After all that article did a particularly good job of explainging how it would be impossible for the tissue to have survived that long, challenging all schools of thought on the matter.
Posts: 3564 | Registered: Sep 2001
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Also, in your long quotation, Kuhn is most certainly being taken out of context. It's perfectly natural and proper to disbelieve a new finding that contradicts so much accummulated knowledge. Until it is replicated.
Then, if it is found to be a reliable phenomenon, it causes theories to be modified. If enough contrary evidence accumulates, a theory will eventually get discarded. But usually what happens is a better theory is developed.
The trouble with creation science is that it ISN'T a better theory. It is already contradicted by mountains of evidence that it can't account for.
Preservation of soft tissue is indeed surprising, but it could be that what's really needed is a new theory of how things get fossilized, not a new theory of how animal life was created and/or modified & diversified over time.
Again, I think you have a pet theory and are so wedded to it that you are missing some rather obvious alternatives.
That doesn't make you an idiot. It's even possible you might be right. It's just extremely unlikely given the preponderance of evidence.
I would suggest reading a wonderful old article about The method of multiple working hypotheses. It is one of the best things that has ever been written about scientific thinking and, really, it's something that every generation of scientist needs to be reacquainted with. It helps a lot to keep us from falling into the kinds of problems that a Kuhnian cycle has inherently built into it.
And please, could we get past this silly persecution complex? I don't mind having a debate with you on just about any subject, but your insistence on feeling like a martyr is just off-putting. I don't have it in for you, or anyone. I think your theory sucks. So what?
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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We're urging museums to crack open bones in their collections, right?
If we find that LOTS of fossil bones have squishy innards, that means that the evidence of soft-tissue preservation has been around since the beginning of paleontology.
The point is that it would've been something interesting that would've had to have been accounted for in the building up of a theory of fossilization processes. Essentially, it wouldn't have thrown off the the estimation of dates of deposition, it would've been something to be accounted for. That under specific conditions in certain parts of the globe, things happen this way and not that way and so we end up with stuff being preserved that would've otherwise been fossilized.
65 million years is a long time. But so is 12,000 years. Or even 6,000 years. Preservation of soft tissue is odd at any of those dates and most people are just going to suspect that the conditions that made it possible are unusual until the fossil record proves otherwise.
And even if the record shows that it's not all that unusual, the question is still going to be one of how does it happen before it results in a question of whether the estimated dates are wrong by 3 orders of magnitude!!!
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
I have to confess I skipped page 2. So I can only hope I'm the first to say "where's that thread about the company that will clone your cat for 50 grand?"
Posts: 2010 | Registered: Apr 2003
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