RSR: Anti-Creationist AronRa vs. Bob Enyart Pt. 3

* 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: just below. 

* 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(like PZ Myers who said the same when recently addressing our RSR Trochlea Challenge), they tend to be unread and out-of-date on the topic, and therefore claim that the many finds are some kind of contamination like "biofilm," which would be a more recently-formed bacterial residue.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Bob Enyart: It's out-of-date.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 RSF'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, RealScienceRadio.com/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, in 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 ourmodels. 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 Resaon), 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 chastizing 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

* 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 2012, no paper has yet emerged from this non-peer-reviewed abstract.

RSF's List of Soft Tissue Deniers (and Doubters): This brief representative list documents the evolutionist science deniers and doubters for ths specific topic. We'll occasionally updating it.

After two decades of extensive research and publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, soft tissue deniers seem to be the rule rather than the exception among atheists and evolutions. (Further, as of late 2012, the existence of dinosaur soft tissue, likely the greatest paleobiology discovery ever, remains virtually unknown to the general public as anyone can extrapolate by asking a few dozen people. RSR is working toward educating the public through radio shows, websites, and by presenting the information in easy-to-use formats.)

Soft tissue deniers (and such science doubters) include:

Smithsonian Dinosaur Expert Brian Switek: This evolutionist, as late at Sept. 27, 2012, wrote, "The supposed dinosaur leftovers may be microfossils created by bacterial biofilms..."

AronRa (click link and then just search for: No.)

Talk Origins quote from their Age of the Earth article as accessed on March 2, 2012 and again on Dec. 29, 2012:

"Answers in Genesis claims that paleontologist Mary Schweitzer found "obvious, fresh-looking blood cells" and traces of blood protein hemoglobin in a Tyrannosaurus rex bone… all these claims are absolutely false." -Talk Origins

League of Reason moderators and members (click and search for: soft).

Sherry Konkus article at stupiddinosaurlies.org copyrighted 2010 - 2012 as retrieved Dec. 3, 2012.

PZ Myers and virtually all the evolutionists on his blog doubted or outright denied extant dinosaur soft tissue. Infamous evolutionist PZ Myers replied to our RSR Trochlea Challenge. (To his credit, he said, "I don't know," which in itself does not prove that he is wrong nor that I am right.)

PZ, being severely out-of-date on what is the greatest paleobiology discovery yet, doubted the existence of dinosaur soft tissue by critically writing about "Will Duffy's rants here" regarding dinosaur soft tissue for which Myers linked to his long out-dated report of "a good alternative explanation: this is an example of bacterial contamination producing a biofilm." If PZ weren't a soft tissue denier (or doubter) he would have instead indicated that the biofilm interpretation against actual primary tissue had been repeatedly refuted in the peer-reviewed literature. Like LoR's AronRa, Myers didn't mention all the confirming studies, and he preferred to keep telling the story, although contrary to the latest science, that is far more comfortable to Darwinists. (And regarding Carbon 14 PZ Myers, like so many evolutionists have, went on to mock Will Duffy and me for our $23,000 grant offer to Jack Horner to carbon date his dinosaur fossil, which PZ says, "makes no sense at all," even though peer-reviewed studies are now carbon dating dinosaur soft-tissue fossils.)

Myers Supporters: Ichthyic Post #189 (approvingly quoting another evolutionist, lawilson200, who commented on a YouTube video, Jack Horner Call, about my grant offer to Jack Horner):

YEC's continued claim there was "soft" tissue found, represents a failure to even read the peer reviewed papers. No organic material was ever found. The material that was found was calcified, which became "soft" after a bath in acid. Learn to read!

[Meanwhile, peer-reviewed papers ARE reporting on their carbon 14 tests on dinosaurs even though PZ Myers wrote mocking RSR that "carbon dating is so absurdly inappropriate and useless that only an ignorant clown would… do it."]

In summary, on what is the greatest paleontology discovery in history, PZ Myers and AronRa join those evolutionists who are science deniers and science doubters, all because they intuitively know that even simple changes in temperature gradually breakdown complex biological molecules which all of science uniformly maintained could not exist for even one million years. Now, they've got to deal with Harvard sequencing hardrosaur proteins, blood vessels from a T. rex, biological materal from archaeopteryx, and a whole boatload of other related problems, including carbon 14, left-handed amino acices, and a world looking them square in the face and saying: "If you believe soft tissue can last for 65 million years, you'll believe just about anything, won't you?" So, for the short-term, it's a lot easier to be a soft tissue denier. But the cure is now here: DinosaurSoftTissue.com!

RSR Listeners: Please feel free to email other soft tissue deniers to Bob@KGOV.com. And let us know if any of our Darwinist listeners over at TOL, such as Alate_One or Johnnie, are deniers. Thanks!