"Jason Spaceman" <notreally@jspaceman.homelinux.org> wrote in message
news:sshb01hdf7a1q48o1h586adoo1err95btf@4ax.com...

From the article:
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The Shroud of Turin is back! After keeping a low profile for a few
years, new experiments on the age of the shroud were all over the
papers and websites last week. But while the coverage was heavily
pro-shroud, a closer look tells a different story.

The occasion was the publication of a report in the chemistry journal
Thermochimica Acta by a scientist named Ray Rogers.

I recognized the name immediately. Rogers has been a shroud devotee
for decades. Once his name is on a report, you can be sure it will
argue that the shroud is the real thing.

Making such a claim has been much more difficult since 1988, when
radiocarbon dating showed that the linen of the shroud is only a
little more than 700 years old. Not old enough to have wrapped
Christ's body, but just right to coincide with the first historically
documented appearance of the shroud in France.

Rogers doesn't buy all that. He begins by embracing an argument put
forth by others that the few threads that were carbon dated were taken
from the wrong place - a patch of cloth that had been used to repair
damage to the shroud in the 1500s. No wonder it dated more recently
than 2,000 years ago.

Having established to his own satisfaction that the carbon dates are
incorrect, Rogers then apparently invents his own dating technique,
and comes up with a range of ages that happily bracket Christ's
lifetime.
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Told you so. This recent trend of peer reviewed journals publishing
Creationist pseudo science is very worrying! Here's the rest of the story.



He noticed that fibres from the shroud proper (of which he apparently has a
small collection gathered over the years) contain no vanillin, a breakdown
product of the flax from which the linen was made.

But the patch area (he has some of those threads, too) had plenty of
vanillin. Rogers then decided the amount of vanillin was like the sand in an
hourglass: The less there is, the more time has passed. If that rate could
be calibrated, he'd have a new method of dating.

But wait a minute. He's got things completely backwards. He is supposed to
be testing the shroud to see how old it is, not deciding in advance that it
is older and then concluding that vanillin might be a good clock to prove
it. This is bad science. The only way this could be taken seriously would be
if Rogers had tested a wide variety of cloths, decided that dwindling
amounts of vanillin served as a clock, then - and only then - tested the
shroud.

But that's not all. The methods he used to measure vanillin are suspect.
Even though Rogers notes at the end of the paper that all the work was done
"in the author's home laboratory," a lack of sophisticated equipment wasn't
the problem - the choice of equipment was.

Clint Chapple, a biochemist at Purdue University, points out that it was odd
that Rogers used a powerfully precise technique, pyrolysis mass
spectrometry, to assess the carbohydrates in the cloth, but didn't choose to
apply that to the vanillin. Odd because there are scientific papers
testifying to the incredible accuracy of this technique as applied to
vanillin.

"I've published using this method and have this instrument in my own lab.
The method would have easily revealed the presence (or absence) of
degradation products like vanillin had the author been seriously interested
in testing his hypothesis," Chapple says.

Instead, Rogers used a staining technique (if vanillin is there you get a
colour change). But this is a qualitative, not a quantitative test.

Malcolm Campbell, a botanist at the University of Toronto, told me that "in
biological sciences, a scientist would be hard-pressed to get their paper
published if they ever attempted to quantify vanillin on the basis of this
staining technique."

Staining is a rough guide to the presence of vanillin and cannot detect very
small amounts.

Campbell and Chapple have identified other flaws in the paper (primary among
them a lack of controls and replication) but the ones I've pointed out
should have been enough to deter the editors of Thermochimica Acta from
publishing it.

Why didn't they? Maybe they were unfamiliar with the chemistry of linen and
its breakdown products; maybe they have a soft spot in their heart for the
shroud. Who knows?

The incident just underlines the fact that the Shroud of Turin will never go
away, and believers will try anything, including arguments masquerading as
science, to prove its authenticity.

Once again, radiocarbon dating fails the Shroud of Turin test.