Soft Tissues in Fossils

Faith & Science Conversation
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Of course YECs could apply for funding. But they will be denied, as you well know, simply for being YEC. And what evidence do you have that these applications would not include testable hypotheses that could not be falsified? And that coming from an evolutionist! The evolutionary community has constructed elaborate narratives so that nothing about evolution can be falsified. I’ve seen that right here in these threads.

“YEC’s assert that soft tissue can not be preserved over millions of years, and yet they have no evidence to back this claim. There is no evidence that they would accept as a falsification for this claim.”
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Who is twisting what? Evolutionists were stunned that soft tissue could last for many millions of years. But when dinosaurs were found with soft tissue, they changed their tune. The shoe is on the other foot, my friend. What evidence do evolutionists have that soft tissue can survive for millions of years?

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And what of Mary Schweitzer’s bogus lab experiments to “prove” that the blood in the dinosaur bones preserved the soft tissues, when it was done under laboratory conditions no way consistent with out in fossil beds?

Who’s twisting evidence to make it fit? And what about the intact nerves and even intact valves in the blood vessels? Not only preserved soft tissue, but even intact features.

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No, they will be denied funding for having a track record of not having the necessary standards of quality control in place.

There is nothing “evolutionist” or “twisting” whatsoever about insisting that you get your facts straight about what the soft tissue remnants consist of before making any claims about how long they can last.

The fact remains that nobody had any measurements to indicate that what was actually found could not have lasted millions of years. The only measurements that we do have proving that stuff couldn’t last for millions of years was on stuff that wasn’t there.

Surprise is not a substitute for measurement.

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So what facts about soft tissues did I get wrong?

Here’s what I found in a few minutes:

What about “transparent, branching flexible blood vessels and red blood cells alongside soft and stretchy ligaments from a supposedly 68 million-year-old T.rex bone. It is not just dinosaur soft tissue, either, but the presence of detectable proteins such as collagen, hemoglobin, osteocalcin, actin, and tubulin that they must account for. These are complex molecules that continually tend to break down to simpler ones.”

“Not only that, but in many cases, there are fine details of the bone matrix, with microscopically intact-looking bone cells (osteocytes) showing incredible detail. And Schweitzer has even recovered fragments of the even more fragile and complex molecule, DNA. This has been extracted from the bone cells with markers indicating its source such that it is extremely likely to be dinosaur DNA.”

Mark Armitage has found intact blood vessel valves and intact nerve fragments.

And this is not just in a few dinosaur bones, but in about half of all those tested.

And before you go off on “red blood cells,” that is what Schweitzer reported, but I guess we aren’t to quote her.

And O yeah, YEC can just apply for grants. Here is a telling comment by Mark: “My lawsuit against the State of California now shows that the very day my paper on soft tissues in a Triceratops horn was published on the online website, several powerful professors in the Biology Department met and decided to terminate my position where I ran a million-dollar microscopy suite. Moreover, very few scientists are working in the dinosaur soft-tissue area, primarily because it is a career killer. So, contrary to what Rana (Reasons to Believe) says, many people in the scientific community see the obvious implications to the presence of dinosaur soft cells and tissues.” And I add, sent Schweitzer running for cover to save her career.

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That they found haemoglobin for starters, when what they found were heme breakdown products. There is a big difference as Joel Duff explains:

That they found DNA. DNA breakdown products are not DNA.

This happens time and time and time again. YECs portray soft tissue findings as if they were the original unstable molecules, but then when you go back to the source material all you find that they found was the ultimately stable breakdown products of those original unstable molecules.

And this goes for substances such as osteocytes, collagen and so on as well. When you consult the original source material you find it’s not the original osteocytes that were found, but structures with the same size, shape and morphology (but not composition) as osteocytes. Or that the collagen has been catalysed by iron into a much more stable cross-linked form consisting of polymers that can persist pretty much indefinitely, in much the same way that molecules in oil can be polymerised to form plastic.

And no Mary Schweitzer did not report finding red blood cells. She reported finding round red microstructures that apparently once had been red blood cells but had fragmented and decayed and were not red blood cells any more. Again, this is another case of presenting ultimately stable breakdown products as if they were the unstable originals.

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Why does one have to believe that dinosaurs walked the Earth until 4370 years ago to believe that God did 2024 years ago?

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Show me a YEC research grant that was rejected without cause and that contained testable hypotheses.

BTW, here are 29+ potential falsifications for evolution:

As discussed by others, they didn’t find intact soft tissue. They didn’t find intact blood vessels.

You are twisting the evidence. There are no intact nerves or intact valves. There are only structures that resemble the biological features that used to be there.

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It is a matter of religion that despite their being no blood, no intact soft tissue, no intact nerves, no intact valves, there is, there are. It’s a form of transubstantiation.

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Here is what Schweitzer was talking about (and a response regarding the apparent blood vessels to YEC). Thanks

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It did not. The trace remains which can only be seen through a high powered microscope are heavily degraded decayed products. The evidence that these remains can survive for millions of years is the fact that T-Rex did not long survive the Chicxulub asteroid strike of 66 million years ago.

If dinosaurs ever disembarked from Noah’s ark, there is no plausible reason that most of them would not be extent today; soft tissue, beating heart, and all.

You owe the discovery of dinosaur soft tissue to Mary Schweitzer. Neither her discovery nor explanation of preservation can be just dismissed as bogus.

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You must believe that there is blood, intact blood vessels, intact nerves, intact soft tissue regardless of the evidence, or your faith in Jesus is worthless.

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Incidentally here is a link to Mary Schweitzer’s original report in Science in 2005:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7944782_Soft-Tissue_Vessels_and_Cellular_Preservation_in_Tyrannosaurus_rex

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There’s one point that’s worth making here.

To be fair to YECs, they aren’t the only ones who misrepresent the soft tissue remnants as consisting of unstable original biomolecules when they do not. It’s sadly all too common for the popular scientific press to make the same mistake. Popular science reports aimed at the layman tend to favour clickbait and sensationalism over rigour and factual accuracy, and they very often operate according to the principle of “never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” And with dinosaur soft tissue, what better story is there than the idea that Jurassic Park might some day become a reality?

This being the case, it is essential to go back to the original peer-reviewed literature in order to find out exactly what scientists have and have not discovered. Unfortunately even then it is all too easy to misunderstand things, especially if you are not all that familiar with the terminology involved or aren’t reading things carefully. For example, “heme molecules” or “heme breakdown products” can all too easily be mistaken for “haemoglobin” because the names sound similar, but they are very different things, and the former is far, far, far, far more stable than the latter. Chemical reactions involving individual components of DNA or proteins can all too easily be mistaken for indicating the presence of DNA or proteins themselves when in actual fact all they reveal is the presence of the breakdown products of DNA or proteins.

This problem is often exacerbated by a tendency in apologetics—especially in YEC apologetics—of approaching scientific reports as an ammunition gathering exercise. When you’re looking for factoids to prove your point, you get all sorts of cognitive biases piling in and the risk of making mistakes, misunderstanding things and quote mining goes through the roof.

For what it’s worth this is a mistake I’ve made myself in the past. When I was at university, I latched onto a remark by one of our lecturers who described cosmology as “the subject where 27\pi^4 is of order one.” I took it to mean that cosmologists didn’t care about accuracy or precision but just tended to hand-wave things, when in actual fact what he was referring to was not accuracy but scale—in cosmology the distances, volumes and timescales you deal with are so massive that the difference between 27\pi^4 and 1 pales into insignificance.

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I’ve asked this before and got no response of course: what was the ecology of Earth like 4370 years ago with a hundred million concurrent species with head count and biomass many thousands of times greater than now? What does transubstantiation science say about that? Not that it matters of course as 31% of the US population (aka The Righteous) have no problem believing six impossible things before breakfast. Transubstantiation is the only answer; there were more dimensions. See? You don’t have to have a privileged inheritance and education.

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Why isn’t the following mentioned?

Initially, some skeptical scientists suggested that bacterial biofilms (dead bacteria aggregated in a slime) formed what only appear to be blood vessels and bone cells. Recently Schweitzer and coworkers found biochemical evidence for intact fragments of the protein collagen, which is the building block of connective tissue. This is important because collagen is a highly distinctive protein not made by bacteria. (See Schweitzer’s review article in Scientific American [December 2010, pp. 62–69] titled “Blood from Stone.”)

'The point that I am making is this…if Egyptian mummies are found to contain similar biological evidence and they are known to be only thousands of years old, then is seems very logical to conclude that perhaps the Dinasoar bones found containing collagen etc may actually be a lot younger than millions of years old.

It is also interesting that the same studies are suggesting that these dinosaurs were buried quickly.

  • So we have biological matter being found that supports young age,
  • we have quick burial suggesting catastrophic event most likely by drowning
  • the areas where they are often found has findings also suggesting young age
  • the bible claims young age (and we know for a fact that the writing of the biblical text has not been altered in over 2000 years as has been proven by the finding of codex sinaiticus and the Dead Sea scrolls)

is it not quite consistent to argue young age? (I think it is)

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wonder what it looks like in a million years :slight_smile: McDonald's Burger Survives 20 Years and Still Looks Fresh off the Grill

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Don’t you just love the oxymoron?

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How can trace residues, scarcely visible even under high power magnification, and requiring identifification by mass spectroscopy and immunohistochemistry, possibly be considered similar to the ample and life like remains of an Egyptian mummy? There is no comparison. But that does raise the question that if there were dinosaurs before and after the flood, why are no remains in states of far greater preservation? Other animals, thousands of years old, have been found mummified. The answer, of course, is that no dinosaurs have been extent since tens of millions of years ago.

This is what happens when, in good faith, you try to be fair to YEC’s. The miniscule amounts of organic material exist on the edge of detection and identification. Although I am partial that Schweitzer’s findings will largely stand up, there is still contention that contamination, including with regards to collagen, is at play - Cretaceous dinosaur bone contains recent organic material and provides an environment conducive to microbial communities.

Why did you not mention the basis Schweitzer paper instead of quoting the hack AiG article?

Hack AiG article: #3 Soft Tissue in Fossils

Schweitzer paper in regards to collegen: Analyses of Soft Tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex Suggest the Presence of Protein

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Oh come on, Adam. If you seriously think that tiny fragments of collagen, no more than a millimetre in size, that had to be soaked in a demineralising solution for a week, are even remotely similar in their state of preservation to Egyptian mummies, consisting as they do of complete carcasses, you must be completely out of touch with reality.

The operative word here is, once again, measurement. I repeat: measurement. We have no measurements that indicate that collagen can not survive in some form or another for hundreds of millions of years. However, it is measurement that pins down and tightly constrains the ages of the fossils concerned. It is measurement that tells us, over and over again through multiple different techniques, that the K/T boundary is 66 million years old and not four and a half thousand.

I’m sorry, but you’re trying to refute measurement with hand-waving here. The scientific term for that kind of shenanigan is “quackery.”

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It’s not logical at all. There is no reason to think that mummies represent the upper threshold of preservation for all features.

That doesn’t require a recent flood nor a global flood.

Based on what evidence?

That can happen at any point in history, and it doesn’t require a global flood.

That’s about as vague as it gets.

Your interpretation of the Bible claims a young age, but it is contradicted by mountains of evidence.

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No it doesn’t

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