Re: [asa] Fw: Re: [MKnet] T- rex closest living relative - the dangerous....chicken

There is a previous claim of DNA from a dinosaur bone, which was based
on degraded human DNA as a contaminant. Not to mention the fact that
they didn't even know with certainty that it was dino bone. The
present study is much better in that regard.

I'm a bit worried about the present report in its claiming that the
lack of a good match with any modern sequence is evidence for the
material being genuine dinosaur protein, since it also reports that
the data for modern sequences is very sparse.

A major flaw in the both the young-earth misinterpretation and in the
blurbs in Science, etc. of this as something that should have decayed
away (e.g., "the discovery of protein in dinosaur bones is a surprise
- organic material was not thought to survive this long") is that
there's a huge range of organic material. Petroleum is degraded
organic material that's often far older than T. rex. Distinctive
lipids (or lipid degradation products) in petroleum provide evidence
of the existence of various protists and bacteria, which don't leave
more tangible traces. Durable organic materials such as spores,
resting cysts, etc. are an important part of the Precambrian and
Phanerozoic fossil record. Protein remnants (which is all the
dinosaur study found-recognizable pieces of a durable protein,
structurally closely associated with minerals) are not uncommon in the
fossil record. I know of Ordovician physical traces of protein in
bivalve shells, such as remains of the ligament and traces of shell
microstructure. Maybe we should try to extract the protein and get
some sequence data, but I bet Science thinks T. rex is more
interesting than Ordivician bivalves. (Disclaimer: Science didn't
want my paper on rediscovery of several "extinct" bivalves but
published the ivory-bill claim.)

The claim that the purported age of the earth is based on
uniformitarian assumptions, not revisited in over a century, is
particularly ironic in that it's actually the young earthers who
currently try to use such arguments in support of their dating.
Molecular clocks typically use such flawed assumptions, but I don't
know of any serious geological research that currently relies
significantly on the types of assumptions mentioned by the
correspondant to obtain a date. (They are used for small-scale
interpolation, but even then there is increasing calibration with
other data sets, including radiometric dating, stable isotope
variations, microfossils, etc.) Radiometric dating provides the
absolute numbers which the correspondant wrongly thinks was based on
uniformitarian extrapolation. The principles of uniformitarianism
demonstrated that the earth looks very old, but didn't provide any
exact dates.

It's also worth noting that ALL reconstruction of the past involves
uniformitarian assumptions, in contrast to certain YEC attempts to
slander old-earth views by claiming that uniformitarianism is
inherently atheistic. Even when we have historical records, we can
only interpret them under the assumptions that people, things, words,
etc. behave much the same then as now. The gospel isn't noteworthy,
for example, unless it's always been true that people don't come back
to life after they die.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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