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.
(Of course, I have seen perfectly good words evolve into anachronisms. And gutteral utterances turn into words! Yo, yo, yo!)
"Of course, I have seen perfectly good words evolve into anachronisms. "
Shows like "Friends" and "Seinfeld" have given rise to new words, too. Terms like, "Significant shrinkage!" have a whole new meaning.
;-)
Are you of the opinion that every thing that dies gets fossilized? If not, what percentage of things would you guess get fossilized, and why?
Since many fossils are found on ancient seacoasts, and seacoasts are changing at a rather constant and measurable rate, what effect do you suppose this has on on the availability of fossil finds as we go back billions of years.
Have you done any math to estimate the effects of subduction on seacoasts? Have you given any consideration to the percentage of seacoasts that have been lost to tectonics?
You seem open minded on this, so I assume you have studied these factors and would like to share your findings with us.
Woodmorappe is a crank. The fact that he apparently can't (or refuses to) understand the difference between the edge of a statistical distribution of isochrons and the mean values that actually determine radiometric ages shows that his "34 billion year age date" claim is total garbage.
Another funny claim in your favorite reference source is that oil deposits are dated at only a few thousand years old, when it is in fact well-known that fossil fuel sources are often contaminated by 14C as a secondary decay product (part of the reason that this technique isn't useful at all on materials over 50,000 years in age).
Hint: you might want to get some better sources, ones that are actually peer-reviewed by other scientists in the field, or actually rely on such sources. The fact that Woodmorappe can only get this material published in his own books and blogs should be clue, here.
No, I am not of the opinion that every thing that dies gets fossilized. Fossilization is a rare event, but even so there are tons upon tons of fossils that have been recovered, and 95% of the total are invertebrates.
The diversity of soft-tissue fossils at Chengjiang is astonishing: alge, medusiforms, sponges, priapulids, annelid-like worms, echinoderms, arthropods (including trilobites), hemichordates, chordates, and the first agnathan fish make up just a small fraction of the total. Numerous problematic forms are known as well, some of which may have represented failed evolutionary attempts at diversity that did not persist for long.
Since many fossils are found on ancient seacoasts, and seacoasts are changing at a rather constant and measurable rate, what effect do you suppose this has on on the availability of fossil finds as we go back billions of years.
I didn't know life went back billions of years. Then again what's a few hundred million years to the availability of fossil finds?
Have you done any math to estimate the effects of subduction on seacoasts? Have you given any consideration to the percentage of seacoasts that have been lost to tectonics?
No. Yes. If the percentage of seacoast that have been lost to techtonics is considerable, the tonnage of fossils recovered is still staggering, and incredibly rich and diverse. What I'm saying is that in all the tonnage of fossils that have been recovered, in the most intact and thorough portions of the extant fossil record, fossils that show any record of the evolution of the complex invertebrates is not there, subduction of seacoasts or not. So if there is evidence of such evolution, it is not to be found in the 95 percent of the extant fossil record that we do have. As the link says, "If their research is valid, at least six major metazoan phyla appeared deep in the Precambrian, hundreds of millions of years before the oldest fossils in the fossil record."
If you are tacitly stating that the fossils are not there (because of subduction of seacoasts) then I will agree with you. Cordially,
Ask all you want. But it is irrelevant to TToE. You CRIDers continue to misconstrue what constitutes TToE and why some issues, although interesting, have nothing to do with it. It is like asking what is your horoscope sign or why the phone rings when you get in the shower.
Science is only compromised when someone in a position of authority says science must conform to a particular interpretation of the Bible.
For many centuries, church officials read the passage dealing with the sun standing still in the sky as indicating that the sun revolves around the earth.
There are people today that believe Genesis defines the age of the earth and the exact physical history of creation. As long as this is not proclaimed by people having political power or authority over other people's children, I see nothing wrong.
What happened to all the animal waste products, which were the result of eating all that plant fiber? Did it just lay around? Or did it decay back into the soil, so the plants could use it? If it decayed, doesn't that imply that decay would be part of the cycle? And if it didn't decay, how would the plants use it?
Fossils go back billions of years. Fossilization of soft-bodied creatures is rare, and this can be deduced from the lack of fossilized soft-bodied creatures in more recent eras. There are many soft bodied creatures living today, and the conditions for their preservation are unusual.
" Ask all you want. But it is irrelevant to TToE."
It's a valid question to ask for one-time events. Otherwise TToE is a dogma.
Only a fool believes that, King Prout, a self-delusional person who is living in a second reality. For when we speak of "right," we are speaking of justice. And justice is not a human creation.
In the end, all the "mighty" fall:
OzymandiasAnd when the "mighty" fall, they often do so with a very great crash. Plato instances the case of the great Pericles, of whom Socrates says in the dialogue Gorgias:
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.-Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822
...what I am going to tell you now is not mere hearsay, but well known both to you and me: that at first, Pericles was glorious and his character unimpeached by any verdict of the Athenians -- this was during the time when they were not so good -- yet afterwards, when they had been made good and gentle by him, at the very end of his life they convicted him of theft, and almost put him to death, clearly under the notion that he was a malefactor.Socrates is speaking ironically here; for he believes the great Pericles was a moral failure, actually a "bad man"; for he flattered the Athenian citizenry, conferring all kinds of goodies and subsidies on them, making them dependent and weak and accustomed to receiving unearned benefits from the State, instead of making them into better men. So Callicles asks, "how does that prove Pericles' badness?" To which Socrates replies:
Why, surely you would say that he was a bad manager of asses or horses or oxen, who had received them originally neither kicking nor butting nor biting him, and implanted in them all these savage tricks? Would he not be a bad manager of any animals who received them gentle, and made them fiercer than they were when he received them?Sounds like what happens in a modern "welfare state."
Socrates warns Callicles:
You praise the men who feasted the citizens and satisfied their desires [e.g., Pericles], and people say that they have made the city great, not seeing that the swollen and ulcerated condition of the State is to be attributed to these elder statesmen; for they have filled the city full of harbours and docks and walls and revenues and all that, and have left no room for justice and temperance. And when the crisis of the disorder comes, the people will blame the advisers of the hour, and applaud Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, who are the real authors of their calamities; and if you are not careful they may assail you ... when they are losing not only their new acquisitions, but also their original possessions; not that you are the authors of these misfortunes of theirs, although you may perhaps be accessories to them.And Callicles later on warns him back:
How confident you are, Socrates, that you will never come to harm! you seem to think that you are living in another country, and can never be brought into a court of justice, as you very likely may be brought by some miserable and mean person.Meaning himself as it turns out. To which Socrates replies:
Then I must indeed be a fool, Callicles, if I do not know that in the Athenian State any man may suffer anything. And if I am brought to trial and incur the dangers of which you speak, he will be a villain who brings me to trial -- of that I am very sure, for no good man would accuse the innocent. Nor shall I be surprised if I am put to death.When Socrates says that "in the Athenian State any man may suffer anything," he is telling Callicles that the order of the Polis (the State) had been utterly destroyed by the "might equals right" theory of morals (together with the institutional supports that inevitably arise in support of it, e.g., political patronage, "vote-buying," popular subsidies, graft, bribery, nepotism, etc.) and the whole society ends up suffering at the hands of "strong men" who act with impunity to gratify their lusts.
Anyhoot, the Athenians almost murdered Pericles in gratitude for his beneficence. So here we have a "mighty man" who almost ended up being the victim of the mighty mob.
But I digress. Socrates insists that when it comes to injustice (the right), it is far, far better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice. For to commit injustice leaves indelible marks on the soul, and the worst of all possible evils in the world for a man is that he should die with a soul corrupted by injustice. The reason for this -- ta-da! -- Socrates tells in a myth -- an aletheinos logos type of myth, which means a "true story": That the immortal soul is subject to divine judgment in an eternal afterlife. The good man goes to the Isles of the Blest. The bad man to eternal pains in Tartarus. In either case, the judgment is forever.
So here we see that traditional Christian morality had been anticipated and articulated some 400 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
Now Callicles is truly a bad man, a man of bad faith, a narcissist who believes as you suggest that "might makes right." That the "noble" man takes what he wants from life with impunity, and all the gods and morality and judgment are simply fairy tales that weak men use to try to restrain the exercise of the libido dominandi of the strong man. But for the strong man to submit to any moral categories whatsover would turn him into a "slave," as Callicles claims. Somehow, I think this attitude is alive and well in our own time, and seems to be factor in the "God is dead" movement: Kill morality, for it enslaves man.
Of course, for Plato and for Aristotle, too, morality is what truly liberates the human person. Christianity also holds to that understanding.
For again, under both classical metaphysics and Christian theology, man is psyche-in-soma, an embodied soul. See my tagline, quoting Socrates in the Gorgias: The soul is immortal, though the body perishes at death. Thus death is not the end of the human person, but the beginning of a new future in eternity, which will either be blessed or tormented, depending on how he lives his life -- i.e., on his moral actions which are constituted in divine justice, and will ultimately be judged by divine justice.
As for Socrates, he tells Callicles:
... [n]o man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one's soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils.Perhaps the foregoing is disappointing to you, King Prout, because it is not in "dialogue" form. Actually, I don't think the forum here can support an authentic dialogue, which is an active back-and-forth between/among the correspondents in real time.
Anyhoot, just my thoughts on the theme you raised and the example I gave.
Thank you so much for writing!
You missed my point 2nsdammit, which is: By what standard can we say that RWP's opinion is any more valuable than anyone else's in the matter, such that his opinion shall be "favored" and even institutionalized (which obviously some people are trying to do these days, in law and public life) and all the others "condemned and supressed?"
Sorry I did not make this clearer the first time around. Thanks for writing.
no one would bother with gods if they did not fear consequences in life and in the afterlife.
try again.
Perhaps you don't understand what a "theory" is. TToE is supported by evidence (and all the more so since the DNA genome was exposed). It doesn't require abiogeensis (which is a different theory), nor does it require observation (although we do have direct observation of micro-evolution).
Seeing something fall down is not proof of the Theory of Gravity.
I believe RWP said "they" are allowed to have opinions. I don't recall him saying "their" opions are more valuable.
The only thing being suppressed these days would be the aspirations of theocrats to have religion taught as science in science classes.
Try what again? Am I supposed to be on a fishing expedition here?
Rant, rant, rant....
As things change the more they stay the same..
"Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you."-Pericles (430 B.C.)
Note: The founders of the United States knew that democracy was MOB Rule, pure and simple.. Pity that, that knowledge is submerged in worship of democracy today.. Amazing the U.S. republican leaders are advocating a democracy for Iraq rather than a republic with Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish States.. You know.. the American Constitution has three words OMITTED on purpose.. 1) democracy.. 2) democratic.. and 3) democrat.. Also, amazing that 99.9 percent of Americans do not know that.. or regrettably CARE... Or do they know the difference between "A" Democracy and democracy.. Little wonder the current political climate is not civil, since "civics" is not taught anymore..
you brought up "justice" and consequences to men in the afterlife for deeds don in life.
even the god of the JudeoChristian tradition derives authority from the unchallengable (supposed) power to inflict infinite consequences, both good and bad.
again, no matter what paradigm one posits -be it real, imaginary, or superstitious- might always is the power which defines "right"
so try again.
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