Dinosaur Shocker (YEC say dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years)

Smithsonian Magazine ^ | May 1, 2006 | Helen Fields

[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.

[Elsie]

 

Oh boy!!  MORE heads!

 

---

Mammal-Like Reptiles

As previously stated, a succession of transitional fossils exists that link reptiles (Class Reptilia) and mammals (Class Mammalia). These particular reptiles are classifie as Subclass Synapsida. Presently, this is the best example of th e transformation of one major higher taxon into another. The morphologic changes that took place are well documented by fossils, beginning with animals essentially 100% reptilian and resulting in animals essentially 100% mammalian. Therefore, I have chosen this as the example to summarize in more detail (Table 1, Fig. 1).  

Comparisons     M. Eyes =           ?           Nose =           ?        Teeth incisors = ?       K. Eyes =           ?           Nose =           pointy    Teeth incisors = smaller fangs        J. Eyes =           Medium    Nose =           stubby        Teeth incisors = BIGGER fangs        I. Eyes =           Medium    Nose =           more pointy    Teeth incisors = big fangs       H. Eyes =           Bigger    Nose =           more blunt    Teeth incisors = Even more          G. Eyes =           real SMALL    Nose =           Real pointy    Teeth incisors = More           F. Eyes =           Smaller    Nose =           Blunt    Teeth incisors = Thin, less         E. Eyes =           HUGE!    Nose =           pointy, again    Teeth incisors = Smaller         D. Eyes =           Smaller    Nose =           Holes bigger    Teeth incisors = Bigger         C. Eyes =           Huge, again!    Nose =           broader    Teeth incisors = very small         B. Eyes =           less huge    Nose =           narrower    Teeth incisors = ??         A. Eyes =           big    Nose =           rounded    Teeth incisors = small

Skulls and jaws of synapsid reptiles and mammals; left column side view of skull; center column top view of skull; right column side view of lower jaw. Hylonomus modified from Carroll (1964, Figs. 2,6; 1968, Figs. 10-2, 10-5; note that Hylonomus is a protorothyrod, not a synapsid). Archaeothyris modified from Reisz (1972, Fig. 2). Haptodus modified from Currie (1977, Figs, 1a, 1b; 1979, Figs. 5a, 5b). Sphenacodo n modified from Romer & Price (1940, Fig. 4f), Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 16);note: Dimetrodon substituted for top view; modified from Romer & Price, 1940, pl. 10. Biarmosuchus modified from Ivakhnenko et al. (1997, pl. 65, Figs. 1a, 1B, 2); Alin & Hopson (1992; Fig. 28.4c); Sigogneau & Tchudinov (1972, Figs. 1, 15). Eoarctops modified from Broom (1932, Fig. 35a); Boonstra (1969, Fig. 18). Pristerognathus modified from Broom (1932, Figs 17a, b,c); Boonstra (1963, Fig. 5d). Procynosuchus modified from Allin & Hopson (1992, Fig. 28.4e); Hopson (1987, Fig. 5c); Brink (1963, Fig. 10a); Kemp (1979, Fig. 1); Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 14). Thrinaxodon modified from Allin & Hopson (1992, Fig. 28.4f);Parrington (1946, Fig. 1); Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 13). Probainognathus modified from Allin & Hopson (1992, Fig. 28.4g); Romer (1970, Fig. 1); Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 12). Morga nucodon modified from Kermack, Mussett, & Rigney (1981, Figs. 95, 99a; 1973, Fig. 7a); Allin (1975, p. 3, Fig. 11). Asioryctes modified from Carroll (1988, Fig. 20-3b). Abbreviations: ag = angular; ar = articular; cp = coronoid process; d = dentary; f = lateral temporal fenestra; j = jugal; mm = attachment site for mammalian jaw muscles; o = eye socket; po = post orbital; q = quadrate; rl = reflected lamina; sq = squamosal; ty = tympanic. .

 

 

 

---

---

 

Are you convinced yet?

 

Oscillating eye sizes,

head shapes that shift back and forth,

teeth that are large, then small, then large again.

 

Yeah; I believe this stuff!

---

---

(The chart is from The Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation" by Clifford A. Cuffey. It is on part 5 of a multipart article. The beginning of the article is here.  )

There are some Evo's who think... "It effectively demolishes the entire creationist argument. Excellent reading!"

After seeing these pix; do you?

[Liberal Classic]

Some yakuza from the National Adademy will be around my house tonight to see about my membership fee. If I don't pay up, they'll have the first digit of my pinky.

[Elsie]

Yes.

Ok; thanks for the 'data'.

[Virginia-American]

[God and genocide]

Joshua

[Elsie]

The God I believe in would never commit genocide.

Can you describe this god for me?

[Right Wing Professor]

You can't calculate how much 87Sr was present at the beginning without first *assuming* that it is relatively proportional w/ 84Sr, 86Sr & 88Sr. Because of this assumption, you are *assuming* the amount of 87Sr that was present when the isochron was formed. Maybe that doesn't qualify as an assumption in your mind, but it does in mine.

No. You know that it does not exceed 7%, because that's the current abundance, and it's increasing with time. We understand isotope fractionation processes pretty well, and we know they're very weak for a divalent ion like Sr²⁺. We also can extrapolate back the abundance of ⁸⁷Sr to the time the rock was formed, based on the known concentration of ⁸⁷Rb in the lithosphere. There will be some error associated with that, but not much, becuase the abundance of ⁸⁷Sr is quite low in the first place, and it is formed very slowly. So you certainly know it's in a very narrow range somewhat below 7% of all strontium. So if you know the abundance of the other isotopes, you can calculate the initial abundance of ⁸⁷Sr at any time in the earth's history, probably to better than 1% accuracy.

And yes, they did find excess helium. You do the same thing when you assume how much helium should be present. Why criticize your opponent for the same thing that you do?

No, they did not. They found less helium than must have been produced by radioactive decay. We know how much helium was produced, because we know the amount of uranium that decayed to lead.

See Setterfield. Setterfield is a fruit-loop whose ideas have ben rejected by the scientific community and even by the more respectable YECcers.

When 3 of 8 isochron samples by Dalrymple return dates of 34 billion years, there are no good 'independent' reasons for discarding these anomalies.

Let's look at what he actually said, shall we? The final example listed in Table 2 is a supposed 34 billion-year Rb-Sr isochron age on diabase of the Pahrump Group from Panamint Valley, California, and is referenced to a book by Faure and Powell (50). Again, Woodmorappe (134) badly misrepresents the facts. The “isochron” that Woodmorappe (134) refers to is shown in Figure 6 as it appears in Faure and Powell (50). The data do not fall on any straight line and do not, therefore, form an isochron. The original data are from a report by Wasserburg and others (130), who plotted the data as shown but did not draw a 34-billion-year isochron on the diagram. The “isochrons” lines were drawn by Faure and Powell (50) as “reference isochrons” solely for the purpose of showing the magnitude of the scatter in the data.

As discussed above, one feature of the Rb-Sr isochron diagram is that, to a great extent, it is self-diagnostic. The scatter of the data in Figure 6 shows clearly that the sample has been an open system to 87Sr (and perhaps to other isotopes as well) and that no meaningful Rb-Sr age can be calculated from these data. This conclusion was clearly stated by both Wasserburg and others (130) and by Faure and Powell (50). The interpretation that the data represent a 34 billion-year isochron is solely Woodmorappe’s (134) and is patently wrong.

The only difference is that science hasn't figured out all of the problems w/ isochron dating yet. But they are starting to come out and that's not good for you.

The two references you've given citing 'problems' are 17 and 22 years old. Hardly 'starting to come out'!

[Liberal Classic]

That's what I get for trying to talk to you. A slap in the face.

[Elsie]

Two words: Flood. Joshua.

(Psst... He hasn't yet defined his god.)

[webstersII]

"I mostly engage in it so that like-minded people can benefit from my sources and experience to strengthen their witness. "

I've definitely been enjoying the discussion on this thread, especially the parts about dating. Thanks for your input.

It's amazing to me how science has gotten so corrupted these days to the point that supposition equates to reproducible data. Your comment "Experimental facts' are *only* valid for the time period covered by the experiments" seems absolutely obvious but is quite an affront to many scientists with their wild extrapolations. And the more you point this out, the more irate they become in their insistence that they only deal with the facts.

[GourmetDan]

Sheesh, 'natural selection'.

Now there's a tautology for you. What is the most fit? Why that which has survived. In this environment, that one survives, in that environment that one does. Fitness has no real meaning and is cherry-picked as necessary to support whatever point is being proposed.

Whole papers have been written trying to convince the faithful that natural selection isn't a tautology, but in the end it's still "the survival of the survivors".

If you want to believe 'simple concepts' with 'tough' details, be my guest. But you are operating on more faith more than any creationist.

Typically, those who believe the 'scientists' have fallen into the trap that our observable reality can *only* be explained by methodological naturalism (science).

Now that is just fine for exercises like building a national power grid or harnessing the power of the atom, but it fails miserably at explaining unobserved history because it is limited to a single viewpoint, that of methodological naturalism.

Just for fun, let's assume that you are, in fact, observing a supernatural creation. Now, limit your acceptable explanations of this supernatural creation to methodological naturalism (science) and guess how likely are you to arrive at the correct theory? That's right, it's impossible.

The reason it is impossible is because you limited your potential explanations to purely natural models 'a priori'. That is exactly what science does. It is true *by definition*, not as a proof.

Once the scientists get you to accept that initial assumption that only 'scientific' (methodologically natural) explanations are acceptable, you are deceived. It matters not what crazy theories they promote, they are the only game in town as defined by their own rules.

Convenient, eh?

The only key is not to accept the initial assumption. Then you can begin to recognize all of the pure assumptions that underlie these 'theories' and expose them for what they are. Imaginitive wishful thinking.

[js1138]

I was agreeing with him.

[Elsie]

A slap in the face.

One man's slap is another man's poke in the ribs.

Sorry you took it so hard, it wasn't intended THAT abusive.

Got any data yet?

[2nsdammit]

Two MORE words: Folk. Tales.

[Elsie]

I was agreeing with him.

Funny way to do it.

[Mamzelle]

Ya'll must have that on your desktop, ready to handy-spam.

[js1138]

I don't think Joshua is a folk tale. I just think he was a liar.

[2nsdammit]

Oops, I was wrong. You're a proselytizing troll.

[Mamzelle]

The point is to post the same thing as often as possible. That's how they "score"--like notches on a belt.

[Liberal Classic]

The chart is from The Fossil Record: Evolution or "Scientific Creation" by Clifford A. Cuffey. It is on part 5 of a multipart article. The beginning of the article is here.

In the interest of full-disclosure, the source of the chart in Elsie's post is the New Orleans Geological Society. They published two articles written by Clifford Cuffey, and copies of these articles are hosted with permission on the website of the Gulf Coast Section of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists. They're a small professional organization under the The Society for Sedimentary Geology.

Here is their introduction to the article:

The American educational system has been under attack for some time as doing a poor job of educating students; many of the criticisms are very justified. However, parts of the cure are worse than disease. One of the cures that religous Christian fundamentalists propose is the teaching of creationism as a viable alternative to evolution. Creationists generally state that they do not deny the tenets of science, just that evolution did not occur. Unfortunately, this comment is generally not true: if you are a true Creationist, you also deny some fundamental principles of physics. Once this is accepted, science becomes witchcraft.

Many creationists wrap themselves in the robe of rightousness claiming their belief in the name of God. Several years ago, the Pope declared that the Catholic Church accepts the fact that religion must agree with science. I can not think of any single fact which shows more clearly that one has nothing to do with the other.

Evolution is Not Anti-Religous. The hostility of creationists toward the sciences that deal with human and cosmic origins stems from fundamentalist conviction that evolution threatens religion. This is not true.

The sciences concerned with the past can discover much of what happened long agol how, where, and when events occurred. But they can not discover the purpose or destiny of human existence. Such ideas lie within the mind of each individual and are the domain of religion, mortality, and philosophy. Science can not, and does not, pretend that it will ever be able to answer all the questions of life.

The great philosopheers and scientists who illuminated the 17th and 18th centuries- so called Age of Reason- taught that science was a way of learning about God by studying His creation, and this view is still held by many religous Americans today. To attack science in the name of religious orthodoxy is detrimental to both science and religion.

Because of the seriousness of the situation, the New Orleans Geological Society has published two articles on the subject written by Clifford Cuffey. We salute their foresight and courage. We are pleased to reproduce the articles here with their permission.

[GourmetDan]

No, you don't. You *assume* that it is equally distributed and you *assume* that it is increasing at the same rate. More assumptions than you can shake a stick at.

And yes, the 34 billion year examples do not 'form an isochron' because they are thrown out. The reason that they are thrown out is because they do not form an isochron (a linear distribution).

Circular reasoning and truth by definition.