We're watching you closely!
Posted on 07/31/2014 2:58:12 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Planet Earth knows nothing of Creation
Sounds like he were doing his job and the students a service.
Look - I (personally) think young Earth creationism is total BS. But - by bringing up an alternate point of view he were doing something that far more teachers should: teaching the students to examine the evidence and THINK. Not just vomit up whatever textbook the professor happened to write last summer.
There's his problem right there. He was a lab tech. Going off and speaking at a conference (any conference, but a YEC conference is going to draw more attention) and holding himself out as a "Biologist at CSU-Northridge" was not a smart career move, to put it mildly.
You’ll have to explain what that sentence means.
Hate to be the grammar nazi but what in Hades is going on with this “he were” business. The past tense of “he is” is “he was”, not “he were”.
Habit, sorry. I often dictate to the computer rather than typing, since I talk fast and type slow. Using were instead of was is part of the local dialect I grew up with, and I forget to correct it a lot of the time. Can’t catch it with spell check because it’s a valid word.
One of those annoying brain farts we all get from time to time.
That’s because it’s a chunk of lifeless dirt.
Roger that. I wondered if spell check might not be involved somehow...
Out of curiosity, what part of the country are you from that used “were” in funny places as part of the dialect?
I’m English - North Yorkshire WAS where I was raised (nearly slipped!). There are all sorts of odd (or very odd) ways of saying things there, really old and harking back to Old Saxon and Viking, and your mind just accepts them. The stuff you learn as a kid never really goes away.
Have you ate, instead of have you eaten, for example.
I’m pretty scrupulous about using spell check, but if that red line isn’t there, just don’t notice sometimes.
I couldn’t create a typewriter if you gave me a million :)
Oh, okay, English. Now it’s all making sense. You guys do have see some funky archaic-isms. Sometimes English dialect quirks aren’t so much wrong as just a few centuries out of date.
Oddly - according to many linguists, which is a really odd job to have, you Americans have a purer form of the original language, say from Shakespeare’s time. Your pronunciation, at least. Except for aluminium - that’s just barbaric the way you butcher an innocent word :)
If people want to say he was fired for his religious beliefs then fine. I'd say that if he was spreading young earth creationism in an academic setting then I'd say he was fired because he didn't know his field.
Having said that, I'm puzzled by these goings-on. Did he in fact find soft tissue in bones that should have been completely fossilized? That is, tissue that hadn't become fossilized? That's a crucial issue, but it seems to have become lost in the debate over his alleged religious beliefs. If true, it's an important scientific finding, with lots of implications for what we think we know about biology, chemistry, and a lot of other things.
Finally, I'm disturbed that researchers were digging up bones only to break them. Surely there are better ways of getting samples from their interiors than destroying the bones. Doesn't sound like good science to me.
RE: . I’d say that if he was spreading young earth creationism in an academic setting then I’d say he was fired because he didn’t know his field.
From the article:
” During the interview process he informed the interview panel (two professors and Mr. Krohmer) that he had published positively about young-earth creationism.”
Why did they hire him knowing this?
RE: Did he in fact find soft tissue in bones that should have been completely fossilized? That is, tissue that hadn’t become fossilized?
From CBS News Local:
EXCERPT:
While at the Hell Creek Formation excavation site in Montana, researcher Mark Armitage discovered what he believed to be the largest triceratops horn ever unearthed at the site, according to attorney Brad Dacus of Pacific Justice Institute.
Upon examination of the horn under a high-powered microscope back at CSUN, Dacus says Armitage was “fascinated” to find soft tissue on the sample – a discovery Bacus said stunned members of the school’s biology department and even some students“because it indicates that dinosaurs roamed the earth only thousands of years in the past rather than going extinct 60 million years ago.”
You can find an abstract of the paper Mark Hollis Armitage wrote here:
TITLE:
Soft sheets of fibrillar bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops horridus.
Department of Biology, California State University, 18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330-8303, USA. Electronic address: . Acta histochemica (Impact Factor: 1.61). 02/2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.acthis.2013.01.001
Just for your information,
Here’s an episode of Ian Juby’s show that contains an interview with Mark Armitage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abhgreIBKZ0&index=19&list=UU23yiJV4Bkagj5dkH-UyHFA
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