
age of the earth to be
306,662,400 years old.

>
You are quote-mining.
>
In reality Darwin wrote:      (second edition)
===
Hence,

Huh?
under ordinary circumstances, I should infer that for a cliff 500

feet in height, a denudation of one inch per century for the whole
length would be a sufficient allowance.

500*12*100 is 600000 years.
At this rate, on the above data,

the denudation of the Weald must have required 306,662,400 years;

Whatever the Weald is, *hence* its height gotta be
306662400/100 inches or 3066624 inches or 3066624/12 feet or 255552 feet
or about 8 times the height of Mount Everest was the height of the
Weald, whatever that may have been.
Somebody smelling a really stinking rat or is our canine arithmetic
woefully wrong somewhere?
Woof-woof woof woof woof-woof woof woof-woof
Bertietaylor
Well, the
 or say

three hundred million years. But perhaps it would be safer to allow two
or three inches per century, and this would reduce the number of years
to one hundred and fifty or one hundred million years.
====
>
It is obvious from the above passage that this is a made up example,
for the purpose of arriving at an order of magnitude estimate.
Darwin was right of of course. Hundreds of millions of years
is a correct estimate for the time scale of geology and evolution.
It was not possible to do better, at the time.
>
Jan

--