God, Science and the Bible

News from the world of science about God and the Bible.

by Mario Seiglie, Tom Robinson and Scott Ashley

Nonfossilized soft tissue found in dinosaur bones

Dinosaur researchers the world over were stunned by the announcement in March that a 70-million-year-old tyrannosaurus rex fossilized leg bone had yielded very unfossilized soft tissue—apparently blood vessels and blood cells—something long thought impossible considering the assumed age of such fossils.

The methods that yielded the soft tissue "seem to upend accepted theories of fossilization," reported the Chicago Tribune March 24. "Conventional wisdom suggests that when animals like dinosaurs died millions of years ago and were covered in silty mud, inert earth minerals gradually seeped into bony tissues and replaced all organic material. The minerals transformed the bone into fossil rock, supposedly destroying any soft tissue."

BBC News Online further explained: "Normally when an animal dies, worms and bugs will quickly eat up anything that is soft. Then, as the remaining bone material gets buried deeper and deeper in the mud, it gets heated, crushed and replaced by minerals, turning it to stone."

How was this amazing discovery made? For years Mary Higby Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and Montana State University, had experimented with chemically dissolving the minerals in fossils—long assumed to be 100 percent mineral—to study any residue left behind.

She recently worked on a three-inch chunk of fossilized femur from a well-preserved tyrannosaurus rex recently uncovered in Montana. When she and her assistant dissolved the stone in the fossil, what they found was "stretchy bone matrix material that, when examined microscopically, seemed to show blood vessels, osteocytes, or bone building cells, and other recognizable organic features."

They repeated the experiment 17 times before they were convinced what they were seeing was indeed actual tyrannosaurus rex tissue. They continued the process with other fossils, discovering similar material in bones from two other tyrannosaurs and an 80-million-year-old hadrosaur.

"They were all preserved a little bit differently than each other, but they all contained very similar material we found in the T. rex," she reported. As a result, finding such material in dinosaur bones may "not be as rare an event as we thought."

For years paleontologists have held that organic materials such as animal remains could not be preserved beyond about 100,000 years. "We may not really know as much about how fossils are preserved as we think," says Schweitzer (Agence France-Presse, March 29). That is quite an understatement.

Regrettably, this amazing discovery doesn't seem to have prompted paleontologists to ask the obvious question: Are dating theories and methods anywhere near as reliable as scientists have assumed they are?

Scholar's fraud a dating disaster for Neanderthals

The 36,000-year-old skull fragment was the missing link between ancient Neaderthals and modern man, Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten told his scientific colleagues.

His other remarkable discoveries included the remains of a woman who lived 21,300 years ago and a man who lived 29,400 years ago. The carbon-14 dating specialist's findings had long been considered proof that Neanderthals had lived in northern Europe and coexisted, as a separate species, with anatomically modern humans.

There was just one problem. The professor didn't know how to operate his carbon-14 dating equipment, and legitimate experts concluded that he'd simply invented the dates. The skeletal remains he had dated between 21,000 and 36,000 years old were dated by others as far younger. One of the skulls turned out to be from a man who had died barely 250 years ago—around A.D. 1750.

On Feb. 19 The Guardian (London) reported that the Frankfurt University professor had been forced to retire due to his many "falsehoods and manipulations" over a 30-year academic career. The scandal surfaced when he was caught attempting to sell the university's chimpanzee skull collection.

In addition to fabricating data, an investigation found that he had plagiarized the work of other scientists and passed off fake fossils as authentic ones. "It's deeply embarrassing," said Professor Ulrich Brandt, who led the investigation. "Of course the university feels very bad about this."

As a result, "anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Professor Thomas Terberger of the University of Greifswald in eastern Germany, who discovered the hoax.

Why had Professor Protsch perpetrated the fraud? "If you find a skull that's more than 30,000 years old it's a sensation," explained Professor Terberger. "If you find three of them people notice you. It's good for your career. At the end of the day it was about ambition."

Regrettably, this isn't the first time such an audacious fraud has been committed in this field. The infamous "Piltdown Man," discovered in Britain in 1912 and heralded as the long-sought missing link between humans and apes, wasn't revealed as a fake until 1953—more than 40 years later. When examined carefully, "Piltdown Man" proved to be a 600-year-old human skull combined with the jawbone of an orangutan, with both parts stained to make them appear older.

Why did it take so long for the scientific establishment to realize this? Robert Foley, director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University, explains in the March 15 issue of The Scientist: "One of the reasons that Piltdown man was so successful was that it fitted people's expectations of what they thought early humans would look like."

Since it took 30 years to expose this latest fraud, it seems history has repeated itself. It appears that the willingness of so many to believe in evolution was a major factor in fabricated evidence being uncritically accepted for so long.

Scientists create petrified wood in a week

A team of materials scientists at a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory in south-central Washington state has discovered a way to do in days what supposedly takes nature millions of years to achieve—convert wood to mineral, forming petrified wood (EurekAlert, Jan. 24).

Petrifaction, as The Harper Encyclopedia of Science explains, is "an aspect of the mineralizing process called replacement; it is commonly associated with wood that has been replaced molecule for molecule by silica (generally opal or chalcedony).

"The petrified forests of our Western states are splendid examples. Forests were buried by ash fall from volcanic eruptions, and burial [without oxygen] prevented total decay of the wood. Later, ground water circulated through the ash, picked up silica from it, and carried it to and into the logs. There slowly the silica was deposited, replacing the wood bit by bit . . .

"The replacement is so minute that as a rule the cell structure of the wood is preserved, and even the growth rings, bark, and similar features can easily be recognized" (Vol. 3, p. 900).

This is commonly understood to involve a span of eons. "For instance, at the Ginkgo Petrified Forest, a state park on the west shore of the Columbia River in central Washington, trees were believed to have been buried without oxygen beneath molten lava millions of years ago" (Associated Press, Jan. 25).

Yet Yongsoon Shin and colleagues at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, have now duplicated the process in less than a week. How?

"They gave a 1 centimeter cube of wood a two-day acid bath, soaked it in a silica solution for two more . . . air-dried it, popped it into an argon-filled furnace gradually cranked up to 1,400 degrees centigrade to cook for two hours, then let cool in argon to room temperature.

"Presto. Instant petrified wood, the silica taking up permanent residence with the carbon left in the cellulose to form a new silicon carbide, or SiC, ceramic. The material 'replicates exactly the wood architecture,' according to Shin" (EurekAlert).

Why is it assumed that this process must have taken ages in nature? Because it fits with evolutionary presuppositions about geologic ages marked out by slow deposits of sediment throughout a uniformitarian past in which there have been almost no cataclysmic changes over vast spans of time.

The truth is that it need not be so. As Creation magazine points out: "There is ample evidence that petrifaction need not take very long. Hot water rich in dissolved minerals like silica, as found in some springs at Yellowstone, has petrified a block of wood in only a year" (March-May 1999, p. 20, citing A.C. Sigleo, "Organic Chemistry of Solidified Wood," Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, 1978, Vol. 42, pp. 1397-1405).

And now we see that it can be done in a lab in a much shorter time than that.

Indeed, considering all the natural factors that have happened over even just thousands of years—volcanoes, weathering, erosion, changes in pressure and temperature, and, if you believe the Bible, the great Flood around 4,300 years ago and the tectonic upheaval that must have accompanied it—is it really so remarkable that petrified wood could have formed naturally in a much shorter span than millions of years?

Of course, petrifaction of wood may have taken long eons in some cases. We often can't know. While many creationists argue that the Bible shows the earth to be only 6,000 years old, that is not what Scripture actually states.

Most of Genesis 1 describes a period of renewing and restoring the earth's surface, which had been destroyed in an earlier calamity between verses 1 and 2. The restoration and creation of man did take place around 6,000 years ago. But the earth itself could easily be considerably older (for more information, request our free booklet Creation or Evolution: Does It Really Matter What You Believe?).

Be that as it may, we would be wise to not accept as dogma what the scientific community claims to know concerning millions or hundreds of millions of years for various things to have transpired on the earth—as the recent laboratory experiments help to show.

We should be especially wary when "scientific" opinion appears to contradict Scripture. While it may be that the interpretation of the Bible is the problem, it could also be that the scientists do not understand as much as they think.

Smithsonian Institute upset over intelligent design article

The intelligent design movement has caused quite a stir in its aim to storm the academic citadels of evolution and replace it with an honest look at the evidence proving an intelligent Creator.

The latest notable incident occurred when Richard Sternberg, managing editor of a journal of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., allowed an article sympathetic to intelligent design to be published in its prestigious publication, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. He was not prepared for the backlash from high-ranking evo-lutionists at the museum and around the world.

"I'm spending my time trying to figure out how to salvage a scientific career," Sternberg told writer David Klinghoffer in a Wall Street Journal article. Sternberg, who holds two Ph.D.s in biology, says that although he continues to work in the museum's department of zoology, he was expelled from his office and is being shunned by colleagues, prompting him to file a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. He charges he is being subjected to religious discrimination.

The article in question, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," written by Stephen Meyer, a Cambridge Ph.D. in philosophy of biology, cites mainstream biologists and paleontologists from schools such as Cambridge, Oxford, Yale and the University of Chicago who are critical of some aspects of Darwinian evolution.

The article contends that supporters of Darwin's theory cannot explain how so many varied animal types suddenly sprang into existence during the short geologic period known as the Cambrian explosion. It further argues the Darwinian mechanism would require a longer time for the required genetic information to be produced, and suggests that intelligent design provides a better explanation.

"Intelligent Design, in any event," says Klinghoffer, "is hardly a made-to-order prop for any particular religion. When the British atheist philosopher Antony Flew made news this winter by declaring that he had become a deist . . . he pointed to the plausibility of Intelligent Design theory.

"Darwinism, by contrast, is an essential ingredient in secularism, that aggressive, quasi-religious faith without a deity. The Sternberg case seems, in many ways, an instance of one religion persecuting a rival, demanding loyalty from anyone who enters one of its churches—like the National Museum of Natural History" ("The Branding of a Heretic," The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 28).

This quote points out that Darwinism is considered a type of religion by many, with fanatical proponents ready to disparage and persecute any colleague who dares introduce another possible explanation of the origin and development of life on the earth.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of the Sternberg case, and whether it turns out to be a victory for evolutionists in their ongoing efforts to stifle discussion of alternative viewpoints as to the origin and development of life.