Real Science Friday CRSQ (Vol 43, Num 2)

[Jefferson]

Real Science Friday CRSQ (Vol 43, Num 2)

This is the show for Friday December 1st 2006.

BEST QUOTE OF THE SHOW:

Bob Enyart: We offered the curator of a major museum $23,000...to carbon-14 date a little tiny specimen of a dinosaur. And they are utterly refusing. They will not do it. That would give them $20,000 toward the museum and $3000 for the cost of preparing the test and all.

Fred Williams: It shows how much they'll defend their faith in this religion of evolution.

SUMMARY:

* Finding C-14 EVERYWHERE: Bob Enyart and Creation Research Society webmaster Fred Williams (of EvolutionFairyTale.com) discuss the current issue of CRSQ, a technical creation/evolution journal. Anything millions of years old should have NO Carbon-14, but scientists are consistently finding C-14 in coal, dinosaurs, fossilized wood, diamond, amber, methane gas, coal, etc., etc., etc. Because such results appear everywhere, they can no longer be called anomalies, but now, it is expected that organic specimens supposedly millions of years old yield maximum C-14 ages of only thousands of years!

Today's Resources: Enjoy the BEL Science Pack and get a free subscription to Creation Research Society Quarterly! With the Science Pack you can watch tremendous documentaries, listen to Bob's Genesis Creation study album, read the best book on creation/evolution ever written, and hear a debate on the Age of the Earth! And then enjoy the extraordinary articles in CRSQ!

 

[ThePhy]

... listen to Bob's Genesis Creation study album …

Is this the album in which the Reverend doesn’t even come close to being truthful in representing the consensus of the science community on the creation of matter?

…read the best book on creation/evolution ever written …

Is this the book that disagrees with the Reverend on Jupiter’s moon Io being hot as evidence for a recent creation?

… hear a debate on the Age of the Earth …

Is this the debate in which the Reverend makes that argument he can't support about the Hubble Deep Field only showing fully formed galaxies?

 

[Jukia]

How about if Pastor Bob or his guest post the references to the scientific literature with reference to C-14 dating of dinosaurs, amber, etc. Also post a cite to the T-rex soft tissue study in the scientific literature.
Thanks so much.

 

[Granite]

This is totally ridiculous.

 

[Jukia]

So BEL and the boys are willing to pay 23K to a "major museum" to have some C-14 tests done on dino bones but are upset because the museum wont't bite? Why not just spend the 23K on a bunch of C-14 tests, perhaps they can get a volume discount, and then publish the results in a peer reviewed journal? That would seem to be a better use of the $.
Can someone explain that to me.
Thanks

 

[Johnny]

Anything millions of years old should have NO Carbon-14, but scientists are consistently finding C-14 in coal, dinosaurs, fossilized wood, diamond, amber, methane gas, coal, etc., etc., etc.

You can put a blank in the spec and have a positive C-14 reading. I'm extremely interested in the methodologies creationists use to correct for background contamination. All sorts of nasties can get in the way of an accurate reading. Indeed many major creationist publications regarding positive C-14 reads have been pounded into the ground for sloppy techniques (such as the famous Snelling dating the piece of porous (can someone say water?) "Triassic wood" even though no one--including Snelling--could verify that's what it was.) I mean, there were a number of papers published nearly two decades ago warning scientists of the perils of contamination. Also remember that most of the time C14 is detected in old samples its at the very limits of detection. Take a moment and think about why that could be.

- Bacteria can contaminate samples with trace C14
- Pourous rock offers another route of contamination
- Groundwater offers another route of contamination
- Surrounding radioactivity of rocks offers another route of contamination
- C14 content in old rocks and oil correlates with the radioactivity of the surrounding rocks.

You can't even logically make the claim that trace C14 in a sample implies the sample is young given the aforementioned facts unless you control for the variables. This is more true for trace samples of C14 because the processes I mentioned (especially radioactivity in rocks, which is often the culprit) create only trace amounts. I'd like to see some studies where all of these have been considered.

And let's just say a fossil sample dates to 6,500 years ago. The virtue of conservatism dictates that the date is much more likely to be an anomaly than it is to be correct. This is basic philosophy of science -- that's why there was such intense research decades ago to identify sources of leaks. And that's also why they found leaks and furthered their knowledge of the natural world (also helped the physicists out when they were looking for places to put neutrino detectors). Had creationists been in charge, we probably would have stopped at finding C14 -- just like they always do.

I'm also fascinated by the two-tongued approach of berating C-14 dating when it gives disagreeable dates but then turning around and relying on C14 dating when it provides dates relatively young dates -- even when those dates turn out to be ~50,000 years or so (at the outer limits of measurability). Funny how that works.

 

[Jukia]

Is this latest Enyartian attempt at "real science" an indictment of all radiometric dating or just C-14?

 

[Johnny]

Is this latest Enyartian attempt at "real science" an indictment of all radiometric dating or just C-14?

Edit: Rethought this post -- nevermind

 

[Servo]

This is totally ridiculous.

I know, why don't the secular scientists just carbon date the samples and get it over with? :dizzy:

 

[Jukia]

I know, why don't the secular scientists just carbon date the samples and get it over with? :dizzy:

See Johnny's last post. And when Enyart learns some of the technical details about C-14 dating then perhaps he can speak intelligently to the issue.
But why don't the creationist scientists spend some the the $ they might be throwing away on their museum and buy the equipment and learn how to do real science? Then they could document their findings and if they passed technical muster get published in a real journal. Sounds like a plan to me.

 

[Aethril]

Favorite quote: Fred Williams, “Essentially evolution is a tax funded religion”.

 

[Servo]

See Johnny's last post. And when Enyart learns some of the technical details about C-14 dating then perhaps he can speak intelligently to the issue.
But why don't the creationist scientists spend some the the $ they might be throwing away on their museum and buy the equipment and learn how to do real science? Then they could document their findings and if they passed technical muster get published in a real journal. Sounds like a plan to me.

So evolutionists can now admit that they are really not sure about the age of any sample as it might be contaminated?

 

[Jukia]

So evolutionists can now admit that they are really not sure about the age of any sample as it might be contaminated?

Perhaps you should spend some time discussing this issue with someone who actually does the work. Perhaps they can explain it to you.

 

[CapnFungi]

I found this interesting!

 

[Prisca]

How about if Pastor Bob or his guest post the references to the scientific literature with reference to C-14 dating of dinosaurs, amber, etc. Also post a cite to the T-rex soft tissue study in the scientific literature.
Thanks so much.

Conventional wisdom among paleontologists states that when dinosaurs died and became fossilized, soft tissues didn't preserve – the bones were essentially transformed into "rocks" through a gradual replacement of all organic material by minerals. New research by a North Carolina State University paleontologist, however, could literally turn that theory inside out.

Dr. Mary Schweitzer, assistant professor of paleontology with a joint appointment at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, has succeeded in isolating soft tissue from the femur of a 68-million-year-old dinosaur. Not only is the tissue largely intact, it's still transparent and pliable, and microscopic interior structures resembling blood vessels and even cells are still present.

In a paper published in the March 25 edition of the journal Science, Schweitzer describes the process by which she and her technician, Jennifer Wittmeyer, isolated soft organic tissue from the leg bone of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex.

Schweitzer was interested in studying the microstructure and organic components of a dinosaur's bone. All bone is made up of a combination of protein (and other organic molecules) and minerals. In modern bone, removing the minerals leaves supple, soft organic materials that are much easier to work with in a lab. In contrast, fossilized bone is believed to be completely mineralized, meaning no organics are present. Attempting to dissolve the minerals from a piece of fossilized bone, so the theory goes, would merely dissolve the entire fossil.

But the team was surprised by what actually happened when they removed the minerals from the T. rex femur fragment. The removal process left behind stretchy bone matrix material that, when examined microscopically, seemed to show blood vessels, osteocytes, or bone building cells, and other recognizable organic features.

Since current data indicates that living birds are more closely related to dinosaurs than any other group, Schweitzer compared the findings from the T. rex with structures found in modern-day ostriches. In both samples, transparent branching blood vessels were present, and many of the small microstructures present in the T. rex sample displayed the same appearance as the blood and bone cells from the ostrich sample.

Schweitzer then duplicated her findings with at least three other well-preserved dinosaur specimens, one 80-million-year-old hadrosaur and two 65-million-year-old tyrannosaurs. All of these specimens preserved vessels, cell-like structures, or flexible matrix that resembled bone collagen from modern specimens.

Current theories about fossil preservation hold that organic molecules should not preserve beyond 100,000 years. Schweitzer hopes that further research will reveal exactly what the soft structures isolated from these bones are made of. Do they consist of the original cells, and if so, do the cells still contain genetic information? Her early studies of the material suggest that at least some fragments of the dinosaurs' original molecular material may still be present.

"We may not really know as much about how fossils are preserved as we think," says Schweitzer. "Our preliminary research shows that antibodies that recognize collagen react to chemical extracts of this fossil bone. If further studies confirm this, we may have the potential to learn more not only about the dinosaurs themselves, but also about how and why they were preserved in the first place."

The research was funded by NC State, the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences and the National Science Foundation.

"Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex"
Authors: Mary H. Schweitzer and Jennifer L. Wittmeyer, North Carolina State University; John R. Horner, Montana State University; Jan B. Toporski, Carnegie Institution of Washington Geophysical Laboratory Published: March 25, 2005, in Science
Biology News Net

 

[Jukia]

Becky: Got a cite to the original paper? Have there been any follow up studies as your cite suggests? Why not talk directly with the researcher and report back to us?
Why not make an effort to get the creation scientists to open their own radiometric dating center?

 

[CapnFungi]

I've done some readin on this matter. It looks like we have organic tissue that survived millions and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions, and millions of years.

or

Dragons lived along side humans!

I choose the 2nd option

of course, I knew this from the bible. Didn't need science to show me this.

 

[Jukia]

Capn F: I think you need to read some more.
Were they fire-breathing dragons by any chance?

 

[CapnFungi]

Capn F: I think you need to read some more.
Were they fire-breathing dragons by any chance?

Does they refer to the T-Rex species of dragon? I don't know?
Perhaps with your plethora of expertise in this field you can enlighten us all!

 

[Jukia]

Who is "they"? And the extra Biblical evidence for dragons (dinosaurs?) and men living together is found where?
Psst, the new movie coming out--Eregon--about flying dragons--its only a movie, its not really real.