Posted on 09/16/2009 9:03:13 AM PDT by GodGunsGuts
Fresh Fossil Feather Nanostructures
by Brian Thomas, M.S.*
Bird feathers can contain pigmentation for a wide range of colors, with specific molecules reflecting certain hues when light touches them. They also can display “structural” colors, where the thicknesses of layers of cells and connective tissues are fine-tuned to refract certain colors.
Scientists recently described structural coloration that is still clearly discernible in well-preserved fossil feathers. Why do these fossil feathers have their original cell structures laid out in the original patterns if they are millions of years old?
In 1995, paleontologists Derek Briggs and Paul Davis provided an overview of fossil feathers from the 40 or so places on the globe where they were known to exist.1 Among their findings was that 69 percent of feather fossils are preserved not as impressions, but as carbon traces. This was verified by comparing the proportions of carbon in both the surrounding carbonaceous rock and the fossil within it, to the proportions of organically-derived carbon from the same items. They found that there was more organic carbon in the fossil than in the stone.
At that time, the researchers thought the carbon came from bacteria that had degraded the feather material and then remained placed in the feather’s outline. But 13 years later, Briggs and other colleagues showed clear evidence that these “bacterial cells” were actually melanosomes―the same microscopic, sausage-shaped, dark pigment-containing structures in today’s bird feathers―from the original feather.2
This means that the organic carbon in the melanosomes somehow avoided decay for millions of years, which contradicts “the well-known fact that the majority of organic molecules decay in thousands of years.”3
Briggs and his colleagues recently described fossil feathers from the German Messel Oil Shale deposits, which are famous for their remarkably well-preserved fossils. These not only contained organic carbon from melanosomes (not bacteria), but the melanosomes were still organized in their original spacing and layering. Thus, the “metallic greenish, bluish or coppery” colors that can be seen from different viewing angles, producing an iridescent sheen, may very well be similar to that of the original bird’s plumage.4
Biologists already know that “in order to produce a particular [structural] colour, the keratin thickness must be accurate to within about 0.05 μm (one twenty thousandth of one millimetre!).”5 Although the keratin had decayed from these fossil feathers, its layers of melanosomes remained laid out in similarly precise thicknesses. Thus, not only was the color preserved, but the melanosomes were still organized to within micrometers of their original positions.
Evolutionary geologists maintain that the Messel Shale was formed 47 million years ago. But with these colorful feather fossils—which retain not only the original molecules inside their original melanosomes, but also the architectural layout of these structures—evolutionists must invent some kind of magical preservation process that simply isn’t observed in the laboratory or in nature.
Without the assumption of millions of years, however, the fossil data begin to make much more sense. Fresh-looking fossil features point to a young world.
References
* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.
Article posted on September 16, 2009.
Gezz, even Newton knew that.
I guess we can add DNA sequences to the long list of things you’re clueless about.
Correction; they were 99.5% human, just like chimps are 95% human.
How kind of you. I was hoping not to mention snake, dancing, speaking in tongues, a lot of stuff in the Bible that taken literally is absolutely crazy in its own right.
And more than a bit frightening.
The whole human-chimp similarity thing is undergoing substantial revision:
http://www.icr.org/article/human-chimp-similarities-common-ancestry/
Or not. To simplify:
You often refer to young-looking fossils as evidence of a young world.
What about the old-looking fossils? What do they point to?
Haven’t you heard?...evo-atheists are amongst the most irrational and superstious groupings in the country:
Wall Street Journal
Look Who’s Irrational Now
By MOLLIE ZIEGLER HEMINGWAY
“You can’t be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you’re drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god,” comedian and atheist Bill Maher said earlier this year on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”
On the “Saturday Night Live” season debut last week, homeschooling families were portrayed as fundamentalists with bad haircuts who fear biology. Actor Matt Damon recently disparaged Sarah Palin by referring to a transparently fake email that claimed she believed that dinosaurs were Satan’s lizards. And according to prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, traditional religious belief is “dangerously irrational.” From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.
“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.
This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener,” skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely.
Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn’t. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students.
We can’t even count on self-described atheists to be strict rationalists. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s monumental “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” that was issued in June, 21% of self-proclaimed atheists believe in either a personal God or an impersonal force. Ten percent of atheists pray at least weekly and 12% believe in heaven.
On Oct. 3, Mr. Maher debuts “Religulous,” his documentary that attacks religious belief. He talks to Hasidic scholars, Jews for Jesus, Muslims, polygamists, Satanists, creationists, and even Rael — prophet of the Raelians — before telling viewers: “The plain fact is religion must die for man to live.”
But it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O’Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman — a quintuple bypass survivor — to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn’t accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: “I don’t believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory.” He has told CNN’s Larry King that he won’t take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn’t even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.
Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: “It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can’t see things as they are.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178219865054585.html
Pseudoscience from the Morris club is like reading the Weekly World News.
“The people who should be embarrassed are the howl-at-the-moon crazies who (like Richard Dawkins) acknowledge that biology is the study of super complex bio-nano machines that far surpass human-level technology and give every appearance of having been designed by a superior intelligence, but then turn around and try to convince us that the obvious is all just a massive illusion created by Darwin’s mindless natural selection god. Now that’s embarrassing!”
—Yeah, it’s totally embarrassing to actually investigate something and revise beliefs instead of just assuming whatever shallow first impressions arise.
I never believed this could be the case until I started reading your threads.
Who would have thought that someone could post this and actually expect it to be taken seriously?
The recent publication of a full-length Neandertal mitochondrial genome has been generating a lot of interest. The paper concluded that Neandertals are outside the range of modern human variation, and are therefore something different. This is a challenge to the standard creationist position that both Neandertals and modern humans are descended from the eight people who survived the Flood. Can we still include Neandertals in the human family tree? Are they descended from Noah? Does this single Neandertal sequence invalidate the Genesis accounts of Creation, the Flood, or the Tower of Babel?
http://creation.com/taking-a-crack-at-the-neandertal-mitochondrial-genome
What’s the matter, are you so paranoid that we might be right that you are afraid to read the scientists from the other side?
PS ICR does not equal the Discovery Institute. When will the evos realize that Creationists and IDers are not the same?
About 50% of the country, and a far higher percentage of conservatives, take that very seriously.
Why would I be paranoid? Your silly websites are the only places where this rubbish is even taken seriously. It's the equivalent of being paranoid that Star Wars fans are taking over NASA because one or two of them wrote a paper about the scientific basis for hyperspace and light sabers.
PS ICR does not equal the Discovery Institute. When will the evos realize that Creationists and IDers are not the same?
It's actually worse. Morris' group makes the Discovery Institute look like the Manhatten Project.
And the young-looking ones?
They are only young-looking to someone who assumes creation theory to be true.
The one proof is no stronger than the other.
Regardless, the percentage of Americans and conservatives that take something seriously has no bearing on its veracity.
“The FOXP2 gene supports Neandertals being fully human
http://creation.com/foxp2-gene-neandertals-human";
From the site:
“The FOXP2 proteins are identical in chimp, gorilla and rhesus monkey. Orangutan and mouse differ by only two amino acids outside the Q regions ... In contrast to these five sequences, the human version differs at two positions.”
—Considering how extremely slow the FOXP2 varies, even the most extreme of those who believe Neandertals should be considered a wholly separate species would have been astonished if the FOXP2 gene showed any differences at all between humans and Neandertals. The genetic evidence (so far), and their anatomy supports them being a human sub-species (IMO).
Do you think it’s possible that hard core evolutionists and hard core creationists are both right and and wrong?
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