Re: virus: Mother-Daughter Dating

zaimoni@ksu.edu
Tue, 18 Feb 1997 10:55:26 -0600 (CST)


On Thu, 13 Feb 1997, Richard Brodie wrote:

> Zamboni wrote:
>
> >The assumption I balk at is this: the starting level of a
> >mother-daughter
> >based dating method is ALWAYS 100% mother, 0% daughter.
>
> I agree this is true in most cases. However, there have been
> well-documented cases in which experimenters have dated the DAUGHTER
> first, only to progress to dating the mother some months later. These
> cases, however, almost always involve some intentionality on the part of
> the mother and so may perhaps be discounted.

Which context were you reading???? I'd like to see it more explicitly.

Superficially, this sounds like a biology context than a geology context.
In this case, "yes, you can discount it."

If you were discussing geology-like context, you are describing
well-documented *ABSURDLY OBVIOUS GARBAGE*, which would give me further
concern for the standards in this field.

Yes, there are multiple-chains of radioactive nucleides that could be
used, but this doesn't fundamentally alter the method: the "daughter" is
the one that requires proton decay to decay.

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