Dr. Stephen Meyer

I think carbon dating is generally accurate.

You can have contamination of samples.

Carbon dating isn't really relevant for these big timescales we're talking about with the origin of animals or on an evolutionary scale.

It's more on the tens of thousands of years old for more relevant for archaeological artifacts.

But there are other radiometric methods like –

potassium argon.

I generally think these are pretty accurate methods.

But the question of do we have enough time is still there.

It's still a big problem.

And in Signature in the Cell, my first book, I calculated the probability of generating a functional protein by chance in a prebiotic

environment, prebiotic soup or other environment, and the probabilities are astronomically small even in relation to the probabilistic resources of the universe.

If every event in the universe had been devoted to searching for a new protein sequence from the Big Bang till now,

call it 13.8 billion years, not nearly enough opportunities to search a space as large as that which corresponds to a protein sequence.

And then Jim Tour, James Tour, the very prominent organic

chemist at Rice University has recently come out with a paper showing that the processes that degrade biomolecules in a presumed prebiotic environment happen much faster than the processes that would be required to build biologically relevant molecules.

So time is not your friend, he argues.

It's actually the enemy.

Things degrade faster than they get built, which means time is working against you, not for you.

Yeah, absolutely.

First thing to say, though, is that many scientific theories are tested in different ways.