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.
Thanks, KP, for the (brief) conversation.
What CarolinaGuitarman said... Before I got back!
YEC/IDers are constantly trying to imply that the basic theory of evolution is somehow in controversy, or even in "crisis". It just isn't so, no matter how much it's wished for.
It reminds me of the media continuing to posit that our current administration is somehow on the ropes.....
Funny, that one didn't seem to really work on me. Maybe I'm too used to trying to stare at graphs using poorly chosen color schemes on computer screens or a deeply hidden color-blindness streak, or my flat-screen monitor; I don't know. I only saw the 3 colors that are there in the graph, though they did appear to be slightly different hues in the various regions. (Usually your illusions get me every time, though.)
No, but I did after that one.
An Optical Illusion is in the Eye of the Beholder.
EVOs claim creationists suppress science, but from my perspective, what most EVOs appear to suppress is any knowledge of God. (Disclaimer: not intended in any way to suggest teaching religious doctrine in your “precious” public schools.)
Want to know the easiest way to deceive yourselves? Romans 1:28 - Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. Many think this is a reference to sexual perversion but depraved refers to any type of corruption.
IMHO the biggest assumption with all the age-dating methods is uniformity – that all the conditions found when a fossil is uncovered have always remained the same. Is this not the main tenet for FR folks rejecting global warming? This flys directly in the face of common sense. If anything corrupted the fossils and then leached out of the environment you assume it must always leave a trace.
Another excerpt defining science from Walt Brown’s heavily researched website: http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ12.html#wp1619382
Let me define science.
science: A field of study seeking to better understand natural phenomena through the use of observations and experiments.
Broad, but increasingly precise and concise, relationships are sought between causes and effects. These relationships, called scientific laws, help predict future phenomena and explain past events.
Notice, this does not mean the first cause must be naturalistic. It is poor logic to say that because science deals with natural, cause-and-effect relationships, the first cause must be a natural event. Furthermore, if the first cause were a natural consequence of something else, it would not be the first cause. Scientific laws can provide great insight on ultimate origins even though the first cause cannot, by definition, be duplicated. Yes, there was a beginning. [See Items 53 and 55 beginning on page 27.]
Scientific conclusions, while never final, must be based on evidence.
scientific evidence: Something that has been observed with instruments or our senses, is verifiable, and helps support or refute possible explanations for phenomena.
All evidence in Part I of this book is based on observable, natural phenomena that others can check. To most people, this evidence implies a creation and a global flood. This does not mean the Creator (The First Cause) can be studied scientifically or that the Bible should be read in public-school science classes. (I have always opposed that.) Those who want evolution taught without the clear evidence opposing it, in effect, wish to censor a large body of scientific evidence from schools. That is wrong. Also, the consequences of a global flood have been misinterpreted as evidence for evolution, not as evidence for a flood. That misinterpretation, unfortunately, is taught as science. [See Part II.]
Explanations other than creation or a global flood may someday be proposed that are (1) consistent with all that evidence and (2) demonstrable by repeatable, cause-and-effect relationships. Until that happens, those who ignore existing evidence are being quite unscientific. Evolutionists’ refusal to debate this subject (see page 343) and their speculations on cause-and-effect phenomena that cannot be demonstrated is also poor science, especially when much evidence opposes those speculations.
Evolutionists raise several objections. Some say, “Even though evidence may imply a sudden creation, creation is supernatural, not natural, and cannot be entertained as a scientific explanation.” Of course, no one understands scientifically how the creation occurred—how space, time, matter, and the laws of physics began. [See Figure 156 on page 336 and the paragraph preceding that figure.] Others, not disputing that the flood best explains many features on earth, object to a global flood, because the Bible—a document they wish to discredit—speaks of the flood. Still others object to the starting point for the flood (given on page 110), but in science, all starting points are available. The key question must always be, “What best explains all the evidence?”
Also, the source of a scientific idea does not need to be scientifically derived. For example, Friedrich Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene in a dream in which a snake grabbed its tail. Kekulé’s discovery laid the basis for structural chemistry. Again, what is important is not the source of an idea, but whether all evidence supports it better than any other explanation. Science, after all, is a search for truth about how the physical universe behaves. Therefore, let’s teach all the science.
How about taking this jumble one item at a time. What's your most important point?
This is why several different dating methods are used in simultaneity in dating any specimen. A convergence of various dating methods means either
A) The date is approximately correct or
B) All these various, unrelated dating methods were "corrupted" to exactly the same degree, even though the physical phenomena are unrelated, by some unexplainable collusion of natural laws, and that this occurs on regular basis in practically every rock sample and fossil ever dated.
The key is indeed uniformity. These scientists know their business (better than any layperson).
Do you regard yourself as a pantheist or panentheist, Chiapet? This would probably entail belief in an eternal universe. Truly I'm interested in your views!
You wrote, "I don't think that God can violate or supercede his own laws. It would be tantamount to God denying himself."
On my view, it makes little sense to use the words "can" and "can't" when it comes to God. If His laws were made for the natural universe, then I don't see why they need to apply to God at all -- on the theory (which I hold) that God is "beyond" the universe, noting the qualifications to this statement I made in my last message to you.
Thank you so much for writing Chiapet! I do appreciate your sharing your thoughts with me.
Funny you should mention that, King -- I feel the same way. But am too polite to complain about it.
Oh but we did, the method of logic was derived, defined and is taught by man. Reason is a learned response and few children learn to reason before six. They learn mostly by observation and those without a good example have little reasoning ability.
Somebody steal all the bibles, and no more will be printed? Or did the evo's get them so they would have all the biblical science.
Hi jec41! Well, I'd define truth as the divine Logos, the Word of God. I think it's the foundation of the order of the universe, the source of all universal law. As to how it is "determined" -- I take this to mean how do humans recognize truth? -- Plato and Aristotle provide some possible answers.
For Plato, the Cosmos is one living being. Aristotle held that the Cosmos is "rational" through and through. Man is an "image" or eikon of the Cosmos; he is the microcosm, and so recapitulates all the various orders of the Cosmos in himself. If the Cosmos is "rational," then man, as its image, must be rational, too. And so man is naturally equipped to grasp the nature of the Cosmos. This is the setting, or context in which the quest for truth unfolds.
Man has two basic tools whereby to discover truth. One is perception, and the other apperception. Perception deals with sensory experience, and is directed "outward" from the human person. Apperception, or introspective self-consciousness, with noetic experience.
I came across a wonderful book recently, P. T. Raju’s Introduction to Comparative Philosophy. He expounds and cross-correlates the Western, Eastern, and Chinese cultural traditions, from antiquity to the present, conceding all the way that cultural traditions leave very long-lasting “footprints” on actual human experience. Raju writes:
If we take all the three traditions together, we find three standpoints in philosophy: the inward, the outward, and the middle. As I have said, man’s being has two dimensions or two directions, the inward and the outward.Raju goes on to say that a rational explanation can be given in one of two ways: as a derivation of “the higher from the lower”; or as a derivation of “the lower from the higher.” In each case “the word evolution is often used.” Raju recognizes thatBoth the inward and the outward are the directions of man and point to something beyond him: the importance of this truth has not been properly recognized. On the whole, the outward limit is treated as objective and therefore as the objective basis for philosophical explanation, and the inward as merely subjective. This attitude results in materialistic philosophies.…
With respect to value, philosophies that start from the inward limit fare better. The Supreme Spirit is higher than mind, mind higher than life, and life higher than matter. The higher the reality, the higher is its value; and if the highest is the only reality as in Sankara, then it is the only value. Spiritual philosophies then can identify and equate reality and value; and this identity is the motif of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic traditions.
...spiritual philosophies maintain that the One — be it Sankara or Ousia — is beyond our powers of understanding. Yet, like a mischief-maker reason demands a rational derivation of the world from what is beyond reason.
Reason here is inconsistent with itself, in that, while accepting that the One is beyond reason, it asks for a rational derivation from the One.
...evolution in the two directions will be intrinsically different. One is evolution of the higher from the lower, of the inward from the outward, of unity from the plurality; the other is the evolution of the lower from the higher, of the outward from the inward, of plurality from unity. The plurality is an emanation, creation, manifestation out of the fullness of the One; just as the unity is an emergence, an evolution, a product, or even a resultant of the plurality. In the histories of the traditions, [every] philosopher ... has accepted one [or other] of these views.In short, what we must have is a balance in consciousness of the external and the internal. They are, as Raju said, “complementary to each other.” For reality contains both the “thingly things” with which science is preoccupied, and the “nonthingly things” — values — with which science does not deal at all.But just as the approach from the limit of outwardness fails to do justice to the conception that ultimate reality is also ultimate value, the approach from the limit of inwardness fails to explain the rationality of the descending orders of being. In the history of philosophy the latter tended to lean towards, and encourage, supernaturalism and even superstition. Indeed, the universe is mysterious. But it is a rational and natural, not a supernatural and superstitious, mystery….
So the world at every stage is a mystery. Yet it is a natural and rational mystery. Only we cannot abandon all attempts to understand it rationally because it is a mystery. It is as much a mystery that unity evolves out of plurality as that plurality evolves out of unity….
Matter answers the best to the principle of fixed order. Hence the contention of contemporary physicalism that we should rebuild our conception of the world in terms of physics. But the difficulty is that, unless we accept the higher realities beforehand, we cannot rebuild them simply with the help of the concepts of physics; much less can we rebuild them with the deeper inner experiences of man, which have an autonomy of their own. Yet, much of the rationality in the universe will be missed if we are content with the inward approach only. And the excesses of this approach are to be checked by the opposite approach and vice versa.…
Thus both the inward and the outward approaches can be made complementary to each other. The excesses and failures of each are checked and made up by the other.
That's enuf for now, jec41. Must run along and take care of an errand. But I'll be back later.
Thank you so much for writing!
I am not asking
What you are asking is whether a real God could possibly have any genuine interaction with man.
That question is unanswerable. But I'd say it's possible.
OR are you asking if God is powerfull enough to have others write accurately what he intended.
That's possible as well. But that doesn't mean it happened that way.
I don't find anything with the string *certain* in it that is anything like the quote under question.
Besides, any rational person could deny being completely certain about something. Everything we believe has degrees of certainty. The question is better expressed as asking whether we have reasonable doubt about the main events and processes of evolution.
I heard you the first time. why did you feel compelled to reply again after so long a break?
that, too.
However looking back into the last several billion years we see everything looking exactly as it would if the speed of light were the same then as it is now. We make predictions about how things would look if lightspeed were constant, and those predictions are borne out. This process is known colloquially as "doing science".
Only when we go back almost to the dawn of time, more than 10 billion years ago, do we start to see apparent effects which *might*, *tentatively*, be explained by the speed of light being different then from its current constant value. As your original question referred to the calibration of events that occurred less than 100 million years ago I have to wonder if you actually read the articles that you posted links to. There is no comfort for YEC positions in them, and no comfort for those who'd question the assumption that at least over the last 4.5 billion years (the approximate age of the earth, calculated using different methods to arrive at answers within 1% of each other) lightspeed and atomic decay has been constant.
"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, or let's call it a non- evolutionary view, was last year I had a sudden realization for over twenty years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. Either there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally, I know there is nothing wrong with me, so for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, `I do know one thing - it ought not to be taught in high school.'"
Of course I don't know if this is an accurate record or not, I found another source wording it differently.
While the Quote Mine Project does not address this directly, a letter from Patterson mentioning it.
"That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else."
I believe he's at least partially right about this, by the way. I've been doing some reading about the classification of Cambrian organisms and it looks like sometimes attempting to place them in modern crown group phyla can give a false picture of the Cambrian explosion since they are actually stem group organisms.
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