An old Rock

My General Biology class is discussing means by which we can date objects. This comes from a question by Ernst Mayr, “What kind of world do we live in?” The basis of this question is, how old is the planet? and how constant is it?

In biology these questions have notable importance because how we explain life’s processes requires that we know how much time these processes are operating over. One would be limited in their explanation of life if we know the world to be young – say, only 1 million years old. Whereas, the current estimate of 4.5 billion years, including ~3.5 billion years with life of some kind, allows for much slower processes to operate.

I discussed one of these measurements, radiometric dating, in an earlier post.  Take a look at how this is done and be sure that you understand the practice problem presented and can work out a similar problem on your own for the quiz.