Squirming at the Squishosaur
A refutation of a progressive creationist response to our articles on the finding
of soft dinosaur tissue
by Carl Wieland
16 May 2005
It had to happen, I suppose. The lashback from ‘progressive creationists’
about our excited announcements on the soft tissue found in a dinosaur fossil (Still soft and stretchy: Dinosaur soft tissue find—a
stunning rebuttal of “millions of years” and
“Ostrich-osaurus” discovery?: Shedding more light on the new startling
find of soft tissue in a T. rex bone).
The ministry Reasons To Believe (RTB), propagating the views of ‘progressive
creationist’ astronomer Hugh Ross, is totally committed to the millions of
years philosophy. This despite the fact that, sadly, this has to involve abandonment
of any consistent, time-honoured, and intellectually honest approach to hermeneutics
(as is overwhelmingly clear from my colleague Dr Sarfati’s
classic book Refuting Compromise). In
fact, it turns the words of the Lord Jesus on humanity’s
time of appearance upside down, and puts millions of years of bloodshed,
suffering of nephesh (soulish) creatures, extinction, thorns and cancer
before Adam (the Curse before the Fall), and much, much more that is equally tragic
(see The Fall: a cosmic catastrophe: Hugh Ross’s blunders
on plant death in the Bible).
So, they could scarcely ‘let it slide’ when our web articles, picked
up by tens of thousands and circulated widely, said things like:
‘This discovery gives immensely powerful support to the proposition that dinosaur
fossils are not millions of years old at all, but were mostly fossilized
under catastrophic conditions a few thousand years ago at most’
The first ‘counter’ was a radio broadcast featuring Hugh Ross and associate
Dr Fazale (Fuz) Rana. That referred to some ‘detective work’ done by
one of their apologists, a Greg Moore, who has now published two articles on this
sort of topic on the RTB website, the latest being the one rebutted here. (The previous
one was attacking our announcements on the 1997 discovery, by the same researcher,
of red blood cells.) This article cites the RTB broadcast five times. Even more
importantly, the original article, ‘Dinosaur Blood?’, by this same author
acknowledges that its ‘background’ is an article by one Gary Hurd, an
antitheistic social scientist, posted on an unsavoury atheist site; Moore’s
follow-up here largely follows Hurd as well. This is unfortunately not the first
time that Ross or his minions have cited disreputable Christ-haters to attack biblical
creationists—see here.
In view of the importance of the issue, the entire article1
has been reproduced here under the ‘fair use’ provisions (so no-one
could think that we had misrepresented or selectively quoted it). I respond to it
in interspersed ‘email style’. As will I trust be clear, apart from
some hairsplitting about definitions, and despite clever use of prejudicial language
and similar rhetorical maneuvers, no evidence has been presented that would generate
any discomfort in our standing behind the conclusions of the articles. In fact,
if anything, our conclusions are reinforced by the transparent desperation in some
of the tactics employed.
Dinosaur Blood Revisited
by Greg Moore
On March 25, 2005, Science magazine reported the discovery of soft tissue
in the leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex.[ref] The study was conducted
by a team of paleontologists led by Dr. Mary Schweitzer, the scientist who found
blood cell remnants in another T. rex bone in 1997. According to the paper,
the soft tissue contains morphological objects that appear to be blood vessels,
blood cells and bone cells.
This study has generated much excitement in the young-earth community. Young-earth
creationists claim the discovery of dinosaur soft tissue is a stunning rebuttal
to the old earth paradigm. For example, in an article titled, “Still
Soft and Stretchy,”[ref.]Carl Wieland
[of Creation Ministries International] states:
It is inconceivable such things could be preserved for (in this case) ‘70
million years’… This discovery gives immensely powerful support to
the proposition that dinosaur fossils are not millions of years old at
all, but were mostly fossilized under catastrophic conditions a few thousand years
ago at most.
They also claim this discovery vindicates their long standing contention that what
Schweitzer found in 1997 was actual dinosaur blood.[ref]
CW: This choice of wording is subtly but significantly prejudicial,
to the point of being misleading. An uninformed reader might think I had written
about blood still dripping onto the floor, yet that was nothing like what I said.
My article, to which he refers, was about the 1997
discovery, under the microscope, of red blood cells in a segment of unfossilized
dinosaur bone. The article did state that the vessels were visible under the microscope,
and that there was immunological evidence for the presence of the protein hemoglobin.
In the RTB broadcast mentioned in the introduction, Ross ally Fuz Rana strongly
implied that it was merely survival of the porphyrin (heme) ring, which is more
stable than the globin chains made up of specific amino acid sequences. However,
this refutation of a critic shows that in order
to get an immune reaction to hemoglobin, one would need substantially more than
a porphyrin ring and 3 or 4 amino acids.
This hemoglobin was associated with what I referred to as ‘the still-recognizable
shapes of red blood cells’. And that is exactly the case. Cameron Tsujita,
a paleontologist at the University of Western Ontario in London, discussing claims
that these are blood cells, says that he ‘can’t really think of what
else they could be.’2
Interestingly, in the RTB radio interview mentioned earlier, Fuz Rana employed similar
tactics by saying that ‘the young earth community is making the claim that
what was found was an unfossilized T. rex femur that contained blood in
it’. That sets up the listener nicely, so that anything other than flowing,
gushing blood out of a totally fresh dino bone could easily be perceived as a creationist
‘distortion’.
He then says: ‘Well, actually, this is not the case. It’s an incompletely
fossilized femur, which is very different from an unfossilized femur.’ In
fact, my article actually quoted Schweitzer as saying that ‘some parts deep
inside the long bone of the leg had not completely fossilized.’ So anyone
reading the word ‘unfossilized’ in the next sentence would have been
fully aware of how I was using the term. The organic material in that section of
bone had not been replaced by minerals.
Natural History magazine
concurred
‘Fossils form gradually, as minerals from soil, rocks, and water replace the
chemical constituents of long-dead bodies. The result is a rock-solid copy—except
when it isn’t, as Horner, Mary H. Schweitzer, and two other paleontologists
were startled to find.
‘Under Schweitzer’s supervision, the fossilized femur was given a soaking
to remove the minerals. Astonishingly, the investigators saw translucent blood vessels
waving in the acid [sic—see later] bath. Soft tissue, still flexible,
had been preserved in the thick bone. And some of the vessels retained cell-like
structures, complete with what looked very much like cell nuclei.’
I can only conclude that all this handwaving and smokeblowing by Moore is meant
to distract from the main point, namely the astonishing discoveries in question
(especially the recent one).
GM: In the same article, Wieland states:
Not only have more blood cells been found, but also soft, fibrous tissue, and complete
blood vessels. The fact that this really is unfossilized soft tissue from a dinosaur
is in this instance so obvious to the naked eye that any skepticism directed at
the previous discovery is completely “history.”
Unfortunately, these claims are based on several distortions about this discovery.
CW: Let’s see.
GM: Misconception 1
Young-earth accounts of the discovery indicate that the T. rex bone contained
fresh, pliable tissue. In other words, when the bone was cracked open, the researchers
found soft tissue. This is certainly the impression one gets from Wieland’s
article.
CW: Not surprisingly, I deny that the article would give a normally
discerning reader such an impression, especially when I said on the twelfth line
of the main text that Schweitzer ‘used chemicals to dissolve the bony matrix,
revealing the soft tissues still present.’ But ‘impressions’ are
fuzzy subjective things, slippery to pin down, and so perhaps tactically more suitable
to relieve long-age embarrassment about what I have given the tongue-in-cheek label
‘Squishosaurus’. Especially when there is no actual error to refute.
GM: Under one photo of the bone tissue he [CW] states:
The arrow points to a tissue fragment that is still elastic [emphasis added].
CW: Note that this emphasis is Moore’s, not mine.
GM citing CW: It beggars belief that elastic tissue like this could
have lasted for 65 million years.
CW: I would reaffirm this statement. Many long-agers have openly
expressed their astonishment. E.g. Derek Briggs, a paleontologist at Yale University
said it was a ‘totally novel discovery,’ while Dr Tsujita said such
preservation is ‘improbable but obviously not impossible.’ Note that
this is a veiled admission that he was surprised by such tissue preservation over
alleged millions of years, but since preserved tissue has been found, to a long-ager,
it’s obviously proof that it can be preserved over such eons!3
GM: Under a second photo he [CW] states:
Another instance of “fresh appearance” which similarly makes it hard
to believe in the “millions of years.”
And elsewhere in the article he states:
One description of a portion of the tissue was that it is “flexible and resilient
and when stretched returns to its original shape.”
However,
CW: Notice the ‘clever’ positioning of that word ‘However’—priming
the reader’s ‘glasses’ to see what follows as contradicting what
I said. Which it really doesn’t.
GM: the paper states when researchers cracked open the bone, they
noticed the hollow interior had not been filled with minerals so they took samples
from the core of the bone.
CW: Presumably Moore and RTB’s editors hope that the people
reading this will not bother to check my article, where I said ‘the bone was
still largely hollow and not filled up with minerals as is usual’. So if I
said it, how can Moore’s saying the same thing be the magic ‘however’
to rebut my statements?
GM: Schweitzer then soaked the samples in a solution of dilute
acid [sic] for seven days to dissolve away the mineral component of the
bone.
CW: As quoted earlier, this is what my article stated, up front
and early in the piece. Except that I said it was ‘chemicals’, not ‘dilute
acid’; according to this
detailed supplement to the original report :
‘the tissues were demineralized (0.5M EDTA, pH 8.0) for 7 days, changing buffer
daily.’
So the demineralization seems to have been in a slightly alkaline solution,
not acid. But the main demineralizer was the very effective chelating agent EDTA.
Fuz Rana in the earlier broadcast stated it was ‘weak vinegar’, so he
appears not to have read the details of the process, either. Many internet sites
seem to have also been ‘fuzzy’ about this issue of what was used, so
I won’t be too hard on this mistake.
GM: It was after this process that she observed that the tissue
exhibited “great elasticity and resilience upon manipulation.”[ref.]
CW: Just to clarify things for readers, note that bone—any
bone, even the freshest of bone—has a ‘matrix’ of hard mineral
(see also Bridges and bones, girders and groans).
To get to be able to ‘stretch’ and ‘squish’ the soft tissues
inside, such as the blood vessels running within a fresh bone, you have to dissolve
this mineral matrix. It is a common school experiment to soak a chicken bone in
vinegar, turning it eventually into a soft, sagging mass—the non-mineral component
of the bone. Note that Schweitzer’s team, in their eagerness to compare this
dino’s soft tissues with its alleged evolutionary relative the ostrich, did
essentially the same thing with fresh ostrich bone, to expose/extract the soft tissue
to compare. So any suggestion that Schweitzer’s use of a chelating agent (EDTA)
to dissolve the bone matrix changes the issue is absurd.
The point is that the stretchy, pliable stuff that was in the shape of blood vessels,
etc. was regarded by Schweitzer, and by all other reasonable people who have read
the paper concerned, as remarkably preserved soft tissue, i.e. it has not been replaced
by minerals. As quoted in my article, she said that ‘preservation of this
extent, where you still have this flexibility and transparency, has never been seen
in a dinosaur before’.
GM: It is also noteworthy that Wieland’s descriptions of
the two photos (when [sic] are from the study) are strikingly different
than Schweitzer’s.
CW: Notice that emotive use of ‘strikingly’. But why
should it be noteworthy or surprising that a long-age-believer, especially one who
saw how Creation magazine made good use
of her 1997 red-cell discovery, should choose her words as cagily as she possibly
can? Schweitzer has publicly expressed her disappointment about creationist mileage
from her finds. But as becomes clear further down, even her carefully chosen words
do not attempt to run away from reality.
GM: She refers to the material in one photo as a “demineralized
fragment” and the material in the other photo as “demineralized bone.”[ref]
CW: A moment’s careful thought should suffice to realize
that Schweitzer’s descriptions are in no way inconsistent with those in our
article. If a chicken bone is demineralized, and all one has left is the soft tissue,
then that is what one has, soft tissue, whether or not one refers to it as ‘demineralized
bone’. Schweitzer’s descriptions are correct, as are mine.
GM: Thus, unlike Wieland, Schweitzer is careful to point out that
the tissue in the photos had been processed and was not the original bone material.
CW: But, as already mentioned, I did point this out; in
fact if the words quoted from Schweitzer above are meant to be a ‘careful’
pointing out, then mine are much more careful and extensive.
It was so glaringly obvious in my article, in fact, that Moore cannot be expected
to leave himself too wide open by ignoring it altogether. Having thus ‘scored
points’ illegitimately, he now feels obliged to grudgingly mention it after
all. He therefore says
GM: Wieland does mention that the bone material was treated later
in the article.
CW: Later? It was, as stated, in the twelfth line down from the
beginning of the main text. Good try, Greg.
GM: He briefly states:
CW: Briefly? Moore could not even resist implying that I should
have used more space in this already-brief web news report. This whole section by
Moore is trying to downplay the fact which he is forced to admit, namely that I
did make it plain and clear to the reader.
GM citing CW: Dr. Schweitzer used chemicals to dissolve the bony
matrix, revealing the soft tissue still present.
GM: However, the clear implication of this statement is that the
material from the T. rex bone contained soft tissue but the researchers
did not see it until the bony matrix was removed. This is not true.
CW: Not true? That’s a powerful statement. (Not-so-subtle
meaning: these dreaded young-earth creationists are lying to you—that
is certainly the impression of some who have emailed us after reading this Moore/RTB
article). Let’s see if he’s right. Remember that the correct use of
the term ‘soft tissue’ is any tissue (body structure substance) other
than bone. For example, in a secular article on salamander fossils we read: ‘There
are whole bodies, impressions of soft tissue preserved, and stomach contents.’4 The soft tissue does not necessarily have to be preserved
in a soft form to be referred to as such. But, let’s go with Moore’s
description above of the ‘clear implication’ of my statement and see
if it is ‘not true’. Question: Did the bones contain actual soft tissue
(e.g. blood vessels that had not been replaced by mineral?) Answer: Yes. Could the
researchers see the soft tissue until the bony matrix was removed? Answer: No.
So much for that.
GM: The soft tissue was a result of the demineralization and hydration
process.
CW: Huh? How can demineralization produce soft tissue that was
not already there? If I dissolve a fresh ostrich bone and am left with the stretchy
soft tissue, that tissue was in the bone all along. It won’t appear ‘soft’
when the bone is broken open, of course, because it is being supported from all
sides by the bony matrix. If Moore should excuse his comment by saying that he merely
meant that the tissue’s softness was the result of the soaking, then
he is really pushing the envelope of reasonableness. Because the whole (and the
obvious) point was that substantial swathes of tissue made up of fragile protein
molecules have survived in this dinosaur bone not just in some amorphous form, but
in recognizable structures, even transparent ones, and recognizably containing red
blood cells, for example.
Whether they would lose some of their ‘stretchiness’ should they be
dried out again is in any case beside the point. If the original material of the
soft tissue had not been preserved, then it would also not be capable of ‘rehydrating’
to any extent. If dry soft tissue that was unfossilized had been found in a dinosaur
leg bone, and this only stretched when softened a bit in water, it would have been
just as sensational. Because it is hardly likely that a section of dino soft tissue
that had been preserved by being replaced with minerals (i.e. petrified) would become
flexible just from hydrating, i.e. soaking up water!
However, all that seems to be academic, anyway, because to clinch the point, Schweitzer’s
article says that the soft tissues were subjected to several cycles of dehydration/rehydration—without
losing their elasticity! So they appear to have been elastic (soft and stretchy,
not hard and brittle) in both the dry and wet state. Of course, Moore did not quote
that part of the article.
GM: Misconception 2
Young earth creationists maintain that the researchers discovered actual blood vessels
and cells in the T. rex tissue. Again, this is certainly the impression
one gets from Wieland’s article. He states:
Not only have more blood cells been found, but also … complete blood vessels.
CW: A more-than-reasonable conclusion, as will be seen.
GM: In fairness, the researchers do state in the paper that they
believe the T. rex tissue contains blood vessels and cells. However,
a close reading of the paper reveals that this is a hopeful speculation, not a statement
of fact.
CW: As will be seen, ‘hopeful speculation’ puts a substantial
spin on the paper. The researchers’ stated belief (not speculative, wild guess)
is a very confident and reasonable conclusion from the observed facts. These facts,
inter alia, are: Soft, stretchy, transparent branching structures were
found inside the bone of a long-dead animal after the bone was demineralized (by
a substance that dissolves fresh bone matrix too). These intricate structures appear
identical to those in a recently-dead animal bone. Inside them are further structures
which have all of the appearances of red blood cells, including the nucleus in the
centre of each one.5 The contents of these hollow branching
tubes that have these red-cell-appearing structures inside them can still be ‘squeezed
out’. The onus of proof is on those who would claim that they are not what
they overwhelmingly appear to be.
By the way, the RTB broadcast glossed over something that is not even mentioned
here in Moore’s article, namely that the researchers also found astonishingly
clear 3-D structures in the shape of osteoclasts—these are very characteristic-looking
cells found in bone—that were once again identical to those in living creatures.
Even the title of Schweitzer et al.’s paper in Science affirms
the conviction of its evolutionist authors: it is not called, e.g., ‘Unusual
Structures Which Sort of Remind us of Blood Vessels and Cells’. It is in fact
called ‘Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus
rex’—the title alone seems virtually sufficient to
‘blow away’ Moore’s article!
GM: The paper states that complete demineralization of the T. rex
material released vessels from the bone matrix that floated to the surface of the
flask. Many of these vessels contained round microstructures that resembled
blood cells and inside these they observed smaller objects that resemble nuclei.
The researchers then subjected ostrich bones to the same process and the resulting
vessels and contents were virtually identical to the T. rex specimen.[ref.]
CW: The italics emphasizing the word ‘resembled’ (to
try to downplay the issue) are in fact undone by Moore’s own words, where
he points out that the ostrich vessels and their contained red blood cells were
for all practical purposes identical.
GM: However, since no molecular studies have yet been done with
the tissue, it is uncertain if it contains original organic material or if the material
was replaced by mineralization or some other chemical process.[ref.]
CW: The only way it can not contain any ‘original organic
material’ is if it has been, as Moore states, ‘replaced by mineralization’.
But no magical mineralization process is known or conceivable which would result
in soft, flexible tubes with all the appearance of the original blood vessels and
showing red blood cells inside. I invite the reader at this stage to revisit the
illustrations (below).
M. H. Schweitzer
Remember, too, that proteins have been detected in dinosaur bone before, in specimens
not even showing any soft tissue preservation like this one does. So I am hardly
sticking my neck out by making the claim that there is no way that this
soft stretchy tissue contains none of the original protein materials, i.e. there
is no way that it has, instead, been replaced ‘brick by brick’ by some
inorganic mineral. Remember, too, that even the original 1997 red-blood-cell find
gave immunological evidence of one such protein, namely hemoglobin that is found
in living red cells.
GM: Therefore, it is very possible that the objects are not intact
blood vessels and cells but blood vessel and cell remnants-the degradation products
of blood vessels and cells that have undergone chemical transformation.[ref.]
CW: Atheist sites attacked our original announcement of the 1997
discovery by saying that we called them ‘red cells’ when in fact they
were ‘the remains of red cells’. But if I were to find a human finger
in a block of cement, by definition it is the ‘remains’ of a finger,
even when fresh, ten seconds after the concrete is poured. As time goes on, it will
become more and more degraded, but it is still the ‘remains’ of a finger
at all times. Say I find one such finger that is partially degraded after a few
weeks, but still soft. Is it reasonable or not to describe the discovery as ‘a
human finger in cement that is still soft’? Of course it’s reasonable!
It would be nothing but the most excruciating, deliberate and devious hairsplitting
for someone to attack the claim by saying, ‘ah, ah, ah—naughty—how
dare he say he found a finger in cement. He should have said it was the remains
of a human finger! Obviously, you can’t trust this guy.’
GM: In fact, Schweitzer admits as much in the closing paragraph
of the paper:
Whether preservation is strictly morphological and the result of some kind of unknown
geochemical replacement process or whether it extends to the subcellular and molecular
levels is uncertain.[ref.]
In an accompanying article in the same of Science, “Tyrannosaurus
rex Soft Tissue Raises Tantalizing Prospects,”[ref.] Erik
Stokstad makes this same point:
Experts, and the team itself, say they won’t be convinced that the original
material has survived unaltered until further test results come in.
CW: Again, even to have lasted 4,000 years, one would expect some
degree of alteration. But this is really beside the point; the astonishing nature
of the preservation is already overwhelmingly clear, and totally unexpected by long-age
thinkers.
GM: Stokstad also notes in his article that there are known instances
where reworked material can have the appearance and resilience of the T. rex
“tissues.” Therefore, until more research is conducted, it is premature
and misleading to claim the structures in the tissue are blood vessels and cells.
CW: I am happy to here quote entirely what Stokstad said, namely:
‘Nucleated protozoan cells have been found in 225-million-year-old amber,
but geochemical tests revealed that the nuclei had been replaced with resin compounds.
Even the resilience of the vessels may be deceptive. Flexible fossils of colonial
marine organisms called graptolites have been recovered from 440-million-year-old
rocks, but the original material—likely collagen—had not survived.’
Stokstad is being commendably cautious, but for those familiar with graptolite morphology,
the difference is profound and would not have caused a stir on our website (nor
indeed did it raise much of a fuss at the time); it is nothing like the same issue
or appearance of ‘identifiable soft tissue’ as this. And the resin example
is neither surprising, nor relevant to this find—amber is thought to be hardened
resin, so why would the nuclei not be replaced by resin? The most exquisite details
of organisms, including microscopic, have routinely been found preserved in amber,
yet this preservation per se was never ‘splashed’ by us as
an argument against the millions of years. More significantly, the Stokstad quote
shows a misleading aspect of this part of the Moore/RTB article (dutifully taken
from their favorite atheistic source, Hurd). It claims that Stokstad says ‘that
there are known instances where reworked material can have the appearance and resilience
of the T. rex “tissues.”’ The unwitting reader might
think that Stokstad was claiming that structures looking like the flexible blood
vessels in the T. rex had been found in other fossils, when he said no
such thing. Nothing in a fossil remotely resembling these dinosaur blood vessels
in both appearance and resilience has ever been found, and Stokstad’s
article does not say otherwise.
GM: Misconception 3
Young-earth creations [sic] claim the discovery of unfossilized bone with
soft tissue and biomolecules proves dinosaurs did not live millions of years ago.
For example, Wieland states in his article:
It is inconceivable that such things should be preserved for (in this case) “70
million years.”
And,
This discovery gives immensely powerful support to the proposition that dinosaur
fossils are not millions of years old at all, but were mostly fossilized
under catastrophic conditions a few thousand years ago at most.
This message is echoed many other young-earth creationists. For example, in another
Answers in Genesisarticle,
David Menton states:
It certainly taxes one’s imagination to believe that soft tissues and cells
could remain so relatively fresh in appearance for the tens of millions of years…[ref.]
CW: Notice that neither my words nor those of my anatomist colleague
Dr Menton claim that this (or indeed anything) can prove a young earth,
but that it is powerfully, overwhelmingly consistent with it. Certainly it ‘taxes
one’s imagination’ less to believe that such structures have survived
a few thousand years, as opposed to >65 million. Even the most rabid long-ager
would surely have to agree with that simple proposition.
GM: There are really two parts to this claim. The first is that
dinosaur bone should be completely fossilized if it is millions of years old. The
second is that soft tissue and biomolecules are fragile and can’t possibly
survive for millions of years. It is important to address both of these issues.
As Schweitzer states in the paper:
The fossil record is capable of exceptional preservation, including feathers, hair,
color or color patterns, embryonic soft tissues, muscle tissue and/or internal organs,
and cellular structure.[ref.]
CW: Exactly. But most such instances (which all speak of rapid
processes, incidentally) do not involve the tissue itself, or any remnant of it
which is still flexible or even capable of hydration. For example, the preservation
of feathers is often merely their imprint. ‘Cellular structure’ can
be preserved within a rock-hard, completely mineralized specimen (which structure
would therefore disappear if those minerals were dissolved, by the way). That is
not what we are talking about here.
GM: Normally, during fossilization, hard materials are replaced
with minerals and soft tissue is destroyed by bacteria that enter the bone.
CW: It is not universally agreed that this is always the result
of bacterial action. In some instances, the soft tissue (even cellular) shape is
preserved, as noted a few lines above in Schweitzer’s quote, while the tissue
itself is replaced by minerals and/or at least the interstitial spaces filled. This
does not necessarily require bacterial action.
GM: However, under certain circumstances, the inner part of the
bone can be preserved. This can occur in instances where the remains are rapidly
buried and entombed in protective sediments. It can occur when the outer bone is
sealed, preventing penetration and decomposition. It can also occur when the remains
are located in an environment that fosters preservation-places that are dry, cold
and oxygen free, or where the sediment contains certain chemicals.[refs.]
CW: Moore really misses the point. Obviously, there is no dispute
with the fact that different degrees of preservation can occur depending on different
environments, burial, etc. Look at the many fossils buried in the Flood; many are
extremely mineralized, some less so, and some much less so, as in the case
in point. The strongly mineralized ones do not present an argument for a young age
or an old age. They could have been mineralized 600 million years ago,
or a century ago (the process of mineralization, e.g. artificial petrified wood,
can occur very rapidly given the right chemical environment). Once they are in effect
‘turned to stone’, they can last more or less indefinitely. But ones
that are not well mineralized are not going to be anywhere near as protected from
the forces of decay.
As Dr Aw Swee Eng (former professor of biochemistry,
Singapore University) confirmed to me personally, complex biomolecules such as proteins
are thermodynamically destined to fall apart eventually (from the random motion
of molecules) even were they to be protected from all outside influences such as
air, moisture, bacteria, etc. This is why it is so astonishing to think of a non-minerally-protected
soft tissue structure lasting for millions of years.
GM: In the case of the T. rex tissue, Schweitzer explains
that it is the likely result of several of these factors:
CW: Before reading her explanations, it is important to note that
she is totally philosophically committed to the millions-of-years age of the specimen;
to her, it is a ‘given’. So from that perspective, it is understandable
for her to look for ways to ‘explain’ the evidence in front of her eyes.
As she indicates, there must be ‘yet undetermined’ things which have
made it happen, despite all expectations to the contrary. Read on …
GM quoting Schweitzer: The unusual preservation of the originally
organic matrix may be due in part to the dense mineralization of dinosaur bone,
because a certain portion of the organic matrix with extant bone is intracrystalline
and therefore extremely resistant to degradation. These factors, combined with yet
undetermined geochemical and environmental factors, presumably also contribute to
the preservation of soft-tissue vessels.[ref.]
GM: In speaking with Schweitzer, Rich Deem reports that she indicated
the bones have a distinct odor that is characteristic of embalming fluids.
CW: Hearsay evidence—via Deem, a notorious Rossite—of
some alleged smell would seem to be a mark of desperation. Schweitzer failed to
mention any detection of formaldehyde, for example, in her official paper (though
aldehydes were used in the fixation process).
GM: Therefore, it possible that the bones landed in some type of
chemical “stew” that preserved the soft tissue inside the bone from
decomposition.[ref.]
CW: To date, there is just as much ‘evidence’ that
the bones landed in an alien spacecraft
which preserved the tissue.
GM: Regarding the issue of whether biomolecules can survive for
millions of years, it is very difficult to predict molecular stability because it
is very dependent upon the conditions.
CW: It may be difficult to predict the degree of stability,
but surely there is a limit at which credulity ceases. Evolutionist Bryan Sykes,
confronted with the alleged discovery of DNA in a fossil magnolia ‘millions
of years old’ indicated that from the known rate at which it breaks down in
the lab, ‘no DNA would remain intact much beyond 10,000 years’.6
But here it apparently was, so he said it was just as well that this chemical deduction
was not known to the people who tried to extract the DNA.
One can grant that it would be hard to be dogmatic and to say that it is not possible
to stretch that 10,000 years by a bit. The rate of ‘falling apart’ is
not that precise. And DNA is more fragile than, say, hemoglobin or osteocalcin or
collagen. But to stretch it by about four orders of magnitude (some 10,000 times)?
GM: In this case, it was an incomplete fossilization process—water
did not gain access to the interior of the bone and water promotes the breakdown
of biomolecules.
CW: Indeed it does. Water will rapidly hydrolyze them, as well
as supporting bacterial attack. But the converse does not follow, namely that the
absence of water will permit the biomolecules to remain forever intact. In fact,
had water been permitted access, they would not have lasted anything like the few
thousand years since their presumed burial in the Flood.
GM: The bone was extremely dense in terms of its mineral matrix,
which would protect the molecules and structures in the very interior of the bone.[ref.]
And, as stated previously, it seems to have located a rich chemical environment.
CW: This seems to be an assumption based on hearsay, not an observation,
being used here as part of a ‘handwaving’ exercise. And note that what
was first a ‘possibility’ has now become a probability in just a few
paragraphs.
GM: It is also important to note that the molecules in question
are very long, chain-like molecules called polymers. When a polymer is absorbed
[sic—should be adsorbed] to a surface, like the mineral material
inside the T. rex bone, it increases the long-term stability of the molecules.
Basically, when a bond is broken it can reform because the ends of the chain can’t
diffuse away from one another. Under the proper conditions, that can provide remarkable
long-term stability.[ref.]
Blood vessels are also extremely durable. They are made up of endothelial cells
that form a channel. This is surrounded by an elastin matrix, then basement membrane,
then muscle fibers and finally a collagen matrix. These materials are very resistant
to breakdown and have to undergo extensive degradation to totally breakdown. This
can explain how some these [sic] vessels may have survived. They are not
the original blood vessels but remnants of some of the blood vessel materials that
retain some elasticity and resiliency.[ref.]
CW: Hmmm … it seems that on the one hand, we’re told
that they are very resistant to breakdown, presumably an argument being used to
support the fact that they’ve been preserved. Then we’re told that they
are not preserved, i.e. ‘not the original blood vessels’. So why is
the argument of their toughness needed at all? Because it is obvious to all that
any ‘remnants’ (remember my finger in the concrete example, it is always
going to be a ‘remnant’ or ‘the remains’ of a finger, with
varying degrees of preservation) that ‘retain some elasticity and resiliency’
are a powerful ‘alert’ to the public at large that maybe something is
not quite right with the millions of years. So Moore needs something to reassure
true believers in long ages.
Incidentally, the reference for this ‘remarkable long-term stability’,
as it is in four other places herein, is the Ross/Rana broadcast itself. In that
broadcast, they argued that because the ostrich bone had been treated with collagenase,
an enzyme that breaks down collagen, to release the vessels and cells for study,
and this was not necessary for the dino bone, that this was ‘further evidence
of breakdown of biomolecules’. But this reinforces our point! We believe that
this was a very old tyrannosaur fossil, likely about 40 centuries or so.
So it is hardly going to be a ‘fresh’ specimen of bone!
The fact is that some of the biomolecules had already degraded, as expected, and
some had not. The astonishing thing was not that there had been degradation of biomolecules
in that time, but that some had survived. But ‘astonishing’ becomes
‘unbelievable’ when the alleged timescale is >65 million years.
Ross said for the benefit of listeners: ‘The difference is that the ostrich
bones were young, the dinosaur bones old. Therefore they used a different treatment
process. That’s evidence in itself that the dinosaur bones must be old.’
It is hard to restrain oneself from excess sarcasm in contemplating this amazing
conclusion—a fossil bone from an extinct creature is ‘old’, and
a freshly killed ostrich bone is ‘young’. Well, well. Rana responds
to Ross’s insight with ‘Exactly, so for me this is a very interesting
piece of work …’. Enough said.
GM: In explaining the discovery, Dr Matthews [sic—should
be Matthew] Collins, who studies ancient biomolecules at York University in the
United Kingdom, states:
This may not be fossilization as we know it, of large macrostructures, but fossilization
at a molecular level. My suspicion is this process has led to … a very tough,
resistant, very lipid-rich material—a polymer that would be very difficult
to break down and characterize, but which has preserved the structure.[ref.]
CW: Let’s see … earlier in the article we had unknown
geochemical processes postulated. Here another long-ager puts up his ‘suspicion’
that these vessels have been converted into an unknown polymer which (by
definition, in his belief system) resists degradation but, amazingly, preserves
both the structure and the elasticity, appearance, transparency, etc. for millions
of years. When Dr Collins finds what that wonderful substance is, he should
invest in the company that is first to market it.
(It reminds me of the letter to the editor of an Australian newspaper many years
ago. The writer had just been given the spiel at a national park about the long
ages assigned to indigenous rock art. He said something like: ‘I’ve
just bought a can of the best house paint around, and I’m told if I’m
lucky, it’ll last 15 years. Yet I’m shown where some Aboriginal has
blown some soggy ochre onto a rock and I’m told it’s lasted 40,000 years.
Where can I get a can of that stuff?’)
GM: Conclusion
This is a very exciting and surprising discovery but not an inexplicable one. Under
the right conditions, biomolecules can survive for millions and millions of years.
CW: Notice incidentally how the emphasis has shifted from denying
the idea that these are the actual tissues, i.e. the actual biomolecules, to now
stating that they ‘can survive’. Which is it? (If they are not the original
biomolecules, they have not survived!) But despite the bravado in that phrase, the
survival for millions of years has been assumed, not demonstrated. The
only ‘evidence’ for it is the belief that specimens containing
biomolecules are millions of years old.
GM: Therefore, in no way does this discovery demand a young-earth
interpretation or prove that dinosaurs didn’t live millions of years ago.
CW: As pointed out earlier, this is attacking a straw man, and
misrepresents our position. We do say that we have every reason to be excited about
this as strongly reinforcing what God has long revealed in His Word about the timing
of Creation Week (see Biblical Chronogenealogies
and In the days of Peleg).
GM: Wieland suggests that the reason that this sort of thing has
not been found before is that the long-age paradigm has blinded researchers to that
possibility. However, the truth of the matter is only now do we have the technology
to do this type of research.
CW: Notice that ‘Wieland suggests … however the truth
is … ’ (Ergo: Wieland lies. Yet this is the same ‘Reasons to
Believe’ that, when exposed in various ways in our literature, plays the victim
with wounded innocence, saying that one should not attack fellow Christians.) In
fact, this comment about technology is an astonishingly misleading statement, and
it is hard to know how Moore/RTB can defend this with a straight face as ‘the
truth of the matter’. Consider: how much technology does it take to crack
open a dinosaur leg bone, grab some EDTA (it’s been around for a very long
time), wait some days and then take a closer look?
Schweitzer was clearly motivated by her serendipitous (and totally unexpected, thanks
to the long-age belief system7) microscopic discovery
of the red blood cells in dino bone to start looking for such things. When the leg
bone was broken open, it was sent to her because other dinosaur researchers knew
of her interest, subsequent to the red cell find, in looking for such things. Evolutionists
are now saying that, because of the discovery, museums should consider looking again
at their specimens with a view to breaking open some bones, as they have probably
overlooked many such specimens all along. Many are looking forward to now being
able to test various evolutionary theories on such specimens (i.e. now that we ‘know’
that soft tissues must be able to survive millions of years). To reinforce the point,
Schweitzer has apparently found a number of other such specimens since this one.
In other words, now that we know that it’s worth looking, we can easily find
such specimens. So why wasn’t it done before? Because no one expected to find
such things, because they would not be expected to last millions of years. How much
more obvious could it be?7
GM: The Bible exhorts us to “test everything” (1
Thess 5:21). It does not say that we are to test only the things that we
disagree with but everything.
CW: This is an odd statement in isolation—it is not possible
to test everything. Unfortunately, RTB has a habit of wrenching passages
out of context, and does so here again. In context, it is about testing purported
prophetic utterances—the verse immediately preceding this is ‘Do not
despise prophecies’. The passage in general concerns our Christian walk, doctrine,
etc. So when some strange new teaching comes along within the church (such as the
old-earth dogma which was absorbed from the secular world well before Darwin, as
Dr Terry Mortenson’s book
The Great Turning Point so ably documents) this should be thoroughly
tested. It has been tested, and it falls dramatically short in the light of Scripture.
GM: It is in this spirit that young-earth creationists need to
examine their view of reality. Even if the structures in this T. rex tissue
are determined to be actual blood vessels and cells, how does one find, or a handful
of such finds, overturn thousands of old-earth evidences?
CW: Here is where we see the different directions from which both
sides are coming. We want to try to always start with Scripture, which is the final
authority. We don’t see any number of finds as the reason to believe the Bible.
Rather, we see things as either confirming or challenging the truth of the Bible.
When the old-earth evidences are examined (and it is mostly bluff and bluster to
talk of ‘thousands’, as if they were independent of each other) they
invariably turn out to be based on axiomatic rejection of the Bible’s account
of creation in the first place. This was always true of long-age beliefs—see
this admission from the ‘father of uniformitarianism’
(the founding principle of long-age geology), James Hutton.
GM: The answer is they don’t. Science has many good reasons
to believe the earth is ancient from many different fields.
CW: ‘Science’ believes nothing—people do. Science
is a methodology, a wonderful tool that has been very helpful to humanity, but one
whose limitations and operation are often not well understood by a lot of anticreationists.
Scientists are fallible human beings, whose interpretations of the evidence are
strongly constrained by the paradigms of their
culture and time. The history of the scientific enterprise is littered with the
rejection of ideas (phlogiston, miasma theory of disease, etc.) that were based
on the same logic, i.e. ‘most scientists believe …’ or ‘most
of the evidence points to …’—there is
huge resistance to ideas that challenge the dominant paradigm. As if scientific
truth is arrived at by weighing up the number of arguments anyway.
GM: Thus, young-earth creationists need to examine all the evidence,
not just selective evidences that can be construed to support their view.
CW: Sigh—another misrepresentation. Are Moore’s readers
really being asked to believe that we don’t examine the evidence that opposes
our viewpoint, as if we close our eyes to it? There are probably thousands of pages
of this very website devoted to examining and dealing with/refuting such evidences,
not to mention a book refuting Ross, which refutation
could not have been accomplished without examining his claims! We do so because,
like Paul, we seek to ‘demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God’
(2
Cor. 10:5).
In any case, the implication of Moore’s comments here is that evidence ‘speaks
for itself’, a naïve 1950s view of the philosophy of science. I.e. if
only one can put all the ‘evidence’ (i.e. the ‘facts’) on
the table, the ‘truth will out’. But this ignores the following:
-
Evidence is always capable of being interpreted in differing ways. A clear demonstration
of that is found in the case of this particular find; there is remarkable similarity
in the way in which long-agers are ‘squirming at the squish’, putting
on a brave face by claiming that, well, it shows that the stuff can last millions
of years after all, must be some unknown mechanism, etc. It crucially depends on
one’s axioms or starting points. For example,
we would love to get hold of an actual sample of this (or similar) dino soft tissue,
because we think it highly likely that carbon dating would show a ‘radiocarbon
age’ of thousands of years, not the ‘infinite age’ that the Moore/RTB
long-age scenario would have to predict. But even when such a result came in (as
it has for many other specimens supposedly millions of years old), someone committed
to long ages could come up with some ‘unknown’ mechanism (as we saw
in this article) to try to ‘explain it away’. That is exactly
what has happened with the young radiocarbon dates in
coal and even in a number of diamonds, for instance.
When YECs do that for something we can’t yet explain, it is seen as evasive.
Evidently there is one rule for us and another for our opponents. But in reality,
it simply demonstrates the way (historical) science operates. The weight one gives
to various evidences, i.e. which ones are given credence over others, is always
going to be a function of one’s starting axioms or beliefs—spoken or
unspoken, conscious or subliminal. If only RTB would realize that the key is to
start with biblical axioms, not with secular ones that are, at their core, antibiblical.
-
More significantly, the Bible itself teaches that both nature and our minds are
fallen, and therefore there will be a tendency for fallen man to reason in ways
that reject biblically revealed realities (Romans
1:18–32). Whenever we elevate the reasoning of fallen mankind, with
its axioms starting outside the Bible, above that of the Word of God itself (consider
Ross’s claim that ‘nature’ is a 67th book of the Bible),
problems are inevitable. It is no wonder that once one compromises at one crucial
point, one ends up in an increasing quagmire, having to pile towers of distortions
upon distortions of the meaning of the biblical text in order to try to extricate
oneself from the inevitable contradictions.
When I was an atheist at university in the early 1970s, smug in my long-age/evolutionary
beliefs, it was a creationist (YEC) book that God used to draw me to Him. The thing
that most powerfully affected me was that here, for the first time, were intelligent
Christians writing on origins who were dealing honestly and unashamedly
with what the Bible taught, accepting it, and not pretending it was saying something
other than what it so clearly does. It was soon very clear that the reason for my
unbelief was not the ‘scientific evidence’ at all, but something deeper.
There is ample evidence to support the straightforward view of Genesis history,
as believed by the Lord Jesus and the apostles, to make it clear that biblical
faith is not some blind ‘leap in the dark’. I.e. there is ‘reason
for the hope’ (1
Peter 3:15). This squishy dinosaur find is just one more confirmation.
Related articles
Further reading
References and notes
- Moore’s reference list was omitted to avoid confusion with
my own reference numbering, but a superscripted ‘[ref]’ is shown wherever
a Moore reference originally appeared in the text. Return to text.
- Sid Perkins,
Old Softy: Tyrannosaurus fossil yields flexible tissue, Science News167(13):195,
26 March 2005. Return to text.
- Sid Perkins,
Old Softy: Tyrannosaurus fossil yields flexible tissue, Science News167(13):195,
26 March 2005. Return to text.
- Amos, J.,
Earliest salamanders discovered, BBC News, 31 March 2003.
Return to text.
- Remember this is not human tissue; our red blood cells lose their
nucleus. Return to text.
- Bryan Sykes, Nature, Vol. 352, 1 August 1991, p. 381.
Return to text.
- This is affirmed by the quote attributed to her in Science261:260,
9 July 1994: ‘It was exactly like looking at a slice of modern bone.
But, of course, I couldn’t believe it. I said to the lab technician:
“The bones, after all, are 65 million years old. How could blood cells
survive that long?”’ Return to text.
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