* Bob Enyart Interviews AronRa: Continuing with AronRa's Foundational Falsehood videos, Bob talks to one of the web's leading anti-creationists. In today's program, AronRa denies the existence of dinosaur soft tissue, and he rejects Bob's argument that a lack of evidence would not prove the negative, as in today's discussion regarding whether or not the universe has a center.
* See our List of Soft Tissue Deniers: at rsr.org/science-deniers.
* AronRa Unaware of Widespread and Confirmed Dinosaur Tissue Finds: Evolutionists should be excited and up-to-date about what may be among the top biological discoveries of the 21st century: the widespread finds and confirmation of original dinosaur soft tissue! Instead, as is common, even with leading evolutionists (like PZ Myers who said the same when recently addressing our RSR Trochlea Challenge), they tend to be unread and out-of-date on the topic, and therefore claim that the many finds are some kind of contamination like "biofilm," which would be a more recently-formed bacterial residue. Here's the exchange, as transcribed from this 1.5 minute segment (starting 27 minutes into today's program):
Bob Enyart: The soft-tissue that we find, the Tyrannosaurus Rex that we've got original biological material [from, and] then they found it in a Mosasaur that's [allegedly] 80 million years old. Then they found it in...
AronRa: You don't have original biological material.
Bob Enyart: Yes you do.
AronRa: No you don't. I've read Schweitzer's paper [Mary S., Jack Horner, etc. [Proc. Bio. Sci. 2007]. I suggest you review it.
Bob Enyart: Well you need to read the last five years worth of refereed scientific journals including from everywhere... in Nature, Science, PLoS -- Public Library of Science, [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, etc.]
AronRa: [dismissive laughter]
Bob Enyart: Ten universities [and institutes] just published a report, in the U.S. and [Europe], leading universities, I can list them for you, saying we have absolutely ruled out contamination. This is not biofilm. This is original...
AronRa: Are you going to argue that you have blood cells? ... I'm not even going to argue this for the moment. I've covered this in my series.
Bob Enyart: It's out-of-date. Because there are now dozens of institutions [acknowledging the studies]. They're finding biological tissue, dinosaur tissue.
* Previously Reported on Real Science Radio: As summarized on RSR's List of Not So Old Things:
* "65-million" Year Old T. rex Soft Tissue: North Carolina State University discovered original biological tissue from a supposedly 65-million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex thighbone, with transparent and pliable blood vessels containing red blood cells. See the many peer-reviewed scientific journal reports at our RSR page, DinosaurSoftTissue.com.
* The Standard Model Cosmological Claim of No Center for the Universe is Based on Philosophy: [Update: See also, rsr.org/cosmological-principle.] The claim of the Cosmological Principle, that the universe has no center, is not confirmed by observation but adhered to out of anti-creationist philosophical sentiment. In our debate, AronRa asserts strongly that, "there is NO CENTER to the universe." His script (8:57 - 9:10) for his 3rd Falsehood also states, "We also know that the Earth... the Earth is not at the center... of the universe in any respect." Hear both of these in this one-minute audio clip. Bob Enyart tried to explain to Aron that such a conclusion is not based on scientific observation but on philosophy. Aron insisted, however, on defending his statement as though it were not a "belief" of his but something that he is justified as claiming to be true. However, in Scientific American's profile of cosmologist George F. R. Ellis, the Stephen Hawking co-author stated:
“People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations... For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations... You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds... What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.”
Further, together, Hawking and Ellis wrote in The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time on page 134 that scientists, "are not able to make cosmological models without some mixture of ideology". University of California, Riverside's Phillip Gibbs wrote, "Despite the discovery of a great deal of structure in the distribution of the galaxies, most cosmologists still hold to the cosmological principle either for philosophical reasons or because it is a useful working hypothesis..." Even regarding Supernova data explicitly, French astrophysicist Marie-Noelle Celerier writes that "ruling out the Cosmological Principle" is a valid interpretation of the data. And the author QED on quantum electrodynamics (of one of Bob's favorite books), Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman has stated, "I suspect that the assumption of uniformity of the universe reflects a prejudice... It would be embarrassing to find, after stating that we live in an ordinary planet about an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy, that our place in the universe is extraordinary … To avoid embarrassment we cling to the hypothesis of uniformity."
Yet Aron (without correction from the atheists at the UK's League of Reason), overlooks the well-known cosmological admissions of leading scientists to mock what he assumes the Bible is teaching, when AronRa emphatically claims, not an observation but a belief, that "there is NO CENTER to the universe!" Thus Aron violates his own test of integrity. Click to hear Ra in his own voice, almost as though he were chastising himself:
…if you believe in truth at all, then you should make sure that the things that you say actually are true [something he hasn't done regarding the universe having no center]. That they are defensibly accurate, and academically correct. And if they are not correct, you should correct them. You wouldn't claim to know anything that you couldn't prove that you knew [like that the universe lacks a center]." hear it
So Aron should correct himself. He should retract his definitive statement that "there is no center to the universe." He could replace it with something like, "Most cosmologists believe that the universe has no center." Unfortunately however, on this radio program, as Bob made an effort to explain to Aron that lacking evidence for a center does not justify a positive assertion that the universe has no center, Aron did change his statement to say that there is "no evident center", but he has refused to "correct" himself in his popular video, and he's also wrong in that at least superficially, there does appear to be an "evident center" to the universe. To describe that, Bob presented to Aron the quantized red-shift mapping of hundreds of thousands of galaxies that might suffice as evidence that the universe has a center.
Today's Resource: The four participants in this Age of the Earth Debate were:
Young Earth
* Bob Enyart
* Science teacher Don Daly
Old Earth
* Geophysicist John Nicholl, former president of the EEGS, the Environmental and Engineering Geophysical Society
* Mathematics Professor Gordon Brown, from CU in Boulder
An atheist physicist named "The Phy" at TheologyOnline.com traveled from Seattle to Denver for this debate and afterward wrote that even though he utterly disagreed with them, the young-earthers won the debate. That night after the event, John Nicholl asked Enyart, "If the earth really were young, and had recently experienced a global flood, that would mean that geologists should give governments greater warnings about earthquake risks. So do you think we should do that?" Bob answered, "Yes, governments should be warned of earthquake risks greater than that predicted by old-earth assumptions." Since that debate there has been 462,000 earthquake deaths.
Since that debate on Feb. 28, 2004 the world has not only seen the recent quakes that made the headlines like in Italy and Haiti, but four of the top ten most powerful quakes in the last 100 years have hit since that recent debate:
- 2004-12-26 Mag. 9.1 Off Coast of Sumatra
- 2005-3-28 Mag. 8.6 Northern Sumatra
- 2007-9-12 Mag. 8.5 Southern Sumatra
- 2011-3-11 Mag. 9.0 Off Coast of Japan
Since 9-11, when the terrible casualty count was about 3,000 dead from terrorism, governments have spent more than a trillion dollars attempting to minimize the risk of further such deaths. In contrast, the quake deaths in the few years since our debate stand at 637,000, dead, from earthquakes. (The 462,000 through 2009 plus the estimated 150,000 in the Port-au-Prince area and 25,000 Japanese casualties). That's nearly 100,000 deaths per year. (For more information, listen to the RSR Earthquake Warning Policy program at KGOV.com/earthquakes.)
* RSR AronRa Conversations with creationist Bob Enyart:
- AronRa and Enyart: Pt. 1
- AronRa and Enyart: Pt. 2
- AronRa and Enyart: Pt. 3 (this show)
- AronRa and Enyart Begin Round Two: Pt. 4
- Fred Williams of RSR Weighs in on AronRa
- AronRa and Enyart: Pt. 5
- AronRa and Enyart: Pt. 6
- AronRa and Enyart: Pt. 7
- AronRa and Bob Enyart's Written Debate at League of Reason
* AronRa says Bob Wrongly Claimed PNAS Published Big Bang Alternative Model: [See this also at rsr.org/bb-alternative-in-pnas on our rsr.org/cosmological-principle page.] I told Aron that I didn't know if the universe had a center or not, but that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 published a paper proposing an alternative cosmology, of a bounded universe centered on our Milky Way galaxy. Aron dismissed this on air, and has now asked me to respond to this:
"Bob claimed an alternative model to Big Bang cosmology -which does not exist…" -AronRa
Standard BB cosmology claims an unbounded, homogeneous (the same everywhere) universe that therefore lacks a center. The alternative BB model I referenced was published in 2003 in PNAS. Smoller and Temple describing their proposal, wrote that, "by incorporating a shock wave at the leading edge of the expansion of the galaxies… [which would be] bounding a finite total mass", that they thereby present, "a cosmological model… of an asymptotically flat Schwarzschild spacetime." For those unfamiliar with the subject, physics professor John Hartnett explains that Smoller thereby "implies that the earth or at least the Galaxy is in fact close to the physical center of the Universe." As Smoller and Temple themselves admit, in their paper, "the Copernican Principle is violated in the sense that the earth then has a special position relative to the shock wave.
"Bob claimed an alternative model to Big Bang cosmology -which does not exist, and he said it was concordant with the creationists' model of the universe -which also does not exist." -AronRa
See the two creation models I briefly describe and link to at RealScienceFriday.com/starlight-and-time#time-dilation proposed by two physicists, one a professor in Australia was has received a prestigious IEEE award, and the other an alumnus of Sandia National Labs where he received awards, including an Award for Excellence for contributions to light ion–fusion target theory.
Aron, again, as with soft tissue, nautiloids, 14C everywhere, you seem to be the one in denial. I don't promote these young-earth models, but as I said on air, they are consistent with that 2003 PNAS paper including in that they propose a bounded universe centered on our solar system. Yet instead of engaging on the substance you and other atheists mock me and my creationist associates.
* Two Reports of the 2011 JVP Abstract, DNA, Dinosaurs, and Metagenomics:
- David Tana's contemporaneous Superoceras SVP 2011 in Vegas blog from Steven Salzberg's paper presentation
- The T-rex Collagen Controversy on the Tom Kaye blog Pterosaur Heresies
These reports describe the 2011 Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology abstract's claims, respectively, that:
- the paper's authors found chicken DNA buried in their hardrosaur bone specimen, and
- NCSU's Mary Schweitzer had contaminated her T. rex bones with ostrich DNA and ostrich hemoglobin.
As of late 2013, no paper has yet emerged from this abstract.
* Forensic Files Dino DNA Prediction: By showing a T. rex skeleton when mentioning the ability to extract DNA from fossils, Forensic Files unintentionally prefigured the 2014 discovery of DNA from a hadrosaur and a Tyrannosaurus rex. For the peer-reviewed paper, and for the recent published measurement of a 521-year half life for DNA, which together indicate dinosaurs lived recently, see rsr.org/soft-tissue.