Gavinchi

Thank you for the insight, everyone

Hello everyone's, I come here anticipating an argument I will inevitably have with my very religious in-laws once my fiancé and I decide to have a child. I can foresee us arguing about whether or not my future child ought to be circumsized. Are there any real health benefits for having this surgery done? Besides the small hygiene benefits? Or isn't it a purely religious practice that somehow caught on to be the norm? I see it as unnecessary and cruel.

Okay, cool! It's interesting to see that it's been thought of before. Thank you!

I agree with you completely! I was also becoming extremely frustrated when looking through my little sister-in-law's "science" textbook to find that it was a scientific creationism publication (She's homeschooled). I sifted through the pages to find that the briefly addressed evolution section just used the flawed "missing link" argument...

Oh yeah... I forgot that I had to climb over that wall first. Haha, I should know better - having watched Richard Dawkins himself having so much trouble convincing people to look at the facts.

Right, that's true. There are a lot of complexities of evolution the gradient couldn't describe but I thought it would be a nice way to show disputers of evolutionary theory how an organism never abruptly shifts into a descendent with noticeable differences.

As an aspiring Biology teacher, I thought of a way to express how organisms evolve after a long period of time - never spontaneously transitioning into a new species. I've seen that it's hard for people to comprehend long intervals of time and change. There is also a massive misunderstanding in how evolution works when creationists point to "missing links" in the evolutionary tree. The only way we wouldn't have missing links is if every organism fossilized (If using the gradient to explain this, we'd state that we would need to find every incredibly thin pixel layer of the gradient). I know evolution can't be explained so easily but I thought it would be easily understood by people who have a difficult time grasping long-term transitions. What do you think? What would make it better? Does this method of explanation already exist in the scientific community?

Thanks for the reply, Studiot. I had an understanding of where the heavier elements originate in photo-planet formation I just didn't know why you'd assume that there would be zero Lead isotopes homogenized within cooled zircon. If there were lead isotopes present among Uranium isotopes at the time of cooling, wouldn't it give the impression that radio-dated samples are older than they actually are? Thank you for the information regardless! I'll take a look at that article here in a bit! Maybe the link will delve into this. Awesome! Thank you, John. This is what I was looking for. I'll go through this wikipedia article.

Self-correction, The uranium isotopes used in Uranium-Lead dating do not decay into 210. The basis of my question is... how do we know that the lead that is present in igneous rock is or isn't radiogenic lead?

I was once told that the science behind radio dating the Earth is filled with assumptions. Like that it's assumed the Lead 210 content of the Earth was at zero when it was cooling. Why would we assume that the Earth contained zero Lead 210 at the point of cooling and how would we account for preexisting Lead 210 when using Uranium-Lead dating methods?