Biological Information and Intelligent Design: New functions are everywhere

Faith & Science Conversation
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@grog,

I know you hate this part … but it just takes a little bit of reading. But the hardest part is explaining why we don’t find dinosaur bodies like we find mammoth bodies… not all dinosaurs lived in the tropics… or why we don’t find 6000 year old mammoths locked up in rock like they were dinosaur fossils!

Controversial T. Rex Soft Tissue Find Finally Explained
Artwork by Scott Hartman reveals the bone structure of T. rex.
Credit: © Scott Hartman / All rights reserved

The research, headed by Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, explains how proteins — and possibly even DNA — can survive millennia. Schweitzer and her colleagues first raised this question in 2005, when they found the seemingly impossible: soft tissue preserved inside the leg of an adolescent T. rex unearthed in Montana.

“What we found was unusual, because it was still soft and still transparent and still flexible,” Schweitzer told LiveScience.

Then, in 2007, Schweitzer and her colleagues analyzed the chemistry of the T. rex proteins. They found the proteins really did come from dinosaur soft tissue. The tissue was collagen, they reported in the journal Science, and it shared similarities with bird collagen — which makes sense, as modern birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs such as T. rex.

The researchers also analyzed other fossils for the presence of soft tissue, and found it was present in about half of their samples going back to the Jurassic Period, which lasted from 145.5 million to 199.6 million years ago, Schweitzer said.

“The obvious question, though, was how soft, pliable tissue could survive for millions of years. In a new study published today (Nov. 26) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Schweitzer thinks she has the answer: Iron.”

“Iron is an element present in abundance in the body, particularly in the blood, where it is part of the protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. Iron is also highly reactive with other molecules, so the body keeps it locked up tight, bound to molecules that prevent it from wreaking havoc on the tissues.”

“After death, though, iron is let free from its cage. It forms minuscule iron nanoparticles and also generates free radicals, which are highly reactive molecules thought to be involved in aging.”

“The free radicals cause proteins and cell membranes to tie in knots,” Schweitzer said. “They basically act like formaldehyde.”

“Formaldehyde, of course, preserves tissue. It works by linking up, or cross-linking, the amino acids that make up proteins, which makes those proteins more resistant to decay.”

“Schweitzer and her colleagues found that dinosaur soft tissue is closely associated with iron nanoparticles in both the T. rex and another soft-tissue specimen from Brachylophosaurus canadensis, a type of duck-billed dinosaur. They then tested the iron-as-preservative idea using modern ostrich blood vessels.”

" They soaked one group of blood vessels in iron-rich liquid made of red blood cells and another group in water. The blood vessels left in water turned into a disgusting mess within days. The blood vessels soaked in red blood cells remain recognizable after sitting at room temperature for two years."

Searching for soft tissue
"Dinosaurs’ iron-rich blood, combined with a good environment for fossilization, may explain the amazing existence of soft tissue from the Cretaceous (a period that lasted from about 65.5 million to 145.5 million years ago) and even earlier. The specimens Schweitzer works with, including skin, show evidence of excellent preservation. The bones of these various specimens are articulated, not scattered, suggesting they were buried quickly. They’re also buried in sandstone, which is porous and may wick away bacteria and reactive enzymes that would otherwise degrade the bone. "

“Schweitzer is set to search for more dinosaur soft tissue this summer. “I’d like to find a honking big T. rex that’s completely articulated that’s still in the ground, or something similar,” she said. To preserve the chemistry of potential soft tissue, the specimens must not be treated with preservatives or glue, as most fossil bones are, she said. And they need to be tested quickly, as soft tissue could degrade once exposed to modern air and humidity.”

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isn’t it true that how money matters are handled in Christian ministries on the leadership end can significantly lead to how the flock is effectively led. Just like how the consultant was paid a lot by Johnson and Johnson to tell them to make the holes bigger on the Baby powder bottle in order to make more profit…in the same light question the financial integrity of ministry leadership and financial paradigms that may inhibit groups from pursuing the truth and this may be one of the most simplest of ingredients that gives a resolve to division occurring and bolster the production of spiritual fruit! AIG gets a paycheck for their stance and Biologos for theirs. Who would tend to give a hoot about the other in the name of peace in Christ even when a person’s livlihood may be at stake? Right? I believe this because I see it in myself from time to time.

I am amazed at the brilliance of Jesus in his sermon on the mount how worry about money and wealth goes hand in hand with Biblical hypocrisy. he is exactly right! It sounds like a tangent but I believe this directly related to some of the divisions we see going on.

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Age and evolution are two completely different topics and are unrelated. Because we see age does not equate to evolution being true yet evolution as we define it today needs long ages.

When God created the heavens and the earth, the physical forces and formulas that could have been engaged in this miraculous process when He created may be quite difficult to interpret through the lenses of science don’t you think? And when God created the flood by supernatural means that enraged the earth in His wrath against mankind, the physical forces and formulas used to perform such a feat may also be additionally very confusing in the lenses of science as it would have never encounters such an event to know how to compare it and interpret it.

I am a science lover. But I remain very skeptical about science’s ability to interpret God and His creative methodologies. Wine appears old and is different than water in many respects. But Jesus created it from water. If the earth appears old, this does not necessarily mean that it is and since the Bible suggests that it isn’t, then we as Christians need to hesitate in our assumptions and guesses based on scientific observation.

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So as long as this does not support evolution in your mind. Long ages does not mean evolution makes sense. That is the issue I am most concerned about. Some of my favorite theologians are old earth creationists which do not disturb the theology surrounding the gospel nearly as badly as theistic evolutionism does.

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That looks like a partial thought @grog. So long as “what” (?) does not support evolution in my mind? An Old Earth makes evolution practically inevitable… especially since even Creationists are starting to discuss “hyper-fast” speciation after the release of animals from the Ark.

Ring Species prove speciation can happen in almost in “Real Time”. And once you have speciation, you automatically have Common Descent, and the ability for 2 similar populations to respond to their environment in distinct ways leading to dramatically distinct animals.

We have talked about this before. Lions and Tigers, evolving from a common population, headed in 2 different directions, leading to two very different kinds of animals:

In Africa, the big cats became social, with the male having a distinctive mane. In India and Asia, tigers are very solitary, and have stripes that help them camouflage their bulk in a jungle setting that would not be suitable for a wide open savannah.

And yet, as you know, the 2 populations have not genetically moved so much apart as the animals appearances and behavior, because they can still produce fertile offspring, known as Ligers and Tigons. By your measure of change, these 2 feline groups should be so different that they would have the chance of producing fertile offspring as Eagles and Falcons!

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Hi Greg,

It’s good that you’re discussing actual evidence now. It’s good to focus on the Bible and theological issues, but you do still need to account for the evidence, even if simply by saying that there must be other factors at work that we know nothing about. What troubles me is seeing it dismissed out of hand as “presupposition” or “religion” without any attempt whatsoever being made to justify claims that it is based on presupposition and not evidence. It sounds ad-hominem at best and borderline dishonest at worst.

Just a couple of remarks on your comments here.

I know that Tas Walker of creation.com has responded to Wiens’s article. Personally I didn’t find Walker’s response at all satisfactory. I wrote some thoughts of my own about his response in another thread on this forum back in February. To summarise: it adopts an unnecessary inflammatory and confrontational tone that is unhelpful and distracting, and many of the claims he makes on a technical level are simply not true.

As others have pointed out, the state of the soft tissue was not consistent with an age of less than six thousand years. It has not yet yielded any sequenceable DNA for starters — in a young earth, we should have sequenced the entire T-rex genome by now.

In actual fact, nobody knows how long soft tissue remnants can survive before becoming completely mineralised. It depends largely on the conditions of fossilisation, and there are a lot of unknown unknowns. In any case, the ages of the fossils were very, very well established and very, very tightly constrained by radiometric dating and other high precision methods.

You’ll need to provide a source for this as it is a new one to me.

I’ve read both the RATE report on helium diffusion in zircons and the various responses to it (Gary Loechelt, Kevin Henke and Randy Isaac).

Unfortunately the various reviews have noted numerous serious purely technical flaws in the RATE team’s work that totally undermine the credibility of their research. For example, they adjusted some twenty-year-old data by a factor of ten to account for “typographical errors.” You simply do not do this. It is not good science to use data whose integrity is in question; it should be discarded, and the original experiment re-done, especially if the original lab notes are no longer available.

They also hand-waved several uncertainties as only affecting the result “by a factor of two or so” or “by an order of magnitude or so” but it only takes half a dozen errors of “an order of magnitude or so” to get you from thousands to billions. The effects of both pressure and anisotropy were ignored, even though other research shows that both of these would be significant.

The RATE team have dismissed the critiques of their work as “petty and nitpicking.” However, to the best of my knowledge, they have not provided any calculations to demonstrate that the critiques really are as petty and nitpicking as they claim that they are. In any case, if you’ve worked with science or technology for any length of time, one thing that you learn fairly early on is that you have to be petty and nitpicking, because seemingly small and inconsequential errors have a nasty habit of not being as small and inconsequential as they first appear. Just read about the butterfly effect if you don’t believe me.

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87

I have said this before and will say again…determining ancient history is more history and less science. When I took some history classes in college, the recurring theme was that history is NEVER fact but rather interpretations. Just the history about Abe Lincoln seen through conservative vs liberal eyes will result in tremendously different results that are almost opposite in some ways. If human kind does this to 200 year history then my guess is that both young earth and really old earth guys are both really really wrong about what they thinking on history 1000’s, or millions of years ago. I personally tend towards chalking some of these things as “mystery” now worship our One and Only God who is outstanding and transcendent beyond human comprehension. Mystery resolved later when we meet Him.

I will put out there a challenge regarding RATE etc. I don’t understand the Helium in zircon crystals issue but if this does indicate that an earth billions of years old out of the question and mainstream science has chosen to ignore, then this is no different than RATE fudging numbers (as I only assume you are correct in your suggestion)

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Greg, your analogy is not valid.

The age of the earth is based entirely on mathematics and measurement. The motivations and political machinations surrounding the history of Abraham Lincoln are not.

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As we have gone completely off topic, will close this thread. If you wish to address some of the splinter topics, please start a new post with them.

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