Posted on 05/01/2006 8:29:14 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Dinosaur Shocker
By Helen Fields
Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels. That’s right, blood vessels. From a dinosaur. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. “I am, like, really excited.”
After 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Cool beans,” she says, looking at the image on the screen.
It was big news indeed last year when Schweitzer announced she had discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. rex bone—the first observation of its kind. The finding amazed colleagues, who had never imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. After all, as any textbook will tell you, when an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors. “The reason it hasn’t been discovered before is no right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens. We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid,” says dinosaur paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr., of the University of Maryland. “It’s great science.” The observations could shed new light on how dinosaurs evolved and how their muscles and blood vessels worked. And the new findings might help settle a long-running debate about whether dinosaurs were warmblooded, coldblooded—or both.
Meanwhile, Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years. They claim her discoveries support their belief, based on their interpretation of Genesis, that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, it’s not unusual for a paleontologist to differ with creationists. But when creationists misrepresent Schweitzer’s data, she takes it personally: she describes herself as “a complete and total Christian.” On a shelf in her office is a plaque bearing an Old Testament verse: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
It may be that Schweitzer’s unorthodox approach to paleontology can be traced to her roundabout career path. Growing up in Helena, Montana, she went through a phase when, like many kids, she was fascinated by dinosaurs. In fact, at age 5 she announced she was going to be a paleontologist. But first she got a college degree in communicative disorders, married, had three children and briefly taught remedial biology to high schoolers. In 1989, a dozen years after she graduated from college, she sat in on a class at Montana State University taught by paleontologist Jack Horner, of the Museum of the Rockies, now an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. The lectures reignited her passion for dinosaurs. Soon after, she talked her way into a volunteer position in Horner’s lab and began to pursue a doctorate in paleontology.
She initially thought she would study how the microscopic structure of dinosaur bones differs depending on how much the animal weighs. But then came the incident with the red spots.
AdvertisementIn 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.”
Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”
What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says. If particles of that one dinosaur were able to hang around for 65 million years, maybe the textbooks were wrong about fossilization.
Schweitzer tends to be self-deprecating, claiming to be hopeless at computers, lab work and talking to strangers. But colleagues admire her, saying she’s determined and hard-working and has mastered a number of complex laboratory techniques that are beyond the skills of most paleontologists. And asking unusual questions took a lot of nerve. “If you point her in a direction and say, don’t go that way, she’s the kind of person who’ll say, Why?—and she goes and tests it herself,” says Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University. Schweitzer takes risks, says Karen Chin, a University of Colorado paleontologist. “It could be a big payoff or it could just be kind of a ho-hum research project.”
In 2000, Bob Harmon, a field crew chief from the Museum of the Rockies, was eating his lunch in a remote Montana canyon when he looked up and saw a bone sticking out of a rock wall. That bone turned out to be part of what may be the best preserved T. rex in the world. Over the next three summers, workers chipped away at the dinosaur, gradually removing it from the cliff face. They called it B. rex in Harmon’s honor and nicknamed it Bob. In 2001, they encased a section of the dinosaur and the surrounding dirt in plaster to protect it. The package weighed more than 2,000 pounds, which turned out to be just above their helicopter’s capacity, so they split it in half. One of B. rex’s leg bones was broken into two big pieces and several fragments—just what Schweitzer needed for her micro-scale explorations.
It turned out Bob had been misnamed. “It’s a girl and she’s pregnant,” Schweitzer recalls telling her lab technician when she looked at the fragments. On the hollow inside surface of the femur, Schweitzer had found scraps of bone that gave a surprising amount of information about the dinosaur that made them. Bones may seem as steady as stone, but they’re actually constantly in flux. Pregnant women use calcium from their bones to build the skeleton of a developing fetus. Before female birds start to lay eggs, they form a calcium-rich structure called medullary bone on the inside of their leg and other bones; they draw on it during the breeding season to make eggshells. Schweitzer had studied birds, so she knew about medullary bone, and that’s what she figured she was seeing in that T. rex specimen.
Most paleontologists now agree that birds are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives. In fact, they say that birds are dinosaurs—colorful, incredibly diverse, cute little feathered dinosaurs. The theropod of the Jurassic forests lives on in the goldfinch visiting the backyard feeder, the toucans of the tropics and the ostriches loping across the African savanna.
To understand her dinosaur bone, Schweitzer turned to two of the most primitive living birds: ostriches and emus. In the summer of 2004, she asked several ostrich breeders for female bones. A farmer called, months later. “Y’all still need that lady ostrich?” The dead bird had been in the farmer’s backhoe bucket for several days in the North Carolina heat. Schweitzer and two colleagues collected a leg from the fragrant carcass and drove it back to Raleigh.
AdvertisementAs far as anyone can tell, Schweitzer was right: Bob the dinosaur really did have a store of medullary bone when she died. A paper published in Science last June presents microscope pictures of medullary bone from ostrich and emu side by side with dinosaur bone, showing near-identical features.
In the course of testing a B. rex bone fragment further, Schweitzer asked her lab technician, Jennifer Wittmeyer, to put it in weak acid, which slowly dissolves bone, including fossilized bone—but not soft tissues. One Friday night in January 2004, Wittmeyer was in the lab as usual. She took out a fossil chip that had been in the acid for three days and put it under the microscope to take a picture. “[The chip] was curved so much, I couldn’t get it in focus,” Wittmeyer recalls. She used forceps to flatten it. “My forceps kind of sunk into it, made a little indentation and it curled back up. I was like, stop it!” Finally, through her irritation, she realized what she had: a fragment of dinosaur soft tissue left behind when the mineral bone around it had dissolved. Suddenly Schweitzer and Wittmeyer were dealing with something no one else had ever seen. For a couple of weeks, Wittmeyer said, it was like Christmas every day.
In the lab, Wittmeyer now takes out a dish with six compartments, each holding a little brown dab of tissue in clear liquid, and puts it under the microscope lens. Inside each specimen is a fine network of almost-clear branching vessels—the tissue of a female Tyrannosaurus rex that strode through the forests 68 million years ago, preparing to lay eggs. Close up, the blood vessels from that T. rex and her ostrich cousins look remarkably alike. Inside the dinosaur vessels are things Schweitzer diplomatically calls “round microstructures” in the journal article, out of an abundance of scientific caution, but they are red and round, and she and other scientists suspect that they are red blood cells.
Of course, what everyone wants to know is whether DNA might be lurking in that tissue. Wittmeyer, from much experience with the press since the discovery, calls this “the awful question”—whether Schweitzer’s work is paving the road to a real-life version of science fiction’s Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs were regenerated from DNA preserved in amber. But DNA, which carries the genetic script for an animal, is a very fragile molecule. It’s also ridiculously hard to study because it is so easily contaminated with modern biological material, such as microbes or skin cells, while buried or after being dug up. Instead, Schweitzer has been testing her dinosaur tissue samples for proteins, which are a bit hardier and more readily distinguished from contaminants. Specifically, she’s been looking for collagen, elastin and hemoglobin. Collagen makes up much of the bone scaffolding, elastin is wrapped around blood vessels and hemoglobin carries oxygen inside red blood cells.
Because the chemical makeup of proteins changes through evolution, scientists can study protein sequences to learn more about how dinosaurs evolved. And because proteins do all the work in the body, studying them could someday help scientists understand dinosaur physiology—how their muscles and blood vessels worked, for example.
Proteins are much too tiny to pick out with a microscope. To look for them, Schweitzer uses antibodies, immune system molecules that recognize and bind to specific sections of proteins. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have been using antibodies to chicken collagen, cow elastin and ostrich hemoglobin to search for similar molecules in the dinosaur tissue. At an October 2005 paleontology conference, Schweitzer presented preliminary evidence that she has detected real dinosaur proteins in her specimens.
Further discoveries in the past year have shown that the discovery of soft tissue in B. rex wasn’t just a fluke. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”
young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”
This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science. After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence. “If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.”
By definition, there is a lot that scientists don’t know, because the whole point of science is to explore the unknown. By being clear that scientists haven’t explained everything, Schweitzer leaves room for other explanations. “I think that we’re always wise to leave certain doors open,” she says.
But schweitzer’s interest in the long-term preservation of molecules and cells does have an otherworldly dimension: she’s collaborating with NASA scientists on the search for evidence of possible past life on Mars, Saturn’s moon Titan, and other heavenly bodies. (Scientists announced this spring, for instance, that Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus appears to have liquid water, a probable precondition for life.)
Astrobiology is one of the wackier branches of biology, dealing in life that might or might not exist and might or might not take any recognizable form. “For almost everybody who works on NASA stuff, they are just in hog heaven, working on astrobiology questions,” Schweitzer says. Her NASA research involves using antibodies to probe for signs of life in unexpected places. “For me, it’s the means to an end. I really want to know about my dinosaurs.”
AdvertisementTo that purpose, Schweitzer, with Wittmeyer, spends hours in front of microscopes in dark rooms. To a fourth-generation Montanan, even the relatively laid-back Raleigh area is a big city. She reminisces wistfully about scouting for field sites on horseback in Montana. “Paleontology by microscope is not that fun,” she says. “I’d much rather be out tromping around.”
“My eyeballs are just absolutely fried,” Schweitzer says after hours of gazing through the microscope’s eyepieces at glowing vessels and blobs. You could call it the price she pays for not being typical.
But there is POWER in belonging to a big group.
Have you ever heard of the Burgess Shale? There are many fossils of soft-tissued organisms that have been found there, as well as tens of thousands of fossils invertebrates that have been collected there. The explantion that purported precursors have not been discovered because they were soft bodied is belied by these discoveries. If there are invertebrate precursors to verterbrates that have been discovered in the fossil record that document the transition I would like to see them, and I would like to know why prominent evolutionists admit that they do not appear in the fossil record if they indeed, do.
Cordially,
I didn't think you would accept it, which was my original point. And it is not controversial among creationists because of laboratory contamination or the like, it is controversial to them because of their differing flood geology scenarios. If you have evidence of improper collection or laboratory techniques by these authors lets see it.
Good day to you, too. For better or worse, I have to go back to work.
Cordially,
"Tie the dog loose and let him run the alley up and down."
Was that one that your child said?
I'm going to do several posts - some information that several others apparently 'could not be bothered with' from www.creationscience.com Part 1. Part 1 contains more than 1-2 anomolies with TOE (so don't shoot the messenger). This site is well researched. Anytime you see the lowercase letter (these subscripts do not appear above/below the line due to copy/paste problems) they provide more information to other books and articles.
13. Language
Children as young as seven months can understand and learn grammatical rules.a Furthermore, studies of 36 documented cases of children raised without human contact (feral children) show that language is learned only from other humans; humans do not automatically speak. So the first humans must have been endowed with a language ability. There is no evidence language evolved.b
Nonhumans communicate, but not with language. True language requires both vocabulary and grammar. With great effort, human trainers have taught some chimpanzees and gorillas to recognize a few hundred spoken words, to point to up to 200 symbols, and to make limited hand signs. These impressive feats are sometimes exaggerated by editing the animals’ successes on film. (Some early demonstrations were flawed by the trainer’s hidden promptings.c)
Wild apes have not shown these vocabulary skills, and trained apes do not pass their vocabulary on to others. When a trained animal dies, so does the trainer’s investment. Also, trained apes have essentially no grammatical ability. Only with grammar can a few words express many ideas. No known evidence shows that language exists or evolves in nonhumans, but all known human groups have language.d
Furthermore, only humans have different modes of language: speaking/hearing, writing/reading, signing, touch (as with braille), and tapping (as with Morse code or tap-codes used by prisoners). When one mode is prevented, as with the loss of hearing, others can be used.e
If language evolved, the earliest languages should be the simplest. But language studies show that the more ancient the language (for example: Latin, 200 B.C.; Greek, 800 B.C.; and Vedic Sanskrit, 1500 B.C.), the more complex it is with respect to syntax, case, gender, mood, voice, tense, verb form, and inflection. The best evidence indicates that languages devolve; that is, they become simpler instead of more complex.f Most linguists reject the idea that simple languages evolve into complex languages.g [See Figure 140 on page 263.]
If humans evolved, then so did language. Because all available evidence indicates that language did not evolve, then humans probably did not evolve.
Have you ever heard of the Burgess Shale? There are many fossils of soft-tissued organisms that have been found there, as well as tens of thousands of fossils invertebrates that have been collected there. The explantion that purported precursors have not been discovered because they were soft bodied is belied by these discoveries. If there are invertebrate precursors to verterbrates that have been discovered in the fossil record that document the transition I would like to see them, and I would like to know why prominent evolutionists admit that they do not appear in the fossil record if they indeed, do.
~
Are you under the misapprehension that vertebrates evolved during the Cambrian explosion??
The Burgess Shale is a unique and invaluable deposit, unfortunately such conditions were not present everywhere (and everywhen) we would like them to be. The Burgess Shale is the exception, not the rule.
At any rate you need to parse my post again. I said that the Cambrian explosion is not as explosive as originally thought because we have gone back and found organisms living earlier that were thought to have originated in the Cambrian explosion.
The Cambrian explosion definitely is an important period in evolution, and the rapid radiation see here was probably enabled by a variety of factors including global warming (oh no!), a higher oxygen content of the atmosphere, and the emergence of the Hox genes, which allow for rapid and significant changes in body plan.
Would it trouble you to know that starlings share the same innate ability to understand recursive grammar that we have, but the other great apes do not?
Fossils all over the world show evidence of rapid burial. Many fossils, such as fossilized jellyfish,a show by the details of their soft, fleshy portionsb that they were buried rapidly, before they could decay. (Normally, dead animals and plants quickly decompose.) The presence of fossilized remains of many other animals, buried in mass graves and in twisted and contorted positions, suggest violent and rapid burials over large areas.
Charles Darwin recognized the problem of finding fossilized soft-bodied organisms such as jellyfish. He wrote: No organism wholly soft can be preserved. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 330.
Fossils crossing two or more sedimentary layers (strata) are called poly (many) strate (strata) fossils. Consider how quickly this tree trunk in Germany must have been buried. Had it been slowly, its top would have decayed. Obviously, the tree could not have grown up through the strata without sunlight and air. The only alternative is rapid burial.
(sorry couldn't get the picture posted too).
If evolution happened, the fossil record should show continuous and gradual changes from the bottom to the top layers. Actually, many gaps or discontinuities appear throughout the fossil record.a At the most fundamental level, a big gap exists between forms of life whose cells have nuclei (eukaryotes, such as plants, animals, and fungi) and those that don’t (prokaryotes such as bacteria and blue-green algae).b Fossil links are also missing between numerous plants,c between single-celled forms of life and invertebrates (animals without backbones), among insects,d between invertebrates and vertebrates (animals with backbones),e between fish and amphibians,f between amphibians and reptiles,g between reptiles and mammals,h between reptiles and birds,i between primates and other mammals,j and between apes and other primates.k In fact, chains are missing, not links. The fossil record has been studied so thoroughly it is safe to conclude these gaps are real; they will never be filled.l
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Frequently, fossils are not vertically sequenced in the assumed evolutionary order.a For example, in Uzbekistan, 86 consecutive hoofprints of horses were found in rocks dating back to the dinosaurs.b Hoofprints of some other animal are alongside 1,000 dinosaur footprints in Virginia.c A leading authority on the Grand Canyon published photographs of horselike hoofprints visible in rocks that, according to the theory of evolution, predate hoofed animals by more than a 100 million years.d Dinosaur and humanlike footprints were found together in Turkmenistane and Arizona.f Sometimes, land animals, flying animals, and marine animals are fossilized side-by-side in the same rock.g Dinosaur, whale, elephant, horse, and other fossils, plus crude human tools, have reportedly been found in phosphate beds in South Carolina.h Coal beds contain round, black lumps called coal balls, some of which contain flowering plants that allegedly evolved 100 million years after the coal bed was formed.i In the Grand Canyon, in Venezuela, in Kashmir, and in Guyana, spores of ferns and pollen from flowering plants are found in Cambrianj rocks—rocks supposedly deposited before flowering plants evolved. Pollen has also been found in Precambriank rocks deposited before life allegedly evolved.
Petrified trees in Arizona’s petrified forest contain fossilized nests of bees and cocoons of wasps. The petrified forests are reputedly 220 million years old, while bees (and flowering plants which bees require) supposedly evolved almost a 100 million years later.l Pollinating insects and fossil flies, with long, well-developed tubes for sucking nectar from flowers, are dated 25 million years before flowers are assumed to have evolved.m Most evolutionists and textbooks systematically ignore discoveries which conflict with the evolutionary time scale.
again - I'm going to do several posts - some information that several others apparently 'could not be bothered with' from www.creationscience.com Part 1. Part 1 contains more than 1-2 anomolies with TOE (so don't shoot the messenger). This site is well researched. Anytime you see the lowercase letter (these subscripts do not appear above/below the line due to copy/paste problems) they provide more information to other books and articles.
Spontaneous generation (the emergence of life from nonliving matter) has never been observed. All observations have shown that life comes only from life. This has been observed so consistently it is called the law of biogenesis. The theory of evolution conflicts with this scientific law when claiming that life came from nonliving matter through natural processes.
While Mendel’s laws give a theoretical explanation for why variations are limited, broad experimental verification also exists.a For example, if evolution happened, organisms (such as bacteria) that quickly produce the most offspring should have the most variations and mutations. Natural selection would then select the more favorable changes, allowing organisms with those traits to survive, reproduce, and pass on their beneficial genes. Therefore, organisms that have allegedly evolved the most should have short reproduction cycles and many offspring. We see the opposite. In general, more complex organisms, such as humans, have fewer offspring and longer reproduction cycles.b Again, variations within existing organisms appear to be bounded.
Organisms that occupy the most diverse environments in the greatest numbers for the longest times should also, according to macroevolution, have the greatest potential for evolving new features and species. Microbes falsify this prediction as well. Their numbers per species are astronomical, and they are dispersed throughout practically all the world’s environments. Nevertheless, the number of microbial species are relatively few.c New features apparently don’t evolve.
An offspring of a plant or animal has characteristics that vary, often in subtle ways, from its “parents.” Because of the environment, genetics, and chance circumstances, some of these offspring will reproduce more than others. So a species with certain characteristics will tend, on average, to have more “children.” In this sense, nature “selects” genetic characteristics suited to an environment—and, more importantly, eliminates unsuitable genetic variations. Therefore, an organism’s gene pool is constantly decreasing. This is called natural selection.a
Notice, natural selection cannot produce new genes; it only selects among preexisting characteristics. As the word “selection” implies, variations are reduced, not increased.b
For example, many mistakenly believe that insect or bacterial resistances evolved in response to pesticides and antibiotics. Instead,
• a previously lost capability was reestablished, making it appear something evolved,c
• a mutation reduced the binding ability, regulatory function, or transport capacity of certain proteins,
• a damaging bacterial mutation or variation reduced the antibiotic’s effectiveness even more,d or
• a few resistant insects and bacteria were already present when the pesticides and antibiotics were first applied. When the vulnerable insects and bacteria were killed, resistant varieties had less competition and, therefore, proliferated.e
While natural selection occurred, nothing evolved and, in fact, some biological diversity was lost.
The variations Darwin observed among finches on different Galapagos islands is another example of natural selection producing micro- (not macro-) evolution. While natural selection sometimes explains the survival of the fittest, it does not explain the origin of the fittest.f Today, some people think that because natural selection occurs, evolution must be correct. Actually, natural selection prevents major evolutionary changes.g
Again from www.creationscience.com...
“It was Charles Darwin who first linked the evolution of languages to biology. In The Descent of Man (1871), he wrote, ‘the formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.’ But linguists cringe at the idea that evolution might transform simple languages into complex ones. Today it is believed that no language is, in any basic way, ‘prior’ to any other, living or dead. Language alters even as we speak it, but it neither improves nor degenerates.” Philip E. Ross, “Hard Words,” Scientific American, Vol. 264, April 1991, p. 144.
Again from www.creationscience.com Part 1:
8. Complex Molecules and Organs
Many molecules necessary for life, such as DNA, RNA, and proteins, are so incredibly complex that claims they evolved are questionable. Furthermore, those claims lack experimental support.a
There is no reason to believe that mutations or any natural process could ever produce any new organs—especially those as complex as the eye,b the ear, or the brain.c For example, an adult human brain contains over 10 to the 14th (a hundred thousand billion) electrical connections,d more than all the electrical connections in all the electrical appliances in the world. The human heart, a ten-ounce pump that will operate without maintenance or lubrication for about 75 years, is another engineering marvel.e
33. Genetic Information
The genetic information in the DNA of each human cell is roughly equivalent to a library of 4,000 books.a Even if matter and life (perhaps a bacterium) somehow arose, the probability that mutations and natural selection produced this vast amount of information is essentially zero.b It would be analogous to continuing the following procedure until 4,000 books were produced:c
a. Start with a meaningful phrase.
b. Retype it, but make some errors and insert a few letters.
c. See if the new phrase is meaningful.
d. If it is, replace the original phrase with it.
e. Return to step “b.”
To produce just the enzymes in one organism would require more than 10 to the 40,000th trials.d (To understand how large this is, realize that the visible universe has fewer than 10 to the 80th atoms in it.)
Since 1970, evolutionists have referred to large segments of DNA as “junk DNA,” because it supposedly had no purpose and was left over from our evolutionary past. We now know this “junk” explains much of the complexity of organisms. Use of the term “junk DNA” reflected past ignorance.e
34. DNA Production and Repair
DNA cannot function without at least 75 preexisting proteins,a but proteins are produced only at the direction of DNA.b Because each needs the other, a satisfactory explanation for the origin of one must also explain the origin of the other.c The components of these manufacturing systems must have come into existence simultaneously. This implies creation.
When a cell divides, its DNA is copied, sometimes with errors. Each animal and plant has machinery that identifies and corrects most errors;d if it did not, the organism would deteriorate and become extinct. If evolution happened, which evolved first, DNA or its repair mechanism? Each requires the other.
Fossils all over the world show evidence of rapid burial.
I'm sorry, but my response to this is, "Duh!" If an animal dies and is not rapidly buried, it rots and scavengers spread the carcass around. The only way that an animal can be fossilized is to be rapidly buried! This is why our richest fossil field are from shallow seas, swamps, and rivers. This in itself does not provide evidence for either YEC or evolution. However, YEC demands that all strata be laid down during the Flood 4000 years ago. Many features of geologic strata are inconsistent with deposition under water. Additionally, radiometric dating methods reliably date strata to much older ages than allowed by YEC.
Here is an article discussing "polystrate" fossils and whether they truly present a problem for an ancient earth.
I don't know why you are presenting the same bad information about the fossil record once again as I replied to it the last time. I'm afraid you're not going to convince me by once again repeating the same thing.
Regarding the last part of your post, in order for us to respond to it you need to provide the documentation of these finds including photographs and dating methods. Without documentation those are worthless.
see prior 4-5 posts for source...
26. Ape-Men?
For over a century, studies of skulls and teeth have produced unreliable conclusions about man’s origin.a Also, fossil evidence allegedly supporting human evolution is fragmentary and open to other interpretations. Fossil evidence showing the evolution of chimpanzees, supposedly the closest living relative to humans, is nonexistent.b
Stories claiming that fossils of primitive, apelike men have been found are overstated.c
• It is now universally acknowledged that Piltdown “man” was a hoax, and yet, it was in textbooks for more than 40 years.d
• Before 1977, evidence for Ramapithecus was a mere handful of teeth and jaw fragments. We now know these fragments were pieced together incorrectly by Louis Leakeye and others in a form resembling part of the human jaw.f Ramapithecus was just an ape.g [See Figure 13.]
• The only remains of Nebraska “man” turned out to be a pig’s tooth. [See Figure 14.]
• Forty years after he discovered Java “man,” Eugene Dubois conceded that it was not a man, but was similar to a large gibbon (an ape). In citing evidence to support this new conclusion, Dubois admitted that he had withheld parts of four other thigh bones of apes found in the same area.h
• Many experts consider the skulls of Peking “man” to be the remains of apes that were systematically decapitated and exploited for food by true man.i Its classification, Homo erectus, is considered by most experts to be a category that should never have been created.j
• The first confirmed limb bones of Homo habilis were discovered in 1986. They showed that this animal clearly had apelike proportionsk and should never have been classified as manlike (Homo).l
• The australopithecines, made famous by Louis and Mary Leakey, are quite distinct from humans. Several detailed computer studies of australopithecines have shown that their bodily proportions were not intermediate between man and living apes.m Another study of their inner ear bones, used to maintain balance, showed a striking similarity with those of chimpanzees and gorillas, but great differences with those of humans.n Likewise, their pattern of dental development corresponds to chimpanzees, not humans.o One australopithecine fossil—a 31/2-foot-tall, long-armed, 60-pound adult called “Lucy”—was initially presented as evidence that all australopithecines walked upright in a human manner. However, studies of Lucy’s entire anatomy, not just a knee joint, now show this is very unlikely. She probably swung from the treesp and was similar to pygmy chimpanzees.q The australopithecines are probably extinct apes.r
• For about 100 years the world was led to believe Neanderthal man was stooped and apelike. This false idea was based upon some Neanderthals with bone diseases such as arthritis and rickets.s Recent dental and x-ray studies of Neanderthals suggest they were humans who matured at a slower rate and lived to be much older than people today.t Neanderthal man, Heidelberg man, and Cro-Magnon man are now considered completely human. Artists’ drawings of “ape-men,” especially their fleshy portions, are often quite imaginative and are not supported by the evidence.
Humans vs. Chimpanzees. Evolutionists say that the chimpanzee is the closest living relative to humans. For two decades (1984–2004), evolutionists and the media claimed that human DNA is about 99% similar to chimpanzee DNA. These statements had little scientific justification, because they were made before anyone had completed sequencing human DNA and long before sequencing chimpanzee DNA had begun.
Chimpanzee and human DNA have now been completely sequenced and rigorously compared. The differences, which total about 4%, are far greater and more complicated than evolutionists suspected.g Those differences include about “thirty-five million single-nucleotide changes, five million insertions/deletions, and various chromosomal rearrangements.”h Although its only 4%, a huge DNA chasm separates humans from chimpanzees.
Why are you posting that DNA screed to me? My relevant specialties are bones and radiocarbon dating.
excuses, excuses...
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/LifeSciences26.html
Nope, abiogenesis is an extremely different process than spontaneous generation, it look a long time to get started, and it could not happen today because bacteria and protists would eat up the precursor molecules before anything could happen.
For example, if evolution happened, organisms (such as bacteria) that quickly produce the most offspring should have the most variations and mutations.
Not really, evolution is not driven so much by copying errors as by environmental DNA damage. If it were the first we would expect rapid evolution in rapidly reproducing organisms, and if it were the second we would expect similar evolutionary rates no matter what the generation time is. What we actually see is typically (although not always) closer to the second.
Therefore, organisms that have allegedly evolved the most should have short reproduction cycles and many offspring. We see the opposite. In general, more complex organisms, such as humans, have fewer offspring and longer reproduction cycles.
As shown above, incorrect. Additionally, how are they measuring who has "evolved the most"? Specialization does not indicate more evolution. Evolution (the change in frequency of alleles in a population) occurs continually in all species, even those we would consider simple.
Organisms that occupy the most diverse environments in the greatest numbers for the longest times should also, according to macroevolution, have the greatest potential for evolving new features and species. Microbes falsify this prediction as well. Their numbers per species are astronomical, and they are dispersed throughout practically all the world’s environments.
They speak as if evolution has a goal, which I suppose could be outlined as:
Evolution does not have a goal. Lengthy absence of change into a new group in a certain species is not evidence that evolution does not occur.
While natural selection occurred, nothing evolved and, in fact, some biological diversity was lost.
For the last thirty years YEC have been ignoring the mecA gene, a novel gene that was manufactured by splicing together two genes to form a new one, thus adding information to the bacterial genome and providing us with a major antibiotic resistant infectious threat.
While natural selection sometimes explains the survival of the fittest, it does not explain the origin of the fittest.
Yes, natural selection acts upon pre-existing traits. The missing piece--mutation. Mutation in all its myriad forms provides the variation that natural selection acts upon.
Bad math plus argument from personal incredulity. Sigh! Too much spam to respond to at length!
I'm sorry, but I don't consider plagiarism a virtue. It's one of my faults.
1,154 is more in your area.
Spam spam spam!
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