https://biologos.org/articles/not-so-dry-bones-an-interview-with-mary-schweitzer
Were you nervous before publishing about soft tissue in dinosaur bones?
Yes, very. After we had the data, I didn’t publish for over a year. I was terrified. First of all, I don’t like attention or the spotlight and I knew this was going to get a lot of attention. I’m not surprised that the response of the community has been skeptical, and I guess I’m grateful for that because the scrutiny has made me much more cautious and therefore, made me a much better scientist. I go above what is usually required to validate my data before I publish—my colleagues are just doing their jobs to be skeptical, a scientist’s job is not to prove things but to question them.
One thing that does bother me, though, is that young earth creationists take my research and use it for their own message, and I think they are misleading people about it. Pastors and evangelists, who are in a position of leadership, are doubly responsible for checking facts and getting things right, but they have misquoted me and misrepresented the data. They’re looking at this research in terms of a false dichotomy [science versus faith] and that doesn’t do anybody any favors. Still, it’s not surprising they’ve reacted this way—the bone that I first studied I got from Jack, and when I gave him our initial results he was rather angry—I called him a few times and by my third call he said, “Dammit Mary the creationists are just going to love you.” But I said, “This is just what the data say— I’m not making it up.”
I don’t think my being a Christian has anything to do with the fact that the data I’m proposing is challenging. I’ve only had one or two people say they don’t trust my science because of my faith. So if I’m doing science according to the rules, which I’m doing to honor God, and I’m aware that anything and everything I do could be proven wrong tomorrow, then my job is to be as careful and cautious as I can and not overstate my data. All I can do is the best that I can do.
So, that leaves us with two alternatives for interpretation: either the dinosaurs aren’t as old as we think they are, or maybe we don’t know exactly how these things get preserved. We’ve known for a while that skin gets preserved. It’s the same with anything controversial—for example, it was decades ago now that somebody first proposed that continents move, and everybody laughed and said that shouldn’t be possible. Nowadays if you say that isn’t true you’d be a laughingstock. DNA, too—nobody wanted to believe that DNA was the carrier of biological information because it’s too simple a molecule.
Any time you turn over a theory that has taken a lot of work to establish, of course challenging that theory should be hard. That’s why when we were preparing to publish, we did these things again and again and again. Even so, people criticized me saying we should have had more data, but there was no way to get more data without more funding and no way to get more funding without publishing our initial results. The scientific response was exactly what it should be: a “wait and see” response. I have a lot of respect for the people who wouldn’t just immediately accept our results.
Even now, I wouldn’t say it’s widely accepted that what we’re seeing is soft tissue from dinosaurs. What I wish would happen is more people would follow up on this. These results are not trivial to attain, and it requires a lot of repetition on specialized instruments. Because we cross so many disciplines in the effort to get molecular information from fossil bone, I think it’s easier to publish in other areas. Also, we’ve found that the longer a bone sits on the shelf, the less likely you are to find anything, so museum specimens, no matter how ‘pretty’, are not the best for our work. Bones that become fossils have been in stasis with the environment for millions of years, and then when we dig them up they are exposed to light and oxygen—which makes the degradation that had been arrested start again. I don’t think what we’re doing here will really be accepted widely, until lots of different groups are doing it regularly. But it’s hard, it’s controversial, it’s expensive, and it’s done inside in a lab—and most paleontologists like to be outside, in the field.
And the speed of light is slowing down ... but too many ‘scientists’ still choose to disbelieve it.
Brave woman, Mary Schweitzer.
She did exactly what a scientist is supposed to do. Follow the data.
She and Jan Smit are heroes of mine. Her for reporting her findings, him for stepping aside and giving full credit to Luis and Walter Alvarez. He had done all the work, and had all the data, only a case of mono prevented him from reviewing the data and publishing first.
No scientist should care or consider what a creationist might say in response to their findings - or what anyone might say.
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