I’ll put it to you this way. If I wanted someone to design or consult on a piece of machinery, a mechanical system, Dr. Brown might be a very good choice, but if I broke my leg or needed open heart surgery, I wouldn’t be calling “Dr”. Brown for a consult; I’d look for a very good MD, an orthopedic or thoracic surgeon. If I owned an oil drilling company and needed a geologist, I wouldn’t be calling Dr. Brown for a consult; I’d look for someone with a Ph.D. in geology. If I owned a cable company and wanted to launch and maintain a communications satellite, I wouldn’t be calling Dr. Brown for a consult; I’d look for someone with a Ph.D in satellite communications and one with a Ph.D. in rocket science. And if I needed new brakes for my car, while Dr. Brown is after all a mechanical engineer, I wouldn’t be ringing him up to work on my car.
Just because someone is bright and has a Ph.D. in a particular field, that doesn’t make them experts or knowledgeable in every other field.
I notice this quite a lot with creationist websites and articles; often some of the people writing these articles have doctorates or BA’s or MA’s but in areas totally unrelated to the area of science they are writing about and have no experience in that other field, no peer reviewed papers, no field work, just opinion pieces written for creationist websites or self published books. Or they have a BA in Bible Studies like the author of the article in this post. Creationist websites like to have people with initials behind their names to post articles because it lends an air of credibility. But often when you look at those initials and read their bios, they, much like Dr. Brown, are writing about fields well outside their area of expertise or they received their degrees from very low level schools 2 year or community colleges and immediately after graduation, go to work for orgs like Creation Research Institute or Answers in Genesis writing blog posts. I would also note that just because a person has a BA, MA or Ph.D. that doesn’t mean their research or conclusions are always correct even if within their field. That’s why science demands peer review and replication of results. And of course there are always cranks and kooks, even among seemingly smart and well educated people. This is why you have to look beyond jus the initials behind their names.
Creationists also like to quote actual scientific research and research papers but they often quote them totally out of context or make conclusions that are contrary to what the actual piece they are quoting from actually said – it’s called “cherry picking”.
Your post #25 - “Speaking of stench - Mary Schweitzer and her group noted that this particular dig site smelled like rotting flesh...” is a good example of this twisting of words or inventing things that are not there – nowhere in the link to the article you posted do the words “stench” or “rotting” or “smell” or “odor” ever appear. You and other creationists would like that to be there, you’d like to picture big chunks of red dino rotting smelly meat clinging to the bones but that is not what Mary Schweitzer and her team found.
And she doesn’t like you creationists high jacking and twisting her research. From the article you linked to and conveniently ignore:
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.”
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.”
You might want to read this:
While the creationists are drooling and slobbering all over themselves, Schweitzer has a new paper in Bone (subscription needed), Molecular analyses of dinosaur osteocytes support the presence of endogenous molecules, which describes her discovery of “soft, transparent microstructures in dinosaur bone” and which explains how such DNA evidence (but not red meat, of course) has been preserved for so long.
http://sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/dinosaur-fossils-found-with-hot-red-meat/
If you could be bothered to do any real research on Dr. Walt Brown I think you’d find that he does have many credentials beyond his PhD and he did indeed work in the field of ‘evolutionary’ science [left b/c he was highly disturbed by the amount of fabrication and outright lying by his peers].
Furthermore, once any scientist goes against the evo meme they will not be published nor peer-reviewed by the evo scientific periodical gate-keepers. Talk about close-minded - reminds me of the global warming accepters!
I did not re-read the article posted about Mary Schweitzer from some time ago and so if my memory failed me, sorry. But I do recall some other article regarding this same dig site being referred to as smelling of rotting flesh. Google it yourself.
Lastly, I’m not taking her research out of context. Rather she contradicts herself at the time of the article and later even invents a just-so story to try to describe how any soft tissue can remain intact for such a long time - an outright distortion of the truth to support a theory that deserved to die out long long ago. A method the evos use time and time again to explain away the problems inherent in long ages evolution.
Ever notice how the cherry-picking you accuse creation followers of doing can be shown historically [and still ongoing] thousands of times greater being done with the evolution hypocritical just-so story-telling?
Read ‘10 Icons of Evolution’ or better yet explain how honest and forthright evolution believers are being with panspermia or punctuated equilibrium? Or the Cambrian explosion, piltdown man, etc. - the list is ridculously long and never stops growing.
Not every one bows to the altar of Satan and the Evolutionary Church.
(hey wake up)
A PhD does not guarantee intelligent/rational thought.....I know......(that goes for quacks in the medical field..I know a few of them too)
Note: Your argument for credentials is False, since there are many Creationist that have
appropriate” degrees, but it is also FALSE to argue that someone without a degree (in that field) cannot use the work of someone else who does...etc.