Insight on the News
Radioactive Dating Challenged
● How accurate are the billions-of-years-ago time scales that are offered with such authority in science textbooks to date life on earth? Perhaps they are not as solidly founded as the public has been led to believe. “Popular Science,” in its November 1979 issue, reports that physicist Robert Gentry of Columbia Union College in Maryland “believes that all of the dates determined by radioactive decay may be off—not only by a few years, but by orders of magnitude.” In fact, Gentry asserts that “presently accepted ages may be too high by a factor of thousands.”
The physicist bases his conclusions on the evidence of radioactive decay in wood that has almost turned to coal. In deposits “supposedly at least tens of millions of years old,” he says, “the ratio between uranium-238 and lead-206 should be low.” But it is not. Of the implications of his research, he observes: “I realize it’s difficult to believe. It would invalidate the whole underlying principle of radioactive dating: that the rates of decay are forever unvarying—an untestable assumption.”
The obvious import for the age of man was noted by “Popular Science”: “Man, instead of having walked the earth for 3.6 million years, may have been around for only a few thousand.” This agrees with the chronology of the Bible, which puts the age of man at about 6,000 years.
Monkey Talk?
● Have the famous communicating chimpanzees, Washoe, Lana and others, actually learned language in the human sense? Three experts writing in the November 1979 issue of “Psychology Today” say No. Columbia University professor H. S. Terrace, for example, said that when he began his study of one chimpanzee, he had “hoped to demonstrate that apes can, indeed, form sentences,” since “human language is most distinctive because of its use of the sentence.” Instead, he says, “I discovered that the sequences of words that looked like sentences were subtle imitations of the teachers’ [training] sequences. I could find no evidence . . . that could not be explained by simpler processes.”
Anthropologists Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok agree, explaining that experimenters often “unwittingly” convince “themselves, on the basis of their own human rules of interpretation, that the apes’ reactions are more humanlike than direct evidence warrants. Real breakthroughs in man-ape communication are still the stuff of fiction.”
Professor Terrace concluded that “language still stands as an important definition of the human species.” And “Psychology Today” perceptively observed editorially: “No matter how many word relationships chimpanzees learn, no matter how many original usages they produce, none of them matches the linguistic dexterity and spontaneity of the average three-year-old human child.” Again science is confronted with the question posed long ago to Moses: “Who is it that gives man speech?”—Ex. 4:11, “The New English Bible.”
Ouija Board Riot
● “The whole school went berserk,” said Miami, Florida, policeman Harry Cunnill. “Teachers and students were running around tearing up things.” A fire department spokesman said of one boy: “Other kids said something supernatural had possessed him.” And officer Cunnill said that police found “people yelling and screaming they were possessed.” The New York “Times” report of the incident at the Miami Aerospace Academy noted that “holes were kicked in walls and doors ripped down” by the frenzied teachers and students.
What caused such a rampage? According to reports, the students told officials that there had been a recent class on the supernatural, and the “Times” later reported that a teacher who resigned after the incident admitted that “a Ouija board game had got out of control.” She said: “There were girls screaming that there was a spirit inside.”
Whether or not this incident occurred as reported, the Bible indicates that evil spirits or demons can indeed use such devices to harm and mislead unwary persons. It warns against divination.—Deut. 18:10-12.