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Dinosaur Shocker (YEC say dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years)
Smithsonian Magazine ^ | May 1, 2006 | Helen Fields

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.


TOPICS: Heated Discussion
KEYWORDS: crevolist; dinosaur; dinosaurs; evolution; godsgravesglyphs; maryschweitzer; paleontology; shocker
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Comment #461 Removed by Moderator

To: 2nsdammit
What part of Death was metaphorical?
If it was a spiritual death, then all the 'people' living before Adam would then have to have been spiritually perfect beings.

Your hypothesis does not stand up to the plain text, or the metaphorical text of scripture.

Perhaps Jesus was the one that he was speaking metaphorically about. He must not have completed the work of salvation then. Which part is metaphorical?
You can't have it both ways.


There is no dispute between what we don't know or understand and what God did in creating a young earth.
462 posted on 05/02/2006 4:55:36 AM PDT by Rhadaghast (Yeshua haMashiach hu Adonai Tsidkenu)
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To: AndrewC
This evidence should not be noteworthy, but it is. Why?

What do you mean?

I don't see why you think that this ought to make people throw up their arms in despair over the theory of evolution. It would be more related to the age of the earth and its strata. We have multiple evidences that the earth is billions of years old and multiple evidences that this strata is millions of years old. When multiple tests are pointing you in the same direction and you have one anomaly, it's more likely that you just don't fully understand the anomaly rather than being completely wrong about the whole scenario.

Likewise we have multiple evidences that evolution has occurred and species are related by common descent. The data fits together so well that it would be difficult to disprove evolution with one or two anomalies.

So, some things that would indicate evolution is not true. If evolution is not true and YEC is we would expect to see a complete mixup in the fossil record--Permian creatures fossilized with Quaternary ones, no sorting of microfossils, and no lines of evolution with increasing complexity and specialization (we see these with foraminifera, ammonites, horses, stegosauri, etc.) The genetic data would be all mixed up and we wouldn't be able to use nested heirarchies based off multiple genes to organize phylogenies. The ERV and pseudogene data that indicates common ancestry of apes and humans would be absent.

In the geologic data we would not find sedimentary rocks containing fossils overlaid with igneous rock that indicates it was formed on dry land. Since YEC say in general that fossils were laid down during the Flood, overlaying igneous rocks should be in the form of pillow lava indicating deposition under water. Since coal seams were supposed to originate from vegetation mats deposited during the Flood, we would not see dinosaur tracks across coal seams indicating these originated as peat in swampy areas. Likewise, we wouldn't see fossilized rootlines growing down into the coal from when in the swamp trees grew in it. There would not be the sharp divisions in the stone we see caused by long-term variations in the levels of certain elements, such as the drastic change from green Permian rock to red, iron-rich Triassic rock. Since all fossils are supposed to have been deposited in the Flood, every fossil should carbon date to the same recent age.

Everything that we see indicates an old earth and old universe, and all of the fossil and genetic evidence indicates evolution and common descent. What's more, observation of living animals and examination of their genomes has provided us with a huge amount of information on by what mechanisms evolution could occur. We have come to see that mutations are not universally negative and that information can be added to a genome. We can observe natural selection occuring in front of our eyes. These observations provide all of the information needed to conclude that evolution can and did happen.

463 posted on 05/02/2006 5:07:28 AM PDT by ahayes (Yes, I have a devious plot. No, you may not know what it is.)
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To: Right Wing Professor

Human/chimp DNA similarity continues to decrease: counting indels

by Chase W. Nelson
Summary

It is conventionally held that humans and chimps differ only very slightly in their DNA. However, new evidence suggests that the difference might be much more drastic. Mutations resulting in DNA insertions and deletions cause much of the genetic difference between the two species, but are typically not included in estimates of diversity. Moreover, areas of significant similarity are often affected by selective constraints. An increasing number of functions are also being discovered for so-called ‘junk DNA’, suggesting similarity in such DNA is not necessarily due to common descent. Additional research should aid the understanding of such important data in the debate over origins.

Creationists have long maintained that the similarity between human and chimp DNA is not all that it is touted to be. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could help confirm this.

It is widely held that ‘The common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) is our closest relative. Its genome sequence is about 98.8% identical to our own, and we shared a common ancestor some six million years ago.’1 The assumption that humans diverged from chimps roughly this long ago also forms the basis of the mitochondrial clock,2 which ‘continues to be widely used to “time” human evolution and population movements, both ancient and modern.’3 In the popular-level book Genome, Matt Ridley states that:

‘Apart from the fusion of chromosome 2, visible differences between chimp and human chromosomes are few and tiny. In thirteen chromosomes no visible differences of any kind exist. If you select at random any “paragraph” in the chimp genome and compare it with the comparable “paragraph” in the human genome, you will find very few “letters” are different: on average, less than two in every hundred. We are, to a ninety-eight per cent approximation, chimpanzees, and they are, with ninety-eight per cent confidence limits, human beings. If that does not dent your self-esteem, consider that chimpanzees are only ninety-seven per cent gorillas; and humans are also ninety-seven per cent gorillas. In other words we are more chimpanzee-like than gorillas are.’4

One creationist response to such arguments regarding human/chimp DNA similarity has been that ‘Chimp DNA has not been anywhere near fully sequenced so that a proper comparison can be made’,5 and that this evidence is just as easily explained (and predicted, for that matter) by the concept of a common designer:

‘Since DNA codes for structures and biochemical molecules, we should expect the most similar creatures to have the most similar DNA. Apes and humans are both mammals, with similar shapes, so both have similar DNA. We should expect humans to have more DNA similarities with another mammal like a pig than with a reptile like a rattlesnake. And this is so. Humans are very different from yeast but they have some biochemistry in common, so we should expect human DNA to differ more from yeast DNA than from ape DNA.’6

In a recent article,7 David A. DeWitt cited a study which found that the two species are only 95% identical when insertions and deletions are considered,8 showing that the estimate of divergence depends mainly on what type of DNA is being compared. A number of differences between humans and chimps were named that are difficult to quantify in an estimate of sequence divergence (that is, the differences in bases between the human and chimp genomes), including shorter telomeres in humans, a 10% larger chimp genome, and great differences in chromosomes 4, 9, 12 and the Y chromosome, for example. Indeed, DNA similarity estimates ‘do not adequately represent fine changes in genome organization.’9
Considering DNA gaps

Previous estimates of sequence divergence have focused exclusively on base substitutions in DNA—that is, one base (or one DNA ‘letter’—A, T, C or G) being replaced with another. The new calculation, resulting in much less sequence similarity, also includes insertions and deletions, or indels, (occurring when a base is added or removed, often resulting in what is known as a frameshift mutation), in addition to base substitutions. The author of the study, Roy J. Britten, stated:

‘It appears appropriate to me to consider the full length of the gaps in estimating the interspecies divergence. These stretches of DNA are actually absent from one and present in the other genome. In the past, indels have often simply been counted regardless of length and added to the base substitution count, because that is convenient for phylogenetics.’8

His findings lend support to the idea that much of the failure of DNA to hybridize between chimps and humans is the result of missing DNA due to indel events. Britten then became involved in a follow-up paper in which these initial results were confirmed; in fact, it was found that ‘the 5% human-chimp difference already published is likely to be an underestimate, possibly by more than a factor of 2.’10
Various types of mutations

Various types of mutations. Much of the difference between human and chimp DNA can be attributed to insertions and deletions (indels).

Now, Anzai et al. have published a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that confirms this statement. In the study, nearly one-half of the MHC (major histocompatibility complex) region was sequenced, ‘which to date represents the longest continuous sequence within this species [chimps], our closest evolutionary relative’, and has been described as a ‘rapidly evolving’ part of the genome.9 Although it has been held that human/chimp similarity in the MHC is ‘so great that the alleles must have originated before the supposed chimp/human evolutionary divergence’,11 the sequence results actually dropped the DNA similarity estimate down to 86.7%!12 Indeed, the actual difference between the two species (when counting indels) is greater than 5% by well more than a factor of two. Not only this, but ‘evolutionists now recognize that complex MHC genetic motifs can arise independently’ in primates—that is, at least some similarities that do exist are not attributable to common descent.13

The human genome contains two MHC Class I genes, the MICA and MICB, yet chimpanzees contain only one gene at this location, the Patr-MIC. According to evolutionary speculation, a 95-kb deletion occurred between the two human genes, forming the hybrid chimpanzee gene ~33–44 million years ago, by far predating the commonly held divergence date between the two species of 6 million years. Because the two ends of the chimpanzee gene seem to match up with the beginning of the human MICA and end of the human MICB genes, it may seem reasonable that common ancestry is feasible. However, even some humans contain a single gene at this location (called the HLA-B*4801 allele) very similar to the one found in chimps. The study notes that it ‘is quite intriguing that an equal-sized deletion involving this very same region and genes (MICA/B) has happened at distinct points in time in several different primate species’.12 Yet it is also claimed that other such similar changes in DNA structure cannot be attributed to convergence, but must be due to common ancestry! Clearly, similar ‘mistakes’ can arise independently in separate species (as expanded upon by Woodmorappe13). The hypothesis that a Designer would create the same structures for the same functions seems to explain the data much more easily. As noted by Woodmorappe,11 strong selective pressures must have existed in order to prevent the MHC similarities between primates from being scrambled over supposed millions of years, further weakening the evolutionary scenario.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v18/i2/similarity.asp


464 posted on 05/02/2006 5:19:04 AM PDT by mlc9852
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To: 2nsdammit

So you believe humans are no better than rodents? LOL


465 posted on 05/02/2006 5:19:59 AM PDT by mlc9852
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To: ashtanga

"the ID contingent seems far more gentlemanly than the Darwinians."

So you noticed that too?


466 posted on 05/02/2006 5:22:59 AM PDT by mlc9852
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To: Coyoteman

See - isn't it great how we can believe whatever we want?


467 posted on 05/02/2006 5:23:37 AM PDT by mlc9852
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To: ashtanga
While I don't know enough science to take sides.....

Do you know enough about various religions to take a side?

468 posted on 05/02/2006 5:25:32 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: ahayes
The environment changes and if the organisms in it don't have traits that fit, they are unable to reproduce effectively.

Then the Welfare state will win!

469 posted on 05/02/2006 5:28:00 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: ColdSteelTalon

"2. The mainstream scientific orthodoxy is really lying to us about the age of dinosaurs and the acutal age of the earth because they have chosen evolution as their religion and can't face up to the fact that finding soft tissue in fossilized bone throws their orthodoxy into question."

I will go with 2.


470 posted on 05/02/2006 5:31:24 AM PDT by mlc9852
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To: Conservative Texan Mom
Is that like saying to God, "Prove yourself," when He has told us that He already has through His invisible qualities?
 
I don't know, but there ARE instances in the bible where people do just that!
 

 
NIV Judges 6:36-40
 36.  Gideon said to God, "If you will save Israel by my hand as you have promised--
 37.  look, I will place a wool fleece on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the fleece and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said."
 38.  And that is what happened. Gideon rose early the next day; he squeezed the fleece and wrung out the dew--a bowlful of water.
 39.  Then Gideon said to God, "Do not be angry with me. Let me make just one more request. Allow me one more test with the fleece. This time make the fleece dry and the ground covered with dew."
 40.  That night God did so. Only the fleece was dry; all the ground was covered with dew.
 
 
 
NIV Malachi 3:10
   Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.
 

NIV Romans 12:2
   Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.
 

NIV 1 Thessalonians 5:21
   Test everything. Hold on to the good.
 

NIV 1 John 4:1
   Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
 

Now the about have to do with obedience.  There are many OTHER instances recorded where God was 'tested' out of DISobedience, and He was not pleased!

471 posted on 05/02/2006 5:39:16 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: SirLinksalot
Sorry, but the burger I had last night at TGI Fridays had to be at least 10 million years old.

And the bun was practically primordial. We won't even discuss the fries.
472 posted on 05/02/2006 5:40:48 AM PDT by LIConFem (A fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi.)
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To: Heartlander
The organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA’.

OOoops!!

We meant...

The organism is only DNA’s way of making more modified DNA’.

--EvoDude

473 posted on 05/02/2006 5:41:20 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: trashcanbred
Basically it is a Canadian goose....

So; did it forget to get back on the boat when it's vacation was over?

474 posted on 05/02/2006 5:43:48 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: shuckmaster

Yes, I am easily mislead. I actually believe humans were created as humans. Silly me!


475 posted on 05/02/2006 5:44:34 AM PDT by mlc9852
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To: trashcanbred
(it neither swims nor flies but its feet have adapted for climbing)

And we ALL know that CLIMBING is a MUCH more efficient method of transportation than flying!

476 posted on 05/02/2006 5:45:31 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: Right Wing Professor
  
 
The chimp genome is published, the human genome is published, you can compare them yourself.
 
 
I'm a believer!!!

477 posted on 05/02/2006 5:49:20 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: SirLinksalot
Fascinating, thanks.
478 posted on 05/02/2006 5:51:46 AM PDT by Ditter
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To: Right Wing Professor
We are very, very similar genetically to chimps.

ATOMICALLY, we are EXACTLY chimps!

Every one of the atoms used to create THEIR bodies is found in OUR bodies!

That's a cold, hard fact.

479 posted on 05/02/2006 5:52:09 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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To: Right Wing Professor
How you shoehorn your hunter gatherer creation myth to adapt to it isn't our problem.



NIV 1 Peter 1:17-21
 17.  Since you call on a Father who judges each man's work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear.
 18.  For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers,
 19.  but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.
 20.  He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.
 21.  Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.
 
 

NIV 1 Corinthians 2:7
  No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.
 

NIV 2 Timothy 1:8-10
 8.  So do not be ashamed to testify about our Lord, or ashamed of me his prisoner. But join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God,
 9.  who has saved us and called us to a holy life--not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,
 10.  but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.
 

NIV Titus 1:1-4
 1.  Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the faith of God's elect and the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness--
 2.  a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time,
 3.  and at his appointed season he brought his word to light through the preaching entrusted to me by the command of God our Savior,
 4.  To Titus, my true son in our common faith:   Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior.
 
 
Just how did these ignurt goat-herders (Oops! hunter gatherer) have such a concept as 'before time' anyway???
 
 

480 posted on 05/02/2006 5:54:56 AM PDT by Elsie (Heck is where people, who don't believe in Gosh, think they are not going....)
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